阅读理解Is it possible that the ideas we have today about ownership and property rights have been so universal in the human mind that it is truly as if they had sprung from the mind of God? By no means. The idea of owning and property emerged in the mists of unrecorded history. The ancient Jews, for one, had a very different outlook on property and ownership, viewing it as something much more temporary and tentative than we do. 　　The ideas we have in America about the private ownership of productive property as a natural and universal right of mankind, perhaps of divine origin, are by no means universal and must be viewed as an invention of man rather than a decree (order) of God. Of course, we are completely trained to accept the idea of ownership of the earth and its products, raw and transformed. It seems not at all strange; in fact, it is quite difficult to imagine a society without such arrangements. If someone, some individual, didn''t own that plot of land, that house, that factory, that machine, that tower of wheat, how would we function? What would the rules be? Whom would we buy from and how would we sell? 　　It is important to acknowledge a significant difference between achieving ownership simply by taking or claiming property and owning what we tend to call the "fruit of labor". If I, alone or together with my family, work on the land and raise crops, or if I make something useful out of natural material, it seems reasonable and fair to claim that the crops or the objects belong to me or my family, are my property, at least in the sense that I have first claim on them. Hardly anyone would dispute that. In fact, some of the early radical workingmen''s movements made (an ownership) claim on those very grounds. As industrial organization became more complex, however, such issues became vastly more intricate, It must be clear that in modern society the social heritage of knowledge and technology and the social organization of manufacture and exchange account for far more of the productivity of industry and the value of what is produced than can be accounted for by the labor of any number of individuals. Hardly any person can now point and say, "That--that right there--is the fruit of my labor. "We can say, as a society, as a nation--as a world, really--that what is produced is the fruit of our labor, the product of the whole society as a collectivity. 　　We have to recognize that the right of private individual ownership of property is man-made and constantly dependent on the extent to which those without property believe that the owner can make his claim stick.

阅读理解 When Liam McGee departed as president of Bank of America in August, his explanation was surprisingly straight up. Rather than cloaking his exit in the usual vague excuses, he came right out and said he was leaving “to pursue my goal of running a company.” Broadcasting his ambition was “very much my decision,” McGee says. Within two weeks, he was talking for the first time with the board of Hartford Financial Services Group, which named him CEO and chairman on September 29. McGee says leaving without a position lined up gave him time to reflect on what kind of company he wanted to run. It also sent a clear message to the outside world about his aspirations. And McGee isn't alone. In recent weeks the No.2 executives at Avon and American Express quit with the explanation that they were looking for a CEO post. As boards scrutinize succession plans in response to shareholder pressure, executives who don't get the nod also may wish to move on. A turbulent business environment also has senior managers cautious of letting vague pronouncements cloud their reputations. As the first signs of recovery begin to take hold, deputy chiefs may be more willing to make the jump without a net. In the third quarter, CEO turnover was down 23% from a year ago as nervous boards stuck with the leaders they had, according to Liberum Research. As the economy picks up, opportunities will abound for aspiring leaders. The decision to quit a senior position to look for a better one is unconventional. For years executives and headhunters have adhered to the rule that the most attractive CEO candidates are the ones who must be poached. Says Korn/Ferry senior partner Dennis Carey:” I can't think of a single search I've done where a board has not instructed me to look at sitting CEOs first.” Those who jumped without a job haven't always landed in top positions quickly. Ellen Marram quit as chief of Tropicana a decade age, saying she wanted to be a CEO. It was a year before she became head of a tiny Internet-based commodities exchange. Robert Willumstad left Citigroup in 2005 with ambitions to be a CEO. He finally took that post at a major financial institution three years later. Many recruiters say the old disgrace is fading for top performers. The financial crisis has made it more acceptable to be between jobs or to leave a bad one. “The traditional rule was it's safer to stay where you are, but that's been fundamentally inverted,” says one headhunter. “The people who've been hurt the worst are those who've stayed too long.”

阅读理解 In some ways, the United States has made spectacular progress. Fires no longer destroy 18,000 buildings as they did in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, or kill half a town of 2,400 people, as they did the same night in Peshtigo, Wisconsin. Other than the Beverly Hill Supper Club fire in Kentucky in 1977, it has been four decades since more than 100 Americans died in a fire. But even with such successes, the United States still has one of the worst fire death rates in the world. Safety experts say the problem is neither money nor technology, but the indifference of a country that just will not take fires seriously enough. American fire departments are some of the world's fastest and best-equipped. They have to be. The United States has twice Japan's population, and 40 times as many fires. It spends far less on preventing fires than on fighting them. And American fire-safety lessons are aimed almost entirely at children, who die in disproportionately large numbers in fires but who, contrary to popular myth, start very few of them. Experts say the fatal error is an attitude that fires are not really anyone's fault. That is not so in other countries, where both public education and the law treat fires as either a personal failing or a crime. Japan has many wood houses; of the estimated 48 fires in world history, that burned more than 10,000 buildings, Japan has had 27. Penalties for causing a severe fire by negligence can be as high as life imprisonment. In the United States, most education dollars are spent in elementary schools. But the lessons are aimed at a too limited audience; just 9 percent of all fire deaths are caused by children playing with matches. The United States continues to rely more on technology than laws or social pressure. There are smoke detectors in 85 percent of all homes. Some local building codes now require home sprinklers. New heaters and irons shut themselves off if they are tipped.

阅读理解 Cyberspace, data superhighways, multi media—for those who have seen the future, the linking of computers, television and telephones will change our lives forever. Yet for all the talk of a forthcoming technological utopia, little attention has been given to the implications of these developments for the poor. As with all new high technology, while the West concerns itself with the 'how', the question of 'for whom' is put aside once again. Economists are only now realizing the full extent to which the communications revolution has affected the world economy. Information technology allows the extension of trade across geographical and industrial boundaries, and transnational corporations take full advantage of it. Terms of trade, exchange and interest rates and money movements are more important than the production of goods. The electronic economy made possible by information technology allows the haves to increase their control on global markets—with destructive impact on the have-nots. For them the result is instability. Developing countries which rely on the production of a small range of goods for export are made to feel like small parts in the international economic machine. As 'futures' are traded on computer screens, developing countries simply have less and less control of their destinies. So what are the options for regaining control? One alternative is for developing countries to buy in the latest computers and telecommunications themselves—so called 'development communications' modernization. Yet this leads to long-term dependency and perhaps permanent constraints on developing countries' economies. Communications technology is generally exported from the U.S., Europe or Japan; the patents, skills and ability to manufacture remain in the hands of a few industrialized countries. It is also expensive, and imported products and services must therefore be bought on credit—credit usually provided by the very countries whose companies stand to gain. Furthermore, when new technology is introduced there is often too low a level of expertise to exploit it for native development. This means that while local elites, foreign communities and subsidiaries of transnational corporations may benefit, those whose lives depend on access to the information are denied it.

阅读理解 During the past generation, the American middle-class family that once could count on hard work and fair play to keep itself financially secure has been transformed by economic risk and new realities. Now a pink slip, a bad diagnosis, or a disappearing spouse can reduce a family from solidly middle class to newly poor in a few months. In just one generation, millions of mothers have gone to work, transforming basic family economics. Scholars, policymakers, and critics of all stripes have debated the social implications of these changes, but few have looked at the side effect: family risk has risen as well. Today's families have budgeted to the limits of their new two-paycheck status. As a result, they have lost the parachute they once had in times of financial setback—a back-up earner (usually Mom) who could go into the workforce if the primary earner got laid off or fell sick. This 'added-worker effect' could support the safety net offered by unemployment insurance or disability insurance to help families weather bad times. But today, a disruption to family fortunes can no longer be made up with extra income from an otherwise-stay-at-home partner. During the same period, families have been asked to absorb much more risk in their retirement income. Steelworkers, airline employees, and now those in the auto industry are joining millions of families who must worry about interest rates, stock market fluctuation, and the harsh reality that they may outlive their retirement money. For much of the past year, President Bush campaigned to move Social Security to a saving-account model, with retirees trading much or all of their guaranteed payments for payments depending on investment returns. For younger families, the picture is not any better. Both the absolute cost of healthcare and the share of it borne by families have risen—and newly fashionable health-savings plans are spreading from legislative halls to Wal-Mart workers, with much higher deductibles and a large new dose of investment risk for families' future healthcare. Even demographics are working against the middle class family, as the odds of having a weak elderly parent—and all the attendant need for physical and financial assistance—have jumped eightfold in just one generation. From the middle-class family perspective, much of this, understandably, looks far less like an opportunity to exercise more financial responsibility, and a good deal more like a frightening acceleration of the wholesale shift of financial risk onto their already overburdened shoulders. The financial fallout has begun, and the political fallout may not be far behind.

阅读理解In the first year or so of Web business, most of the action has revolved around efforts to tap the consumer market. More recently, as the Web proved to be more than fashion, companies have started to buy and sell products and services with one another. Such business-to-business sales make sense because business people typically know what product they''re looking for. 　　Nonetheless, many companies still hesitate to use the Web because of doubts about its reliability. "Businesses need to feel they can trust the pathway between them and the supplier," says senior analyst Blane Erwin of Forrester Research. Some companies are limiting the risk by conducting online transactions only with established business partners who are given access to the company''s private internet. 　　Another major shift in the model for Internet commerce concerns the technology available for marketing. Until recently, Internet marketing activities have focused on strategies to "pull" customers into sites. In the past year, however, software companies have developed tools that allow companies to "push" information directly out to consumers, transmitting marketing messages directly to targeted customers. Most notably, the Pointcast Network uses a screen saver to deliver a continually updated stream of news and advertisements to subscribers'' computer monitors. Subscribers can customize the information they want to receive and proceed directly to a company''s Web site. Companies such as Virtual Vineyards are already starting to use similar technologies to push messages to customers about special sales, product offerings, or other events. But push technology has earned the contempt of many Web users. Online culture thinks highly of the notion that the information flowing onto the screen comes there by specific request. Once commercial promotion begins to fill the screen uninvited, the distinction between the Web and television fades. That''s a prospect that horrifies Net purists. 　　But it is hardly inevitable that companies on the Web will need to resort to push strategies to make money. The examples of Virtual Vineyards, Amazon. com, and other pioneers show that a Web site selling the right kind of products with the right mix of interactivity, hospitality, and security will attract online customers. And the cost of computing power continues to free fall, which is a good sign for any enterprise setting up shop in silicon. People looking back 5 or 10 years from now may well wonder why so few companies took the online plunge.

阅读理解Non-indigenous (non-native) species of plants and animals arrive by way of two general types of pathways. First, species having origins outside the United States may enter the country and become established either as free-living populations or under human cultivation-for example, in agriculture, horticulture, aquaculture, or as pets. Some cultivated species subsequently escape or are released and also become established as free-living populations. Second, species of either U.S. or foreign origin and already within the United States may spread to new locales. Pathways of both types include intentional as well as unintentional species transfers. Rates of species movement driven by human transformations of natural environments as well as by human mobility-through commerce, tourism, and travel-greatly exceed natural rates by comparison. While geographic distributions of species naturally expand or contract over historical time intervals (tens to hundreds of years), species'' ranges rarely expand thousands of miles or across physical barriers such as oceans or mountains. 　　Habitat modification can create conditions favorable to the establishment of non-indigenous species. Soil disturbed in construction and agriculture is open for colonization by non-indigenous weeds, which in turn may provide habitats for the non-indigenous insects that evolved with them. Human-generated changes in fire frequency, grazing intensity, as well as soil stability and nutrient levels similarly facilitate the spread and establishment of non-indigenous plants. When human changes to natural environments span large geographical areas, they effectively create passages for species movement between previously isolated locales. The rapid spread of the Russian wheat aphid to fifteen states in just two years following its 1986 arrival has been attributed in part to the prevalence of alternative host plants that are available when wheat is not. Many of these are non- indigenous grasses recommended for planting on the forty million or more acres enrolled in the U.S. Department of Agriculture Conservation Reserve Program. 　　A number of factors perplex quantitative evaluation of the relative importance of various entry pathways. Time lags often occur between establishment of non-indigenous species and their detection, and tracing the pathway for a long-established species is difficult. Experts estimate that non-indigenous weeds are usually detected only after having been in the country for thirty years or having spread to at least ten thousand acres. In addition, federal port inspection, although a major source of information on non-indigenous species pathways, especially for agriculture pests, provides data only when such species enter via closely-examined routes. Finally, some comparisons between pathways defy quantitative analysis-for example, which is more "important": the entry path of one very harmful species or one by which many but less harmful species enter the country?

阅读理解Which of the following is the best title for the text?

阅读理解 'My expectations and my happiness all got destroyed, that was the minute that it happened.' So testified Sony Sulekha, one of the plaintiffs in the largest human-trafficking case ever brought in America. He and around 500 other Indians had been recruited to work in the Signal International shipyard in Mississippi. Each had paid at least $10,000 to a local recruiter working for Signal, expecting a well-paid job and help in getting a green card. Instead they laboured in inhumane conditions, lived in a crowded camp under armed guard and were given highly restricted work permits. Bonded labour is also common in parts of Pakistan, Russia and Uzbekistan—and rife in Thailand's seafood industry. A recent investigation by Verité, an NGO, found that a quarter of all workers in Malaysia's electronics industry were in forced labour. But the focus is now widening to the greater number of people in other forms of bonded labour—and the proposed solutions are changing. Campaign groups and light-touch laws, backed up by the occasional high-profile prosecution, aim to shame multinationals into policing their own supply chains. The Global Fund to End Slavery, which is reported to have substantial seed money from Andrew Forrest, an Australian mining magnate, will seek grants from donor governments and part-fund national strategies developed by public-private partnerships in countries in which bonded labour is common. The Freedom Fund finances research into ways to reduce bonded labour. The Freedom Fund's first schemes include assessments of efforts to free bonded labour in the Thai seafood industry, the clothing industry in southern India and—a harder problem, since the customers are rarely multinationals—in brick kilns in the Indian states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. Arguably, the lack of evidence about what works is the main obstacle to reducing the prevalence of modem slavery. America made human trafficking illegal in 2000, after which it started to publish annual assessments of other countries' efforts to tackle it. But it has only slowly turned up the heat on offenders within its borders. Australia and Britain have recently passed light-touch laws along the lines of a law requiring transparency in supply chains that was adopted by California in 2010. This requires manufacturers and retailers that do business in the state and have global revenues of at least $100m to list the efforts they are taking to eradicate modern slavery and human trafficking from their supply chains. Ending bonded labour will require economic as well as legal measures. Those desperate enough to get into debt for the chance of a job need better options, and long-standing recruitment practices must change.

阅读理解Wild Bill Donovan would have loved the Intemet. The American spymaster who built the Office of Strategic Services in World War Ⅱ and later laid the roots for the (CIA) was fascinated with information. Donovan believed in using whatever tools came to hand in the "great game" of espionage--spying as a "profession." These days the Net, which has already re-made such everyday pastimes as buying books and sending mail, is reshaping Donovan'' s vocation as well. The latest revolution isn'' t simply a matter of gentlemen reading other gentlemen'' s e-mail. That kind of electronic spying has been going on for decades. In the past three or four years, the World Wide Web has given birth to a whole industry of point-and-click spying. The spooks call it "open- source intelligence," and as the Net grows, it is becoming increasingly influential. In 1995 the CIA held a contest to see who could compile the most data about Bumndi. The winner, by a large margin, was a tiny Virginia company called Open Source Solutions, whose clear advantage was its mastery of the electronic world. Among the firms making the biggest splash in this new world is Straifford, Inc., a private intelligence-analysis firm based in Austin, Texas. Straifford makes money by selling the results of spying (covering nations from Chile to Russia) to corporations like energy-services firm McDermott International. Many of its predictions are available online at www. straitford, com. Straifford President George Friedman says he sees the online world as a kind of mutually reinforcing tool for both information collection and distribution, a spymaster'' s dream. Last week his firm was busy vacuuming up data bits from the far comers of the world and predicting a crisis in Ukraine. "As soon as that report runs, we'' II suddenly get 500 new Intemet singe-ups from Ukraine," says Friedman, a former political science professor. "And we'' 11 hear back from some of them." Open- source spying does have its risks, of course, since it can be difficult to tell good information from bad. That'' s where Straifford earns its keep. Fridman relies on a lean staff of 20 in Austin.Several of his staff members have military- intelligence backgrounds. He sees the firm''s outsider status as the key to its success. Straifford'' s briefs don''t sound like the usual Washington back-and-forthing, whereby agencies avoid dramatic declarations on the chance they might be wrong. Straitford, says Friedman, takes pride in its independent voice.

阅读理解 The biggest danger facing the global airline industry is not the effects of terrorism, war, SARS and economic downturn. It is that these blows, which have helped ground three national flag carriers and force two American airlines into bankruptcy, will divert attention from the inherent weaknesses of aviation, which they have exacerbated. As in the crisis that attended the first Gulf War, many airlines hope that traffic will soon bounce back, and a few catastrophic years will be followed by fuller planes, happier passengers and a return to profitability. Yet the industry's problems are deeper—and older—than the trauma of the past two years implies. As the centenary of the first powered flight approaches in December, the industry it launched is still remarkably primitive. The car industry, created not long after the Wright Brothers made history, is now a global industry dominated by a dozen firms, at least half of which make good profits. Yet commercial aviation consists of 267 international carriers and another 500-plus domestic ones. The world's biggest carrier, American Airlines, has barely 7% of the global market, whereas the world's biggest carmaker, General Motors, has (with its associated firms) about a quarter of the world's automobile market. Aviation has been incompletely deregulated, and in only two markets: America and Europe. Everywhere else, governments dictate who flies under what rules. These aim to preserve state-owned national flag-carriers, run for prestige rather than profit. And numerous restrictions on foreign ownership impede cross-border airline mergers. In America, the big network carriers face barriers to exit, which have kept their route networks too large. Trade unions resisting job cuts and Congressmen opposing route closures in their territory conspire to block change. In Europe, liberalization is limited by bilateral deals that prevent, for instance, British Airways (BA) flying to America from Frankfurt or Paris, or Lufthansa offering transatlantic flights from London's Heathrow. To use the car industry analogy, it is as if only Renaults were allowed to drive on French motorways. In airlines, the optimists are those who think that things are now so bad that the industry has no option but to evolve. Frederick Reid, president of Delta Air Lines, said earlier this year that events since the September llth attacks are the equivalent of a meteor strike, changing the climate, creating a sort of nuclear winter and leading to a 'compressed evolutionary cycle'. So how, looking on the bright side, might the industry look after five years of accelerated development?

阅读理解 If open-source software is supposed to be free, how does anyone selling it make any money? It's not that different from how other software companies make money. You'd think that a software company would make most of its money from, well, selling software. But you'd be wrong. For one thing, companies don't sell software, strictly speaking; they license it. The profit margin on a software license is nearly 100 percent, which is why Microsoft gushes billions of dollars every quarter. But what's the value of a license to a customer? A license doesn't deliver the code, provide the utilities to get a piece of software running, or answer the phone when something inevitably goes wrong. The value of software, in short, doesn't lie in the software alone. The value is in making sure the soft ware does its job. Just as a traveler should look at the overall price of a vacation package instead of obsessing over the price of the plane ticket or hotel room, a smart tech buyer won't focus on how much the license costs and ignore the support contract or the maintenance agreement. Open-source is not that different. If you want the software to work, you have to pay to ensure it will work. The open-source companies have refined the software model by selling subscriptions. They roll together support and maintenance and charge an annual fee, which is a healthy model, though not quite as wonderful as Microsoft's money-raking one. Tellingly, even Microsoft is casting an envious eye at aspects of the open-source business model. The company has been taking halting steps toward a similar subscription scheme for its software sales. Microsoft's subscription program, known as Soft ware Assurance, provides maintenance and support together with a software license. It lets you up grade to Microsoft's next version of the software for a predictable sum. But it also contains an implicit threat: If you don't switch to Software Assurance now, who knows how much Microsoft will charge you when you decide to upgrade? Chief information officers hate this kind of 'assurance', since they're often perfectly happy running older versions of software that are proven and stable. Microsoft, on the other hand, rakes in the software-licensing fees only when customers upgrade. Software Assurance is Microsoft's attempt to get those same licensing fees but wrap them together with the service and support needed to keep systems running. That's why Microsoft finds the open-source model so threatening: open-source companies have no vested interest in getting more licensing fees and don't have to pad their service contracts with that extra cost. In the end, the main difference between open-source and proprietary software companies may be the size of the check you have to write.

阅读理解 Could the bad old days of economic decline be about to return Since OPEC agreed to supply-cuts in March, the price of crude oil has jumped to almost $ 26 a barrel, up from less than $10 last December. This near-tripling of oil prices calls up scary memories of the 1973 oil shock, when prices quadrupled, and 1979―80, when they also almost tripled. Both previous shocks resulted in double- digit inflation and global economic decline. So where are the headlines warning of gloom and doom this time? The oil price was given another push up this week when Iraq suspended oil exports. Strengthening economic growth, at the same time as winter grips the northern hemisphere, could push the price higher still in the short term. Yet there are good reasons to expect the economic consequences now to be less severe than in the 1970s. In most countries the cost of crude oil now accounts for a smaller share of the price of petrol than it did in the 1970s. In Europe, taxes account for up to four-fifths of the retail price, so even quite big changes in the price of crude have a more muted effect on pump prices than in the past. Rich economies are also less dependent on oil than they were, and so less sensitive to swings in the oil price. Energy conservation, a shift to other fuels and a decline in the importance of heavy, energy-intensive industries have reduced oil consumption. Software, consultancy and mobile telephones use far less oil than steel or car production. For each dollar of GDP ( in constant prices) rich economies now use nearly 50% less oil than in 1973. The OECD estimates in its latest Economic Outlook that, if oil prices averaged $ 22 a barrel for a full year, compared with $13 in 1998, this would increase the oil import bill in rich economies by only 0.25 - 0.5% of GDP. That is less than one-quarter of the income loss in 1974 or 1980. On the other hand, oil-importing emerging economies--to which heavy industry has shifted--have become more energy-intensive, and so could be more seriously squeezed. One more reason not to lose sleep over the rise in oil prices is that, unlike the rises in the 1970s, it has not occurred against the background of general commodity-price inflation and global excess demand. A sizable portion of the world is only just emerging from economic decline. The Economist''s commodity price index is broadly unchanging from a year ago. In 1973 commodity prices jumped by 70%, and in 1979 by almost 30%.

阅读理解 Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln were born in the same year, on the same day: Feb.12, 1809. How's this for a coincidence? Instinctively, we want to say that they belong together. It's not just because they were both great men, and not because they happen to be exactly at the same age. Rather, it's because the scientist and the politician each touched off a revolution that changed the world. Lincoln and Darwin were both revolutionaries, in the sense that both men upended realities that prevailed when they were born. They seem—and sound—modern to us, because the world they left behind them is more or less the one we still live in. So, considering the joint magnitude of their contributions—and the coincidence of their conjoined birthdays—it is hard not to wonder: who was the greater man? It's an apples and oranges—or Superman vs. Santa—comparison. But if you limit the question to influence, it bears pondering, all the more if you turn the question around and ask, what might have happened if one of these men had not been born? Very quickly the balance tips in Lincoln's favor. Great as Darwin's book on evolution is, it does no harm to remember that be hurried to publish 'The Origin of Species' because he thought he was about to be scooped(抢先)by his fellow naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, who had independently come up with much the same idea of evolution through natural selection. In other words, there was a certain inevitability to Darwin's theory. Ideas about evolution surfaced throughout the first part of the 19th century, and while none of them was as conclusive as Darwin's, it was not as though he was the only man who had the idea. Lincoln, in contrast, is Unique. Take him out of the picture, and there is no telling what might have happened to the country. True, his election to the presidency did provoke secession and, in turn, the war itself, but that war seems inevitable—not a question of if but when. If Darwin were not so irreplaceable as Lincoln, that should not deny his accomplishment. No one could have formulated his theory any more elegantly—or anguished more over its implications. Like Lincoln, Darwin was brave. He risked his health and his reputation to advance the idea that we are not over nature but a part of it. Lincoln prosecuted a war—and became its ultimate casualty—to ensure that no man should have dominion over another. Their identical birthdays afford us a superb opportunity to observe these men in the shared context of their time—how each was shaped by his circumstances, how each reacted to the beliefs that steered the world into which he was born and ultimately how each reshaped his comer of that world and left it irrevocably changed.

阅读理解 Earlier this year Ian Leslie wrote a piece for Intelligent Life about the 'filter bubble', which said that the Internet's top five—Yahoo!, Google, Facebook, YouTube and Microsoft—were using personalised data filtering to create a 'you loop' in which serendipitous discoveries are replaced by commercial prompts designed to keep us inside our comfort zone. There's been lots of discussion about the political dangers of what Kunzru calls 'the myopic self', but there has been little about its impact on how we choose and buy books. Theoretically, there's never been a better time to be an adventurous reader, but despite all those self-published writers, boutique publishers and specialist booksellers, I don't think I'm the only one struggling to translate this theory into reality. When it comes to deciding what to read next, I find myself caught between a paralysing ocean of choice and endless recommendations for E. L. James's Fifty Shades of Grey. I end up rereading Dorothy Dunnett's King Hereafter—11th-century Orkney being firmly within my comfort zone. Of course, we can't really blame the algorithms. Our reading choices have always been constrained by the natural filter bubble created by our friends, and the pressures of time play as large a role as Google's search engines. So are there any steps we can take to combat the natural 'you loop' in our reading tastes? First, I propose we adopt a thoroughly disruptive stance: 'If you enjoyed that, then this is the opposite.' If your sister loves the erotic fantasies of E. L. James, then it's time for her to take on the metaphysics of Gods and Monsters, and give Hari Kunzru a try. And second when I've finished the remaining 700 pages of my Norse epic, I shall ask my Twitter friends: what shouldn't I read next? And why stop there? How about disloyalty cards, where booksellers give us discounts for clocking up an eclectic range of purchases? Or discomfort zones, with a 'books we can't stand' display, complete with little handwritten condemnations: so much more inviting than yet another card explaining why Bleak House is really rather good. Could there be a pop-up sci-fi corner in a romance authors' convention or critics reviewing novels that are diametrically opposed in subject matter, style and philosophical outlook, and still liking both? As the season for lazy beach-reading approaches, let us make a stand for the joy of being thoroughly surprised.

阅读理解 Historians may well look back on the 1980s in the United States as a time of rising affluence side by side with rising poverty. The growth in affluence is attributable to an increase in professional and technical jobs, along with more two career couples whose combined incomes provide a' comfortable living'. Yet simultaneously, the nation' s poverty rate rose between 1973 and 1983 from 11.1 percent of the population to 15.2, or by well over a third. Although the poverty rate declined somewhat after 1983, it was still held at 13.5 percent in 1987, comprising a population of 32:5 million Americans. The definition of poverty is a matter of debate. In 1795, a group of English magistrates decided that a minimum in come should be 'the cost of a gallon loaf of bread, multiplied by three, plus an allowance for each dependent'. Today the Census Bureau defines the threshold of poverty in the United States as the minimum amount of money that families need to purchase a nutritionally adequate diet, assuming they use one third of their income for food. Using this definition, roughly half the American population was poor in the aftermath of the Great Depression of the 1930s. By 1950, the proportion of the poor had fallen to 30 percent and by 1964, to 20 percent. With the adoption of the Johnson administration ' s antipoverty programs, the poverty rate dropped to 12 percent in 1969. But since then, it has stopped falling. Liberals contend that the poverty line is too low because it fails to take into account changes in the standard of living. Conservatives say that it is too high because the poor receive other forms of public assistance, including food stamps, public housing subsidies, and health care.

阅读理解What our society suffers from most today is the absence of consensus about what it and life in it ought to be. Such consensus cannot be gained from society''s present stage, or from fantasies about what it ought to be. For that the present is too close and too diversified, and the future too uncertain, to make believable claims about it. A consensus in the present hence can be achieved only through a shared understanding of the past, as Homer''s epics (史诗) informed those who lived centuries later what it meant to be Greek, and by what images and ideals they were to live their lives and organize their societies. 　　Most societies derive consensus from a long history, a language all their own, a common religion, common ancestry. The myths by which they live are based on all of these. But the United States is a country of immigrants, coming from a great variety of nations. Lately, it has been emphasized that an asocial, narcissistic ( 自我陶醉的 ) personality has become characteristic of Americans, and that it is this type of personality that makes for the lack of well-being, because it prevents us from achieving consensus that would counteract a tendency to withdraw into private worlds. In his study of narcissism, Christopher Lasch says that modern man, "tortured by self- consciousness, turns to new therapies not to free himself of his personal worries but to find meaning and purpose in life, to find something to live for." There is widespread distress because national morale has declined, and we have lost an earlier sense of national vision and purpose. 　　Contrary to rigid religions or political beliefs, as are found in totalitarian ( 极权主义的 ) societies, our culture is one of great individual differences, at least in principle and in theory. But this leads to disunity, even chaos. Americans believe in the value of diversity, but just because ours is a society based on individual diversity, it needs consensus about some dominating ideas more than societies based on uniform origin of their citizens. Hence, if we are to have consensus, it must be based on a myth―a vision―about a common experience, a conquest that made us Americans, as the myth about the conquest of Troy formed the Greeks. Only a common myth can offer relief from the fear that life is without meaning or purpose. Myths permit us to examine our place in the world by comparing it to a shared idea. Myths are shared fantasies that form the tie that binds the individual to other members of his group. Such myths help to ward off feelings of isolation, guilt, anxiety, and purposelessness―in short, they combat isolation and the breakdown of social standards and values.

阅读理解It''s a funny thing, happiness. People refer to it as something they want, something missing, as if it could be secured if they only knew where to find it. Lack of it is blamed on past relationships and hope for it placed on future lovers. Desire for it becomes a restless quest. Yet over and again in therapy, it is clear that a hungry pursuit for the illusive state of happiness only ends in frustration and yet more unhappiness. 　　When I ask a man who''s just turned 40 and wants to try psychotherapy to tell me about the disappointments he mentions, he reels off a list: a love affair that lost its zest; a work project ruined by a colleague; a holiday spoiled by the weather; a plan halted by ill health. All were potential routes to happiness. And it is this endless feeling of things being spoilt that makes him feel let down by life and unhappy. 　　He tells me that he had been a willful child. He was, he says, spoilt rotten by very loving parents. They had suffered much hardship in their own lives, and when hard work and good luck made them well off, they decided that he, their only son, would have all they had lacked, and more. 　　He had wanted for nothing. Yet this came with a cost. For having everything on a plate before he had even developed an appetite had robbed him of the chance to reach and struggle for something meaningful and of his very own. There had never been an empty space he had enjoyed working to fill. Little wonder he was unable to remain attached to anything or anyone after frustration set in. Working through difficulty simply hadn''t ever been asked of him. 　　While hopefully a by-product of developing emotional maturity, happiness was not, I told him, a specific therapeutic aim. But therapy could offer the challenge to stay with, and so gradually understand, the meaning of his unhappiness, rather than bolting when the going got rough. The notion that we can uncover a meaning within our suffering supports the whole therapeutic venture. By working towards understanding the reasons for his disappointments, this man had the chance to begin reshaping his own life journey. This was unlikely to give him happiness as a "given constant", but could enable him to develop something far more important. As C. G. Jung, the founder of Analytical Psychology, said:" The principal aim of psychotherapy is not to transport the patient to an impossible state of happiness, but to help him acquire steadfastness and philosophic patience in the face of suffering. Life demands for its completion and fulfillment a balance between joy and sorrow."

阅读理解 A new book by a former lawyer at Kirkland Ellis, one of the nation's largest law firms, has delivered a thrill to the already rattled legal profession. In The Lawyer Bubble: A Profession in Crisis, Steven J. Harper argues that legal jobs are disappearing not because of short-term economic fluctuations but because of powerful long-term trends. The word bubble is an overstatement, but Harper deserves credit for sounding the alarm. The decline in the market for lawyers is being driven by an array of forces. For some time now, corporate clients have been less willing to sign off on bulky legal bills. They have increasingly been balking at the top hourly rates of $1,000 that some partners charge. And as a result of globalization, an increasing share of American legal work is being shipped overseas. Lawyers in India and other lower- wage markets are willing to do the work for a fraction of what American law firms would charge. Taking away even more of this work: newly sophisticated legal software that can do 'document review' and other tasks for which lawyers were once needed. The legal market is without question soft these days. Last June, the Association for Legal Career Professionals released a grim placement report stating that only 65.4% of law-school graduates had found jobs for which it was necessary to pass a state bar exam. And the Internet is full of first-hand accounts of law-school graduates who say that their law degree has not helped them get a law job-and, worse still, those who report that their degree has actually hurt their job prospects, since some employers now tell them they are overqualified for nonlegal positions. Harper argues that the profession's leaders are a big part of the problem. He contends that big-firm managers are too focused on maximizing profits for the biggest, most rainmaking partners-at the expense of junior lawyers and the long-term interest of the firm. And he faults law-school deans for putting the interests and salaries of law professors ahead of the interests of their underemployed, debt- laden students. Controversial as it is, Harper's big-picture argument is undoubtedly correct, and it is a real cause for concern. Bar associations and legal academics have begun talking about how the profession should adapt -discussions that are long overdue. The biggest problem with The Lawyer Bubble is not the warning it is sounding but its title; unlike tulips and other speculative bubbles in the past, lawyers will always be a necessity not a fad. But then, The Very, Very Challenging Job Market for Lawyers doesn't have the same ring to it.

阅读理解 Hunger is no novelty. We can discount legends of golden ages, lands of Cockayne, and Megasthenes' statement that before Alexander's invasion of India, there had never been famine or food shortage there. Trustworthy historical records show that during the Renaissance one year in ten in Britain, and one in five in Europe, was a famine year. China, with a greater area and more diverse climate, had a famine in some region every year. Famine is a state of affairs in which people are dying in the streets. It therefore attracts the notice of historians and is recorded. The fact that it strikes people who are aware of having been properly fed and well is more important. Not only are the survivors more adjustable, they are also angry at the breakdown of the system and eager to do something about it though it is obvious from the record that they do not always have the means. Malnutrition is much more underhanded. It is a chronic state in which the total food supply or, more often, the supply of certain components such as protein or some of the vitamins, is inadequate. It seems probable that, either constantly or seasonally, it used to be the usual condition of mankind and was regarded as normal. The unhealthy appearance of the figures in medieval paintings and drawings is often put down to the incompetence of the artist: it is as likely that most people really did look like that. The plentifulness with which poets greeted the 'merry month of May' may, in our dull climate, have had a climatic basis: it is just as likely that in May, after six months' shortage, there was now an adequate vitamin supply. The promptness with which some sailors died of scurvy after leaving port suggests that they were normally on the edge of scurvy and needed only a slight worsening of conditions to get it acutely. Others will think of other examples. Hunger and malnutrition are components of a classic example of a vicious circle. They lead to enfeeblement or unfeelingness in which nothing either can be done, or seems to be worth doing, to alter the state of affairs, this leads to more hunger and malnutrition. There is good reason to think that, in much of the developing world, if the circle could once be broken, it need never return.