阅读理解Being a man has always been dangerous. There are about 105 males born for every 100 females, but this ratio drops to near balance at the age of maturity, and among 70-year-old there are twice as many women as men. But the great universal of male mortality is being changed. Now, boy babies survive almost as well as girls do. This means that, for the first time, there will be an excess of boys in those crucial years when they are searching for a mate. More important, another chance for natural selection has been removed. Fifty years ago, the chance of a baby (particularly a boy baby) surviving depended on its weight. A kilogram too light or too heavy meant almost certain death. Today it makes almost no difference. Since much of the variation is due to genes, one more agent of evolution has gone. 　　There is another way to commit evolutionary suicide: stay alive, but have fewer children. Few people are as fertile as in the past. Except in some religious communities, very few women have 15 children. Nowadays the number of births, like the age of death, has become average. Most of us have roughly the same number of offspring. Again, differences between people and the opportunity for natural selection to take advantage of it have diminished. India shows what is happening. The country offers wealth for a few in the great cities and poverty for the remaining tribal peoples. The grand mediocrity of today--everyone being the same in survival and number of offspring--means that natural selection has lost 80% of its power in upper-middle-class India compared to the tribes. 　　For us, this means that evolution is over; the biological Utopia has arrived. Strangely, it has involved little physical change. No other species fills so many places in nature. But in the past 100,000 years--even the past 100 years--our lives have been transformed but our bodies have not. We did not evolve, because machines and society did it for us. Darwin had a phrase to describe those ignorant of evolution: they" look at an organic being as a savage looks at a ship, as at something wholly beyond his comprehension. "No doubt we will remember a 20th century way of life beyond comprehension for its ugliness. But however amazed our descendants may be at how far from Utopia we were, they will look just like us.

阅读理解Which of the following is the text mainly about ?

阅读理解Text 3 Progressives often support diversity mandates as a path to equality and a way to level the playing field

阅读理解 'Dark patterns' may sound like the title of a horror film going straight to DVD, but it is also the latest buzzword in the congressional conversation about Internet governance. Senator Mark R. Warner and Deb Fischer have introduced a bill that would bar technology companies from employing deceptive techniques to get users to make choices they otherwise would not, including consenting to data collection. Another, less abnormal term for dark patterns is 'nudges'—tricks based on psychological biases that platforms design into their systems to encourage users to complete transactions. Maybe data-sharing is turned on by default and takes tens of clicks to turn off, or maybe users must navigate a digital maze to cancel their accounts. Maybe a false dirty mark appears on an advertisement so a smartphone user trying to wipe it off ends up clicking. Maybe a box to purchase insurance for a flight reservation is automatically checked 'yes.' Mr. Warner and Ms. Fischer's bill is about more than data protection, but Mr. Warner has said he hopes it can be incorporated into a larger privacy package from Congress all the same. That makes sense. The focus on companies' coercive practices is another much-needed acknowledgment that the notice-and-consent model defining the data economy today is inadequate. A privacy law including some sort of duty of care should restrict not only what companies can do with user data but also how they can exploit users' limitations against them to extract more information than consumers would otherwise provide. Banning dark patterns would also bear on how consumers can exercise any rights Congress grants them to access, correct and delete their data. Still, there is cause for caution. Distinguishing unethical coercion from design choices meant to make things run more smoothly may prove difficult. Other parts of the bill present similar balancing problems: The legislation requires that users be informed before they become subjects of behavioral studies. That's great, but some worry that the constraint would effectively bar platforms from testing site features against one another altogether, despite the bill's safe harbor for small experiments used to determine consumer preferences. A prohibition on addictive features in products directed toward children also leaves open exactly which platforms would be on the hook. There's a lot to like in the so-called Detour Act, but there's also a lot to hammer out. The good news is that this latest buzzword signals a broader shift in the data debate toward putting the responsibility on platforms not to trick users, instead of putting the responsibility on users not to get tricked.

阅读理解 One positive consequence of our current national crisis may be at least a temporary dent in Hollywood's culture of violence. Fearful of offending audiences in the wake of the terrorist attack, some movie-makers have postponed the release of films with terrorist themes. Television writers are shelving or delaying scripts with warlike and terrorist scenarios. It is probably good thinking. My local video store tells me nobody is checking out 'disaster' movies. Says the manager, 'Currently, people want comedy. They want an escape from stories about violence and terrorism.' Similarly, in the music business, there's a run on patriotic and inspirational tapes and CDs. According to the New York Times, the self-scrutiny among these czars of mass-entertainment taste is unprecedented in scale, sweeping aside hundreds of millions of dollars in projects that no longer seem appropriate. A reasonable concern is that this might be a short-term phenomenon. Once life returns to something more normal, will Hollywood return to its bad old ways? The Times offers a glimmer of hope. The industry's titans, it suggests, are grappling with much more difficult, long-range questions of what the public will want once the initial shock from the terrorist attacks wears off. Many in the industry admit they do not know where the boundaries of taste and consumer tolerance now lie. This is an opportunity for some of us to suggest to Hollywood where that boundary of consumer tolerance is. Especially those of us who have not yet convinced Hollywood to cease its descent into ever-lower of desensitization of our young. The nonprofit, nonpartisan Parents Television Council, which monitors the quality of TV programming, says in its latest report that today's TV shows are more laced than ever with vulgarities, sexual immorality, crudities, violence, and foul language. The traditional family hour between 8 p.m. and 9 p.m., when the networks used to offer programs for the entire family, has disappeared. The problem looks like it will get worse. That certainly looked to be the case before the Sep. 11 assault. One pre-attack the New York Times story reported that TV producers were crusading for scripts that include every crude word imaginable. The struggles between network censors and producers, according to the report, were 'growing more intense'. Producers like Aaron Sorkin of The West Wing planned to keep pushing hard. He was quoted as saying, 'There's absolutely no reason why we can't use the language of adulthood in programs that are about adults.' My guess is that a lot of adults don't use the language Mr. Sorkin wants to use, and don't enjoy having their children hear it. At this moment of crisis in our nation's history, thought has become more contemplative, prayerful, and spiritual. It may be the time to tell the entertainment industry that we want not a temporary pause in the flow of tastelessness, but a long-term cleanup.

阅读理解Modern technology and science have produced a wealth of new materials and new ways of using old materials. For the artist this means wider opportunities. There is no doubt that the limitations of materials and nature of tools both restrict and shape a man''s work. Observe how the development of plastics and light metals along with new methods of welding has changed the direction of sculpture. Transparent plastic materials allow one to look through an object, to see its various sides superimposed on each other (as in Cubism or in an X-ray). Today, welding is as prevalent as casting was in the past. This new method encourages open designs, where surrounding and intervening space becomes as important as form itself. 　　More ambiguous than other scientific inventions familiar to modern artists, but no less influential, are the psychoanalytic studies of Freud and his followers, discoveries that have infiltrated recent art, especially Surrealism (超现实主义). The Surrealists, in their struggle to escape the monotony and frustrations of everyday life, claimed that dreams were the only hope. Turning to the irrational world of their unconscious, they banished all time barriers and moral judgments to combine disconnected dream experiences from the past, present and intervening psychological states. The Surrealists were concerned with overlapping emotions more than with overlapping forms. Their paintings often become segmented capsules of associative experiences. For them, obsessive and often unrelated images replaced the direct emotional messages of Expressionism. They did not need to smash paint and canvas; they went beyond this to smash the whole continuity of logical thought. 　　There is little doubt that contemporary art has taken much from contemporary life. In a period when science has made revolutionary strides, artists in their studios have not been unaware of scientists in their laboratories. But this has rarely been a one-way street. Painters and sculptors, though admittedly influenced by modern science, have also molded and changed our world. If break-up has been a vital part of their expression, it has not always been a symbol of destruction. Quite the contrary: it has been used to examine more fully, to penetrate more deeply, to analyze more thoroughly, to enlarge, isolate and make more familiar certain aspects of life that earlier we were apt to neglect. In addition, it sometimes provides rich multiple experiences so organized as not merely to reflect our world, but in fact to interpret it.

阅读理解 Could HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, be weakening? The results of a study conducted in Belgium, at the Institute of Tropical Medicine in Antwerp, seem to suggest that in one corner of the world it might be. The report, published in the latest issue of AIDS, a specialist journal, concludes that HIV's ability to replicate (known technically as its virulence) may have decreased since the start of the pandemic. Kevin Arien, the lead author of the paper, stresses that the study is based on a small set of samples and does not prove that HIV's virulence is attenua- ting around the world. However, it does offer new insights into the evolution of the disease. Dr. Arien looked at 24 blood samples collected from untreated patients attending an HIV/AIDS clinic in Antwerp. A dozen of these samples were taken between 1986 and 1989; the other 12 were collected between 2002 and 2003. First, he analyzed the samples to find their viral load (the number of virus particles per cubic centimeter) and the subtype of virus involved. In Europe and North America, the predominant subtype is B; in sub-Saharan Africa, where the epidemic is at its worst, the predominant subtype is C. Most of Dr. Arien's samples were of subtype B. Having done this analysis, he paired the samples off for a series of replicative 'duels'. Each sample from the earlier series was matched with the most similar one from the later series, and they were placed in identical cell cultures to see which would multiply the most. The result was that 75 % of the viruses from 2002-2003 were less virulent than apparently similar counterparts from 1986-1989—a statistically significant observation. Dr. Arien's caution is sensible, at least until someone replicates the work elsewhere. But his conclusion is not necessarily surprising. Such viral attenuation, as it is known, is one way that vaccines are produced. What causes attenuation in wild viruses, though, is a matter of speculation. Dr. Arien believes that in this case the attenuation could be the result of what he calls 'serial genetic bottlenecks' during transmission from host to host. These act to reduce the genetic diversity (and thus the replicative fitness) of the virus. Genetic diversity is known to be an important component of HIV's virulence. But what might cause the bottlenecks is still unclear. A second reason for caution besides the small size of the study is, as Geoffrey Garnett, a professor of microparasite epidemiology at Imperial College, London, points out, that the ability of a virus to infect cells in a test-tube is not the same as its ability to cause disease and death in a human host. Nevertheless, Dr. Arien's result is intriguing, and surely worth following up in a larger piece of research.

阅读理解 How efficient is our system of criminal trial? Does it really do the basic job we ask of it—convicting the guilty and acquitting the innocent? It is often said that the British trail system is more like a game than a serious attempt to do justice. The lawyers on each side are so engrossed in playing hard to win, challenging each other and the judge on technical points, that the object of finding out the truth is almost forgotten. All the effort is concentrated on the big day, on the dramatic cross examination of the key witnesses in front of the jury. Critics like to compare our 'adversarial' system (resembling two adversaries engaged in a contest) with the continental 'inquisitorial' system, under which the judge plays a more important inquiring role. In early times, in the Middle Ages, the systems of trial across Europe were similar. At that time trial by 'ordeal'—especially a religious event—was the main way of testing guilt or innocence. When this way eventually abandoned the two systems parted company. On the continent church-trained legal officials took over the function of both prosecuting and judging, while in England these were largely left to lay people, the Justice of the Peace and this meant that all the evidence had to be put to them orally. This historical accident dominates procedure even today, with all evidence being given in open court by word of mouth on the crucial day. On the other hand, in France for instance, all the evidence is written before the trial under supervision by an investigating judge. This exhaustive pretrial looks very undramatic; much of it is just a public checking of the written records already gathered. The Americans adopted the British system lock, stock and barrel and enshrined it in their constitution. But, while the basic features of our systems are common, there are now significant differences in the way serious cases are handled. First, because the U.S.A. has virtually no contempt of court laws to prevent pretrial publicity in the newspaper and on television, Americans lawyers are allowed to question jurors about knowledge and beliefs. In Britain this is virtually never allowed, and a random selection of jurors who are presumed not to be prejudiced are empanelled. Secondly, there is no separate profession of barrister in the United States, and both prosecution and defense lawyers who are to present cases in court prepare themselves. They go out and visit the scene, track down and interview witnesses, and familiarize themselves personally with the background. In Britain it is the solicitor who prepares the case, and the barrister who appears in court is not even allowed to meet witness beforehand. British barristers also alternate doing both prosecution and defense work. Being kept distant from the preparation and regularly appearing for both sides, barristers are said to avoid becoming too personally involved, and can approach cases more dispassionately. American lawyers, however, often know their cases better. Reformers rightly want to learn from other countries' mistakes and successes. But what is clear is that justice systems, largely because they are the result of long historical growth, are peculiarly difficult to adapt piecemeal.

阅读理解A. These tools can help you win every argument-not in the unhelpful sense of beating your opponents but in the better sense of learning about the issues that divide people. Learning why they disagree with us and learning to talk and work together with them. If we readjust our view of argumentsfrom a verbal fight or tennis game to a reasoned exchange through which we all gain mutual respect, and understandingthen we change the very nature of what it means to win an argument. B. Of course, many

阅读理解The author's attitude toward choosing Mauna Kea as the TMT site is one of_____

阅读理解U.S. prisons are filled with drug offenders; the number of prisoners tripled over the past 20 years to nearly 2 million, with 60 to 70 per cent testing positive for substance abuse on arrest. The country has spent billions of dollars attacking the problem at its roots. But there is growing consensus that the "war on drug" has been lost. The United States is still the world''s largest consumer of illegal substances; cocaine continues to pour over the border from Mexico. "Traffic" taps into the national frustration, depicting the horrors of both drugs and the drug war. Without taking sides, the film illuminates the national debate and poses on alternative that Americans seem increasingly willing to consider: finding new ways to treat, rather than merely punish, drug abuse. 　　Policy revolutions―like legalizing narcotics (drugs producing sleep or insensibility) ―remain a distant dream. But there is growing public awareness that the money and energy wasted on trying to check the flow of drugs into the United States might be better spent on trying to control demand instead. Voters in several states are far ahead of the politicians, approving ballot initiatives that offer more treatment opinions. "Drugs courts" that allow judges to use carrots and sticks to compel substance-abuse treatment have grown fifty-fold since the mid-1990s, part of a new understanding that, even with frequent relapses( returns to a formal state), treatment is much less expensive for society than jail and ban. 　　Drug addiction is increasingly being viewed as more a disease than a crime. Science is yielding clues about the "hedonic (of pleasure ) region" of the brain, while breakthrough medications and greater understanding of the mental-health problems that underlie many addictions are giving therapists new tools. 　　Officials across the Continent have already begun shifting their focus from preventing drug flow to rehabilitating (making able to live a normal life again) drug users. The new European Union Drugs Strategy for 2000-2004 makes a commitment to increasing the number of successfully treated addicts. Gemany, Italy and Luxembourg have transferred responsibility for drug policy from their Ministries of the Interior to the Ministries of Health or Social Affairs. In Britain, the government has set up a National Treatment Agency to coordinate the efforts of social-service agencies and the Department of Health. And drug-prevention and support agencies there are getting about 30 percent more funding this year. Changing the main national strategy from attacking drug pushers to rehabilitating addicts won''t come easy. But slowly, steadily, Americans, like Europeans, seem determined to try.

阅读理解We sometimes hear that essays are an old-fashioned form. that so-and-so is the "last essayist", but the facts of the marketplace argue quite otherwise. Essays of nearly any kind are so much easier than short stories for a writer to sell, so many more see print, it''s strange that though two fine anthologies (collections)remain that publish the year''s best stories, no comparable collection exists for essays. Such changes in the reading public''s taste aren''t always to the good, needless to say. The art of telling stories predated even cave painting, surely; and if we ever find ourselves living in caves again, it (with painting and drumming)will be the only art left, after movies, novels, photography, essays ,biography, and all the rest have gone down the drain―the art to build from. 　　Essays, however, hang somewhere on a line between two sturdy poles: this is what I think, and this is what I am. Autobiographies which aren''t novels are generally extended essays, indeed. A personal essay is like the human voice talking, its order being the mind''s natural flow, instead of a systematized outline of ideas. Though more changeable or informal than an article or treatise, somewhere it contains a point which is its real center, even if the point couldn''t be uttered in fewer words than the essayist has used. Essays don''t usually boil down to a summary, as articles do, and the style of the writer has a "nap" to it, a combination of personality and originality and energetic loose ends that stand up like the nap( 绒毛)on a piece of wool and can''t be brushed flat. Essays belong to the animal kingdom, with a surface that generates sparks, like a coat of fur, compared with the flat, conventional cotton of the magazine article writer, who works in the vegetable kingdom, instead. But, essays, on the other hand, may have fewer "levels" than fiction, because we are not supposed to argue much about their meaning. In the old distinction between teaching and storytelling, the essayist, however cleverly he tries to conceal his intentions, is a bit of a teacher or reformer, and an essay is intended to convey the same point to each of us. 　　An essayist doesn''t have to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth; he can shape or shave his memories, as long as the purpose is served of explaining a truthful point. A personal essay frequently is not autobiographical at alt, but what it does keep in common with autobiography is that, through its tone and tumbling progression, it conveys the quality of the author''s mind. Nothing gets in the way. Because essays are directly concerned with the mind and the mind''s peculiarity, the very freedom the mind possesses is conferred on this branch of literature that does honor to it, and the fascination of the mind is the fascination of the essay.

阅读理解 In the idealized version of how science is done, facts about the world are waiting to be observed and collected by objective researchers who use the scientific method to can'y out their work. But in the everyday practice of science, discovery frequently follows an ambiguous and complicated route. We aim to be objective, but we cannot escape the context of our unique life experience. Prior knowledge and interest influence what we experience, what we think our experiences mean, and the subsequent actions we take. Opportunities for misinterpretation, error, and self-deception abound. Consequently, discovery claims should be thought of as protoscience. Similar to newly staked mining claims, they are lull of potential. But it takes collective scrutiny and acceptance to transform a discovery claim into a mature discovery. This is the credibility process, through which the individual researcher's me, here, now becomes the community's anyone, anywhere, anytime. Objective knowledge is the goal, not the starting point. Once a discovery claim becomes public, the discoverer receives intellectual credit. But, unlike with mining claims, the community takes control of what happens next. Within the complex social structure of the scientific community, researchers make discoveries; editors and reviewers act as gatekeepers by controlling the publication process; other scientists use the new finding to suit their own purposes; and finally, the public (including other scientists) receives the new discovery and possibly accompanying technology. As a discovery claim works it way through the community, the interaction and confrontation between shared and competing beliefs about the science and the technology involved transforms an individual's discovery claim into the community's credible discovery. Two paradoxes exist throughout this credibility process. First, scientific work tends to focus on some aspect of prevailing Knowledge that is viewed as incomplete or incorrect. Little reward accompanies duplication and confirmation of what is already known and believed. The goal is new-search, not re-search. Not surprisingly, newly published discovery claims and credible discoveries that appear to be important and convincing will always be open to challenge and potential modification or refutation by future researchers. Second, novelty itself frequently provokes disbelief. Nobel Laureate and physiologist Albert Azent-Gy6rgyi once described discovery as 'seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought.' But thinking what nobody else has thought and telling others what they have missed may not change their views. Sometimes years are required for truly novel discovery claims to be accepted and appreciated. In the end, credibility 'happens' to a discovery claim—a process that corresponds to what philosopher Annette Baier has described as the commons of the mind. 'We reason together, challenge, revise, and complete each other's reasoning and each other's conceptions of reason.'

阅读理解 You've spent 90 percent of your life inside. What have you been breathing in that whole time? Conversations about pollution tend to focus on the outdoors—the exhaust from cars and buses, the contaminant smog that comes wheezing out of smokestacks and factories. But we're missing what's right in front of our noses, what we breathe in for most of our lives: indoor air. Indoor air pollution is 'an area that's relatively unexplored compared to other fields in public health,' says Dr. Joseph Allen, director of the Healthy Buildings Program at Harvard's Center for Health and the Global Environment. Despite the fact that indoor air is sometimes more polluted than outdoor air, 'we haven't dedicated comparable resources to it.' The issue of indoor air pollution was all but unspoken until the 1970s, when buildings started to get sealed with energy-conscious insulation. That's when so-called 'sick building syndrome' started to pop up nationwide, with huge numbers of tenants complaining about sickness and discomfort. Their symptoms were mostly caused by indoor pollutants, particularly what scientists call volatile organic compounds, or VOCs. VOCs are especially harmful in indoor spaces because they easily evaporate; formaldehyde, for instance, boils at-2 degrees Fahrenheit, meaning it will sublimate in any indoor environment that isn't a deep freezer. VOCs are everywhere, in some of the most common materials and products of home and office—there is benzene in art supplies, formaldehyde comes in paint, perchloroethylene comes in fabric-, wood-, and shoe-cleaning products. They present a whole host of health threats, as do other types of indoor chemicals and pollutants, including the risk of causing cancer and 'damage to the liver, kidneys, and central nervous system,' according to the National Institutes of Health. WHAT CAN WE DO to protect ourselves? Allen says the solution may lie in the people responsible for making buildings, who have the power to control and monitor indoor air quality. And while the bigger solution may lie in ground-up renovations, everyone can help improve the air we breathe by looking for toxic chemicals on the labels on the products we buy, keeping up regular cleaning routines, and making sure to monitor and purify indoor air quality. 'We must understand that the indoor environment influences your health,' Allen says. 'When people start thinking about where we spend our time and all that's around us, I think things will start to change.'

阅读理解It''s hardly news anymore that Americans are just too fat. A quick look around the mall, the beach or the crowd at any baseball game will leave no room for doubt:our individual weight problems have become a national crisis. Even so, the actual numbers are shocking. Fully two-thirds of U. S. adults are officially overweight, and about half of those have graduated to full-blown obesity. 　　It wouldn''t be such a big deal if the problem were simple aesthetic. But excess poundage takes a terrible toll on the human body. significantly increasing the risk of heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, infertility, and many forms of cancer. The total medical bill for illnesses related to obesity is $117 billion a year-and climbing - and the Journal of the American Medical Association reported that poor diet and physical inactivity could soon overtake tobacco as the leading cause of preventable death in the U. S. 　　Why is it happening? The obvious, almost trivial answer is that we eat too much high-calorie food and don''t burn it off with enough exercise. If only we could change those habits, the problem would go away. But clearly it isn''t that easy. Americans pour scores of billions of dollars every year into weight-loss products and health-club memberships. Food and drug companies spend even more trying to find a magic food or drug that will melt the pounds away. Yet the nation''s collective waistline just keeps growing. 　　It''s natural to try to find something to blame - fast-food joints or food manufacturers or even ourselves for having too little willpower. But the ultimate reason for obesity may be rooted deep within our genes. Obedient to the inevitable laws of evolution, the human race adapted over millions of years to living in a world of scarcity, where it paid to eat every good-tasting thing in sight when you could find it. 　　Although our physiology has stayed pretty much the same for the past 50,000 years or so,we humans have utterly transformed our environment. Over the past century especially, technology has almost completely removed physical exercise from the day-to-day lives of most Americans. At the same time, it has filled supermarket shelves with cheap, mass-produced, good-tasting food that is packed with calories. And finally, technology has allowed advertisers to deliver constant, virtually irresistible messages that say "Eat this now" to everyone old enough to watch TV. 　　This artificial environment is most pervasive in the U. S. and other industrialized countries, and that''s exactly where the fat crisis is most acute.

阅读理解Scientific tradition demands that scientific papers follow the formal progression :method first, results second, conclusion third. The rules permit no hint that, as often happens, the method was really made up as the scientist went along, or that accidental results determined the method, or that the scientist reached certain conclusions before the results were all in, or that he started out with certain conclusions, or that he started doing a different experiment. 　　Much scientific writing not only misrepresents the workings of science but also does a disservice to scientists themselves. By writing reports that make scientific investigations sound as unvarying and predictable as the sunrise, scientists tend to spread the curious notion that science is infallible. That many of them are unconscious of the effect they create does not alter the image in the popular mind. We hear time and again of the superiority of the "scientific method". In fact, the word "unscientific" has almost become a synonym for "untrue". Yet the final evaluation of any set of data is an individual, subjective judgment; and all human judgment is liable to error. Thoughtful scientists realize all this; but you wouldn''t gather so from reading most scientific literature. A self-important, stiff and unnatural style too often seizes the pen of the experimenter the moment he starts putting words on paper. 　　Editors of scientific publications are not without their reasons for the current style of scientific writing. Their journals aren''t rich. Paper and printing are expensive. Therefore, it is helpful to condense articles as much as possible. Under pressure of tradition, the condensation process removes the human elements first. And few scientific writers rebel against the tradition. Even courageous men do not go out of their way to publicize their deviations from accepted procedures. Then ,too, there is an apparent objectivity and humbleness attached to the third person, passive voice writing technique adopted in the preparation of most scientific papers. So, bit by bit, the true face of science becomes hidden behind what seems to the outsider to be a self-satisfied all-knowing mask. Is it any wonder that in the popular literature the scientist often appears as a hybrid superman-spoiled child? 　　No small contribution to modern culture could be the simple introduction, into the earliest stage of our public-school science courses, of a natural style of writing about laboratory experiments as they really happen. This is something that could be done immediately with the opening of classes this fall. It requires no preparation except a psychological acknowledgment of the obvious fact that the present form of reporting experiments is a mental tie whose very appearance is calculated to repel the imaginative young minds science so badly needs.

阅读理解Text 4 Last Thursday, the French Senate passed a digital services tax, which would impose an entirely new tax on large multinationals that provide digital services to consumers or users in France

阅读理解 Sometimes the biggest changes in society are the hardest to spot precisely because they are hiding in plain sight. It could well be that way with wireless communications. Something that people think of as just another technology is beginning to show signs of changing lives, culture, politics, cities, jobs, even marriages dramatically. In particular, it will usher in a new version of a very old idea: nomadism. Futurology is a dangerous business, and it is true that most of the important arguments about mobile communications at the moment are to do with technology or regulation—bandwidth, spectrum use and so on. Yet it is worth jumping ahead and wondering what the social effects will be, for two reasons. First, the broad technological future is pretty clear: there will be ever faster cellular networks, and many more gadgets to connect to these networks. Second, the social changes are already visible: parents on beaches waving at their children while typing furtively on their BlackBerrys; entrepreneurs discovering they don't need offices at all. Everybody is doing more on the move. Wireless technology is surely not just an easier-to-use phone. The car divided cities into work and home areas; wireless technology may mix them up again, with more people working in suburbs or living in city centers. Traffic patterns are beginning to change again: the rush hours at 9am and 5pm are giving way to more varied patterns, with people going backwards and forwards between the office, home and all sorts of other places throughout the day. Already, architects are redesigning offices and universities: more flexible spaces for meeting people, fewer private enclosures for sedentary work. Will it be a better life? In some ways, yes. Digital nomadism will liberate ever more knowledge workers from the cubicle prisons as depicted in Mr. Dilbert's cartoons. But the old tyranny of place could become a new tyranny of time, as nomads who are 'always on' all too often end up—mentally—anywhere but here. As for friends and family, permanent mobile connectivity could have the same effect as nomadism: it might bring you much closer to family and friends, but it may make it harder to bring in outsiders. Sociologists fret about constant e-mailers and texters losing the everyday connections to casual acquaintances or strangers sitting next to them in the cafe or on the bus. The same tools have another dark side, turning everybody into a fully equipped paparazzo. Some fitness clubs have started banning mobile phones near the treadmills and showers lest exercising people find themselves pictured, flabby and sweaty, on some website. As in the desert, so in the city: nomadism promises the heaven of new freedom, but it also signals the hell of constant surveillance by the tribe.

阅读理解One of the questions that is coming into focus as we face growing scarcity of resources of many kinds in the world is how to divide limited resources among countries. In the international development community, the conventional wisdom has been that the 2 billion people living in poor countries could never expect to reach the standard of living that most of us in North America enjoy, simply because the world does not contain enough iron ore, protein, petroleum, and so on. At the same time, we in the United States have continued to pursue superaffluence as though there were no limits on how much we could consume. We make up 6 percent of the world''s people; yet we consume one-third of the world''s resources. 　　As long as the resources we consumed each year came primarily from within our own boundaries, this was largely an internal matter. But as our resources come more and more from the outside world, "outsiders''’ are going to have some say over the rate at which and terms under which we consume. We will no longer be able to think in terms of "our" resources and "their" resources, but only of common resources. 　　As Americans consuming such a disproportionate share of the world''s resources, we have to question whether or not we can continue our pursuit of superaffluence in a world of scarcity. We are now reaching the point where we must carefully examine the presumed link between our level of well-being and the level of material goods consumed. If you have only one crust of bread and get another crust of bread, your well-being is greatly enhanced. But if you have a loaf of bread, then an additional crust of bread doesn''t make that much difference. In the eyes of most of the world today, Americans have their loaf of bread and are asking for still more. People elsewhere are beginning to ask why. This is the question we''re going to have to answer, whether we''re trying to persuade countries to step up their exports of oil to us or trying to convince them that we ought to be permitted to maintain our share of the world fish catch. 　　The prospect of a scarcity of, and competition for, the world''s resources requires that we reexamine the way in which we relate to the rest of the world. It means we find ways of cutting back on resource consumption that is dependent on the resources and cooperation of other countries. We cannot expect people in these countries to concern themselves with our worsening energy and food shortages unless we demonstrate some concern for the hunger, illiteracy and disease that are diminishing life for them.

阅读理解A "radiative forcing" is any change imposed on the Earth that affect the planetary energy balance. Radiative forcings include changes in greenhouse gases (such as carbon dioxide and ozone), aerosols in the atmosphere, solar irradiance, and surface reflectivity. A forcing may result from either a natural or an anthropogenic cause, or from both, as in the case of atmospheric aerosol concentrations, which can be altered either by volcanic action or the burning of fossil fuels. Radiative forcings are typically specified for the purpose of theoretical global climate simulations. In contrast, radiative "feedbacks" are environmental changes resulting from climate changes and are calculated from scientific observation. Radiative feedbacks include changes in such phenomena as clouds, atmospheric water vapor, sea-ice cover, and snow cover. 　　The interplay between forcings and feedbacks can be quite complex. For example, an increase in the concentration of atmospheric water vapor increases solar irradiance, thereby warming the atmosphere and, in turn, increasing evaporation and the concentration of atmospheric water vapor. A related example of this complex interplay also shows the uncertainty of future climatic changes associated with forcings and feedbacks. Scientists are unsure how the reduction of ozone will ultimately affect clouds and, in turn, the Earth temperature. Clouds trap outgoing, cooling radiation, thereby providing a warming influence. However, they also reflect incoming solar radiation and thus provide a cooling influence. Currents measurements indicate that the net effect of clouds is to cool the Earth. However, scientists do not know how the balance might shift in the future as cloud formation and dispersion are affected by ozone reduction. 　　Contributing to this uncertainty is the complexity of the mechanisms at work in the process of ozone reduction. The amount of radiation reaching the earth''s surface and the amount of reradiated radiation that is trapped by the greenhouse effect influence the Earth''s temperature in opposite directions. Both mechanisms are affected by the vertical distribution of ozone. Also, the relative importance of these two competing mechanisms depends on the altitude at which ozone changes occur. In a recent NASA-sponsored aircraft study of the Antarctic ozone hole, chlorine monoxide was measured at varying altitudes. The measurements suggest that chlorine plays a greater role, and oxides of nitrogen a lesser role, than previously thought in the destruction of ozone in the lower atmosphere. The study concluded that simultaneous high-resolution measurements at many different altitudes (on the scale of 0.1 kilometer in vertical extent) are necessary to diagnose the operative mechanisms. These findings have called into question conventional explanations for ozone reduction, which fail to adequately account for the new evidence. (NASA=National Aeronautics and Space Administration 国家航空航天局)