单选题It would be enormously convenient to have a single, generally accepted index of the economic and social welfare of the people of the United States. A glance at it would tell us how much better or worse off we had become each year, and we would judge the desirability of any proposed action by asking whether it would raise or lower this index. Some recent discussion implies that such an index could be constructed. Articles in the popular press even criticize the Gross National Production because it is not such a complete index of welfare, ignoring, on the one hand, that it was never intended to be, and suggesting, on the other, that with appropriate changes it could be converted into one. The output available to satisfy our wants and needs is one important determinant of welfare. Whatever want, need, or social problem engages our attention, we ordinarily can more easily find resources to deal with it when output is large and growing than when it is not. GNP measures output fairly well, but to evaluate welfare we would need additional measures which would be far more difficult to construct. We would need an index of real costs incurred in production, because we are better off if we get the same output at less cost. Use of just man-hours for welfare evaluation would unreasonably imply that to increase total hours by raising the hours of eight women from 60 to 65 a week imposes no more burden than raising the hours of eight men from 40 to 45 a week, or even than hiring one involuntarily unemployed person for 40 hours a week. A measure of real costs of labor would also have to consider working conditions. Most of us spend almost half our waking hours on the job and our welfare is vitally affected by the circumstances in which we spend those hours. To measure welfare we would need a measure of changes in the need our output must satisfy. One aspect, population change, is now handled by converting output to a per capita basis on the assumption that, other things equal, twice as many people need twice as many goods and services to be equally well off. But an index of needs would also account for differences in the requirements for living as the population becomes more urbanized and suburbanized; for the changes in national defense requirements; and for changes in the effect of weather on our needs. The index would have to tell us the cost of meeting our needs in a base year compared with the cost of meeting them equally well under the circumstances prevailing in every other year. Measures of "needs" shade into measure of the human and physical environment in which we live. We all are enormously affected by the people around us. Can we go where we like without fear of attack? We are also affected by the physical environment—purity of water and air, accessibility of park land and other conditions. To measure this requires accurate data, but such data are generally deficient. Moreover, weighting is required, to combine robberies and murders in a crime index; to combine pollution of the Potamac and pollution of Lake Erie into a water pollution index; and then to combine crime and water pollution into some general index. But there is no basis for weighting these beyond individual preference. There are further problems. To measure welfare we would need an index of the "goodness" of the distribution of income. There is surely consensus that given the same total income and output, a distribution with fewer families in poverty would be the better, but what is the ideal distribution? Even if we could construct indexes of output, real costs, needs, state of the environment, we could not compute a welfare index because we have no system of weights to combine them.

单选题The tower of Pisa has been leaning so long—nearly 840 years—that it"s natural to assume it will 1 gravity forever. But the famous structure has been in danger of collapsing almost since its first brick was 2 . It began leaning shortly after construction began in 1173. Builders had only reached the third of the tower"s 3 eight stories when its foundation began to settle unevenly on soft soil composed 4 mud, sand and clay. As a result, the structure leaned 5 to the north. Laborers tried to 6 it by making the columns and arches of the third story on the sinking northern side slightly taller. Then political unrest halted construction. The tower sat 7 for nearly 100 years, but it wasn"t done moving. By the time work restarted in 1272, the tower tilted to the south—the 8 it still leans today. Engineers tried to make another 9 , only to have their work interrupted once again in 1278 with just seven stories completed. Unfortunately, the building continued to settle, sometimes at an 10 rate. Finally, between 1360 and 1370, workers finished the project, once again trying to correct the lean 11 angling the eighth story, with its bell room, northward. In 1989, a similarly constructed bell tower in Pavia, Italy, collapsed suddenly. Officials became 12 worried the tower of Pisa would suffer a similar fate that they closed the monument to the 13 . A year later, they rallied together an international team to see 14 the tower could be brought back from the brink. By 2001, the team had decreased the tower"s lean by 44 centimeters, enough to make officials 15 that they could reopen the monument. The actions taken by Burland and his team could, 16 , stabilize the structure forever. The real threat now comes from the masonry itself, especially the material in the 17 stories, where most of the forces caused by the centuries-long leaning have been directed. If any of this masonry crush, the tower could collapse. And even a 18 earthquake in the region could have devastating consequences. After 200 years, another intervention may be required, but the 19 available to make improvements could be far more advanced and 20 the tower for another 800 years.

单选题Foxes and farmers have never got on well. These small dog-like animals have long been accused of killing farm animals. They are officially classified as harmful and farmers try to keep their numbers down by shooting or poisoning them. Farmers can also call on the services of their local hunt to control the fox population. Hunting consists of pursuing a fox across the countryside, with a group of specially trained dogs, followed by men and women riding horses. When the dogs eventually catch the fox they kill it or a hunter shoots it. People who take part in hunting think of it as a sport; they wear a special uniform of red coats and white trousers, and follow strict codes of behavior. But owning a horse and hunting regularly is expensive, so most hunters are wealthy. It is estimated that up to 100,000 people watch or take part in fox hunting. But over the last couple of decades the number of people opposed to fox hunting, because they think it is brutal, has risen sharply. Nowadays it is rare for a hunt to pass off without some kind of confrontation between hunters and hunt saboteurs. Sometimes these incidents lead to violence, but mostly saboteurs interfere with the hunt by misleading riders and disturbing the trail of the fox"s smell, which the dogs follow. Noisy confrontations between hunters and saboteurs have become so common that they are almost as much a part of hunting as the pursuit of foxes itself. But this year supporters of fox hunting face a much bigger threat to their sport. A Labour Party Member of the Parliament, Mike Foster, is trying to get Parliament to approve a new law which will make the hunting of wild animals with dogs illegal. If the law is passed, wild animals like foxes will be protected under the ban in Britain.

单选题 In 2009 the European Commission carried out an investigation into Microsoft. The American software giant tied Internet Explorer, its web browser, into Windows, the operating system in the great majority of personal computers. This, thought the commission, might be an abuse of its dominance in operating systems: buy a PC, and unless you took the trouble of choosing otherwise, you would browse the web through Explorer. In December that year Microsoft promised that until 2014 it would provide a "choice screen", asking European Windows users whether they wanted to install another browser. The screen first turned up in March 2010. Jolly good—but Microsoft forgot to keep its word. On March 6th the competition commissioner, Joaquin Almunia, said he had fined it 561m ($732m) for not including the choice screen with 15m copies of Windows software between May 2011 and July 2012. Neither Microsoft nor the commission spotted the lapse. It seems that eventually other companies did. The fine must sting all the more because Microsoft's transgression brought it little if any gain. Explorer has fallen behind Chrome, made by Google, and Firefox, made by Mozilla, a non-profit organisation. And people are doing more and more browsing on smartphones and tablets, the domain of Apple, Google and their browsers. Microsoft's antitrust woes in Europe should have been over. In 2004 in was fined 497m for trying its media player and server operating systems with it PC system. In 2008 it copped another 899m penalty for failing to comply with the commission's ruling in that case. Lately it has been among the accusers—of Google, which Mr. Almunia has been investigating since 2010. He suspects Google of abusing a position in online search every bit as imposing as Microsoft's in PC operating systems. Bing, Microsoft's search engine, is a distant second. The commissioner believes that Google may be favouring its own specialised services at rival's expense; that its deals with publishers may unfairly exclude competitors; and that it prevents advertisers from taking their data elsewhere. Mr. Almunia asked Google to propose by the end of January ways of meeting his concerns. He has not yet said what it suggested or how he will respond. European antitrust cases have a habit of dragging on. Just ask Microsoft.

单选题Early in the age of affluence that followed World War Ⅱ, an American retailing analyst named Victor Lebow proclaimed, "Our enormously productive economy... demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction, in consumption.... We need things consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced and discarded at an ever increasing rate." Americans have responded to Lebow"s call, and much of the world has followed. Consumption has become a central pillar of life in industrial lands and is even embedded in social values. Opinion surveys in the world"s two largest economies—Japan and the United Sates—show consumerist definitions of success becoming ever more prevalent. Overconsumption by the world"s fortunate is an environmental problem unmatched in severity by anything but perhaps population growth. Their surging exploitation of resources threatens to exhaust or unalterably spoil forests, soils, water, air and climate. Ironically, high consumption may be a mixed blessing in human terms, too. The time-honored values of integrity of character, good work, friendship, family and community have often been sacrificed in the rush to riches. Thus many in the industrial lands have a sense that their world of plenty is somehow hollow—that, misled by a consumerist culture, they have been fruitlessly attempting to satisfy what are essentially social, psychological and spiritual needs with material things. Of course, the opposite of overconsumption—poverty—is no solution to either environmental or human problems. It is infinitely worse for people and bad for the natural world too. Dispossessed peasants slash-and-burn their way into the rain forests of Latin America, and hungry nomads turn their herds out onto fragile African grassland, reducing it to desert. If environmental destruction results when people have either too little or too much, we are left to wonder how much is enough. What level of consumption can the earth support? When does having more cease to add noticeably to human satisfaction?

单选题As the Big Three automakers seek a $25 billion federal government bailout to avoid financial collapse, angst is rising among the auto behemoths" suppliers, and in the communities they support. On Monday, an auto industry consulting firm, Planning Perspectives Inc., reported that 68% of participants in a survey of executives for industry suppliers said their companies would have to downsize if General Motors declared bankruptcy, while 12% said their businesses would likely close or would definitely do so. In the Midwest alone, some 275,000 jobs would be lost as a result of a GM bankruptcy. "If they go into bankruptcy, it"s going to have a catastrophic effect on businesses across the board," says John W. Henke Jr., president of PPI, based in Birmingham, Mich. Amid the economic downturn, Americans are buying fewer new cars and light-trucks, or even used cars. In recent weeks, GM announced a third-quarter loss of $2.5 billion. And the major automakers have stirred a vigorous debate over how much, if at all, the federal government should be involved in rescuing yet another ailing industry. Much of the automakers" argument hinges on the notion that the collapse of any of the key industry players would aggravate an already troubled economy. Fully one-third of automotive industry suppliers were deemed at risk of bankruptcy, according to a study earlier this year by Grant Thornton, a Southfield, Michigan, consulting firm. If General Motors files for bankruptcy, it will further impede its ability to pay its suppliers in full, on time. Many suppliers are already burdened with debt. So the extra burden will likely destroy suppliers" operating budgets—and, in turn, cripple their ability to deliver goods to surviving automakers. Experts say the suppliers most vulnerable to collapse are those whose businesses are heavily dependent on the ailing U.S. automakers, or on raw materials for which rising costs cannot be easily passed onto the automakers. Kimberly Rodriguez, automotive industry analyst at Grant Thornton, says concern about how suppliers will be impacted is justified. "It"s not hype. It"s huge." To understand how the angst is playing out, consider Tipton, Ind., population barely 5,000. In April 2007, the German manufacturer Getrag LLC announced it would build a $455 million plant about an hour"s drive north of Indianapolis. The plant"s sole purpose was to build energy-efficient transmissions for Chrysler. The plant would inject some 1,200 new jobs into a state whose economy is both ailing and heavily dependent on the automotive industry. Townsfolk talked of a new hotel, a new fast-food restaurant. Earlier this month, however, Getrag announced that the entity established to build the Tipton plant would file for bankruptcy and that the plant would not open, mainly because Chrysler backed out of its agreement. Meanwhile, some people in the industry have been calling and e-mailing their Congressional representatives, urging them to support a bailout for the major automakers. The consequences of a bankruptcy declaration from either of the Big Three, Rodriguez fears, are just too severe. "It"d kill us," he says.

单选题When my son started going to "school" full time in February, I readied myself for immunological battle. Day-care kids get sicker than children who stay at home, and I knew mine" would, too. But other parents assured me that by kindergarten he"d be the healthiest kid in class. Last week parenting message boards lit up when a University of California, Berkeley, researcher presented unpublished data showing that children who attend playgroups or day care have a 30 percent lower risk of developing childhood leukemia than kids who don"t, possibly because they are exposed to more infections early in life. The human immune system is an elegant mix of two parts—a built-in, or innate, system and an acquired one. The innate system has already read the manual on generic germs. The acquired system, by contrast, is a bookworm, reading on the go,, learning with every new microbial visitor and growing wiser as it ages. Together, the two systems assess the foods we eat, the particles we breathe, the bacteria we touch, then determine whether or not to attack. Can a young immune system handle so much new information? Research published over the past decade is reassuring. Scientists at the University of Arizona found that 2-year-olds who attend day care in the first six months of life have almost twice as many colds as stay-at-home kids. But they have a third fewer colds between the ages of 6 and 11. By 13, there"s no difference in the groups, suggesting that the kids" immune systems catch up with each other. Several studies have found that children who go to day care early in life are also less likely to develop asthma. The Arizona scientists discovered that high-risk children who start day care before 3 months old have lower levels of immunoglobutin E—a marker of allergic susceptibility connected to asthma-than non-day-care kids. Those levels remain low for the first three years of life. Anne Wright, the study"s lead author, says this doesn"t necessarily mean that kids benefit from being sick more often. She believes the findings support the "hygiene hypothesis," which suggests that simply being exposed to more microbes—which run rampant at day care—educates the immune system, making it less likely to launch unwarranted warfare. All this is good to know. But I had to ask the experts: why am I getting: so sick? "Because you live with the source," says Liu. And I hug and kiss him a lot, too, so I"m probably getting a big dose of germs. It"s also possible that my immune system"s memory has faded a bit, making old harmless viruses look new and dangerous. Or I may be meeting bugs my immune system has never seen before. The most comforting words I heard were from Columbia University pediatrician Philip L. Graham Ⅲ, who told me that pediatricians get horribly sick during their first year of treating patients. After that, they"re immunological powerhouses.

单选题Though not the ideal shape for a Christmas stocking, this slim little volume could nevertheless make a welcome seasonal gift. Launched in Britain at the end of October, and covering just under 100 pages, it is not much more than an extended essay. But it presents an interesting idea eloquently and clearly, offering digestible brain food in the middle of excessive turkey and television. The author of Hierarchy Is Not the Only Way, Gerard Fairtlough, was a senior executive with Shell for many years before he left in 1980 to found a new biotechnology company called Celltech—recently bought by UCB, a Belgian group, for over $2 billion. He knows how businesses are run—both well-established organisations, such as Shell, in which it can be hard to see an alternative to the "way things are done around here", and new firms, where the founders" enthusiasm can evaporate if it has to be organized into an organogram. The author"s thesis is that we are all addicted to hierarchy—partly because that is how we are hardwired, as are our simian cousins, but also because we do not realise there are other ways to run organisations. "The powerful status of hierarchy," writes Mr. Fairtlough, "makes us think the only alternative is disorganisation...we only compare hierarchy with anarchy or chaos." There are, he says, two alternatives to hierarchy. One is heterarchy; the other, "responsible autonomy." Heterarchy is the form of structure commonly found in professional-service firms, the partnerships of accountants or lawyers in which key decisions are taken by all the partners jointly. With responsible autonomy "an individual or a group has autonomy to decide what to do, but is accountable for the outcome of the decision." "Accountability," says Mr. Fairtlough, "is what makes responsible autonomy different from anarchy." The author says that hierarchy is so deeply rooted that it will take years before there is any significant change. But he perhaps gives too little credit to the many companies that have moved along the spectrum from hierarchy to responsible autonomy. BP, for example, a huge multinational, has managed to split authority into much smaller units in recent years and has reduced the staff in its headquarters. Toyota, likewise, evolved towards greater autonomy as it discovered that the only effective way to carry out its famous "just-in-time" system of stock control was by delegating responsibility for ordering stock to the person closest to the coal face. The fact that these are among the most successful companies in the world today strengthens Mr. Fairtlough"s case.

单选题Community courts and community justice prevailed in England at the time of the Norman Conquest. The legal system was ritualistic, dependent upon oaths at most stages of lawsuit. The proceedings were oral, very personal, and highly confrontative. Juries were unknown. One party publicly "appealed", or accused, the other before the community meeting at which the presence of both was obligatory. To be absent meant risking fines and outlawry. After the preliminary statements of the parties, the court rendered judgment, not on the merits ot7 the issue nor the question of guilt or innocence, but on the manner by which it should be resolved. Judgment, in other words, preceded trial because it was a decision on what form the trial should take. It might be by ordeal, or, after the Norman Conquest, by battle. Excepting trial by battle, only one party was tried or, more accurately, was put to his "proof". Proof being regarded as an advantage, it was usually awarded to the accused party; in effect he had the privilege of proving his own case. Ordeals were usually reserved for more serious crimes, for persons of bad reputation, for peasants, or for those caught with stolen goods. The accused underwent a physical trial in which he called upon God to witness his innocence by putting a miraculous sign upon his body. Cold water, boiling water, and hot iron were the principal ordeals, all of which the clergy administered. In the ordeal of cold water, the accused was trussed up and cast into a pool to see whether he would sink or float. On the theory that water which had been sanctified by a priest would receive an innocent person but reject the guilty, innocence was proved by sinking and guilt by floating. In the other ordeals, one had to plunge his hand into a cauldron of boiling water or carry a red hot piece of iron for a certain distance, in the hope that three days later, when the bandages were removed, the priest would find a "clean" wound, one that was healing free of infection. How deeply one plunged his arm into the water, how heavy the iron or great the distance it was carried, depended mainly on the gravity of the charge. The Normans brought to England still another ordeal, trial by battle. Trial by battle was a savage yet sacred method of proof which was also thought to involve divine judgment on behalf of the righteous. Rather than let a wrongdoer triumph, God would presumably strengthen the arms of the party who had sworn truly to the justice of his cause. Right, not might, would therefore conquer. Trial by battle was originally available for the settlement of all disputes but eventually was restricted to cases of serious crime.

单选题Humanity uses a little less than half the water available worldwide. Yet occurrences of shortages and droughts are causing famine and distress in some areas, and industrial and agricultural by-products are polluting water supplies. Since the world"s population is expected to double in the next 50 years, many experts think we are on the edge of a widespread water crisis. But that doesn"t have to be the outcome. Water shortages do not have to trouble the world—if we start valuing water more than we have in the past. Just as we began to appreciate petroleum more after the 1970s oil crises, today we must start looking at water from a fresh economic perspective. We can no longer afford to consider water a virtually free resource of which we can use as much as we like in any way we want. Instead, for all uses except the domestic demand of the poor, governments should price water to reflect its actual value. This means charging a fee for the water itself as well as for the supply costs. Governments should also protect this resource by providing water in more economically and environmentally sound ways. For example, often the cheapest way to provide irrigation water in the dry tropics is through small-scale projects, such as gathering rainfall in depressions and pumping it to nearby cropland. No matter what steps governments take to provide water more efficiently, they must change their institutional and legal approaches to water use. Rather than spread control among hundreds or even thousands of local, regional, and national agencies that watch various aspects of water use, countries should set up central authorities to coordinate water policy.

单选题When imaginative men turn their eyes towards space and wonder whether life exists in any part of it, they may cheer themselves by remembering that life need not resemble closely the life that exists on Earth. Mars looks like the only planet where life like ours could exist, and even this is doubtful. But there may be other kinds of life based on other kinds of chemistry, and they may multiply on Venus or Jupiter. At least we cannot prove at present that they do not. Even more interesting is the possibility that life on other planets may be in a more advanced state of evolution. Present-day man is in a peculiar and probably temporary stage. His individual units retain a strong sense of personality. They are, in fact, still capable under favorable circumstances of leading individual lives. But man"s societies are already sufficiently developed to have enormously more power than the individuals have. It is not likely that this transitional situation will continue very long on the evolutionary time scale. Fifty thousand years from now man"s societies may have become so close-knit that the individuals retain no sense of separate personality. Then little distinction will remain between the organic parts of the multiple organisms and the inorganic parts (machines) that have been constructed by it. A million years further on man and his machines may have merged as closely as the muscles of the human body and the nerve cells that set them in motion. The exploration of space should be prepared for such a situation. If they arrive on a foreign planet that has reached an advanced stage (and this is by no means impossible), they may find it being inhabited by a single large organism composed of many closely cooperating units. The units may be "secondary" —machines created millions of years ago by a previous form of life and given the will and ability to survive and reproduce. They may be built entirely of metals and other durable materials. If this is the case, they may be much more tolerant of their environment, multiplying under conditions that would destroy immediately any organism made of carbon compounds and dependent on the familiar carbon cycle. Such creatures might be relics of a past age, many millions of years ago, when their planet was favorable to the origin of life, or they might be immigrants from a favored planet.

单选题Faced with rising costs, decreased funding and laws in many states designed to keep public universities from raising tuition, many state school systems are making up for budget inadequacy by adding fees for everything from "technology" to "energy". Meanwhile, the average cost to attend a public school increased 47% between 2000 and 2007 (adjusted for inflation) according to the College Board, a non-profit that studies education costs and owns the SAT. State politicians are so eager to advocate low-cost higher education that "tuition" has become a dirty word. The F-word, on the other hand fees—has become a go-to charge for public universities strapped for cash. The 2006—2007 school year marked the first time fee increases outpaced tuition hikes, according to the College Board. Fees were up 8% and tuition 6% in 2007—2008 compared to the previous year. Why the fee frenzy? State legislatures across the country have instituted strict limits on tuition increases and require arduous bureaucratic and political procedures to change them. With financing for public universities on the decline since the 1980s, "everybody got very interested in what they could do to affect revenues, and fees Undoubtedly turned out to be one of the measures they could control," says David Brenaman, an economics professor at the University of Virginia who studies college financing. In Oregon, so many extras had been tacked on over the years that in 2007, fees added as much as 40% to the cost of tuition. When campuses saw their energy bills go up, students were charged a fee. When classrooms had to be wired for new technologies, students were charged a fee. "There were some that were one-time things that ended up staying a little bit longer," concedes Diane Saunders, director of communications for the Oregon University System. These covert tuition hikes did not go unnoticed. The Oregon Student Association, which represents pupils at the state"s seven public colleges, protested the enormous fees, arguing that they decreased transparency in the system and penalized students whose financial aid packages only covered tuition. In June, the system announced that mandatory fees would be rolled into tuition. "So families know what they"re facing up front and so students know what they"re facing up front," says Saunders, who credits the students for being "co-advocates" with the Oregon University System that is constantly lobbying the state legislature for more funding. With no state politician likely to campaign on a platform of dramatically increasing school tuitions, fees will continue to fill in the gaps. And as high oil prices continue to drive up the cost of energy and transportation—to name just two expensive items in any university budget—students are advised to read their bills carefully. And don"t forget to factor in the F-word.

单选题Once upon a time, the only ideologically acceptable explanations of mental differences between men and women were cultural. Any biologist who dared to suggest in public that perhaps evolution might work differently on the sexes, and that this might perhaps result in some underlying neurological inequalities, was likely to get tarred and feathered. Today, by contrast, biology tends to be an explanation of first resort in matters sexual. So it is beneficiary to come across an experiment which shows that a newly discovered difference which fits easily, at first sight, into the biological-determinism camp, actually does not belong there at all. Writing in Psychological Science, a team led by ran Spence of the University of Toronto describes a test performed on people"s ability to spot unusual objects that appear in their field of vision. Success at spatial tasks like this often differs between the sexes, so the researchers were not surprised to discover a discrepancy between the two. The test asked people to identify an "odd man out" object in a briefly displayed field of two dozen otherwise identical objects. Men had a 68% success rate. Women had a 55% success rate. Had they left it at that, Dr. Spence and his colleagues might have concluded that they had uncovered yet another evolved difference between the sexes, come up with a "Just So" story to explain it in terms of division of labour on the African savannah, and moved on. However, they did not leave it at that. Instead, they asked some of their volunteers to spend ten hours playing an action-packed, shoot-"em-up video game, called "Medal of Honour: Pacific Assault". As a control, other volunteers were asked to play a decidedly non-action-packed puzzle game, called "Ballance", for a similar time. Both sets were then asked to do the odd-man-out test again. Among the Ballancers, there was no change in the ability to pick out the unusual. Among those who had played "Medal of Honour", both sexes improved their performances. That is not surprising, given the different natures of the games. However, the improvement in the women was greater than the improvement in the men—so much so that there was no longer a significant difference between the two. Moreover, that absence of difference was long-lived. When the volunteers were tested again after five months, both the improvement and the lack of difference between the sexes remained. Though it is too early to be sure, it looks likely that the change in spatial acuity—and the abolition of any sex difference in that acuity—induced by playing "Medal of Honour" is permanent. That has several implications. One is that playing violent computer games can have beneficial effects. Another is that the games might provide a way of rapidly improving spatial ability in people such as drivers and soldiers. And a third is that although genes are important, upbringing matters, too. In this instance, exactly which bit of upbringing remains unclear. Perhaps it has to do with the different games that boys and girls play. But without further research, that suggestion is as much of a "Just So" story as those tales from the savannah.

单选题Directions: Read the following text. Choose the best word(s) for each numbered blank and mark A, B, C or D on the ANSWER SHEET. For many parents, summer is oppressive not mostly because of the heat but because of scheduling. The lengthening days are a hint of the specter of more than 50 million school-age {{U}} {{U}} 1 {{/U}} {{/U}}with six more hours of {{U}} {{U}} 2 {{/U}} {{/U}}time than usual. It's a child-care chasm that I usually end up crossing by building an emergency bridge made of cash: for more baby-sitting, more late {{U}} {{U}} 3 {{/U}} {{/U}}, more hastily put-together sort of activities. {{U}} {{U}} 4 {{/U}} {{/U}}no matter how unprepared I am, I'll never be arrested for my choices. That's what {{U}} {{U}} 5 {{/U}} {{/U}}to Deborah Harrell, who was taken into custody earlier this month, officially for unlawful conduct toward a child, also known as {{U}} {{U}} 6 {{/U}} {{/U}}her 9-year-old daughter in a park in North Augusta, S.C., for several hours {{U}} {{U}} 7 {{/U}} {{/U}}she was at work. Her kid had a cell phone, and the McDonald's Harrell works at was {{U}} {{U}} 8 {{/U}} {{/U}}, but the girl was there without adult {{U}} {{U}} 9 {{/U}} {{/U}}for much of the day, a {{U}} {{U}} 10 {{/U}} {{/U}}said. The mom's {{U}} {{U}} 11 {{/U}} {{/U}}led to a round of national hair pulling about "How a person could even do that" {{U}} {{U}} 12 {{/U}} {{/U}}"How a person could even report that". {{U}} {{U}} 13 {{/U}} {{/U}}, about 40% of parents leave their kids on their own, at least for a while, {{U}} {{U}} 14 {{/U}} {{/U}}the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. Three states have even {{U}} {{U}} 15 {{/U}} {{/U}}a minimum age for being home alone, {{U}} {{U}} 16 {{/U}} {{/U}}from 8 years old in Maryland to 14 in Illinois. Kids have raced around outside by themselves since the dawn of time. That's why those on the free-range end of the child-raising spectrum blamed the busybody who {{U}} {{U}} 17 {{/U}} {{/U}}Harrell. {{U}} {{U}} 18 {{/U}} {{/U}}she was doing exactly what child-protective-service agencies have asked U.S. citizens to do, especially since data {{U}} {{U}} 19 {{/U}} {{/U}}that child-abuse reports {{U}} {{U}} 20 {{/U}} {{/U}}to go down over summer but child-abuse incidents do not.

单选题Everybody knows that global fish stocks are heading for collapse. That is why governments try to limit the amount of fish taken out of the sea. But recent research suggests that the world is going about regulating fishing the wrong way—that fish stocks would fare better if efforts were made to protect entire ecosystems rather than individual species. There are plenty of data to prove the importance of diversity on dry land. Until recently, however, there was little evidence that the same was the case in the oceans, which make up 90% of the biosphere, and on which a billion people rely for their livelihoods. In order to establish whether diversity matters in the sea as well as on land, 11 marine biologists, along with three economists, have spent the past three years crunching all the numbers they could lay their hands on. These ranged from the current United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation"s database to information hundreds of years old, collected from kitchen records and archaeology. The results of their comprehensive analysis have been published in Science. Marine biodiversity, they report, matters because it is variety per se that delivers services—such as maintaining water quality and processing nutrients—to humans as well as the goods people reap from the sea. It also ensures these goods and services recover relatively rapidly after an accident or natural disturbance. The new work is silent on exactly how biodiversity protects these things—merely showing that it does. Earlier work though has shown some possible mechanisms. One example from a study in Jamaica showed that continuously removing algae grazers from a reef allowed the algae to overwhelm the coral. The latest study, led by Boris Worm of Dalhousie University, in Halifax, Canada, gathered the available material into four separate groups. The researchers found the same result from different pools of data, in different types of marine ecosystems and at different scales. The findings suggest that governments should rethink the way they try to manage fisheries. Marine reserves are common in the tropics, but policymakers in temperate countries tend to focus on one species at a time to control numbers of that species caught. They might do better to spend more time thinking about ecosystems and less bargaining over quotas. Some governments claim to have already come around to the idea. In America, Britain and Canada officials are considering how to redraft fisheries policy. Scientists hope that the move will push the inevitably unhappy compromise between their recommendations and fishermen"s aspirations closer to their way. Dr. Worm reckons that, the way things are going, commercial fish stocks will collapse completely by 2048. The date may be spuriously precise, but the danger is there. And so, if Dr. Worm is right, is a better way of making sure that it doesn"t happen.

单选题When school officials in Kalkaska, Michigan, closed classes last week, the media flocked to the story, portraying the town"s 2,305 students as victims of stingy taxpayers. There is some truth to that: the property-tax rate here is one-third lower than the state average. But shutting their schools also allowed Kalkaska"s educators and the state"s largest teachers" union, the Michigan Education Association, to make a political point. Their aim was to spur passage of legislation Michigan lawmakers are debating to increase the state"s share of school funding. It was no coincidence that Kalkaska shut its schools two weeks after residents rejected a 28 percent property-tax increase. The school board argued that without the increase it lacked the $1.5 million needed to keep schools open. But the school system had not done all it could to keep the schools open. Officials declined to borrow against next year"s state aid, they refused to trim extracurricular activities and they did not consider seeking a smaller—perhaps more acceptable—tax increase. In fact, closing early is costing Kalkaska a significant amount, including $600,000 in unemployment payments to teachers and staff and $250,000 in lost state aid. In February, the school system promised teachers and staff two months of retirement payments in case schools closed early, a deal that will cost the district $275,000 more. Other signs suggest school authorities were at least as eager to make a political statement as to keep schools open. The Michigan Education Association hired a public relations firm to stage a rally marking the school closings, which attracted 14 local and national television stations and networks. The president of the National Education Association, the MEA"s parent organization, flew from Washington, D.C., for the event. And the union tutored school officials in the art of television interviews. School supervisor Doyle Disbrow acknowledges the district could have kept schools open by cutting programs but denies the moves were politically motivated. Michigan lawmakers have reacted angrily to the closings. The state Senate has already voted to put the system into receivership and reopen schools immediately; the Michigan House plans to consider the bill this week.

单选题One of the most powerful strategic planning tools a business can possess is a marketing plan. Here is not referring to an academic exercise found in college marketing textbooks. Your marketing plan should be a simple (in some cases, one-page) document that specifically answers who you are, what you do, who needs what you do and how you plan to attract their attention. It"s a combination of the planning process and the completed action plan. Follow these seven simple steps to build the perfect marketing plan: Step 1: Narrow your market focus. Try to describe your ideal customer in the narrowest and most detailed terms possible, as though you"re describing him or her to a referral source. Step 2: Position your business. Figure out what you do best and what your target market wants. Maybe it"s how you serve a niche or package your products. If you don"t know what it is, call up three or four of your clients and ask them why they buy from you. Craft a core marketing message that allows you to quickly differentiate your business. Step 3: Create education-based marketing materials. Recreate all your marketing materials, including your website, to focus on education. Make certain every word in your marketing materials speaks of your core messages and to your target market. Step 4: Never cold call. Make sure all your advertising is geared toward creating prospects, not customers. You must find ways to educate before you sell. Your target market needs to learn how you provide value in a way that makes them want to pay a premium for your services or products. You simply can"t do this in a 3-inch-by-4-inch ad. Your ad must get viewers to ask for more information. Then you can proceed to selling. Determine all the ways you can get your education-based messages in front of your narrowly defined target market. Step 5: Earn media attention. Create a list of journalists who cover your industry or community, and build relationships with each by becoming a reliable resource of information. Plan out an entire year of new items you can promote by season or event. Step 6: Expect referrals. Create a referral marketing engine that systematically turns each client and referral network into a kind of unpaid sales pro. You must instill a referral marketing mind-set into your business"s culture. Do this by making every customer a marketing and referral contact. Map every contact and build processes that focus on referrals. Step 7: Live by a calendar. After you complete steps 1 through 6, determine what you need to do to put them into action. Then create an annual marketing calendar, noting the required monthly, weekly and daily appointments necessary to move your plan forward.

单选题A young man comes into Lucinda Roy"s office. She is the head of English at Virginia Tech, a university. He is a student whose bloodthirsty "creative writing" has set off alarm bells. He insists that his teacher is over-reacting. He is not really angry, he says. His poetry is satirical; it is supposed to make people laugh. He speaks "in the softest voice I have ever heard coming from a full-grown man," says Ms Roy. That was in October 2005. Eighteen months later the young man shot and killed 32 people, mostly fellow students, without uttering a word. Then he killed himself. As the second anniversary of the Virginia Tech massacre approaches, crazed gunmen are in the news again. Why do such horrors happen? Some people are turning to Ms Roy"s new memoir to find out. Ms Roy favors gun control. It annoys her that Virginia still allows gun shows to sell guns without background checks to weed out buyers who are criminal or insane. But she admits that the gun advocates occasionally have a point. Armed students do sometimes subdue school shooters. Ms Roy lists examples. Whether more guns on campus would lead to fewer deaths, as some claim, or more, as others insist, is impossible to prove. There are too many confounding factors, and too few school shootings, thank heavens. In any case, the gun advocates" thesis is unlikely to be tested. Few teachers would feel comfortable in a gun-filled classroom. How do you give an "F" grade to an armed adolescent? Another popular argument, after Virginia Tech, was that the media were partly to blame. The killer had watched coverage of a previous massacre, at Columbine High School in Colorado, and decided to copy it. He also wanted to be famous. He filmed himself posing with guns and issuing an incoherent manifesto of complaints. Between his first two murders and his last 30, he posted the footage to NBC, a television channel, hoping they would broadcast it. They obliged. He thus became an icon to other lonely madman. Ms Roy agrees that some of the reporters covering Virginia Tech were insensitive. And making killers famous surely encourages copycats. But Ms Roy cautions against a rush to judgment. The media allowed people at Virginia Tech to find out what was going on in real time—no small service. And investigative reporting, she argues, helps to hold institutions accountable. She thinks the university"s leaders should have been more open about their failure to provide the killer with adequate counselling, among other things. Virginia Tech now has better locks on classroom doors and a brightly-lit notice telling staff and students what to do in an emergency. But there is no reliable way to prepare for the unpredictable. And that, alas, is the only lesson to be drawn from April 16th 2007.

单选题During the recession, job losses were not equitably shared; employment rates fell more for some groups than others. It is also well-known that job losses were greater among men than among women—the so-called mancession—largely because men had been more likely to work in the residential construction and manufacturing industries that were hit hardest. What I"m going to reveal is the employment rates separately for married women and unmarried women who were heads of households. Not surprisingly, the latter are somewhat more likely to work. More surprising is that employment rates fell so much more for these unmarried women who were heads of household. Employment per capita fell 4.7 percentage points among the latter, compared with 1.6 percentage points among the former. The job-loss gap associated with marital status turns out to be as large as the more widely recognized job loss gap associated with gender. Neither group of women had many members working in construction, so the decline of construction cannot explain these differences. An "added-worker effect" has been observed during a number of recessions: more married women worked during a recession than during an expansion because wives sometimes begin work to help replace the income lost by their unemployed husbands. The employment rate among nonelderly married men fell 4 percentage points, to 83 percent from 87 percent. While that is a large decline by historical standards, it still means that roughly 95 percent of wives whose husbands were employed in 2007 had husbands who continued their employment during the recession. Among the 5 percent of wives who were not so fortunate, roughly two-thirds of them had already been working before the recession and therefore could not react to their husband"s unemployment by starting work. Therefore the added-worker effect is much too small to explain the sharply different job-loss rates by marital status. What seems to be especially different between married and unmarried women is their propensity to be unemployed for long periods. The point is that married and unmarried women enter unemployment at about the same rate, but unmarried women leave it more slowly. Part of the difference in labor-market experiences has to do with the safety net. Many safety-net programs, like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which provides food stamps, and Medicaid, base eligibility on family income. A married woman is usually ineligible for a number of safety-net programs because her family"s income is above the poverty line regardless of her employment status. Unmarried household heads, on the other hand, are usually the sole breadwinner for the family, and when their income falls to zero, the household income essentially does, too. For this reason, more unmarried women who are heads of households can expect anti-poverty programs to help them when they are out of work than married women can. An unintended but unavoidable consequence of providing someone a cushion when they are without work is that they are provided with less incentive to get back to work.

单选题{{B}}Directions:{{/B}} Read the following text. Choose the best word(s) for each numbered blank and mark A, B, C or D on the ANSWER SHEET. March 11th marks the second anniversary of the tsunami that killed 18,500 people in Japan. Good news is scant. Almost 315,000 evacuees still {{U}} {{U}} 1 {{/U}} {{/U}}in cramped temporary housing, and need new {{U}} {{U}} 2 {{/U}} {{/U}}. A different kind of suffering weighs on about 20m people (a sixth of the {{U}} {{U}} 3 {{/U}} {{/U}}) at this time of year which, though less than anguish-filled, is not trivial. {{U}} {{U}} 4 {{/U}} {{/U}}late February until May they {{U}} {{U}} 5 {{/U}} {{/U}}pollen allergies, mostly {{U}} {{U}} 6 {{/U}} {{/U}}by Japanese cedar, or sugi, trees. Usually the affliction, entailing sneezing, eye irritation and huge medical bills, is shrugged off—it can't be helped. {{U}} {{U}} 7 {{/U}} {{/U}}a way could be found to ease the allergies that could also {{U}} {{U}} 8 {{/U}} {{/U}}rebuild homes. It would involve thinning out the sugi and other conifer plantations that {{U}} {{U}} 9 {{/U}} {{/U}}about 40% of Japan's forest, most of which are now {{U}} {{U}} 10 {{/U}} {{/U}}as uneconomic. The timber could be used to restore and beautify lost villages. The sugi were planted across Japan after the war as material to {{U}} {{U}} 11 {{/U}} {{/U}}destroyed cities and {{U}} {{U}} 12 {{/U}} {{/U}}. Sugi, straight and tall, are {{U}} {{U}} 13 {{/U}} {{/U}}for construction. But after taxes fell, imported wood put the sugi foresters out of business. The higher they grow, the more pollen the magnificent, abandoned trees emit. Officials say some owners, many now in their 70s, reject {{U}} {{U}} 14 {{/U}} {{/U}}to plant new ones that emit less pollen {{U}} {{U}} 15 {{/U}} {{/U}}the payback is too long. As a result, {{U}} {{U}} 16 {{/U}} {{/U}}Kevin Short, a columnist for the Daily Yomiuri, an English-language newspaper, "immense clouds of yellow-green sugi pollen dust {{U}} {{U}} 17 {{/U}} {{/U}}down onto the urban areas, like some amorphous monster out of a science-fiction movie." {{U}} {{U}} 18 {{/U}} {{/U}}Kiyohito Onuma of the Forestry Agency says his sneezing wife and children often ask him to do more to {{U}} {{U}} 19 {{/U}} {{/U}}the problem, the public pressure is muted. Partly this is because the sugi have always {{U}} {{U}} 20 {{/U}} {{/U}}near temples and shrines, and are part of national folklore.