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

If open-source software is supposed to be free

1 That Louise Nevelson is believed by many critics to be the greatest twentieth- century sculptor

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

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

Legislation to turn every school in England into an academy independent of local authority control will be unveiled in the budget. Draft legislation, to be published possibly as early as Thursday, will begin the process of implementing a pledge made by David Cameron in his conference speech last autumn. The prime minister said his "vision for our schooling system" was to place education into the hands of headteachers and teachers rather than "bureaucrats" The white paper will come just days before the government's education and adoption bill is made law. That bill was introduced to "sweep away bureaucratic and legal loopholes" and speed up the process of dealing with failing schools by taking them out of local authority control and putting them in the hands of academy sponsors. Concerns have already been raised about whether there would be enough good sponsors to take on schools. With many more schools facing academisation, that task will be even greater at a time when some academy trusts are facing criticism for underachievement. Teachers' unions, who have been critical of the academisation process, said parents and teachers would be outraged. Kevin Courtney, the deputy general secretary of the National Union of Teachers, said: "Finally the government has come clean on its education priorities and admitted that its real agenda all along has been that every school must become an academy. The fig leaf of 'parental choice', 'school autonomy' and 'raising standards' has finally been dropped and the government's real agenda has been laid bare—all schools removed from collaborative structures within a local authority family of schools, all schools instead run by remote academy trusts, unaccountable to parents, staff or local communities." Councils reacted angrily to the news. Councillor Roy Perry, chairman of the Local Government Association's children and young people board, said: "Only 15% of the largest academy chains perform above the national average in terms of pupil progress, compared with 44% of council-run schools." "It's vital that we concentrate on the quality of education and a school's ability to deliver the best results for children, rather than on the legal status of a school, to make sure that we're providing the education and support needed in each area," he said. "We oppose forced academisation and giving significant powers relating to education to unelected civil servants with parents and residents unable to hold them to account at the ballot box." Schools in England will turn into academies because of ______.

British parents encourage their children to play musical instruments as part of a family tradition a

Imagine a world in which getting fitted with a new heart, liver or set of kidneys

A. Invest in the relationship

Empirical and experimental philosophy has no quarrel with science