单选题Although the names on the list of SIFI are supposed to be secret. AIG and Prudential, two insurers, this week confirmed they are on it. So too did GE Capital, the conglomerate's financial arm. These firms, and perhaps others, have joined America's largest banks and clearing houses in being 【C1】______ "systemically important financial institutions" (SIFIs) by the new Financial Stability Oversight Council, a regulatory watchdog. What that means in practice is that 【C2】______ they are thought to be 【C3】______ enough to blow up America's economy, they should get special 【C4】______. An appeals process against being 【C5】______ a SIFI will last for 30 days, but discussions have been going on for years so it is hard to believe minds will be 【C6】______ now. The immediate 【C7】______ is that the firms will be regulated by the Fed and 【C8】______ to tougher capital and operational requirements. Jack Lew, the treasury secretary, said the designations would "protect taxpayers, reduce risk in the financial system, and 【C9】______ financial stability." Others are less 【C10】______. "This is a catastrophe," says Peter Wallison, a fellow of the American Enterprise Institute, a think-tank, and a former White House counsel. Putting these institutions under the 【C11】______ of the Fed will 【C12】______ undermine their ability to innovate, he argues. And joining the group of entities perceived to be too big to fail means they will enjoy an 【C13】______ government guarantee. That will put them at a funding advantage 【C14】______ smaller companies, he says, and 【C15】______ that their products are government-backed, a huge help for insurers in particular. Firms themselves appear to have 【C16】______ feelings about the SIFI label. AIG seems to approve; MetLife, an insurer that has not been designated, thinks that the higher capital requirements it brings could 【C17】______ the viability of some products. Much depends on whether SIFIs are now perceived to have an implicit guarantee, and on 【C18】______ that can be monetised. It also 【C19】______ how many other firms are designated SIFIs. Lots of financial firms in America are large: there are rumblings a-bout money-market funds, asset managers and private-equity firms. Risk can move around the financial system. The question today is which firms should be on the list. Eventually it might be which to 【C20】______.

单选题Management consultants, investment banks and big law firms are the Holy Trinity of white-collar careers. They recruit up to a third of the graduates of the world's best universities. They offer starting salaries in excess of $ 100,000 and a chance of making many multiples of that. They also provide a ladder to even better things. The top ranks of governments and central banks are sprinkled with Goldman Sachs and McKinsey veterans. Technology firms, though they are catching up fast, have nothing like the same grip on the global elite. Which raises a pressing question; how do you maximize your chances of joining such elite professional-services firms? Lauren Rivera of Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management has spent a decade studying how these firms recruit. According to her, the best way to get into the tiny group of elite firms is to be studying at the tiny group of elite universities. The firms spend millions of dollars love-bombing these institutions with recruiting events: students can spend the recruitment season wining and dining at their expense. However, as Ms. Rivera notes, firms reject the vast majority of elite students they interview: so even the most pedigreed need to learn how to game the system. The most important tip is to look at who is doing the recruiting. The firms use revenue-generating staff rather than human-resources people to decide who has the right stuff. The interviewers are trying to juggle their day jobs with their recruiting duties. In the interview room they behave predictably: they follow a set script, starting with some ice-breaking chit-chat, then asking you about yourself, then setting a work-related problem. That makes them desperate for relief from the tedium. Be enthusiastic. Hang on their every word. And flatter their self-image as "the best of the best". The most important quality recruiters are looking for is "fit": for all their supposedly rigorous testing of candidates, they would sooner choose an easy-going person with a second-class mind than a Mark Zuckerberg-type genius who rubs people up the wrong way. Staff in professional-services firms spend most of their time dealing with clients; so looking the part is essential. They also expect their employees to spend extraordinary amounts of time together—learning the ropes in boot camps, working late in the office, having constant work dinners, getting stuck together in airports in godforsaken places. One candidate in Ms. Rivera's sample passed the interview by adopting the persona of a successful consultant that he knew at that firm. Even if you do not go that far, you must at all costs avoid appearing nerdy or eccentric. The old-fashioned belief still prevails that playing team sports, especially posh ones like rowing, makes for a rounded character. The final key to success is to turn your interviewer into a champion: someone who is willing to go to bat for you when the hiring committee meets to whittle down the list.

问答题Writeanessayof160-200wordsbasedonthefollowingdrawing.Inyouressay,youshould1)describethedrawingbriefly,2)explainitsintendedmeaning,and3)giveyourcomments.YoushouldwriteneatlyontheANSWERSHEET.

单选题The past year or two has tested the idea that all publicity is good publicity, at least when it comes to business. Undeserved bonuses, plunging share prices and government funding, among other ills, have aroused the anger of the media and public—and created unexpected gain for public-relations firms. The recession has increased corporate demand for PR, analysts say, and enhanced the industry's status. "We used to be the tail on the dog," says Richard Edelman, the boss of Edelman. But now, he continues, PR is "the organizing principle" behind many business decisions. PR has done well in part because it is often cheaper than mass advertising campaigns. Its impact, in the form of favorable reporting in the media or online, can also be more easily measured. Moreover, PR firms are beginning to expand into territory that used to be the domain of advertising firms, a sign of their increasing influence. They used chiefly to pitch story ideas to media outlets and try to get their clients mentioned in newspapers. Now they also dream up and organize live events, web launches and the like. "When you look at advertising versus public relations, it's not going to be those clearly different," says Christopher Graves, the boss of Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide. PR has also benefited from the changing media landscape. The declining of many traditional media outlets has left fewer journalists from fewer firms covering business. That makes PR doubly important, both for attracting journalists' attention, and for helping firms bypass old routes altogether and spread news by posting press releases on their websites, for example. The rise of the internet and social media has given PR a big boost. Many big firms have a presence on social-networking sites, such as Facebook and Twitter, watched and directed by PR staff. PR firms are increasingly called on to track what consumers are saying about their clients online and to respond directly to any negative comments. Perhaps the best indication of PR's growing importance is the attention it is attracting from regulators. They are worried that PR firms do not make it clear enough that they are behind much seemingly independent comments on blogs and social networks. In October America's Federal Trade Commission published new guidelines for bloggers, requiring them to disclose whether they had been paid by companies or received free merchandise. Further regulation is likely. But that will not hamper PR's growth. After all, companies that fall foul of the rules will need the help of a PR firm.

单选题"I believe in equality for everyone, except reporters and photographers," Mahatma Gandhi once said. Journalist-haters like him might not care about the agony of America's news firms, but many Americans do. Nearly a third of them say they have abandoned a news source because they thought the quality of its information was declining. According to "The State of the News Media 2013", a report by the Project for Excellence in Journalism at the Pew Research Centre, the deteriorating financial state of news organizations has hurt their output. Newspaper staffs have shrunk by around 30% since their peak in 1989, and newspapers collectively now employ fewer than 40,000 full-time professionals, the lowest number since the mid-1970s. Americans who think media firms are putting out fewer original, thoughtful stories are probably right. Weather, traffic and sport now account for around 40% of local television newscasts. The average length of a story keeps falling. Only 20% of local TV stories exceed a minute, and half take less than 30 seconds. On cable-news channels, live reports, which require camera crews and journalists actually to show up somewhere, have fallen by a third in daytime programs in the past five years. Interview segments, which are cheap, have risen. Americans may also prefer talking heads because they increasingly prefer to hear opinion rather than fact. This trend is highlighted by the popularity of Fox, a conservative news network, and of MSNBC, its left-leaning counterpart. CNN, which tends to toe the middle line, continues to struggle with its ratings unless there is a big news event. Where is the good news? Last year local TV stations, especially those in swing states like Florida and Ohio, got a welcome boost from the $3 billion spent on TV advertising during the election. And newspapers are now starting in large numbers to demand payment for their digital content. Pew reckons that around a third of America's 1,380 dailies have started (or will soon launch) paywalls, inspired by the success of the New York Times, where 640,000 subscribers get the digital edition and circulation now accounts for a larger portion of revenues than advertising. Boosting circulation revenue will help stem losses from print advertising, since it has become clear that digital advertising will not be enough. For every $16 lost in print advertising last year, newspapers made only around $1 from digital ads. The bulk of the $37.3 billion spent on digital advertising in 2012 went to five firms: Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Microsoft and AOL. Not much Gandhian equality there.

单选题Nearly all cultures have a version of the arrow of time, a process by which they move towards the future and away from the past. According to a paper to be published in Psychological Science this has an interesting psychological effect. A group of researchers, led by Eugene Caruso of the University of Chicago, found that people judge the distance of events differently, depending on whether they are in the past or future. The paper calls this the "Temporal Doppler Effect". In physics, the Doppler effect describes the way that waves change frequency depending on whether their source is traveling towards or away from you. Mr Caruso argues that something similar happens with people's perception of time. Because future events are associated with diminishing distance, while those in the past are thought of as receding, something happening in one month feels psychologically closer than something that happened a month ago. This idea was tested in a series of experiments. In one, researchers asked 323 volunteers and divided them into two groups. A week before Valentine's day, members of the first were asked how they planned to celebrate it. A week after February 14th the second group reported how they had celebrated it. Both groups also had to describe how near the day felt on a scale of one to seven. Those describing forthcoming plans were more likely to report it as feeling "a short time from now", while those who had already experienced it tended to cluster at the "a long time from now" end of the scale. To account for the risk that recalling actual events requires different cognitive functions than imagining ones that have not yet happened, they also asked participants to rate the distance of hypothetical events a month in the past or future. The asymmetry remained. Interestingly, the effect can be reversed by manipulating time's arrow. In another experiment, participants were plugged into a virtual reality machine, with some moving forwards along a tree-lined street others backwards. Those who were moving backwards reported that past events began to feel closer. Mr Caruso speculates that his research has implications for psychological well-being. He suspects that people who do not show this bias—those who feel the past as being closer—might be more subject to depression, because they are more likely to dwell on past events. There may also be lessons for politicians and business leaders. Talking of future plans may be more effective than boasting about past successes. "People want to know what are you going to do for me next, not what have you done for me lately," suggests Mr Caruso.

单选题Seven years ago, when I was visiting Germany, I met with an official who explained to me that the country had a perfect solution to its economic problems. Watching the U.S. economy【C1】______during the '90s, the Germans had decided that they, too, needed to go the high-technology【C2】______. But how? In the late '90s, the answer seemed obvious: Indians. After all, Indian entrepreneurs【C3】______one of every three Silicon Valley start-ups. So the German government decided that it would【C4】______Indians to Germany just as America does: by【C5】______green cards. Officials created something called the German Green Card and【C6】______that they would issue 20,000 in the first year.【C7】______, the Germans expected that tens of thousands more Indians would soon be begging to come, and perhaps the【C8】______would have to be increased. But the program was a failure. A year later【C9】______half of the 20,000 cards had been issued. After a few extensions, the program was【C10】______. I told the German official at the time that I was sure the【C11】______would fail. It's not that I had any particular expertise in immigration policy,【C12】______I understood something about green cards, because I had one (the American【C13】______). The German Green Card was misnamed, I argued,【C14】______it never, under any circumstances, translated into German citizenship. The U.S. green card, by contrast, is an almost【C15】______path to becoming American (after five years and a clean record). The official【C16】______my objection, saying that there was no way Germany was going to offer these people citizenship. "We need young tech workers," he said. "That's what this program is all【C17】______." So Germany was asking bright young【C18】______to leave their country, culture and families, move thousands of miles away, learn a new language and work in a strange land—but without any【C19】______of ever being part of their new home. Germany was sending a signal, one that was【C20】______received in India and other countries, and also by Germany's own immigrant community.

单选题Chances are your friends are more popular than you are. It is a basic feature of social networks that has been known about for some time. Consider both an enthusiastic party hostess with hundreds of acquaintances and an ill-tempered guy, who may have one or two friends. Statistically speaking, the average person is much more likely to know the hostess simply because she has so many more friends. This, in essence, is what is called the "friendship paradox": the friends of any random individual are likely to be more central to the social web than the individual himself. Now researchers think this seemingly depressing fact can be made to work as an early warning system to detect outbreaks of contagious diseases. By studying the friends of a randomly selected group of individuals, epidemic disease experts can isolate those people who are more connected to one another and are therefore more likely to catch diseases like the flu early. This could allow health authorities to spot outbreaks weeks in advance of current monitoring methods. In a report, Nicholas Christakis from Harvard University and James Fowler from the University of California, San Diego put the friendship paradox to good use. In a trial carried out last autumn, they monitored the spread of flu through students and their friends at Harvard University, and found that their social links were indeed causing them to get infected sooner. As this result came after the outbreak, the researchers tried to come up with a real-time measure that could potentially provide an early warning sign of an outbreak as it began to spread. Currently, the conventional methods used to assess an infection lag an outbreak by a week or two. Google's Flu Trends is at best simultaneous with an outbreak. Dr. Christakis and Dr. Fowler suggest that a compound method might be developed in which the search inquiries of a group of highly connected individuals could be scanned for signs of the flu. Although the technique has so far only been demonstrated for the flu and in the social surroundings of a university, the researchers nevertheless think that it could help predict other infectious diseases and do so on a larger scale. Nor should it be difficult to implement. Public-health officials already conduct random sampling, so getting the participants to name a few friends too should not be troublesome. When it comes to infectious diseases, your friends really do say a lot about you.

单选题Encouragement and praise can come in many forms, and some ways are better for child development than others. Researchers at the University of Chicago and Stanford University who studied mother-child interactions over the course of several years found that the type of praise children receive affects their attitudes toward challenges later in life. Specifically, praise that came with feedback about their behavior and the choices that toddlers made helped them to cope better with difficult experiences five years later, compared with compliments that focused more on the child himself, like "You're a good boy." The study, which appears in the journal Child Development, is the first major study of praise and childhood development done outside of a lab setting. In the study, researches found that the children who grew up with more process praise (comments such as "You worked really hard" or "You're doing a great job," which emphasize the child's actions.) were more open to challenge, and were able to identify more ways of overcoming difficult problems. They were also more likely to say that they could improve their intelligence with hard work. While person praise (comments like "You're so smart" or "You're so good," which focus on a child's inherent qualities.) didn't seem to have any negative effect on the children, the study suggests that process praise teaches children that their talents and abilities can be developed and improved, while person praise sends the message that their abilities are fixed and therefore not easily altered. "This study is monumental," says Carol Dweck, a co-author of the study and a professor at Stanford University whose earlier research laid the foundation for understanding the role of praise in child development. Another revelation from the study involved how praise affects boys and girls differently. Parents gave boys and girls the same amount of praise, but of the encouragement boys received, 24% was process praise, while girls received only 10% of this type. Previous research suggested this pattern, but Gunderson, an assistant professor of psychology at Temple University, says she was surprised by how great the difference was. The inequality could have consequences for how girls evaluate their abilities as they progress in school and may play a role in aggravating some of the self-esteem issues that become more common among teens and adolescents. The findings send a clear message to parents. "The biggest takeaway is that parent praise matters," Dweck says. "The parents, even when the children are very young, are starting to shape the child's motivation, the children's attitudes toward themselves and their stance to the world." Not all praise, it seems, is equal.

单选题Entire cities and counties have banned them. McDonald's and KFC have declared to give them up—as have Starbucks, Ruby Tuesday, and a host of other former sources of sinful pleasures. In response to the 2006 Food and Drug Administration requirement that trans fats be listed on nutrition labels, makers of packaged goods have brought their totals down to zero. Last month, Frito-Lay even got the FDA's blessing to put a claim on products loaded with healthy, unsaturated fats that replacing bad fats with good ones may protect against heart disease. Does this mean that junk food is now the new health food? "No! " says Robert Eckel, immediate past president of the American Heart Association, whose "Face the Fats" education campaign points out that a "zero trans fats" label doesn't tell the whole story. "People know trans fats are not good for them," says Eckel. "But they do not understand that replacing them with saturated fat is not a good option." And that, in some cases, is what's happening. Yes, the food industry is experimenting with ways to keep the saturated fat content low—by using unsaturated options such as canola and sunflower oils, for example. But some manufacturers, unwilling to sacrifice taste and texture, are turning back to less-than-healthful choices such as palm oil and butter. Baked goods have proved particularly unwilling to change. The solid fats that provide their light texture, as well as the rich flavor typically are either highly saturated or are "partially hydrogenated" oils that contain trans fats. Makers of fried foods have had an easier task, since certain liquid unsaturated oils can do as tasty a job. Snack makers, too, have found the switch to be relatively manageable. Manufacturers are raising nutrition experts' eyebrows with other tricks, too. Walter Willett, a professor of nutrition at Harvard whose research showed that trans fats promote heart disease, says that some companies now are fully, rather than partially, hydrogenating vegetable oil. Full hydrogenation doesn't create trans fats as it solidifies the oil, but it does produce an acid, a saturated fat which seems in preliminary research to promote inflammation, thus contributing to heart disease. "I'm not in favor of using totally hy-drogenated oil until more is known," he says. A recent study by the International Food Information Council Foundation shows that about 42 percent of Americans—a 9 percent increase over last year—are trying to cut back on certain healthy fats along with trans fats. "All people hear is that fat is bad, bad, bad," says Susan Borra, president of the foundation. In fact, most people need more of the good kind.

单选题While the mission of public schools has expanded beyond education to include social support and extra-curricular activities, the academic schedule has changed little in more than a century. Reclaiming the school day for academic instruction and escaping the time-bound traditions of education are vital steps in the school-reform process, says a report released today by the National Education Commission on Time and Learning. The commission's report, titled "Prisoners of Time," calls the fixed clock and calendar in American education a "fundamental design flaw" in desperate need of change. "Time should serve children instead of children serving time," the report says. The two-year commission found that holding American students to "world-class standards," will require more time for classroom instruction. "We have been asking the impossible of our students—that they learn as much as their foreign peers while spending half as much as in core academic subjects," it states. The Commission compared the relationships between time and learning in Japan, Germany, and the United States and found that American students receive less than half the basic academic instruction that Japanese and German students are provided. On average, American students can earn a high school diploma if they spend only 41 percent of their school time on academics, says the report. American students spend an average of three hours a day on "core" academics such as English, math, science, and history, the commission found. Their report recommends offering a minimum of 5.5 hours of academics every school day. The nine-member commission also recommends lengthening the school day beyond the traditional six hours. "If schools want to continue offering important activities outside the academic core, as well as serving as a hub for family and community services, they should keep school doors open longer each day and each year," says John Hodge Jones, director of schools in Murfreesboro, Tenn., and chairman of the commission The typical school year in American public schools is 180 days. Eleven states allow school years of 175 days or less, and only one state requires more than 180 day. "For over a decade, education reform advocates have been working feverishly to improve our schools," says Milton Goldberg, executive director of the commission. "But... if reform is to truly take hold, the six-hour, 180-day school year should be put in museums—an exhibit from our education past."

单选题There's no question that future leaders will need constant coaching. As the business environment becomes more complex, they will increasingly turn to coaches for help in understanding how to act. The kind of coaches I am talking about will do more than influence behaviors; they will be an essential part of the leader's learning process, providing knowledge, opinions, and judgment in critical areas. These coaches will be retired CEOs or other experts from universities, think tanks, and government. Clearly, this is not a description of what most coaches do today. What we think of as coaching is generally a service to middle managers provided by entrepreneurs with a background in consulting, psychology, or human resources. This kind of coaching became popular over the past five years because companies faced a shortage of talent and were concerned about turnover among key employees. Firms wanted to signal their commitment to developing their high-potential executives, so they hired coaches. Meanwhile, businesspeople needed to develop not just quantitative capabilities but also people-oriented skills, and many coaches are helpful for that As coaching has become more common, any disgrace attached to receiving it at the individual level has disappeared. Now, it is often considered a badge of honor. The coaching industry will remain fragmented until a few partnerships build a brand, collect excellent people, weed out those who are not so good, and create a reputation for outstanding work. Some coaching groups are evolving in this direction, but most are still small firms specializing in, for example, administering and interpreting 360-degree evaluations. To get beyond this level, the industry badly needs a leader who can define the profession and create a serious firm in the way that Marvin Bower did when he invented the modem professional management consultancy in the form of McKinsey most of the evidence around effectiveness remains unproved. My sense is that the positive stories outnumber the negative ones—but as the industry matures, coaching firms will need to be able to demonstrate how they bring about change, as well as offer a clear methodology for measuring results. Despite the recession, I agree with most survey respondents that the demand for coaching will not contract in the long term. The big developing economies are going to have a tremendous appetite for it because management there is very youthful. University graduates are coming into jobs at 23 years old and finding that their bosses are all of 25, with the experience to match.

单选题There was a time when women were considered smart if they played dumb to get a man, and women who went to college were more interested in getting a "Mrs. Degree" than a bachelor's. Even today, it's not unusual for a woman to get whispered and uninvited counsel from her grandmother that an advanced degree could hurt her in the marriage market. Despite the fact that more women than men now attend college, the idea that smart women finish last in love seems to hang on and on. "There were so many misperceptions out there about education and marriage that I decided to sort out the facts," said economist Betsey Stevenson, an assistant professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania So along with Wharton colleague Adam Isen, Stevenson analyzed national marriage data from 1950 to 2008 and found that the marriage penalty women once paid for being well educated has largely disappeared. "Marriage rates in the U.S. for college-educated women have risen enormously since the 1950s," Stevenson said. "In 1950, less than three quarters of white college-educated women went on to marry by age 40 (compared with 90 percent of high-school graduates). But today, 86 percent marry by age 40, compared with 88 percent of high-school graduates." "In other words, the difference in marriage rates between those with college degrees and those without is very small," said Stephanie Coontz, a family historian at Evergreen State College and author of Marriage: A History. The new analysis also found that while high-school dropouts had the highest marriage rates (93 percent) in the 1950s, today college-educated women are much more likely to marry than those who don't finish high school (86 percent versus 81 percent). Of course, expectations have changed dramatically in the last half century. In the 1950s, men didn't want a woman who was their equal; they needed and wanted someone who knew less, someone who looked up to them. And in fact 40 percent of college women admitted to playing dumb on dates. "These days, few women feel the need to play down their intelligence or achievements," Coontz said. The new research has more good news for college graduates. Stevenson said the data indicate that modern college-educated women are more likely than other groups of women to be married at age 40, are less likely to divorce, and are more likely to describe their marriages as "happy" compared with other women. The marriages of well-educated women tend to be more stable because the brides are usually older as well as wiser, Stevenson said.

单选题When public schooling began to expand access to education in the 19th century, literacy was mainly about learning to read, a set of technical skills that individuals would acquire once for a lifetime in order to process a fairly established body of coded knowledge. For most, though not all, individuals in the industrialized world, those technical reading skills can now largely be taken for granted. But literacy requirements have shifted toward reading for learning—the capacity to identify, understand, interpret, create, and communicate knowledge, using written materials associated with varying situations in changing contexts. These skills have now become an almost universal requirement for success in the industrialized world. This shift in the concept of literacy is perhaps best illustrated with statistics on skill utilization in the labor force. It is no longer manual skills but routine cognitive skills that see the steepest decline in labor-market demand in advanced economies. Computers can replace humans for tasks involving processing of information through inductive or deductive rules. Routine cognitive skills are easier to outsource to foreign producers than other kinds of work: When a task can be reduced to rules, the process needs to be explained only once, so communicating with foreign producers is much simpler than for non-rules-based tasks where each piece of work is a special case. The reproduction of a fixed body of knowledge, acquired with technical reading skills, is therefore no longer sufficient. Individuals need the capacity to infer from what they know, to use knowledge in new ways or situations, and to generate new knowledge. Ensuring that assessments are comparable across countries is critical. Another challenge relates to external validity, verifying that literacy assessments measure what they set out to measure and that those skills are predictive for future outcomes of individuals. Adult literacy surveys show that competencies in major educational, training and work transitions are generally better predictors for earnings and employment status than the level of formal educational qualification that individuals had attained. Important aspects of the "new literacy" concept, especially elements of creating and communicating information, remain beyond the scope of large-scale comparative assessment. The long-term future lies with multi-layered assessment systems that extend from classrooms to schools to regional to national to international levels, that measure not just what students know but also how students progress, that are largely performance-based, that make students' thinking visible, and that allow for divergent thinking. Also, these assessments must generate data that teachers, administrators, and policymakers can act upon.

单选题The business practices of America will have you in the office from nine in the morning to five in the evening, if not longer. Much of the world, though, prefers to take a nap. And research presented to the AAAS (American Academy of Arts and Sciences) meeting in San Diego suggests it may be right to do so. Matthew Walker and his colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley, have found that they probably have better memory, too. A post-meal snooze, Dr Walker has discovered, sets the brain up for learning. The role of sleep in consolidating memories that have already been created has been understood for some time. Dr Walker has been trying to extend this understanding by looking at sleep's role in preparing the brain for the formation of memories in the first place. He was particularly interested in a type of memory called episodic memory, which relates to specific events, places and times. This contrasts with procedural memory, of the skills required to perform some sort of mechanical task, such as driving. The theory he and his team wanted to test was that the ability to form new episodic memories deteriorates with increasing wakefulness, and that sleep thus restores the brain's capacity for efficient learning. They asked a group of 39 people to take part in two learning sessions, one at noon and one at 6pm. On each occasion the participants tried to memorize and recall 100 combinations of pictures and names. After the first session they were assigned randomly to either a control group, which remained awake, or a nap group, which had 100 minutes of monitored sleep. Those who remained awake throughout the day became worse at learning. Those who napped, by contrast, actually improved their capacity to learn, doing better in the evening than they had at noon. These findings suggest that sleep is clearing the brain's short-term memory and making way for new information. The benefits to memory of a nap, says Dr Walker, are so great that they can equal an entire night's sleep. He warns, however, that napping must not be done too late in the day or it will interfere with night-time sleep. Moreover, not everyone awakens refreshed from a nap. The dazedness that results from an unrefreshing nap is termed "sleep inertia". Sara Mednick, from the University of California, San Diego, suggests that non-habitual nappers suffer from this more often than those who snooze regularly. It may be that those who have a tendency to wake up dazed are choosing not to nap in the first place. Perhaps, though, as in so many things, it is practice that makes perfect.

单选题Individuals and businesses have legal protection for intellectual property they create and own. Intellectual property【C1】______creative flunking and may include products,【C2】______processes, and ideas. Intellectual property is protected【C3】______misappropriation. Misappropriation is taking the intellectual property of others without【C4】______compensation and using it for monetary gain. Legal protection is provided for the【C5】______of intellectual property. The three common types of legal protection are patents, copyrights, and trademarks. Patents provide exclusive use of inventions. If the U.S. Patent Office【C6】______a patent, it is confirming that the intellectual property is【C7】______. The patent prevents others from making, using, or selling the invention without the owner's【C8】______for a period of 20 years. Copyrights are similar to patents【C9】______that they are applied to artistic works. A copyright protects the creator of an【C10】______artistic or intellectual work, such as a song or a novel. A copyright gives the owner exclusive rights to copy,【C11】______, display, or perform the work. The copyright prevents others from using and selling the work. The【C12】______of a copyright is typically the lifetime of the author【C13】______an additional 70 years. Trademarks are words, names, or symbols that identify the manufacturer of a product and【C14】______it from similar goods of others. A servicemark is similar to a trademark【C15】______is used to identify services. A trademark prevents others from using the【C16】______or a similar word, name, or symbol to take advantage of the recognition and【C17】______of the brand or to create confusion in the marketplace.【C18】______registration, a trademark is usually granted for a period of ten years. It can be【C19】______for additional ten-year periods indefinitely【C20】______the mark's use continues.

单选题Don't look now, but they're all around you. They're standing by the copy machine, hovering by the printer, answering the phone. Yes, they're the overworked, underappreciated interns: young, eager and not always paid. And with just 20% of the graduating class of 2011 gainfully employed, according to the National Association of Colleges and Employers, there are more and more of them each day. It seems the importance of internships for securing full-time work has dramatically increased over the years. Intern, previously used in the medical profession to define a person with a degree but without a license to practice, became a term for a physician in training following World War I, when medical school was no longer seen as preparation enough for practice. Later, the word migrated to politics as an alternative to the term apprentice as a reference to those interested in learning about careers in government. Meanwhile, co-op programs, in which students would work at a company for an extended period during college, emerged. From 1970 to 1983, the number of colleges and universities offering the programs increased from 200 to 1,000. Sure, it took an extra year to earn a B.A., but for three months each school year, students worked for companies they were interested in, tried out careers they weren't sure about and earned money to help cover tuition. Internship programs have produced several successes: Bill Gates was once a congressional page, and Oprah Winfrey worked at a CBS affiliate during her college years, just to name a few. Of course, Monica Lewinsky was a 22-year-old White House intern when she engaged in an intimate relationship with President Clinton, a scandal that still taints both offices. Today's interns are not limited to summer jobs at their local businesses. Some programs provide dorm housing in cities like New York and Washington, allowing students from around the country to work for the nation's biggest companies. Many popular cities even have Facebook groups devoted to providing social outings and networking opportunities for the thousands of interns who descend each summer. Though internships were formerly praised as an opportunity for students to explore career options, doing so now comes with a price. Some experts argue that internships punish those who might decide later than age 18 what they want to do with their life. More important, they can favor wealthier students, who can afford to not make any money during the summer, over the less privileged. Still, with pressure increasing on students to find work, the passion for internships is only growing. To land that first job, career advisers now say, applicants should have two or more internships under their belt. Anyone who takes a summer to simply explore might be too late.

单选题Air pollution triggers more heart attacks than using cocaine and poses as high a risk of sparking a heart attack as alcohol, coffee and physical exertion. The findings, published in The Lancet journal, suggest population-wide【C1】______like polluted air should be【C2】______more seriously when looking at heart risks, and should be put into context beside higher but relatively【C3】______risks like drug use. Researchers combined data【C4】______36 separate studies and calculated the relative risk【C5】______by a series of heart attack triggers. They found that of the triggers for heart attack studied, cocaine is the most【C6】______to trigger an event in an individual,【C7】______traffic has the greatest population effect as more people are【C8】______to it. A report published late last year found that air pollution in many major cities in Asia【C9】______the WHO's air quality guidelines and that toxic cocktails of pollutants【C10】______more than 530,000 premature deaths a year. While【C11】______smoking was not included in this study, the researchers said the effects of second-hand smoke were likely to be【C12】______to that of outdoor air pollution, and noted previous research which found that bans on smoking in public places have significantly【C13】______heart attack rates. British researchers said last year that a ban on smoking in public places in England【C14】______to a swift and significant drop in the number of heart attacks,【C15】______the health service 8.4 million pounds in the first year. 【C16】______, what triggers the heart attack should be considered the "last straw." The【C17】______of heart disease that lead to a heart attack are【C18】______down over many years. If someone wants to【C19】______a heart attack they should focus on not smoking, exercising, eating a healthy diet and【C20】______their ideal weight.

单选题For the past several years, I have been immersed in the study of friendship, and among the many things I have learned, one idea stands out: If you truly want to change some aspect of your life, developing friendships with people who aspire to the same goals as you do can lead to more successful endeavors than embarking on solitary efforts. Shortly after we make a decision to change our behavior, we often sense a softening of what at first felt like ironclad conviction. We chastise ourselves for our inability to summon motivation and return to the poor habits we're trying to break to comfort us, actively undermining our goals. What a disheartening cycle. But research shows that having friends with the same goal can interrupt that cycle. Researchers James Fowler and Nicholas Christakis have demonstrated that weight loss (and gain) spreads through friend groups, most likely via a process of altered norms. It's not that you'll necessarily adopt your friend's new habits right away, but the seed will be planted. If you want to continue to feel close to her, you might even start adjusting your own routines (perhaps unconsciously) to align them more with hers. Friends can help you reinforce individual willpower. In The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg recommends replacing the cues that trigger, and the rewards that follow, bad behaviors with new, healthier ones. The cue and reward of a real person knocking on your door for a joint jog, and a stimulating talk over coffee afterwards, is a particularly alluring replacement for whatever previously sucked you into sedentary TV watching. In a recent New York Times column, "How People Change," David Brooks noted that, "There's a research suggesting that it's best to tackle negative behaviors indirectly, by redirecting attention toward different, positive ones." Investing in fulfilling friendships with those who have the values and habits you admire will lift you up to those friends' level more easily. The desire to be with, be like, and be liked by friends is primal. We're all built to seek out strong bonds with friends on whom our very survival might have once been dependent. While we don't necessarily need friends to help hunt or fight off predators these days, most of us probably still feel like we can't live without them. Tap into that deep-down social motivation and you'll not only be primed for success, you'll take pleasure in the proverbial journey.

单选题What happens when you combine product design skills, high-powered market research techniques, and abundant customer data? Too often, the result is devices that suffer from "feature creep" or the return of billions of dollars' worth of merchandise by customers who wanted something different after all. That kind of waste is bad enough in normal times, but in a downturn it can take a fearsome toll. The trouble is that most customer-preference rating tools used in product development today are blunt instruments, primarily because consumers have a hard time articulating their real desires. Asked to rate a long list of product attributes on a scale of 1 ("completely unimportant") to 10 ("extremely important"), customers are apt to say they want many or even most of them. To solve that problem, companies need a way to help customers sharpen the distinction between "nice to have" and "gotta have." Some companies are beginning to pierce the fog using a research technique called "Maxdiff" (Maximum Difference Scaling), which was pioneered in the 1990s. It requires customers to make a sequence of explicit trade-offs. Researchers begin by amassing a list of product or brand attributes that represent potential benefits. Then they present respondents with sets of four or so attributes at a time, asking them to select which attribute of each set they prefer most and least. Subsequent rounds of mixed groupings enable the researchers to identify the standing of each attribute relative to all the others by the number of times customers select it as their most or least important consideration. A popular restaurant chain recently used MaxDiff to understand why its expansion efforts were failing. In a series of focus groups and preference surveys, consumers agreed about what they wanted: more healthful meal options and updated decoration. But when the chain's heavily promoted new menu was rolled out, the marketing team was dismayed by the results. Customers found the complex new choices confusing, and sales were sluggish in the more contemporary new outlets. The company's marketers decided to cast the range of preferences more broadly. Using MaxDiff, they asked customers to compare eight attributes and came to a striking realization. The results showed that prompt service of hot meals and a convenient location were far more important to customers than healthful items and modern furnishings. The ability to predict how customers will behave can be extremely powerful. Companies planning cross-border product rollouts need a tool that is free of cultural bias. And as customer tastes fragment, product development teams need reliable techniques for drawing bright lines between customer segments based on the features that matter most to each group. Companies are starting to apply MaxDiff analysis to those issues as well.