It is hard to predict how science is going to turn out, and if it is really good science it is impossible to predict. If the things to be found are actually new, they are by definition unknown in advance. You cannot make choices in this matter. (46) You either have science or you don"t, and if you have it you are obliged to accept the surprising and disturbing pieces of information, along with the neat and promptly useful bits. The only solid piece of scientific truth about which I feel totally confident is that we are profoundly ignorant about nature. Indeed, I regard this as the major discovery of the past hundred years of biology. It is, in its way, an illuminating piece of news. (47) It would have amazed the brightest minds of the 18th century Enlightenment to be told by any of us how little we know and how bewildering the way ahead seems. (48) It is this sudden confrontation with the depth and scope of ignorance that represents the most significant contribution of the 20th century science to the human intellect. In earlier times, we either pretended to understand how things worked or ignored the problem, or simply made up stories to fill the gaps. Now that we have begun exploring in earnest, we are getting glimpses of how huge the questions are, and how far from being answered. Because of this, we are depressed. (49) It is not so bad being ignorant if you are totally ignorant the hard thing is knowing in some detail the reality of ignorance, the worst spots and here and there the not so bad spots, but no true light at the end of the tunnel nor even any tunnels that can yet be trusted. But we are making a beginning and there ought to be some satisfaction. There are probably no questions we can think up that can"t be answered, sooner or later, including even the matter of consciousness. (50) To be sure, there may well be questions we can"t think up, ever, and therefore limits to the reach of human intellect, but that is another matter. Within our limits, we should be able to work our way through to all our answers if we keep at it long enough, and pay attention.

To avoid the various foolish opinions to which man is liable, no superhuman genius is required. A few simple rules will keep you, not from all error, but from silly error. If the matter is one that can be serried by observation, make the observation yourself. (46) Aristotle could have avoided the mistake of thinking that women have fewer teeth than men, by the simple device of asking Mrs. Aristotle to keep her mouth open while he counted. He did not do so because he thought he knew. Thinking that you know when in fact you don"t is a fatal mistake, to which we are all liable. Many matters, however, are less easily brought to the test of experience. (47) If, like most of mankind, you have strong convictions on many such matters, there are ways in which you can make yourself aware of your own prejudice. If an opinion contrary to your own makes you angry, that is a sign that you subconsciously are aware of having no good reason for thinking as you do. If someone maintains that two and two are five, or that Iceland is on the equator, you feel pity rather than anger, unless you know little of arithmetic or geography that his opinion shakes your own contrary conviction. (48) The most savage controversies are those about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way. So whenever you find yourself getting angry about a difference of opinion, be on your guard; you will probably find, on examination, that your belief is going beyond what the evidence justifies. For those who have enough psychological imagination, it is a good plan to imagine an argument with a person having a different opinion. (49) This has one advantage, and only one, as compared with actual conversation with opponents; this one advantage "is "that the method is not subject to the same limitations of time and space. Mahatma Gandhi considered it unfortunate to have railways and steam boats and machinery; he would have liked to undo the whole of the industrial revolution. You may never have an opportunity of actually meeting anyone who holds this opinion, because in Western countries most people take the advantage of modern technology for granted. (50) But if you want to make sure that you are right in agreeing with the prevailing opinion, you will find it a good plan to test the arguments that occur to you by considering what Gandhi might have said in refutation of them. I have sometimes been led actually to change my mind as a result of this kind of imaginary dialogue. Furthermore, I have frequently found, myself growing, more agreeable through realizing the possible reasonableness of a hypothetical opponent.

In the following text, some sentences have been removed. For Questions 41-45, choose the most suitable one from the list (A、B、C、D、E、F、G……) to fit into each of the numbered blank. There are several extra choices, which do not fit in any of the gaps. (10 points) The days are getting shorter and the house-price forecasts are dropping faster than the last of the autumn leaves. Forecasts of a price crash, which began life as a minority view, are now banging in the middle of the mainstream. (41) ______. One of the most aggressive interest-rate forecasts is from John O"Sullivan at Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein. He expects the Bank of England to cut the base rate to 40% by the end of next year in efforts to limit the house-price drop to 5%. (42) ______. But these things can change rapidly. The shift in rate expectations, particularly among City economists, has been dramatic, and it is reflected in the currency markets. (43) ______. The other impact of housing will be on firms, particularly retailers. The Bank has been working hard to try to prove that housing and consumer spending have "decoupled", because the final two years of the boom in house prices coincided with a softening of spending growth. (44) ______. Charlie Bean, the Bank"s chief economist, repeated the "decoupling" case last week, but admitted there were big uncertainties. And underlying this quest for understanding has been the fear, certainly for the chancellor and his political advisers, that boom could turn to bust. For a government that promised no return to boom and bust, the excuse that only one part of the economy had turned to bust would cut little ice with voters. The relationship between house prices and election outcomes is not a perfect one. Having slipped in 2000, prices were rising strongly at the time of the 2001 election, which Labour won comfortably. (45) ______. The change in the housing climate will be a test in another way. In the budget the Treasury factored in a modest slowdown in consumer spending next year, from just over 3% to 2.5%, but within the context of strong overall growth of 3% to 3.5%, with exports and investment taking up the slack.A. Capital Economics, which got there first, had its 20% price fall starting this year with a 5% drop and continuing for another couple of years.B. My view is that the Bank"s monetary policy committee, having worked hard to get rates up from last year"s emergency low level of 3.5% to the present 4.75%, won"t surrender cuts without a fight and would like to keep rates where they are for quite a long time.C. But Mervyn King, the governor, is too good an economist to have real confidence in a view based on a short run of data. When the housing market tanked in the past, consumer spending suffered. In the absence of better evidence to the contrary, that has to be the assumption this time.D. Booming house prices were as welcome at the Treasury as flower arrangements at a hay-fever convention. The Treasury could not understand how, having delivered low-inflation economic stability, it had a housing boom as powerful as in the unstable days of the late 1980s.E. It has hit the financial markets in at least three ways. The housing downturn has changed perceptions about the interest-rate outlook.F. The pound has been climbing against the dollar but slipping against the euro. Its rise against the sickly dollar would have been much bigger had it not coincided with the softening of the outlook for rates.G. On the other hand, the Tories lost the 1997 election despite a strong housing market, having won in 1992 at a time when prices were falling. Margaret Thatcher"s 1983 and 1987 victories came when prices were soaring.

Clenching your fist could be enough to help you get a grip on your memory.【F1】 Research suggests that balling up the right hand and squeezing it tightly actually makes it easier to memorise lists. Later, when it is time to retrieve the information, it is the left hand that should be clenched. It is thought the movements activate brain regions key to the storing and recall of memories. 【F2】 The American researchers suggest those who are short of a pen and paper should try the trick when attempting to commit a shopping list or phone number to memory. In the study, volunteers were given a rubber ball and asked to squeeze it as hard as possible before trying to memorise a list of 72 words.【F3】 They squeezed the ball again a couple of minutes later, ahead of recollecting as many of the words as possible. One group used their right hand on both occasions, another their left. A third group clenched their right fist ahead of memorising and their left ahead of recall and a fourth did the reverse. A fifth group held the ball but did not squeeze it. Those who squeezed with their right hand, followed by their left, remembered the most words.【F4】 The next best were the volunteers who made a fist with their right hand both times, while those who didn" t squeeze at all did better than those who led with their left. 【F5】 It is thought that the movement of clenching the right fist activates a brain region that is involved in storing memories, while squeezing the left hand triggers an area that is key to retrieving information. Lead researcher Dr Ruth Propper said, "The findings suggest that simple body movements—by temporarily changing the way the brain functions—can improve memory."

To snatch opportunity, you must spot the signals that it is time to conquer the new markets, add products or perhaps franchise your hot ideas.

"Deadpool", which so far has taken more than $500m in cinemas worldwide, is an atypical blockbuster, a foul-mouthed anti-hero film with a mature "R" audience rating. But in one important respect it is typical of many of Hollywood' s most successful movies: it does not rely on a world-famous star to sell it. 【C1】______What happened? Ms Lawrence is by the reckoning of some the biggest star in Hollywood's firmament; Mr Smith held that unofficial title for years. Have film stars lost some of their lustre? Overall, the cinema business' s health seems as rude as ever. 【C2】______The industry has held up well against increased competition from streaming services that give people plenty of option stars with the biggest global profiles, such as Tom Cruise and Leonardo DiCaprio, are instantly recognizable in lucrative overseas markets. 【C3】______ Such productions are more likely to make stars than to be made by them. "You really don't want to have a movie star" in certain big franchises, says a senior studio executive: the films will be hits either way, so why pay more? An analysis by The Economist of two decades of box-office results in America and Canada does not refute Ms Lawrence' s status as one of the biggest box-office draws. 【C4】______ Hollywood executives still want to believe in stars' power to get bums on seats, so they will bet again on a headliner even after a few flops. Academic studies in recent decades have generally failed to find any conclusive evidence to support studio bosses' faith in stars' pulling power. 【C5】______It helps to have a damsel in distress, but it does not really which damsel. [A]But much of the industry's recent success, at home and abroad, comes from the rise of the big special-effects event film: franchises like "Fast and Furious", "Avengers", "The Hunger Games", "Jurassic Park", James Bond and "Star Wars" [B]In contrast, two recent "star vehicle" films struggled to attract audiences despite heavy promotion and high-profile openings on Christmas Day in America. "Joy", with Jennifer Lawrence, and "Concussion", with Will Smith, both failed to earn back their production budgets at the domestic box office and also fared poorly overseas. [C]The 2015 film, "Terminator: Genisys", a flop in America with $ 90m in takings on a $155m production budget, was a blockbuster overseas, earning $35 lm, including $113m in China. But At least 14 films with more than $500m each led in worldwide box-office takings last year. [D]Our own analysis suggests only that a few of them do add a bit to box-office receipts. And they reckon that as long as the stars look good and can act, they make scant difference, with at best a very few exceptions. [E]Revenue from the American box office grew by 6.3% in 2015, to a record high of $11 billion. Thanks to droves of new film-goers in China, where the market grew by 49% last year, global revenues increased by 4% to $38 billion. [F]But it is hard statistically to disentangle her singular appeal from the massive success of the franchise films she has been in. By the same token, she should perhaps not be blamed for the poor performance of "Joy"—without Jennifer Lawrence in it, it would have been a flop, a total flop. [G]Jennifer Lawrence was not "Jennifer Lawrence, biggest female movie star in the world" until she made the first "Hunger Games" film.

If you didn't know any better, you might mistake the Newark Earthworks in southern Ohio for the product of some giant celestial spirit who went crazy with an Etch A Sketch. The Earthworks (or what's left of them) are actually a series of huge geometric mounds that anthropologists believe were created two millennia ago by ancestors of Native Americans called the Hopewell people. The most significant feature still standing is known as the Octagon, which has 550-foot-long earthen walls and a footprint big enough to hold four Roman Colosseums. The structure is connected, via two parallel embankments, to a perfect, 20-acre circle. Together the two shapes form a sophisticated astronomical observatory—scientists have discovered that the structure is precisely aligned with the 18.6-year lunar cycle's northernmost moonrise. The residents of Newark will tell you that it is also precisely aligned with the ninth fairway at the private Moundbuilders Country Club. The Earthworks are a National Historic Landmark, and they are under consideration for the UNESCO World Heritage list of cultural and natural wonders. But if you want to see them—well, you're too late. During the golf season, everyone but club members is kept out, except on four visiting days. Let's not condemn the duffers so fast. The club, which since 1910 has occupied the Octagon and covered all maintenance costs, is widely credited with preventing the place from being plowed under. The issue is how to accommodate nonmembers who want more access, especially for Native American ceremonial purposes. Most visitors end up seeing only a tiny part of the Octagon from a small observation deck. Or they can follow the asphalt cart path that winds past the swimming pool, an old tennis court, and a parking lot to reach a chain-link fence through which, off in the distance, they can glimpse the loaf-shaped mound known as the Observatory. Several years ago the financially strapped Ohio Historical Society, which owns the Earthworks, extended the club's lease until 2078. If the World Heritage site nomination goes through, tourism would undoubtedly jump. That would certainly put more pressure on the club and historical society. One frequently suggested scenario is for the federal government to buy out the club and turn the Newark Earthworks into a national park.Some people simply refuse to be intimidated by men wearing spiky shoes and pastel shirts. Cherokee elder Barbara Crandell has climbed the Observatory to pray for more than two decades—but not once, the octogenarian is proud to point out, when the golf course has dictated. She goes when her heart calls. A few years ago, after Crandell, with the aid of a cane, made her way to the top, club officials showed up and asked her to leave. When she refused, she was arrested and later convicted of trespassing. Friends passed the hat and paid off her $ 883 fine and court costs in Sacagawea dollar coins.

You bought a new color TV set made in Guangdong, but it is in poor quality. You want to write a letter to the store and have the set repaired or changed. Your letter should cover the following points: 1) the picture is not clear enough, and some channel buttons don"t work well; 2) sometimes there is no sound, and the color is not stable; 3) Customer First, Service Best. You should write about 100 words. Do not sign up your own name at the end of the letter. Use "Li Ming" instead. You do not need to write the address.

NASA launched the first space mission to Pluto yesterday as a powerful rocket hurled the New Horizons spacecraft on a nine-year, three-billion-mile journey to the edge of the solar system As it soared toward a 2007 meeting with Jupiter, whose powerful gravitational field will shoot it on its way to Pluto. Mission managers said radio communications confirmed that the 1,054-pound craft was in good health. The $700 million mission began when a Lockheed Martin Atlas 5 rocket rose from a launching pad at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida at 2 p.m., almost an hour later than planned because of low clouds that obscured a clear view of the flight path by tracking cameras. Less than an hour later, all three stages of the booster rocket worked as planned, and the spacecraft separated from them and sprinted away toward deep space. The robot ship sped away at about 36,000 miles per hour, the fastest flight of any spacecraft sent from Earth, allowing it to pass the Moon in about nine hours. "This is a historic day", said Alan Stem of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo, the mission"s principal scientist and team leader. Speaking at a news conference at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, Dr. Stern said the timing assured that the New Horizons would arrive for its closest approach to Pluto on July 14, 2015—the 50th anniversary of the first flyby of Mars by the Mariner 4. the mission that began the exploration of the planets. The New Horizons is powered by a small plutonium-fired electric generator. Its instruments include three cameras, for visible-light, infrared and ultraviolet images, and three spectrometers to study the composition and temperatures of Pluto"s thin atmosphere and surface features. It also carries a University of Colorado dust counter, the first experiment to fly on a planetary mission that is entirely designed and operated by students. This is the only experiment that will not hibernate during the mission. Yesterday"s liftoff also paid regard to Pluto"s discoverer, the astronomer Clyde W. Tombaugh, who in 1930 became the only American to find a planet in the solar system.(He died at 90 in 1997.) His widow, Patricia Tombaugh, 93, and other family members were present at the cape, and some of his remains were among the commemorative items aboard the spacecraft. "Some of Clyde"s ashes are on their way to Pluto today", Dr. Stem said. The New Horizons is to reach Jupiter"s gravitational field in 13 months. The trip to Pluto will take eight more years, most of which the craft will spend in electronic "hibernation" to save power and wear on the equipment needed for its seven experiments. In addition to the two-hour delay, the launching was postponed twice in two days—on Tuesday by strong winds at the cape and on Wednesday by a storm that caused a power; failure at the spacecraft"s control center at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel. Md. Mission planners had until Feb. 14 to launch the mission this year, but only until the end of this month to use the gravity boost from Jupiter, which will shorten the trip to Pluto by five years.

【F1】 One meaning of the Greek word "dran" is to accomplish, and in this meaning lies a further key to the structure of drama. A play concerns a human agent attempting to accomplish some purpose. In tragedy his attempt is, in personal terms at least, unsuccessful; in comedy it is successful; in the problem play final accomplishment is often either ambiguous or doubtful. 【F2】 This action, from the beginning to the end of a movement toward a purposed goal, must also have a middle; it must proceed through a number of steps, the succession of incidents which make up the plot. Because the dramatist is concerned with the meaning and logic of events rather than with their casual relationship in time, he will probably select his material and order it on a basis of the operation, in human affairs, of laws of cause and effect. It is in this causal relationship of incidents that the element of conflict, present in virtually all plays, appears. The central figure of the play—the protagonist—encounters difficulties; his purpose or purposes conflict with events or circumstances, with purposes of other characters in the play, or with cross-purposes which exist within his own thoughts and desires. These difficulties threaten the protagonist"s accomplishment.【F3】 In other words, they present complications, and his success or failure in dealing with these complications determines the outcome. 【F4】 Normally, complications build through the play in order of increasing difficulty: one complication may be added to another, or one may grow out of the solution of a preceding one. At some point in this chain of complication and solution, achieved or attempted, the protagonist performs an act or makes a decision which irrevocably commits him to a further course, points toward certain general consequences.【F5】 This point is usually called the crisis; the complications and solutions which follow work out the logical steps from crisis to final resolution, or denouement.

In the following text, some sentences have been removed. For Questions 41-45, choose the most suitable one from the list (A、B、C、D、E、F、G……) to fit into each of the numbered blank. There are several extra choices, which do not fit in any of the gaps. (10 points)A. Human population growth add more pressures on land.B. Different factors play role in land degradation.C. What is land conversion?D. The protected areas cannot escape from the destruction.E. The land conversion processes in stages.F. The land conversion has a great impact on nature. The projections of species loss by deforestation lurk a number of crucial but hard-to-plot variables, among which two are especially weighty, continuing landscape conversion and the growth curve of human population. (41)______. Landscape conversion can mean many rings: draining wetlands to braid roads and airports, turning tall grass prairies under the plow, fencing savanna and overgrazing it with domestic stock, cutting second-growth forest in Vermont and consigning the land to ski resorts or vacation suburbs, slash-and-burn clearing of Madagasar"s rain forest to grow rice on wet hillsides, industrial logging on Boreno to meet Japanese plywood demands. (42)______. The ecologist Jon Terborgh and a colleague, Carel P. van Schaik, have described a four-stage process of landscape conversion that they call the land-use cascade. The successive stages are. (1) wildlands, encompassing national floral and faunal communities altered little or not at all by human impact; (2) extensively used areas, such as natural grasslands lightly grazed, savanna kept open for prey animals by infrequent human-set fires, or forests sparsely worked by slash-and-bum farmers at low density; (3) intensively used areas, meaning crop riel (4) degraded land, formerly useful but now abused beyond value to anybody. (43)______. Among all forms of landscape conversion, pushing tropical forests from the wildlands category to the intensively used category has the greatest impact on biological diversity. You can see it in the central Amazon, where big tracts of rain forest have been felled and burned, in a largely futile attempt to pasture cattle on sun-hardened clay. By the middle of the next century, if the trend continues, tropical forest will exist virtually nowhere outside of protected areas—that is, national park, wildlife refuges, and other official reserves. (44)______. Human population growth will make a bad situation worse by putting ever more pressure on all available land. The annual increase is, now 80 million people, with most of that increment coming in less developed countries. According to U.N."s middle estimate, human population will rise from the present 5.9 billion to 9.4 billion by the year 2050. Anyone interested in the future of biological diversity needs to think about the pressures these people will face, and the pressures they will exert in return. (45)______. That direction, necessarily, will be toward ever more desperate exploitation of landscape. Even Noah"s ark only manages to rescue paired animals, not large parcels of habitats. The jeopardy of the ecological fragments that we presently cherish as parks, refuges, and reserves is already severe due to internal and external forces, internal, because insularity itself leads to ecological unraveling; and external, because those areas are still under siege by needy and covetous people. Projected forward into a future of 10.8 billion humans, that jeopardy increases to the point of impossibility. We shouldn"t take comfort in assuming that at least the parks and reserves like Yellowstone National Park, will still harbor grizzly bears in the year 2150. Those predator populations, and other species down the cascade, are likely to disappear. "Wildness" will be a word applicable only to urban turmoil. Lions, tigers, and bears will exist in zoos. Nature won"t come to an end, but it will look very different.

Mary didn't come because she wanted to see me.

Americans today don"t place a very high value on intellect. Our heroes are athletes, entertainers, and entrepreneurs, not scholars.【F1】 Even our schools are where we send our children to get a practical education—not to pursue knowledge for the sake of knowledge. Symptoms of pervasive anti-intellectualism in our schools aren"t difficult to find. "Schools have always been in a society where practical is more important than intellectual," says education writer Diane Ravitch. "Schools could be a counterbalance." Ravitch"s latest book, Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms, traces the roots of anti-intellectualism in our schools, concluding they are anything but a counterbalance to the American distaste for intellectual pursuits. But they could and should be. Encouraging kids to reject the life of the mind leaves them vulnerable to exploitation and control.【F2】 Without the ability to think critically, to defend their ideas and understand the ideas of others, they cannot fully participate in our democracy. "Continuing along this path," says writer Earl Shorris, "We will become a second-rate country. We will have a less civil society." "Intellect is resented as a form of power or privilege," writes historian and professor Richard Hofstadter in Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, a Pulitzer-Prize winning book on the roots of anti-intellectualism in US politics, religion, and education. From the beginning of our history, says Hofstadter, our democratic and populist urges have driven us to reject anything that smells of elitism.【F3】 Practicality, common sense, and native intelligence have been considered more noble qualities than anything you could learn from a book. Ralph Waldo Emerson and other Transcendentalist philosophers thought schooling and rigorous book learning put unnatural restraints on children, "【F4】 We are shut up in schools and college recitation rooms for 10 or 15 years and come out at last with a bellyful of words and do not know a thing." Mark Twain"s Huckleberry Finn exemplified American anti-intellectualism. Its hero avoids being civilized—going to school and learning to read—so he can preserve his innate goodness. Intellect, according to Hofstadter, is different from native intelligence, a quality we reluctantly admire. Intellect is the critical, creative, and contemplative side of the mind.【F5】 Intelligence seeks to grasp, manipulate, re-order, and adjust, while intellect examines, ponders, wonders, theorizes, criticizes and imagines. School remains a place where intellect is mistrusted. Hofstadter says our country" s educational system is in the grips of people who "joyfully and militantly proclaim their hostility to intellect and their eagerness to identify with children who show the least intellectual promise."

I have vet to hear that report.

As the twentieth century began, the importance of formal education in the United States increased. The frontier had mostly disappeared and by 1910 most Americans lived in towns and cities. Industrialization and the bureaucratization of economic life combined with a new emphasis upon credentials and expertise to make schooling increasingly important for economic and social mobility. Increasingly, too, schools were viewed as the most important means of integrating immigrants in to American society. The arrival of a great wave of southern and eastern European immigrants at the turn of the century coincided with and contributed to an enormous expansion of formal schooling. By 1920 schooling to age fourteen or beyond was compulsory in most states, and the school year was greatly lengthened. Kindergartens, vacation schools, extracurricular activities, and vocational education and counseling extended the influence of public schools over the lives of students, many of whom in the larger industrial cities were the children of immigrants. Classes for adult immigrants were sponsored by public schools, corporations, Unions, churches, and other agencies. Reformers early in the twentieth century suggested that education programs should suit the needs of specific populations. Immigrant women were one such population. Schools tried to educate young women so they could occupy productive places in the urban industrial economy, and one place many educators considered appropriate for women was the home. Although looking after the house and family was familiar to immigrant women. American education gave homemaking a new definition. In preindustrial economies, homemaking had meant the production as well as the consumption of goods, and it commonly included income-producing activities both inside and outside the home, in the highly industrialized early twentieth-century, United States. However, overproduction rather than scarcity was becoming a problem. Thus, the ideal American homemaker was viewed as a consumer rather than a producer. Schools trained women to be consumer homemakers cooking, shopping, decorating, and caring for children "efficiently" in their own homes, or if economic necessity demanded, as employees in the homes of others. Subsequent reforms have made these notions seem quite out-of-date.

Time spent in a bookshop can be most enjoyable, whether you are a book-lover or merely there to buy a book as a present. You may even have entered the shop just to find shelter from a sudden shower. Whatever the reason, you can soon become totally unaware of your surroundings. The desire to pick up a book with an attractive dust-jacket is irresistible, although this method of selection ought not to be followed, as you might end up with a rather dull book. You soon become absorbed in some book or other, and usually it is only much later that you realize that you have spent far too much time there and must dash off to keep some forgotten appointment—without buying a book, of course. This opportunity to escape the realities of everyday life is, I think, the main attraction of a bookshop. There are not many places where it is possible to do this. A music shop is very much like a bookshop. You can wander round such places to your heart"s content. If it is a good shop, no assistant will approach you with the inevitable greeting: "Can I help you, sire." You needn"t buy anything you don"t want. In a Bookshop an assistant should remain in the background until you have finished browsing. Then, and only then, are his services necessary. Of course, you may want to find out where a particular section is, but when he has led you there, the assistant should retire discreetly and look as if he is not interested in selling a single book. You have to be careful not to be attracted by the variety of books in a bookshop. It is very easy to enter the shop looking for a book on, say, ancient coins and to come out carrying a copy of the latest best-selling novel and perhaps a book about brass-rubbing—something which had only vaguely interested you up till then. This volume on the subject, however, happened to be so well illustrated and the part of the text you read proved so interesting that you just had to buy it. This sort of thing can be very dangerous. Apart from running up a huge account, you can waste a great deal of time wandering from section to section. Booksellers must be both long-suffering and indulgent. There is a story which well illustrates this. A medical student had to read a textbook which was far too expensive for him to buy. He couldn"t obtain it from the library and the only copy he could find was in his bookshop. Every afternoon, therefore, he would go along to the shop and read a little of the book at a time. One day, however, he was dismayed to find the book missing from its usual place and about to leave when he noticed the owner of the shop beckoning to him. Expecting to be reproached, he went toward him. To his surprise, the owner pointed to the book, which was tucked away in a corner. "I put it there in case anyone was tempted to buy it," he said, and left the delighted student to continue his reading.Notes：to one"s heart"s content尽情地run up积聚，招致beckon v.打招呼

Last month, America"s National Law Journal told its readers that "employment lawyers are warning lovestruck co-workers to take precautions in the office before locking lips outside". The advice came too late for Harry Stonecipher. The boss of Boeing was forced to resign last weekend—for reasons that will strike many outsiders as absurd—after his board were told of an affair that the 68-year-old married man had been conducting with a female employee "who did not report directly to him". Inevitably, as the week rolled on, details of the affair rolled out. The other party was reported to be Debra Peabody, who is unmarried and has worked for Boeing for 25 years. The couple were said to have first got together at Boeing"s annual retreat at Palm Desert, California in January. After that much of the affair must have been conducted from a distance: Mr. Stonecipher"s office is at Boeing"s headquarters in Chicago; Ms Peabody runs the firm"s government-relations office in Washington, D.C. They exchanged e-mails, it seems, as office lovers tend to do these days, and therein probably lay Mr. Stonecipher"s downfall Lewis Platt, Boeing"s chairman, said that Mr. Stonecipher broke a company rule that says: "Employees will not engage in conduct or activity that may raise questions as to the company"s honesty, impartiality, reputation or otherwise cause embarrassment to the company". Having an affair with a fellow employee is not, of itself, against company rules; causing embarrassment to Boeing is. It seems that the board judged that the contents of the lovers" e-mails would have been bad for Boeing had they been made public. Gone are the days when a board considered such matters none of its business, as Citibank"s did in 1991 when its boss, John Reed, became the talk of Wall Street for having an affair with a stewardess on Citi"s corporate jet. At Boeing, a whistleblower is said to have forwarded the messages to Mr. Platt. In general, e-mails are encrypted and not accessible to anyone who does not know the sender"s password. But many firms install software designed to search electronic communications for key words such as, "sex" and "CEO". A study last year of 840 American firms by the American Management Association found that 60% of them check external e-mails (incoming and outgoing), while 27% scrutinize internal messages between employees. Sweet nothings whispered by the water cooler may travel less far these days than electronic billets do. Boeing is particularly sensitive to embarrassment at the moment. Mr. Stonecipher was recalled from retirement only 15 months ago, after the company"s previous boss, Phil Condit, and its chief financial officer, Michael Sears, had left in the wake of a scandal involving an illegal job offer to a Pentagon official. Mr. Stonecipher, a crusty former number two at Boeing, was brought back specifically to raise the company"s ethical standards and to help it be seen in its main (and affectedly puritanical) market, in Washington, DC, as squeaky clean. Verbally explicit extra-marital affairs are inconsistent with such a strategy, it seems, though they are not yet enough to bring down future kings of England. In corporate life, such affairs are hardly unusual. One survey found that one-quarter of all long-term relationships start at work; another found that over 40% of executives say they have been involved in an affair with a colleague, and that in haft of these cases one or other party was married at the time. Many a boss has married his assistant and lived happily ever after. Boeing apparently used to accept this: Mr. Condit"s fourth wife was a colleague before they married.

In 2016, many shoppers opted to avoid the frenetic crowds and do their holiday shopping from the comfort of their computer. But people are also returning those purchases at record rates, up 8% from last year. What went wrong? Is the lingering shadow of the global financial crisis making it harder to accept extravagant indulgences? Or do people shop more impulsively when online? Both arguments are plausible. However, there is a third factor: a question of touch. And physically interacting with an object makes you more committed to your purchase. When my most recent book Brand washed was released, I teamed up with a local bookstore to conduct an experiment. I carefully instructed a group of volunteers to promote my book in two different ways. The first was a fairly hands-off approach. Whenever a customer would inquire about my book, the volunteer would take them over to the shelf and point to it. Out of 20 such requests, six customers proceeded with the purchase. The second option also involved going over to the shelf but, this time, removing the book and then subtly holding onto it for just an extra moment before placing it in the customer' s hands. Of the 20 people who were handed the book, 13 ended up buying it. Just physically passing the book showed a big difference in sales. Why? We feel something similar to a sense of ownership when we hold things in our hand. It can motivate us to make the purchase even more. A recent study conducted by Bangor University together with the United Kingdom's Royal Mail service also revealed the power of touch. A deeper and longer-lasting impression of a message was formed when delivered in a letter, as opposed to receiving the same message online. The study also indicated that once touch becomes part of the process, it could translate into a sense of possession. In other words, we simply feel more committed to possess and thus buy an item when we've first touched it. This sense of ownership is simply not part of the equation in the online shopping experience. As the rituals of purchase in the lead-up to Christmas change, not only do we give less thought to the type of gifts we buy for our loved ones but, through our own digital wish lists, we increasingly control what they buy for us. The reality, however, is that no matter how convinced we all are that digital is the way to go, finding real satisfaction will probably take more than a few simple clicks.

Suppose you have found something wrong with the electronic dictionary that you bought from an online store the other day. Write an email to the customer service center to 1) make a complaint, and 2) demand a prompt solution. You should write about 100 words on the ANSWER SHEET. Do not sign your own name at the end of the letter. Use "Li Ming" instead. Do not write your address. (10 points)

The global reputation of Japan"s animation industry—an animated cartoon industry—has never been higher, and at first glance it would appear to be in rude health. In the opening weekend of Miyazaki"s new film, Howl"s Moving Castle, a record 1.1 million Japanese crammed into cinemas nationwide. It has since been seen at home by nearly 10 million people, and has made Japan the only country in which the incredibles has been kept out of the top slot. Yet Japan"s animators are full of gloom. They fear that the future is bleak and that the success enjoyed by Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli, which makes his films, is actually masking a sad decline. Industry experts say that not only is there a lack of creative talent on a par with Miyazaki, but the overall standard of animators has fallen over the past decade as low pay and poor working conditions force many to quit. "Miyazaki can"t be replaced, he"s a one-off", says Jonathan Clements, a British animation expert, "Miyazaki isn"t 100 percent of Ghibli, but when he goes, the party is over". The creative and commercial success enjoyed by Ghibli has afforded it a unique breathing space. For other studios, however, commercial pressures force work to be done at breakneck speed and on shoestring budgets. Veterans of the industry say quality has been sacrificed as television cartoon episodes are "made for as little as ￡10,000. Many young animators rely on parental support to put them through animation schools and continue to need financial help just to afford to work in Tokyo, the world"s most expensive city. Yet, remarkably, animation has little problem attracting recruits. Dozens of students pore over desks painstakingly producing page after page of drawings. Most say they are aware that pay is low but desperately want to work in the industry they fell in love with as children through cartoons such as Doraemon, the blue talking cat, and Battle of the Planets. But reality often bites as animators reach their thirties, by which time they typically earn around a third of the average pay for Japanese their age and at lower hourly rates than supermarket clerks. Clements believes that the soul of animation is at stake. "Animation is, by definition, from Japan, but it"s only a matter of time before the number of foreign contributors tips the balance, and what used to be animation becomes plain old cartoons", he says. "It may ultimately remove much of what makes animation appeal to its current foreign audience base: its exoticism".