单选题Earlier this year Ian Leslie wrote a piece for Intelligent Life about the "filter bubble", which said that the Internet"s top five—Yahoo!, Google, Facebook, YouTube and Microsoft—were using personalised data filtering to create a "you loop" in which serendipitous discoveries are replaced by commercial prompts designed to keep us inside our comfort zone. There"s been lots of discussion about the political dangers of what Kunzru calls "the myopic self", but there has been little about its impact on how we choose and buy books. Theoretically, there"s never been a better time to be an adventurous reader, but despite all those self-published writers, boutique publishers and specialist booksellers, I don"t think I"m the only one struggling to translate this theory into reality. When it comes to deciding what to read next, I find myself caught between a paralysing ocean of choice and endless recommendations for E. L. James"s Fifty Shades of Grey . I end up rereading Dorothy Dunnett"s King Hereafter —11th-century Orkney being firmly within my comfort zone. Of course, we can"t really blame the algorithms. Our reading choices have always been constrained by the natural filter bubble created by our friends, and the pressures of time play as large a role as Google"s search engines. So are there any steps we can take to combat the natural "you loop" in our reading tastes? First, I propose we adopt a thoroughly disruptive stance: "If you enjoyed that, then this is the opposite." If your sister loves the erotic fantasies of E. L. James, then it"s time for her to take on the metaphysics of Gods and Monsters , and give Hari Kunzru a try. And second when I"ve finished the remaining 700 pages of my Norse epic, I shall ask my Twitter friends: what shouldn"t I read next? And why stop there? How about disloyalty cards, where booksellers give us discounts for clocking up an eclectic range of purchases? Or discomfort zones, with a "books we can"t stand" display, complete with little handwritten condemnations: so much more inviting than yet another card explaining why Bleak House is really rather good. Could there be a pop-up sci-fi corner in a romance authors" convention or critics reviewing novels that are diametrically opposed in subject matter, style and philosophical outlook, and still liking both? As the season for lazy beach-reading approaches, let us make a stand for the joy of being thoroughly surprised.

单选题The author cites the British example in order to______

单选题As pointed out in Paragraph 3, the "evenly mixed" scenario

单选题It may be just as well for Oxford University's reputation that this week's meeting of Congregation, its 3 552-strong governing body, was held in secret, for the air of civilized rationality that is generally supposed to pervade donnish conversation has lately turned fractious. That's because the vice-chancellor, the nearest thing the place has to a chief executive, has proposed the most fundamental reforms to the university since the establishment of the college system in 1249; and a lot of the dons and colleges don' t like it. The trouble with Oxford is that it is unmanageable. Its problems—the difficulty of recruiting good dons and of getting rid of bad ones, concerns about academic standards, severe money worries at some colleges—all spring from that. John Hood, who was recruited as vice-chancellor from the University of Auckland and is now probably the most- hated antipodean in British academic life, reckons he knows how to solve this, and has proposed to reduce the power of dons and colleges and increase that of university administrators. Mr. Hood is right that the university's management structure needs an overhaul. But radical though his proposals seem to those involved in the current row, they do not go far enough. The difficulty of managing Oxford stems only partly from the nuttiness of its system of governance; the more fundamental problem lies in its relationship with the government. That's why Mr. Hood should adopt an idea that was once regarded as teetering on the lunatic fringe of radicalism, but these days is discussed even in polite circles. The idea is independence. Oxford gets around ￡ 5 000 ( $ 9 500) per undergraduate per, year from the government. In return, it accepts that it can charge students only ~ 1 150 (rising to ~ 3 000 next year) on top of that. Since it probably costs at least ~ 10 000 a year to teach an undergraduate, that leaves Oxford with a deficit of ~ 4 000 or so per student to cover from its own funds. If Oxford declared independence, it would lose the ~ 52m undergraduate subsidy at least. Could it fill the hole? Certainly. America's top universities charge around￡ 20,000 per student per year. The difficult issue would not be money alone: it would be balancing numbers of not-so-brilliant rich people paying top whack with the cleverer poorer ones they were cross subsidising. America's top universities manage it: high fees mean better teaching, which keeps competition hot and academic standards high, while luring enough donations to provide bursaries for the poor. It should be easier to extract money from alumni if Oxford were no longer state-funded.

单选题In many places water is becoming scarcer. Treating it as a right makes the scarcity worse. Ideally, efficient water use would be encouraged by charging for it, but attempts to do so have mostly proved politically impossible. A more practicable alternative is a system of tradable waterusage rights. As our explains, many water problems have global causes: population growth, climate change, urbanization and, especially, changing diets. It takes 2,000 liters of water to grow a kilo of vegetables but 15,000 liters to produce a kilo of beef—and people are eating more meat. The problems also have global implications. Without a new green revolution, farmers will need 60% more water to feed the 2 billion extra people who will be born between now and 2025. Yet there is, globally, no shortage of water. Unlike other natural resources (such as oil), water cannot be used up. It is recycled endlessly, as rain, snow or evaporation. On average, people are extracting for their own uses less than a tenth of what falls as rain and snow each year. The central problem is that so much water is wasted, mainly by farmers. Agri-culture uses three-quarters of the world"s water. Because water is usually free, thirsty crops like alfalfa (苜蓿) are grown in arid California. Wheat in India and Brazil uses twice as much water as wheat in America. Dry countries like Pakistan export textiles though a 1 kg bolt of cloth requires 11,000 liters of water. Any economist knows what to do: price water to reflect its value. But decades of trying to do that for agriculture have run into powerful resistance from farmers. They reject scarcity pricing for the reason that water falls from the skies. No government owns it, so no government should charge for it. There is a way out. Australian farmers have the right to use a certain amount of water free. They can sell that right to others. But if they want more water themselves, they must buy it from a neighbor. The result of this trading is a market that has done what markets do: allocate resources to more productive use. Australia has endured its worst drought in modern history in the past ten years. Water supplies in some farming areas have fallen by half. Yet farmers have responded to the new market signals by switching to less thirsty crops and kept the value of farm output stable. Water productivity has doubled. Australia"s system overcomes the usual objections because it confirms farmers" rights to water and lets them have much of it for nothing.

单选题According to the text, the decisive factor in maintaining a firm's competitive advantage is

单选题A mysterious "black cloud" approaches the earth -- our planet' s weather is severely affected. Throughout the rest of June and July temperatures rose steadily all over the Earth. In the British Isles the temperature climbed through the eighties, into the nineties, and moved towards the hundred mark. People complained, but there was no serious disaster. The death number in the U. S. remained quite small, thanks largely to the air - conditioning units that had been fitted during previous years and months. Temperatures rose to the limit of human endurance throughout the whole country and people were obliged to remain indoors for weeks on end. Occasionally air - conditioning units failed and it was then that fatalities occurred. Conditions were utterly desperate throughout the tropics as may be judged from the fact that 7943 species of plants and animals became totally extinct. The survival of man himself was only possible because of the caves and cellars he was able to dig. Nothing could be done to reduce the hot air temperature. More than seven hundred million persons are known to have lost their lives. Eventually the temperature of the surface waters of the sea rose, not so fast as the air temperature, it is true, but fast enough to produce a dangerous increase of humidity. It was indeed this increase that produced the disastrous conditions just remarked. Millions of people between the latitudes of Cairo and the Cape of Good Hope were subjected to a choking atmosphere that grew damper and hotter from day to day. All human movements ceased. There was nothing to be done but to lie breathing quickly as a dog does in hot weather. By the fourth week of July conditions in the tropics lay balanced between life and total death. Then quite suddenly rain clouds appeared over the whole globe. The temperature declined a little, due no doubt to the clouds reflecting more of the sun' s radiation back into space, but conditions could not be said to have improved. Warm rain fell everywhere, even as favorable as Iceland. The insect population increased enormously, since the burning hot atmosphere was as favorable to them as it was unfavorable to man and many other animals.

单选题Austerity is a word much found on the lips of politicians and economists at the moment; but it is seldom heard from technologists. And although the idea that "less is more" has many adherents in architecture, design and fashion, the technology industry has historically held the opposite view. Products should have as many features as possible; and next year's version should have even more. As prices fall, what starts off as a fancy new feature quickly becomes commonplace prompting companies to add new features in an effort to outdo their rivals. Never mind if nobody uses most of these new features. In an arms race, more is always more. But now there are signs that technologists are waking up to the benefits of minimalism, thanks to two things: feature fatigue among consumers who simply want things to work, and strong demand from less affluent consumers in the developing world. It is telling that the market value of Apple, the company most closely associated with simple, elegant high-tech products, recently overtook that of Microsoft, the company with the most notorious case of new-featuritis. Gadgets are no longer just for geeks, and if technology is to appeal to a broad audience, simplicity trumps fancy specifications. Another strand of techno-austerity can be found in software that keeps things simple in order to reduce distractions and ensure that computer-users remain focused and productive. Many word processors now have special full-screen modes, so that all unnecessary and distracting menus are disabled or hidden; rather than fiddling with font sizes or checking e-mail, you are encouraged to get on with your writing. A computer on which some features are not present, or have been deliberately disabled, may in fact be more useful if you are trying to get things done. There are no distracting hyperlinks on a typewriter. And then there is the phenomenon of "frugal" innovation--the new ideas that emerge when trying to reduce the cost of something in order to make it affordable to consumers in places like China, India and Brazil. The resulting products often turn out to have huge appeal in the rich world too, especially in an era of belt-tighten- ing. The netbook, or low-cost laptop, was inspired by a scheme to produce cheap laptops for children in poor countries, but has since proved popular with consumers around the world. All this offers grounds for hope. If the feature--obsessed technology industry can change its tune, perhaps there is a chance that governments--which have also tended to be habitual believers in the idea that more is more--might also come to appreciate the merits of minimalism.

单选题Seven years ago, a group of female scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology produced a piece of research showing that senior women professors in the institute's school of science had lower salaries and received fewer resources for research than their male counterparts did. Discrimination against female scientists has cropped up elsewhere. One study conducted in Sweden, of all places--showed that female medical-research scientists had to be twice as good as men to win research grants. These pieces of work, though, were relatively small-scale. Now, a much larger study has found that discrimination plays a role in the pay gap between male and female scientists at British universities. Sara Connolly, a researcher at the University of East Anglia's school of economics, has been analyzing the results of a survey of over 7 000 scientists and she has just presented her findings at this year's meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in Norwich. She found that the average pay gap between male and female academics working in science, engineering and technology is around ￡ 1 500 ($ 2850 ) a year. That is not, of course, irrefutable proof of discrimination. An alternative hypothesis is that the courses of men's and women's lives mean the gap is caused by something else; women taking "career breaks" to have children, for example, and thus rising more slowly through the hierarchy. Unfortunately for that idea, Dr. Connolly found that men are also likely to earn more within any given grade of the hierarchy, Male professors, for example, earn over ￡ 4 000 a year more than female ones. To prove the point beyond doubt, Dr. Connolly worked out how much of the overall pay differential was explained by differences such as seniority, experience and age, and how much was unexplained, and therefore suggestive of discrimination. Explicable differences amounted to 77% of the overall pay gap between the sexes. That still left a substantia123% gap in pay, which Dr. Connolly attributes to discrimination. Besides pay, her study also looked at the "glass-ceiling" effect--namely that at all stages of a woman' s career she is less likely than her male colleagues to be promoted. Between postdoctoral and lecturer level, men are more likely to be promoted than women are, by a factor of between 1.04 and 2.45. Such differences are bigger at higher grades, with the hardest move of all being for a woman to settle into a professorial chair: Of course, it might be that, at each grade, men do more work than women, to make themselves more eligible for promotion. But that explanation, too, seems to be wrong. Unlike the previous studies, Dr. Connolly's compared the experience of scientists in universities with that of those in other sorts of laboratory. It turns out that female academic researchers face more barriers to promotion, and have a wider gap between their pay and that of their male counterparts, than do their sisters in industry or research institutes independent of universities. Private enterprise, in other words, delivers more equality than the supposedly egalitarian world of academia does.

单选题The author argues that vaccinations are both a blessing and a curse because______.

单选题Chronic insomnia is a major public health problem. And too many people are using (1) therapies, even while there are a few treatments that do work. Millions of Americans (2) awake at night counting sheep or have a stiff drink or (3) an pill, hoping it will make them sleepy. (4) experts agree all that self-medicating is a bad idea, and the causes of chronic insomnia remain (5) . Almost a third of adults have trouble sleeping, and about 10 percent have (6) of daytime impairment that signal true insomnia. But (7) the complaints, scientists know surprisingly little about what causes chronic insomnia, its health consequences and how best to treat it, a panel of specialists (8) together by the National Institutes of Health concluded Wednesday. The panel called (9) a broad range of research into insomnia, (10) that if scientists understood its (11) causes, they could develop better treatments. Most, but not all, insomnia is thought to (12) other health problems, from arthritis and depression to cardiovascular disease. The question often is whether the insomnia came first or was a result of the other diseases and how trouble sleeping in (13) complicates those other problems. Other diseases (14) , the risk of insomnia seems to increase with age and to be more (15) among women, especially after their 50s. Smoking, caffeine and numerous (16) drugs also affect sleep. The NIH is spending about $200 million this year on sleep-related research, some (17) to specific disorders and others (18) the underlying scientific laws that control the nervous system of sleep. The agency was (19) the pane's review before deciding what additional work should be (20) at insomnia.