As the intelligence of robots increases to match that of humans and as their cost declines through economies of scale we may use them to expand our frontiers, first on earth through their ability to withstand environments harmful to ourselves.

"PursuitforMoreComfortandLuxury"Studythefollowingpicturecarefullyandwriteanessayin160—200words.Youressaymustbewrittenclearlyandmeettherequirementsbelow:1)Describethechangesasshowninthetable2)Analyzepossiblereasonsforthechange3)Makepredictionsonthefuturetendency

You are going to give a send-off speech at a farewell party given in honor of Prof. Kerry Stubbs. In your speech, you would 1) indicate the purpose of the party 2) acknowledge what Mr. Stubbs has done 3) invite Mr. Stubbs to speak You should write about 100 words.

On Constellation Craze A. Title: On Constellation Craze B. Word limit: 160~200 words (not including the given opening sentence) C. Your composition should be based on the OUTLINE below and should start with the given opening sentence: "Nowadays, constellation has become a common topic." OUTLINE: 1. Young people's craze for constellation 2. My opinion 3. Making a conclusion

OnFoodSafetyWriteanessayof160-200wordsbasedonthedrawing.Inyouressay,youshould1)describethedrawingbriefly,2)explainitsintendedmeaning,and3)giveyourcomments.

A person's home is a reflection of his personality. Depending on personality, most have in mind a(n)"【C1】______home". But in general, there are practical【C2】______of cash and location on achieving that idea. Cash【C3】______, in fact, often means that the only way of【C4】______when you leave school is to stay at home for a while until things【C5】______financially. There are obvious【C6】______of living at home—personal laundry is usually【C7】______done along with the family wash; meals are provided and there will be a well-established circle of friends to【C8】______. And there is【C9】______the responsibility for paying bills, rates, etc. On the other hand, 【C10】______depends on how a family gets on. Do your parents like your friends? You may love your family—【C11】______do you like them? Are you prepared to be【C12】______when your parents ask where you are going in the evening and what time you expect to be back? If you find that you cannot manage a(n) 【C13】______, and that you finally have the money to leave, how do you【C14】______finding somewhere else to live? If you plan to stay in your home area, the possibilities are【C15】______well-known to you already. Friends and the local paper are always【C16】______. If you are going to work in a【C17】______area, again there are the papers—and the accommodation agencies, 【C18】______these should be approached with【C19】______. Agencies are allowed to charge a fee, usually the【C20】______of the first week' s rent, if you take accommodation they have found for you.

Lawyers are less than 1% of American adults,【C1】______they are well-represented in government. Both the president and the vice-president trained as lawyers.【C2】______did 55% of senators and 100% of Supreme Court justices. There are【C3】______to having a bit of legal expertise among those who write and【C4】______the nation"s laws, or assess their constitutionality. But there is also a potential conflict of interest.【C5】______florists had such a lock on the levers of【C6】______, you might expect subsidies for weddings and a campaign to beautify cities. Lawyers, alas, are no more【C7】______. The American legal system is the most lawyer-friendly on Earth. It is dizzily【C8】______. The regulations that accompany the Dodd-Frank law governing Wall Street,【C9】______are already more than 3 million words long—and not yet half-written. Companies must hire【C10】______lawyers to guide them【C11】______a maze created by other lawyers. They must also hire lawyers to【C12】______themselves against attacks by other lawyers on a playing field【C13】______by lawyers. The cost—roughly $800 a year for every American—is【C14】______to consumers. The【C15】______are hard to detect. Americans are probably no less likely to be injured or cheated than the citizens of countries【C16】______spend a fraction as much. 【C17】______it is hard to feel sympathy for lawyers facing a【C18】______labour market. America"s 250 biggest law firms shed more than 9500 people last year. Law students are【C19】______to find the lavishly paid work they expected after graduation. One big law firm even went bust. None of this is nice for the people【C20】______especially those with large student debts.

TheArtsClassandtheScienceClassWriteanessayof160-200wordsbasedonthedrawing.Inyouressay,youshould1)describethedrawingbriefly,2)explainitsintendedmeaning,and3)giveyourcomments.

Whoever said that victory has many fathers and defeat is an orphan, surely had never heard of the World Trade Organization (WTO). In the case of the hapless multilateral trade body and its long suffering representatives, the total failure of the opening meeting of the so-called Millennium trade round has lots of people boasting of their role in the violent physical struggle. Well. That"s just brilliant. They are proud of being part of a movement that wants to wreck the most important engine of economic growth, prosperity and overall global rising living standards we have—the freedom of trade and movement of people and goods between nations. The 135-member WTO is composed of sovereign governments wishing to further this goal and ease the settlement of international trade disputes. From the sounds emanating from Seattle, though, it would now seem the WTO has now replaced the Trilateral Commission and the Freemasons as candidate No. 1 to take over the world. Everybody has his favorite Seattle story. The city"s police chief will have plenty of time to think about his, having now resigned in disgrace over the loss of control of downtown Seattle. The Seattle business community maybe more inclined to brood over theirs; the poor fools invested $9 million to attract the meeting to their fine city. What stands out more? I would nominate the union of steel workers who were marching in protest. It"s an image that will boggle the mind for years to come. The debate now is over just how effective this anti-globalist coalition will turn out to be. In the heat of the moment, it always looks as though the world as we know it is coming to an end. But the overwhelming likelihood is that we have not actually seen a replay of the anti-Vietnam War movement, which had much clearer focus, obviously, though its consequences were far-reaching. How long, after all, can you protest against cheap imports when those same imports are all over your house? No, the real reason for the disaster in Seattle is political, and reports coming out of the meeting point to President Clinton as a major culprit, which may be both good and bad. Taking the long view, other trade rounds have had difficult beginnings, too. It took years to get the Uruguay Round under way, which finally happened in 1986. Thankfully, we will soon be electing another president, and it should be someone whose actions match his rhetoric. Still, it is a disgrace that the world"s greatest trading nation, i.e. the United States, is currently led by a man whose motivations are so narrowly political and egocentric that he has now wrecked any chance of entering the history books as a champion of free trade.

The staggering variety of free stuff available on the Internet sometimes seems to have repealed the first law of economics: There"s no such thing as a free lunch. But as so often happens, the dismal science actually has it right. When it looks like you"re getting something for nothing, somebody is paying, and it"s often instructive to know who that is. I"ve been testing a new phone service called ooma that provides an interesting case in point. Once you pay $399 up front for a box called the ooma Hub and connect it to your phone and the Internet via your home network, you are promised free, unlimited phone calls over two lines, plus voice mail. The system works fine and is simple to set up. When a voice-over-Internet call has to go to a regular phone number, a service such as ooma usually has to pay a "termination fee" to a carrier such as Verizon. Skype, for example, charges 2% per minute for calls outside the Skype network. But ooma avoids this by using some of its customers— those who have kept regular phone lines—to serve as gateways onto the local phone network at no charge. When you want to call outside the ooma network, the call moves from your Hub over the Internet to a second landline-connected Hub within the destination"s local calling area. The Hub dials the target number and patches the call through. In effect, ooma customers with landlines pay to keep the whole system going. You don"t even notice if your landline is being used because your own phone calls go out over your broadband connection, with your flat-rate monthly phone bill covering the ooma traffic. In fact, this improves the efficiency of the phone system by putting idle lines to work. But if ooma ever gains real traction, I expect a legal assault from big phone companies, which are losing income from termination fees. Web services do take advantage of genuine economies. The phone network is more expensive than the Net. Lots of Net players build on these advantages. Skype relies on selected users who act, often without their knowledge, as "super nodes" to manage the system. FreeConference.com provides calls by taking advantage of regulatory quirks—namely, the stiff tennination fees long-distance carriers must pay to certain rural phone companies that handle calls into their territory. In effect, the free conferences are subsidized by customers and shareholders of the long-distance carriers. You may as well enjoy free calls while you can. But it"s always a good idea to read the fine print. If it isn"t obvious who"s paying for a free service, it might well be you.

What comes to mind when you hear the word "diversity"? Issues of race or gender may spring to mind. Equal rights? Or minority issues? I encourage people to look at a much wider definition of the word. I would tend to say diversity is "different-ness" in any form. A good example of this kind of diversity has been experienced by every person who ever left behind the comforts of home and moved into uncharted territory that is at once stimulating, curious, and estranging. Issues of diversity are informed not only by your cultural background and context, but also by your religion, age, field of work, family situation, sexual orientation, personality, and countless other factors that make us unique. Diversity affects everyone. It"s for this reason that diversity has become such a buzz word. The buzz happens because it"s all about how you handle it. It" s very much like the job a composer has when creating a great musical composition. If the composer understands what each unique note and dynamic mark is capable of in combination with the other parts, the result achieved is extraordinary. If, however, none of the parts is communicating with the others, we"re left with a cacophony. On a personal level, it" s this understanding and acceptance of " the other" which rests at the core of diversity. Whether we"re talking about navigating through a multicultural urban environment or uprooting and moving to a new foreign social context, it is necessary to set aside rigid assumptions about "the other" and put oneself in the other"s shoes. So how do we make this leap? It"s often as simple as asking questions and being careful not to assume that what you see is necessarily what the other side sees. Often in my workshops I give a magic lesson to the audience to illustrate this principle. I first present the magic and accomplish the "impossible". The participants receive the same props but simply can"t do it. We look more carefully at the situation and realize that the assumptions they made about it actually blocked them from achieving this feat; a feat they suddenly are empowered to do which, moments ago, was impossible. The goal in being sensitive to diversity is to cultivate a culture of respect for people"s differences and understand that such an environment is beneficial to everyone involved. Diversity awareness is an evolution. We can" t get there by snapping our fingers, and it isn" t a matter of training people to have "textbook" politically correct attitudes. Instead it"s a case of looking at the big picture of how we see the world, understanding why we see it that way, and making sure we do our part to genuinely value difference and benefit from it.

After clashes between riot police and protesters, workers at the Keihin Hotel in Tokyo were forcibly ejected on January 25th. They had been fired in October when the hotel went bankrupt, but decided to keep it running—an example of the lengths to which people will go to keep their jobs in Japan, where unemployment is suddenlyrising at an alarming rate. Over 150,000people are expected to lose their jobs between October and March. Hisashi Yamada of the Japan Research Institute expects 1.5 million job losses by the end of next year, lifting the unemployment rate from 4% last year to over 6% Though low by international standards, yet that is exceptionally high in Japan. Hardest hit will be "non-regular" workers—those who work part-time, as day-laborers, for a fixed duration, or under agency contracts. "Regular" workers enjoy benefits such as housing, bonuses, framing and (usually) lifetime employment, but non-regular workers earn as little as 40% of the pay for the same work, and do not receive training, pensions or unemployment insurance. In the past 20 years their numbers have grown to one-third of all workers. For years most Japanese ignored their predicament But now their problems have erupted into plain sight. In January around 500 recently fired, homeless people set up a tent village in Hibiya Park—a highly visible spot in the centre of Tokyo. Politicians and television news crews flocked to the scene. The embarrassed city government eventually found accommodation for the park"s homeless in unused city-owned buildings, though it put them up for only a week. The problem is that Japan lacks a social safety net, says Makoto Yuasa, the organizer of the Hibiya tent village, who dropped out of a PhD program at Tokyo University to help homeless people. Because families or companies traditionally looked after people, the state did not have to. Moreover, there is a stigma in Japan if an unemployed person asks for help: "If you don"t work, you don"t deserve to eat", the saying goes. Yet there are signs of change. The main political parties recognize the need to establish better support and training for non-regular workers. And there is even a new government program to help unemployed foreign workers, such as Brazilians who worked at car factories, so that they do not leave Japan if they are laid off. With a shrinking population and workforce, losing skilled hands would only compound the country"s woes when the economy eventually recovers.

In recent years, Microsoft has focused on three big tasks, building robust security into its software, resolving numerous antitrust complaints against it and upgrading its Windows operating system. These three tasks are now starting to collide. On August 27th the firm said that the successor to its Windows XP operating system, code-named Longhorn, will go on sale in 2007 without one of its most impressive features: a technique to integrate elaborate search capabilities into nearly all desktop applications. (On the bright side, Longhorn will contain advances in rendering images and enabling different computing platforms to exchange data directly between applications.) It is a big setback for Microsoft, which considers search technology a pillar of its future growth—not least as it competes against Google. The firm"s focus on security—championed by]Bill Gates himself—took resources away from Longhorn, admits Greg Sullivan, a lead product manager in the Windows client division. Programmers have been fixing Windows XP rather than working on Longhorn. In mid-August, Microsoft released Service Pack 2, a huge set of free software patches and enhancements to make Windows XP more secure. Though some of the fixes turned out to have vulnerabilities of their own, the patches have mostly been welcomed. Microsoft"s decision to forgo new features in return for better security is one that most computer users will probably applaud. Yet ironically, as Microsoft slowly improves the security of its products—by, for instance, incorporating firewall technology, anti-virus systems and spam filters—its actions increasingly start to resemble those that, in the past, have got the firm into trouble with regulators. Is security software an "adjacent software market", in which case Microsoft may be leveraging its dominance of the operating system into it? Integrating security products into Windows might be considered "bundling" which, with regard to web browsing, so excited America"s trustbusters in the 1990s. And building security directly into the operating system seems a lot like "commingling" software code, on which basis the European Commission ruled earlier this year that Microsoft abused its market power through the Windows Media Player. Microsoft is appealing against that decision, and on September 30th it will argue for a suspension of the commission"s remedies, such as the requirement that it license its code to rivals. Just last month, the European Union"s competition directorate began an investigation into Microsoft and Time Warner, a large media firm, on the grounds that their proposed joint acquisition of Content Guard, a software firm whose products protect digital media files, might provide Microsoft with undue market power over digital media standards. The commission will rule by January 2005. Microsoft, it seems, in security as elsewhere, is going to have to get used to being punished for its success. Its Windows monopoly lets it enjoy excessive profits—but the resulting monoculture makes it an obvious target for viruses and regulators alike.

In this latest facet of the ongoing information revolution, millions of personal computers are connected by the Internet and other computer networks and have started a global revolution in business and interpersonal communications. The personal computer today functions as a combination of personal printing press, radio, telephone, post office and television set. 【B1】______ The stunning possibilities of the Internet for journalism and the news business are somewhat obvious. Publishers, broadcasters and journalists are aware of this explosive information revolution and believe they should be involved. 【B2】______ A newspaper is, of course, a business operation. At a time when some publishers are downsizing staffs and trimming costs to increase profitability, other papers are investing heavily in the new electronic or interactive journalism. 【B3】______ In early 1996, the National Newspaper Association listed 162 newspapers that had electronic pages on the web, triple the number in 1994. By early 1997, the number of online newspapers rose to 700. These numbers keep going up to date and include such heavy hitters as The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune and The Wall Street Journal. For newspapers, two basic uncertainties currendy exist about interactive journalism; first, will the public pay for electronic news on a medium where information, after a basic user's fee, is free? Second, quickly, will advertising displayed on web pages "sell" on a medium that so far lacks both an effective way to count the number of people who eyeball web pages or to ascertain the demographic of those views? 【B4】______ The fear comes from the threat to the newspapers' advertising base, especially classified advertisements, from the computer's point-and-click technology and the ease of getting answers quickly, complete with pictures and sounds. 【B5】______ So far, the numbers of potential users of interactive newspapers are still small compared with total newspaper readership but the number is growing fast. The only certainty, promoters of electronic publishing say, is that the breakthrough to make the Internet economically viable for the newspaper business will come someday.[A] A website can be simply a screen or two of information, or it can be an extensive and complex number of offerings, with news items plus advertisements, illustrations, documents, and background stories which are not included in a printed daily.[B] Hence, the press' rush to online services is seen as driven by both fear and greed.[C] Although no one seems to know whether they will ever make money on the WWW, the Internet multimedia information retrieval system is on the verge of becoming a mass medium itself.[D] However, neither they, nor anyone else, seem to know where this brave new world of communication is headed. No consensus exists as to when and how journalism as we know it will get involved and be changed by the Internet, but no one doubts that change is coming—and fast.[E] While someone argue that the computer may not replace any of these media, which are, of course, heavily involved in journalism, still the Internet has the potential to transcend them all, providing not just one-to-one communications, or one to many, but the creation of whole new communities of people sharing ideas and interests regardless of where they live.[F] The access for this fledgling news source is established, but so far the number of news readers is small and no one is making much money out of providing the news. Online news users tend to be young male adults who log on from office computers.[G] Greed is stimulated by the possibility of large sums to be made if a system is developed that counts and categorizes every visitor to a website. If this happens, Internet publishing could be a profitable marriage of newspapers' advertising bases with franchise strengths. Publishers also want to attract the younger users who no longer read newspapers.

Studythefollowingpicturecarefullyandwriteanessayof160-200wordsinwhichyoushould1)describethepicturebriefly,2)interpretthesocialphenomenonreflectedbyit,and3)giveyourcomments.

You are planning to go to a foreign university for further study. Write a letter of application which should include: 1) the reason why you apply for, 2) the introduction of your study experience, 3) the earnest request for consideration. You should write about 100 words. Do not sign your own name at the end of the letter. Use "Li Ming" instead. You do not need to write your address.

A.Studythefollowingpicturecarefullyandwriteanessayofabout160—200words.B.Youressaymustbewrittenclearly.C.Youressayshouldmeettherequirementsbelow:1)Describethedrawing,2)interpretitsmeaning,and3)giveyourcomments.

All is not gold that glitters.

The question facing Swiss voters on March 3rd was called the "people's initiative against fat-cat pay ". With a billing like that, who wouldn't vote yes? As it happened, 68% of the electorate did, passing a measure that requires listed companies to offer shareholders a binding vote on senior managers' pay and appointments at each annual general meeting. The penalty for bosses who fail to comply is up to three years in jail or the forfeit of up to six years' salary. Switzerland's penchant for direct democracy has trumped its tolerance for tycoons. Swiss business is shaken. It had backed a "counter-initiative" giving shareholders more voting powers without threatening criminal sanction. That was rejected by voters. The new law, which will be written into the constitution, endangers Switzerland as an investment destination, the business lobby claims. Economiesuisse, the Swiss Business Federation, now accepts the popular verdict but warns that such complex and highly charged changes must be implemented carefully. The laws needed to put the vote into practice will take ten years to write, some cynics suggest. The initiative is the brainchild of Thomas Minder, who runs his family's toiletries business. He has apparently never forgiven Swissair for backing out of a contract when it nearly went bankrupt 12 years ago and then awarding its former boss a big pay-off. Mr Minder's campaign gained momentum last month on news that Novartis, a Swiss drug firm, intended to pay its departing chairman, Daniel Vasella, a severance package of SFr72m ($76m). Mr Vasella later refused the package. After Mr Minder's victory it will become harder to extend such corporate generosity. Some of the new restrictions seem sensible. Shareholder votes on executive pay, hitherto ad hoc and advisory, will become routine and binding. Pension funds will be required to vote in the interests of their members and make their votes public. Board members will not be permitted to have consulting or other contracts with firms in the same group. But other provisions are more burdensome. The law will ban incentives that can be useful, such as "golden hellos" and severance packages for board members. It will also bar them from accepting rewards for buying or selling company divisions.

He has told me when they are to discuss my proposal.