In the two decades between 1929 and 1949

Walter Schloss was by no means a celebrity

Brands began as badges of product quality

A. Entering international markets B. Satisfying global customers C

Directions: Write a letter to invite students to participate in a book donation activity organized

"THE SERVANT'(1963) is one of those films that it is impossible to forget. The servant exploits his master's weaknesses until he turns the tables: the story ends with the a cringing master ministering to a lordly servant. It is hard to watch it today without thinking of another awkward relationship—the one between business folk and their smartphones. Smart devices are sometimes empowering. They put a world of information at our fingertips. But for most people the servant has become the master. Not long ago only doctors were on call all the time. Now everybody is. Bosses think nothing of invading their employees' free time. Work invades the home far more than domestic chores invade the office. Hyper connectivity exaggerates the decline of certainty and the general cult of flexibility. Smartphones make it easier for managers to change their minds at the last moment. Employees find it ever harder to distinguish between "on-time" and "off-time"—and indeed between real work and make-work. None of this is good for business people's marriages or mental health. It may be bad for business, too. When bosses change their minds at the last minute, it is hard to plan for the future. How can we reap the benefits of connectivity without becoming its slaves? One solution is digital dieting. Banning browsing before breakfast can reintroduce a small amount of civilization. Banning texting at weekends or, say, on Thursdays, can really show the iPhone who is boss. The problem with this approach is that it works only if you live on a desert island or at the bottom of a lake. Leslie Perlow of Harvard Business School argues that for most people the only way to break the 24/7 habit is to act collectively rather than individually. One of the world's most hard-working organisations, the Boston Consulting Group, introduced rules about when people were expected to be offline, and encouraged them to work together to make this possible. Eventually it forced people to work more productively while reducing burnout. Ms Perlow's advice should be taken seriously. The problem of hyper connectivity will only get worse, as smartphones become smarter and young digital natives take over the workforce. But ultimately it is up to companies to outsmart the smartphones by insisting that everyone turn them off from time to time. The author mentions the film in the first paragraph in order to ______.

On June 17

A new book by a former lawyer at Kirkland Ellis, one of the nation's largest law firms, has delivered a thrill to the already rattled legal profession. In The Lawyer Bubble: A Profession in Crisis, Steven J. Harper argues that legal jobs are disappearing not because of short-term economic fluctuations but because of powerful long-term trends. The word bubble is an overstatement, but Harper deserves credit for sounding the alarm. The decline in the market for lawyers is being driven by an array of forces. For some time now, corporate clients have been less willing to sign off on bulky legal bills. They have increasingly been balking at the top hourly rates of $1,000 that some partners charge. And as a result of globalization, an increasing share of American legal work is being shipped overseas. Lawyers in India and other lower- wage markets are willing to do the work for a fraction of what American law firms would charge. Taking away even more of this work: newly sophisticated legal software that can do "document review" and other tasks for which lawyers were once needed. The legal market is without question soft these days. Last June, the Association for Legal Career Professionals released a grim placement report stating that only 65.4% of law-school graduates had found jobs for which it was necessary to pass a state bar exam. And the Internet is full of first-hand accounts of law-school graduates who say that their law degree has not helped them get a law job-and, worse still, those who report that their degree has actually hurt their job prospects, since some employers now tell them they are overqualified for nonlegal positions. Harper argues that the profession's leaders are a big part of the problem. He contends that big-firm managers are too focused on maximizing profits for the biggest, most rainmaking partners-at the expense of junior lawyers and the long-term interest of the firm. And he faults law-school deans for putting the interests and salaries of law professors ahead of the interests of their underemployed, debt- laden students. Controversial as it is, Harper's big-picture argument is undoubtedly correct, and it is a real cause for concern. Bar associations and legal academics have begun talking about how the profession should adapt -discussions that are long overdue. The biggest problem with The Lawyer Bubble is not the warning it is sounding but its title; unlike tulips and other speculative bubbles in the past, lawyers will always be a necessity not a fad. But then, The Very, Very Challenging Job Market for Lawyers doesn't have the same ring to it. The book The Lawyer Bubble: A Profession in Crisis ______.

For too long

This time last year three out of four 16 to 24-year-olds were wearing the white band of Make Poverty History. Whatever the campaign may or may not have achieved in Africa, it briefly inspired millions in Britain. A joy, but also a revelation, for this was the moment when I saw how ready people were to take a little bit of action for a big cause. It may also explain how the small movement I helped to found has become a rather large phenomenon. Don't think changing the world can start by something as simple as shutting down your computer at night? Those marching were different crowds from 20 years ago. Make Poverty History made few formal demands. No slogans, no forms, not even meetings if you didn't fancy them. It was activism lite-more a brand than an organization. Show solidarity wherever you go-fashionably of course-do more, if and when you can. The future of active citizenship may depend on understanding why it ignited a generation. If social engagement is a funnel (a tube or pipe that is wide at the top and narrow at the bottom) turned on its side, about a quarter of a million people in the UK are at the narrow end, serial activists, responsible for 80 per cent of our community action. Most charities are here, focusing their efforts on these committed citizens. Our organization, We Are What We Do, is at the mouth of the funnel targeted at people who don't recycle or think about fair trade. It is styled as a brand, inspiring people to make the small changes that will make a big difference if enough of us do the same. Our first book-Change the World for a Fiver-featured 50 simple actions, from not spitting out your gum to declining plastic bags. All began by doing something small. Some of the 800 who are buying the book every day remain usefully but lightly engaged. For our new book, Change the World 9 to 5, we decided to focus on the workplace, where most of us spend most of our waking hours. Actions range from the entertaining (smile!); the symbolic (turn off your phone charger when not in use) and the serious (learn to save a life). In working with We Are What We Do I have moved from the view that the sum of individual actions can help to make a difference to the belief that ultimately it is the only thing that ever does. The smallest act has a value of its own. The author views people's wearing the white band of Make Poverty History as "a revelation" because ______.

It is a familiar ritual for many: after a late night out you reach for your smartphone to hail an Uber home, only to find—disaster—that the fare will be three times the normal rate. Like many things beloved by economists, "surge pricing" of the sort that occasionally afflicts Uber-users is both efficient and deeply unpopular. From a consumer's perspective, surge pricing is annoying at best and downright offensive when applied during emergencies. Extreme fare surges often lead to outpourings of public criticism: when a snowstorm paralysed New York in 2013, celebrities, including Salman Rushdie, took to social media to rail against triple-digit fares for relatively short rides. Some city governments have banned the practice altogether: Delhi's did so in April. Surge (or dynamic) pricing relies on frequent price adjustments to match supply and demand. Such systems are sometimes used to set motorway tolls (which rise and fall with demand in an effort to keep traffic flowing), or to adjust the price of energy in electricity markets. A lower-tech version is common after natural disasters, when shopkeepers raise the price of necessities like bottled water and batteries as supplies run low. People understandably detest such practices. It offends the sensibilities of non-economists that the same journey should cost different amounts from one day or hour to the next—and more, invariably, when the need is most desperate. Yet surge fares also demonstrate the elegance with which prices moderate a marketplace. When demand in an area spikes and the waiting time for a car rises, surge pricing kicks in; users requesting cars are informed that the fare will be a multiple of the normal rate. As the multiple rises, the market goes to work. Higher fares ration available cars by willingness to pay: to richer users, in some cases, but also to those less able to wait out the surge period or with fewer good alternatives. Charging extra to those without good alternatives sounds like gouging, yet without surge pricing such riders would be less likely to get a ride at all, since there would be no incentive for all the other people requesting cars to drop out. Surge pricing also boosts supply, at least locally. The extra money is shared with drivers, who therefore have an incentive to travel to areas with high demand to help relieve the crush. Whether Uber remains a big part of the transport network in future, and whether it retains surge pricing, depends in part on how well local governments manage the transport system as a whole. In other words, surge pricing is really only as painful as local officials allow it to be. It can be inferred from Paragraph 1 that Uber's pricing strategy ______.

By 2012

Quiet carriages on trains are a nice idea: travellers voluntarily switch phones to silent, turn stereos off and keep chatter to a minimum. In reality, there is usually at least one inane babbler to break the silence. A couple of problems prevent peaceful trips. First, there is a sorting problem: some passengers end up in the quiet carriage by accident and are not aware of the rules. Second, there is a commitment problem: noise is sometimes made by travellers who choose the quiet carriage but find an important call hard to ignore. The train operators are trying to find answers. Trains in Queensland Australia, are having permanent signs added to show exactly what is expected; a British operator has invested in signal-jamming technology to prevent phone calls. Microeconomics suggests another approach: putting a price on noise. Fining people for making a din would surely dissuade the polluter and is a neat solution in theory, but it requires costly monitoring and enforcement. Another tack would be to use prices to separate quiet and noisy passengers--in effect, creating a market for silence. A simple idea would be to sell access to the quiet carriage as an optional extra when the ticket is bought. Making the quiet coach both an active choice and a costly one would dissuade many of those who do not value a peaceful ride. Charging may also solve the commitment problem. This is particularly tricky, as attitudes to noise can change during the journey. Some passengers would pay the quiet premium but still chatter away when some vital news arrives. Schemes that reward the silent—a ratings system among fellow passengers, for example—could help. The idea is that losing your hard-won reputation offsets the short-term gain from using the phone. But such a system also fails the simplicity test. A 2010 book by George Akerlof and Rachel Kranton argues that "norms"—feelings about how everyone should behave—also play a role in decision-making. Charging a price, even if just a token amount, means the quiet carriage becomes a service that fellow passengers have bought, not just a preference they have expressed. Perhaps different norms would come into play, encouraging calm. If not, a personal bubble is always an option: noise-cancelling headphones start at around $50. What would happen in quiet carriages?

"The ancient Hawaiians are astronomers"

Are we, as some popular writers suggest

For years American conversation about Iraq has included a refrain about how we cannot expect to crea

To Google is now in broad usage as a verb for retrieving information from the internet. If the tech giant has its way, "I Googled" will become a standard reply to the question, "How did you get here?" On May 28th Google said it would build 100 prototype driverless cars devoid of pedals, steering wheel or controls save an on/off switch. It is the next stage in its apparent quest to be as ubiquitous on the road as on computer screens. People have dreamed about driverless motoring since at least the 1930s, but only in recent years have carmakers such as Mercedes-Benz and Volvo given the matter more thought, kitting out test cars with the sensors and sophisticated software required to negotiate busy roads. Google has roared ahead by designing a driverless car from the ground up. But bringing autonomous motoring to the world is proving harder than Google had envisaged. It once promised it by 2017. Now it does not see production models coming out before 2020. The technology is far advanced, but needs shrinking in size and cost—Google's current test cars, retrofitted Toyota and Lexus models, are said to be packed with $80,000-worth of equipment. Google's latest efforts may have as much to do with convincing the public and lawmakers as refining the technology. The firm stresses the safety advantages of computers being more likely than humans to avoid accidents. The cars will have a top speed of just 25mph and a front end made of soft foam to cushion unwary pedestrians. The benefits could indeed be huge. Driving time could be given over to working, snoozing or browsing the web. Rather than suffer all the costs of owning a car, some people may prefer to summon a rented one on their smartphones whenever they need it. However, the issue of liability in the event of a driverless car crashing has yet to be resolved. Turning cars into commodities may not be good news for traditional carmakers. But reinventing motoring as a service fits neatly with Google's plans to become as big in hardware as in software. And unlike car firms, which talk vaguely of becoming "mobility providers", Google has pots of cash to make that a reality and no worries about disrupting its current business. Google admits it still has "lots of work to do". But one day Googling to the shops may be a common activity. The word "ubiquitous" (Line 4, Para. 1) is closest in meaning to ______.

"The ancient Hawaiians are astronomers"

Often referred to as "the heart of a factoring organization

Directions: Write an essay of 160-200 words based on the following drawing. In your essay