单选题One important reason why teachers are leaving their profession is that they are

单选题Despite ongoing negotiations with its unions, United Airlines has told the bankruptcy court that the "likely result" will be a termination to its pension plans. That would precipitate the biggest pension default in history. The move is expected to destabilize the already struggling airline industry, prompting other carriers to eventually follow suit to maintain competitiveness. It would also put additional pressure on the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC), the federal agency that insures traditional pensions in case companies belly up. A default by United would saddle it with an additional $8.4 billion in unfunded obligations. If other airlines follow, the PBGC may have to go to Congress and plead for a bailout. More broadly, what all this means is that retirement for US workers just isn't what it used to be. The impact of globalization and competition from low—wage companies that don't provide benefits has shifted the onus of retirement security from larger firms onto individuals. Twenty years ago, 40 percent of American workers were covered by traditional pensions known as defined—benefit plans. Today that number's dropped to 20 percent. As the United examples show, even that 20 percent may not be able to count on what they've been promised. Currently, about 75 percent of those corporate plans are underfunded. There are numerous threats to retirement in the future, so it's incumbent on individuals to be well informed, prudent about their investments, and to save accordingly. Betty has been flying for United for 26 years. She was expecting to retire at 60 with $140, 000 a year. After the recent round of give-backs, that was cut to $90, 000. But if United defaults as expected, she'd receive only $28, 000. If she waits until 65 to start collecting, she could be eligible for as much $44, 500 a year. Either way, once pilots are forced to leave the cockpit at 60, most will probably look for another job rather than lounge on the golf course. Betty has already started a mediation business on the side. "All of the benefits have been erased by corporate American greed," she says, "You have to see the big picture. If the money isn't there, it isn't there." For the pilots union, which negotiated the pension benefits, often giving up wage increases for better retirement packages, the current situation is infuriating. They see pensions as benefits that are earned, not a bonus to be given as long as a company can afford it. "It seems immoral that just because they happen to be in a legal situation, they can walk away from those obligations," says Steve Derebey, spokesman for Air Line Pilots Association. "Why this isn't a burning, blazing campaign issue is beyond me./

单选题The celebration of the New Year is the oldest one of all holidays. It was first (1) in (2) Babylon about 4,000 years ago. New Year's Day is an (3) national holiday, and banks and offices will be closed. Many families have New year's Day (4) . Traditionally, it was thought that it could (5) the luck they would have (6) the coming year by (7) they did or ate on the first day of the year. For that reason, it has become common for (8) to celebrate the first few minutes of a (9) new year in the (10) with the family and friends. Parties often last into the middle of the night after the ringing of a new year. It was once believed that the first visitor on New Year's Day would bring (11) good luck or bad luck to the rest of the year. It was particularly lucky if that visitor (12) to be a tall dark-haired man. Traditional New Year's (13) are also thought to bring luck. People in many parts of the US celebrate the New Year by (14) black-eyed peas and cabbage. Black-eyed peas have been considered good luck in many cultures. Cabbage leaves are considered a (15) of prosperity, being (16) of paper currency. Other traditions of the season include the making of New Year's resolutions. That tradition also (17) back to the early Babylonians. Popular modern resolutions might include the (18) to lose weight or quit smoking. The song, "Auld Lang Syne", is sung at the (19) of midnight in almost every English-speaking country in the world to bring in the New Year. "Auld Lang Syne" literally (20) "yearning for the old days./

单选题When European Union (EU) leaders took delivery of Europe's first draft of a constitution at a summit in Greece last June, it was with almost universal praise. There was wide agreement that the text could save the EU from paralysis once it expands from 15 to 25 members next year. It would give Europe a more stable leadership and greater clout on the world stage, said the chairman of the Convention which drafted the agreement, former French President Valery Giscard d'Estaing. Such praise was too good to last. As the product of a unique 16-month public debate, the draft has become a battleground. Less than four months after it was delivered, the same leaders who accepted it opened the second round of talks on its content this week by trading veiled threats to block agreement or cut off funds if they don't get their way. The tone was polite, but unyielding. In a bland joint statement issued when the talks opened on October 4, the leaders stressed the constitution, "represents a vital step in the process aimed at making Europe more cohesive, more democratic and closer to its citizens. "Sharp differences remain, though, between member countries of the EU over voting rights, the size and composition of the executive European Commission, defense co-operation and the role of religion in the new constitution. Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's hopes of wrapping up a deal on the constitution by Christmas seem far from being realized. While the six founding members of the EU--Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg--plus Britain and Denmark, want as little change as possible to the draft, the 10 mainly central European countries due to join the 15-nation bloc next year want to alter the institution's balance. Such small states are afraid their views will be ignored under the constitution and are determined to defend the disproportionate voting rights they won at the 2000 Nice Summit. EU experts fear such sharp differences will create exactly the paralysis in the EU the Convention was established to avoid.

单选题 How long you live has a lot to do with your environment and lifestyle, but exceptional longevity may have even more to do with your genes. For the first time, researchers have identified a genetic recipe that accurately predicts who may live to 100 and beyond. Scientists led by Dr. Thomas Perls at the Boston University School of Medicine conducted a genetic analysis of more than 1,000 centenarians and their matched controls and found 150 genetic variants-or bits of DNA-that differed between the two groups. These variants identified people who lived to a very old age (past 100) with 77% accuracy, researchers found. Further analysis identified 19 distinct genetic profiles associated with extremely long life; 90% of participants who lived to 100 possessed at least one of the signature genetic clusters. Each profile appeared to confer a different tendency to develop common age-related chronic diseases, such as heart disease or brain disorder. "We realize this is a complex genetic puzzle," Perls said. "We're quite a ways away still in understanding how the integration of these genes-not just with themselves but with environmental factors-are playing a role in this longevity puzzle." Perls has studied many factors that contribute to longevity, and he is the first to acknowledge that living longer isn't likely to be simply a matter of genes. His previous work has shown, for example, that among most elderly people who live into their 70s and 80s, about 70% of their longevity can be ascribed to environmental factors such as not smoking; eating a healthy, low-fat, low-calorie diet; and remaining socially engaged and intellectually active throughout life. Still, it seems clear that those who live to an exceptionally ripe old age are benefiting from a special DNA boost. In fact, Perls believes that the older a person gets, the more likely it is that his or her genes are contributing to those extended years. His current genetic findings support that theory: the 19 most common genetic profiles that distinguished the exceptionally long-lived appear to be correlated with lower incidence of certain diseases. For example, some profiles were associated with lower rates of high blood pressure and diabetes, while another was linked to a reduced risk of brain disorder. Although most of us can't expect to become centenarians, Peris is hoping that his work will lead to better ways-perhaps through pharmaceutical interventions based on the genetic clues to longevity-to help more of us live like them.

单选题Once upon a time, innovation at Procter today, they could even be in the majority. " As Procter & Gamble has found, the United States is no longer an isolated market. Americans are more open than ever before to buying foreign-made products and to selling U S-made products overseas.

单选题This year's Sumantra Ghoshal Conference, held at London Business School, debated whether strategy research has become irrelevant to the practice of management. The late Mr Ghoshal published a paper in 2005 scolding business schools for pouring "bad theory" on their students. That same year Warren Bennis and James O'Toole, both at the University of Southern California, published an article in the Harvard Business Review criticising MBA programmes for paying too much attention to "scientific" research and not enough to what current and future managers actually needed. Business schools, they argued, would be better off acting more like their professional counterparts, such as medical or law schools, nurturing skilled practitioners as well as frequent publishers. However, business school professors have a tendency not to change. Since universities take journal rankings into account when awarding tenure, academics are rewarded more when they publish in research journals. (Popular media rankings of MBA programmes, although not The Economist's, also take research output into account.) In 2008 the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) took up the debate, publishing a report on making business research more useful. It suggested that tenure committees become more flexible. A scholar dedicated to popularising management ideas, for example, should be evaluated on book sales and attention from the news media, not on articles in research journals. This would allow faculty to reach out to wider audiences, rather than be, as Messrs Bennis and O'Toole put it, "damned as popularisers". But that might also risk granting tenure on the basis of trendy but ultimately unhelpful ideas. In any case, some argue that the relevance of business research is understated. Jan Williams, vice chair of AACSB, argues that doing research allows faculty members to stay at the forefront of their subject, and that in turn improves their teaching. "We can't teach students outdated material," he says. What is more, a paper in Academy of Management Learning access to frontier research comes afterwards. As Messrs Bennis and O'Toole put it: "Business professors too often forget that executive decision-makers are not fact-collectors; they are fact users and integrators.

单选题{{B}}Text 3{{/B}} THE ivory-billed woodpecker is not large, as birds go: It is about the size of a crow, but flashier, its claim to fame is that, though it had been thought extinct since 1944, a lone kayaker spotted it about two years ago, flying around among the cypress trees in the Cache River National Wildlife Refuge. And that sighting may prove the death-blow to a $319m irrigation project in the Arkansas corner of the Delta. The Grand Prairie Area Demonstration Project seemed, at first, a fine idea. The Grand Prairie is the fourth-largest rice-bowl in the world, with 363 000 acres under paddies. But it is running out of water, with farmers driving wells deeper and deeper into the underlying aquifer. The new project, dreamed up around a decade ago, would tap excess water from the White river when it floods and pumps it, at the rate of about one billion gallons a day, to storage tanks on around 1000 rice farms. Unfortunately, it would also divert water from the region's huge, swampy wildlife refuges, home to black bears and alligators and the pallid sturgeon. Tiny swamp towns like Clarendon and Brinkley, which are heavily black and almost destitute, rely on nature tourism for the little economic activity they have. In Brinkley, the barber offers an "ivorybill" haircut that makes you look like one. The project has some powerful local backers. They include Blanche Lincoln, the state's senior senator, who grew up on a rice farm in Helena, and Dale Bumpers, a former four-term senator and governor of Arkansas. Mr. Bumpers, long an icon of the environmental movement and prominent in the efforts to establish the refuges, now believes the water project is important for national security in food and trade, and that it will not damage the forests he has worked to protect. Opponents worry that the project, apart from its environmental risks, will overwhelm the innovative water conservation methods that rice-farmers are already using, and give the biggest water users an unfair advantage. They also object that it means using subsidised pumps to provide subsidised water for a crop that doesn't pay. Rice is one of the most heavily assisted crops in America; rice payments cost taxpayers almost $10 billion between 1995 and 2004, and rich farmers round Stuttgart in Arkansas County (an efficient and politically shrewd group) took in $21.2m in subsidies in 2004 alone.

单选题This year has turned out to be a surprisingly good one for the world economy. Global output has probably risen by close to 5%, well above its trend rate and a lot faster than forecasters were expecting 12 months ago. Most of the dangers that frightened financial markets during the year have failed to materialize. China"s economy has not suffered a hard landing. America"s mid-year slowdown did not become a double-dip recession. Granted, the troubles of the euro area"s peripheral economies have proved all too real. Yet the euro zone as a whole has grown at a decent rate for an ageing continent, thanks to oomph from Germany, the fastest-growing big rich economy in 2010. The question now is whether 2011 will follow the same pattern. Many people seem to think so. Consumer and business confidence is rising in most parts of the world; global manufacturing is accelerating; and financial markets are buoyant. The MSCI index of global share prices has climbed by 20% since early July. Investors today are shrugging off news far more ominous than that which rattled them earlier this year, from the soaring debt yields in the euro zone"s periphery to news of rising inflation in China. Earlier this year investors were too pessimistic. Now their breezy confidence seems misplaced. To oversimplify a little, the performance of the world economy in 2011 depends on what happens in three places: the big emerging markets, the euro area and America. These big three are heading in very different directions, with very different growth prospects and contradictory policy choices. Some of this divergence is inevitable: even to the casual observer, India"s economy has always been rather different from America"s. But new splits are opening up, especially in the rich world, and with them come ever more chances for friction. Begin with the big emerging markets, by far the biggest contributors to global growth this year. Where it can, foreign capital is pouring in. Isolated worries about asset bubbles have been replaced by a fear of broader overheating. With Brazilian shops packed with shoppers, inflation there has surged above 5% and imports in November were 44% higher than the previous year. Cheap money is often the problem. Though the slump of 2009 is a distant memory, monetary conditions are still extraordinarily loose, thanks, in many places, to efforts to hold down currencies. This combination is unsustainable. To stop prices accelerating, most emerging economies will need tighter policies next year. If they do too much, their growth could slow sharply. If they do too little, they invite higher inflation and a bigger tightening later. Either way, the chances of a macroeconomic shock coming from the emerging world are rising steeply.

单选题The society envisioned by Saint Simonians would be a society in which

单选题Most of us are taught to pay attention to what is said--the words. Words do provide us with some information, but meanings are (1) from so many other sources that it would hinder our effectiveness (2) a partner to a relationship to rely too heavily on words (3) Words are used to describe only a small part of the many ideas we associate with any given (4) . Sometimes we can gain insight into some of those (5) if we listen for (6) words. We don't always say what we mean (7) mean what we say. Mostly we mean several things at once. A person wanting to purchase a house says to the current owner. "This step has to be fixed before I'll buy." The owner says, "It's been like that for years". (8) , the step hasn't been like that for years, but the (9) message is: "I don't want to fix it. We can put up with it why can't you?" The (10) for a more expansive view of meaning can be developed by examining a message (11) who said it, when it occurred, the (12) conditions or situation, and how it was said. When a message occurs can also (13) associated meaning. A friend's unusually docile behavior may only be understood by (14) that it was preceded by situations that required a (n) (15) amount of assertiveness. We would do well to listen for how message are (16) The words, "it sure has been nice to have you over," can be said with (17) and excited or ritualistically. The phrase can be said once or (18) several times. And the meaning we associate with the phrase will change (19) Sometimes if we say something infrequently it assumes more importance; sometimes the more we say something the (20) importance it assumes.

单选题Someone has calculated that by the time an American reaches the age of 40, he or she has been exposed to one million ads. Another estimate is that we have encountered more than 600, 000 ads by the time we reach the age of only 18. Now, of course, we don't remember what exactly they said or even what the product was, but a composite message gets through: that you deserve the best, that you should have it now, and that it's okay to indulge yourself, because you deserve the compliments, sex appeal, or adventure you are going to get as a result of buying this car or those cigarettes. Our consumer-based economy makes two absolutely reciprocal psychological demands on its members. On the one hand, you need the "discipline" values to ensure that people will be good workers and lead orderly, law-abiding lives. On the other hand, you need the "enjoy yourself" messages to get people to be good consumers. One author was disturbed about the "enjoy yourself" side, but acknowledged that "without a means of stimulating mass consumption, the very structure of our business enterprise would collapse." The interesting question has to do with the psychological consequences of the discrepancy between the dual messages. The "discipline" or "traditional values" theme demands that one compartment of the personality have a will strong enough to keep the individual doing unpleasant work at low wages, or to stay in an unhappy marriage, and, in general, to do things for the good of the commonwealth. The "enjoy yourself" message, on the other hand, tends to encourage a very different kind of personality-one that is self-centered, based on impulse, and is unwilling to delay rewards. As an illustration, I can't. resist reciting one of my favorite ads of all time, an ad from a psychology magazine: "I love me. I'm just a good friend to myself. And I like to do what makes me feel good. I used to sit around, putting things off till tomorrow. Tomorrow I'll drink champagne, and buy a set of pearls, and pick up that new stereo. But now I live my dreams today, not tomorrow." So what happens to us as we take in these opposing messages, as we are, in fact, torn between the opposite personality types that our society seems to require of us? Tile result is anxiety, fear, and a mysterious dread. The fear of being sucked in and dragged down by our consumer culture is real: the credit card company is not friendly when you default on your bills. And we all know that the path of pleasure-seeking and blind acquisition is a recipe for financial ruin-for most of us, anyway-and that, in American society, there isn't much of a safety net to catch you if you fall.

单选题{{B}}Text 3{{/B}} Imagine that you are in hospital, waiting to have an operation. It is time to go to the theatre; the anesthetist approaches you and speaks. But instead of the reassuring words" I'm just going to give you something to send you off to sleep", you hear: "Let me take you on a trip towards death". Terrifying? Maybe, but that is what having a general anesthetic is all about. "If you give a small amount of an anesthetic drug, it won' t have any effect. If you give more, it will put the patient off to sleep, but if you give more still it can kill the patient." In a modem hospital, before you are given an anesthetic, an anesthetist asks you a number of questions to decide which drugs to use. Most importantly, they check the state of your heart and lungs and ask if you have asthma, angina or have ever had a heart attack. They want to know about any drugs you are taking, so that they do not give you an anesthetic that reacts badly with them, and they will also find out if you have any allergies. As well as putting you to sleep, the anesthetist is also responsible for controlling your pain. Then how can the anesthetist tell that they have put their patients far enough under? Mostly, by experience. There is no such thing as an awareness monitor, though all the patient's body functions, such as heart rate, gases going in and out and oxygen levels in the blood, are monitored. If the anesthetic is not deep enough and the patient becomes "light', the monitors should tell the anesthetist that something is wrong long before the patient becomes aware. This is why the anesthetist watches the patient carefully throughout the operation. At the end of your operation, the anesthetic is mined off. It might seem surprising that the anesthetist is often the unsung hero of the operating thestre. Many people, including some nursing staff, do not realize that the anesthetist first has to qualify as a doctor. They then take three further examinations to qualify as anesthetists because of the number of things they have to take into account when carrying out their work They do not simply need to know about the drugs they use; they must also know about all the other drugs on the market so that they can avoid dangerous interactions. They have to keep abreast of any new surgical technique, to make sure they give an appropriate anesthetic for any operation. The "journey towards death" has come a long way. But one fascinating fact remains: whether it is ether or a complex cocktail being used to "put someone to sleep": no one yet knows exactly how anesthetics work.

单选题It was the best of times or, depending on your political and philosophical outlook, one of the foulest and most depraved. Rebellion seemed to be leaping from city to city, continent to continent, by some fiery process of contagion. Radical students filled the streets of Mexico city, Berlin, Tokyo, Prague. In the U. S. , Chicago swirled into near anarchy as cops battled antiwar demonstrators gathered at the Democratic Convention. And everywhere from Amsterdam to Haight-Ashbury, a generation was getting high, acting up. So, clearly, it was the year from hell—a collective "dive into extensive social and personal dysfunction," as the Wall Street Journal editorialized recently. Or, depending again on your outlook, a global breakthrough for the human spirit. On this, the 25th anniversary of 1968, probably the only thing we can all agree on is that 68 marks the beginning of the "culture wars," which have divided America ever since. Both the sides of the "culture wars" of the '80s and '90s took form in the critical year of '68. The key issues are different now abortion and gay rights, for example, as opposed to Vietnam and racism--but the underlying themes still echo the clashes of '68: Diversity vs. conformity, tradition vs. iconoclasm, self-expression vs. deference to norms. "Question authority," in other words, vs. "Father knows best." The 25th anniversary of '68 is a good time to reflect, calmly and philosophically, on these deep, underlying choices. On one hand we know that anti--authoritarianism for its own sake easily degenerates into a rude and unfocused defiance: Revolution, as Abbie Hoffman put it, "for the hell of it." Certainly '68 had its wretched excesses as well as its moments of glory: the personal tragedy of lives undone by drugs and sex, the heavy cost of riots and destruction. One might easily conclude that the ancient rules and hierarchies are there for a reason--they're worked, more or less, for untold millenniums, so there's no point in changing them now. But it's also true that what "worked" for thousands of years may not be the best way of doing things. Democracy, after all, was once a far-out, subversive notion, condemned by kings and priests. In our own country, it took all kinds of hell-raising, including a war, to get across the simple notion that no person is morally entitled to own another. One generation's hallowed tradition--slavery, or the divine right of kings--may be another generation's object lesson in human folly. '68 was one more awkward, stumbling, half step forward in what Dutschke called the "long march" toward human freedom. Actually, it helped inspire the worldwide feminist movement.

单选题{{B}}Text 3{{/B}} Shopping has always been something of an impulse activity, in which objects that catch our fancy while strolling are immediately bought on a whim. Advertisers and sellers have taken advantage of this fact, carefully positioning inexpensive but attractive items on paths that we are most likely to cross, hoping that our human nature will lead to a greater profit for them. With the dawn of the Internet and its exploding use across the world, the same tactics apply. Advertisers now place "banners", links to commercial web sites decorated with attractive pictures designed to catch our eyes while browsing the webs, on key web sites with heavy traffic. They pay top dollar for the right, thus creating profits for the hosting web site as well. These actions are performed in the hopes that during the course of our casual and leisurely web surfing, we'll click on that banner that sparks our interest and thus, in theory, buy the products advertised. Initial results have been positive. Web sites report a huge inflow of cash, both from the advertisers who tempt customers in with the banners and the hosting web sites, which are paid for allowing the banners to be put in place. As trust and confidence in Internet buying increases and information security is heightened with new technology, the volume of buying is increasing, leading to even greater profits. The current situation, however, is not quite as optimistic. Just as magazine readers tend to unconsciously ignore advertisements in their favorite periodicals, web browsers are beginning to allow banners to slip their notice as well. Internet users respond to the flood of banners by viewing them as annoyances, a negative image that is hurting sales, since users are now less reluctant to click on those banners, preferring not to support the system that puts them in place. If Internet advertising is to continue to be a viable and profitable business practice, new methods will need to be considered to reinvigorate the industry. With the recent depression in the technology sector and slowing economy, even new practices may not do the trick. As consumers are saving more and frequenting traditional real estate businesses over their Internet counterparts, the fate of Internet business is called into question. The coming years will be the only reliable indication of whether shopping on the World Wide Web is the wave of the future or simply an impulse activity whose whim has passed. (404 words){{B}}Notes:{{/B}} on a whim 心血来潮。surf v.冲浪。in theory在理论上，顺理成章。hosting 访问率离的。call...into question 质疑，对……提出疑问。

单选题{{B}}Text 3{{/B}} A growing number of women are rising to the top -- and beginning to change the culture of the workplace. This should be a season of celebration. After all, by many measures, there's never been a better time to be a woman. In places like Scandinavia and Britain, a third or more of all corporate managers are now women. The number of female executive directors of FISE 100 companies nearly doubled from 2000 to 2004. Latin America has seen a 50 percent jump in the number of women politicians in the last decade. Japan voted 26 new female parliamentarians into office this year. Of course, the jewel in the equal-opportunity crown was this fall's election of Angela Merkel -- once nicknamed "the Girl" by Helmut Kohl -- to Germany's highest office. But as always, statistics tell a multifaceted story. Sure, it's no longer an anomaly to have a female CEO -- but there are still only 17 female executive directors in the largest FTSE 100 companies. In the EU Parliament, only 23 out of 162 members are female. In Britain, studies show that women have never been more dissatisfied with the workplace. No wonder: the EU pay gap between men and women shrank only one point in the last couple of years, to 17.5 percent. So where does all this leave us? With some big challenges that require more female leadership to solve. At some major companies -- including Shell and British Telecom -- women are combating the old-boys' club atmosphere by starting their own networks, linking top female leaders with up-and-comers they can mentor. Labor flexibility is also on the agenda; in parts of Europe, top female legislators have fought to give employees with children or elderly parents the right to ask for adjustable hours. Perhaps most important, there is an increasingly vibrant debate around work-life balance. Study after study shows that it is a working woman's second full-time job -- as caregiver -- that makes it most difficult for her to stay on the career ladder. While extra benefits and longer maternity, leave can help, they aren't a complete solution. Clearly, some out-of-the-box thinking is required. And that's where women come in. In countries like Cameroon, Bolivia and Malaysia, greater numbers of women in public office have resulted in less spending on the military and more on health, education and infrastructure. Norway's woman-heavy Parliament recently passed a law mandating that 40 percent of directors on corporate boards be women. And in Germany, the archetypal outsider -- a woman who grew up on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain -- will likely take the helm in a country with virtually no other women in top positions of power. No longer "the Girl" but poised to become the chancellor, Merkel is a symbol of how far women have come -- and the work that remains to be done.