单选题There is no question that some "greenwashing" is going on in the corporate world. Bayernwerk, a Bavarian utility, began selling "Aqua Power" last year when Germany began to let customers choose their electricity supplier. Bayernwerk markets Aqua Power as 100% green, renewable, hydroelectric energy. But any customer who signs up gets power from the same mix of sources as before: hydro, gas, coal and nuclear. Nothing changes except some accounting, and there is no net benefit to the environment. There is a benefit, though, to Bayernwerk, which charges more for Aqua Power and has been swamped with orders for it. Greenwashing takes many forms. "Companies often advertise themselves as environmentally friendly even though they might have some pretty hideous environmental records," says Jill Johnson of the group Earth Day 2000. California's PG&E, the utility that settled out of court after the real Erin Brockovich accused it of polluting groundwater, runs pro-environmental ads. But PG&E is due in court in November on charges of polluting wells in a second California town. "PG&E has a very good environmental track record," says spokesman Greg Pruett, citing recycling and waste reduction. Weyerhaeuser, the timber company, cuts old-growth trees in Canada but trumpets the 100 million tree seedlings it will plant this year. Overall, the greening of corporate America is real and has not been as hard to achieve as some environmental activists imagined. That is especially true for greenhouse gases and climate change, the focus of Earth Day 2000. "Now there is more recognition by companies that there may be an economic advantage to reducing emissions of greenhouse gases," says Paul Portney, president of the think tank Resources for the Future. More and more companies are changing the way they heat and light their buildings and design their factories to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as well as their energy bills. (Energy-efficiency upgrades can save a company roughly $1 per square foot of office or factory space every year. ) The reductions often exceed those called for in the 1997 international agreement on greenhouse warming called Kyoto Treaty, whose goal of reducing greenhouse emissions 7% from their 2000 levels is deemed so threatening to the economy by many oil, coal and chemicals companies that the White House does not dare to submit it to the Senate for ratification.

单选题More people than ever before are embarking on their own enterprise adventure and starting their own business. Nearly 400, 000 companies were established last year, or 35 percent more than in 2002. But official statistics also show that more businesses than ever are failing. Last year, a record 40,000 businesses were declared insolvent. With so many businesses failing it is important if you are thinking of starting a business to plan and prepare properly. This will also increase the chances of securing finance. "One of the key parts of starting a business is ensuring that the original idea is developed into a fully viable product or service," Judith Rutherford, the chief executive of Business Link for London, says. "Establishing whether there is a market for the product or service is the next step. This should include a thorough examination of potential competitors and customers," she says. "It may also be worth commissioning some market research." If the research demonstrates there is a viable Business to be had, then the next step is to develop a detailed business plan. As well as details of the product and market, this should also include a budget plan and cashflow forecast. Approaching a qualified accountant can also help. A professional looking plan with credible figures will make it easier to attract finance. But John Rendall, the head of business banking at HSBC warns against falling into the trap of creating a business plan designed solely with the objective of securing funding. "A good business plan should demonstrate some critical thinking about your business, help you clarify what you want to achieve and how you are going to achieve it. It should also help you mark progress, set goals and be in better shape to deal with the challenges any new business is likely to face," Mr. Rendall says. "This approach is far more likely to impress than something solely designed to justify borrowing." Mr. Rendall also advises businesses not to underestimate how much they need to borrow. "Don't be tempted to underplay the debt you require just to please your bank," he says. "A bank is just as likely to consider a larger sum if it is persuaded of the growth potential of your business." A good business plan should also include contingency plans that outline responses to unforeseen circumstances--positive as well as negative. For example, what would be the financial impact of changed economic circumstances? What changes could be made to respond? It is always worth getting comments from friends or colleagues who can bring a more detached perspective. It could also be worth taking the time to investigate whether your business qualifies for any grants. Grants are available from a variety of sources including the Government and its various departments and agencies, the European Union and some charitable organizations. If you are under the age of 30, it would be worth visiting the Prince's Trust website, which last year helped more than 4,300 young people start-up in business. More details on how to find grants, raise finance and improve financial management can be found on Times Online's Grant and Finance guide.

单选题Everyone knows that arriving late is the scourge of air travel. But many passengers have started to complain about something they find almost as irritating: arriving early. Or landing early, to be more precise. If a flight is not held up by air traffic congestion, weather or some mechanical difficulty, it may well touch down at its destination hetbre it is scheduled to arrive. But showing up early often means waiting for gate space at the terminal, which is becoming increasingly scarce. As the minutes tick by, expectant passengers are left to gape through the portholes at the Promised Land, just beyond reach. "Once you arrive, the last thing you want is another delay," said Michael Gaiss, who estimates that he has flown more than 100,000 miles this year. "I would say it happens 20% to 25% of the time. " The deficiencies of government data gathering make it hard to be precise. But top airline executives acknowledge they are aware of passengers' annoyance over early arrivals. And officials said it is part of a broader problem with congestion at the nation's busiest airports—including a competition for gates that can leave travellers stranded on planes whether they land early, late or on time. Paradoxically, the problems stem in large measure from the airlines' efforts to improve their on- time records. As congestion has increased in recent years, the major airlines have padded their schedules to more accurately reflect the longer gate-to-gate travel time caused by air traffic problems of all sorts. For example, a flight from Kennedy International Airport to Seattle took 22 minutes and 48 seconds longer last year than a decade earlier, even though the time in the air has not changed. Airlines and the government do not track the waiting times of flights that arrive early. However, it is clear that waiting to roll the final distance to the gate is taking longer, no matter when a flight arrives. The inspector-general found that waits lasting an hour or more, from the time a plane lands to the time it pulis up to a gate, increased by 35% from 1995 to 1999. On Dec. 15, four of American Eagle's commuter flights sat for 90 minutes to two hours before the passengers were taken off on buses. On Nov. 27, travelers on a Delta Air Lines flight that arrived two hours late from Birmingham, Alabama, waited three and half hours to disembark—almost tripling the length of their scheduled three hour flight.

单选题Many things make people think artists are weird—the odd hours, the nonconformity, the clove cigarettes. However, the weirdest may be this: artists' only jobs are to explore emotions, and yet they choose to focus on the ones that feel lousy. This wasn't always so. The earliest forms of art, like painting and music, are those best suited for expressing joy. But somewhere in the 19th century, more artists began seeing happiness as insipid, phony or, worst of all, boring. In the 20th century, classical music became more atonal, visual art more unsettling. Sure, there have been exceptions, but it would not be a stretch to say that for the past century or so, serious art has been at war with happiness. In 1824, Beethoven completed his " Ode to Joy " . In 1962, novelist Anthony Burgess used it in A Clockwork Orange as the favorite music of his ultra-violent antihero. You could argue that art became more skeptical of happiness because modem times have seen such misery. But the reason may actually be just the opposite: there is too much happiness in the world today. In the West, before mass communication and literacy, the most powerful mass medium was the church, which reminded worshippers that their souls were in peril and that they would someday be meat for worms. Today the messages that the average Westerner is bombarded with are not religious but commercial, and relentlessly happy. Since these messages have an agenda—to pry our wallets from our pockets—they make the very idea of happiness seem bogus. " Celebrate! " commanded the ads for the arthritis drug Celebrex, before we found out it could increase the risk of heart attack. What we forget—what our economy depends on us forgetting—is that happiness is more than pleasure without pain. The things that bring the greatest joy carry the greatest potential for loss and disappointment. Today, surrounded by promises of easy happiness, we need someone to tell us that it is OK not to be happy, that sadness makes happiness deeper. As the wine connoisseur movie Sideways tells us, it is the kiss of decay and mortality that makes grape juice into Pinot Noir. We need art to tell us, as religion once did, that you will die, that everything ends, and that happiness comes not in denying this but in living with it. It's a message even more bitter than a clove cigarette, yet, somehow, is a breath of fresh air.

单选题Violent lyrics in songs increase aggression - related thoughts and emotions and could indirectly create a more hostile social environment, a study released on Sunday by a U. S. psychology association found. The Washington D.C. -based American Psychological Association (APA) released the study, resulting from five experiments involving over 500 college students, in the May issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The violent songs increased feelings of hostility without provocation or threat, according to the study. It said the effect was not the result of differences in musical style, specific performing artist or arousal properties of the songs. Even the humorous violent songs increased aggressive thoughts, the study said. The group said the study contradicts a popular notion that listening to angry, violent music actually serves as a positive catharsis for people. The music industry came under criticism from lawmakers in October for failing to use more descriptive parental advisory labels that specify whether the music contains sex, violence or strong language. But the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has said that current CD labels give parents enough information without violating the right to free expression. The RIAA is the trade group for the world's five big labels, including AOL Time Warner Inc. , EMI Group Plc., Bertelsmann AG, Vivendi Universal's Universal Music and Sony Corp.. Results of the APA's experiments showed that violent songs led to more aggressive interpretations of ambiguously aggressive words and increased the relative speed with which people read aggressive versus non-aggressive words. "Such aggression-biased interpretations can, in turn, instigate a more aggressive response, verbal or physical, than would have been emitted in a nonbiased state, thus provoking an aggressive escalatory spiral of antisocial exchanges," said researcher Craig Anderson, in a statement. While researchers said repeated exposure to violent lyrics could indirectly create a more hostile social environment, they said it was possible the effects of violent songs may last only a fairly short time.

单选题It is usual to classify types of production as job production, batch production and flow production. In job production, products are supplied to the special requirements of a customer, and the whole project is undertaken as one operation which is completed before passing, on to the next. A good example of this kind of work is shipbuilding. In job production a single item is produced at a time, whereas in batch production a number of similar items are produced in order to meet a continuing sales demand Batch sizes vary, but the quantity which is produced amounts to more than immediate requirements, and the surplus production is stored. Finally, in flow production, the manufacture of a product proceeds from one operation to another at a planned rate of output. It is argued that the type of production method which is employed depends on the development of an individual company. That. is to say, many factories begin manufacturing on a job production basis and proceed, as the volume of production increases, to batch and flow production methods. This is not always the case, however, since the type of production is not necessarily determined by the product volume which is aimed at. In fact, in the car industry, tools are produced by jobbing methods, components are produced by batch methods, and the final product is assembled by flow methods. Flow production is associated with flow layouts, whereas job and batch production are associated with process layouts. In a process layout, machines of a similar type are grouped together in the same section of the factory, and work in progress is moved from one part of the factory to another. In a flow layout scheme, the manufacturing equipment is arranged in the same sequence as the operations performed on the product. Each of these operations must be capable of processing work at the rate required for assembly of the final product, and the output for each operation must be balanced in order to provide a smooth flow of work. There are advantages in both types of layout. In a process layout system there is more flexibility, and a greater specialization of machines and labour is possible, while in a flow layout system it is not necessary to maintain a high level of stocks or to demand great skill in the workforce.

单选题In the rarefied world of the corporate board, a good network matters. (1) often involves word-of- mouth recommendations: getting on a (2) is easier if you have the right connections. New research suggests men use (3) better than women. Marie Lalanne and Paul Seabright of the Toulouse School of Economics (4) the effect of a network on (5) using a database of board members in Europe and America. They find that if you were to compare two executive directors, (6) in every way except that one had 200 ex-colleagues now (7) boards and the other 400, the latter, (8) , would be paid 6% more. For non-executives the gap is 14%. The really (9) finding concerns the difference between the sexes. Among executive-board members, women earn 17% less than their male (10) . There are plenty of plausible explanations for this (11) , from interruptions to women's careers to old-fashioned (12) . But the authors find that this pay gap can be fully (13) by the effect of executives' networks. Men can leverage a large network into more senior positions or a seat on a more (14) board; women don't seem to be able to. Women could just have (15) connections with members of their networks. "Women seem more inclined to build and rely on only a few strong relationships," says Mr. Seabright. Men are better at developing (16) acquaintances into a network, and better at maintaining a high personal (17) through these contacts. Women may, of course, also be hurt by the existing (18) of men on boards and a male (19) for filling executive positions with other men. But a tendency to think of other men first will be (20) if talented women don't stay on the radar. (289 words)

单选题For the past several years, the Sunday newspaper supplement Parade has featured a column called "Ask Marilyn." People are invited to query Marilyn vos Savant, who at age 10 had tested at a mental level of someone about 23 years old; that gave her an IQ of 228—the highest score ever recorded. IQ tests ask you to complete verbal and visual analogies, to envision paper after it has been folded and cut, and to deduce numerical sequences, among other similar tasks. So it is a bit confusing when vos Savant fields such queries from the average Joe (whose IQ is 100) as, what"s the difference between love and fondness? Or what is the nature of luck and coincidence? It"s not obvious how the capacity to visualize objects and to figure out numerical patterns suits one to answer questions that have eluded some of the best poets and philosophers. Clearly, intelligence encompasses more than a score on a test. Just what does it mean to be smart? How much of intelligence can be specified, and how much can we learn about it from neurology, genetics, computer science and other fields? The defining term of intelligence in humans still seems to be the IQ score, even though IQ tests are not given as often as they used to be. The test comes primarily in two forms: the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale and the Wechsler Intelligence Scales (both come in adult and children"s version). Generally costing several hundred dollars, they are usually given only by psychologists, although variations of them populate bookstores and the World Wide Web. Superhigh scores like vos Savant"s are no longer possible, because scoring is now based on a statistical population distribution among age peers, rather than simply dividing the mental age by the chronological age and multiplying by 100. Other standardized tests, such as the Scholastic Assessment Test (SAT) and the Graduate Record Exam (GRE), capture the main aspects of IQ tests. Such standardized tests may not assess all the important elements necessary to succeed in school and in life, argues Robert J. Sternberg. In his article "How Intelligent Is Intelligence Testing?", Sternberg notes that traditional test best assess analytical and verbal skills but fail to measure creativity and practical knowledge, components also critical to problem solving and life success. Moreover, IQ tests do not necessarily predict so well once populations or situations change. Research has found that IQ predicted leadership skills when the tests were given under low-stress conditions, but under high-stress conditions, IQ was negatively correlated with leadership—that is, it predicted the opposite. Anyone who has toiled through SAT will testify that test-taking skill also matters, whether it"s knowing when to guess or what questions to skip.

单选题Bernard Bailyn has recently reinterpreted the early history of the United States by applying new social research findings on the experiences of European migrants. In his reinterpretation, migration becomes the organizing principle for rewriting the history of pre-industrial North America. His approach rests on four separate propositions. The first of these asserts that residents of early modern England moved regularly about their countryside: migrating to the New World was simply a "natural spillover" Although at first the colonies held little positive attraction for the English—they would rather have stayed home—by the eighteenth century people increasingly migrated to America because they regarded it as the land of opportunity. Secondly, Bailyn holds that. contrary to the notion that used to flourish in American history textbooks, there was never a typical New World community. For example, the economic and demographic character of early New England towns varied considerably. Bailyn's third proposition suggests two general patterns prevailing among the many thousands of migrants: one group came as indentured servants, another came to acquire land. Surprisingly, Bailyn suggests that those who recruited indentured servants were driving forces of transatlantic migration. These colonial entrepreneurs helped determine the social character of people who came to pre-industrial North America. At first, thousands of unskilled laborers were recruited: by the 1730's. however. American employers demanded skilled workers. Finally, Bailyn argues that the colonies were a half-civilized hinterland of the European culture system. He is undoubtedly correct to insist that the colonies were part of the Anglo-American empire. But to divide the empire into English core and colonial periphery, as Bailyn does, devalues the achievements of colonial culture. It is true. as Bailyn claims, that high culture in the colonies never matched that in England. But what of seventeenth-century New England, where the settlers created effective laws. built a distinguished university, and published books? Bailyn might respond that New England was exceptional. However, the ideas and institutions developed by New England Puritans had powerful effects on North American culture. Although Bailyn goes on to apply his approach to some thousands of indentured servants who migrated just prior to the revolution, he fails to link their experience with the political development of the United States. Evidence presented in his work suggests how we might make such a connection. These indentured servants were treated as slaves for the period during which they had sold their time to American employers. It is not surprising that as soon as they served their time they gave up good wages in the cities and headed west to ensure their personal independence by acquiring land. Thus.it is in the west that a peculiarly American political culture began, among colonists who were suspicious of authority and intensely anti-aristocratic. Notes: spillover n. 外流。indentured servant 合同工。hinterland n. 内地。Anglo-American 英裔美国人的。 periphery n. 边缘。anti-aristocratic 反对贵族的。demographics 人口统计(特点)。

单选题The author seems to be mainly concerned with

单选题According to the author, the concept of "people-literate" in par

单选题It seems that mental activities are characteristic of______

单选题We can learn from the text that the America's central bank ______.

单选题When I was 13 my mother died. Through my own sorrow I was aware of the great loss this was to Pop. But he made only one reference to his own misery. He said, "To be happy every day is to be not happy at all." He was saying to his sons that happiness is not a state you achieve and keep, but something that must be won over and over, no matter what the defeats and losses. Later that year I got a job as an entertainer in small clubs, and suddenly I knew this was the career I had been searching for. The world of the theater was far removed from the world of my father, yet I found myself returning to him time and again, for the same reason his friends did. When I was 20 I got what every actor dreams of—a permanent job! At that time, at the depth of the depression, actors were out of work by the hundreds, yet I wanted to quit that job because I needed new experiences and challenges. Pop heard me out, then said, "There are some people who always have to test themselves, to stretch their wings and try new winds. If you think you can find more happiness and usefulness this way, then you should do it." This advice came from a man who never left a secure job in his life, who had the European tradition of family responsibility, but who knew I was different. He understood what I needed to do and he helped me do it. For the next few years I worked in clubs, and then I got my big break, appearing in a major movie. After that I went to Hollywood, and from then on Pop lived with me and my family there. We had a big party one evening. That night I thought Pop might enjoy hearing some of the old folk songs we used to sing at home. When I began to sing, the music and the memories were too much for him to resist, and he came over to join me. I faded away, and he was in the middle of the room singing alone—in a clear, true voice. He sang for 15 minutes before some of the world's highest-paid stars. This simple, kindly old man singing of our European roots had touched something deep in these sophisticated people. When he finished there was overwhelming applause. I knew the applause that night was not just for a performance; it was for a man.