单选题The majority of successful senior managers do not closely follow the classical rational model of first clarifying goals, assessing the problem, formulating options, estimating likelihoods of success, making a decision, and only then taking action to implement the decision. Rather, in their day-by-day tactical maneuvers, these senior executives rely on what is vaguely termed "intuition" to manage a network of interrelated problems that require them to deal with ambiguity, inconsistency, novelty, and surprise; and to integrate action into the process to thinking. Generations of writers on management have recognized that some practicing managers rely heavily on intuition. In general, however, such writers display a poor grasp of what intuition is. Some see it as the opposite of rationality; others view it as an excuse for capriciousness. Isenberg"s recent research on the cognitive processes of senior managers reveals that managers" intuition is neither of these. Rather, senior managers use intuition in at least five distinct ways. First, they intuitively sense when a problem exists. Second, managers rely on intuition to perform" well-learned behavior patterns rapidly. This intuition is not arbitrary or irrational, but is based on years of painstaking practice and hands-on experience that build skills. A third function of intuition is to synthesize isolated bits of data and practice into an integrated picture, often in an "Aha!" experience. Fourth, some managers use intuition as a check on the results of more rational analysis. Most senior executives are familiar with the formal decision analysis models and tools, and those who use such systematic methods for reaching decisions are occasionally leery of solutions suggested by these methods which run counter to their sense of the correct course of action. Finally, managers can use intuition to bypass in-depth analysis and move rapidly to engender a plausible solution. Used in this way, intuition is an almost instantaneous cognitive process in which a manager recognizes familiar patterns. One of the implications of the intuitive style of executive management is that "thinking" is inseparable from acting. Since managers often "know" what is right before they can analyze and explain it, they frequently act first and explain later. Analysis is inextricably tied to action in thinking/acting cycles, in which managers develop thoughts about their companies and organizations not by analyzing a problematic situation and then acting, but by acting and analyzing in close concert. Given the great uncertainty of many of the management issues that they face, senior managers often instigate a course of action simply to learn more about an issue. They then use the results of the action to develop a more complete understanding of the issue. One implication of thinking/acting cycles is that action is often part of defining the problem, not just of implementing the solution.

单选题Naturalism is the view that the "natural" universe, the universe of matter and energy, is all that there really is. By ruling out a spiritual part of the human person which might survive death and a God who might resurrect the body, naturalism also rules out survival after death. In addition, naturalism denies human freedom on the grounds that every event must be explainable by deterministic natural laws. It denies any absolute values because it can find no grounds for such values in a world made up only of matter and energy. And finally, naturalism denies that the universe has any meaning or purpose because there is no God to give it a meaning or purpose, and nothing else which can give it a meaning or purpose. Anyone who accepts the first three denials, of God, spiritual beings, and immortality, might be called a naturalist in the broad sense, and anyone who adds to these the denial of freedom, values, and purpose might be labeled a naturalist in the strict sense, or a strict naturalist. Some opponents of naturalism would argue that naturalists in the broad sense are at least somewhat inconsistent and that naturalism in the broad sense leads logically to strict naturalism. Many strict naturalists would agree with this. Those who reject naturalism in both the strict and broad sense do so for a variety of masons. They may have positive arguments for the existence of .some of what naturalists deny, or they may have what seem to be decisive refutations of some or all of the arguments for naturalism. But, in addition to particular arguments against naturalist tenets or their grounds of belief, some opponents of naturalism believe that there is a general argument which holds against any form of naturalism. These opponents hold that naturalism has a "fatal flaw" or, to put it more strongly, that naturalism is self-destroying. If naturalism is true, then human reason must be the result of natural forces. These natural forces are not, on the naturalistic view, rational themselves, nor can they be the result of a rational cause. So human reason would be the result of nonrational causes. This, it can be argued, gives us a strong reason to distrust human reach, especially in its less practical and more theoretical exercises. But the theory of naturalism is itself such an exercise of theoretical reason. If naturalism is true, we would have strong reasons to distrust theoretical reasoning. If we distrust theoretical reasoning, we distrust particular applications of it, such as the theory of naturalism. Thus, if naturalism is true, we have strong reasons to distrust naturalism.

单选题The "reconfiguration plan'(Para. 4) probably refers to a. selling the Church property. B. covering the cost of settlements. C. shutting and remolding churches. D. keeping up crumbling buildings.

单选题{{B}}Text 2{{/B}} Michael Porter, who has made his name throughout the business community by advocating his theories of competitive advantages, is now swimming into even more shark-infested waters, arguing that competition can save even America' s troubled health-care system, the largest in the world. Mr. Porter argues in "Redefining Health Care" that competition, if properly applied, can also fix what ails this sector. That is a bold claim, given the horrible state of America's health-care system. Just consider a few of its failings: America pays more per capita for health care than most countries, but it still has some 45m citizens with no health insurance at all. While a few receive outstanding treatment, he shows in heart-wrenching detail that most do not. The system, wastes huge resources on paperwork, ignores preventive care and, above all, has perverse incentives that encourage shifting costs rather than cutting them outright. He concludes that it is "on a dangerous path, with a toxic combination of high costs, uneven quality, frequent errors and limited access to care." Many observers would agree with this diagnosis, but many would undoubtedly disagree with this advocacy of more market forces. Doctors have an intuitive distrust of competition, which they often equate with greed, while many public-policy thinkers argue that the only way to fix America' s problem is to quash the private sector' s role altogether and instead set up a government monopoly like Britain's National Health Service. Mr. Porter strongly disagrees. He starts by acknowledging that competition, as it has been introduced to America' s health system, has in fact done more harm than good. But he argues that competition has been introduced piecemeal, in incoherent and counter-productive ways that lead to perverse incentives and worse outcomes: "health-care competition is not focused on delivering value for patients," he says. Mr. Porter offers a mix of solutions to fix this mess, and thereby to put the sector on a genuinely competitive footing. First comes the seemingly obvious (but as yet unrealized) goal of data transparency. Second is a redirection of competition from the level of health plans, doctors, clinics and hospitals, to competition "at the level of medical conditions, which is all but absent". The authors argue that the right measure of "value" for the health sector should be how well a patient with a given health condition fares over the entire cycle of treatment, and what the cost is for that entire cycle. That rightly emphasizes the role of early detection and preventive care over techno-fixes, pricey pills and the other failings of today's system. If there is a failing in this argument, it is that he sometimes strays toward naive optimism. Mr. Porter argues, for example, that his solutions are so commonsensical that private actors in the health system could forge ahead with them profitably without waiting for the government to fix its policy mistakes. That is a tempting notion, but it falls into a trap that economists call the fallacy of the $ 20 bill on the street. If there really were easy money on the pavement, goes the argument, surely previous passers-by would have bent over and picked it up by now. In the same vein, if Mr. Porter's prescriptions are so sensible that companies can make money even now in the absence of government policy changes, why in the world have they not done so already? One reason may be that they can make more money in the current suboptimal equilibrium than in a perfectly competitive market--which is why government action is probably needed to sweep aside the many obstacles in the way of Mr. Porter' s powerful vision.

单选题Parents who write letters to complain television companies______

单选题It is an open secret in the tech world that Google and Facebook are hardly the best of friends. But now their relations are going to sink to a new low. According to numerous reports appearing today, Burson-Marsteller, a public-relations company working for Facebook has been urging bloggers and journalists to write scathing pieces about the way in which Social Circle, a Google offering that lets users share search results and other stuff with their friends, violates users' privacy. The Financial Times's website quotes Burson-Marsteller as saying that Facebook had asked the PR fill not to reveal who it was working for. The agency admitted that agreeing to this "was not at all standard operating procedure and is against our policies, and the assignment on those terms should have been declined. " USA Today is carrying the same statement from the PR fill. There is no shortage of irony in all this. It is true that Google hardly has a stellar track record on privacy matters. The company's Google Buzz social network came under fire when it was launched for using people's Gmail contacts without their permission. And Google found itself in the middle of another stink when its Street View street-mapping service was caught "sniffing" (accidentally, Google has claimed) data from unprotected Wi-Fi networks. In March the film reached a settlement with America's Federal Trade Commission that requires it to submit to regular external audits of its approach to privacy issues. But Facebook is no angel either on privacy matters. In particular, it got its fingers badly burnt with its Beacon service, which shared people's activities on the web with their contacts. This case eventually led to Facebook having to cough up millions of dollars to resolve litigation brought against it for violating their privacy. It has also been bashed repeatedly by privacy activists for using default settings in its privacy controls that mean users' data is automatically shared broadly over the web unless they change them. Indeed, Facebook's reputation is arguably even worse than Google's in this area—which may explain why, rather than concentrating on improving its own act, it has chosen to pay third parties to take a pop at Google instead. This Babbage's coverage of Facebook's shortcomings (e. g. here) may explain why Burson-Marsteller left him off its call list. It is possible that Google may have some questions to answer about Social Circle's approach to data-sharing. But for now, it is Facebook that has egg all over its face.

单选题{{B}}Text 3{{/B}} Africa's elephants are divided between the savannahs of eastern and southern Africa and the forests of central Africa. Some biologists reckon the forest ones-smaller, with shorter, straighter tusks-may even constitute a distinct species. But not for long, at the latest rate of poaching. The high price of ivory is increasing the incentive to kill elephants everywhere in Africa, and especially in places where there is virtually no law. The latest reports suggest that the forest elephant population is collapsing on the back of rising Chinese demand for ivory. Some conservationists argue that a recent decision by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) to auction 108 tonnes of stockpiled ivory from southern Africa may be prompting more poaching in central and eastern Africa, as criminals seek to mix illicit ivory in with the legitimate kind. But some economists maintain that the legitimate sale of ivory lowers prices, thus decreasing the incentive to poach. A study of a previous sale of ivory suggested it did not lead to more intensive poaching. Either way, the Congo basin is " hemorrhaging elephants ", says TRAFFIC, which monitors trade in wildlife. The head of the 790,000-hectare (1,952,000-acre) Virunga National Park in eastern Congo, Emmanuel de Merode, reports that 24 elephants have been poached in his park so far this year. The situation is dire: 2,900 elephants roamed Virunga when Congo became independent in 1964,400 in 2006, and fewer than 200 today. Most have been poached by militias, particularly Hutu rebels from Rwanda who hack off the ivory and sell it to middlemen in Kinshasa, Congo's capital, who then smuggle it to China. Once ivory has left its country of origin, and if it is not seized by customs officials, it can be hard to identify its source and those responsible for acquiring it. But forensic help may be at hand. Scientists from the University of Washington are using genetic markers in elephant dung to identify exactly where ivory has been poached. This should help governments in countries such as Tanzania and Zambia, which are capable of catching poachers, but not in anarchic eastern Congo, where 120-odd rangers have been killed in Virunga in recent years trying to protect elephants and gorillas. With an influx of businessmen and other officials from China engaged in infrastructure projects such as road building and logging, the slaughter is expected to accelerate. Forest elephants may survive in large numbers only in remote protected pockets of the Congo basin, such as the Odzala-Koukoua National Park in Congo-Brazzaville and Minkebe National Park in northeast Gabon.

单选题D. Until

单选题 A few years ago, James Green began to dread work. He dragged himself out of bed every morning and plodded through New York's Penn Station, trying to manage a "game face" for his office at Giant Realm, an online advertising network. But Mr. Green wasn't just any manager at the company; he was the CEO. And he was burned out on the job. Companies and managers are equipped to handle job fatigue among employees, but what happens when burnout-described as persistent fatigue, detachment or resentment triggered by excessive work and stress-strikes the top boss? More companies might soon find out. An uncertain economy, shareholder discontent and mounting expectations to deliver results have made the lives of chief executives more stressful, management experts say. And while few executives publicly acknowledge burnout, researchers studying the issue say it is more common than previously thought. In one study conducted by Harvard Medical School faculty, 96% of senior leaders reported feeling burned out to some degree, with one-third describing their burnout as extreme. Burned-out bosses complain of lost focus and mental clarity, and feelings that they're always behind. Company performance can suffer as they struggle to make decisions or treat staff fairly, according to management and medical experts. Yet HR departments usually assume, wrongly, that CEOs and other senior executives {{U}}"have it to together. "{{/U}} For Mr. Green, a turnaround specialist who spent a decade reviving struggling firms and preparing them for sale, fining hundreds of workers and answering investor demands left him feeling hollow. But he kept {{U}}that{{/U}} to himself. "If you want to be a real leader, you can't go around being emotionally unstable," he says. Eventually, the 51-year-old executive said he felt he "just had to check out." Taking time off to travel or sail is a common fantasy among executives, but leaves aren't a sure fix for burnout, says Gabriela Corá, a psychiatrist and author of "Leading Under Pressure." Dr. Corá, who has treated some executive patients, generally recommends sleep, exercise and sometimes prescription medication, such as antidepressants. Preventing burnout is one focus of a recently launched Harvard Business School workshop for executives at a career crossroads. John Davis, an HBS management professor and faculty chair of the Crossroads Program, says many bosses lack "good thermostats" for gauging their levels of fatigue. What's more, the executives say they simply can't afford to step off the "treadmill" to solve the problem, he adds. But just as Frits van Paasschen, CEO of Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide Inc. says, "The energy comes from somewhere-you draw down from a bank, and at some point you have to put it back in."

单选题The function of the office is to perform administrative work. First, it must provide the necessary communications with customers, banks, government departments, and other outside organizations. Second, it must service the information requirements within the company itself. In order to meet these needs efficiently, the Office Manager must employ the most appropriate business methods, systems and equipment. In an efficient administrative structure, clerical operations are organized so that they add to the profitability of the business. However, in many countries the number of clerical staff has increased while the total number of workers employed in production has fallen. In Britain, for example, the total workforce in the years 1919-1976 went up by 25%, while the number of people who were employed in clerical work increased by 150%. For a country such as Britain, which depends on a manufacturing base, that can mean inefficiency. To ensure that office services run smoothly, there must be the means to check, sort, copy and file correspondence and other paperwork. Today there is a growing range of machines that can be used to do such jobs. The size and resources of a company will determine how mechanized or computerized its office systems are. The office must give maximum service at minimum cost. A balance must be kept between production, marketing, and administration. As a company develops and grows, the contribution of administration will vary in kind and in value. The most important objective in modern offices is the processing of data in order to provide a means of business control, but in many companies there are weaknesses in the ability to manage communications efficiently. For example, some data are often used only by individual managers, and different departments in the same company may use different data processing systems. In order to contribute to business efficiency, however, data processing must be a centralized service, The system which is required is one that looks at the total needs of a business and therefore assists management in making appropriate decisions quickly.