单选题Scientists had until very recently believed that there were around 100,000 human genes, available to make each and every one of us in our splendid diversity. Now, the two rival teams decoding the book of life, have each found that instead there are only somewhere between 30,000 and 40,000 genes. So that grand panjandrum, the human, may not manage to boast twice as many genes as that microscopic nowhere-worm, with its 18,000 genes, the nematode. Even the fruit fly, considered so negligible that even the most extreme of animal rights activists don"t kick up a fuss about its extensive use in genetic experimentation, has 16,000 genes. Not for the first time it has to be admitted that it"s a funny old world, and that we humans are the beings who make it such. Without understanding in the least what the scientific implications of this discovery might be, anybody with the smallest curiosity about people—and that"s pretty much all of us—can see that it is pretty significant. The most obvious conclusion to be drawn from the limited number of genes available to programme a human is that biological determination goes so far and no further. Human complexity, on this information, can be best explained in the manner it looks to be best explained before scientific evidence becomes involved at all. In other words, in the nature versus nurture debate, the answer, thankfully, is "both". Why is this so important? Because it should mean that we can accept one another"s differences more easily, and help each other when appropriate. Nurture does have a huge part to play in human destiny. Love can transform humans. Trust can make a difference. Second chances are worth trying. Life, to a far greater extent than science thought up until now, is what we make it. One day we may know exactly what we can alter and what we cannot. Knowing that there is a great deal that we can alter or improve, as well as a great deal that we must accept and value for its own sake, makes the human journey progressive rather than deterministic, complex and open, rather than simple and unchangeable. For no one can suggest that 30,000 genes don"t give the human race much room for manoeuvre. Look how many tunes, after all, we"re able to squeeze out of eight notes. But it surely must give the lie to the rather sinister belief that has been gaining credence in the West that there is a hard-wired, no-prisoners-taken, gene for absolutely everything, and that whole sections of the population can be labelled as "stupid" or "lazy" or "criminal" or somehow or other sub-human. Instead, like the eight notes which can only make music (albeit in astounding diversity), the 30,000 genes can only make people. The rest is up to US.

单选题Black and Hispanic patients infected with the HIV virus are less likely than whites to participate in clinical studies of new treatments or to receive experimental drugs, according to the first study that has used nationally representative data to examine such disparities. Moreover, underrepresentation of blacks and Hispanics in HIV treatment studies becomes a concern for the applicability of the clinical research to patients in the general population. The findings indicate that people with HIV infection overall are much more likely to get experimental treatments than are people with other diseases, such as cancer or heart disease. Because AIDS treatment is evolving rapidly and because the virus often develops resistance to approved drugs, AIDS activists have lobbied successfully to expand access to new medicines. An estimated 14 percent of the approximately 231,000 adults treated for HIV infection in 1996 participated in a clinical trial, and 24 percent had taken an experimental drug, the study found. Only 4 percent of adults with cancer who are less than 50 years old participate in clinical trials. But the results suggest marked racial and ethnic disparities in access to experimental HIV treatment. Blacks made up only 23 percent of clinical study participants but constituted 33 percent of adults receiving HIV care. Similarly, 11 percent of study participants, but 15 percent of HIV-infected patients nationally, were Hispanic. In contrast, whites made up 62 percent of participants in HIV trials, yet represented only 49 percent of adults receiving HIV care. The research team studied a nationally representative sample of 2,864 adults in the 48 contiguous United States who were receiving care for HIV infection in 1996. They interviewed participants three times between 1996 and 1998, asking about their participation in studies, their use of experimental drugs and other personal data, including such factors as their trust of doctors and desire to participate in decisions about treatment. The researchers found that, in addition to being black or Hispanic, several other factors also reduced patients" likelihood of participating in a clinical trial. They included having less than a high school education, belonging to a health maintenance organization (HMO), and living eight or more miles from a major research hospital. Patients who were white, who were highly educated or who received their health care close to a research center were more likely than others to get experimental drugs. In an editorial accompanying the study, Talmadge E. King of San Francisco General Hospital suggested that racial and ethnic disparities in access to experimental treatment may reflect "barriers at the level of the patient, the physician, the institution and the community." Doctors may harbor unconscious prejudices toward blacks or Hispanics, he suggested. Patients may be mistrustful or fear that participating in a study will threaten their autonomy. Researchers studying new treatments for drug companies may avoid enrolling members of minorities "because they believe that poor compliance is common in these groups."

单选题 The country's biggest challenge now is the plight of lower-income Americans, who are under severe and sustained economic pressure. Today, America resembles a tale of two cities. Those who own homes or stocks have benefited from the recovery in these asset classes and are moving up again. But 40% of working-age families earn $40,000 a year or less. Generally they live within 250% of the official poverty level, which is the eligibility threshold for food stamps. Indeed, judging from current trends, half of today's 20-year-olds will receive food stamps during their adult lives. More broadly, median household income is still 8% below the precrisis level, and those who have not completed college are seeing declines in anticipated lifetime earnings compared with their peers with college degrees. This is the primary economic challenge. If a third of the population has little purchasing power, it will be hard to achieve the desired rate of long-term growth. The U.S. needs to improve the work skills of this group, strengthen the social safety net and increase the number of young Americans receiving a full college education. Although doing more to relieve the financial burdens of working Americans is good economics, it is also, and perhaps more important, a matter of values. For much of the 20th century Americans strove, with much success, to build a fairer and more inclusive society. But today, too many working families are {{U}}living paycheck to paycheck{{/U}} or even in outright poverty, while the toeholds (客服困难的方法) to economic stability become fewer and farther between. With the economy's near and medium term economic outlook strong, now is the time to remove the barriers that are keeping hardworking Americans walking a far too thin financial line.

单选题There is a fashionable new science, behavioral economics, which applies the insights of psychology to how people make economic decisions. It tries to explain, for instance, the herd instinct that led people during the recent bubble to override common sense and believe things about asset values because others did. the " bandwagon effect." Behavioral economics has also brought us notions like "loss aversion", how we hate giving up a dollar we have far more than forgoing a dollar we have not yet got. But while there is a lot of interest in the psychology and neuroscience of markets, there is much less in the psychology and neuroscience of government. Slavisa Tasic, of the University of Kiev, wrote a paper recently for the Istituto Bruno Leoni in Italy about this omission. He argues that market participants are not the only ones who make mistakes, yet he notes drily that "in the mainstream economic literature there is a near complete absence of concern that regulatory design might suffer from lack of competence." Public servants are human, too. Mr. Tasic identifies five mistakes that government regulators often make: action bias, motivated reasoning, the focusing illusion, the affect heuristic and illusions of competence. In the last case, psychologists have shown that we systematically overestimate how much we understand about the causes and mechanisms of things we half understand. The Swedish health economist Hans Rosling once gave students a list of five pairs of countries and asked which nation in each pair had the higher infant-mortality rate. The students got 1.8 right out of 5. Mr. Rosling noted that if he gave the test to chimpanzees they would get 2.5 right. So his students" problem was not ignorance, but that they knew with confidence things that were false. The issue of action bias is better known in England as the "dangerous dogs act," after a previous government, confronted with a couple of cases in which dogs injured or killed people, felt the need to bring in a major piece of clumsy and bureaucratic legislation that worked poorly. Undoubtedly the hasty legislation following the current financial crisis will include some equivalents of dangerous dogs acts. It takes unusual courage for a regulator to stand up and say "something must not be done," lest "something" makes the problem worse. Motivated reasoning means that we tend to believe what it is convenient for us to believe. The focusing illusion partly stems from the fact that people tend to see the benefits of a policy but not the hidden costs. "Affect heuristic" is a fancy name for a pretty obvious concept, namely that we discount the drawbacks of things we are emotionally in favor of. If lawmakers are to understand how laws get applied in the real world, they need to know and understand the habits of mind of their officials.

单选题Baltimore was founded in 1729. For a generation it seemed no different from a dozen other small settlements 1 up at the head of the Chesapeake Bays. Its claim to 2 consisted of a blacksmith"s shop, flour 3 , and tobacco warehouse. Yet Baltimore was 4 for a more dynamic future than its slow beginnings seemed to 5 . 6 by an agricultural revolution in the Maryland and Pennsylvania countryside as well as dramatic disruptions in the Atlantic economy, Baltimore at mid-century began to 7 . By 1799 it had risen to become the new Republic"s fourth largest city with 8 to overtake the three still 9 : New York, Philadelphia and Boston. 10 the Baltimore village of the Jeffersonian era looked utterly unlike the colonial village from 11 it had emerged, the two shared more than it might be 12 at the first glance. Baltimore"s economy had expanded tremendously, to be sure, but the same forces that sparked 13 around 1750 continued to 14 it fifty years later. 15 the establishment of new government at the state level in 1776, national level in 1788, and 16 level in 1797, the same irritating issues continued to attack its politics. If Baltimore had become richer and bigger, its occupational structure, wealth 17 and residential patterns withstood the pressure of growth and looked about the same in 1790 as in 1812. In other words, 18 the frozen and seemingly chaotic pace of 19 , Baltimore enjoyed a strong element of stability. For in 1812, no 20 than in 1729, Baltimore was a pre-industrial town.

单选题Devil, V8, Anal, Christ: these are among the baby names 1 by New Zealand"s department of internal affairs, who recently 2 a 3 list of those disallowed by registrars in the past ten years. Few decisions are more 4 than the naming of offspring. Yet laws 5 the choice of both first names and surnames are not 6 around the world. Denmark expects new parents to choose from a register of acceptable names; Portugal lists banned and approved ones. German registrars prohibit the use of most nouns and place-names, and also frown 7 any that do not clearly imply a gender: bad luck, Kim. Governments argue that these rules prevent children being 8 with absurd names that may cause them problems in later life. They also aim to block names that might cause 9 to others. In 2009 a couple in New Jersey lost custody of a boy they had named Adolf Hitler. 10 concerns play a role, too. Government databases may struggle with long names: New Zealand allows 100 characters for all first names; the state of Massachusetts has a 11 of 40 for each. Chinese face a particular difficulty: their language has tens of thousands of characters, but a name that uses 12 or rare ones can mean computer problems. Whether these decisions make any difference is another matter. A study in 2002 suggested that individuals may be influenced by their first names, without even being 13 of it. A disproportionate number of girls named Georgia live in the American state that 14 their name; boys named Dennis may be slightly 15 likely to become dentists than those called Walter (and Georges seem to have a 16 for geology). Academics with surnames in the 17 half of alphabet are more likely to get good university jobs (the authors of papers are listed alphabetically). Ballot papers that list politicians" names that way also show a 18 effect. But reinvention beckons. Britain"s chancellor was born Gideon Osborne; aged 13, he became George. The UK Deed Poll Service, a legal firm, in 2011 helped 60,000 Britons rename themselves (fees start at ￡33, around $50); it was only 5,000 a decade before. American courts report similar trends. Some such applicants may wish to 19 their parents" expectations, while others may regret they were not given a more 20 name.

单选题About 1,400 college students die and about 500,000 are injured each year in accidents related to alcohol use, according to the first comprehensive estimates of the toll of heavy drinking on campuses. The impact of alcohol is not limited to students who drink. More than 600,000 college students are assaulted annually by another student who has been drinking, and more than 70,000 are victims of alcohol-associated sexual assaults, according to the study, whose findings were released yesterday along with the report of a government task force on college drinking. The estimates are for students between the ages of 18 and 24. Although deaths of individual college students from acute alcohol intoxication or injuries have received widespread media attention in recent years, experts said the new national estimates show that the consequences of heavy drinking by students are greater than previously realized. Among the nation"s 8 million college students, about 4 out of 5 drink alcohol. Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 have the highest rates of periodic, heavy drinking of any age group, and college students drink more heavily than people of similar age who are not in school. The researchers calculated that there are approximately 1,100 alcohol-related motor vehicle crash deaths and approximately 300 alcohol-related fatal injuries among college students annually. The estimates do not include homicides and suicides. To estimate the frequency of health problems and high-risk behaviors associated with drinking, the team used data from national student surveys and extrapolated them to the college population. For example, in a 1999 government survey of almost 7,000 college students, about 27 percent reported that they had driven under the influence of alcohol in the preceding year—which amounts to about 2.1 million students nationally each year. About 3.1 million students annually ride with such drivers. For students, the highest-risk time for alcohol-related injuries, assaults, sexual assaults and other consequences of heavy drinking "is in the first year of college, maybe in the first weeks", said Mark. S. Goldman, a professor of psychology at the University of South Florida and the task force"s other co-chairman. The task force concluded that most efforts by colleges to reduce high-risk drinking have failed, in part because they have focused on individuals rather than on the entire community and because few programs designed to reduce drinking have been scientifically tested in college settings. The report found that several programs combining alcohol education, behavioral skills training and motivational enhancement have reduced drinking among high-risk students. Community strategies, such as increased enforcement of minimum-drinking-age laws, restricting the number of local alcohol licenses issued, and raising prices and taxes on alcoholic beverages, have been successfully tested in other settings and might also be effective. Other measures, such as instituting tougher penalties for breaking campus rules on drinking, establishing alcohol-free dormitories, eliminating alcohol at sports events and conducting campaigns to change students" opinions about how much other students drink, are theoretically promising but have not been scientifically evaluated.

单选题 It is not unusual for chief executives to collect millions of dollars a year in pay, stock options, and bonuses. In the last fifteen years, while executive remuneration (报酬) rose, taxes in the highest income bracket went down. Millionaires are now commonplace. Amiability (和蔼可亲) is not a prerequisite for rising to the top, and there are a number of chief executive officers with legendary bad tempers. It is not the boss' s job to worry about the well-being of his subordinates although the man with many enemies will be swept out more quickly in hard times; it is the company he worries about. His business savvy (机智) is supposed to be based on intimate knowledge of his company and the industry, so he goes home nightly with a full briefcase. At the very top—and on the way up executives are exceedingly dedicated. The American executive must be capable of enough small talk to get him through the social part of his schedule, but he is probably not a highly cultured individual or an intellectual. Although his wife may be on the board of the symphony or opera, he himself has little time for such pursuits. His reading may largely concern business and management, despite interests in other fields. Golf provides him with a sportive outlet that combines with some useful socializing. These days, he probably attempts some form of {{U}}aerobic exercise{{/U}} to "keep the old heart in shape" and for the same reason goes easy on butter and alcohol, and substances thought to contribute to taking highly stressed executives out of the running. But his doctor's warning to "take it easy" falls on deaf ears. He likes to work. He knows there are younger men nipping at his heels. Corporate head-hunting, carried on by "executive search finns", is a growing industry. America has great faith in individual talent, and dynamic and aggressive executives are so in demand that companies regularly raid each other's managerial ranks.

单选题 It's 2:45 p.m. on a Wednesday, and Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti is in the backseat of a black Chevy Tahoe that's inching its way to city hall along the 101 freeway. This stretch of the often clogged road is eight lanes, but there are so many cars on it that everyone is moving at about 30km/h, a single mass of steel and glass lurching toward downtown. Just a few hours earlier, Garcetti was traveling a lot faster. To get to an event in University City, about 16 km from his office, Garcetti took the city's Red Line subway, which can reach speed of up to 110km/h—a pace L.A.'s rush-hour drivers can only dream about. Persuading more Angelenos to take the train could go a long way toward solving one of L.A's most intractable problems. "We don't need people to completely give up their cars," he says while holding onto a pole on the Red Line. "But right now, we average 1.1 people per car. If we could get that to 1.6, the traffic problem would go away." In L.A., cars are a source of smog, billions of dollars in lost productivity every year and endless frustration for residents. "Every working person plans their life around traffic in this town," says Zev Yaroslavsky, a Los Angeles County supervisor and longtime friend of Garcetti's. "Building a transportation infrastructure is something that needs to be focused on, and Eric gets that." Should Garcetti, 43—who was elected in May as the youngest mayor of L. A. in more than a century—ever manage to get the freeways flowing, it would be a triumph. And it would only begin to cure what ails L.A. Los Angeles' structural problems are daunting. The city has fewer jobs now than it did in 1990, with a regional unemployment rate that is more than 2 points higher than the national average. L.A. is also buckling under health care and pension costs and is scaling back public services to compensate. The 2014-2015 budget is projected to be $242 million in the red. As the Los Angeles 2020 Commission, a group of business, labor and public-sector leaders charged by the city council with diagnosing the region's ills, put it in a December report, "Los Angeles is barely treading water while the rest of the world is moving forward."

单选题A new study suggests that contrary to most surveys, people are actually more stressed at home than at work. Researchers measured people"s cortisol, which is a stress marker, while they were at work and while they were at home and found it higher at what is supposed to be a place of refuge. "Further contradicting conventional wisdom, we found that women as well as men have lower levels of stress at work than at home." writes one of the researchers, Sarah Damaske. In fact women even say they feel better at work, she notes, "It is men, not women, who report being happier at home than at work." Another surprise is that the findings hold true for both those with children and without, but more so for nonparents. This is why people who work outside the home have better health. What the study doesn"t measure is whether people are still doing work when they"re at home, whether it is household work or work brought home from the office. For many men, the end of the workday is a time to kick back. For women who stay home, they never get to leave the office. And for women who work outside the home, they often are playing catch-up-with-household tasks. With the blurring of roles, and the fact that the home front lags well behind the workplace in making adjustments for working women, it"s not surprising that women are more stressed at home. But it"s not just a gender thing. At work, people pretty much know what they"re supposed to be doing, working, making money, doing the tasks they have to do in order to draw an income. The bargain is very pure. Employee puts in hours of physical or mental labor and employee draws out life-sustaining moola . On the home front, however, people have no such clarity. Rare is the household in which the division of labor is so clinically and methodically laid out. There are a lot of tasks to be done, there are inadequate rewards for most of them. Your home colleagues—your family—have no clear rewards for their labor: they need to be talked into it, or if they"re teenagers, threatened with complete removal of all electronic devices. Plus, they"re your family. You cannot fire your family. You never really get to go home from home. So it"s not surprising that people are more stressed at home. Not only are the tasks apparently infinite, the co-workers are much harder to motivate.

单选题 Surveys find entrenched (根深蒂固的) pessimism over the country's economic outlook and overall trajectory (轨道). In the latest Wall Street Journal poll, 63% of the respondents said the U.S. is on the wrong track. It's not difficult to see why. Set aside the gridlock in Washington for a moment and appreciate the weakness of the economic recovery: Households whose finances were too weak to spend. Large numbers of unemployed workers who couldn't do so either. Younger Americans who couldn't afford their own homes. Banks that were too broken to lend. Yet nearly a year ago, I wrote an essay for Time suggesting that the economy could surprise on the upside. That hypothesis looks even more valid today. Despite the pessimistic mood, America is experiencing a profound comeback. Yes, too many Americans are out of work and have been for far too long. And yes, there is a huge amount of slack to make up. In fact, if the 2008 collapse had not happened, the U.S. GDP would be $1 trillion— or more than 5%—higher than it is today. But in terms of the growth outlook, the news is good. Goldman Sachs and many private-sector forecasters project a 3.3% growth rate for the remainder of 2014. The first half of 2014 saw the best job-creation rate in 15 years. Total household wealth and private employment surpassed 2008 levels last year. Bank loans to businesses exceeded previous highs this year. And income growth will soon improve too. America is finally returning to where it was seven years ago. As halting as the U.S. recovery has been, the economy is now leaner and more capable of healthy, sustained growth through 2016 and beyond. The U.S. outlook shines compared with that of the rest of the industrialized world, as Europe and Japan are stagnant. The 2008 economic crisis and Great Recession forced widespread restructuring throughout the U.S. economy—not unlike a company gritting its teeth through a lifesaving bankruptcy. Manufacturing costs are down. The banking system has been recapitalized. The excess and abuse that defined the housing market are gone. And it's all being turbocharged by an energy boom nobody saw coming.

单选题About the time that schools and others quite reasonably became interested in seeing to it that all children, whatever their background, were fairly treated, intelligence testing became unpopular. Some thought it was unfair to minority children. Through the past few decades such testing has gone out of fashion and many communities have indeed forbidden it. However, paradoxically, just recently a group of black parents filed a lawsuit in California claiming that the state"s ban on IQ testing discriminates against their children by denying them the opportunity to take the test. (They believed, correctly, that IQ tests are a valid method of evaluating children for special education classes.) The judge, therefore, reversed, at least partially, his original decision. And so the argument goes on and on. Does it benefit or harm children from minority groups to have their intelligence tested? We have always been on the side of permitting, even facilitating, such testing. If a child of any color or group is doing poorly in school it seems to us very important to know whether it is because he or she is of low intelligence, or whether some other factor is the cause. What school and family can do to improve poor performance is influenced by its cause. It is not discriminative to evaluate either a child"s physical condition or his intellectual level. Unfortunately, intellectual level seems to be a sensitive subject, and what the law allows us to do varies from time to time. The same fluctuation back and forth occurs in areas other than intelligence. Thirty years or so ago, for instance, white families were encouraged to adopt black children. It was considered discriminative not to do so. And then the style changed and this cross-racial adopting became generally unpopular, and social agencies felt that black children should go to black families only. It is hard to say what are the best procedures. But surely good will on the part of all of us is needed. As to intelligence, in our opinion, the more we know about any child"s intellectual level, the better for the child in question.

单选题A new high-performance contact lens under development at the department for applied physics at the University of Heidelberg will not only correct ordinary vision defects but will enhance normal night vision as much as five times, making people"s vision sharper than that of cats. Bille and his team work with an optical instrument called an active mirror—a device used in astronomical telescopes to spot newly emerging stars and far distant galaxies. Connected to a wave-front sensor that tracks and measures the course of a laser beam into the eye and back, the aluminum mirror detects the deficiencies of the cornea, the transparent protective layer covering the lens of the human eye. The highly precise data from the two instruments—which, Bille hopes, will one day be found at the opticians all over the world—serve as a basis for the production of completely individualized contact lenses that correct and enhance the wearer"s vision. By day, Bille"s contact lenses will focus rays of light so accurately on the retina that the image of a small leaf or the outline of a far distant tree will be formed with a sharpness that surpasses that of conventional vision aids by almost half a diopter. At night, the lenses have an even greater potential. "Because the new lens—in contrast to the already existing ones also works when it"s dark and the pupil is wide open," says Bille, "lens wearers will be able to identify a face at a distance of 100 meters" —80 meters farther than they would normally be able to see. In his experiments night vision was enhanced by an even greater factor: in semi darkness, test subjects could see up to 15 times better than without the lenses. Bille"s lenses are expected to reach the market in the year 2000, and one tentative plan is to use the Internet to transmit information on patients" visual defects from the optician to the manufacturer, who will then produce and mail the contact lenses within a couple of days. The physicist expects the lenses to cost about a dollar a pair, about the same as conventional one-day disposable lenses.

单选题The adage "like a kid at heart" may be truer than we think, since new research is showing that grown-ups are more immature than ever. Specifically, it seems a growing number of people are retaining the behaviors and attitudes associated with youth. As a consequence, many older people simply never achieve mental adulthood, according to a leading expert on evolutionary psychiatry. Among scientists, the phenomenon is called psychological neoteny. The theory"s creator is Bruce Charlton, a professor in the School of Biology at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, England. Charlton explained that humans have an inherent attraction to physical youth, since it can be a sign of fertility, health and vitality. In the mid-20th century, however, another force kicked in, due to increasing need for individuals to change jobs, learn new skills, move to new places and make new friends. A "child-like flexibility of attitudes, behaviors and knowledge" is probably adaptive to the increased instability of the modern world. Formal education now extends well past physical maturity, leaving students with minds that are, he said, "unfinished." When formal education continues into the early twenties, it Probably, to an extent, counteracts the attainment of psychological maturity, which would otherwise occur at about this age. Charlton pointed out that past cultures often marked the advent of adulthood with initiation ceremonies. While the human mind responds to new information over the course of any individual"s lifetime, Charlton argues that past physical environments were more stable and allowed for a state of psychological maturity. In hunter-gatherer societies, that maturity was probably achieved during a person"s late teens or early twenties. By contrast, many modern adults fail to attain this maturity, and such failure is common and indeed characteristic of highly educated and, on the whole, effective and socially valuable people. Charlton added that since modern cultures now favor cognitive flexibility, "immature" people tend to thrive and succeed, and have set the tone not only for contemporary life, but also for the future, when it is possible our genes may even change as a result of the psychological shift. The faults of youth are retained along with the virtues. These include short attention span, sensation and novelty-seeking, short cycles of arbitrary fashion and a sense of cultural shallowness. David Brooks, a social commentator and a columnist at The New York Times, has documented a somewhat related phenomenon concerning the current blurring of "the bourgeois world of capitalism and the bohemian counterculture," which Charlton believes is a version of psychological neoteny. Brooks believes such individuals have lost the wisdom and maturity of their bourgeois predecessors due to more emphasis placed on expertise, flexibility and vitality.

单选题When global warming finally came, it stuck with a vengeance. In some regions, temperatures rose several degrees in less than a century. Sea levels shot up nearly 400 feet, flooding coastal settlements and forcing people to migrate inland. Deserts spread throughout the world as vegetation shifted drastically in North America, Europe and Asia. After driving many of the animals around them to near extinction, people were forced to abandon their old way of life for a radically new survival strategy that resulted in widespread starvation and disease. The adaptation was farming: the global-warming crisis that gave rise to it happened more than 10,000 years ago. As environmentalists convene in Rio de Janeiro this week to ponder the global climate of the future, earth scientists are in the midst of a revolution in understanding how climate has changed in the past—and how those changes have transformed human existence. Researchers have begun to piece together an illuminating picture of the powerful geological and astronomical forces that have combined to change the planet"s environment from hot to cold, wet to dry and back again over a time period stretching back hundreds of millions of years. Most important, scientists are beginning to realize that the climatic changes have had a major impact on the evolution of the human species. New research now suggests that climate shifts have played a key role in nearly every significant turning point in human evolution., from the dawn of primates some 65 million years ago to human ancestors rising up to walk on two legs, from the huge expansion of the human brain to the rise of agriculture. Indeed, the human history has not been merely touched by global climate change, some scientists argue, it has in some instances been driven by it. The new research has profound implications for the environmental summit in Rio. Among other things, the findings demonstrate that dramatic climate change is nothing new for planet Earth. The benign global environment that has existed over the past 10,000 years—during which agriculture, writing, cities and most other features of civilization appeared—is a mere bright spot in a much larger pattern of widely varying climate over the ages. In fact, the pattern of climate change in the past reveals that Earth"s climate will almost certainly go through dramatic changes in the future—even without the influence of human activity.

单选题Richard Satava, program manager for advanced medical technologies, has been a driving force in bringing virtual reality to medicine, where computers create a "virtual" or simulated environment for surgeons and other medical practitioners. "With virtual reality we"ll be able to put a surgeon in every trench," said Satava. He envisaged a time when soldiers who are wounded fighting overseas are put in mobile surgical units equipped with computers. The computers would transmit images of the soldiers to surgeons back in the U.S. The surgeons would look at the soldier through virtual reality helmets that contain a small screen displaying the image of the wound. The doctors would guide robotic instruments in the battlefield mobile surgical unit that operate on the soldier. Although Satava"s vision may be years away from standard operating procedure, scientists are progressing toward virtual reality surgery. Engineers at an international organization in California are developing a tele-operating device. As surgeons watch a three-dimensional image of the surgery, they move instruments that are connected to a computer, which passes their movements to robotic instruments that perform the surgery. The computer provides feedback to the surgeon on force, textures, and sound. These technological wonders may not yet be part of the community hospital setting but increasingly some of the machinery is finding its way into civilian medicine. At Wayne State University Medical School, surgeon Lucia Zamorano takes images of the brain from computerized scans and uses a computer program to produce a 3-D image. She can then maneuver the 3-D image on the computer screen to map the shortest, least invasive surgical path to the tumor. Zamorano is also using technology that attaches a probe to surgical instruments so that she can track their positions. While cutting away a tumor deep in the brain, she watches the movement of her surgical tools in a computer graphics image of the patient"s brain taken before surgery. During these procedures—operations that are done through small cuts in the body in which a miniature camera and surgical tools are maneuvered—surgeons are wearing 3-D glasses for a better view. And they are commanding robot surgeons to cut away tissue more accurately than human surgeons can. Satava says, "We are in the midst of a fundamental change in the field of medicine."

单选题 One reason why shareholder activism has been increasing is that regulators have encouraged it, especially on pay. For a decade Britain has required firms to give shareholders a non-binding annual vote on executive pay. The colossal Dodd-Frank act of 2010 gave shareholders in American companies a "say on pay", too. Now comes two new moves. On March 3rd the Swiss voted to oblige firms to hold a binding annual vote on director's pay: in the small print, the referendum also banned golden handshakes and severance packages for board members, and bonuses that encourage the buying or selling of firms. Then on March 5th E.U. finance ministers (with only Britain objecting) agreed to cap bankers' bonuses to 100% of their basic salary, or 200% if shareholders vote for it. If the Swiss had merely given shareholders an annual vote on pay, it would have been a good thing; but the accompanying bans are not. There are times when a golden handshake to a talented manager can be in shareholders' interests: far better to let the owners vote on it than restrict the firm from trying it. The E.U.'s proposal has less still to recommend it. The rationale for it is that banking bonuses have encouraged risk taking, because they reward bankers hugely for bets that come off and punish them only slightly for those that don't. But banks have come a long way since the crisis, by deferring bonuses and making them partly payable in their own debt and equity. Blunt laws could undermine such progress. And bonus caps will either hold pay down, thus sending clever people elsewhere, or push up salaries, thus making pay less responsive to performance. Enpowering shareholders is a good idea; requiring them to channel populist fury is not.

单选题Comparisons to the Depression feature are in almost every discussion of the global economic crisis. In world trade, such parallels are especially chilling. Trade declined alarmingly in the early 1930s as global demand imploded, prices collapsed and governments embarked on a destructive, protectionist spiral of higher tariffs and retaliation. Trade is contracting again, at a rate unmatched in the post-war period. This week the WTO predicted that the volume of global merchandise trade would shrink by 9% this year. This will be the first fall in trade flows since 1982. Between 1990 and 2006 trade volumes grew by more than 6% a year, outstripping the growth rate of world output, which was about 3%. Now the global economic machine has gone into reverse: output is declining and trade is tumbling at a faster pace. The turmoil has shaken commerce in goods of all sorts, bought and sold by rich and poor countries alike. It is too soon to talk of a new protectionist spiral. Nevertheless, errors of policy risk make a bad thing worse—despite politicians" promises to keep markets open. When they met in November, the leaders of the G20 rich and emerging economies declared that they would eschew protectionism and will doubtless do so again when they meet on April 2nd. But this pledge has not been honoured. According to the World Bank, 17 members of the group have taken a total of 47 trade restricting steps since November. Modern protectionism is more subtle and varied than the 1930s version. In the Depression tariffs were the weapon of choice. America"s Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, passed in 1930, increased nearly 900 American import duties and provoked widespread retaliation from America"s trading partners. A few tariffs have been raised this time, but tighter licensing requirements, import bans and anti-dumping have also been used. Rich countries have included discriminatory procurement provisions in their fiscal-stimulus bills and offered subsidies to ailing national industries. These days, protectionism comes in 57 varieties. There are good reasons for thinking that the world has less to fear from protectionism than in the past. International agreements to limit tariffs, built over the post-war decades, are a safeguard against all-out tariff wars. The growth of global supply chains, which have bound national economies together tightly, have made it more difficult for governments to increase tariffs without harming producers in their own countries. But these defences may not be strong enough. Multilateral agreements provide little insurance against domestic subsidies, fiercer use of anti-dumping or the other forms of creeping protection.

单选题Happy people work differently. They"re more productive, more creative, and willing to take greater risks. And new research suggests that happiness might influence 1 firms work, too. Companies located in places with happier people invest more, according to a recent research paper. 2 , firms in happy places spend more on R&D (research and development). That"s because happiness is linked to the kind of longer-term thinking 3 for making investments for the future. The researchers wanted to know if the 4 and inclination for risk-taking that come with happiness would 5 the way companies invested. So they compared U.S. cities" average happiness 6 by Gallup polling with the investment activity of publicly traded firms in those areas. 7 enough, firms" investment and R&D intensity were correlated with the happiness of the area in which they were 8 . But is it really happiness that"s linked to investment, or could something else about happier cities 9 why firms there spend more on R&D? To find out, the researchers controlled for various 10 that might make firms more likely to invest—like size, industry, and sales—and for indicators that a place was 11 to live in, like growth in wages or population. The link between happiness and investment generally 12 even after accounting for these things. The correlation between happiness and investment was particularly strong for younger firms, which the authors 13 to "less codified decision making process" and the possible presence of "younger and less 14 managers who are more likely to be influenced by sentiment." The relationship was 15 stronger in places where happiness was spread more 16 . Firms seem to invest more in places where most people are relatively happy, rather than in places with happiness inequality. 17 this doesn"t prove that happiness causes firms to invest more or to take a longer-term view, the authors believe it at least 18 at that possibility. It"s not hard to imagine that local culture and sentiment would help 19 how executives think about the future. "It surely seems plausible that happy people would be more forward-thinking and creative and 20 R&D more than the average," said one researcher.

单选题Many states have gone on prison-building sprees, yet the penal system is choked to bursting. To ease the pressure, nearly all convicted felons are released early—or not locked up at all. "About three of every four convicted criminals," says John DiIulio, a noted Princeton criminologist, "are on the streets without meaningful probation or parole supervision." And while everyone knows that amateur thugs should be deterred before they become career criminals, it is almost unheard-of for judges to send first- or second-time offenders to prison. Meanwhile, the price of keeping criminals in cages is appalling—a common estimate is $30,000 per inmate per year. (To be sure, the cost to society of turning many inmates loose would be even higher.) For tens of thousands of convicts, prison is a graduate school of criminal studies: They emerge more ruthless and savvy than when they entered. And for many offenders, there is even a certain cachet to doing time—a stint in prison becomes a sign of manhood, a status symbol. But there would be no cachet in chaining a criminal to an outdoor post and flogging him. If young punks were horsewhipped in public after their first conviction, fewer of them would harden into lifelong felons. A humiliating and painful paddling can be applied to the rear end of a crook for a lot less than $30,000—and prove a lot more educational than 10 years" worth of prison meals and lockdowns. Are we quite certain the Puritans have nothing to teach us about dealing with criminals? Of course, their crimes are not our crimes: We do not arrest blasphemers or adulterers, and only gun control fanatics would criminalize the sale of weapons to Indians. (They would criminalize the sale of weapons to anybody.) Nor would the ordeal suffered by poor Joseph Gatchell—the tongue "pierce through" with a hot poker—be regarded today as anything less than torture. But what is the objection to corporal punishment that doesn"t maim or mutilate? Instead of a prison term, why not sentence at least some criminals—say, thieves and drunk drivers—to a public whipping? "Too degrading," some will say. "Too brutal." But where is it written that being whipped is more degrading than being caged? Why is it more brutal to flog a wrongdoer than to throw him in prison—where the risk of being beaten, raped, or murdered is terrifyingly high? The Globe reported in 1994 that more than 200,000 prison inmates are raped each year, usually to the indifference of the guards. "The horrors experienced by many young inmates, particularly those who ... are convicted of nonviolent offenses," former Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun has written, "border on the unimaginable." Are those horrors preferable to the short, sharp shame of corporal punishment? Perhaps the Puritans were more enlightened than we think, at least on the subject of punishment. Their sanctions were humiliating and painful, but quick and cheap. Maybe we should readopt a few.