单选题How do hotels react to the penny-pinching policy?

单选题If you are anything like me, you left the theater after Sex and the City 2 and thought, there ought to be a law against a looks-based culture in which the only way for 40-year-old actresses to be compensated like 40-year-old actors is to have them look and dress like the teenage daughters of 40-year-old actors. Meet Deborah Rhode, a Stanford law professor who proposes a legal regime in which discrimination on the basis of looks is as serious as discrimination based on gender or race. In a provocative new book, The Beauty Bias , Rhode lays out the case for an America in which appearance discrimination is no longer allowed. That means Hooters can"t fire its servers for being too heavy, as allegedly happened last month to a waitress in Michigan who says she received nothing but excellent reviews but weighed 132 pounds. Rhode is at her most persuasive when arguing that in America, discrimination against unattractive women and short men is as pernicious and widespread as bias based on race, sex, age, ethnicity, religion, and disability. Rhode cites research to prove her point: 11 percent of surveyed couples say they would abort a fetus predisposed toward obesity. College students tell surveyors they"d rather have a spouse who is an embezzler, drug user, or a shoplifter than one who is obese. And all of this is compounded by a virtually unregulated beauty and diet industry and soaring rates of elective cosmetic surgery. Rhode reminds us how Hillary Clinton and Sonia Sotomayor were savaged by the media for their looks, and says it"s no surprise that Sarah Palin paid her makeup artist more than any member of her staff in her run for the vice presidency. And the problem with making appearance discrimination illegal is that Americans just really, really like hot girls. And so long as being a hot girl is deemed a bona fide occupational qualification, there will be cocktail waitresses fired for gaining three pounds. It"s not just American men who like things this way. The truth is that women feel good about competing in beauty pageants. To put it another way, appearance bias is a massive societal problem with tangible economic costs that most of us—perhaps especially women—perpetuate each time we buy a diet pill or sneer at fat women. This doesn"t mean we shouldn"t work toward eradicating discrimination based on appearance. But it may mean recognizing that the law won"t stop us fi"om discriminating against the overweight, the aging, and the imperfect, so long as it"s the quality we all hate most in ourselves.

单选题"Was it a he or a she" (Line 7, Paragraph 2) may be replaced by

单选题By "Miuccia Prada was obviously biting her nails" (Paragraph 1), the author means ______.

单选题All around the world, lawyers generate more hostility than the members of any other profession—with the possible exception of journalism. But there are few places where clients have more grounds for complaint than America. During the decade before the economic crisis, spending on legal services in America grew twice as fast as inflation. The best lawyers made skyscrapers-full of money, tempting ever more students to pile into law schools. But most law graduates never get a big-firm job. Many of them instead become the kind of nuisance-lawsuit filer that makes the tort system a costly nightmare. There are many reasons for this. One is the excessive costs of a legal education. There is just one path for a lawyer in most American states: a four-year undergraduate degree in some unrelated subject, then a three-year law degree at one of 200 law schools authorized by the American Bar Association and an expensive preparation for the bar exam. This leaves today"s average law-school graduate with $100,000 of debt on top of undergraduate debts. Law-school debt means that they have to work fearsomely hard. Reforming the system would help both lawyers and their customers. Sensible ideas have been around for a long time, but the state-level bodies that govern the profession have been too conservative to implement them. One idea is to allow people to study law as an undergraduate degree. Another is to let students sit for the bar after only two years of law school. If the bar exam is truly a stern enough test for a would-be lawyer, those who can sit it earlier should be allowed to do so. Students who do not need the extra training could cut their debt mountain by a third. The other reason why costs are so high is the restrictive guild-like ownership structure of the business. Except in the District of Columbia, non-lawyers may not own any share of a law firm. This keeps fees high and innovation slow. There is pressure for change from within the profession, but opponents of change among the regulators insist that keeping outsiders out of a law firm isolates lawyers from the pressure to make money rather than serve clients ethically. In fact, allowing non-lawyers to own shares in law firms would reduce costs and improve services to customers, by encouraging law firms to use technology and to employ professional managers to focus on improving firms" efficiency. After all, other countries, such as Australia and Britain, have started liberalizing their legal professions. America should follow.

单选题In the end, a degree of sanity prevailed. The militant Hindus who had vowed to breach a police cordon and start the work of building a temple to the god Ram at the disputed site of Ayodhya decided to respect a Supreme Court decision barring them from the area. So charged have Hindu-Muslim relations in India become in recent weeks, as the declared deadline of March 15th neared, that a clash at Ram's supposed birthplace might well have provoked bloodshed on an appalling scale across the nation. It has, unfortunately, happened often enough before. But the threat has not vanished. The court's decision is only an interim one, and the main Hindu groups have not given up on their quest to build their temple. Extreme religious violence, which seemed in recent years to have faded after the Ayodhya-related explosion of 1992--1993, is again a feature of the political landscape. Though faults lie on both sides (it was a Muslim attack On Hindus in a train in Gujarat that started the recent slaughter), the great bulk of victims were, as always, Muslims. Once again, educated Hindus are to be heard inveighing against the "appeasing" of Muslims through such concessions as separate constitutional status for Kashmir or the right to practice Islamic civil law. Once again, the police are being accused of doing little or nothing to help Muslim victims of rampaging Hindu mobs. Once again, India's 130m Muslims feel unequal and unsafe in their own country. Far too many Hindus would refuse to accept that it is "their own country" at all. The wonder of it, perhaps, is that things are not worse. While the world applauds Pakistan for at last locking up the leaders of its extreme religious groups, in India the zealots still support, sustain and to a degree constitute the government. The BJP, which leads the ruling coalition, was founded as a political front for the Hindu movement. It is simply one, and by no means the dominant, member of what is called the Sangh Pariwar, the "family of organizations". Other members of the family are much less savoury. There is the VHP, the World Hindu Organization, which led the movement to build the Ram temple. There is the Bajrang Dal, the brutalist "youth wing" of the VHP. There is substantial evidence that members of the VHP and the Bajrang Dal helped to organize the slaughter of hundreds of Muslims in Gujarat after 58 Hindus were killed on a train as they returned from Ayodhya.

单选题"You are not here to tell me what to do. You are here to tell me why I have done what I have already decided to do," Montagu Norman, the Bank of England's longest-serving governor (1920-1944), is reputed to have once told his economic adviser. Today, thankfully, central banks aim to be more transparent in their decision making, as well as more rational. But achieving either of these things is not always easy. With the most laudable of intentions, the Federal Reserve, America's central bank, may be about to take a step that could backfire. Unlike the Fed, many other central banks have long declared explicit inflation targets and then set interest rates to try to meet these. Some economists have argued that the Fed should do the same. With Alan Greenspan, the Fed's much-respected chairman, due to retire next year-after a mere 18 years in the job-some Fed officials want to adopt a target, presumably to maintain the central bank's credibility in the scary new post-Greenspan era. The Fed discussed such a target at its February meeting, according to minutes published this week. This sounds encouraging. However, the Fed is considering the idea just when some other central banks are beginning to question whether strict inflation targeting really works. At present centra1 banks focus almost exclusively on consumer-price indices. On this measure Mr. Greenspan can boast that inflation remains under control. But some central bankers now argue that the prices of assets, such as houses and shares, should also somehow be taken into account. A broad price index for America which includes house prices is currently running at 5.5%, its fastest pace since 1982. Inflation has simply taken a different form. Should central banks also try to curb increases in such asset prices? Mr. Greenspan continues to insist that monetary policy should not be used to prick asset-price bubbles. Identifying bubbles is difficult, except in retrospect, he says, and interest rates are a blunt weapon: an increase big enough to halt rising prices could trigger a recession. It is better, he says, to wait for a housing or stockmarket bubble to burst and then to cushion the economy by cutting interest rates-as he did in 2001-2002. And yet the risk is not just that asset prices can go swiftly into reverse. As with traditional inflation, surging asset prices also distort price signals and so can cause a misallocation of resources-encouraging too little saving, for example, or too much investment in housing. Surging house prices may therefore argue for higher interest rates than conventional inflation would demand. In other words, strict inflation targeting-the fad of the 1990s-is too crude.

单选题It can be inferred from the first paragraph that the author is

单选题{{B}}Text 4{{/B}} More than any other industry, the luxury-goods business needs people to feel good about spending money. So at a recent conference in Moscow, Bernard Arnault, the head of Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton (LVMH), the world's biggest luxury-goods group, went to great lengths to dismiss investors' fears about the impact on the industry of America's credit crisis, a possible recession and the weak dollar. Indeed, Mr. Arnault said he expects the industry's sales almost to double in the next five years, thanks to strong demand from emerging markets and the creation of new wealth across the globe. After a depressing period at the beginning of the decade when the terrorist attacks in America, the outbreak of SARS and the war in Iraq reduced international travel and people's appetite for frivolous things, the industry has had three excellent years. According to Bain, a consultancy, sales of luxury goods grew by 9% in 2006 to 159 billion ($ 200 billion) and will reach about 170 billion this year, which would double the 1996 figure. Europe remains the biggest market, with about 40% of sales, though the strongest growth is in China, Russia, the Middle East and some Latin American countries. Can the industry really double again in half the time? Analysts at Citigroup say that Christmas will be good this year for luxury-goods firms, but they are more cautious about next year because of worries about falling demand in America. It is tempting to think that luxury goods are isolated from the broader economy, because customers are rich enough to ignore it, says Luca Solca, a luxury-goods analyst. But the industry's expansion into a broader "aspirational" market, by selling to the merely affluent, makes it susceptible. And as luxury firms expand in Asia and the Americas, they will continue to suffer currency woes. Most of the industry's production is in the euro-zone, mainly in France and Italy. Even the optimistic Mr. Arnault complained at his firm's recent annual meeting that the euro had reached "incomprehensible" levels against the dollar and the yen. Luxury companies could shift more of their production to countries with weaker currencies and cheap labor (ie, China), but some customers-especially Asian customers-want the elitism and craftsmanship associated with products manufactured in Europe. At least sales in emerging markets are growing fast. But Melanie Flouquet, a luxury analyst at JPMorgan, an investment bank, says that this growth is not enough to offset a slowdown in America. Chinese and Russian consumers account for around 7% and 4% of global luxury sales respectively, compared with 16-18% for Americans. Even so, European firms are sticking to their plans in New York, America's fashion capital. Gucci will open its biggest shop in February in Trump Tower, a shiny skyscraper on New York's Fifth Avenue. Ermenegildo Zegna will also open a shop on Fifth Avenue next year. And this week Dolce Gabbana re-opened its spruced-up shop on Madison Avenue. Claudia D' Arpizio of Bain thinks luxury makers need to follow Giorgio Armani and segment their customers more carefully with different product lines at different price ranges. She predicts that the industry will see solid growth rates of up to 10% a year in the near term. This means that the industry could double in ten years-by which time China is likely to account for more than a quarter and maybe as much as a third of the world's consumption of luxury goods. Yet Mr. Arnault's rosy prediction seems unlikely to come true. As Americans tighten their purse-strings, over-optimism is a luxury even this industry cannot afford.

单选题Senator D. P. Moynihan would probably agree that ______.

单选题The phrase "impinge on" in Paragraph 1 most probably means______