单选题In more than a century of hand-to-hand combat in shops, supermarket aisles, restaurants and bars around the world, Coca-Cola has nearly always been in the lead and Pepsi in second place. When Warren Buffett, Coke's long-time investor, told the board that he had visited a pizza parlour in Omaha, Nebraska, with his grandson only to discover it served nothing but Pepsi, Coke's bosses acted swiftly to remove their arch-rival from the menu and replace it with Coke. If only the Atlanta-based company had moved as determinedly in response to changing consumer tastes, it might have avoided a humiliating reversal in fortunes. On December 12th PepsiCo overtook Coca-Cola in market capitalisation for the first time. With PepsiCo's share price having risen by 14% this year, its stock market value reached $ 98.4 billion, compared with $ 97.9 billion for Coca-Co la, which has seen its shares decline by 1.2% in the same period. Pepsi is powered not by its traditional fizzy drinks--sales of those are flat--but such products as Gatorade, a sports drink that has seen sales grow by more than 30%. Gatorade also represents a broader diversification by PepsiCo away from a reliance on sugary colas and into other products. PepsiCo now reportedly gets around 20% of its revenue from soft drinks, unlike Coca-Cola, where they account for some 80%. Many of the brands that PepsiCo has been acquiring and promoting appeal to consumers' concerns a bout their health. PepsiCo's latest advertising programme promotes a new "Smart Spot" symbol, which al lows people to identify healthier products. The spots are being attached to Gatorade and other PepsiCo brands such as Tropicana orange juice, Aquafina water, baked lay's crisps and Quaker Granola Bars. Coca-Cola will now try to regain the crown. Having endured various troubles and two chief executives since the death in 1997 of Roberto Goizueta, a much-admired boss, Coke brought a veteran, Neville Isdell, out of retirement last year to reinvigorate the company. Mr. Isdell knows a thing or two about being in second place. In the 1980s he took Coke from the number two spot in the Philip pines to move ahead of Pepsi. Mr. Isdell has Coke's own sports drink, Powerade, in his portfolio--but he could have had Gatorade. Five years ago another fizzy drink (champagne) was on ice, to celebrate Coca-Cola's $15.8 billion takeover of Quaker Oats, then owner of Gatorade. This takeover was supposed to lead Coke into what looked to be a hot new market for health drinks. But the "Sage of Omaha", as Mr. Buffett is known, blocked the deal, in part because it would have diluted the value of Coke's shares. Pepsi took over Quaker Oats instead--a memory that must leave Mr. Buffett and other Coke shareholders with a bitter taste in their mouths.

单选题{{B}}Text 2{{/B}} They may not be the richest, but Africans remain the world's staunchest optimists. An annual survey by Gallup International, a research outfit, shows that, when asked whether this year will be better than last, Africa once again comes out on top. Out of 52 000 people interviewed all over the world, under half believe that things are looking up. But in Africa the proportion is close to 60% almost twice as much as in Europe. Africans have some reasons to be cheerful. The continent's economy has been doing fairly well with South Africa, the economic powerhouse, growing steadily over the past few years. Some of Africa's long-running conflicts, such as the war between the north and south in Sudan and the civil war in Congo, have ended. Africa even has its first elected female head of state, in Liberia. Yet there is no shortage of downers too. Most of Africa remains dirt poor. Crises in places like Cote d' Ivoire, Sierra Leone and Zimbabwe are far from solved. And the democratic credentials of Ethiopia and Uganda, once the darlings of western donors, have taken a bad knock. AIDS killed over gm Africans in 2005, and will kill more this year. So is it all just a case of irrational exuberance? Meril James of Gallup argues that there is, in fact, usually very little relation between the survey's optimism rankings and reality. Africans, this year led by Nigerians, are consistently the most upbeat, whether their lot gets better or not. On the other hand, Greece--hardly the worst place on earth--tops the gloom and doom chart, followed closely by Portugal and France. Ms James speculates that religion may have a lot to do with it. Nine out of ten Africans are religious, the highest proportion in the world. But cynics argue that most Africans believe that 2006 will be golden because things have been so bad that it is hard to imagine how they could possibly get worse. This may help explain why places that have suffered recent misfortunes, such as Kosovo and Afghanistan, rank among the top five optimists. Moussaka for thought for those depressed Greeks.

单选题We learn from the second paragraph, ______.

单选题 The energy crisis, which is being felt around the world, has dramatized how the reckless despoiling of the earth's resources has brought the whole world to brink of disaster. The overdevelopment of motor transport, with its increase of more cars, more highways, more pollution, more suburbs, more commuting, has contributed to the near-destruction of our cities, the disintegration of the family, and the pollution not only of local air, but also of the earth's atmosphere. The catastrophe has arrived in the form of the energy crisis. Our present situation is unlike war, revolution, or depression. It is also unlike the great natural catastrophes of the past. Worldwide resources exploitation and energy use have brought us to a state where long-range planning is crucial. What we need is not a continuation of our present perilous state, which endangers the future of our country, our children, and our earth, but a movement forward to a new norm in order to work rapidly and effectively on planetary problems. This country has been reeling under the continuing exposures of loss of moral integrity and the revelation that lawbreaking has reached into the highest places in the land. There is a strong demand for moral revival and for some commitment that is vast enough and yet personal enough to enlist the loyalty of all. In the past it has been only in a war in defense of their own country and their own ideals that any people have been able to invoke a total commitment. This is the first time that we have been asked to defend ourselves and what we hold dear in cooperation with all the other inhabitants of this planet, who share with us the same endangered air and the same endangered oceans. There is a common need to reassess our present course, to change that course, and to devise new methods through which the world can survive. This is a priceless opportunity. To grasp it, we need a widespread understanding of the nature of the crisis confronting us-and the world-a crisis that is no passing inconvenience, no by-product of the ambition of the oil producing countries. no environmentalists' mere fears, no by-product of any present system of government. What we face is the outcome of the invention of the last four hundred years. What we need is a transformed life-style. This new life style can flow directly from science and technology, but its acceptance depends on an overriding commitment to a higher quality of life for the world's children and future generation.

单选题When it comes to suing doctors, Philadelphia is hardly the city of brotherly love. A combination of sprightly lawyers and sympathetic juries has made Philadelphia a hotspot for medical-malpractice lawsuits. Since 1995, Pennsylvania state courts have awarded an average of $ 2m in such cases, according to Jury Verdict Research, a survey firm. Some medical specialists have seen their malpractice insurance premiums nearly double over the past year. Obstetricians are now paying up to $104,000 a year to protect themselves. The insurance industry is largely to blame. Carol Golin, the Monitor's editor, argues that in the 1990s insurers tried to grab market share by offering artificially low rates (betting that any losses would be covered by gains on their investments). The stock-market correction, coupled with the large legal awards, has eroded the insurers' reserves. Three in Pennsylvania alone have gone bust. A few doctors--particularly older ones--will quit. The rest are adapting. Some are abandoning litigation-prone procedures, such as delivering babies. Others are moving parts of their practice to neighboring states where insurance rates are lower. Some from Pennsylvania have opened offices in New Jersey. New doctors may also be deterred from setting up shop in litigation havens, however prestigious. Despite a Republican president, tort reform has got nowhere at the federal level. Indeed doctors could get clobbered indirectly by a Patients' Bill of Rights, which would further expose managed care companies to lawsuits. This prospect has fuelled interest among doctors in Pennsylvania's new medical malpractice reform bill, which was signed into law on March 20th. It will, among other things, give doctors $ 40m of state funds to offset their insurance premiums, spread the payment of awards out over time and prohibit individuals from double dipping--that is, suing a doctor for damages that have already been paid by their health insurer. But will it really help? Randall Bovbjerg, a health policy expert at the Urban Institute, argues that the only proper way to slow down the litigation machine would be to limit the compensation for pain and suffering, so-called "non-monetary damages". Needless to say, a fixed cap on such awards is resisted by most trial lawyers. But Mr Bovbjerg reckons a more nuanced approach, with a sliding scale of payments based on well-defined measures of injury, is a better way forward. In the meantime, doctors and insurers are bracing themselves for a couple more rough years before the insurance cycle turns. Nobody disputes that hospital staff make mistakes: a 1999 Institute of Medicine report claimed that errors kill at least 44,000 patients a year. But there is little evidence that malpractice lawsuits on their own will solve the problem.

单选题{{B}}Text 2{{/B}} The history of modem pollution problems shows that most have resulted from negligence and ignorance. We have an appalling tendency to interfere with nature before all of the possible consequences of our actions have been studied in depth. We produce and distribute radioactive substances, synthetic chemicals and many other potent compounds before fully comprehending their effects on living organisms. Our education is dangerously incomplete. It will be argued that the purpose of science is to move into unknown territory, to explore, and to discover. It can be said that similar risks have been taken before, and that these risks are necessary to technological progress. These arguments overlook an important element. In the past, risks taken in the name of scientific progress were restricted to a small place and brief period of time. The effects of the processes we now strive to master are neither localized nor brief. Air pollution covers vast urban areas. Ocean pollutants have been discovered in nearly every part of the world. Synthetic chemicals spread over huge stretches of forest and farmland may remain in the soil for decades and years to come. Radioactive pollutants will be found in the biosphere for generations. The size and persistence of these problems have grown with the expanding power of modern science. One might also argue that the hazards of modem pollutants are small compared with the dangers associated with other human activity. No estimate of the actual harm done by smog, fallout, or chemical residues can obscure the reality that the risks are being taken before being fully understood. The importance of these issues lies in the failure of science to predict and control human intervention into natural processes. The true measure of the danger is represented by the hazards we will encounter if we enter the new age of technology without first evaluating our responsibility to environment.

单选题Computer brain games may not offer the big mental boost many were hoping for, suggests new research, but brain scientists and brain-game experts don't all agree on the findings. The study, out this week in Nature, is the largest of its kind, say scientists from England's Medical Research Council Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit and the Alzheimer's Society, UK. They said in a Tuesday press briefing that brain-training games, used by millions, may not increase general brain power on other tasks or increase IQ "Participants did get better at games they practiced. The more they trained, the better they got. But there was still no translation to any general improvement in cognitive function," said lead author Adrian Owen, assistant director of Medical Research Council. The online experiment was sponsored by the BBC and involved more than 11 000 people between the ages of 18 and 60. They were split into three groups, including two groups that played different brain-training games that are similar to commercially available games, and a control group that was asked to go online and find answers to questions about topics such as music. Participants trained for at least 10 minutes a day, three times a week, for up to six weeks, Owen said. All took standard cognitive assessment tests at the start and finish of the study. While players increased their skills the more they played a specific game, that improvement didn't transfer to other activities or to a higher score on intelligence tests, said Owen and colleagues. Duke psychiatrist and Alzheimer's expert Murali Doraiswamy said it's the best study done to date and a good reality check. "There was so much hype surrounding brain games," he said. But it's not a death knell for gaming, Doraiswamy said. "I still think brain games offer tremendous potential for helping people with conditions such as ADHD and learning disabilities, but this study puts the burden of proof now on game manufacturers to show that they really offer meaningful benefits. " Study shortcomings include the fact that it didn't focus on the aging population, a group targeted by brain-game makers, experts said. And it did not look at benefits of more intense training, said Alvaro Fernandez, CEO and cofounder of Sharp Brains, a San Francisco market research firm that specializes in cognitive science. "This study shows random brain exercise doesn't transfer, but it does not deny that transfer can work if a person engages in more intense and targeted brain-training," Fernandez said.

单选题Imagine a world where your doctor could help you avoid sickness, using knowledge of your genes as well as how you live your life. Or where he would prescribe drugs he knew would work and not have debilitating side-effects. Such a future is arriving faster than most realise: genetic tests are already widely used to identify patients who will be helped or harmed by certain drugs. And three years ago, in the face of a torrent of new scientific data, a number of new companies set themselves up to interpret this information for customers. Through shop fronts on the internet, anyone could order a testing kit, spit into a tube and send off their DNA—with results downloaded privately at home. Already customers can find out their response to many common medications, such as antivirals and blood-thinning agents. They can also explore their genetic likelihood of developing deep-vein thrombosis, skin cancer or glaucoma. The industry has been subject to conflicting criticisms. On the one hand, it stands accused of offering information too dangerous to trust to consumers; on the other it is charged with peddling irrelevant, misleading nonsense. For some rare disorders, such as Huntington's and Tay-Sachs, genetic information is a diagnosis. But most diseases are more complicated and involve several genes, or an environmental component, or both. Someone's chance of getting skin cancer, for example, will depend on whether he worships the sun as well as on his genes. America's Government Accountability Office (GAO) report also revealed what the industry has openly admitted for years: that results of disease-prediction tests from different companies sometimes conflict with one another, because there is no industry-wide agreement on standard lifetime risks. Governments hate this sort of anarchy and America's, in particular, is considering regulation. But three things argue against wholesale regulation. First, the level of interference needs to be based on the level of risk a test represents. The government does not need to be involved if someone decides to trace his ancestry or discover what type of earwax he has. Second, the laws on fraud should be sufficient to deal with the snake-oil salesmen who promise to predict, say, whether a child might be a sporting champion. And third, science is changing very fast. Fairly soon, a customer's whole genome will be sequenced, not merely the parts thought to be medically relevant that the testing companies now concentrate on, and he will then be able to crank the results through open-source interpretation software downloadable from anywhere on the planet. That will create problems, but the only way to stop that happening would be to make it illegal for someone to have his genome sequenced— and nobody is seriously suggesting that illiberal restriction. Instead, then, of reacting in a hostile fashion to the trend for people to take genetic tests, governments should be asking themselves how they can make best use of this new source of information. Restricting access to tests that inform people about bad reactions to drugs could do harm. The real question is not who controls access, but how to minimise the risks and maximise the rewards of a useful revolution.

单选题The telecity is a city whose life, direction, and functioning are largely shaped by telecommunications. In the twenty-first century; cities will be based more and more on an economy that is dependent on services and intellectual property. Telecommunications and information networks will define a city's architecture, shape, and character. Proximity in the telecity will be defined by the speed and bandwidth of networks as much as by geographical propinquity. In the, age of the telecity, New York and Singapore may be closer than, say, New York and Arkadelphia, Arkansas. Telecities will supersede megacities for several reasons, including the drive toward clean air, reducing pollution, energy conservation, more jobs based on services, and coping with the high cost of urban property. Now we must add the need to cope with terrorist threats in a high-technology world. Western mind-sets were clearly jolted in the wake of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in New York City and attacks in Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere. But the risks posed by twentieth-century patterns of urbanization and architecture have yet to register fully with political figures and leaders of industry. The Pentagon, for example, has been rebuilt in situation rather than distributed to multiple locations and connected by secure landlines and broadband wireless systems. Likewise, the reconstruction of the World Trade Center complex still represents a massive concentration of humanity and infrastructure. This is a remarkably shortsighted and dangerous vision of the future. The security risks, economic expenses, and environmental hazards of over centralization are everywhere, and they do not stop with skyscrapers and large governmental structures. There are risks also at seaports and airports, in food and water supplies, at nuclear power plants and hydroelectric turbines at major dams, in transportation systems, and in information and communications systems. This vulnerability applies not only to terrorist threats but also to human error, such as system-wide blackouts in North America in August 2003 and in Italy in September 2003, and natural disasters such as typhoons, hurricanes, floods, and earthquakes. Leaders and planners are only slowly becoming aware that over centralized facilities are the most vulnerable to attack or catastrophic destruction. There is also growing awareness that new broadband electronic systems now allow governments and corporations to safeguard their key assets and people in new and innovative ways. So far, corporations have been quickest to adjust to these new realities, and some governments have begun to adjust as well.

单选题The sentence "Newton would not take no for an answer" probably means _____.

单选题The best salespeople first establish a mood of trust and rapport by means of "hypnotic pacing" statements and gestures that play back a customer' s observations, experience, or behavior. Pacing is a kind of mirror-like matching, a way of suggesting: "I am like you. We are in sync. You can trust me." The simplest form of pacing is "descriptive pacing", in which the seller formulates accurate, if banal, descriptions of the customer's experience. "It's been awfully hot these last few days, hasn't it? ... You said you were going to graduate in June." These statements serve the purpose of establishing agreement and developing an unconscious affinity between seller and customer. In clinical hypnosis, the hypnotist might make comparable pacing statements. "You are ham today to see me for hypnosis." "You told me over the phone about a problem that concerns you." Sales agents with only average success tend to jump immediately into their memorized sales pitches or to hit the customer with a barrage of questions. Neglecting to pace the customer, the mediocre sales agent creates no common ground on which to build trust. A second type of hypnotic pacing statement is the "objection pacing" comment. A customer objects or resists, and the sales agent agrees, matching his or her remarks to the remarks of the customer. A superior insurance agent might agree that "insurance is not the best investment out there", just as a clinical hypnotist might tell a difficult subject. "You are resisting going into trance. That's good. I encourage that." The customer, pushing against a wall, finds that the wall has disappeared. The agent, having confirmed the customer's objection, then leads the customer to a position that negates or undermines the objection. The insurance salesperson who agreed that "insurance is not the best investment out there" went on to tell his customer, "but it does have a few uses." He then described all the benefits of life insurance. Mediocre salespeople generally respond to resistance head-on, with arguments that presumably answer the customer's 0biection. This response often leads the customer to dig in his heels all the harder. The most powerful forms of pacing have more to do with how something is said than with what is said. The good salesperson has an ability to pace the language and thought of any customer. With hypnotic effect, the agent matches the voice tone, rhythm, volume, and speech rate of the customer. He matches the customer's posture, body language, and mood. He adopts the characteristic verbal language of the customer. If the customer is slightly depressed, the agent chares that feeling and acknowledges that he has been feeling "a little down" lately. Ill essence, the top sales producer becomes a sophisticated biofeedback mechanism, sharing and reflecting the customer's reality—even to the point of breathing in and out with the customer.

单选题In Line 6, Para. 3, the author use the expression of "learn the hard way" to mean that

单选题The last three sentences in the passage serve to

单选题The human Y chromosome--the DNA chunk that makes a man a man—has lost so many genes over evolutionary time that some scientists have suspected it might disappear in 10 million years. But a new study says it'll stick around. Researchers found no sign of gene loss over the past 6 million years, suggesting the chromosome is "doing a pretty good job of maintaining itself," said researcher David Page of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Mass. That agrees with prior mathematical calculations that suggested the rate of gene loss would slow as the chromosome evolved, Page and study co-authors note in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature. And, they say, it clashes with what Page called the "imminent demise" idea that says the Y chromosome is doomed to extinction. The Y appeared 300 million years ago and has since eroded into a dinky chromosome, because it lacks the mechanism other chromosomes have to get rid of damaged DNA. So mutations have disabled hundreds of its original genes, causing them to be shed as useless. The Y now contains only 27 genes or families of virtually identical genes. In 2003, Page reported that the modern-day Y has an unusual mechanism to fix about half of its genes and protect them from disappearing. But he said some scientists disagreed with his conclusion. The new paper focuses on a region of the Y chromosome where genes can't be fixed that way. Researchers compared the human and chimpanzee versions of this region. Humans and chimps have been evolving separately for about 6 million years, so scientists reasoned that the comparisons would reveal genes that have become disabled in one species or the other during that time. They found five such genes on the chimp chromosome, but none on the human chromosome, an imbalance Page called surprising. "It looks like there has been little if any gene loss in our own species lineage in the last 6 million years," Page said. That contradicts the idea that the human Y chromosome has continued to lose genes so fast it'll disappear in 10 million years, he said. "I think we can with confidence dismiss ... the 'imminent demise' theory," Page said. Jennifer A. Marshall Graves of the Australian National University in Canberra, a gene researcher who argues for eventual extinction of the Y chromosome, called Page's work "beautiful" but said it didn't shake her conviction that the Y is doomed. The only real question is when, not if, the Y chromosome disappears, she said. "It could be a lot shorter than 10 million years, but it could be a lot longer," she said. The Y chromosome has already disappeared in some other animals, and "there's no reason to expect it can't happen to humans," she said. If it happened in people, some other chromosome would probably take over the sex-determining role of the Y, she said.

单选题Until recently, the common factor in all the science used to figure out if a piece of art was forged was that it was concerned with the medium of the artwork, rather than the art itself. Matters of style and form were left to art historians, who could make erudite,, but qualitative, judgments about whether a painting was really good enough to be, say, a Leonardo. But this is changing. A paper in this week's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Hany Farid and his colleagues at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire uses statistical techniques to examine art itself--the message, not the medium. Dr. Farid employed a technique called wavelet analysis to examine 13 drawings that had at one time or another been attributed to Pieter Bruegel the Elder, a 16th-century Flemish painter. He also looked at Perugino's "Madonna with Child", a 15th-century Italian - masterpiece lodged in the college's Hood Museum of Art. He concluded, in agreement with art historians, that eight of the putative Bruegels are authentic, while the other five are imitations. In the case of "Madonna with Child", he analysed the six faces in the painting (Mary, the infant Jesus and several saints) and found that three of them were probably done by the same painter, while the other three were each done by a different hand. The view that four different painters worked on the canvas is, he says, consistent with the view of some art historians that Perugino's apprentices did much of the work, although there is no clear consensus among art historians. As sceptics will doubtless point out, this is a small number of images. Furthermore, Dr. Farid knew before performing the analysis what results he expected. But he is the first to acknowledge that it is early days for his methodology. He hopes to study many more paintings. By looking at large numbers of paintings that are universally believed to be authentic, Dr. Farid hopes to be able to examine doubtful cases with confidence in the future. Even with the Bruegels--real and imitation--though, Dr. Farid's results are persuasive. It is tricky to describe exactly what it is that distinguishes the real ones from the imitations, but Dr. Farid says that it can be thought of as the nature of the artist's brushstroke. Unlike some analyses of Jackson Pollock's work that have been done over the past few years by Richard Taylor of the University of Oregon, Dr. Farid says his technique could, in principle, be used for any artist. What Dr. Farid did was to convert each work of art into a set of mathematical functions. These so-called wavelets describe particular parts of the image as a series of peaks and troughs of variable height and wavelength. By expressing an image this way, it is possible to compress that image while losing very little information. The sums of the wavelets from different images can then be compared. Once he did this, Dr. Farid found that the types of wavelets used to express authentic Bruegels were noticeably different from those used to express the imitations. (The Perugino was analysed by treating the six faces as distinct paintings.) It seems that curators may s6on be able to add another weapon to their anti-forgery arsenal.

单选题Soon after his appointment as secretary-general of the United Nations in 1997, Kofi Annan lamented that he was being accused of failing to reform the world body in six weeks. "But what are you complaining about?" asked the Russian ambassador. "You've had more time than God." Ah, Mr. Annan quipped back, "but God had one big advantage. He worked alone without a General Assembly, a Security Council and [all] the committees." Recounting that anecdote to journalists in New York this week, Mr. Annan sought to explain why a draft declaration on UN reform and tackling world poverty, due to be endorsed by some 150 heads of state and government at a world summit in the city on September 14th-16th, had turned into such a pale shadow of the proposals that he himself had put forward in March. "With 191 member states", he sighed, "it's not easy to get an agreement." Most countries put the blame on the United States, in the form of its abrasive new ambassador, John Bolton, for insisting at the end of August on hundreds of last-minute amendments and a line-by-line renegotiation of a text most others had thought was almost settled. But a group of middle-income developing nations, including Pakistan, Cuba, Iran, Egypt, Syria and Venezuela, also came up with plenty of last-minute changes of their own. The risk of having no document at all, and thus nothing for the world's leaders to come to New York for, was averted only by marathon all-night and all-weekend talks. The 35-page final document is not wholly devoid of substance. It calls for the creation of a Peacebuilding Commission to supervise the reconstruction of countries after wars; the replacement of the discredited UN Commission on Human Rights by a supposedly tougher Human Rights Council; the recognition of a new "responsibility to protect" peoples from genocide and other atrocities when national authorities fail to take action, including, if necessary, by force; and an "early" reform of the Security Council. Although much pared down, all these proposals have at least survived. Others have not. Either they proved so contentious that they were omitted altogether, such as the sections on disarmament and non-proliferation and the International Criminal Court, or they were watered down to little more than empty platitudes. The important section on collective security and the use of force no longer even mentions the vexed issue of pre-emptive strikes; meanwhile the section on terrorism condemns it "in all its forms and manifestations, committed by whomever, wherever and for whatever purposes", but fails to provide the clear definition the Americans wanted. Both Mr. Annan and, more surprisingly, George Bush have nevertheless sought to put a good face on things, with Mr. Annan describing the summit document as "an important step forward" and Mr. Bush saying the UN had taken "the first steps" towards reform. Mr. Annan and Mr. Bolton are determined to go a lot further. It is now up to the General Assembly to flesh out the document's skeleton proposals and propose new ones. But its chances of success appear slim.