Writeonacompositionaccordingtotheinformationgiveninthegraphbelowonthefollowingtopic:THEUPSANDDOWNSOFPOPULATIONGROWTHStudythefollowinggraphscarefullyandwriteanessayinatleast150words.Youressaymustbewrittenneatlyandshouldcoverthesethreepoints:1.effectofthecountry"sgrowinghumanpopulationonitswildlife2.possiblereasonfortheeffect3.yoursuggestionforwildlifeprotection

Greater efforts should be made to increase agricultural production if food shortage is to be avoided.

It is still doubtful whether she would play the part.

Writeanessayof160-200worksbasedonthefollowingdrawing.Inyouessay,youshouldfirstdescribethedrawing,theninterpretitsmeaning,andgiveyourcommentonit.

What once was considered "pie in the sky" is slowly becoming law. In New York, state legislators just agreed to raise the state minimum wage to $ 15 an hour, with the full effect beginning in New York City by December 2018. How did this reform go from being scorned as "extreme" to being enacted? Consensus politicians don't champion it. Pundits and chattering heads tend to ignore it. Many liberal economists deride it as too radical. The idea moved only because workers and allies organized and demanded the change. Contrary to the business lobby, an analysis by economists at the University of California at Berkeley shows that New York's increases will not lead to job losses. The higher wages will generate billions in new consumer spending; the increased sales will offset the costs to businesses. In Seattle, the unemployment rate reached an eight-year low after the initial increases in the minimum wage last year. This movement continues to build. The Fight for $ 15 and Good Jobs Nation initiatives will ratchet up their walkouts and demonstrations this month. On Monday, an interfaith coalition of religious leaders issued a call for " moral action on the economy." They will press presidential candidates to pledge to " issue an executive order to make sure taxpayer dollars reward 'model employers' that pay a living wage of at least $ 15 an hour, provide decent benefits and allow workers to organize without retaliation." As Jim Winkler, general secretary of the National Council of Churches, summarized:" This election is fundamentally about whether the next president is willing to take transformative executive action to close the gap between the wealthy and workers." Sanders has made $ 15 and a union a centerpiece of his campaign. He has urged Obama to take executive action and surely will sign the pledge. Hillary Clinton supports raising the minimum wage to $ 12.50, allowing cities to go higher. Her position on the pledge is unknown. The Republican candidates—Sen. Ted Cruz ( R - Tex.) , Donald Trump and Ohio Gov. John Kasich—oppose raising the minimum wage and would likely repeal Obama's executive orders on low-wage contract workers if elected. With inequality reaching record extremes, childhood poverty the worst in the industrial world and more Americans struggling simply to stay afloat, this country is desperately in need of bold reform. Yet bold ideas are repeatedly mocked as unrealistic and blocked by entrenched interests and conservative politicians. What the activists and low-wage workers have shown with their fight for $ 15 is that the changes we need will come if people organize and force them. Many commentators deride Sanders's call for a political revolution, but that may be the most realistic idea of them all.

Now that many media chieftains have fallen into disrepute and have left, those who are still in positions feel the need to take the problem seriously. "CEOs were overturned as were some stocks." That is how AOL Time Warner entertainment group Chairman Jeff Bewkes summed it up. The era of the "imperial" (one-man rule) CEO has come to an end, MTV Networks Chairman Tom Freston added. The two executives agreed that the industry"s complex and often ill-fated megs mergers had proven that bigger is not necessarily better, no matter how big the reputations of the personalities behind them. The continuing flameout of media executives who a few years ago were hailed as visionaries was active this month, and the industry"s fears reached into the executive ranks of music, publishing and TV. Technology visionary Steve Case left as chairman of AOL Time Warner, replaced by Chief Executive Richard Parsons. Top executives at Sony Music, MCA Records and Random House were booted. And Walter Isaacson, chairman of CNN Networks, left for a think tank. This shows just how difficult it has become to find the right managers for the terribly altered media. "Many executives got caught up in the late 90"s boom in the media industry and got ahead of themselves in strategic vision for their companies," said Mark May, of US investment firm Kaufman Bros. "It takes more than a couple of years for these companies to be ready for another visionary." The collapse of the dotcom bubble, the ability of music fans to get songs free on the Internet, sagging bottom lines and intense competition among cable TV news networks are some developments that helped trip up media executives recently. But the urge to merge was one of their weakest points. It is not that media companies should avoid all mergers, said Larry Haverty, managing director at State Street Research, a US investment management firm. They need acquisitions for growth. But making them work is a real challenge. They need to choose what pieces fit together and how much they are worth. They need to adjust quickly when technology and consumer habit trends shift. And, more than ever, they must be careful not to promise too much. Sony Corp. of America Chairman Howard Stringer said that an executive today is "the rarest of senior entertainment executives, equally adept at business, management strategy and value creation, as well as a consummate(完美的) and proven developer of content, talent and ideas".

SpamTextMessageWriteanessayof160-200wordsbasedonthedrawing.Inyouressay,youshould1)describethedrawingbriefly,2)explainitsintendedmeaning,and3)giveyourcomments.

When Melissa Mahan and her husband visited the Netherlands, they felt imprisoned by their tour bus. It forced them to see the city according to a particular【C1】______as well as a specific【C2】______—but going off on their own meant【C3】______the information provided by the guide. On their return home, they started a new company called Tour Coupes. Now, when tourists in San Diego【C4】______one of their small, brightly coloured three-wheeled vehicles, they are【C5】______to a narration over the stereo system【C6】______the places they pass, triggered by Global Positioning System(GPS)satellite technology. This is just one example of how GPS is being used to provide new services to tourists. A tourism firm began offering a【C7】______service in Montgomery, Alabama The city is【C8】______with sites associated with two important【C9】______in American history, the civil war of the 1860s and the civil-rights movement a century later. Montgomery has a 120-year-old streetcar system, called the Lightning Route, which【C10】______around the downtown area and is【C11】______used by tourists. On the Lightning Route streetcars, GPS-triggered audio clips point out historical【C12】______. If such services can prove【C13】______, the use of audio-guide devices could give way【C14】______a different approach. Now, a(n) 【C15】______number of mobile phones have built-in GPS or can determine their【C16】______using other technologies. Information for tourists delivered【C17】______phones could be updated in real time. "Location-based services", such as the ability to call up a list of nearby banks or pizzerias, have been talked about for years【C18】______have never taken off. Aiming such services【C19】______tourists makes sense—since people are more likely to want information when in a(n) 【C20】______place. It could give mobile roaming a whole new meaning.

An earthquake hit Kashmir on Oct. 8, 2005. It took some 75,000 lives, 【B1】______ 130,000 and left nearly 3.5 million without food, jobs or homes. 【B2】______ overnight, scores of tent villages bloomed 【B3】______ the region, tended by international aid organizations, military 【B4】______ and aid groups working day and night to shelter the survivors before winter set【B5】______. Mercifully, the season was mild. But with the 【B6】______ of spring the refugees will be moved again. Camps that 【B7】______ health care, food and shelter for 150,000 survivors have begun to close as they were 【B8】______ intended to be permanent. For most of the refugees, the thought of going back brings【B9】______emotions. The past six months have been difficult. Families of【B10】______many as 10 people have had to shelter【B11】______a single tent and share cook stoves and bathing【B12】______with neighbors. "They are looking forward to the clean water of their rivers," officials say. "They are【B13】______of free fresh fruit. They want to get back to their herds and start【B14】______again." But most will be returning to【B15】______but heaps of ruins. In many villages, electrical【B16】______have not been repaired, nor have roads. Aid workers【B17】______that it will take years to rebuild what the earthquake took【B18】______. And for the thousands of survivors, the【B19】______will never be complete. Yet the survivors have to start somewhere. New homes can be built【B20】______the stones, bricks and beams of old ones. Spring is coming and it is a good time to start again.

There was a great deal to be troubled by in a report by the International Committee of the Red Cross documenting the kinds of torture and abuse inflicted on terrorism suspects by the Central Intelligence Agency. One disturbing footnote is that medical personnel were deeply involved in facilitating the abuses, which were intended to coerce suspects into providing intelligence. The report, prepared in 2007 but kept secret until it was published by The Nexv York Review of Books , was based on Red Cross interviews in late 2006 with 14 "high-value detainees", who include some of the most dangerous terrorists in custody. The prisoners" complaints gain credibility because they described similar abuses and had been kept in isolation at different locations, with no chance to concoct a common story. Various prisoners said they had been subjected to waterboarding, forced to stand for days with their arms shackled overhead, confined in small boxes, beaten and kicked, slammed repeatedly into walls, prevented from sleeping, deprived of solid food, forced to remain naked for weeks or months at a stretch, often in frigid cells and immersed in cold water. All were kept in continuous solitary confinement for their C. I. A. detention, ranging from 16 months to more than four years. Medical personnel seem to have been involved mostly as facilitators rather than torturers or interrogators. In one case, they monitored a detainee"s oxygen saturation with a device attached to his finger so waterboarding could be stopped before the prisoner suffocated. In another case, an amputee forced to stand with his arms shackled overhead had his intact leg checked daily for signs of dangerous swelling. Several detainees said health workers sometimes instructed interrogators to continue, adjust or stop particular methods of abuse. Such activities violate the ethical codes of major health organizations, both national and international. The Red Cross called it "a gross breach of medical ethics" that in some cases "amounted to participation in torture and/or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment". None of the health personnel wore identification, but the prisoners inferred that they were physicians or psychologists. They also could have been paramedics, physician"s assistants or other less-trained personnel. The report underscores the need to have a full-scale investigation into these abusive practices and into who precisely participated in them. Only then will we know whether indictments or, in the case of physicians, the loss of medical licenses, are warranted.

We have reached the conclusion that the practice is the criterion for testing truth.

Karl Von Linne (or Linnaeus, as he is widely known) was a Swedish biologist who devised the system of Latinised scientific names for living things that biologists use to this day. When he came to (1)_____ people into his system, he put them into a group called Homo—and Linne"s hairless fellow humans are still known biologically as Homo sapiens. (2)_____ the group originally had a second member, Homo troglodytes. It lived in Africa, and the pictures show it to be covered (3)_____ hair. Modern (4)_____ are not as generous as Linne in welcoming other species into Man"s lofty (5)_____, and the chimpanzee is now referred to (6)_____ Pan troglodytes. But Pan or Homo, there is no (7)_____ that chimps are humans" nearest living relatives, and that if the secrets of what makes humanity special are ever to be (8)_____, understanding why chimps are not people, nor people chimps, is a crucial part of the process. That, in turn, means looking at the DNA of the two species, (9)_____ it is here that the (10)_____ must originate. One half of the puzzle has been (11)_____ for several years: the human genome was published in 2001. The second has now been added, with the announcement in this week"s Nature (12)_____ the chimpanzee genome has been sequenced as well. For those expecting (13)_____ answers to age-old questions (14)_____, the publication of the chimp genome may be something of an (15)_____. There are no immediately obvious genes-present in one, but not the other-that account for such characteristic human (16)_____ as intelligence or even hairlessness. And (17)_____ there is a gene connected with language, known as FOXP2, it had already been discovered. But although the preliminary comparison of the two genomes (18)_____ by the members of the Chimpanzee Sequencing and Analysis Consortium, the multinational team that generated the sequence, did not (19)_____, any obvious nuggets of genetic gold, it does at least show where to look for (20)_____.

If all we did were simply work to live, the reality of our everyday existence would be equivalent to that of stone-age man. All of human achievement that makes modern life possible has happened because of time that has been freed up from the work of everyday survival. For most of the human species term on earth man and woman have been preoccupied with the simple business of staying alive in as much relative comfort as possible. Hunting and gathering, finding or building shelter, defending the little that one has from plunder, surviving long enough to have progeny of a mature enough age to contribute to the welfare of the group—this was initially the main business of living. It has only been comparatively recently, since the agrarian and industrial revolutions that utilised emerging technologies to free human beings from the drudgery of day-to-day survival, that time has become available to do other than simply survive. Living to work is a luxury that we should not take for granted, for even now there are many, in the developed world as well as the rest, that do not have such a choice. When we live to work we enjoy what we are doing, otherwise we wouldn"t be doing it. The term "live to work" implies choice. Working to live denotes the exact opposite: anything will do that pays the bills. Anyone in the latter situation will attest to the undesirability of being in such a position. Living to work suggests exhilaration in one"s calling; it summons images of freedom and excitement at the prospect of what each new day will bring, whereas working to live suggests drudgery and slavery, and little choice if any. "What do you want to do when you grow up?" is a question with which most children will be familiar, perhaps even weary. It is a question of which even a young adult can often not be sure until they have had experience of many different jobs, or at least the ones they initially thought to try. But to be forced to work at a task that one does not enjoy day after day for survival would be last choice on anyone" s list. Enlightened humanity, while acknowledging that some undesirable jobs must be done regardless, would acknowledge that if one is motivated in their work, their work will be so much the better for it. Wouldn"t you rather live to work than work to live?

Analysts have their go at humor, and I have read some of this interpretative literature, (1)_____ without being greatly instructed. Humor can be (2)_____, (3)_____ a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are (4)_____ to any but the pure scientific mind. One of the things (5)_____ said about humorists is that they are really very sad people clowns with a breaking heart. There is some truth in it, but it is badly (6)_____. It would be more (7)_____, I think, to say that there is a deep vein of melancholy running through everyone"s life and that the humorist, perhaps more (8)_____ of it than some others, compensates for it actively and (9)_____ Humorists fatten on troubles. They have always made trouble (10)_____ They struggle along with a good will and endure pain (11)_____, knowing how well it will (12)_____ them in the sweet by and by. You find them wrestling with foreign languages, fighting folding ironing hoards and swollen drainpipes, suffering the terrible (13)_____ of tight boots. They pour out their sorrows profitably, in a (14)_____ of what is not quite fiction nor quite fact either. Beneath the sparking surface of these dilemmas flows the strong (15)_____ of human woe. Practically everyone is a manic depressive of sorts, with his up moments and his down moments, and you certainly don"t have to be a humorist to (16)_____ the sadness of situation and mood. But there is often a rather fine line between laughing and crying, and if a humorous piece of writing brings a person to the point (17)_____ his emotional responses are untrustworthy and seem likely to break over into the opposite realm, it is (18)_____ humor, like poetry, has an extra content, it plays (19)_____ to the big hot fire which is Truth, and sometimes the reader feels the (20)_____.

Just how much does the Constitution protect your digital data? The Supreme Court will now consider whether police can search the contents of a mobile phone without a warrant if the phone is on or around a person during an arrest. California has asked the justices to refrain from a sweeping ruling, particularly one that upsets the old assumptions that authorities may search through the possessions of suspects at the time of their arrest. It is hard, the state argues, for judges to assess the implications of new and rapidly changing technologies. The court would be recklessly modest if it followed California"s advice. Enough of the implications are discernable, even obvious, so that the justice can and should provide updated guidelines to police, lawyers and defendants. They should start by discarding California"s lame argument that exploring the contents of a smartphone—a vast storehouse of digital information—is similar to, say, going through a suspect" s purse. The court has ruled that police don"t violate the Fourth Amendment when they go through the wallet or pocketbook of an arrestee without a warrant. But exploring one" s smartphone is more like entering his or her home. A smartphone may contain an arrestee" s reading history, financial history, medical history and comprehensive records of recent correspondence. The development of "cloud computing", meanwhile, has made that exploration so much the easier. Americans should take steps to protect their digital privacy. But keeping sensitive information on these devices is increasingly a requirement of normal life. Citizens still have a right to expect private documents to remain private and protected by the Constitution"s prohibition on unreasonable searches. As so often is the case, stating that principle doesn"t ease the challenge of line-drawing. In many cases, it would not be overly burdensome for authorities to obtain a warrant to search through phone contents. They could still invalidate Fourth Amendment protections when facing severe, urgent circumstances, and they could take reasonable measures to ensure that phone data are not erased or altered while waiting for a warrant. The court, though, may want to allow room for police to cite situations where they are entitled to more freedom. But the justices should not swallow California"s argument whole. New, disruptive technology sometimes demands novel applications of the Constitution"s protections. Orin Kerr, a law professor, compares the explosion and accessibility of digital information in the 21st century with the establishment of automobile use as a virtual necessity of life in the 20th: The justices had to specify novel rules for the new personal domain of the passenger car then; they must sort out how the Fourth Amendment applies to digital information now.

The satisfying thump of a bass drum sounds every time Gil Weinberg strikes thin air with his iPhone.A pal nearby swings his Nokia smartphone back and forth, adding a rippling bass line.A third phone-waving friend sprinkles piano and guitar phrases on top. Weinberg"s trios are using software that turns ordinary cellphones into musicalinstruments. "People can play on their own, but we are more excited about them jamming like a band," says Weinberg, a music technologist at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta Commuters regularly bombarded with tinny recorded music played on other passengers" phones might not share his enthusiasm, but air guitarists and would-be drummers will probably be delighted. Weinberg claims his smart gesture-recognition software will democratize music-making as never before. "With the right tools, everyone can be creative and expressive musically—even if they don"t know anything about music theory," he says. The software, dubbed ZoozBeats and launched this week, monitors a phone"s motion and plays a corresponding sound. For example, you might play a rhythm based on a snare drum by beating the air with the phone as if it"s a drumstick. Or you could strum with it to play a sequence of guitar chords. The software runs on a wide range of phones because it uses many different ways to sense gestures. The obvious way is to use the accelerometers built into small devices like the Apple iPhone and Nokia N96 smartphone. But ZoozBeats can also trigger sounds when the view through a phone"s camera lens changes rapidly, or generate a beat or bass line from simple taps on the mobile"s microphone. Of course, people who aren"t well skillful in music-making are more likely to make unpleasant noises than beautiful melodies, so ZoozBeats incorporates a system called Musical Wizard to make sure their musical decisions are harmonious. It won"t do everything, though. The system has been built to ensure that practice still makes perfect: "The big challenge was not to make it sound OK whatever you do," says Weinberg. "It will fit, but not perfectly, so you can still learn to improve the music yourself." ZoozBeats comes with instruments for three types of music: rock, techno (a form of modern electronic music with a very fast beat) and hip hop. It also allows users to produce vocal effects by singing into the phone and will be downloadable in two versions. One of these will be for solo use, the other a Bluetooth networkable version that supports jamming by groups of people—using the Musical Wizard to keep everybody"s input melodious.

When an American policeman pulled over a Volkswagen (VW) Jetta in 2013, he suspected that the array of pipes sticking out of the back of the car and the grey box and portable generator in the vehicle were a sign of something fishy. He was right. The West Virginia University researchers inside the car had nothing to hide. 【B1】______ The decision by VW, a pillar of Germany's car industry, to fit "defeat devices" and cheat emissions tests in up to 11m cars has so far cost the company $ 21bn in fines and compensation in North America alone. 【B2】______ Jack Ewing, a journalist for the New York Times, offers a timely guide to the scandal, setting out in detail why VW’s corporate culture led to the deception.He delves into VW’s origins, when Adolf Hitler ordered the construction of a "people's car", or Volkswagen in German. VW set up shop in the German countryside. Wolfsburg bred a "headquarters mentality" that insulated the firm from outside influence. 【B3】______.This allowed autocratic bosses to have their way. Ferdinand Pi?ch became chief executive in 1993 at a time when the company was struggling. To win back sales, Mr. Ewing argues, he created the conditions that allowed the fraud to "fester". To keep workers onside, the company had to carry on growing. Managers were kept quiet through fear. The ruthless Mr. Pi?ch replaced almost the entire management board by his second year in the job. His successor as CEO, Martin Winterkorn, a man cut from the same cloth, wanted the firm to become the world's biggest carmaker. An assault on the American market, where VW was weak and emissions regulations much tighter than in Europe, was vital to overtaking Toyota and General Motors. To meet that demanding target, though, VW had to cheat. 【B4】______ The company insists the deception was cooked up by middle managers and that senior bosses, despite a reputation for microscopic attention to detail, knew nothing of the fraud until it was too late. If there is clear evidence implicating bigger fish it has yet to emerge. 【B5】______ European customers are pursuing class-action lawsuits for compensation , though VW insists it did nothing wrong in Europe, where the rules are laxer. Mr. Pi?ch left the company before the scandal erupted and Mr. Winterkorn has since resigned. Several employees have been arrested or charged with criminal offences in America. German prosecutors are investigating nearly 40 employees and have begun a probe into Matthias Müller, the latest CEO and another long-serving insider, for failing to warn shareholders in a timely manner about the scandal. The company has denied those allegations. In any event, Mr. Ewing's tale will need a new edition with extra chapters. [A] Mr. Ewing explains why VW cheated, but pinpointing who was responsible has been much harder. [B] The German car maker has been installing "defeat devices"-software that allows cars to cheat in emissions tests, making them appear cleaner than they actually are. [C] The scandal still haunts VW, despite a settlement with American law enforcers and compensation for American car-buyers. [D] Martin Winterkorn, the German company's chief executive, accepted responsibility when he resigned , but denied any wrongdoing on his part. [E] But the tests they were conducting on the exhaust fumes, meant to prove the cleanliness of modern diesel engines, uncovered one of the biggest and boldest frauds in corporate history. [F] Unprecedented union power, handed over in the 1960s as the price the federal government paid for floating the firm on the stockmarket, and the sway of the state of Lower Saxony, which retained a 20% voting stake in the company, gave outside shareholders little say. [G] Why did the company deliberately set out to engineer cars that spewed out up to 35 times more poisonous nitrogen oxides on the road than stated in official tests?

One thing that distinguishes the online world from the real one is that it is very easy to find things. To find a copy of The Economist in print, one has to go to a newsstand, which may or may not carry it. Finding it online, though, is a different proposition. Just go to Google, type it in "economist" and you will be instantly directed to economist.com. (46) Indeed, until Google, now the world"s most popular search engine, came on to the scene in September 1998, searching online was a hit-or-miss affair. Google was vastly better than anything that had come before: so much better, in fact, that it changed the way many people use the web. (47) Almost overnight, it made the web far more useful, particularly for non-specialist users, many of whom regard Google as the Internet"s front door. It"s now a worldwide phenomenon. Not only has it made the Internet into an extremely fast and valuable research tool, it"s become a common word and has even created a new verb "to google". (48) The recent fuss over Google"s stock market flotation obscures its far wider social significance: few technologies, after all, are so influential that their names have become a household verb such as the cloning technology creates the verb "to clone". Google began in 1998 as an academic research project by Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, who were then graduate students at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. It was not the first search engine, of course. (49) Existing search engines were able to scan a large portion of the web, build an index, and then find pages that matched particular words, but were less good at presenting those pages, which might number in the hundreds of thousands, in a useful way. Mr. Brin"s and Mr. Page"s accomplishment was to devise a way to sort the results by determining which pages were likely to be most relevant. They did so by using a mathematical program, called PageRank. (50) This program is at the heart of Google"s success, distinguishing it from all search engines and accounting for its apparently magical ability to find the most useful web pages. With this powerful ability, Google distinguished itself from among all the search engines and became an established standing research tool in the online world.

One of the strangest aspects of the mechanical approach to life is the widespread lack of concern about the danger of total destruction by nuclear weapons; a possibility people are consciously aware of. The explanation, I believe, is that they are more proud of than frightened by the gadgets of mass destruction. (46) Also they are so frightened of their personal failure and humiliation that their anxiety about personal matters prevents them from feeling anxiety about the possibility that everybody and everything maybe destroyed. Perhaps total destruction is even more attractive than total insecurity and never ending personal anxiety. Am I suggesting that modern man is doomed and that we should return to the pre industrial mode of production or to nineteenth century "free enterprise" capitalism? Certainly not. Problems are never solved by returning to a stage which one has already outgrown. (47) I suggest transforming our Social system from a bureaucratically managed industrialism in which maximal production and consumption are ends in themselves into a humanist industrialism in which man and the full development of his potentialities—those of love and of reason—are the aims of all social arrangements. Production and consumption should serve only as means to this end, and should be prevented from ruling man. To attain this goal we need to create a Renaissance of Enlightenment and of Humanism. It must be an Enlightenment, however, more radically realistic and critical than that of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It must be a Humanism that aims at the full development of the total man, not the gadget man, not the consumer man, not the organization man. The aim of a humanist society is the man who loves life, who has faith in life, who is productive and independent. (48) Such a transformation is possible if we recognize that our present way of life makes us sterile and eventually destroys the vitality necessary for survival. (49) Whether such transformation is likely is another matter. But we will not be able to succeed unless we see the alternatives clearly and realize that the choice is still ours. Dissatisfaction with our way of life is the first step toward changing it. As to these changes, one thing is certain: They must take place in all spheres simultaneously—in the economic, the social, the political and the spiritual. (50) Change in only one sphere will lead into blind alleys, as did the purely political French Revolution and the purely economic Russian Revolution.

Britain"s bosses would have you believe that business in Britain is groaning under red tape and punitive tax levels, inhibiting enterprise and putting British firms at a disadvantage compared with overseas competitors. As usual, reality paints a far different picture from the tawdry image scrawled by the CBI and Tory frontbenchers. Not only do British businesses pay lower levels of corporation tax than their counterparts abroad but they benefit from the most savage legal hamstringing of trade unionism. But boardroom fat cats in Britain have one further advantage over their competitors, which is their total inability to feel any sense of shame. The relatively poor performance since the 1990s of pension investment funds, overseen by the top companies themselves, has brought about a wide-ranging cull of occupational pension schemes. Final salary schemes have been axed in favour of money purchase or have been barred to new employees and, in many companies, staff have been told that they will have to increase pensions fund payments to ensure previously guaranteed benefits. At a time when the government has been deliberately running down the value of the state retirement pension and driving pensioners towards means-tested benefits, the increasingly shaky nature of occupational schemes has brought about higher levels of insecurity among working people. However, it"s not all doom and gloom. There is a silver lining. Unfortunately, that silver lining, doesn"t shine too brightly outside the corridors of corporate power, where directors are doing what they are best at—looking after number one. Bosses are not only slurping up huge salaries, each-way bonuses and golden parachutes. They have also, as TUC general secretary Brendan Barber says, got "their snouts in a pensions trough." If having contributions worth one-thirtieth of their salary each year paid into a pension scheme is good enough for directors, why do most workers only receive one-sixtieth? And if companies only donate 6 percent of an employee"s salary for money purchase schemes, why do they give 20430 percent for directors" schemes? The answer, which will be no secret to many trade unionists, is that we live in a class- divided society in which big business and the rich call the shots. The Child Poverty Action Group revelation that Britain also has the worst regional social inequality in the industrialised world—second only to Mexico—illustrates how fatuous are claims that this country enjoys social justice and opportunities for all. The stark facts of inequality, based on class, gender, age and race, that are outlined in the CPAG Poverty book ought to dictate a new government approach to tackling poverty. Inequality and poverty cannot be tackled by allowing big business and the rich to dodge their responsibilities to society and to use their positions of power to seize the lion"s share.