单选题It is supposed to be the time of opportunity and adventure, before mortgages and marriage have taken their toll. But【C1】______to cope with anxieties about jobs, unemployment, debt and relationships, many young adults are experiencing a "quarterlife crisis", according to new research by British psychologists. 【C2】______all the features of the midlife crisis, this phenomenon—【C3】______by insecurities, disappointments, loneliness and depression—is【C4】______twenty- and thirtysomethings shortly after they enter the "real world", with educated professionals most likely to suffer. "Quarterlife crises don't happen【C5】______a quarter of the way through your life," said lead researcher Dr Oliver Robinson, from the University of Greenwich in London. "They occur a quarter of your way through【C6】______, in the period between 25 and 35, although they【C7】______around 30." Robinson, who presented his【C8】______at the British Psychological Society Annual Conference in Glasgow, worked with researchers from Birkbeck College on what he says is the first research to look at the quarterlife crisis from a "solid, empirical【C9】______based on data rather than【C10】______." The research is backed by a(n)【C11】______which found 86% of the 1,100 young people questioned admitted feeling under pressure to succeed【C12】______their relationships, finances and jobs before hitting 30. Two in five were【C13】______about money, saying they did not earn enough, and 32% felt under pressure to marry and have children by the age of 30. Six percent were planning to emigrate,【C14】______21% wanted a complete career change. But Robinson also found that the quarterlife crisis—which lasts on average for two years—can be a【C15】______experience. Such early-life crises have four【C16】______, he said, moving from feelings of being trapped to a desire for【C17】______then, eventually, the【C18】______and solidifying of a new life. "The results will help reassure those who are experiencing this【C19】______that it is a commonly experienced part of early adult life, and that a proven pattern of positive change【C20】______it," said Robinson.

单选题"What's the difference between God and Larry Ellison?" asks an old software industry joke. Answer: God doesn't think he's Larry Ellison. The boss of Oracle is hardly alone among corporate chiefs in having a reputation for being rather keen on himself. Indeed, until the bubble burst and the public turned nasty at the start of the decade, the worship of the celebrity chief executive seemed to demand bossly narcissism, as evidence that a firm was being led by an all-conquering hero. Narcissus met a nasty end, of course. And in recent years, boss-worship has come to be seen as bad for business. In his management bestseller, "Good to Great", Jim Collins argued that the truly successful bosses were not the self-proclaimed stars who adorn the covers of Forbes and Fortune, but instead modest, thoughtful sorts who lead by inspiring example. A statistical answer may be at hand. For the first time, a new study, "It's All About Me", to be presented next week at the annual gathering of the American Academy of Management, offers a systematic, empirical analysis of what effect narcissistic bosses have on the firms they run. The authors, Arijit Chat-terjee and Donald Hambrick, of Pennsylvania State University, examined narcissism in the upper rank of 105 firms in the computer and software industries. To do this, they had to solve a practical problem: studies of narcissism have relied on surveying individuals personally, something for which few chief executives are likely to have time or inclination. So the authors devised an index of narcissism using six publicly available indicators obtainable without the cooperation of the boss. These are: the prominence of the boss's photo in the annual report; his prominence in company press releases; the length of his "Who's Who" entry; the frequency of his use of the first person singular in interviews; and the ratios of his cash and non-cash compensation to those of the firm's second-highest paid executive. Narcissism naturally drives people to seek positions of power and influence, and because great self-esteem helps your professional advance, say the authors, chief executives will tend on average to be more narcissistic than the general population. Messrs Chatterjee and Hambrick found that highly narcissistic bosses tended to make bigger changes in the use of important resources, such as research and development, or in spending; they carried out more and bigger mergers and acquisitions; and their results were both more extreme (more big wins or big losses) and more unstable than those of firms run by their humbler peers.

单选题The idea seems sort of foolish, just another exercise trick. Stand for a few minutes on a platform that vibrates. Get off and try to do some weight lifting. Or see how high you can jump. You are【C1】______supposed to be able to lift heavier weights and jump higher. But maybe it's not so【C2】______, exercise experts say. Although they don't really know why vibrations should work, researchers report that they actually seem to slightly improve【C3】______in the few minutes after a person gets off the machine. The problem,【C4】______, is that there is little【C5】______on how fast the vibrations should be or in what direction platforms are【C6】______to vibrate. Some studies have【C7】______to show any effects from vibrations. And then there is the question of【C8】______exactly vibrations are doing to muscles and nerves. "It【C9】______is arousing interest, and a large portion of the【C10】______would support that something is happening," said Lee E. Brown, an expert at California State University. But he added, "We are still trying to【C11】______exactly what the mechanism is." Meanwhile, several companies make the vibrating platforms, and they are being used at gyms and【C12】______some athletes. One company, Power Plate,【C13】______that stars like Serena Williams and Justin Morneau, of the Minnesota Twins, train with its【C14】______. Another company, Wave, says the United States ski team used its vibrating plates in training【C15】______the coming Winter Olympics. But researchers are【C16】______. "There is something to it," said William J. Kraemer, a professor at the University of Connecticut,【C17】______it "another tool" for athletic conditioning. But he added that other conditioning methods might【C18】______the same or better results. Researchers say, people should be appropriately skeptical about the effects of standing on a vibrating platform. "We don't know a lot about prescribing it," Dr. Kraemer said. "There's the【C19】______. Research is trying to【C20】______up."

单选题Understanding what distinguishes people who battle with Alzheimer's as they age from those whose mental acuteness remains strong well into their 80s, 90s and even older, is a major focus of current psychiatric research Previous studies have pointed to the potentially protective value of exercise, social support and even language skills. And other studies have also shown that having a strong sense of purpose in life is, unsurprisingly, associated with greater overall mental health, happiness, and even longevity. A study published recently in the Archives of General Psychiatry expands on that research, finding that people who reported feeling a greater sense of purpose in life were less likely to develop Alzheimer's disease than those who reported feeling less fulfilled. The study, conducted by researchers at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, analyzed medical records and life outlook among 951 participants from the Rush Memory and Aging Project. At the beginning of the study, participants' overall sense of purpose in life was measured by assessing their level of agreement with 10 statements—such as, "I have a sense of direction and purpose in life,"—derived from a psychological well-being scale. After an average of four years of follow-up, 16.3% (155) participants had developed Alzheimer's disease. When researchers analyzed the relationship between the psychological well-being scale and risk of Alzheimer's, they found that participants who reported higher levels of fulfillment were significantly less likely to have developed the degenerative mental disease than those who expressed less sense of validation in life. In fact, participants with high scores on the life purpose test were 2.4 times less likely to develop Alzheimer's compared with those who had the lowest scores. Researchers say that what drives the correlation between reduced risk and heightened sense of purpose is not clear, and should be explored with future research Still, they expressed optimism at the findings, which add to studies that have linked sense of fulfillment in life everything from better sleep to improved psychological health. What's more, because a sense of purpose is something that can be cultivated, researchers say that these findings could point toward new treatments designed to improve sense of fulfillment in older adults. If these findings are replicated, they say, "the implications could be far-reaching, and efforts to increase purpose in life may help reduce the rapidly increasing burden of cognitive impairment in old age." Perhaps Marlow and Frances Cowan can offer some insight into how to make the most of life as you age. It's hard to watch the elderly couple's playful—and off-hand—piano performance in a lobby at the Mayo Clinic without admiring their sense of fulfillment, and breaking into a grin.

单选题When two drunken men fight over a woman, alcohol and stupidity may not be the only things at work. Sadly, evolution may have shaped men to behave this way. Almost all of the traits considered to be masculine—big muscles, facial hair, square jaws, deep voices and a propensity to violence—evolved, it now seems, specifically for their usefulness in fighting off or intimidating other men, allowing the winner to get the girl. That, at least, is the contention of David Puts, an anthropologist at Pennsylvania State University, in an upcoming paper in Evolution and Human Behavior. Dr Puts is looking at how sexual selection gave rise to certain human traits. A trait is sexually selected if it evolved specifically to enhance mating success. They come in two main forms: weapons, such as an elk's horns, which are used to fight off competitors; and ornaments, like a peacock's tail, which are used to advertise genetic fitness to attract the opposite sex. Researchers have tended to consider human sexual selection through the lens of the female's choice of her mate. But human males look a lot more like animals designed to battle with one another for access to females, says Dr Puts. On average, men have 40% more fat-free mass than women, which is similar to the difference in gorillas, a species in which males unquestionably compete with other males for exclusive sexual access to females. In species whose males do not fight for access to females, males are generally the same size as, or smaller than, females. The heavier brow and jaw of males might have developed to withstand blows from other males. Heavy eyebrows, facial hair and deep voices all could serve to make a man more imposing to other men. Dr Puts does not dismiss mate selection outright. Women are attracted to some of the same traits that are good for dominating other men because they signal that the man will sire sons who will also be successful at mating. But female choice probably is not the primary cause of the traits. It is a disturbing idea to modern minds, harking back to old stereotypes about violent cavemen battling with clubs while a passive woman, fetching in furs, waits helplessly to see who will win her. But Dr Puts emphasizes that evolutionary biology is not destiny. Regardless of our evolutionary past, in modern societies men and women freely choose their mates. However, understanding the evolutionary pressures that made men the way they are could help us better understand male violence, including murder, domestic abuse, gang violence and perhaps even warfare.

单选题The era of cheap and convenient sources of energy is coming to an end. A transition to more expensive but less polluting sources must now be managed. Energy contributes positively to human's well-being by providing such consumer services as heating and lighting. But the costs of energy—including not only the money and other resources devoted to exploiting it but also environmental impacts—diminish the well-being. For most of the past 100 years, the problems of excessive energy costs have seemed less threatening than the problems of insufficient supply. However, it became possible to think that expanding some forms of energy supply could create costs exceeding the benefits as energy was getting costlier in all respects. There are a variety of other energy resources that are more abundant than oil and gas. But none of them can deliver large quantities of electricity at costs comparable to those of the cheap coal-fired plants of the 1960's.

单选题"At Booz Allen, we're shaping the future of cyber-security," trumpets a recruiting message on the website of Booz Allen Hamilton, a consulting and technology firm. It is hard to argue with that exaggeration right now. Edward Snowden, the man who revealed he was responsible for leaks about monitoring American citizens by the National Security Agency (NSA), was a contractor working for Booz Allen. That has turned a spotlight on the extensive involvement of private firms in helping America's spies to do their jobs. The affair could lead to changes in the way these relationships work. The role of firms such as Booz Allen in the intelligence arena and the flow of government cyber-tsars into tech companies are evidence of an emerging cyber-industrial complex in which the private and public sectors are intimately linked. Some will see this as a worrying development, noting that President Dwight Eisenhower used the term "military-industrial complex" in a speech in 1961 to give warning about the dangers of too cosy a relationship between government, military men and defence contractors. There are risks inherent in the cyber-industrial complex too. Mr. Snowden's leak will raise questions about just how watertight firms such as Booz Allen can keep their operations. There is also a theoretical risk that former officials might tap their friends in government to give their new employers an unfair advantage in bidding for federal contracts or to influence policy for commercial advantage. But there are also reasons why the cyber-industrial complex should, on balance, be welcomed. For a start, many talented but weird teenies would refuse to work for government agencies. Better to have them work as contractors than not to enlist their talents at all. Deep-pocketed firms may also be best placed to attract rare birds such as data scientists. Because of the danger that online security threats pose, companies need to co-operate closely with government spies to counter them. Former cyber-officials can advise firms how best to do this. Moreover, if the government wants to continue to benefit from the intelligence of its departing cyber-warriors, it can always hire their new firms. Government types can also help cyber-security firms and consultancies, which are prime targets for hackers, to protect their own operations better. Dmitri Alperovitch, a founder of CrowdStrike, a cyber-security company that hired Shawn Henry after he retired from a senior position at the FBI, says that in addition to working with clients Mr. Henry is also responsible for CrowdStrike's own internal security.

单选题A new study found that inner-city kids living in neighborhoods with more green space gained about 13% less weight over a two-year period than kids living amid more concrete and fewer trees. Such【C1】______tell a powerful story. The obesity epidemic began in the 1980s, and many people【C2】______it to increased portion sizes and inactivity, but that can't be everything. Fast foods and TVs have been with us for a long time. "Most experts agree that the changes were【C3】______to something in the environment," says social epidemiologist Thomas Glass of The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. That something could be a【C4】______of the green. The new research,【C5】______in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, isn't the first to associate greenery with better health, but it does get us closer【C6】______identifying what works and why. At its most straightforward, a green neighborhood【C7】______means more places for kids to play—which is【C8】______since time spent outdoors is one of the strongest correlates of children's activity levels. But green space is good for the mind【C9】______: research by environmental psychologists has shown that it has cognitive【C10】______for children with attention-deficit disorder. In one study, just reading【C11】______in a green setting improved kids' symptoms. 【C12】______to grassy areas has also been linked to【C13】______stress and a lower body mass index among adults. And an【C14】______of 3,000 Tokyo residents associated walkable green spaces with greater long life among senior citizens. Glass cautions that most studies don't【C15】______prove a causal link between greenness and health, but they're nonetheless helping spur action. In September the U.S. House of Representatives【C16】______the delightfully named No Child Left Inside Act to encourage public initiatives【C17】______exposing kids to the outdoors. Finding green space is not【C18】______easy, and you may have to work a bit to get your family a little grass and trees. If you live in a suburb or a city with good parks,【C19】______what's there. Your children in particular will love it—and their bodies and minds will be【C20】______to you.

单选题A. Have enough information B. Listen to your Gremlin C. Test them against your values D. Respect your doubts E. Trust your gut F. Weigh up the pro's and con's G. It just doesn't matter Some years ago I remember standing in my kitchen, staring silently at my boxes of cereal, trying to decide which to have for breakfast. I stood there for 5 minutes, until—utterly frustrated—I marched out of the house and went without. Fortunately I've learned to make decisions more quickly and more easily now, and when I notice that second-guessing and doubting starting to kick in, I kick it right back. So here are 5 ways to make confident decisions. 【R1】______ So many times we have to make decisions without a framework and no way to judge between two choices. When faced with a tricky decision it's often a good idea to line up your choices and ask "Which one of these most honors the things that mean the most to me?" The decision that's most in line with the things that mean the most to you—your core values—will be the best decision for you. That might not be the simplest or most practical, but because it fits with who you are and what's most important to you it will always be the best decision for you. 【R2】______ When I was growing up I used to love rainy Sunday afternoons watching Columbo (an American crime fiction TV series). What Columbo had bundles of was a great trust in his intuition. In every episode, from the very moment he first meets the bad guy, he knows "whodunit"—and he always trusts that. So look at what your intuition tells you is the 'right' decision for you. Forget about all the "What if 's" and the myriad, tiny details—what is your gut telling you? Listen to your intuition, it knows what it's talking about. 【R3】______ My decision between breakfast cereals wasn't a big deal. Whichever one I chose, there were never going to be any huge consequences and the ripples from that decision wouldn't have been felt much further than the end of my spoon. Sometimes it just doesn't matter which way you go. It's easy to get wrapped up in second-guessing yourself, going round in circles and over-complicating things, when—if you get right down to it—it just doesn't matter. Going round in circles is only going to make you dizzy, so stop it. Ask yourself this question—if your future happiness wasn't dependent on your decision, which way would you go? 【R4】______ Go and get the facts before you make a complex decision. By all means weigh up the pro's and con's so that you can get an understanding of what's behind a choice. But be careful—there's a huge difference between knowing enough to make a choice, and knowing everything to make a choice. When you feel yourself pursuing every fact or every piece of information before you make a decision, stop yourself. Ask "What do I really need to know to make this decision?" and focus your efforts on getting the best information relatively quickly. 【R5】______ We all naturally shy away from change, and we've developed a whole bunch of tricks that make it easy for us to avoid making decisions and stay exactly where we are. That part of you is often called the "Gremlin", and it's the part of you that would rather avoid making decisions altogether rather than run the risk of making a bad one or screwing up. Your Gremlin is not the same thing as having doubts, which are valid concerns about a possible course of action, or reasonable concerns about what might be in store. Your doubts can help you prepare for change and get ready for what could happen. Your Gremlin is adept at feeding on your doubts and using them to get you to stay put, so knowing the difference between your Gremlin and your valid doubts helps you clarify what's real and what's imagined, what's relevant and what's irrelevant.

单选题If you were a woman reading this magazine 40 years ago, the odds were good that your husband provided the money to buy it. That your son was heading to college but not your daughter. That your boss, if you had a job, could explain that he was paying you less because, after all, you were probably working just for pocket money. It's funny how things change slowly, until the day we realize they've changed completely. It's expected that by the end of the year, for the first time in history the majority of workers in the U.S. will be women—largely because the downturn has hit men so hard. This is an extraordinary change in a single generation, and it is gathering speed. More and more women are the primary breadwinner in their household or are providing essential income for the family's bottom line. Their buying power has never been greater.

单选题When my mother's health was failing, I was the "bad" sister who lived far away and wasn't involved. My sister helped my parents. She never asked me to do anything, and I didn't【C1】______. I was widowed, raising kids and working, but that wasn't really【C2】______I kept to weekly calls and short, infrequent visits. I was【C3】______in my adolescent role as the indifferent achiever, defending myself【C4】______my judgmental mother and other family craziness. As always, I turned a deaf ear to my sister's【C5】______about my not being around more—and I didn't hear her rising desperation. It wasn't until my mom's【C6】______, watching my dad and sister【C7】______each other and weep, that I got a【C8】______of their long painful experience—and how badly I'd behaved. My sister was so furious, she【C9】______spoke to me during my father's last years. To be honest, I'm not a terrible person. So how did I get it so【C10】______? We hear a lot about the【C11】______of taking care of our graying population. But the big story beneath the surface is the psychological crisis among middle-aged brothers and sisters who are fighting【C12】______issues involving their aging parents. According to a new survey, an【C13】______43.5 million adults in the U.S. are【C14】______an older relative or friend. Of these, 43% said they did not feel they had a【C15】______in this role. And although 7 in 10 said another unpaid caregiver had provided help in the past year, only 1 in 10 said the burden was【C16】______equally. As brothers and sisters who are often separated【C17】______and emotionally, we are having to come together to decide such【C18】______issues as where Mom and Dad should live and where they should be【C19】______. "It's like being put down with your brothers and sisters in the center of a nuclear reactor and being told, 'Figure it【C20】______,'" says University of Colorado psychologist Sara Honn Quails.

单选题Human language is the subject of endless scientific investigation, but the gestures that accompany speech are a surprisingly neglected area. It is sometimes jokingly said that the way to render an Italian speechless is to tie his wrists together, but almost everyone moves their hands in meaningful ways when they talk Susan Goldin-Meadow of the University of Chicago, however, studies gestures carefully—and not out of idle curiosity. Introspection suggests that gesturing not only helps people communicate but also helps them to think. She set out to test this, and specifically to find out whether gestures might be used as an aid to children's learning. It turns out, as she told the American Association for the Advancement of Science, that they can. The experiment she conducted involved balancing equations. Presented with an equation of the form 2+3+4=x+4, written on a blackboard, a child is asked to calculate the value of x. In the equations Dr Goldin-Meadow always made the last number on the left the same as the last on the right; so x was the sum of the first two numbers. Commonly, however, children who are learning arithmetic will add all three of the numbers on the left to arrive at the value of x. In her previous work Dr Goldin-Meadow had noted that children often use spontaneous gestures when explaining how they solve mathematical puzzles. So to see if these hand-movements actually help a child to think, or are merely descriptive, she divided a group of children into two and asked them to balance equations. One group was asked to gesture while doing so. A second was asked not to. Both groups were then given a lesson in how to solve problems of this sort. As Dr Goldin-Meadow suspected, the first group learnt more from the lesson than the second. By observing their gestures she refined the experiment. Often, a child would touch or point to the first two numbers on the left with the first two fingers of one hand. Dr Goldin-Meadow therefore taught this gesture explicitly to another group of children. Or, rather, she taught a third of them, taught another third to point to the second and third numbers this way, and told the remainder to use no gestures. When all were given the same lesson it was found those gesturing "correctly" learnt the most. But those gesturing "incorrectly" still outperformed the non-gesturers. Gesturing, therefore, clearly does help thought. Indeed, it is so thought-provoking that even the wrong gestures have some value. Perhaps this helps to explain why the arithmetic-intensive profession of banking was invented in Italy.

单选题Throughout the years, music has been a common thread that unites generations and had provided social commentary, individual expression, and a soundtrack for life. Music has evolved and changed as time has moved forward, and become, in some cases more of an art, and in other cases, less than one. Today music has nearly universal appeal—though there are more styles and types of music than ever before, there are also wider gaps in ever between groups who listen to certain types of music. This said, however there are still millions of Americans who consider themselves to have "global musical tastes" meaning that they listen to numerous genres of music on a regular basis instead of focusing their time and attention on only rap, country, or rock and roll. In Utah, as in most other parts of the country, there are many people who listen to a broad range of music: from Oldies to Emo and from Blues to Hip Hop. These varying tastes in music are reflected by the concerts in Utah during any given year. Utah's concerts range from the biggest names in Hip Hop and Country music to Rock and Roll acts that you might have thought had been dissolved in the 80's. There seems to be just as much excitement for a Cyndi Lauper or Pretenders reunion tour as for a tour from Snoop Dogg or The Foo Fighters. The sheer dynamism of Utah concert goers—in age and musical taste makes Utah a "must stop" for most any musical act. Utah's concert scene consists of many small venues such as bars and private clubs that host touring acts year round, as well as a few large venues, both indoor and outdoor that host only the larger acts and are only open during certain times of the year—as dictated by sports team schedules and weather. The varying degrees of concert venues in Utah makes for an additional plus for great musical acts to stop in Utah. There are obviously some acts, while very well received in bars and small venues, that just would not be able to fill a 20,000 seat amphitheater. Thus, the various small venues are perfect for lesser known or up-and-coming rock and country acts that are not quite able to fill the bigger venues. All things considered, Utah has a lot going for it in terms of creating a solid environment for musical acts as well as fans of music from a myriad of genres. As the state continues to grow and become a more mainstream culture, concerts in Utah will continue to be growing attractions.

单选题Every day, employees make decisions about whether to act like givers or like takers. When they act like givers, they contribute to others without seeking anything in return. They might offer assistance, share knowledge, or make valuable introductions. When they act like takers, they try to get other people to serve their ends while carefully guarding their own expertise and time. Organizations have a strong interest in fostering giving behavior. A willingness to help others achieve their goals lies at the heart of effective collaboration, innovation, quality improvement, and service excellence. In workplaces where such behavior becomes the norm, the benefits multiply quickly. But even as leaders recognize the importance of generous behavior and call for more of it, workers receive mixed messages about the advisability of acting in the interests of others. As a matter of fact, various situations put employees against one another, encouraging them to undercut rather than support their colleagues' efforts. Even without a dog-eat-dog scoring system, strict description of responsibilities and a focus on individual performance metrics can cause a "not my job" mentality to take hold. As employees look around their organizations for models of success, they encounter further reasons to be wary of generosity. A study by the Stanford professor Frank Flynn highlighted this problem. When he examined patterns of favor exchange among the engineers in one company, he found that the leastproductive engineers were givers—workers who had done many more favors for others than they'd received. I made a similar discovery in a study of salespeople: The ones who generated the least revenue reported a particularly strong concern for helping others. This creates a challenge for managers. Can they promote generosity without cutting into productivity and undermining fairness? How can they avoid creating situations where already-generous people give away too much of their attention while selfish coworkers feel they have even more license to take? How, in short, can they protect good people from being treated like doormats? Part of the solution must involve targeting the takers in the organization—providing incentives for them to collaborate and informing them of the consequences of refusing reasonable requests. But even more important, my research suggests, is helping the givers act on their generous impulses more productively. The key is for employees to gain a more subtle understanding of what generosity is and is not. Givers are better positioned to succeed when they distinguish generosity from three other attributes-timidity, availability, and empathy—that tend to travel with it.

单选题To function well in the world, people need a good sense of where their body is in space and how it's postured. This "position sense" helps us coordinate high-fives, boot a soccer ball or pick up the remote. But that doesn't seem to mean that our brains have an accurate sense of our body's precise proportions. A new study found that people tend to have rather inaccurate mental models of their own hands. When asked to estimate where the fingertips and finger joints of their hidden hands were, study volunteers were way off. But they were all incorrect in the same directions, guessing that their hands were both shorter and wider than they actually were. The findings come from a study led by Matthew Longo of the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London. "Our results show dramatic distortions of hand shape, which were highly consistent across participants," Longo said in a prepared statement. He and his co-author, Patrick Haggard, had subjects place their left hand on a platform (using different orientations in different groups), which was then covered with a board to obscure the hand. The subjects were asked to use their free right hand point with a stick to the location of each finger joint and fingertip of their left hand. The process was filmed and compared to before and after pictures of the hand. On average, the volunteers judged their hands to be 27.9 percent shorter and 69 percent wider than they were measure to be. Underestimation of each finger length, from the thumb to the little finger, increased by about 7 percent in each finger, rendering the little finger quite a bit littler than it really was. This trend "mirrors similar grades of decreasing sensory acuteness," the authors pointed out, and the results seem to back up models of the human body constructed from the amount of sensory cortex dedicated to various body parts. In these models the hands and face are disproportionately large in comparison to most of the body. But Longo and Haggard are still not sure why the brain has such a distorted perception of our hand proportions. Longo speculated that these disproportions might occur in other parts of the body as well. "These findings may well be relevant to psychiatric conditions involving body image such as anorexia nervosa, as there may be a general bias toward perceiving the body to be wider than it is," Longo said. "Our healthy participants had a basically accurate visual image of their own body, but the brain's model of the hand underling position sense was highly distorted. This distorted perception could come to dominate in some people, leading to distortions of body image."

单选题A new book by a former lawyer at Kirkland unlike other speculative bubbles in the past, lawyers will always be a necessity not a passing fashion. But then, The Very, Very Challenging Job Market for Lawyers doesn't have the same ring to it.

单选题A Getting carried away with the culture B. Carrying vast amount of luggage C. Staying on the road too long D. Wearing sexy clothing E. Judging other travelers F. Failing to respect the local culture G. Expecting everything to go to plan There is no doubt that tourism provides a positive impact on tourist spots. It creates quality jobs for the local community, revives the local culture rather than destroying it, and encourages the protection and restoration of the environment. Yet not every traveler will receive warm welcome. On the contrary, some upset the locals and make fellow travelers retreat. Here is a listed some of the deadliest sins of travel. Pray you don't commit them. 【R1】______ OK, traveling for long periods of time is hardly a sin, provided you're spending some cash, but if you stay away longer than you meant to, it can turn you into a less-than-agreeable traveler. You start to think that everyone you meet is out to rip you off, you get a little too confident when someone helps themselves to a spot ahead of you in line and the language barrier starts to be an annoying headache rather than an entertaining challenge. 【R2】______ And at some point we're all guilty of saying yes to a couple of cultural no-nos such as not moderating their clothing as they head from the sheltered environment of the hotel pool to the wider world of Egypt's tombs. But sometimes those who've been wandering the world for great lengths of time feel that they know it all and can do no wrong. Remember sexy clothing, chugging beer and grabbing your boyfriend's ass could well offend a few locals. And if you've upset the locals, it'll be the next group of travelers who pay. 【R3】______ Enveloping yourself in local customs is part of the reason we travel. We want to sample original flavors, see unusual architecture, learn foreign tongues and experience the new traditions that come with a different religion. But some travelers go too far: they put on the local traditional clothes to go about their daily affairs, would never dream of eating a hamburger and frown at the very notion of socializing with one of their countrymen. Respecting a culture is one thing, but adopting it as your own can sometimes cause offence. Plus you look ridiculous. 【R4】______ No matter how many years you've been traveling the globe, things will always go wrong. Trains will break down, hotels will fill up, attractions will close on the only day you could possibly visit and food poisoning will put you out of action just as you had some life-affirming adventure planned. The key is to accept the setbacks as a natural part of your adventure. Expecting everything to run smoothly is to set foot on the road to disappointment and a way to ruin your trip. 【R5】______ Travel snobs are people who consider themselves superior for a wealth of bizarre reasons. They travel for longer, rough it more, stray further from the beaten track or simply carry less luggage and therefore feel the need to look down on anyone who doesn't meet their standards. Who cares if someone opts for package tours or carries vast amounts of designer luggage to their five-star hotels? If you spend your time sorting out the good travelers from the bad, you run the risk of raining your trip.

单选题The major task facing adolescents is to create a stable identity. There are some developmental tasks that enable them to create an identity. It's important to accept one's body shape. The beginning of adolescence and the rate of body changes for adolescent varies tremendously. How easily adolescents【C1】______those changes will partly reflect how closely their bodies match the well-defined【C2】______of the "perfect" body for young women and young men. Adolescents who do not match it may need【C3】______support from adults to improve their feelings of comfort and self-worth regarding their shapes. Try to achieve emotional independence from parents. Children derive strength from【C4】______their parents' values and attitudes. Adolescents,【C5】______, must redefine their【C6】______of personal strength and move toward self-reliance. This change is【C7】______if the adolescent and parents can agree on some level of【C8】______that increases over time.【C9】______, parents and adolescents should set a time by which children must be back home. That time should be increased【C10】______the adolescent matures. Prepare for an economic career. In our society, an adolescent【C11】______adult status when he or she is able to【C12】______support himself or herself. This task has become more【C13】______than in the past because the job market demands increased education and skills. Today, this developmental task is generally not achieved【C14】______late adolescence or early adulthood, after the individual completes her/his education and gains some entry level work experience. Adolescents can think abstractly and about possible situations. With these【C15】______in thinking, the adolescent is able to develop his or her own【C16】______of values and beliefs. Thus, it is essential to take an ideology as a guide to behavior. The family is【C17】______children define themselves and their world. Adolescents define themselves and their world from their new social roles. Status【C18】______the community, beyond that of family is an important achievement for older adolescents and young adults. Adolescents and young adults become members of the larger community【C19】______employment (financial independence) and 【C20】______independence from parents.

单选题Why does Peter Drucker continue to enjoy such a high reputation? Part of the answer lies in people's mixed emotions about management. The management-advice business is one of the most successful industries of the past century. When Drucker first turned his mind to the subject in the 1940s it was a backwater. Business schools were treated as poor relations by other professional schools. McKinsey had been in the management-consulting business for only a decade and the Boston Consulting Group did not yet exist. Officials at General Motors doubted if Drucker could find a publisher for his great study of the company, "Concept of the Corporation". Today the backwater has turned into Niagara Falls. The world's great business schools have replaced Oxbridge as the nurseries of the global elite. The management-consulting industry will earn revenues of $300 billion this year. Management books regularly top the bestseller lists. Management masters can command $60,000 a speech. Yet the practitioners of this great industry continue to suffer from a severe case of status anxiety. This is partly because the management business has always been prey to fads and frauds. But it is also because the respectable end of the business seems to lack what Yorkshire folk call "bottom". Consultants and business-school professors are forever discovering great ideas, like re-engineering, that turn to dust, and wonderful companies, like Enron, that burst into flames. Peter Drucker is the perfect antidote to such anxiety. He was a genuine intellectual who, during his early years, rubbed shoulders with the likes of Ludwig Wittgenstein, John Maynard Keynes and Joseph Schumpeter. He illustrated his arguments with examples from medieval history or 18th-century English literature. He remained at the top of his game for more than 60 years, advising generations of bosses and avoiding being trapped by fashion. But Drucker was more than just an antidote to status anxiety. He was also a preacher of management. He argued that management is one of the most important engines of human progress: "the organ that converts a mob into an organization and human effort into performance". He endlessly extended management's empire. From the 1950s onwards he offered advice to Japanese companies as well as American ones. He insisted that good management was just as important for the social sector as the business sector.

单选题When George Price died in January 1975, his funeral in London was attended by five homeless men: untidy, smelly and cold. Alongside them were Bill Hamilton and John Maynard Smith, both distinguished British evolutionary biologists. All seven men had come to mourn an American scientist who helped to unpick the riddle of why people should ever be kind to one another, who had chosen to give away his clothes, his possessions and his home, and who, when his generosity was exhausted, slashed his own throat with a pair of scissors, aged 52. Ever since Charles Darwin had published his theory of evolution in 1859, scientists have pondered whether it can explain the existence of altruism: behavior that decreases an individual's fitness but which increases the average fitness of the group to which he belongs. Such kindness is not unique to humans but exists also in complex insect societies. Bees, for example, live in colonies headed by a queen and populated by sterile workers. One reading of Darwin's theory says that, because the workers do not breed, evolution should result in their elimination. Yet this is not what happens in nature. In the 1960s, Hamilton proposed that evolution acts on characteristics that favor the survival of close relatives of a certain individual. The bee colonies that survive are those in which sterile workers provide the "fittest" service to their mother. Each worker thus strives to favor the reproductive success of the queen, even at the price of her own reproductive failure. Price wanted to describe mathematically how a genetic predisposition to altruism could evolve. He devised a formula, now called the Price equation, that describes how characteristics that can, in some cases, prove disadvantageous, nevertheless persist in the population By slightly changing the variables, he was able to describe populations in which kindness was widespread, everyone benefited and altruism was passed down the generations, and other, more brutal worlds, where charity was abused and kindness died out. Ultimately, Price ended up in such a place. In 1967 he moved to London, where he hooked up with Hamilton and derived the equation for which he is famed. At the same time, his interest in altruism blossomed into something less kin-based and more practical: he began to seek out needy strangers. At one stage, he had four homeless men staying in his flat, while he slept in his office. As he became increasingly unwell, both physically and mentally, he redoubled his efforts to help the poor, moving into a dirty cabin where, one freezing night, he committed suicide. Price ultimately became one of the homeless he had set out to save.