单选题The "last barrier" (Para. 3) mentioned in Melano's e-mail refers to

单选题In paragraph 1, "both sides of the Atlantic" probably refers to

单选题{{B}}Text 3{{/B}} Fiercely independent, 90 year-old Vincenzia Rinaldi wouldn't consider a home health aide or nursing home. So Louis Critelli, her nephew had to coax the widowed homemaker into assisted living, the nation's growing long-term care option for the elderly. For $1, 100 a month, Rinaldi became the reluctant resident of an efficiency unit where she could still simmer her much-loved tomato sauce and where caregivers would make sure she took her pills. Instead, 30 months later, she died. Not because she was old. But because aides at her new home, Loretto Utica Center, one of the modern, hotel-style facilities that have sprouted across the country over the past decade, mistakenly gave her another resident's prescription medication. That error led to her death, state inspectors concluded. Neither the state nor Loretto told her nephew about the cause of death. Critelli, thinking his aunt had been properly cared for, only learned of the finding years later from USA TODAY. "When they find something blatant like that, you'd think they'd tell the family," the shaken nephew told a reporter after a long pause. A USA TODAY investigation shows that Rinaldi's death represents the tragic extreme in a pattern of mistakes and violations that lead to scores of injuries and occasional deaths among the estimated 1 million elderly residents of assisted living facilities. The centers are the state regulated, largely private-pay residences that help seniors with medication and other activities of daily life. In a wide ranging analysis, USA TODAY reviewed two years of inspection records within 2000-02 for more than 5,300 assisted living facilities in seven states: Alabama, Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Indiana, New York and Texas. The precise time period varied slightly from state to state. The analysis covered a broad range--from mom-and-pop facilities with just a few residents to corporate run centers with scores of beds and 'many levels of care. It is the first time such data have been gathered and analyzed across so many states. The review included less-detailed data from five other states and focused on broad quality-of-care categories to compensate for variations in regulations from state to state. As affluent and middle-class Americans cope with the infirmities of age, many turn to assisted living as an alternative to a nursing home industry that has been periodically plagued by abuse or neglect scandals. Even though assisted living facilities generally don't provide 24- hour skilled medical care, they increasingly serve seniors who only a decade ago might have been in nursing homes.

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 lm 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 be 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 9000, 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The author seem to believe that prosperity

单选题Paragraph 4 is written in order to

单选题This election year, the debate over cloning technology has become a circus -- and hardly anybody has noticed the gorilla hiding in the tent. Even while President Bush has endorsed throwing scientists in jail to stop '"reckless experiments", it's just possible the First Amendment will protect researchers who want to perform cloning research. Dr. Leon Kass, the chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics, would like to keep that a secret. "I don't want to encourage such thinking," he said. But the notion that the First Amendment creates a "right to research" has been around for a long time, and Kass knows it. In 1977, four eminent legal scholars -- Thomas Emerson, Jerome Barron, Walter Berns and Harold P. Green -- were asked to testify before the House Subcommittee on Science, Technology and Space. At the time, there was alarm in the country over recombinant DNA. Some people feared clones, designer babies, a plague of superbacteria. The committee wanted to know if the federal government should, or could, restrict the science. "Certainly the overwhelming tenor of the testimony was in favor of protecting it," Barron, who now teaches at George Washington University, recalls. Barns, a conservative political scientist, was forced to agree. He didn't like this conclusion, be- cause he feared the consequences of tinkering with nature, but even after consulting with Kass before his testimony, he told Congress that "the First Amendment protected this kind of research." Today, he believes it protects cloning experiments as well. Law-review articles written at the time supported Barns, and so would a report issued by Congress's Office of Technology Assessment (O. T. A. ). But the courts never got the chance to face the right-to-research issue squarely. An oversight body called the Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee, formed by the National Institutes of Health, essentially allowed science to police itself. So the discussion was submerged. Until now. Why legal scholars would defend the right to research is hardly mysterious. The founding fathers passionately defended scientific and academic freedom, and the Supreme Court has traditionally had a high regard for it. But why would the right to read, write and speak as you please extend to the tight to experiment in the lab? Neoconservatives like Kass have emphasized the need to maintain a fixed conception of human nature. But the O. T.A. directly addressed this in a 1981 report. "Even if the rationale.., were expanded to include situations where knowledge threatens fundamental cultural values about the nature of man, control of research for such a reason probably would not be constitutionally permissible," The government can restrict speech if it can prove a "compelling interest," like public safety or national security. But courts have set that bar very high. Unlike, say, an experiment that releases smallpox into the wind to study how it spreads, which could be banned, embryo research presents no readily apparent danger to public health or security. And if that's the case, scientists who wish to create stem cells by cloning might have a new source of succor: the U.S. Constitution.

单选题The biggest demonstration in a generation is being assembled by mobilizing the power of the web, which allows anti-war groups to rally multitudes at the click of a mouse. Cornish speakers for peace can share ideas by e-mail with Rhodes Scholars Against the War while taking into account the sensitivities of the Young Muslim Sisters. Footsore ban-the-bomb veterans such as Tony Myers of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, busily preparing yesterday for the mass protest, can only marvel at the power of the net. "It's made a massive difference," he said. "Back in the 1980s when we were trying to organize huge demos it was all about going to meetings and sending mail to regional people. I was a volunteer before the 1983 demonstration which attracted 400,000 marchers. The office was just awash with people printing things on old duplicators. People today feel more like they are part of a big movement. In the 1980s, we would read about demos all over the world a few days later in the newspapers. Now you know all the details in advance if you are on the e-mail list. The Stop the War Coalition needs only a handful of headquarters staff because the website is a virtual campaign group in itself, complete with briefings, news, addresses and artwork. Children's superior mastery of the internet is reflected in the proliferation of youth groups opposing war. The Woodcraft Folk (a sort of pacifist version of the Scouts) announce that they will be bringing an orange parachute on the march. The Engels-Marx Communist Party (slogan "Resist and Revolt") is a group of pupils at a Leicester comprehensive school opposing the war. The entire country is covered from the Aberdeen Students Against War Society to Torbay Stop the War group. Anti-war campaigners put leaflets, maps, posters and petitions on their websites for supporters to print, stick in their window or hand out at the march. Stop the War Coalition includes a direct- debit form which supporters can download and send to their bank manager to make donations. Message boards are filled with anti-war protesters arguing their case. The issue is being exploited by the British National Party, which has posted a self-serving press release proclaiming support for the march because of their concerns over "the power of the Israeli lobby". Anti-war individuals have been e-mailing friends with songs for the march, one to the tune of If You're Happy and You Know It. The internet was created in the 1960s partly by the Advanced Research Project Agency of the US Department of Defense. It is widely said to have been created in order to send military messages after an atomic war.

单选题According to the passage, early-twentieth-century education reformers believed that ______.

单选题It can be inferred that the author would define as "political" (line 1, Para. 3) the questions that

单选题Whether work should be placed among the causes of happiness or among the causes of unhappiness may perhaps be regarded as a doubtful question. There is certainly much work which is exceedingly weary and an excess of work is always very painful. I think, however, that, provided work is not excessive in amount, even the dullest work is to most people less painful than idleness. There are in work all grades, from mere relief of tedium up to the profoundest delights, according to the nature of the work and the abilities of the worker. Most of the work that most people have to do is not in itself interesting, but even such work has certain great advantages. To begin with, it fills a good many hours of the day without the need of deciding what one shall do. Most people, when they are left free to fill their own time according to their own choice, are at a loss to think of anything sufficiently pleasant to be worth doing. And whatever they decide, they are troubled by the feeling that something else would have been pleasanter. To be able to fill leisure intelligently is the last product of civilization, and at present very few people have reached this level. Moreover the exercise of choice is in itself tiresome. Except to people with unusual initiative it is positively agreeable to be told what to do at each hour of the day, provided the orders are not too unpleasant. Most of the idle rich suffer unspeakable boredom as the price of their freedom from toil. At times they may find relief by hunting big game in Africa, or by flying round the world, but the number of such sensations is limited, especially after youth is past, Accordingly the more intelligent rich men work nearly as hard as if they were poor, while rich women for the most part keep themselves busy with innumerable trifles of those earth-shaking importance they are firmly persuaded. Work therefore is desirable, first and foremost, as a preventive of boredom, for the boredom that a man feels when he is doing necessary though uninteresting work is as nothing in comparison with the boredom that he feels when he has nothing to do with his days. With this advantage of work another is associated, namely that it makes holidays much more delicious when they come. Provided a man does not have to work so hard as to impair his vigor, he is likely to find far more zest in his free time than an idle man could possibly find. The second advantage of most paid work and of some unpaid work is that it gives chances of success and opportunities for ambition. In most work success is measured by income, and while our capitalistic society continues, this is inevitable. It is only where the best work is concerned that this measure ceases to be the natural one to apply. The desire than men feel to increase their income is quite as much a desire for success as for the extra comforts that a higher income can acquire. However dull work may be, it becomes bearable if it is a means of building up a reputation, whether in the world at large or only in one's own circle.

单选题Galloway, a mostly middle-class community northwest of Atlantic City, is part of a wave of districts across the nation trying to remake homework amid concerns that high-stakes testing and competition for college have fueled a nightly grind that is stressing out children and depriving them of play and rest, yet doing little to raise achievement, particularly in elementary grades. Such efforts have drawn criticism from some teachers and some parents who counter that students must study more, not less, if they are to succeed. Even so, the anti-homework movement has been reignited in recent months by the documentary Race to Nowhere, about burned-out students caught in a pressure-cooker educational system. "There is simply no proof that most homework as we know it improves school performance," said Vicki Abeles, the filmmaker and a mother of three from California. "And by expecting kids to work a 'second shift' in what should be their downtime, the presence of schoolwork at home is negatively affecting the health of our young people and the quality of family time. " So teachers at Mango Elementary School in Fontana, Calif., are replacing homework with "goal work" that is specific to individual student's needs and that can be completed in class or at home at his or her own pace. The Brooklyn School of Inquiry, a gifted and talented program, has made homework optional. "I think people confuse homework with rigor," said Donna Taylor, the Brooklyn School's principal, who views homework for children under 11 as primarily benefiting parents by helping them feel connected to the classroom. Research has long suggested that homework in small doses can reinforce basic skills and help young children develop study habits, but that there are diminishing returns. Still, efforts to roll back homework have been opposed by those who counter that there is not enough time in the school day to cover required topics and that homework reinforces classroom learning. In Coronado, Calif. , the school board rejected a proposal by the superintendent to eliminate homework on weekends and holidays after some parents said that was when they had time to help their children and others worried it would result in more homework on weeknights. Homework wars have divided communities for over a century. In the 1950s, the Sputnik launching ushered in heavier workloads for American students in the race to keep up with the Soviet Union. The 1983 report "A Nation at Risk" and, more recently, the testing pressures of the No Child Left Behind law, also resulted in more homework for children at younger ages. A few public and private schools have renounced homework in recent years, but most have sought a middle ground. In Galloway, the policy would stipulate that homework cover only topics already addressed in class. Dr. Giaquinto, Galloway's superintendent, said the goal of the proposed policy was to make homework "meaningful and manageable," noting that teachers would have to coordinate assignments so that a student's total homework would not exceed the time limit.