单选题Which of the following is not mentioned in the text？

单选题It can be inferred from the text that the economic slump ______.

单选题It"s the part of the job that stock analyst Hiroshi Naya dislikes the most: phoning investor managers on a Saturday or Sunday when he"s working on a report and facing a deadline. In Japan, placing a work call to someone on the weekend "feels like entering someone"s house with your shoes on, " says Naya, chief analyst at Ichiyoshi Research Institute in Tokyo. So last year, Naya started asking his questions via messages on Facebook. While a telephone call seems intrusive, he says, a Facebook message "feels more relaxed. " Many Japanese have become fans of Mark Zuckerberg"s company in the past year. It"s taken a while: Even as Facebook took off in India, Indonesia, and other parts of Asia, it"s been a laggard in Japan since its local-language version debuted in 2008. The site faced cultural obstacles in a country where people historically haven"t been comfortable sharing personal information, or even their names, on the Internet. Homegrown rivals such as community website operator Mixi and online game portals such as DeNA allow their users to adopt pseudonyms . The Japanese are overcoming their shyness, though. In February, Facebook had 13.5 million unique users, up from 6 million a year earlier. That puts Facebook in the No. 1 position in Japan for the first time, ahead of Twitter and onetime leader Mixi. "Facebook didn"t have a lot of traction in Japan for the longest time, " says Arvind Rajan, Asia-Pacific managing director for Linkedln, which entered the Japanese market last October and hopes to emulate Face book"s recent success. " They really did turn the corner, " he says. Rajan attributes the change in attitude to the March 11, 2011, earthquake and tsunami . During the crisis and its aftermath, sites such as Facebook helped parents and children locate each other and allowed people post and find reliable information. " The real-name case has been answered, " says Rajan. "People are getting it now. " Japanese see Facebook as a powerful business tool. The real-name policy makes the site a good place to cultivate relationships with would-be partners. As more companies such as retailers Uniqlo and Muji turn to Facebook to reach Japanese consumers, the Silicon Valley company is benefiting from a viruous cycle, says Koki Shiraishi, an analyst in Tokyo with Daiwa Securities Capital Markets. " It"s a chicken-and-egg thing : If everyone starts using it, then more people start using it. " As a result of Facebook"s rise, investors have soured on some of its rivals : DeNA"s stock price has dropped 24 percent in the past year, and Mixi"s has fallen 38 percent. Growth at Twitter—which also entered Japan in 2008—has stagnated , and the San Francisco company has partnered with Mixi to do joint marketing. Twitter Japan country manager James Kondo says there"s no reason to worry. Japan"s social networking scene "is a developing thing, " he says. "We"re not in a flat market where everyone is competing for a share of a fixed pie. "

单选题Yasuhisa Shizoki, a 51-year-old MP from Japan's ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), starts tapping his finger on the dismal economic chart on his coffee table. "Unless we change the decision-making process," he says bluntly, "we are not going to be able to solve this kind of problem." With the economy in such a mess, it may seem a bit of a diversion to be trying to sort out Japan's political structures as well as its economic problems. But Mr Shiozaki can hardly be accused of time-wasting. He has consistently prodded the government to take a firm hand to ailing banks, and has given warning against complacency after a recent rise in share prices. Far from being a distraction, his latest cause highlights how far Japan is from genuine economic reform. Since cowriting a report on political reform, which was released by an LDP panel last week, Mr Shiozaki has further upset the party's old guard. Its legionaries, flanked by columns of the bureaucracy, continue to hamper most attempts to overhaul the economy. Junichiro Koizumi was supposed to change all that, by going over their heads and appealing directly to the public. Yet nearly a year after becoming prime minister, Mr Koizumi has precious little to show for his efforts. His popularity is now flagging and his determination is increasingly in doubt. As hopes of immediate economic reform fade, optimists are focusing on another potential benefit of Mr Koizumi's tenure. They hope that his highly personalized style of leadership will pave the way for a permanent change in Japanese politics: towards more united and authoritative cabinets that are held directly accountable for their policies. As that happens, the thinking goes, real economic reforms will be able to follow. A leading candidate for change is the 40 year-old system--informal but religiously followed--through which the LDP machinery vets every bill before it ever gets to parliament. Most legislation starts in the LDP's party committees, which mirror the parliamentary committee structure. Proposals then go through two higher LDP bodies, which hammer out political deals to smooth their passage. Only then does the prime minister's cabinet get fully involved in approving the policy. Most issues have been decided by the LDP mandarins long before they reach this point, let alone the floor of parliament, leaving even the prime minister limited influence, and allowing precious little room for public debate and even less for accountability. As a result, progress will probably remain slow. Since they know that political reform leads to economic reform, and hence poses a threat to their interests, most of the LDP will resist any real changes. But at least a handful of insiders have now bought into one of Mr Koizumi's best slogans: "Change the LDP, change Japan./

单选题The word "profligacy" ( line 1, par

单选题In Craig Howley's opinion, prospective teachers should

单选题Why is the interdependence of the UK economy mentioned in paragraph 1?

单选题What's the main idea of the text?

单选题If national health insurance would not cure the problems of the American healthcare system, what, then, is responsible for them? Suspicion falls heavily on hospitals, which make up the largest component of the system. In 1988 hospitals accounted for 39% of all health expenditures-more than doctor, nursing homes, drugs, and home health care combined. Although U. S. hospitals provide outstanding research and frequently excellent care, they also exhibit the classic attributes of insufficient organizations: increasing costs and decreasing use. The average cost of a hospital stay in 1987—＄3,850—was more than double the 1980 cost. A careful government analysis published in 1987 revealed the inflation of hospital costs, over and above general price inflation, as a major factor in their growth, even after allowances were made for increases in the population and in intensity of care. While the rate of increase for hospital costs was 2796 greater than that for all medical care and 163% greater than that for all other goods and services, demand for hospital services fell by 34%. But hospitals seemed oblivious of the decline: during this period the number of hospital beds shrank only by about 396, and the number of full-time employees grew by more than 240, 000. After yet another unexpectedly high hospital-cost increase last year, one puzzled government analyst asked: "Where's the money going?" Much of the increase in hospital costs—amounting to ＄180 billion from 1965 to 1987—went to duplicating medical technology available in nearby hospitals and maintaining excess beds. Modern Healthcare, a leading journal in the field, recently noted that "anecdotes of hospitals' unnecessary spending on technology abound". Medical technology is very expensive. An operating room outfitted to perform open-heart surgery costs hundreds of thousands of dollars. From 1982 to 1989 the number of hospitals with open-heart-surgery facilities grew by 33%, and the most rapid growth occurred among smaller and moderate-sized hospitals. This growth was worrisome for reasons of both costs and quality. Underused technology almost inevitably decreases quality of care. In medicine, as in everything else, practice makes perfect. For example, most of the hospitals with the lowest ra6rtaiity rates for coronary-bypass surgery perform at least fifty to a hundred such procedures annually, and in some cases many more: the majority of those with the highest mortality rates perform fewer than fifty a year.

单选题The word "fundamental" in line 6, Par