阅读理解A "greenhouse effect" will raise the earth''s temperature enough by the year 2100 to cause dramatic climate changes, increase sea levels and disrupt food production, United States scientists said this week. 　　The earth''s atmosphere is heating at a rate that could mean temperature rises of two degrees centigrade by the middle of the 21st century and five degrees centigrade by the year 2100, according to a report issued by the US government''s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). 　　"Substantial increases in global warming may occur sooner than most of us would like to believe," the EPA said. 　　The agency said the first effects might be felt as early as 1990, because temperatures would be rising more than seven times faster each decade between now and the year 2100 than they had been for the past 100 years. 　　"Temperature increases are likely to be accompanied by dramatic changes in precipitation and storm patterns and a rise in global average sea level," the EPA report said. 　　"As a result," the agency said, "agricultural conditions will be significantly altered, environmental and economic systems potentially disrupted." 　　The EPA report said the burning of fossil fuels was directly responsible for most of the atmosphere build-up of carbon dioxide but the current concentration is so great that even a worldwide ban on the use of such fuels would delay the warming effect for only a few years. 　　"A warmer climate will raise sea levels by heating and expanding the world''s oceans and causing glaciers to melt," the EPA said. 　　The agency estimated that sea levels could rise anything between 48 to 380 cm in the next 120 years. 　　"An increase of even 48 cm could flood or cause storm damage to many of the major ports of the world, disrupt transportation networks, alter underwater ecology systems and cause major shifts in land development patterns." 　　One study cited in the report suggested that if the average global temperature rose by 2.5 degrees centigrade, regional climatic conditions might be similar to those during the last interglacial period 120,000 years ago. 　　During this period, oceans were five to seven metres higher than today''s, flooding the shores of Europe and western Siberia and making Scandinavia an island. 　　The agency said that while the warming trend could have some beneficial effects, such as reducing heating costs and improving climate and growing seasons in some parts of the world, there would be difficulty in redirecting national economies to adapt to the new climate patterns. 　　The EPA said it seemed unlikely that the nations of the world would reach a consensus on step to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. Instead, it urged more research on the greenhouse effect and stressed the need for better planning to cope with the changes the warming trend is expected to produce.

阅读理解It''s a rough world out there. Step outside and you could break a leg slipping on your doormat. Light up the stove and you could burn down the house. Luckily, if the doormat or stove failed to warn of coming disaster, a successful lawsuit might compensate you for your troubles. Or so the thinking has gone since the early 1980s, when juries began holding more companies liable for their customers'' misfortunes. 　　Feeling threatened, companies responded by writing ever-longer warning labels, trying to anticipate every possible accident. Today, stepladders carry labels several inches long that warn, among other things, that you might--surprise! -- fall off. The label on a child''s Batman cape cautions that the toy "does not enable user to fly." 　　While warnings are often appropriate and necessary--the dangers of drug interactions, for example--and many are required by state or federal regulations, it isn''t clear that they actually protect the manufacturers and sellers from liability if a customer is injured. About 50 percent of the companies lose when injured customers take them to court. 　　Now the tide appears to be turning. As personal injury claims continue as before, some courts are beginning to side with defendants, especially in cases where a warning label probably wouldn''t have changed anything. In May, Julie Nimmons, president of Schutt Sports in Illinois, successfully fought a lawsuit involving a football player who was paralyzed in a game while wearing a Schutt helmet. "We''re really sorry he has become paralyzed, but helmets aren''t designed to prevent those kinds of injuries," says Nimmons. The jury agreed that the nature of the game, not the helmet, was the reason for the athlete''s injury. At the same time, the American Law Institute--a group of judge, lawyers, and academics whose recommendations carry substantial weight--issued new guidelines for tort law stating that companies need not warn customers of obvious dangers or bombard them with a lengthy list of possible ones. "Important information can get buried in a sea of trivialities," says a law professor at Cornell Law School who helped draft the new guidelines. If the moderate end of the legal community has its way, the information on products might actually be provided for the benefit of customers and not as protection against legal liability.

阅读理解[A]Thefirstpublishedsketch,ADinneratPolarWalkbroughttearstoDickensseyeswhenhediscovereditinthepagesofTheMonthlyMagazineFromthenonhissketches,whichappearedunderthepennameBozinTheEveningChronicle,earnedhimamodestreputation.[B]TherunawaysuccessofThePickwickPapers,asitisgenerallyknowntoday,securedDickenssfame.TherewerePickwickcoatsandPickwickcigars,andtheplump,spectacledhero,SamuelPickwick,becauseanationalfigure.[C]SoonafterSketchesbyBozappeared,apublishingfirmapproachedDickenstowriteastoryinmonthlyinstallments,asabackdropforaseriesofwoodcutsbythethen-famousartistRobertSeymour,whohadoriginatedtheideaforthestory.Withcharacteristicconfidence,DickenssuccessfullyinsistedthatSeymourspicturesillustratehisownstoryinstead.Afterthefirstinstallment,DickenswrotetotheartistandaskedhimtocorrectadrawingDickensfelt,wasnotfaithfulenoughtohisprose.Seymourmadethechange,wentintohisbackyard,andexpressedhisdispleasurebycommittingsuicide.Dickensandhispublisherssimplypressedonwithanewartist.Thecomicnovel,ThePosthumousPapersofthePickwickClub,appearedseriallyin1836and1837andwasfirstpublishedinbookformin1837.[D]CharlesDickensisprobablythebest-knownand,tomanypeople,thegreatestEnglishnovelistofthe19thcentury.Amoralist,satirist,andsocialreformer,DickenscraftedcomplexplotsandstrikingcharactersthatcapturethepanoramaofEnglishsociety.[E]Soonafterhisfathersreleasefromprison,Dickensgotabetterjobaserrandboyinlawoffices.HetaughthimselfshorthandtogetanevenbetterjoblaterasacourtstenographerandasareporterinParliament.Atthesametime,Dickens,whohadareporterseyefortranscribingthelifearoundhim,especiallyanythingcomicorodd,submittedshortsketchestoobscuremagazines.[F]DickenswasborninPortsmouth,onEnglandssoutherncoast.HisfatherwasaclerkintheBritishNavyPayoffice--arespectableposition,butwithlittlesocialstatus.Hispaternalgrandparents,astewardandahousekeeper,possessedevenlessstatus,havingbeenservants,andDickenslaterconcealedtheirbackground.Dickensmothersupposedlycamefromamorerespectablefamily.YettwoyearsbeforeDickensbirth,hismothersfatherwascaughtstealingandfledtoEurope,nevertoreturn.ThefamilysincreasingpovertyforcedDickensoutofschoolatage12toworkinWarrensBlackingWarehouse,ashoe-polishfactory,wheretheotherworkingboysmockedhimastheyounggentleman.Hisfatherwasthenimprisonedfordebt.ThehumiliationsofhisfathersimprisonmentandhislaborintheblackingfactoryformedDickenssgreatestwoundandbecamehisdeepestsecret.Hecouldnotconfidethemeventohiswife,althoughtheyprovidetheunacknowledgedfoundationofhisfiction.[G]AfterPickwick,Dickensplungedintoableakerworld.InOliverTwist,hetracesanorphansprogressfromtheworkhousetothecriminalslumsofLondon.NicholasNickleby,hisnextnovel,combinesthedarknessofOliverTwistwiththesunlightofPickwick.ThepopularityofthesenovelsconsolidatedDickensasanationallyandinternationallycelebratedmanofletters.

阅读理解 Progressives often support diversity mandates as a path to equality and a way to level the playing field. But all too often such policies are an insincere form of virtue-signaling that benefits only the most privileged and does little to help average people. A pair of bills sponsored by Massachusetts state Senator Jason Lewis and House Speaker Pro Tempore Patricia Haddad, to ensure 'gender parity' on boards and commissions, provide a case in point. Haddad and Lewis are concerned that more than half the state-government boards are less than 40 percent female. In order to ensure that elite women have more such opportunities, they have proposed imposing government quotas. If the bills become law, state boards and commissions will be required to set aside 50 percent of board seats for women by 2022. The bills are similar to a measure recently adopted in California, which last year became the first state to require gender quotas for private companies. In signing the measure, California Governor Jerry Brown admitted that the law, which expressly classifies people on the basis of sex, is probably unconstitutional. The US Supreme Court frowns on sex-based classifications unless they are designed to address an 'important' policy interest, because the California law applies to all boards, even where there is no history of prior discrimination, courts are likely to rule that the law violates the constitutional guarantee of 'equal protection'. But are such government mandates even necessary? Female participation on corporate boards may not currently mirror the percentage of women in the general population, but so what? The number of women on corporate boards has been steadily increasing without government interference. According to a study by Catalyst, between 2010 and 2015 the share of women on the boards of global corporations increased by 54 percent. Requiring companies to make gender the primary qualification for board membership will inevitably lead to less experienced private sector boards. That is exactly what happened when Norway adopted a nationwide corporate gender quota. Writing in The New Republic, Alice Lee notes that increasing the number of opportunities for board membership without increasing the pool of qualified women to serve on such boards has led to a 'gold skirt' phenomenon. Where the same elite women scoop up multiple seats on a variety of boards. Next time somebody pushes corporate quotas as a way to promote gender equity, remember that such policies are largely self-serving measures that make their sponsors feel good but do little to help average women.

阅读理解In a competitive economy, the consumer usually has the choice of several different brands of the same product. Yet underneath their labels, these products are often nearly identical. One manufacturer''s toothpaste tends to differ very little from another manufacturer''s. Two different brands of shampoo may vary only in scent or color. And the tobacco in two different brands of cigarettes frequently comes from the same fields. This close similarity means that a shopper often has little reason to choose one brand over another. Thus, manufacturers are confronted with a problem--how to keep sales high enough to stay in business. Manufacturers solve this problem by advertising. Through advertising, each manufacturing company tries to convince consumers that its product is special. To do this ,the companies try to appeal to consumers in various ways. In fact, advertisements may be classified into three types according to the kind of appeals they use. 　　One type of advertisement tries to appeal to the consumer''s reasoning mind. It may offer a claim that seems scientific. For example, it may say that dentists recommend Flash toothpaste, or it may declare that Woof dog food contains a special, vitamin-rich ingredient known as K-9, or it may report that laboratory tests show that R. I. P. cigarettes contain fewer harmful ingredients than other brands. In selling a product, the truth of advertising may be less important than the appearance of truth. A scientific approach gives the appearance of truth. 　　Another type of advertisement tries to amuse the potential buyer. Products that are essentially boring, such as cleaning powder or insecticide, are often advertised in an amusing manner. One way of doing this is to make the products appear alive. The advertiser may draw little cartoon eyes, arms, and legs on the cans of cleaning powder and have the resulting figures scrub the sink. Ads of this sort are silly, but advertisers believe that consumers are likely to remember and buy the products that the consumers associate with fun. 　　Associating the product with something pleasant is the technique of the third type of appeal. In this class are ads that suggest that the product will satisfy some basic human desires. One such desire is the wish to be admired by other people. Many automobile advertisements are in this category. They imply that other people will admire you--may even be jealous--when they see you driving the hot, new Aardvark car. This kind of appeal is sometimes strengthened by hiring a famous person to endorse the product. Seeing the famous person, the consumer is supposed to reason thus: Everyone admires Judson Smith the great football star. Judson Smith used Buckworthy Bank traveler''s checks. Therefore, if I use Buckworthy Bank traveler''s checks, everyone will admire me too. Some other basic desires that ads commonly try to appeal to are the desires for social acceptance ,financial security, and so on. 　　One only needs to look through a magazine or watch an hour of TV in order to see examples of these three different advertising strategies.

阅读理解 This week's A-level results will have disappointed some students, but despite that there may in one sense never be a better time to be a UK teenager who wants to go on to higher education. The recent massive expansion in higher education, as well as the lack of alternatives and the decline in the number of school leavers, means that for now and the next two or three years, sixth formers holding A-level certificates and equivalent qualifications will be in high demand. The generous offers being made by institutions to attract students at all stages of the admissions process are a symptom of that demand. Since cutting tuition fees puts off students fearing a cut-price education, universities are instead offering incentives in various forms, as well as offering bursaries to support those students whose family circumstances mean they would otherwise be unable to afford to go. But the current shortage of students obscures a major flaw in the pipeline from school to campus: the UK's outdated insistence on conducting applications and admissions without knowing a candidate's final exam results. It's not enough to say that if the system isn't broken it doesn't need fixing, because it is broken. The evidence is the bureaucratic scaffolding that has been erected purely to work around the lack of exam results. First come the grade predictions made by teachers—these are ridiculously unreliable but they set the boundaries of where students apply, aggravating inequality. Then there is the growth in unconditional offers, which overcome the instability of the system by ignoring exam results entirely but are said to downgrade the importance of the exams. There are two straightforward options to tackle this problem. One is to imitate Scotland and reintroduce the halfway AS-level scrapped by Michael Gove as education secretary, and allow those to be used as a better guide. The other is to move A-level exams earlier in the year, to March or April. Then the results would be published during term time, with sixth formers using the intervening period to research possible choices, assisted by school staff able to aid those from disadvantaged backgrounds. Other countries avoid these difficulties because they have education systems that don't insist on 16- and 17-year-olds making definitive choices in a narrow range of subjects to study and then propel them into choosing overly specialised courses from their first day as undergraduates. That is a wider issue, but for now let us reform the admissions process, as Labour has suggested. There could not be a better time now that student numbers are low.

阅读理解 Corals are approaching a brink. Warming oceans, acidification and a constellation of other man-made stressors mean coral reefs may face extinction within the century. And with around 25 percent of all sea life, dependent on the health of coral reefs, if the corals go down, they're taking a huge swath of marine biodiversity with them. But in a paper published in the journal Science, a team of scientists made a hopeful discovery: Heat tolerance in corals can be inherited, and at a remarkably high rate of success too; 87 percent of all differences in survival rates among the heat-stressed coral they studied was explained by how heat-tolerant the corals' parents were. 'This implies that heat tolerance could not only evolve, but evolve fast,' explained Mikhail Matz, an associate professor of integrative biology and an author on the paper. In other words, some corals are already capable of genetically adapting to warmer oceans. If heat-tolerant coral parents can have heat-tolerant coral babies, then interbreeding between more and less heat-tolerant corals has the potential to help genetically rescue the next generation of a colony. Humans, the authors posit, could potentially harness the natural genetic variation among corals to help save them. More resilient coral could be born out of 'something as simple as exchange of coral immigrants across latitudes,' said Line Bay, an evolutionary ecologist and another author on the paper. If humans strategically move heat-tolerant, reproductively active corals to vulnerable reefs, the process of 'genetic rescue' might be jump-started. 'This is occasion for hope and optimism about coral reefs and the marine life that thrive there,' Matz said. Meanwhile, a multitude of other problems face coral reefs. For example, as the paper notes, corals live a long time; from decades to centuries. With climate change poised to measurably warm and acidified oceans within the next several decades, and pollution causing oxygen depletion and 'dead zones' in some areas, 'it has been argued that in such long-lived organisms acclimatization rather than genetic adaptation will play the leading role in their response to climate change,' the paper reads. In other words, to save reefs, something needs to be done for the coral that already exist. 'Existing genetic variation is by no means a magic bullet that will solve the problem once and for all,' Matz said. 'The good news is that genetic variation will buy us some time; but it will eventually 'run out' when the warming progresses beyond the high levels seen now in natural populations. So if we want to save corals (as well as the rest of biodiversity) we will still need to come up with a solution to curb global warming as a global problem.'

阅读理解No one can be a great thinker who does not realize that as a thinker it is his first duty to follow his intellect to whatever conclusions it may lead. Truth gains more even by the errors of one who, with due study and preparation, thinks for himself, than by the true opinions of those who only hold them because they do not suffer themselves to think. Not that it is solely, or chiefly, to form great thinkers that freedom of thinking is required. On the contrary, it is as much or even more indispensable to enable average human beings to attain the mental quality which they are capable of. There have been, and may again be, great individual thinkers in a general atmosphere of mental slavery. But there never has been, nor ever will be, in that atmosphere an intellectually active people. While any people has made a temporary approach to such a character, it has been because the dread of heterodox(非正统的) thinking was for a time suspended. Where there is an unspoken convention that principles are not to be disputed; where the discussion of the greatest questions which can occupy humanity is considered to be closed, we cannot hope to find that generally high scale of mental activity which has made some periods of history so remarkable. Never when prolonged arguments avoided the subjects which are large and important enough to rouse enthusiasm was the mind of a people stirred up from its foundations and the impulse given which raised even persons of the most ordinary intellect to something of thinking beings. 　　He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, and if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion. The rational position for him would be suspension of judgment, and unless he contents himself with that, he is either led by authority, or adopts, like the generality of the world, the side to which he feels the most inclination. Nor is it enough that he should hear the arguments of opponents from his own teachers ,presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. That is not the way to do justice to the arguments, or bring them into real contact with his own mind. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them; who defend them in earnest, and do their very utmost for them. He must know them in their seemingly reasonable and persuasive form: he must feel the whole force of the difficulty which the true view of the subject has to encounter and dispose of; otherwise he will never really possess himself of the portion of truth which meets and removes that difficulty. Ninety-nine in a hundred of what are called educated men are in this condition, and even of those who can argue fluently for their opinions. Their conclusion may be true, but it might be false for anything they know. They have never thrown themselves into the mental position of those who think differently from them and considered what such persons may have to say.

阅读理解Science has long had an uneasy relationship with other aspects of culture. Think of Gallileo’s 17th-century trial for his rebelling belief before the Catholic Church or poet William Blake''s harsh remarks against the mechanistic worldview of Isaac Newton. The schism between science and the humanities has, if anything, deepened in this century. 　　Until recently, the scientific community was so powerful that it could afford to ignore its critics but no longer. As funding for science has declined, scientists have attacked "antiscience" in several books, notably Higher Superstition, by Paul R. Gross, a biologist at the University of Virginia, and Norman Levitt, a mathematician at Rutgers University; and The Demon-Haunted World, by Carl Sagan of Cornell University. 　　Defenders of science have also voiced their concerns at meetings such as" The Flight from Science and Reason," held in New York City in 1995,and "Science in the Age of (Mis) information, "which assembled last June near Buffalo. 　　Antiscience clearly means different things to different people. Gross and Levitt find fault primarily with sociologists, philosophers and other academics who have questioned science''s objectivity. Sagan is more concerned with those who believe in ghosts, creationism and other phenomena that contradict the scientific worldview. 　　A survey of news stories in 1996 reveals that the antiscience tag has been attached to many other groups as well, from authorities who advocated the elimination of the last remaining stocks of smallpox virus to Republicans who advocated decreased funding for basic research. 　　Few would dispute that the term applies to the Unabomber, whose manifesto published in 1995, scorns science and longs for return to a pretechnological Utopia. But surely that does not mean environmentalists concerned about uncontrolled industrial growth are antiscience, as an essay in US News & World Report last May seemed to suggest. 　　The environmentalists, inevitably, respond to such critics. The true enemies of science, argues Paul Ehrtich of Stanford University, a pioneer of environmental studies, are those who question the evidence supporting global warming, the depletion of the ozone layer and other consequences of industrial　growth. 　　Indeed, some observers fear that the antiscience epithet is in danger of becoming meaningless. "The term '' antiscience'' can lump together too many, quite different things, "notes Harvard University philosopher Gerald Holton in his 1993 work Science and Anti-Science. "They have in common only one thing that they tend to annoy or threaten those who regard themselves as more enlightened."

阅读理解 Ten years ago, I got a call from a reporter at a big-city daily paper. 'I'm writing a story on communication skills,' she said. 'Are communication skills important in business?' I assumed I had misheard her question, and after she repeated it for me I still didn't know how to respond. Are communication skills important? 'Er, they are very important,' I managed to squeak out. My brain said: Are breathing skills important? The reporter explained: 'The people I've spoken with so far have been mixed on the subject.' Ten years ago, we were trapped even deeper in the Age of Left-Brain Business. We were way into Six Sigma and ISO 9000 and spreadsheets and regulations and policies. We thought we could line-item budget our way to greatness, create shareholder value by tracking our employees' every keystroke, and employ a dress-code policy to win in the marketplace. And lots of us believed that order and uniformity could save the world-the business world, anyway. We had to go pretty far down that path before we caught onto the limits of process, technology, and linear thinking. The right brain is coming back into style in the business world, and not a moment too soon. Smart salespeople say, 'We've got compelling story that meshes with our customer's values and history.' Strong leaders say, 'We're creating a context for our team members that weaves their passions into ours.' Consultants get big money for providing perspective on the 'user experience.' That's not a linear, analytical process. These days, we're talking about emotion again, and context and meaning. Thank goodness we are. I was about to choke on the death-by-spreadsheet diet, and I wasn't the only one. Job seekers get great jobs today by avoiding the Black Hole of Keyword-Searching Algorithms and going straight to a human decision-maker to share a story that links the job seeker's powerful history with the decision-maker's present pain. Leadership teams spend their off-site weekends talking about not the next 400 strategic initiatives on somebody's list but rather a story-type road map to keep the troops philosophically on board while they take the next hill. The right brain's return is coming just at the right time, when employees are sick of not only their jobs but also the cynical, hypocritical, and obsessively left-brain behaviors they see all around them in corporate life. Smart employers will grab this opportunity to lose the three-inch-thick policy manuals and enforcement mentality. There's no leverage in those, no spark, and no aha. We've seen where the left- brain mentality has gotten us: to the land of spreadsheets, with PowerPoints and burned-out shells where our workforce used to be.

阅读理解 Though pundits were quick to declare that the election of Barack Obama represented the emergence of a 'post- racial' America, the macroeconomy has provided a corrective. During the American economy's last deep recession, in the early 1980s, black unemployment soared to twice the level among whites, passing 21% in 1983. And according to the latest data from the Bureau of Labour Statistics, time has changed little. The current unemployment rate among black Americans is almost 16%; among whites the figure is under 10%. The yawning gap between blacks and whites persists across demographic lines. The current 'mancession' has hit male-dominated professions hardest. But white men face a relatively mild unemployment rate of just over 10% compared with over 18% among black men. For the worst-off, the data are catastrophic. Among young black men without a high-school diploma, nearly half have no jobs. These rates are based on a labour-force number which excludes those in prison; if there were not five times as many blacks behind bars as whites, the figures would look even worse. There is no shortage of explanations for the gap. States with weaker labour markets, like South Carolina and Michigan, also tend to have larger black populations than low-unemployment states like Iowa and Montana. Predominantly black neighbourhoods are often a long way from where jobs are concentrated, in largely white suburbs, so those without cars cannot get to them. Blacks are also at a disadvantage when it comes to relying on friends and family connections to find jobs; there is not the same network of family businesses that whites and Latinos have. Some studies have found that this factor may explain as much as 70% of the difference in black and white unemployment rates, and may also explain the difference between black and Latino jobless rates. Among young men, for instance, the near-20% Hispanic unemployment rate is much closer to that for whites (17%) than blacks (30%). And discrimination, too, plays a part. What is clear is that the unemployment problem in black communities will not end with the recession. The employment-to-population ratio among black adults is only just above 50%, and it is closer to a shocking 40% for young black men; for adult whites it is 59%. Black workers are also unemployed for about five weeks longer, on average, than the rest of the population. Some 45% of unemployed blacks have been out of work for 27 weeks or longer, compared with just 36% of unemployed whites. That means continued loss of skills, and a longer and harder road back into the workforce.

阅读理解 A small group of Internet security specialists gathered in Singapore to start up a global system to make e-mail and e-commerce more secure, end the rapid growth of passwords and raise the bar significantly for Internet fraud, spies and troublemakers. The Singapore event included an elaborate technical ceremony to create and then securely store numerical keys that will be kept in three hardened data centers there, in Zurich and in San Jose, Calif. The keys and data centers are working parts of a technology known as Secure DNS, or DNSSEC. DNS refers to the Domain Name System, which is a directory that connects names to numerical Internet addresses. Preliminary work on the security system had been going on for more than a year, but this was the first time the system went into operation, even though it is not quite complete. The three centers are fortresses made up of five layers of physical, electronic and cryptographic security, making it virtually impossible to damage the system. Four layers are active now. The fifth, a physical barrier, is being built inside the data center. The technology is viewed by many computer security specialists as a ray of hope amid the recent cascade of data thefts, attacks, disruptions and scandals, including break-ins at Citibank, Sony, Lockheed Martin, RSA Security and elsewhere. It allows users to communicate via the Internet with high confidence that the identity of the person or organization they are communicating with is not being tricked or forged. Internet engineers like Dan Kaminsky, an independent network security researcher who is one of the engineers involved in the project, want to counteract three major deficiencies in today's Internet. There is no mechanism for ensuring trust, the quality of software is uneven, and it is difficult to track down bad actors. One reason for these flaws is that from the 1960s through the 1980s the engineers who designed the network's underlying technology were concerned about reliable, rather than secure, communications. That is starting to change with the introduction of Secure DNS by governments and other organizations. The event in Singapore capped a process that began more than a year ago and is expected to be complete after 300 so-called top-level domains have been digitally signed. Before the Singapore event, 70 countries had adopted the technology, and 14 more were added as part of the event. While large countries are generally doing the technical work to include their own domains in the system, the association of Internet security specialists is helping smaller countries and organizations with the process.

阅读理解As America''s air becomes steadily more contaminated, activities across the nation to cope with smog appear to be lagging further and further behind actual needs despite a rising public clamor for improvement. 　　 There has been a considerable progress in the last couple of years. But the over-all picture is that so many localities haven''t really come to grips with the air pollution problem that people might be dismayed if they knew how their welfare was being trifled with. 　　Air pollution sources are now hurling more than 140 million tons of contaminants into the atmosphere every year, by Federal estimates. Two years ago it was only 130 million tons. 　　The increase has been caused by many things--more people, more automobiles, more industry, more space heating, little if any reduction that more often than not are inadequate. 　　The adverse health effects of air pollution are becoming more widely recognized, although specific medical evidence is still fragmentary. As a psychological annoyance, often called an "esthetic" factor, it translates into decreased property values. In damage to crops and other plants, its cost is reckoned in millions of dollars; in damage to structures and materials, in billions. 　　Federal and state pollution control officials report the following highlight of the current situation. 　　States and localities generally still have penalties for air pollution that are little more than a wrist slap (with fines as low as ＄10). Enforcement is generally sketchy and weak. And the remedial procedures are so cumbersome that more and more they are being bypassed by simple lawsuits brought by public officials or citizens. 　　Although Federal law has required auto makers to provide vehicles with fume control equipment, few states have done anything to assure its effectiveness, after a car has left the factory, by providing for regular inspection of the equipment. 　　Public officials in many places still seem to consider bursts of complaints from citizens preferable to complaints they might get from instituting effective air quality programs. Industries and other polluters, such as municipalities, still exert great influence, opposing or weakening regulatory laws and "packing" regulatory boards with their own spokesmen. 　　Public resentment over air pollution is growing, as is shown by recurring incidents of picketing (设置纠察员) and increasing number of legal actions. 　　The big Federal program to combat air pollution, under way for several years, is proceeding fairly close to schedule. But Federal auto-fume regulations will not be very productive for nearly a decade until around 100 million unregulated, older-generation cars have been replaced on the highways. 　　The part of the Federal effort that deals with stationary pollution sources, like factories, is still largely in an organizational phase, yielding little immediate reduction in fumes.

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

阅读理解 People have wondered for a long time how their personalities and behaviors are formed, h is not easy to explain why one person is intelligent and another is not, or why one is cooperative and another is competitive. Social scientists are, of course, extremely interested in these types of questions. They want to explain why we possess certain characteristics and exhibit certain behaviors. There are no clear answers yet, but two distinct schools of thought on the matter have developed. As one might expect, the two approaches are very different from one another, and there is a great deal of debate between proponents of each theory. The controversy is often referred to as 'nature/nurture'. Those who support the 'nature' side of the conflict believe that our personalities and behavior patterns are largely determined by biological and genetic factors. That our environment has little, if anything, to do with our abilities, characteristics, and behavior is central to this theory. Taken to an extreme, this theory maintains that our behavior is predetermined to such a degree that we are almost completely governed by our instincts. Proponents of the 'nurture 'theory, or, as they are often called, behaviorists, claimed that our environment is more important than our biologically based instincts in determining how we will act. A behaviorist, B. F. Skinner sees humans as beings whose behavior is almost completely shaped by their surroundings. The behaviorists' view of the human being is quite mechanistic; they maintain that, like machines, humans respond to environmental stimuli as the basis of their behavior. Either of these theories cannot yet fully explain human behavior. In fact, it is quite likely that the key to our behavior lies somewhere between these two extremes. That the controversy will continue for a long time is certain.

阅读理解Since the dawn of human ingenuity

阅读理解 It's summer, you'd like to go to the movies, but you don't want to see anything that's a sequel, remake, or that features a superhero. In her chatty new book, Sleepless in Hollywood, part memoir, part 'Hollywood business model for dummies,' longtime producer Lynda Obst (Sleepless in Seattle, The Fisher King) sets out to explain when and why studios stopped making movies for grown-ups, the sort of midpriced original fare that was Obst's specialty. Obst began her career at 20th Century Fox and left to work at Paramount in 1998. There, she had a front-row seat for what she calls the transition from the 'Old Abnormal,' the period from the 1980s to '90s when profits were essentially stable, to the 'New Abnormal,' which arrived at the end of the aughts and saw the studios focus on huge blockbusters that earn money overseas. During this time, Paramount went through eight presidents and transformed itself from a fiscally and creatively conservative studio making small movies with small profits to the Transformers and Star Trek tent-pole factory it is today. Obst's argument, occupying too many chapters, is that the collapse of the DVD market in the late 2000s forced the studios to cut costs and size and look elsewhere for profit. The elsewhere they could rely on was literally elsewhere: Since the '80s, international revenue has gone from 20 percent to 70 percent of the studios' income. The only movies that Hollywood can be sure will sell internationally are films with lots of 'pre-awareness,' those based on a character or property people already know—thus all the superheroes and sequels and less time or interest in taking original pitches. Some of Obst's complaints about the new Hollywood stem from nostalgia. She misses the refined casting sessions of yore and complains about the ubiquity of e-mail and the Internet, which she constantly calls 'the Net.' Worse than her nostalgia is her false hope. Obst has gathered abundant evidence that suggests the New Abnormal is making the studios money, but she keeps insisting that the movies she herself wants to see will come back. 'The smartest studio people are beginning to recognize this sequel fatigue,' she says, even as Iron Man 3 and Fast Furious 6 are raking in hundreds of millions of dollars. Sleepless in Hollywood decries Hollywood's distaste for risk, for grown-up material, for the truly original, but it's as safe and sanded down as the most screen-tested movie.

阅读理解That experiences influence subsequent behaviour is evidence of an obvious but nevertheless remarkable activity called remembering. Learning could not occur without the function popularly named memory. Constant practice has such an effect on memory as to lead to skilful performance on the piano, to recitation of a poem, and even to reading and understanding these words. So-called intelligent behaviour demands memory, remembering being a primary requirement for reasoning. The ability to solve any problem or even to recognize that a problem exists depends on memory. Typically, the decision to cross a street is based on remembering many earlier experiences. 　　Practice (or review) tends to build and maintain memory for a task or for any learned material. Over a period of no practice what has been learned tends to be forgotten; and the adaptive consequences may not seem obvious. Yet, dramatic instances of sudden forgetting can be seen to be adaptive. In this sense, the ability to forget can be interpreted to have survived through a process of natural selection in animals. Indeed, when one''s memory of an emotionally painful experience leads to serious anxiety, forgetting may produce relief. Nevertheless, an evolutionary interpretation might make it difficult to understand how the commonly gradual process of forgetting survived natural selection. 　　In thinking about the evolution of memory together with all its possible aspects, it is helpful to consider what would happen if memories failed to fade. Forgetting clearly aids orientation in time, since old memories weaken and the new tend to stand out, providing clues for inferring duration. Without forgetting, adaptive ability would suffer; for example, learned behaviour that might have been correct a decade ago may no longer be. Cases are recorded of people who (by ordinary standards) forgot so little that their everyday activities were full of confusion. Thus forgetting seems to serve the survival of the individual and the species. 　　Another line of thought assumes a memory storage system of limited capacity that provides adaptive flexibility specifically through forgetting. In this view, continual adjustments are made between learning or memory storage (input) and forgetting (output). Indeed, there is evidence that the rate at which individuals forget is directly related to how much they have learned. Such data offer gross support of contemporary models of memory that assume an input-output balance.

阅读理解 Grade inflation—the gradual increase in average GPAs (grade-point averages) over the past few decades—is often considered a product of a consumer era in higher education, in which students are treated like customers to be pleased. But another, related force—a policy often buried deep in course catalogs called 'grade forgiveness'—is helping raise GPAs. Grade forgiveness allows students to retake a course in which they received a low grade, and the most recent grade or the highest grade is the only one that counts in calculating a student's overall GPA. The use of this little-known practice has accelerated in recent years, as colleges continue to do their utmost to keep students in school (and paying tuition) and improve their graduation rates. When this practice first started decades ago, it was usually limited to freshmen, to give them a second chance to take a class in their first year if they struggled in their transition to college-level courses. But now most colleges, save for many selective campuses, allow all undergraduates, and even graduate students, to get their low grades forgiven. College officials tend to emphasize that the goal of grade forgiveness is less about the grade it-self and more about encouraging students to retake courses critical to their degree program and graduation without incurring a big penalty. 'Ultimately,' said Jack Miner, Ohio State University's registrar, 'we see students achieve more success because they retake a course and do better in subsequent courses or master the content that allows them to graduate on time.' That said, there is a way in which grade forgiveness satisfies colleges' own needs as well. For public institutions, state funds are sometimes tied partly to their success on metrics such as graduation rates and student retention—so better grades can, by boosting figures like those, mean more money. And anything that raises GPAs will likely make students—who, at the end of the day, are paying the bill—feel they've gotten a better value for their tuition dollars, which is another big concern for colleges. Indeed, grade forgiveness is just another way that universities are responding to consumers' expectations for higher education. Since students and parents expect a college degree to lead to a job, it is in the best interest of a school to turn out graduates who are as qualified as possible—or at least appear to be. On this, students' and colleges' incentives seem to be aligned.

阅读理解Financial engineers don''t wear white lab coats. They don''t experiment on rats or perform gas chromatography(气相层析). Their raw material-money-isn''t as showy as what biologists and physicists investigate. But the innovations they produce will contribute just as much to economic growth. 　　Maybe more, in fact, because without the science of finance, all other sciences are just a bunch of neat concepts. Ideas begin to tribute to human betterment when they''re financed-by venture capital, stock offerings, loans, or buyouts. A smoothly operating financial system showers money on good ideas. Equally important, it cuts off funding to tired ideas and tired companies, so their assets can be employed more efficiently elsewhere. 　　In the 21st century economy, innovation in finance will increase in concert with the increase in competition. Partly because of deregulation and globalization, competition should get tougher, and margins thinner. As products such as home mortgage loans become commoditized, financial- service companies will be forced to get more creative. 　　Financial technology will keep feeding off information technology. The secret to success will be a strong software platform, which will lower the cost of general services while making it possible to create high-margin variations as well. A few companies that get it right can spin away from the rest and become stronger and stronger. 　　In the new world of finance, size counts. Big companies enjoy economies of scale and name recognition, and they can be safer because their bets are spread across more regions and market segments. The value of U. S. bank mergers in the first half of 1998 was greater than that of the three previous years combined. The mergers are occurring across industries as well. 　　At the other extreme will be specialists that survive by doing one thing either very cheaply or exceptionally well. By offering lower prices or better service, specialists will discipline the financial supermarkets; the big guys know their customers can walk away if they get a raw deal. "There is no way we are going to maximize a short-term transactional benefit at the risk of destroying a long-term relationship," says Chase Manhattan Corp. Vice-Chairman Joseph G. Sponholz. 　　Predictably, the biggest winners from financial innovation will be companies, and families that have complex finances. Banks already show signs of losing interest in people who want just plain checking accounts. 　　But as incomes and wealth rise, more people will find themselves thrust into the role of asset managers. Businesses, too, will have to become more sophisticated-if only to keep pace with financially innovative rivals.