单选题The right to pursue happiness is promised to Americans by the US Constitution, but no one seems quite sure which way happiness ran. It may be we are issued a hunting license but offered no game. Jonathan Swift conceived of happiness as "the state of being well-deceived", or of being "a fool among idiots", for Swift saw society as a land of false goals. It is, of course, un-American to think in terms of false goals. We do, however, seem to be dedicated to the idea of buying our way to happiness. We shall all have made it to Heaven when we possess enough. And at the same time the forces of American business are hugely dedicated to making us deliberately unhappy. Advertising is one of our major industries, and advertising exists not to satisfy desires but to create them—and to create them faster than anyone's budget can satisfy them. For that matter, our whole economy is based on addicting us to greed. We are even told it is our patriotic duty to support the national economy by buying things. Look at any of the magazines that cater to women. There advertising begins as art and slogans in the front pages and ends as pills and therapy in the back pages. The art at the front illustrates the dream of perfect beauty. This is the baby skin that must be hers. This, the perfumed breath she must breathe out. This, the sixteen-year-old figure she must display at forty, at fifty, at sixty, and forever. This is the harness into which Mother must strap herself in order to display that perfect figure. This is the cream that restores skin, these are the tablets that melt away fat around the thighs, and these are the pills of perpetual youth. Obviously no reasonable person can be completely persuaded either by such art or by such pills and devices. Yet someone is obviously trying to buy this dream and spending billions every year in the attempt. Clearly the happiness-market is not running out of customers, but what is it they are trying to buy? Defining the meaning of "happiness" is a perplexing proposition: the best one can do is to try to set some extremes to the idea and then work towards the middle. To think of happiness as achieving superiority over others, living in a mansion made of marble, having a wardrobe with hundreds of outfits, will do to set the greedy extreme.

单选题Attacks on Jose Manuel Barroso, the president of the European Commission, have intensified before the European election held between June 4th and 7th, and ahead of a European Union summit when national leaders will discuss his reappointment to a second five- year term. On the left, the Party of European Socialists (PES) calls Mr. Barroso a conservative who "puts markets before people". Should the PES emerge as the largest group in the European Parliament, it will try to block him. But prominent federalists are also unimpressed. Guy Verhofstadt, a former Belgian prime minister, speaks for many in Brussels when he denounces Mr. Barroso for a lack of ambition for Europe. Mr. Verhofstadt invokes the memory of Jacques Delors, the pugnacious Frenchman who ran the commission from 1985 to 1995．Mr. Delors proposed many ambitious plans, he says, and got 30% of them: that 30% then became the European internal market. Mr. Verhofstadt thinks that last autumn Mr. Barroso should have proposed such things as a single EU financial regulator, a single European bad bank, or a multi-trillion issue of "Eurobonds". That would have triggered a " big fight" with national governments, he concedes. But "maybe the outcome would have been 10%, 20% or 30% of his plan. " The French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, has endorsed a second tenn for Mr. Barroso, a former centre-right prime minister of Portugal. Yet he seems keen to make him sweat. French officials have briefed that the decision on Mr. Barroso's future taken at the June 18th-19th summit should be only political, leaving a legally binding nomination for later. Yet the attacks on Mr. Barroso are unlikely to block him. No opinion poll shows the PES overtaking the centre-right European People's Party in the European Parliament. The centre- right leaders who hold power in most of Europe have endorsed Mr. Barroso, as have the (nominally) centre-left leaders of Britain, Spain and Portugal. This helps to explain why the PES, for all its bluster, has not fielded a candidate against Mr. Barroso. It is equally wrong to pretend that Europe was ready for a federalist big bang last autumn. Officials say Mr. Barroso spent the first weeks of the economic crisis bridging differences between Britain and France on such issues as accounting standards and the regulation of rating agencies. Later, he kept the peace between Mr. Sarkozy and the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, after the French president pushed for summits of EU leaders from euro-area countries (Ms Merkel thought that sounded like a two-speed Europe). In any case France has no veto over Mr. Barroso's reappointment: the decision is now taken by majority vote. Some diplomats suggest that France's stalling tactics are meant to extract such concessions as a plum portfolio for its commissioner. Those calling for "European" action often talk as if they are describing an elegant mechanism, needed to make the union work properly. They argue that only a single financial regulator can police Europe's single market, or complain that 27 national bail-out plans lack "coherence". In fact, these apparently structural calls for "more Europe" are pitches for specific ideological programmes. Thus, in a joint statement on May 30th Mr. Sarkozy and Ms Merkel announced that "Liberalism without rules has failed. " They called for a European economic model in which capital serves "entrepreneurs and workers" rather than "speculators", and hedge funds and bankers' pay are tightly regulated. They added that competition policies should be used to favour the "emergence of world-class European companies", and gave warning against a "bureaucratic Europe" that blindly applies "pernickety rules". If all this sounds like Europe as a giant Rhineland economy, that is no accident. Mr. Verhofstadt, a continental liberal, means something different by "Europe" He agrees that the crisis "represents the crash of the Anglo-American model". But he is not keen on heavy regulation. When he calls for economic policies to reflect Europe's " way of thinking", he means things like raising savings. Above all, he considers the nation-state to be incapable of managing today's "globalised" economy, so Europe must take over. This is fighting talk. Britain, notably, does not accept that everything about the Anglo-Saxon model has failed, nor is it about to cede more power to Brussels. And it has allies, notably in eastern Europe.

单选题The views of Gordon Brown and John Hutton on public services reforms are ______.

单选题It is no longer just dirty blue-collar jobs in manufacturing that are being sucked offshore but also white-collar service jobs, which used to be considered safe from foreign competition. Telecoms charges have tumbled, allowing workers in far-flung locations to be connected cheaply to customers in the developed world. This has made it possible to offshore services that were once non-tradable. Morgan Stanley's Mr. Roach has been drawing attention to the fact that the "global labour arbitrage" is moving rapidly to the better kinds of jobs. It is no longer just basic data processing and call centres that are being outsourced to low-wage countries, but also software programming, medical diagnostics, engineering design, law, accounting, finance and business consulting. These can now be delivered electronically from anywhere in the world, exposing skilled white-collar workers to greater competition. The standard retort to such arguments is that outsourcing abroad is too small to matter much. So far fewer than 1m American service-sector jobs have been lost to off-shoring. Forrester Research forecasts that by 2015 a total of 3.4m jobs in services will have moved abroad, but that is tiny compared with the 30m jobs destroyed and created in America every year. The trouble is that such studies allow only for the sorts of jobs that are already being off-shored, when in reality the proportion of jobs that can be moved will rise as IT advances and education improves in emerging economies. Alan Blinder, an economist at Princeton University, believes that most economists are underestimating the disruptive effects of off-shoring, and that in future two to three times as many service jobs will he susceptible to off-shoring as in manufacturing. This would imply that at least 30% of all jobs might be at risk. In practice the number of jobs off-shored to China or India is likely to remain fairly modest. Even so, the mere threat that they could be shifted will depress wages. Moreover, says Mr. Blinder, education offers no protection. Highly skilled accountants, radiologists or computer programmers now have to compete with electronically delivered competition from abroad, whereas humble taxi drivers, janitors and crane operators remain safe from off-shoring. This may help to explain why the real median wage of American graduates has fallen by 6% since 2000, a bigger decline than in average wages. In the 1980s and early 1990s, the pay gap between low-paid, low-skilled workers and high-paid, high-skilled workers widened significantly. But since then, according to a study by David Autor, Lawrence Katz and Melissa Kearney, in America, Britain and Germany workers at the bottom as well as at the top have done better than those in the middle-income group. Office cleaning cannot be done by workers in India. It is the easily standardised skilled jobs in the middle, such as accounting, that are now being squeezed hardest. A study by Bradford Jensen and Lori Kletzer, at the Institute for International Economics in Washington D. C. , confirms that workers in tradable services that are exposed to foreign competition tend to be more skilled than workers in non-tradable services and tradable manufacturing industries.

单选题{{B}}Text 1{{/B}} John Battelle is Silicon Valley's Bob Woodward. One of the founders of Wired magazine, he has hung around Google for so long that he has come to be as close as any outsider can to actually being an insider. Certainly, Google' s founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, and its chief executive, Eric Schmidt, believe that it is safer to talk to Mr. Battelle than not to do so. The result is a highly readable account of Google's astonishing rise-the steepest in corporate history-from its origins in Stanford University to its controversial stockmarket debut and its current struggle to become a grown-up company while staying true to its youthfully brash motto, "Don't be evil." Mr. Battelle makes the reader warm to Google's ruling triumvirate-their cleverness and their good intentions-and fear for their future as they take on the world. Google is one of the most interesting companies around at the moment. It has a decent shot at displacing Microsoft as the next great near-monopoly of the information age. Its ambition-to organise all the world's information, not just the information on the world wide web-is epic, and its commercial power is frightening, Beyond this, Google is interesting for the same reason that secretive dictatorships and Hollywood celebrities are interesting-for being opaque, colourful and, simply, itself. The book disappoints only when Mr. Battelle begins trying to explain the wider relevance of internet search and its possible future development. There is a lot to say on this subject, but Mr. Battelle is hurried and overly chatty, producing laundry lists of geeky concepts without really having thought any of them through properly. This is not a fatal flaw. Read only the middle chapters, and you have a great book.

单选题When it comes to schooling, the Herrera boys are no match for the Herrera girls. Last week, four years after she arrived from Honduras, Martha, 20, graduated from Fairfax High School in Los Angeles. She managed decent grades while working 36 hours a week at a Kentucky Fried Chicken. Her sister, Marlin, 22, attends a local community college and will soon be a certified nurse assistant. The brothers are a different story. Oscar, 17, was expelled two years ago from Fairfax for carrying a knife and later dropped out of a different school. The youngest, Jonathan, 15, is now in a juvenile boot camp after running into trouble with the law. "The boys get sidetracked more," says the kids' mother, Suyapa Landaverde. "The girls are more confident. " This is no aberration. Immigrant girls consistently outperform boys, according to the preliminary findings of a just-completed, five-year study of immigrant children -the largest of its kind, including Latino, Chinese and Haitian kids-by Marcelo and Carola Suarez-Orozco of the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Though that trend holds for U. S. -born kids as well, the reasons for the discrepancy among immigrants are different. The study found that immigrant girls are more adept at straddling cultures than boys. "The girls are able to retain some of the protective features of (their native) culture" because they're kept closer to the housework, says Marcelo Suarze-Orozco, "while they maximize their acquisition of skills in the new culture" by helping their parents navigate it. Consider the kid's experiences in school. The study found that boys face more peer pressure to adopt American youth culture -the dress, the slang, the contempt for education. They're disciplined more often and, as a result, develop more adversarial relationships with teachers -and the wider society. They may also face more prejudices. One teacher interviewed for the study said that the "culture awareness training" she received as part of her continuing included depictions of Latino boys as "aggressive" and "really masculine" and of the girls as "pure sweetness". Gender shapes immigrant kids' experience outside school as well. Often hailing from traditional cultures, the girls face greater domestic obligations. They also frequently act as "cultural ambassadors", translating for parents and mediating between them and the outside world, says Carola Suarze-Orozco. An unintended consequence: "The girls get foisted into a responsible role more than the boys do. " Take Christina Im as an example, 18, a junior at Fairfax who arrived from Korea four years ago. She ranks ninth in a class of 400 students and still finds time to fix dinner for the family and work on Saturdays at her mother's clothing shop. Her brother? "He plays computer games," Says Im. The Harvard study bears a cautionary note : If large numbers of immigrant boys continue to be alienated academically -and to be clear, plenty perform phenomenally -they risk sinking irretrievably into an economic underclass. Oscar Herrera, Martha's dropout brother, may be realizing that. "I'm thinking 9f returning to school," he recently told his mother. He ought to look to his sisters for guidance.

单选题The majority of successful senior managers do not closely follow the classical rational model of first clarifying goals, assessing the problem, formulating options, estimating likelihood of success, making a decision, and only then taking action to implement the decision. Rather, in their day-by-day tactical activities, these senior executives rely on what is vaguely termed "intuition" to manage a network of interrelated problems that require them to deal with ambiguity, inconsistency, novelty, and surprise; and to integrate action into the process of thinking. Generations of writers on management have recognized that some practicing managers rely heavily on intuition. In general, however, such writers display a poor grasp of what intuition is. Some see it as the opposite of rationality; others view it as an excuse of capriciousness. Isenberg's recent research on the cognitive processes of senior managers reveals that managers' intuition is neither of these. Rather, senior managers use intuition in at least five distinct ways. First, they intuitively sense when a problem exists. Second, managers rely on intuition to perform well-learned behavior patterns rapidly. This intuition is not arbitrary or irrational, but is based on years of painstaking practice and personal experience that build skills. A third function of intuition is to synthesize isolated bits of data and practice into an integrated picture, often in an "Aha!" experience. Fourth, some managers use intuition as a check on the results of more rational analysis. Most senior executives are familiar with the formal decision analysis models and tools, and those who use such systematic methods for reaching decisions are occasionally suspicious of solutions suggested by these methods which run counter to their sense of the correct course of action. Finally, managers can use intuition to bypass in-depth analysis and move rapidly to find out a plausible solution. Used in this way, intuition is an almost instantaneous cognitive process in which a manager recognizes familiar patterns. One of the implications of the intuitive style of executive management is that "thinking" is inseparable from acting. Since managers often "know" what is right before they can analyze and explain it, they frequently act first and explain later. Analysis is invariably tied to action in thinking/acting cycles, in which managers develop thoughts about their companies and organizations not by analyzing a problematic situation and then acting, but by acting and analyzing in close concert. Given the great uncertainty of many of the management issues that they face, senior managers often initiate a course of action simply to learn more about an issue. They then use the results of the action to develop a more complete understanding of the issue. One implication of thinking/acting cycles is that action is often part of defining the problem, not just of implementing the solution. (454 words)

单选题Robert Plomin did the survey involving two groups of students in order to

单选题{{B}}Text 2{{/B}} "WHAT'S the difference between God and Larry Ellison?" asks an old software industry joke. Answer: God doesn't think he's Larry Ellison. The boss of Oracle is hardly alone among corporate chiefs in having a reputation for being rather keen on himself. Indeed, until the bubble burst and the public turned nasty at the start of the decade, the cult of the celebrity chief executive seemed to demand bossly narcissism, as evidence that a firm was being led by an all-conquering hero. Narcissus met a nasty end, of course. And in recent years, boss-worship has come to be seen as bad for business. In his management bestseller, "Good to Great", Jim Collins argued that the truly successful bosses were not the self-proclaimed stars who adorn the covers of Forbes and Fortune, but instead self-effacing, thoughtful, monkish sorts who lead by inspiring example. A statistical answer may be at hand. For the first time, a new study, "It's All About Me", to be presented next week at the annual gathering of the American Academy of Management, offers a systematic, empirical analysis of what effect narcissistic bosses have on the firms they run. The authors, Arijit Chatterjee and Donald Hambrick, of Pennsylvania State University, examined narcissism in the upper levels of 105 firms in the computer and software industries. To do this, they had to solve a practical problem: studies of narcissism have hitherto relied on surveying individuals personally, something for which few chief executives are likely to have time or inclination. So the authors devised an index of narcissism using six publicly available indicators obtainable without the co-operation of the boss. These are: the prominence of the boss's photo in the annual report; his prominence in company press releases; the length of his "Who's Who" entry; the frequency of his use of the first person singular in interviews; and the ratios of his cash and non-cash compensation to those of the firm's second-highest paid executive. Narcissism naturally drives people to seek positions of power and influence, and because great self-esteem helps your professional advance, say the authors, chief executives will tend on average to be more narcissistic than the general population. How does that affect a firm? Messrs Chatterjee and Hambrick found that highly narcissistic bosses tended to make bigger changes in the use of important resources, such as research and development, or in spending and leverage; they carried out more and bigger mergers, and acquisitions; and their results were both more extreme (more big wins or big losses ) and more transient than those of firms run by their humbler peers. For shareholders, that could be good or bad. Although (oddly) the authors are keeping their narcissism ranking secret, they have revealed that Mr Eilison did not come top. Alas for him, that may be because the study limited itself to people who became the boss after 1991—well after he took the helm. In every respect Mr Ellison seems to be the classic narcissistic boss, claims Mr Chatterjee. There is life in the old joke yet.

单选题The federal entity created by the Constitution is by far the dominant feature of the American governmental system. (1) the system itself is in reality a mosaic, (2) of thousands of smaller units--building blocks which together (3) the whole. There are 50 state governments (4) the government of the District of Columbia, and further down the ladder are still smaller units, (5) counties, cities, towns and villages. This (6) of governmental units is best understood (7) the evolution of the United States. The federal system, it has been seen, was the last step in the (8) process. Prior to its creation, there were the governments of the (9) colonies (later states) and prior to (10) , the governments of counties and smaller units. One of the first tasks (11) by the early English settlers was the creation of governmental units for the tiny (12) they established along the Atlantic coast. Even before the Pilgrims disembarked (13) their ship in 1620, they (14) the Mayflower Compact, the first written American constitution. And as the new nation pushed (15) each frontier outpost created its own government to manage its affairs. The drafters of the U. S. Constitution left this multilayered governmental system (16) . While they made the national structure supreme, they wisely (17) the need for a series of governments more directly in (18) with the people and more keenly attuned(合拍) to their needs. Thus, certain (19) such as defense, currency regulation and foreign relations--could only be managed by a strong centralized government. But (20) such as sanitation, education and local transportation--belong mainly to local jurisdictions(管辖权).

单选题Which of the following is WRONG according to the article?

单选题 In their everyday life, most Americans seem to agree with Henry Ford who once said, "History is more or less absurdity. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker's damn is the history we make today. " Certainly a great—but now also deadlocked—debate on immigration figures prominently in the history being made today in the United States and around the world. In both history and sociology, scholarly work on immigration was sparked by the great debates of the 1920s, as Americans argued over which immigrants to include and which to exclude from the American nation. The result of that particular great debate involved the restriction of immigration from Asia and southern and eastern Europe. Reacting to the debates of their time, sociologists and historians nevertheless developed different central themes. While Chicago School sociologists focused on immigrant adaptation to the American mainstream, historians were more likely to describe immigrants engaged in building the American nation or its regional subcultures. Historians studied the immigrants of the past, usually in the context of nation-building and settlement of the western United States, while sociologists focused on the immigrant urban workers of their own times— that is, the early 20th century. Meanwhile, sociologists' description of assimilation as an almost natural sequence of interactions resulting in the modernization, and Americanization of foreigners reassured Americans that their country would survive the recent arrival of immigrants whom longtime Americans perceived as radically different. Historians insisted that the immigrants of the past had actually been the "makers of America" ; they had forged the mainstream to which new immigrants adapted. For sociologists, however, it was immigrants who changed and assimilated over the course of three generations. For historians, it was the American nation that changed and evolved. In current debates, overall, what seems to be missing is not knowledge of significant elements of the American past or respect for the lessons to be drawn from that past, but rather debaters' ability to see how time shapes understanding of the present. In the first moments of American nation-building, the so-called Founding Fathers celebrated migration as an expression of human liberty. Here is a reminder that today's debates take place among those who agree rather fundamentally that national self-interest requires the restriction of immigration. Debaters disagree with each other mainly over how best to accomplish restriction, not whether restriction is the right course. The United States, along with many other nations, is neither at the start, nor necessarily anywhere near the end, of a long era of restriction.