When the first white men arrived in Samoa, they found blind men, who could see well enough to describe things in detail just by holding their hands over objects. In France, Jules Romaine tested hundreds of blind people and found a few who could tell the difference between light and dark. He narrowed their photosensitivity(感光灵敏度) down to areas on the nose or in the finger tips. In 1960 a medical board examined a girl in Virginia and found that, even with thick bandages over her eyes, she was able to distinguish different colors and read short sections of large print. Rosa Kuleshova, a young woman in the Urals, can see with her fingers. She is not blind, but because she grew up in a family of blind people, she learned to read Braille(盲文) to help them and then went on to teach] herself to do other things with her hands. She was examined by the Soviet Academy of Science, and proved to be genuine. A scientist made an intensive study with her and found that, securely blindfolded with only her arms stuck through a screen, she could tell the difference between three primary colors. To test the possibility that the cards reflected heat differently, he heated some and cooled others without affecting her response to them. He also found that she could read newsprint under glass, so texture was giving her no clues. She was able to identify the colors and shape of patches of light projected on to her palm or on to a screen. In rigidly controlled tests, with a blindfold and a screen and a piece of card around her neck so wide that she could not see round it, Rosa read the small print in a newspaper with her elbow. And, in the most convincing demonstration of all, she repeated these things with someone standing behind her pressing hard on her eyeballs. Nobody can cheat under this pressure.

The Asian tiger mom that Amy Chua portrays in her new book may seem like just one more species in the genus Extreme Parent-the counterpart to the hovering American helicopter parents who frantically rush ahead of their children, sweeping their paths clear of the tiniest obstacles. The common characteristics include an obsession with a child's success, a reflex to treat kids as extensions or reflections of oneself and patterns of conduct that impartial observers might class as insane if not criminal. In Chua's case, this famously include prohibiting graders lower than an A, TV, playdates and sleepovers, and warning her pianist child that "if the next time's not perfect, I am going to take all your stuffed animals and burn them. "【C1】______. But it is the differences between the Tigers and the Helicopters that help explain the furor Chua has caused. Tigers fixate on success, defined as achievement in precision-oriented fields like music and math; Helicopters are obsessed with failure and preventing it at all costs. 【C2】______.Tigers view children as tough, able to take the abuse; Helicopters view them as precious, to be raised under glass. Their fury at a bad grade is more likely to land on the teacher than on the child. 【C3】______. "The thing that impresses me most America," observed Edward, Duke of Windsor, "is the way parents obey their children." But there is something bracing about Chua's apparent indifference to her daughters' hostility, especially for parents who have learned that even if you let your teenagers spend 50 hours a week on Facebook, they will still find reasons to hate you. 【C4】______. You let your toddlers have Froot Loops? You quit karate lessons? Commenters spank the moms who appear insufficiently committed to breast feeding. "You literally make me shudder," reads one response on UrbanBaby. com. Some of Chua's critics sound just as smug when they declare that the Tigers' "inside-the-box" thinking is why Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and/or a cure for cancer will never come from China. "【C5】______ But this much derision, I suspect, reflects some doubts. Western families, have no monopoly on happiness, and those of the helicopter variety at least do not exactly encourage wild individuality in their children. Chua's daughters are, by all accounts, girls any parent would be proud of. But maybe the real appeal is her tone of certainty in discussing something so confounding as child rearing-as it is a puzzle to be solved rather than a picture to be painted, and there is no way to know what it will look like until it is done.[A] Too much discipline, they argue, makes for submissiveness and lack of imagination, because imagination is by its nature subversive; it colors outside the lines. Likewise, invention, the creation of something utterly new, violates the authority of the present and the tyranny of tradition. [B] One reason the book has touched such a nerve is a suspicion among the Helicopters that if you don't let your kids get clobbered now and then by a tough teacher, they will never have the resilience to thrive as adults in a competitive economy. [C] In the case of the classic Western helicopter parent, it starts with reward charts for toilet training, and it never really ends, which is why colleges have to devote so many resources to teaching parents how to leave their kids alone.[D] Tigers operate in a culture of discipline; Helicopters, in a culture of fear.[E] Helicopters parents are great believers in expertise: read enough books, consult enough professionals and you can crack the parenting code.[F] Twenty-first century parenting already seemed like a gladiatorial contest, its battles fought in playgrounds, at book clubs and especially online, with the rise of parenting websites where parents claw and bite.[G] If Chua appears to sentence her children to slave labor, Western parents enshrine their children and crave their friendship.

The battle to prevent or at least slow global warming has intensified in the past year as scientists have learned more about the magnitude of the problem. One of the leading climate experts, Inez Y. Fung, director of the Atmospheric Sciences Center at the University of California, Berkeley, recently showed that the earth may soon lose its ability to absorb much of the greenhouse gas thatis raising temperatures. The oceans and continents currently soak up about half the carbon dioxide produced by the burning of fossil fuels. In the oceans, the gas combines with water to form carbonic acid; on land, plants take in more carbon dioxide and grow faster. But computer modeling done by Fung and her colleagues indicates that these carbon sinks will become less effective as the earth continues to warm. For example, as the tropics become hotter and drier in the summer, plants will reduce their respiration of carbon dioxide to avoid water loss. Atmospheric measurements over the past decade have confirmed this effect. If the oceans and land take in less carbon dioxide, more will remain in the atmosphere and global warming could accelerate catas-trophically. Despite these warning signs, the government administration has opposed approval of the Kyoto Protocol, the international treaty mandating reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, But nine states in the northeastern U.S. are attempting to sidestep the federal government"s opposition by taking action on their own. Last August the group reached a preliminary agreement to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide by 10 percent by 2020. The plan requires approval by the state legislatures, but environmentalists are already hoping that other regions of the U.S. will follow suit. If adopted nationwide, the proposal would lower greenhouse gas emissions by roughly as much as the Kyoto Protocol would have. Steve Howard, chief executive of the Climate Group, is tackling the global-warming problem from a different angle. Founded in 2004, the Climate Group is a coalition of corporations and local governments that have voluntarily committed to reducing their greenhouse gas emissions. Members include oil giant BP(British Petroleum Co. PLC), drug-maker Johnson BP, for instance, slashed its energy bills by $650 million over 10 years. "We have seen important evidence about successful emission reduction scattered here and there in the most surprising places all over the globe," Howard says. "We are working to bring all of it together so that it forms a body of evidence."

Do people get happier or more foul-tempered as they age? Stereotypes of irritable neighbors【B1】______, scientists have been trying to answer this question for decades, and the results have been 【B2】______. Now a study of several thousand Americans born between 1885 and 1980 reveals that well-being 【B3】______ increases with age but overall happiness【B4】______when a person was born. 【B5】______studies that have【B6】______older adults with the middle-aged and young have sometimes found that older adults are not as happy. But these studies could not【B7】______whether their 【B8】______ was because of their age or be cause of their 【B9】______ life experience. The new study, published online January 24 in Psychological Science,【B10】______out the answer by examining 30 years of data on thousands of Americans, including【B11】______measures of mood and well-being, reports of job and relationship success, and objective measures of health. The researchers found, after controlling for variables【B12】______health, wealth, gender, ethnicity and education, that well-being increases over everyone's lifetime.【B13】______people who have lived through extreme hardship, such as the Great Depression,【B14】______much less happy than those who have had more【B15】______lives. This finding helps to【B16】______why past studies have found conflicting results—experi-ence【B17】______, and tough times can【B18】______an entire generation's happiness for the rest of their lives. The【B19】______news is,【B20】______we've lived through, we can all look forward to feeling more content as we age.

Title: TELEVISIONWord limit: 160-200 wordsTime limit: 40 minutesYou are required to develop your essay according to the given topic sentence of each paragraph 1. Television now plays an increasingly important role in people"s lives. 2. No one will deny that we have benefited a lot from the invention of television. 3. However, people have different opinions about television and have argued heatedly about its advantages and disadvantages.

Leave it to writer Buchwald to bring humor to hospice. Last February, the famed satirist was diagnosed with terminal kidney failure, given three weeks to live, and transferred to a hospice for a quiet goodbye. Then the unexpected happened. His kidneys almost miraculously started working again. The poisons in his blood that were supposed to carry him out in peaceful slumber(死亡) washed out of his system, leaving instead a funny bone stunned and amused by the absurdity of the situation. It"s not every day that someone flunks hospice. Seasoned author that he is, Buchwald turned the irony into a book. Only 10 months ago, he was a sad, 80-year-old man with a newly amputated(切除) leg and kidneys on the fritz(发生故障). Despite his family"s pleas, he entered a hospice facility, at ease with his Choice to die naturally. Most people don"t know much about hospice, the place. It doesn"t cure; it cares, relieving physical pain and mental anguish. Most often, cancer or cardiovascular(心血管病) disease carries hospice patients to their end, usually in weeks. But some are put on hold like Buchwald. Buchwald left after five months. In one large study, 6 percent of hospice patients improved enough to be taken off the terminal list and sent home. Buchwald was shocked when the big sleep didn"t come. Before Buchwald became the hospice"s superstar, he had been the poster boy for depression. But with the help of physicians and medication, he didn"t drown. Laugh or cry. Facing natural death, he now offers a message many of his contemporaries need to hear. Older men, particularly those in their 80s, have the highest rate of suicide. Risk factors for them notably include health issues. In fact, suicide often comes soon after they"ve seen a doctor. On that point, Buchwald notes the medical dearth of smiles and laughter". Look at how often doctors and nurses walk into a patient"s room all serious", he says. His prescription? They" need to go to Disney World to be trained". Laughter, of course, is the best medicine, and some studies even show humor is a biological stress reliever. As Buchwald sees it, many humorists use it as therapy to block out periods of hurt or anger. You would not know there were hurts or anger judging by his hospice time. Friends and family smothered Buchwald with love. VIPs beat a path to the hospice door. And they all came bearing food, lots of cheesecake. He thrived. After he planned his funeral, he started up writing again and found he could write wonderfully. Buchwald is now teaching all of us how to live—and to die. Yet he"s quick to add", I have had such a good time at the hospice. I am going to miss it".

When three Florida boys were diagnosed as having AIDS, their barber refused to cut their hair and their house was burned down by neighbors. These reactions may be (1)_____, but other AIDS sufferers have experienced job loss, (2)_____ of insurance, and even (3)_____ by their families and friends. Social scientists use the term stigma to describe the discredit and shame that public hostility can (4)_____ a group of people. (5)_____, AIDS sufferers are often stigmatized. Where do these stigmatizing attitudes come from? AIDS forces us to confront our own (6)_____ in a particularly (7)_____ way, because most of its victims are young. Some people (8)_____ feelings of vulnerability by convincing themselves that AIDS victims are not like them and (9)_____ their fate. They define AIDS (10)_____ something that can happen only to members of certain groups. Because homosexuals are already a target of (11)_____, people"s intolerance becomes (12)_____ to victims of the disease. The stigma of AIDS has created a (13)_____ for people who think they may be (14)_____ risk. Should they (15)_____ themselves tested for HIV—and risk discrimination if their test results are positive? (16)_____ should they avoid being tested? Many people take the (17)_____ course. Even when HIV testing is required by law, many people (18)_____ great lengths to avoid it. The tragic result is that many people who have the virus do not (19)_____ out about it, do not receive treatment, and remain (20)_____ to spread the virus to others.

King Juan Carlos of Spain once insisted "kings don"t abdicate, they die in their sleep." But embarrassing scandals and the popularity of the republican left in the recent Euro-elections have forced him to eat his words and stand down. So, does the Spanish crisis suggest that monarchy is seeing its last days? Does that mean the writing is on the wall for all European royals, with their magnificent uniforms and majestic lifestyles? The Spanish case provides arguments both for and against monarchy. When public opinion is particularly polarised, as it was following the end of the Franco regime, monarchs can rise above "mere" politics and "embody" a spirit of national unity. It is this apparent transcendence of politics that explains monarchs, continuing popularity as heads of state. And so, the Middle East excepted, Europe is the most monarch-infested region in the world, with 10 kingdoms(not counting Vatican City and Andorra). But unlike their absolutist counterparts in the Gulf and Asia, most royal families have survived because they allow voters to avoid the difficult search for a non-controversial but respected public figure. Even so, kings and queens undoubtedly have a downside. Symbolic of national unity as they claim to be, their very history—and sometimes the way they behave today—embodies outdated and indefensible privileges and inequalities. At a time when Thomas Piketty and other economists are warning of rising inequality and the increasing power of inherited wealth, it is bizarre that wealthy aristocratic families should still be the symbolic heart of modem democratic states. The most successful monarchies strive to abandon or hide their old aristocratic ways. Princes and princesses have day-jobs and ride bicycles, not horses(or helicopters). Even so, these are wealthy families who party with the international l%,and media intrusiveness makes it increasingly difficult to maintain the right image. While Europe"s monarchies will no doubt be smart enough to survive for some time to come, it is the British royals who have most to fear from the Spanish example. It is only the Queen who has preserved the monarchy"s reputation with her rather ordinary(if well-heeled)granny style. The danger will come with Charles, who has both an expensive taste of lifestyle and a pretty hierarchical view of the world. He has failed to understand that monarchies have largely survived because they provide a service—as non-controversial and non-political heads of state. Charles ought to know that as English history shows, it is kings, not republicans, who are the monarchy"s worst enemies.

A Letter of Consultation Write a letter of consultation of about 100 words based on the following situation: Your roommate Jim has suffered from psychological problems. Worried about him as you are, you don"t know how to help him. Now write a letter to a psychological expert, Professor White, to ask for advice. Do not sign your own name at the end of the letter. Use "Li Ming" instead. Do not write the address.

Personality is to a large extent inherent—A-type parents usually bring about A-type offspring.【F1】 But the environment must also have a profound effect, since if competition is important to the parents, it is likely to become a major factor in the lives of their children. One place where children soak up A characteristics is school, which is, by its very nature, a highly competitive institution. Too many schools adopt the win at all costs moral standard and measure their success by sporting achievements.【F2】 The current passion for making children compete against their classmates or against the clock produces a two-layer system, in which competitive A-types seem in some way better than their B-type fellows. Being too keen to win can have dangerous consequences: remember that Pheidippides, the first marathon runner, dropped dead seconds after saying: Rejoice, we conquer! By far the worst form of competition in schools is the disproportionate emphasis on examinations. It is a rare school that allows pupils to concentrate on those things they do well.【F3】 The merits of competition by examination are somewhat questionable, but competition in the certain knowledge of failure is positively harmful. Obviously, it is neither practical nor desirable that all A youngsters change into B"s.【F4】 The world needs types, and schools have an important duty to try to fit a child"s personality to his possible future employment. It is top management. If the preoccupation of schools with academic work was lessened, more time might be spent teaching children surer values.【F5】 Perhaps selection for the caring professions, especially medicine, could be made less by good grades in chemistry and more by such considerations as sensitivity and sympathy. It is surely a mistake to choose our doctors exclusively from A-type stock. B"s are important and should be encouraged.

BSection II Reading Comprehension/B

On a weekday night this January, thousands of flag-waving youths packed Olaya Street, Riyadh"s main shopping strip, to cheer a memorable Saudi victory in the GCC Cup football final. One car, rock music blaring from its stereo, squealed to a stop, blocking an intersection. The passengers leapt out, clambered on to the roof and danced wildly in front of the honking crowd. Having paralyzed the traffic across half the city, they sped off before the police could catch them. Such public occasion was once unthinkable in the rigid conformist kingdom, but now young people there and in other Gulf states are increasingly willing to challenge authority. That does not make them rebels, respect for elders, for religious duty and for maintaining family bonds remain pre-eminent values, and premarital sex is generally out of the question. Yet demography is beginning to put pressure on ultra-conservative norms. After all, 60% of the Gulf"s native population is under the age of 25. With many more of its citizens in school than in the workforce, the region faces at least a generation of rocketing demand for employment. In every single GCC country the native workforce will double by 2020. In Saudi Arabia it will grow from 3.3m now to over 8m. The task of managing this surge would be daunting enough for any society, but is particularly forbidding in this region, for several reasons. The first is that the Gulf suffers from a lopsided labor structure. This goes back to the 1970s, when ballooning oil incomes allowed governments to import millions of foreign workers and to dispense cozy jobs to the locals. The result is a two-tier workforce, with outsiders working mostly in the private sector and natives monopolizing the state bureaucracy. Private firms are as productive as any. But within the government, claims one study, workers are worth only a quarter of what they get paid. Similarly, in the education sector, 30 years spent keeping pace with soaring student numbers has taken a heavy toll on standards. The Saudi school system, for instance, today has to cope with 5m students, eight times more than in 1970. And many Gulf countries adapted their curricula from Egyptian models that are now thoroughly discredited. They continue to favor rote learning of "facts" intended to instill patriotism or religious values. Even worse, the system as a whole discourages intellectual curiosity. It channels students into acquiring prestige degrees rather than gaining marketable skills. Of the 120,000 graduates that Saudi universities produced between 1995 and 1999, only 10,000 had studied technical subjects such as architecture or engineering. They accounted for only 2% of the total number of Saudis entering the job market.

BSection III Writing/B

The manager was sympathetic, but he could do nothing.

Until recently, the common factor in all the science used to figure out if a piece of art was forged was that it was concerned with the medium of the artwork, rather than the art itself. Matters of style and form were left to art historians, who could make erudite, but qualitative, judgments about whether a painting was really good enough to be, say, a Leonardo. But this is changing. A paper in this week"s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Hany Farid and his colleagues at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire uses statistical techniques to examine art itself—the message, not the medium. Dr. Farid employed a technique called wavelet analysis to examine 13 drawings that had at one time or another been attributed to Pieter Bruegel the Elder, a 16th-century Flemish painter. He also looked at Perugino"s "Madonna with Child", a 15th-century Italian masterpiece lodged in the college"s Hood Museum of Art. He concluded, in agreement with art historians, that eight of the putative Bruegels are authentic, while the other five are imitations. In the case of "Madonna with Child", he analysed the six faces in the painting (Mary, the infant Jesus and several saints) and found that three of them were probably done by the same painter, while the other three were each done by a different hand. The view that four different painters worked on the canvas is, he says, consistent with the view of some art historians that Perugino"s apprentices did much of the work, although there is no clear consensus among art historians. As sceptics will doubtless point out, this is a small number of images. Furthermore, Dr. Farid knew before performing the analysis what results he expected. But he is the first to acknowledge that it is early days for his methodology. He hopes to study many more paintings. By looking at large numbers of paintings that are universally believed to be authentic, Dr. Farid hopes to be able to examine doubtful cases with confidence in the future, Even with the Bruegels—real and imitation—though, Dr. Farid"s results are persuasive. It is tricky to describe exactly what it is that distinguishes the real ones from the imitations, but Dr. Fetid says that it can be thought of as the nature of the artist"s brushstroke. Unlike some analyses of Jackson Pollock"s work that have been done over the past few years by Richard Taylor of the University of Oregon, Dr. Farid says his technique could, in principle, be used for any artist. What Dr. Farid did was to convert each work of art into a set of mathematical functions. These so-called wavelets describe particular parts of the image as a series of peaks and troughs of variable height and wavelength. By expressing an image this way, it is possible to compress that image while losing very little information. The sums of the wavelets from different images can then be compared. Once he did this, Dr. Farid found that the types of wavelets used to express authentic Bruegels were noticeably different from those used to express the imitations. (The Perugino was analysed by treating the six faces as distinct paintings.) It seems that curators may soon be able to add another weapon to their anti-forgery arsenal.

In 1924 America's National Research Council sent two engineers to supervise a series of experiments at a telephone-parts factory called the Hawthorne Plant near Chicago. It hoped they would learn how stop-floor lighting【B1】______workers' productivity. Instead, the studies ended【B2】______giving their name to the "Hawthorne effect", the extremely influential idea that the very【B3】______of being experimented upon changed subjects' behavior. The idea arose because of the【B4】______behavior of the women in the plant. According to 【B5】______of the experiments, their hourly output rose when lighting was increased, but also when it was dimmed. It did not【B6】______what was done in the experiment;【B7】______something was changed, productivity rose. A(n)【B8】______that they were being experimented upon seemed to be【B9】______to alter workers' behavior【B10】______itself. After several decades, the same data were【B11】______to econometric analysis. Hawthorne experiments has another surprise in store.【B12】______the descriptions on record, no systematic【B13】______was found that levels of productivity were related to changes in lighting. It turns out that the peculiar way of conducting the experiments may have led to【B14】______interpretations of what happened.【B15】______, lighting was always changed on a Sunday. When work started again on Monday, output【B16】______rose compared with the previous Saturday and【B17】______to rise for the next couple of days. 【B18】______, a comparison with data for weeks when there was no experimentation showed that output always went up on Mondays. Workers【B19】______to be diligent for the first few days of the week in any case, before【B20】______a plateau and then slackening off. This suggests that the alleged "Hawthorne effect" is hard to pin down.

BSection I Use of EnglishDirections: Read the following text. Choose the best word(s) for each numbered blank and mark A, B, C or D./B

As one of Haiti's most famous musicians drives down the two-lane Delmas roadway in Port-au-Prince, scattered calls in the street grow into a trembling chant in Haitian Creole (the language of Haiti) :"Pwezidan, Pwezidan"—"President, President. " But the young men shouting the words are not calling to Wyclef Jean, who just announced he was running for President of Haiti. They were greeting Michel "Sweet Micky" Martelly, the bad boy of the Haitian musical genre kompa who just happens to want to be the country's President too. Better known for the eyebrow-raising lyrics and his ability to rouse even the most conservative of Haitian elites to dance on top of tables, Martelly, 49, dressed in a suit on Thursday to submit his paperwork to run for President on the ticket of his party Repons Peyizan, or Countrymen's Response. He acknowledges that comparisons will be made between himself and Jean. But Martelly says despite being opponents for the presidency, he and Jean are friends. Martelly appeared on Jean's first solo album The Carnival in 1997. But Martelly jokes,"He's global and I'm local. " And he says what sets him apart from the rest of the presidential field—his friend included—is the Haitian people's true affinity for him. "You need to be loved by the people, cherished by them, trusted by them," Martelly says, shifting fluidly from Creole to English to French. "I'm not running to be President. I'm running to be the citizen who changes things. I want to be the inspirateur"—the inspirer. Martelly never falls short of inspiring attention. On the road to submit his paperwork, his car passes a mob of Jean supporters. But after honking his blaring car horn, the crowd quickly recognizes Martelly and changes directions. The group starts pouncing on Martelly's car chanting, "We will die with you," perhaps a sign of Haiti's fickle voter. Half the population of about 9 million is under 25. "I will follow whoever has the most support," says Ricardo Priville, 29, dressed in a Jean T-shirt but reaching for Martelly as the star exits his car. Martelly is also being supported by Jean's former Fugees band member Pras Michel. Michel admits Martelly is the underdog financially in the race to the National Palace, but he argues that Martelly connects to the Haitian people like no one else. Martelly has yet to release a comprehensive recovery plan, but he says it will promote foreign investments and tourism to help bolster the economy in the poorest country of the western hemisphere. Right now, the Nov. 28 election might seem more like Haitian Idol than a presidential race, but Martelly insists he's putting his bad-boy persona to rest and focusing on serious issues. "This is serious business," says Martelly. "The carnival is over."

BSection I Use of EnglishDirections: Read the following text. Choose the best word(s) for each numbered blank and mark A, B, C or D./B

People find it hard to like businesses once they grow beyond a certain size. Banks that were "too big to fail" sparked a global economic crisis and burned bundles of taxpayers' cash. Big retailers such as Walmart and Tesco squeeze suppliers and crush small rivals. Some big British firms minimise their tax bills so aggressively that they provoke outrage. It is shrewd politics to champion the little guy. But the popular fetish for small business is at odds with economic reality. Big firms are generally more productive, offer higher wages and pay more taxes than small ones. Economies dominated by small firms are often sluggish. Countries such as Greece, Italy and Portugal have lots of small firms which, thanks to cumbersome regulations, have failed lamentably to grow. Firms with at least 250 workers account for less than half the share of manufacturing jobs in these countries than they do in Germany, the euro zone's strongest economy. For all the boosterism around small business, it is economies with lots of biggish companies that have been able to sustain the highest living standards. Big firms can reap economies of scale. A big factory uses far less cash and labour to make each car or steel pipe than a small workshop. Big supermarkets such as the villainous Walmart offer a wider range of high-quality goods at lower prices than any corner store. Size allows specialisation, which fosters innovation. Big firms have their flaws, of course. They can be slow to respond to customers' needs, changing tastes or disruptive technology. To idolise big firms would be as unwise as to idolise small ones. Rather than focusing on size, policymakers should look at growth. One of the reasons why everyone loves small firms is that they create more jobs than big ones. But many small businesses stay small indefinitely. The link between small firms and jobs growth relies entirely on new start-ups, which are usually small, and which by definition create new jobs (as they did not previously exist). Rather than spooning out subsidies and regulatory favours to small firms, governments should concentrate on removing barriers to expansion. In parts of Europe, for example, small firms are exempted from the most burdensome social regulations. This gives them an incentive to stay small. Far better to repeal burdensome rules for all firms. The same goes for differential tax rates, such as Britain's, and the separate bureaucracy America maintains to deal with small businesses. In a healthy economy, entrepreneurs with ideas can easily start companies, the best of which grow fast and the worst of which are quickly swept aside. Size doesn't matter. Growth does.