单选题The celebration of the New Year is the oldest one of all holidays. It was first 1 in 2 Babylon about 4,000 years ago. New Year"s Day is an 3 national holiday, and banks and offices will be closed. Many families have New Year"s Day 4 . Traditionally, it was thought that it could 5 the luck they would have 6 the coming year by 7 they did or ate on the first day of the year. For that reason, it has become common for 8 to celebrate the first few minutes of a 9 new year in the 10 with the family and friends. Parties often last into the middle of the night after the ringing of a new year. It was once believed that the first visitor on New Year"s Day would bring 11 good luck or bad luck to the rest of the year. It was particularly lucky if that visitor 12 to be a tall dark-haired man. Traditional New Year"s 13 are also thought to bring luck. People in many parts of the US celebrate the New Year by 14 black-eyed peas and cabbage. Black-eyed peas have been considered good luck in many cultures. Cabbage leaves are considered a 15 of prosperity, being 16 of paper currency. Other traditions of the season include the making of New Year"s resolutions. That tradition also 17 back to the early Babylonians. Popular modern resolutions might include the 18 to lose weight or quit smoking. The song, "Auld Lang Syne", is sung at the 19 of midnight in almost every English-speaking country in the world to bring in the New Year. "Auld Lang Syne" literally 20 "yearning for the old days."

单选题Many people talked of the 288,000 new jobs the Labor Department reported for June, along with the drop in the unemployment rate to 6.1 percent, as good news. And they were right. For now it appears the economy is creating jobs at a decent pace. We still have a long way to go to get back to full employment, but at least we are now finally moving forward at a faster pace. However, there is another important part of the jobs picture that was largely overlooked. There was a big jump in the number of people who report voluntarily working part-time. This figure is now 830,000 (4.4 percent) above its year ago level. Before explaining the connection to the Obamacare, it is worth making an important distinction. Many people who work part-time jobs actually want full-time jobs. They take part-time work because this is all they can get. An increase in involuntary part-time work is evidence of weakness in the labor market and it means that many people will be having a very hard time making ends meet. There was an increase in involuntary part-time in June, but the general direction has been down. Involuntary part-time employment is still far higher than before the recession, but it is down by 640,000(7.9 percent) from its year ago level. We know the difference between voluntary and involuntary part-time employment because people tell us. The survey used by the Labor Department asks people if they worked less than 35 hours in the reference week. If the answer is "yes," they are classified as working part-time. The survey then asks whether they worked less than 35 hours in that week because they wanted to work less than full time or because they had no choice. They are only classified as voluntary part-time workers if they tell the survey taker they chose to work less than 35 hours a week. The issue of voluntary part-time relates to Obamacare because one of the main purpose was to allow people to get insurance outside of employment. For many people, especially those with serious health conditions or family members with serious health conditions, before Obamacare the only way to get insurance was through a job that provided health insurance. However, Obamacare has allowed more than 12 million people to either get insurance through Medicaid or the exchanges. These are people who may previously have felt the need to get a full-time job that provided insurance in order to cover themselves and their families. With Ohamacare there is no longer a link between employment and insurance.

单选题Is performance art really art at all? We must determine what art is or how it is defined before answering this question. The oldest theory of art in the West is to be found in Plato, in Book X of "The Republic." There, Socrates defines art as imitation. He then declares that it is very easy to get perfect imitations—by means of mirrors. His intent is to show that art belongs to the domain of reflections, shadows, illusions, dreams. He proceeds to map the universe in terms of three degrees of reality. The highest reality is found in the domain of what he calls "ideas," the forms of things. Ideas are grasped by the mind. The next degree of reality is possessed by ordinary objects, the kind carpenters make. The artist only knows how ordinary objects look, as rendered in painting or drawings. The carpenter"s knowledge is higher than the artist"s: his beds, for example, hold the sleeping body. The highest knowledge is possessed by those who grasp the idea of the bed, understanding how it supports the body. The lowest knowledge, if it is knowledge at all, is the artist"s ability to draw pictures of beds. They only show appearances. This famous design of the universe and its degrees of reality was clearly constructed to put art in its place—the domain of illusions, shadows, dreams. The artist is cognitively useless. It explains why philosophers tend to have little use for art. Several of Plato"s dialogues stress the inferiority of art. The political message of "The Republic" is that philosophers, at home in the realm of ideas, should be kings. Artists don"t even belong in the Republic! Meanwhile, the mimetic theory, as it is called, had a certain power. Aristotle, in his "Poetics," characterizes plays and epics as imitations of actions, such as the death of Hektor. But a performance is not the imitation of an action, but the action itself. It is art and reality in one. In the 1960s, a group of philosophers argued that art was indefinable, so many things are classified as art that the most one could hope for is what Wittgenstein called a "family resemblance." Yet not having a definition does not stand in the way of our picking out the art works from a pile of assorted things. A definition will make us none the wiser. Unfortunately, the philosophers who subscribed to this view were out of touch with the avant garde. Between 1913 and 1917, Duchamp presented a number of readymades, most famously his "Fountain," a toilet bowl. In 1964, Andy Warhol exhibited wooden facsimiles of shipping cartons. A work of art and a mere shipping carton can look exactly alike. What explains the difference? What is the difference between sitting down with someone in a performance and merely sitting down with someone? The work of art has meaning; it is about something. And it embodies that meaning.

单选题Engineering students are supposed to be examples of practicality and rationality, but when it comes to my college education I am an idealist and a fool. In high school I wanted to be an electrical engineer and, of course, any sensible student with my aims would have chosen a college with a large engineering department, famous reputation and lots of good labs and research equipment. But that"s not what I did. I chose to study engineering at a small liberal-arts university that doesn"t even offer a major in electrical engineering. Obviously, this was not a practical choice; I came here for more noble reasons. I wanted a broad education that would provide me with flexibility and a value system to guide me in my career. I wanted to open my eyes and expand my vision by interacting with people who weren"t studying science or engineering. My parents, teachers and other adults praised me for such a sensible choice. They told me I was wise and mature beyond my 18 years, and I believed them. I headed off to college sure I was going to have an advantage over those students who went to big engineering "factories" where they didn"t care if you have values or were flexible. I was going to be a complete engineer: technical genius and sensitive humanist all in one. Now I"m not so sure. Somewhere along the way my noble ideals crashed into reality, as all noble ideals eventually do. After three years of struggling to balance math, physics and engineering courses with liberal-arts courses, I have learned there are reasons why few engineering students try to reconcile engineering with liberal-arts courses in college. The reality that has blocked my path to become the typical successful student is that engineering and the liberal arts simply don"t mix as easily as I assumed in high school. Individually they shape a person in very different ways; together they threaten to confuse. The struggle to reconcile the two fields of study is difficult.

单选题Given the lack of fit between gifted students and their schools, it is not surprising that such students often have little good to say about their school experience. In one study of 400 adults who had achieved distinction in all areas of life, researchers found that three-fifths of these individuals either did badly in school or were unhappy in school. Few MacArthur Prize fellows, winners of the MacArthur Award for creative accomplishment, had good things to say about their precollegiate schooling if they had not been placed in advanced programs. Anecdotal reports support this. Pablo Picasso, Charles Darwin, Mark Twain, Oliver Goldsmith, and William Butler Yeats all disliked school. So did Winston Churchill, who almost failed out of Harrow, an elite British school. About Oliver Goldsmith, one of his teachers remarked, "Never was so dull a boy." Often these children realize that they know more than their teachers, and their teachers often feel that these children are arrogant, inattentive, or unmotivated. Some of these gifted people may have done poorly in school because their gifts were not scholastic. Maybe we can account for Picasso in this way. But most fared poorly in school not because they lacked ability but because they found school unchallenging and consequently lost interest. Yeats described the lack of fit between his mind and school: "Because I had found it difficult to attend to anything less interesting than my own thoughts, I was difficult to teach." As noted earlier, gifted children of all kinds tend to be strong-willed nonconformists. Nonconformity and stubbornness (and Yeats"s level of arrogance and self-absorption) are likely to lead to conflicts with teachers. When highly gifted students in any domain talk about what was important to the development of their abilities, they are far more likely to mention their families than their schools or teachers. A writing prodigy studied by David Feldman and Lynn Goldsmith was taught far more about writing by his journalist father than his English teacher. High-IQ children, in Australia studied by Miraca Gross had much more positive feelings about their families than their schools. About half of the mathematicians studied by Benjamin Bloom had little good to say about school. They all did well in school and took honors classes when available, and some skipped grades.

单选题The richest man in America stepped to the podium and declared war on the nation"s school systems. High schools had become "obsolete" and were "limiting—even ruining—the lives of millions of Americans every year." The situation had become "almost shameful." Bill Gates, prep-school grad and college dropout, had come before the National Governors Association seeking converts to his plan to do something about it—a plan he would back with $2 billion of his own cash. Gates"s speech, in February 2005, was a signature moment in what has become a decade-long campaign to improve test scores and graduation rates, waged by a loose alliance of wealthy CEOs who arrived with no particular background in education policy—a fact that has led critics to dismiss them as "the billionaire boys" club." Their bets on poor urban schools have been as big as their egos and their bank accounts. Has this big money made the big impact that they—as well as teachers, administrators, parents, and students—hoped for? The results, though mixed, are dispiriting proof that money alone can"t repair the desperate state of urban education. For all the millions spent on reforms, nine of the 10 school districts studied substantially trailed their state"s proficiency and graduation rates—often by 10 points or more. That"s not to say that the urban districts didn"t make gains. The good news is many did improve and at a rate faster than their states" 60 percent of the time—proof that the billionaires made some solid bets. But those spikes up weren"t enough to erase the deep gulf between poor, inner-city schools, where the big givers focused, and their suburban and rural counterparts. The confidence that marked Gates"s landmark speech to the governors" association in 2005 has given way to humility. The billionaires have not retreated. But they have improved their approach, and learned a valuable lesson about their limitations. "It"s so hard in this country to spread good practice. When we started funding, we hoped it would spread more readily," acknowledges Vicki Phillips, the director of K-12 education at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. "What we learned is that the only things that spread well in school are kids" viruses." The business titans entered the education arena convinced that America"s schools would benefit greatly from the tools of the boardroom. They sought to boost incentives for improving performance, deploy new technologies, and back innovators willing to shatter old orthodoxies. They pressed to close schools that were failing, and sought to launch new, smaller ones. They sent principals to boot camp. Battling the long-term worry that the best and brightest passed up the classroom for more lucrative professions, they opened their checkbooks to boost teacher pay. It was an impressive amount of industry. And in some places, it has worked out—but with unanticipated complications.

单选题When families gather for Christmas dinner, some will stick to formal traditions dating back to Grandma"s generation. Their tables will be set with the good dishes and silver, and the dress code will be Sunday-best. But in many other homes, this china-and-silver elegance has given way to a stoneware-and-stainless informality, with dresses assuming an equally casual-Friday look. For hosts and guests, the change means greater simplicity and comfort. For makers of fine china in Britain, it spells economic hard times. Last week Royal Doulton, the largest employer in Stoke-on-Trent, announced that it is eliminating 1,000 jobs—one-fifth of its total workforce. That brings to more than 4,000 the number of positions lost in 18 months in the pottery region. Wedgwood and other pottery factories made cuts earlier. Although a strong pound and weak markets in Asia play a role in the downsizing, the layoffs in Stoke have their roots in earthshaking social shifts. A spokesman for Royal Doulton admitted that the company "has been somewhat slow in catching up with the trend" toward casual dining. Families eat together less often, he explained, and more people eat alone, either because they are single or they eat in front of television. Even dinner parties, if they happen at all, have gone casual. In a time of long work hours and demanding family schedules, busy hosts insist, rightly, that it"s better to share a takeout pizza on paper plates in the family room than to wait for the perfect momentor a "real" dinner party. Too often, the perfect moment never comes. Iron a fine-patterned tablecloth? Forget it. Polish the silver? Who has time? Yet the loss of formality has its down side. The fine points of etiquette that children might once have learned at the table by observation or instruction from parents and grandparents ("Chew with your mouth closed." "Keep your elbows off the table.") must be picked up elsewhere. Some companies now offer etiquette seminars for employees who may be competent professionally but clueless socially.

单选题 "We will safeguard Britain's credit rating with a credible plan to eliminate the bulk of the structural deficit over a parliament," read the 2010 Conservative Manifesto. Well, so much for that. The decision by Moody's, one of the three big rating agencies, to downgrade Britain from Aaa to Aal on February 22nd was a colossal embarrassment. Moody's now ranks Britain's credit lower than that of Luxembourg or the Isle of Man. Will the downgrade harm the economy? In the past countries with lower credit ratings have had to pay higher borrowing costs. But neither America, which was downgraded in 2011, or France, which suffered a similar fate last year, have suffered much. It is hard to spot an immediate impact in Britain, either. Investors had expected the ratings agencies to act after last year's autumn statement revealed that the government was struggling to reduce its deficit on schedule. The two other big ratings agencies—Fitch and Standard figures released on February 27th showed that GDP had shrunk by 0.3% smaller than it was in the first quarter of 2008. Growth forecasts for the next few years were lowered in the autumn statement.

单选题In September 2008, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said the company never met to hammer out business model. No brainstorming sessions; no scribblings on a white board; the entire site would go down for hours at a time. Stone and his team were far too busy combating the site"s recurring problems to worry about how it would eventually support itself. It appears that over the past year and a half, Twitter has managed to schedule a few meetings. On Tuesday, it announced and outlined its strategy to make money. The main point is Twitter"s decision to mask its ads as actual tweets. Rather than seeing a big, glossy image advertising a Frappuccino, users will see a sponsored Starbucks tweet that hypes the latest Frappuccino flavor. It"s admittedly a small difference, but it"s one that allows Twitter to be true to the past three years of its development while setting a course for the next three years. Self-promotion is always what Twitter has done best. Professionals fill their feeds with links to their own work. Amateurs respond with mundane advertisements for themselves. Companies, threatened by all of this self-branding, have responded in kind. Some businesses have hundreds of followers; no matter the follower count, every tweet is a shill. Facebook has proved how hard it is to advertise against a social network. The concern is that if Twitter becomes too much of a social network—and not enough of an aggregator—it will run into the same problem. In the end, the same advertising principles that exist online exist offline. Twitter is convinced the way it can make sure its ads work is by making sure they"re "resonant". That word was all over Twitter"s ads announcement, and it"s sure to become a new buzzword for the Web. Twitter"s general principle is that it"s going to display only ads that users like—the ones that resonate. It"s great in theory, impossible to do in practice. If Starbucks is spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on Twitter ads but its Twitter ads are terrible, is Twitter really going to tell Starbucks to take back its money?

单选题That everyone"s too busy these days is a cliché. But one specific complaint is made especially mournfully: There"s never any time to read. What makes the problem thornier is that the usual time-management techniques don"t seem sufficient. The web"s full of articles offering tips on making time to read: "Give up TV" or "Carry a book with you at all times." But in my experience, using such methods to free up the odd 30 minutes doesn"t work. Sit down to read and the flywheel of work-related thoughts keeps spinning—or else you"re so exhausted that a challenging book"s the last thing you need. The modern mind, Tim Parks, a novelist and critic, writes, "is overwhelmingly inclined toward communication... It is not simply that one is interrupted; it is that one is actually inclined to interruption." Deep reading requires not just time, but a special kind of time which can"t be obtained merely by becoming more efficient. In fact, "becoming more efficient" is part of the problem. Thinking of time as a resource to be maximized means you approach it instrumentally, judging any given moment as well spent only in so far as it advances progress toward some goal. Immersive reading, by contrast, depends on being willing to risk inefficiency, goallessness, even time-wasting. Try to slot it as a to-do list item and you"ll manage only goal-focused reading— useful, sometimes, but not the most fulfilling kind. "The future comes at us like empty bottles along an unstoppable and nearly infinite conveyor belt," writes Gary Eberle in his book Sacred Time , and "we feel a pressure to fill these different-sized bottles (days, hours, minutes) as they pass, for if they get by without being filled, we will have wasted them." No mind-set could be worse for losing yourself in a book. So what does work? Perhaps surprisingly, scheduling regular times for reading. You"d think this might fuel the efficiency mind-set, but in fact, Eberle notes, such ritualistic behavior helps us "step outside time"s flow" into "soul time". You could limit distractions by reading only physical books, or on single-purpose e-readers. "Carry a book with you at all times" can actually work, too—providing you dip in often enough, so that reading becomes the default state from which you temporarily surface to take care of business, before dropping back down. On a really good day, it no longer feels as if you"re "making time to read," but just reading, and making time for everything else.

单选题When the shocking details of the suffering of Baby P emerged last month, ministers were quick to reassure an outraged public they would take whatever action necessary to tackle the flaws in the child protection system. And today the children"s secretary, Ed Balls, immediately announced that Haringey"s director of children"s services, Sharon Shoesmith, was being removed from her post. Such tough talk serves only to distract us from recognising ministers" complicity in the failings that led to yet another child"s horrific" death in the same north London borough. Lord Laming, who headed the inquiry into the murder of Victoria Climbié, said those at the top should be held accountable for her death. But the then director of Haringey"s social services went on to a better-paid job in Hackney, while the council chief executive, Gurbux Singh, went on to head the Commission for Racial Equality. What is worse, however, is that the government"s child protection reforms since the Climbié scandal have created a more bureaucratic child protection system that is only better in the sense it can be more easily audited. The government"s response to Laming"s finding that child protection professionals were failing to share and properly record data has been to set up a growing array of databases, such as the much-criticized Integrated Children"s System. The theory was that this would lead to fewer errors, but in practice it has drowned social workers in paperwork, giving them even less time spend with families—the only means by which they can really detect abuse. Experts like Munro believe the introduction next month of Contact" Point, the database of all 11 million children in England, will only heighten the bureaucratic burden. The database will include the names, ages and addresses of all 11 million under-18s, rather than focus on those most in need of help. When you are searching for a needle in a haystack—a child at risk why make the haystack bigger? The momentum of the government"s post-Climbié reforms has been to improve the wellbeing of all children rather than to focus on those most in need. The creation of children"s trusts in every local authority, combining education and social services, has arguably led to child protection being marginalised. In favouring structural solutions to the problems identified in the Climbié inquiry, the government has failed to address the main requirement of good child protection—being able to make risk assessments of chaotic families often in difficult circumstances. Social workers and other professionals need to work within a system that encourages them to use their analytical skills rather than being tied to a tick-box culture that may allow the likes of Haringey to look good on paper despite all the shocking evidence to the contrary.

单选题In the 1960s, medical researchers Thomas Holmes and Richard Rahe developed a checklist of stressful events. They appreciated the tricky point that any major change can be stressful. Negative events like "serious illness of a family member" were high on the list, hut so were some positive life-changing events, like marriage. When you take the Holmes-Rahe test you must remember that the score does not reflect how you deal with stress—it only shows how much you have to deal with. And we now know that the way you handle these events dramatically affects your chances of staying healthy. By the early 1970s, hundreds of similar studies had followed Holmes and Rahe. And millions of Americans who work and live under stress worried over the reports. Somehow, the research got boiled down to a memorable message. Women"s magazines ran headlines like "Stress causes illness!" If you want to stay physically and mentally healthy, the articles said, avoid stressful events. But such simplistic advice is impossible to follow. Even if stressful events are dangerous, many—like the death of a loved one—are impossible to avoid. Moreover, any warning to avoid all stressful events is a prescription for staying away from opportunities as well as trouble. Since any change can be stressful, a person who wanted to be completely free of stress would never marry, have a child, take a new job or move. The notion that all stress makes you sick also ignores a lot of what we know about people. It assumes we"re all vulnerable and passive in the face of adversity. But what about human initiative and creativity? Many come through periods of stress with more physical and mental vigor than they had before. We also know that a long time without change or challenge can lead to boredom, and physical and metal strain.

单选题In the 1960s pop was a young person"s business. But today age is no barrier to success. The Rolling Stones are still touring in their 60s. Bob Dylan"s songwriting skills have survived intact. Sir Paul McCartney warbles on. It is time to do for enterprise what such ageing rockers have done for pop music: explode the myth that it is a monopoly of the young. This idea has been powerfully reinforced by the latest tech boom: Facebook, Google and Groupon were all founded by people in their 20s or teens. Mark Zuckerberg, aged 27, will soon be able to count his years on earth in billions of dollars. Research suggests that age may in fact be an advantage for entrepreneurs. Vivek Wadhwa of Singularity University in California studied more than 500 American high-tech and engineering companies with more than $1m in sales. He discovered that the average age of the founders of successful American technology businesses is 39. There were twice as many successful founders over 50 as under 25, and twice as many over 60 as under 20. Experience continues to count for a great deal, in business as in other walks of life—or, to borrow a phrase from P.J. O"Rourke, age and guile can still beat "youth, innocence and a bad haircut". It is one thing to invent a clever new product but quite another to hire employees or build a sales machine. And even when it comes to breakthrough ideas, age may still be an asset. Benjamin Jones of Northwestern University"s Kellogg School of Management and Bruce Weinberg of Ohio State University examined the careers of Nobel Prizewinners in chemistry, physics and medicine. They found that the average age at which these stars made their greatest innovations is now higher than it was a century ago. This is not to say that the rise of young entrepreneurs like Mr. Zuckerberg is insignificant. The barriers that once discouraged enterprise among the young are collapsing. Social networks make it easier to build contacts. Knowledge-intensive industries require relatively little capital. But the fact that barriers are collapsing for the young does not mean that they are being erected for greybeards. The point is that the creation of fast-growing businesses is now open to everybody regardless of age. The evidence that older people are if anything becoming more enterprising should help to calm two of the biggest worries that hang over the West. One is that the greying of the population will inevitably produce economic sluggishness. The second is that older people will face hard times as companies shed older workers in the name of efficiency and welfare states cut back on their pensions.

单选题Not all admission processes are as selective as the press would have us believe. For the class that entered in fall 2007, approximately 70 of the more than 3,000 colleges and universities in the United States offered admission to fewer than one third of their candidates. Admission rates describe raw numbers and percentages, but digging a few levels deeper into those figures may allow individual students to see where they fit in the statistics. The lower the overall admission rate, the more likely it is that grades and scores are not the point where a final admission decision will be made by admissions officers. Candidate pools at highly selective colleges tend to be self-selective and academic ability is almost a given. Everything matters, but what draws attention may be something unexpected. One former Pomona student worked as a garbage collector on Long Island for a couple of summers rather than pursuing more-prestigious internships or travel. He earned much higher pay than his classmates did in their internships, and learned a lot about life from the work and his co-workers. Immediately after graduating from Pomona, he got a job as an investment banker. Was he admitted to fewer colleges or offered a lesser job because of his summer experience? Apparently not. In the last few years, many students have routinely applied to more than a dozen schools, a huge increase from a decade ago when three to five was more common. This skews the process down the line—and ultimately hurts students. Application numbers rise (far more than population increases should suggest) and rates of admission drop, potentially stimulating even more applications the following year. Waiting lists grow and April notification may become May or June or July notification. As students submit more applications, they inevitably and perhaps necessarily may communicate less with each college where they submit an application and may dig less deeply into the information available that could help them target their real needs and interests. Students and their families have a wealth of information available about colleges and the admission process, and should take advantage of the resources. Understanding your talents and interests while working to understand the academic structures and offerings of a college is a vital step. Gaining insight into the social fabrics, geographic and even political environments of colleges should help students think more clearly about their own interests as they align with realistic possibilities. It takes hard work and real thinking. No student should have to look at a handful of bad news in April because he didn"t take the admission process seriously enough or had insufficiently developed his college list. And none should be left on May 1 with complete confusion and an inability to decide among multiple offers. In this case, homework is not busywork. It is time very well spent.

单选题The last-minute victory of the Texas Longhorns in this year"s Rose Bowl— America"s college football championship—was the kind of thing that stays with fans forever. Just as well, because many had paid vast sums to see the game. Rose Bowl tickets officially sold for $175 each. On the Internet, resellers were hawking them for as much as $3,000 a pop. "Nobody knows how to control this," observed Mitch Dorger, the tournament"s chief executive. Reselling tickets for a profit, known less politely as scalping in America or touting in Britain, is booming. In America alone, the "secondary market" for tickets to sought-after events is worth over $10 billion, reckons Jeffrey Fluhr, the boss of StubHub, an online ticket market. Scalping used to be about burly men lurking outside stadiums with fistfuls of tickets. Cries of "Tickets here, tickets here" still ring out before kick-off. But the Internet has created a larger and more efficient market. Some Internet-based ticket agencies, such as tickco.com and dynamiteticketz.com act as traditional scalpers, buying up tickets and selling them on for a substantial mark-up. But others like StubHub have a new business model—bring together buyers and sellers, and then take a cut. For each transaction, StubHub takes a juicy 25%. Despite its substantial commission—far higher than those charged by other online intermediaries including eBay or Craigslist—StubHub is flourishing. The firm was set up in 2000 and this year"s Rose Bowl was its biggest event ever. The Super Bowl in early February will bring another nice haul, as have U2 and Rolling Stones concerts. Unlike eBay, which is the largest online trader in tickets, StubHub guarantees each transaction, so buyers need not worry about fraud. The company"s revenues, now around $200 million, are tripling annually (despite its start in the dotcom bust). And there is plenty more room to grow. Mr. Fluhr notes that the market remains "highly fragmented", with tiny operations still flourishing and newspaper classified not yet dead. But there are risks. Some events are boosting prices to cut the resale margins; others are using special measures to crack down. This summer, tickets to the soccer World Cup in Germany will include the name and passport number of the original purchaser and embedded chips that match the buyer to the tickets. Then there are legal worries. In America, more than a dozen states have anti-scalping laws of various kinds. New Mexico forbids the reselling of tickets for college games; Mississippi does so for all events on government-owned property. Such laws are often ignored, but can still bite. In Massachusetts, where reselling a ticket for more than $2 above face value is unlawful, one fan brought a lawsuit last autumn against 16 companies (including StubHub) over his pricey Red Sox tickets.

单选题Many countries have a tradition of inviting foreigners to rule them. The English called in William of Orange in 1588, and, depending on your interpretation of history, William of Normandy in 1055. Both did rather a good job. Returning the compliment, Albania asked a well-bred Englishman called Aubgrey Herbert to be their king in the 1920s. He refused—and they ended up with several coves called Zog. America, the country of immigrants, has no truck with imported foreign talent. Article two of the constitution says that "no person except a natural-born citizen... shall be eligible to the office of the president". This is now being challenged by a particularly irresistible immigrant: Arnold Schwarzenegger. Barely a year has passed since the erstwhile cyborg swept to victory in California"s recall election, yet there is already an Amend-for-Arnold campaign collecting signatures to let the Austrian-born governor have a go at the White House. George Bush senior has weighed in on his behalf. There are several "Arnold amendments" in Congress: one allows foreigners who have been naturalized citizens for 20 years to become president. (The Austrian became American in 1983.) It is easy to dismiss the hoopla as another regrettable example of loopy celebrity politics. Mr. Schwarzenegger has made a decent start as governor, but he has done little, as yet, to change the structure of his dysfunctional state. Indeed, even if the law were changed, he could well be elbowed aside by another incomer, this time from Canada: the Democratic governor of Michigan, Jennifer Granholm, who appears to have fewer skeletons in her closet than the hedonistic actor. Moreover, changing the American constitution is no doddle. It has happened only 17 times since 1791 (when the first ten amendments were codified as the bill of rights). To change the constitution, an amendment has to be approved by two-thirds of both houses of Congress, and then to be ratified by three-quarters of the 50 states. The Arnold amendment is hardly in the same category as abolishing slavery or giving women the vote. And, as some wags point out, Austrian imports have a pretty dodgy record of running military superpowers.

单选题New science reveals how your brain is hard-wired when it comes to spending—and how you can reboot it. The choice to spend rather than save reflects a very human—and, some would say, American—quirk: a preference for immediate gratification over future gains. In other words, we get far more joy from buying a new pair of shoes today, or a Caribbean vacation, or an iPhone 4S, than from imagining a comfortable life tomorrow. Throw in an instant-access culture—in which we can get answers on the Internet within seconds, have a coffeepot delivered to our door overnight, and watch movies on demand—and we"re not exactly training the next generation to delay gratification. "Pleasure now is worth more to us than pleasure later," says economist William Dickens of Northeastern University. "We much prefer current consumption to future consumption. It may even be wired into us." As brain scientists plumb the neurology of an afternoon at the mall, they are discovering measurable differences between the brains of people who save and those who spend with abandon, particularly in areas of the brain that predict consequences, process the sense of reward, spur motivation, and control memory. In fact, neuroscientists are mapping the brain"s saving and spending circuits so precisely that they have been able to stir up the saving and disable the spending in some people. The result: people"s preferences switch from spending like a drunken sailor to saving like a child of the Depression. All told, the gray matter responsible for some of our most crucial decisions is finally revealing its secrets. Psychologists and behavioral economists, meanwhile, are identifying the personality types and other traits that distinguish savers from spenders, showing that people who aren"t good savers are neither stupid nor irrational—but often simply don"t accurately foresee the consequences of not saving. Rewire the brain to find pleasure in future rewards, and you"re on the path to a future you really want. In one experiment, neuroeconomist Paul Glimcher of New York University wanted to see what it would take for people to willingly delay gratification. He gave a dozen volunteers a choice: $20 now or more money, from $20.25 to $110, later. On one end of the spectrum was the person who agreed to take $21 in a month—to essentially wait a month in order to gain just $1. In economics-speak, this kind of person has a "flat discount function," meaning he values tomorrow almost as much as today and is therefore able to delay gratification. At the other end was someone who was willing to wait a month only if he got $68, a premium of $48 from the original offer. This is someone economists call a "steep discounter," meaning the value he puts on the future (and having money then) is dramatically less than the value he places on today; when he wants something, he wants it now.

单选题 Henry Kissinger may be the most successful, certainly the most {{U}}flamboyant{{/U}}, Secretary of State to hold that office in modern times. When he was appointed in the late 1960's, there were no American ties with Communist China, Vietnam and Berlin seemed ready to draw the United States into a Third World War, and Russia was seen as "the enemy". But all this has changed, and Henry Kissinger caused much of the change; in 1971, he made his first trip to China, a trip that was the beginning of the current ties between the United States and China. He brought the United States and Russia closer together on major issues by the policy he called "detente", literally meaning a relaxation. His philosophy was always to talk and to bring together. With these two policies, Kissinger did much to draw attention away from any possible Russian-American friction. In 1973 he made his first visit to Egypt. Here he was able to begin U.S. relations with Egypt, He used his contact later to begin the sort of talks that the American press called "shuttle diplomacy". For ninety-nine days, he "shuttled" back and forth on flights between Cairo and Jerusalem to work out a step-by-step withdrawal of Israeli troops from the Sinai desert. His wit, his careful approach to detail, and his presence made "shuttle diplomacy" work. It was the only successful approach to Middle-east peace in the thirty years since the state Israel was founded. Another major work was the Strategic Arms Limitation Talk. Though his term in office passed with the treaty unsigned, Kissinger left a draft of the treaty to which the Russians had already agreed. The SALT treaty spelled out a one-tenth reduction in nuclear arms, a major accomplishment by any standard, even if one does not consider all the other conditions and limitations included in the treaty. Even though he successfully helped bring an end to the Vietnam War, Kissinger's final days in office were affected, as was the entire executive branch in one way or another, by the scandals of the Nixon White House. Kissinger's critics point to his role in placing wiretaps on the phones of reporters and officials and to what they consider his "high-handed" approach to setting foreign policy. But Kissinger, during the last few months of the Nixon presidency, limited the effects of American domestic problems on our foreign policy. He continued talks in the Middle East. He continued close contact with the Soviet Union. History will decide in the final view, as Kissinger—and many presidents—often said, on the value of his service. Whatever they decide, whether his actions are finally to be considered wise or foolish, he had a personal vision that will be difficult to match.

单选题Whatever happened to the death of newspaper? A year ago the end seemed near. The recession threatened to remove the advertising and readers that had not already fled to the Internet. Newspapers like the San Francisco Chronicle were chronicling their own doom. America"s Federal Trade Commission launched a round of talks about how to save newspapers. Should they become charitable corporations? Should the state subsidize them? It will hold another meeting soon. But the discussions now seem out of date. In much of the world there is little sign of crisis. German and Brazilian papers have shrugged off the recession. Even American newspapers, which inhabit the most troubled corner of the global industry, have not only survived but often returned to profit. Not the 20% profit margins that were routine a few years ago, but profit all the same. It has not been much fun. Many papers stayed afloat by pushing journalists overboard. The American Society of News Editors reckons that 13,500 newsroom jobs have gone since 2007. Readers are paying more for slimmer products. Some papers even had the nerve to refuse delivery to distant suburbs. Yet these desperate measures have proved the right ones and, sadly for many journalists, they can be pushed further. Newspapers are becoming more balanced businesses, with a healthier mix of revenues from readers and advertisers. American papers have long been highly unusual in their reliance on ads. Fully 87% of their revenues came from advertising in 2008, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation & Development (OECD). In Japan the proportion is 35%. Not surprisingly, Japanese newspapers are much more stable. The whirlwind that swept through newsrooms harmed everybody, but much of the damage has been concentrated in areas where newspapers are least distinctive. Car and film reviewers have gone. So have science and general business reporters. Foreign bureaus have been savagely cut off. Newspapers are less complete as a result. But completeness is no longer a virtue in the newspaper business.

单选题Washington DC has traditionally been an unbalanced city when it comes to the life of the mind. It has great national monuments, from the Smithsonian museums to the Library of Congress. But day-to-day cultural life can be thin. It attracts some of the country"s best brains. But far too much of the city"s intellectual life is devoted to the minutiae of the political process. Dinner table conversation can all too easily turn to budget reconciliation or social security. This is changing. On October 1st the Shakespeare Theatre Company opened a 775-seat new theatre in the heart of downtown. Sidney Harman Hall not only provides a new stage for a theatre company that has hitherto had to make do with the 450-seat Lansburgh Theatre around the comer. It will also provide a platform for a large number of smaller arts companies such as the Washington Ballet, the Washington Bach Consort and the CityDance Ensemble. The fact that so many of these outfits are queuing up to perform is testimony to Washington"s cultural vitality. The recently-expanded Kennedy Centre is by some measures the busiest performing arts complex in America. But it still has a growing number of arts groups which are desperate for mid-sized space downtown. Michael Kahn, the theatre company"s artistic director, jokes that, despite Washington"s aversion to keeping secrets, it has made a pretty good job of keeping quiet about its artistic life. The Harman Centre should act as a whistle blower. Washington still bows the knee to New York and Chicago when it comes to culture. But it has a good claim to be America"s intellectual capital. It has the greatest collection of think-tanks on the planet, and it regularly sucks in a giant share of the country"s best brains. Washington is second only to San Francisco for the proportion of residents 25 years and older with a bachelor"s degree or higher. Washington"s intellectual life has been supercharged during the Bush years, despite the Decider"s aversion to ideas. September 11th, 2001, put questions of global strategy at the centre of the national debate. Most of America"s intellectual centres are firmly in the grip of the left-liberal establishment. For all their talk of "diversity" American universities are allergic to a diversity of ideas. Washington is one of the few cities where conservatives regularly do battle with liberals. It is also the centre of a fierce debate about the future direction of conservatism. The danger for Washington is that this intellectual and cultural renaissance will leave the majority of the citizens untouched. The capital remains a city deeply divided between over-educated white itinerants and under-educated black locals. Still, the new Shakespeare theatre is part of job-generating downtown revival. Twenty years ago downtown was a desert of dilapidated buildings and bag people. Today it is bustling with life. If Washington is struggling to fix the world, at least it is making a reasonable job of fixing itself.