In an ideal world

Hunger is no novelty

If you are worried about climate change

Directions: em>Seat occupation has become a common phenomenon in your university

A. The health dangers of eating meat B. Respect the rights of animals C

Helping yourself to a cup of coffee may seem like a small, everyday thing. But not if you are quadriplegic. Unlike paraplegics, for whom the robotic legs described in the previous article are being developed, quadriplegics have lost the use of all four limbs. Yet thanks to a project organised by John Donoghue of Brown University, in Rhode Island, and his colleagues, they too have hope. One of the participants in his experiments, a 58-year-old woman who is unable to use any of her limbs, can now pick up a bottle containing coffee and bring it close enough to her mouth to drink from it using a straw. She does so using a thought-controlled robotic arm fixed to a nearby stand. It is the first time she has managed something like that since she suffered a stroke, nearly 15 years ago. Arms are more complicated pieces of machinery than legs, so controlling them via electrodes attached to the skin of someone's scalp is not yet possible. Instead, brain activity has to be recorded directly. And that is what Dr. Donoghue is doing. Both his female participant and a second individual, a man of 66 also paralysed by a stroke, have worked with him before, as a result of which they have had small, multichannel electrodes implanted in the parts of the motor cortexes of their brains associated with hand movements. The woman's implant was put there in 2005; the man's five months before the latest trial, described in a paper just published in em>Nature/em>. Dr. Donoghue and his team decoded signals from their participants' brains as they were asked to imagine controlling a robotic arm making preset movements. The volunteers were then encouraged to operate one of two robot arms by thinking about the movements they wanted to happen. When the software controlling the arms detected the relevant signals, the arms moved appropriately. Dr. Donoghue and his colleagues have thus shown that a mechanical arm can be controlled remotely by the brain of a person with paralysis. Controlling a true prosthetic-an arm that is attached to the individual's body-will be trickier, but in time even that may be possible. In the meantime, a robotic arm attached to (say) a wheelchair will be a real boon. For people who have little or no ability to move their arms Dr Donoghue's work promises liberation in the form of quotidian action that the able-bodied take for granted. Dr. Donoghue's experiments include ______.

Directions: Your pen pal Peter will come to Beijing for a visit. For some reasons

Choice is a fundamental American value that often lies at the center of heated political discussions

It's not that we thought things were free

A. MBA program boom in South Africa B. Current assessment of MBA programs C

阅读理解Text 2A new survey by Harvard University finds more than two-thirds of young Americans disapprove of President Trumps use of Twitter

阅读理解Part BDirections:The following paragraphs are given in a wrong order

阅读理解Text 1Among the annoying challenges facing the middle class is one that will probably go unmentioned in the next presidential campaign: What happens when the robots come for their jobs?Dont dismiss that possibility entirely

阅读理解Text 4The U

阅读理解Text 3Any fair-minded assessment of the dangers of the deal between Britains National Health Service (NHS) and DeepMind must start by acknowledging that both sides mean well

阅读理解A. In December of 1869, Congress appointed a commission to select a site and prepare plans and cost estimates for a new State Department Building. The commission was also to consider possible arrangements for the War and Navy Departments. To the horror of some who expected a Greek Revival twin of the Treasury Building to be erected on the other side of the White House, the elaborate French Second Empire style design by Alfred Mullett was selected, and construction of a building to house all thre

单选题If you ask a Swiss person who their president is, they likely won't be able to tell you. And it's not because they are politically apathetic or uninformed. In Switzerland, citizens don't vote for their president. In this small alpine country, citizens elect a new Parliament every four years, and the Parliament chooses a group of seven councilors from different parties. They are the head of state. The presidency rotates among the members every year. But the keystone of Swiss democracy is the regular use of referendums, in which citizens vote on everything from their town's new sports center to the country's immigration policy. As Michael Bechtel, professor of political science at the University of St. Gallen, explains, in a direct democracy there is a stronger incentive for political elites to take into account citizen preferences when making choices. It might sound like a panacea for Occupy Wall Street types, but this is actually a complex system with both advantages and disadvantages. Voting in Switzerland is easy. With no need to register, every citizen receives a ballot for each vote, which can be returned by mail. And decisions aren't final. If a law has already been passed, people can still overturn it by getting 50,000 signatures in 100 days. The bill then has to be voted on by the public. And if that wasn't enough, Swiss citizens can also suggest their own laws by " popular initiative ." If 100,000 people ask for a change in the constitution, the Parliament is obligated to discuss it and submit the proposal to a popular vote. To be sure, there are pitfalls. Popular votes can lead to a tyranny of the majority, making it easy to discriminate against small groups. In 2009, a law was passed with 57 percent of the votes in favor of banning the construction of mosque towers even if the government emphatically opposed the ban. This system also slows down the law-making process and makes it more difficult to get on the same page with international rulings like those of the European Union. Could other nations benefit from direct democracy? Maybe, but the preconditions are high. Besides being a well-educated electorate with basic rights, they must be able to see past party lines." It comes down to how much you trust your fellow citizens," says Klaus Dingwerth, political scientist and fellow at the Global Public Policy Institute.

单选题Although the names on the list of SIFI are supposed to be secret. AIG and Prudential, two insurers, this week confirmed they are on it. So too did GE Capital, the conglomerate's financial arm. These firms, and perhaps others, have joined America's largest banks and clearing houses in being 【C1】______ "systemically important financial institutions" (SIFIs) by the new Financial Stability Oversight Council, a regulatory watchdog. What that means in practice is that 【C2】______ they are thought to be 【C3】______ enough to blow up America's economy, they should get special 【C4】______. An appeals process against being 【C5】______ a SIFI will last for 30 days, but discussions have been going on for years so it is hard to believe minds will be 【C6】______ now. The immediate 【C7】______ is that the firms will be regulated by the Fed and 【C8】______ to tougher capital and operational requirements. Jack Lew, the treasury secretary, said the designations would "protect taxpayers, reduce risk in the financial system, and 【C9】______ financial stability." Others are less 【C10】______. "This is a catastrophe," says Peter Wallison, a fellow of the American Enterprise Institute, a think-tank, and a former White House counsel. Putting these institutions under the 【C11】______ of the Fed will 【C12】______ undermine their ability to innovate, he argues. And joining the group of entities perceived to be too big to fail means they will enjoy an 【C13】______ government guarantee. That will put them at a funding advantage 【C14】______ smaller companies, he says, and 【C15】______ that their products are government-backed, a huge help for insurers in particular. Firms themselves appear to have 【C16】______ feelings about the SIFI label. AIG seems to approve; MetLife, an insurer that has not been designated, thinks that the higher capital requirements it brings could 【C17】______ the viability of some products. Much depends on whether SIFIs are now perceived to have an implicit guarantee, and on 【C18】______ that can be monetised. It also 【C19】______ how many other firms are designated SIFIs. Lots of financial firms in America are large: there are rumblings a-bout money-market funds, asset managers and private-equity firms. Risk can move around the financial system. The question today is which firms should be on the list. Eventually it might be which to 【C20】______.

单选题Management consultants, investment banks and big law firms are the Holy Trinity of white-collar careers. They recruit up to a third of the graduates of the world's best universities. They offer starting salaries in excess of $ 100,000 and a chance of making many multiples of that. They also provide a ladder to even better things. The top ranks of governments and central banks are sprinkled with Goldman Sachs and McKinsey veterans. Technology firms, though they are catching up fast, have nothing like the same grip on the global elite. Which raises a pressing question; how do you maximize your chances of joining such elite professional-services firms? Lauren Rivera of Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management has spent a decade studying how these firms recruit. According to her, the best way to get into the tiny group of elite firms is to be studying at the tiny group of elite universities. The firms spend millions of dollars love-bombing these institutions with recruiting events: students can spend the recruitment season wining and dining at their expense. However, as Ms. Rivera notes, firms reject the vast majority of elite students they interview: so even the most pedigreed need to learn how to game the system. The most important tip is to look at who is doing the recruiting. The firms use revenue-generating staff rather than human-resources people to decide who has the right stuff. The interviewers are trying to juggle their day jobs with their recruiting duties. In the interview room they behave predictably: they follow a set script, starting with some ice-breaking chit-chat, then asking you about yourself, then setting a work-related problem. That makes them desperate for relief from the tedium. Be enthusiastic. Hang on their every word. And flatter their self-image as "the best of the best". The most important quality recruiters are looking for is "fit": for all their supposedly rigorous testing of candidates, they would sooner choose an easy-going person with a second-class mind than a Mark Zuckerberg-type genius who rubs people up the wrong way. Staff in professional-services firms spend most of their time dealing with clients; so looking the part is essential. They also expect their employees to spend extraordinary amounts of time together—learning the ropes in boot camps, working late in the office, having constant work dinners, getting stuck together in airports in godforsaken places. One candidate in Ms. Rivera's sample passed the interview by adopting the persona of a successful consultant that he knew at that firm. Even if you do not go that far, you must at all costs avoid appearing nerdy or eccentric. The old-fashioned belief still prevails that playing team sports, especially posh ones like rowing, makes for a rounded character. The final key to success is to turn your interviewer into a champion: someone who is willing to go to bat for you when the hiring committee meets to whittle down the list.

单选题[A] We don't make a commitment.[B] We get trapped by thinking fallacies.[C] We're motivated by negative emotions.[D] We try to change too much.[E] We try to eat the entire elephant.[F] We neglect the toolbox.[G] We forget that failure is usually a given. Changing our behavior is a self-engineering challenge with few equals. Whether the change involves diet, exercise, habits, dependencies or anything else, changing behavior is one of the hardest things any of us will ever try to do. This is a well-researched area and quite a lot is known about why sustained change is tremendously difficult. Here are five of the biggest reasons.【B1】______ While it's understandable to think that strongly felt negative emotions like regret, shame, fear and guilt should be able to catalyze lasting behavior change, the opposite is true. Negative emotion may trigger us to think about everything we're not doing, or feel like we're doing wrong, but it's horrible fuel for making changes that stick. One review of 129 behavior change studies found that the consistently least effective change strategies hinged on fear and regret. As much as this sounds like a platitude, real change needs a positive platform to launch from; we need positive, self-edifying reasons for taking on the challenge.【B2】______ Feeling overwhelmed by trying to change a behavior—any behavior—tends to foster all-or-nothing thinking. "I'm going to charge in and change, and if I fail that means I just can't do it." If you're up on your cognitive biases and distortions, you know that all-or-nothing thinking is a big one. It straps us into a no-win situation, because your odds of sustaining even the most impressive jolt of momentum to change any behavior just aren't very good. If we really want to change, one of the first things we have to do is take all-or-nothing off the table, and purge a few other thinking errors while we're at it.【B3】______ Behavior change is a big thing, no matter the behavior, and it's almost never possible to take all of it on all at once. We have to start somewhere with particular, measurable actions. Big and vague has to give way to small and specific. Rather than "I'm going to start exercising," it's "I'm going to start walking tonight after work for 30 minutes down Edgemont Road." Each specific action is one forkful of behavior change, and a set of those actions engaged over time results in cumulative change. And accompanying those cumulative actions, we need specific goals, which behavior change research suggests are essential to success because we need performance targets to measure ourselves against. And those, too, should be realistic and specific.【B4】______ If you can commit to changing one behavior long-term, and really make it stick, that's commendable change. But trying to take on multiple behaviors at once is a surefire way to send all of them into a ditch. The resources we rely on to make change happen are limited: attention, self-control, motivation, etc. Trying to change too much places unrealistic demands on those resources and dooms the efforts early on. We forget that the other areas of our lives keep spinning and also require those resources, so even just one additional behavior-change commitment is a big deal.【B5】______ Finally, but perhaps most importantly, what the best of behavior change research tells us is that if we haven't made a commitment to accomplish whatever we want to accomplish, it won't happen. We need a "commitment device" that firmly establishes what we're going to do and how we're going to do it. Everything else starts there.