The following paragraphs are given in a wrong order. For Questions 41-45, you are required to reorganize these paragraphs into a coherent article by choosing from the list A-G. Some of the paragraphs have been placed for you. (10 points)A. The first category consists of substantial payments for political purpose or to secure major contracts. For example, the U.S. conglomerate YIT (International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation) offered a large sum of money in support of a U.S. presidential candidate at a time when it was under investigation for possible violations of the U.S. anti-trust law. This same company, it was revealed, was ready to finance efforts to overthrow the Marxist government of Chile whose President was Salvadore Allende.B. The second category covers payments made to obtain quicker official approval of some project, to speed up the wheels of bureaucracy. An interesting example of this kind of payment is provided by the story of a sales manager who had been trying for some months to sell road machinery to the Minister of Works of a Caribbean country. Finally, he hit upon the answer. Discovering that the minister was a bibliophile, he bought a rare edition of a book, slipped $20,000 within its pages, then presented it to the minister. This man examined its contents, then said: "I understand there is a two-volume edition of this work." This sales manager, who was quick-witted, replied: "My company cannot afford a two-volume edition, sir, but we could offer you a copy with an appendix!" A short time later, the deal was approved.C. In this category, we may also include large payments made to ruling families or their close advisers in order to secure arms sales or major petrochemical and construction contracts. In a court case involving an arms deal with Iran, a witness claimed that ￡1 million had been paid by a British company to a "go between" who helped clinch a deal for supply of tanks to that country. Other countries have also been known to put pressure on foreign companies to make donation to party funds.D. It is difficult to resist the impression that bribery and other questionable payments are on the increase. Indeed, they seem to have become a fact of commercial life. To take just one example, the Chrysler Corporation, third largest of the U.S. motor manufacturers, disclosed that it made questionable payments of more than $2.5 million between 1971 and 1976. By making this revelation, it joined more than 300 U.S. companies that had admitted to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that they had made dubious payments of one kind or another—bribes, facilitating payments, extra discounts, etc.—in recent years. For discussion purposes, we can divide these payments into three broad categories.E. Students taking business course are sometimes a little surprised to find that lectures on business ethics have been included in their syllabuses of study. They often do not realize that, later in their careers, they may be tempted to bend their principles to get what they want; perhaps also they are not fully aware that bribery in various forms is on the increase in many countries and, in some, this type of corruption has been a way of life for centuries.F. It is easy to talk about having high moral standards but, in practice, what would one really do in such a situation7 Some time ago the British car manufacturer, British Leyhand, was accused of operating a "slush fund", and of other questionable practices such as paying agents and purchasers with padded commission, offering additional discounts and making payments to numbered bank accounts in Switzerland. The company rejected these allegations and they were later withdrawn. Nevertheless, at this time, there were people in the motor industry in Britain who were prepared to say in private: "Look; we"re in a wheeling-dealing business. Every year we"re selling more than a 1,000 million worth of cars abroad. If we spend a few million greasing the palms of some of the buyers, who"s hurt? If we didn"t do it, someone else would."G. In dealing with the topics of business ethics, some lecturers ask students how they would act in the following situation: suppose you were head of a major soft-drinks company and you want to break into a certain overseas market where the growth potential for your company is likely to be very great indeed. During negotiations with government officials of this country, the Minister of Trade makes it clear to you that if you offer him a substantial bribe, you will find it much easier to get an import license for your goods, and you are also likely to avoid" bureaucratic delays", as he puts it. Now, the question is: do you pay up or stand by your principles?Order: G is the second paragraph, and C is the sixth one.

You are going to read a text about basic element in both speaking and writing, followed by a list of examples and explanations. Choose the best example or explanation from the list for each numbered subheading. There is one extra example which you do not need to use. There are many differences between communicating in written and spoken words—one to one or one to many. Because speaking is face to face and personal, it is much more direct than writing.. Hand and body gestures, facial expressions, and vocal variety help greatly to support face-to-face communication. It is also reinforced by instant feedback from listeners in the form of smiles, frowns, applause, catcalls, clenched fists, and so on. An alert speaker who is sensitive to feedback can "shift gears" and adapt to changing circumstances. (41) The differences between talking and writing Writing, however, depends solely on words and punctuation to deliver the message. There are no gestures and no voice, and if there is any feedback, it takes time to reach the writer. (42) Why long sentences can be used in writing? Effective talking is aimed at people"s minds and hearts through their ears, and ears prefer short, direct, conversational sentences. There are three standards that apply equally to talking and writing—clarity, accuracy, and appropriateness. (43) Clarity. If the audience doesn"t understand the message instantly, then the speaker has, to some extent, failed. Thus, every possible measure must be taken to ensure that all your words and thoughts are perfectly clear to the audience. (44) Accuracy. As a conscientious speaker, you must see to it that your information is as current and as accurate as research can make it. (45) Appropriateness. In addition to being precise, your language should also be suitable to the subject, audience, and occasion.A. For instance, a speaker can vary his/her pitch or tone to change the meaning expressed. A writer, on the other hand, has to rely solely on the words and context or even explanations in braces to achieve that.B. Good talking is wordy, repetitive, and far less structured than efficient writing. A good speech, reproduced word for word on paper, usually does not read well because it rambles and repeats words and thoughts. It is not nearly as disciplined and organized as good writing.C. Throughout your talk, words are your prime means for helping your audience understand your message. And to harness the profound power of words, you should develop a lifelong habit of using a dictionary and a thesaurus. If you do not exploit these resources, you will fail to achieve your full potential as a speaker and conversationalist. Another device that will help you achieve clarity in your talk is a summary. If your talk consists of three will researched major points, lit those points in your introduction so your audience will know at once what ground you will cover. Discuss them in depth, summarize them at the end of your talk, and emphasize any conclusions hat they lead to.D. For example, a speaker who"s addressing a Parent-Teacher Association should avoid the statistical and psychological jargon of advanced educational researchers. By the same token, she should not indulge in teenage slang. Any speaker worth her salt will analyze her audience first and adapt her language accordingly.E. The surest way for you to damage your credibility is to spew forth misinformation or outdated information. How many times have you seen a story, a name, an important fact, or a charge against someone retracted in newspapers? Unfortunately, the damage was done when the misinformation first appeared in print. Such unwarranted embarrassment and mental anguish could have been avoided ff someone had taken the time to recheck the information. If your talk is on a current or crucial topic, do your homework and arm yourself with quotations and sources to fortify your facts.F. Long, involved sentences are acceptable in writing for two reasons: 1) The eye can absorb many more words in an instant than the ear can hear. 2) If a reader stumbles on a marathon sentence, she can read it again. Not so with spoken words—once uttered they"re gone, especially in speech. If a listener misses a sentence, both she and the speaker have lost part of the message; there is no going back, except perhaps during the question-and-answer period. In a conversation, of course, the listener can ask the speaker to repeat.

Robert F. Kennedy once said that a country' s GDP measures " everything except that which makes life worthwhile". With Britain voting to leave the European Union, and GDP already predicted to slow as a result, it is now a timely moment to assess what he was referring to. The question of GDP and its usefulness has annoyed policymakers for over half a century. Many argue that it is a flawed concept. It measures things that do not matter and misses things that do. By most recent measures, the UK' s GDP has been the envy of the Western world, with record low unemployment and high growth figures. If everything was going so well, then why did over 17 million people vote for Brexit, despite the warnings about what it could do to their country' s economic prospects? A recent annual study of countries and their ability to convert growth into well-being sheds some light on that question. Across the 163 countries measured, the UK is one of the poorest performers in ensuring that economic growth is translated into meaningful improvements for its citizens. Rather than just focusing on GDP, over 40 different sets of criteria from health, education and civil society engagement have been measured to get a more rounded assessment of how countries are performing. While all of these countries face their own challenges, there are a number of consistent themes. Yes, there has been a budding economic recovery since the 2008 global crash, but in key indicators in areas such as health and education, major economies have continued to decline. Yet this isn' t the case with all countries. Some relatively poor European countries have seen huge improvements across measures including civil society, income equality and environment. This is a lesson that rich countries can learn: When GDP is no longer regarded as the sole measure of a country' s success, the world looks very different. So what Kennedy was referring to was that while GDP has been the most common method for measuring the economic activity of nations, as a measure, it is no longer enough. It does not include important factors such as environmental quality or education outcomes—all things that contribute to a person' s sense of well-being. The sharp hit to growth predicted around the world and in the UK could lead to a decline in the everyday services we depend on for our well-being and for growth. But policymakers who refocus efforts on improving well-being rather than simply worrying about GDP figures could avoid the forecasted doom and may even see progress.

There's nothing simple about gun control, a tangle of legal, political and public-health issues complicated by cultural preferences and regional biases. Passions run high on all sides. Lifelong hunters who grew up with firearms, urban victims of gun violence, Second Amendment scholars, NRA lobbyists , chiefs of police—they've all got cases to make and they make them well, often contentiously. For the past 15 years, much of the debate has centered on the effectiveness of the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, the federal gun-control bill that was passed in 1993. Critics say the focus on law abiding gun buyers doesn't address the real issue—bad guys who acquire their weapons illegally. Supporters say that the bill stops thousands of illegal gun purchases and deters crime and violence. Now medical research has come to the rescue, sifting through the data to figure out which legal measures work best to reduce firearm suicides and homicides. In a paper published in the May issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, Steven Sumner, a third-year med student and Dr. Peter Layde, co-director of the Injury Research Center at the Medical College of Wisconsin, found that local background checks, which are optional and used by just a handful of states, were more effective than the federal background checks mandated by the Brady law. The report compared the homicide and suicide rates in states that perform only federal checks with states that do state-level checks and those that perform local-level checks. The local-level checks were associated with a 27 percent lower firearm suicide rate and a 22 percent lower homicide rate among adults 21 and older, the legal age to purchase a gun. Why are local checks so much better? "We hypothesize that it's due to access to additional information that's not available at the federal checks." says Layde, "particularly related to mental-health issues and domestic-violence issues." All 50 states use the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS), the minimum-required under Brady, while 17 states also perform state-level checks and 12 do additional local-level checks. "This is the first study that's looked at this issue." says Layde. "If the magnitude of impact we found were in fact to apply to all 50 states, you would expect a very substantial reduction in suicides and homicides linked to firearms, many thousands." However, background checks can be both an administrative and a cost burden for strapped and stretched local authorities. There is another way to get the same results: improve the flow of local information to the MCS databases. "In an ideal world," says Layde, "you might not have to have the local agencies involved if you just reliably got all the data they had up to the federal level."

The translator must have an excellent, up-to-date knowledge of his source languages, full【C1】______in the handling of his target language, which will be his mother tongue or language of【C2】______use, and a knowledge and understanding of the【C3】______subject-matter in his field of specialization. This is, as it were, his professional equipment.【C4】______this, it is desirable that he should have an【C5】______mind, wide interests, a good memory and the ability to【C6】______quickly the basic principles of new developments. He should be willing to work【C7】______his own, often at high speeds, but should be humble enough to consult others【C8】______his own knowledge not always prove【C9】______to the task in hand. He should be able to type fairly quickly and accurately and, if he is working mainly for publication, should have more than a nodding【C10】______with printing techniques and proofreading. If he is working basically as an information translator, let us say, for an industrial firm, he should have the flexibility of mind to enable him to【C11】______rapidly from one source language to another, as well as from one subject-matter to another,【C12】______this ability is frequently【C13】______of him in such work. Bearing in mind the nature of the translator"s work, i.e. the processing of the written word, it is, strictly speaking,【C14】______that he should be able to speak the languages he is dealing with. If he does speak them, it is an advantage【C15】______a hindrance, but this skill is in many ways a luxury that he can do away with. It is,【C16】______, desirable that he should have an approximate idea about the pronunciation of his source languages【C17】______this is restricted to knowing how proper names and place names are pronounced. The same【C18】______to an ability to write his source languages. If he can, well and good; if he cannot, it does not【C19】______. There are many other skills and【C20】______that are desirable in a translator.

Title: Copyright on the Internet Outline: the present state, reasons, and solutions You should write about 160—200 words neatly.

For centuries in Spain and Latin America, heading home for lunch and a snooze with the family was some thing like a national right, but with global capitalism standardizing work hours, this idyllic habit is fast becoming an endangered pleasure. Ironically, all this is happening just as researchers are beginning to note the health benefits of the afternoon nap. According to a nationwide survey, less than 25 percent of Spaniards still enjoy siestas. And like Spain, much of Latin America has adopted Americanized work schedules, too, with shortened lunch times and more rigid work hours. Last year the Mexican government passed a law limiting lunch breaks to one hour and requiring its employees to work their eight-hour shift between 7 a.m. and 6 p.m.. Before the mandate , workers would break up the shift—going home midday for a long break with the family and returning to work until about 9 or 10 p.m.. The idea of siesta is changing in Greece, Italy and Portugal, too, as they rush to join their more "industrious" counterparts in the global market. Most Americans I know covet sleep, but the idea of taking a nap mid-afternoon equates with laziness, un employment and general sneakiness. Yet according to a National Sleep Survey poll, 65 percent of adults do not get enough sleep. Numerous scientific studies document the benefits of nap taking, including one 1997 study on the deleterious effects of sleep deprivation in the journal Internal Medicine. The researchers found that fatigue harms not only marital and social relations but worker productivity. According to Mark Rosekind, a former NASA scientist and founder of Solutions in Cupertino, Calif., which educates businesses about the advantages of sanctioning naps, we're biologically programmed to get sleepy between 3 and 5 p.m. and 3 and 5 a.m.. Our internal timekeeper—called the circadian clock—operates on a 24-hour rotation and every 12 hours there' s a dip. In accordance with these natural sleep rhythms, Rosekind recommends that naps be either for 40 minutes or for two hours. Latin American countries, asserts Rosekind, have had it right all along. They've been in sync with their clocks; we haven't. Since most of the world is sleep-deprived, getting well under the recommended eight hours a night(adults get an average of 6. 5 hours nightly), we usually operate on a kind of idle midday. Naps are even more useful now that most of us forfeit sleep because of insane work schedules, longer commute times and stress, In a study published last April, Brazilian medical researchers noted that blood pressure and arterial blood pressure dropped during a siesta.

Time was when the solar system had two watery worlds. (46) Directly next door to the warm. wet, loamy Earth was the warm, wet, loamy Mars, both planets covered with oceans and running with rivers-and both possibly teeming with life. Billions of years ago, however, the low-gravity Mars had both its air and water leak away, causing the planet to become the dead, freeze-dried place it is today. That is what the prevailing thinking has been. Now, it appears that thinking may be wrong. (47) Recently, NASA released new images from the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft that suggest water may be flowing up and streaming onto the Martian surface-dramatically increasing the likelihood that at least part of the planet is biologically alive. "If these results prove true," says Ed Weiler, associate administrator of NASA"s Office of Space Science, "they have profound implications for the possibility of life." Finding liquid water on Mars" surface has never been easy-because it simply can"t exist there. The modern-day Martian atmosphere has barely 1 percent the density of Earth"s, and its average temperature hovers around-67 degrees Fahrenheit (-19 degrees Centigrade). In an environment as harsh as this, water would either vaporize into space or simply flash-freeze in place. (48) Scientists studying Martian history have always looked for clues the planet"s ancient water left behind-tracks where vanished rivers once flowed, basins where vanished seas once stood. (49) The approximately 65,000 images the Surveyor orbiter has beamed home in the nearly three years it has been circling Mars are full of this kind of expected hydro-scarring. But some of the pictures took scientists by surprise. The older a formation is, the more likely it is to have been distorted over the eons-smoothed by periodic windstorms or gouged by the occasional incoming meteor. However, a few of the newly discovered water channels look fresh. That discovery has lead astonished researchers to conclude that these channels may have been recently formed. (50) Planetologists have long assumed that if underground water was going to bubble up on Mars, it would have to be somewhere in the balmy equatorial zones: where temperatures at noon in midsummer may reach 68 degrees Fahrenheit (20 degrees Centigrade). Almost all the new channels, however, were discovered at the planet"s relative extremes-north of 30 degrees north latitude and south of 30 degrees south latitude-and all were carved on the cold, shaded sides of slopes.

America is one of many countries where the state gives a leg-up to members of certain racial, ethnic, or other groups【C1】______holding them to different standards. The details【C2】______. In some countries, the policy【C3】______only to areas under direct state control, such as public-works contracts or【C4】______to public universities. In others, private firms are also obliged to take【C5】______of the race of their employees, contractors and even owners. 【C6】______the effects are strikingly similar around the world. Many of these policies were put in place with the best of intentions: to【C7】______for past injustices and purify their legacy. No one can deny that, 【C8】______, blacks in America have suffered awful wrongs, and continue to suffer【C9】______. Favouring members of these groups seems like a quick and effective way of making society【C10】______. Most of these groups have made great【C11】______. At the same time, the downside of affirmative action has become all too【C12】______. Awarding university places to black students 【C13】______lower test scores than whites sounds reasonable, 【C14】______the legacy of segregation. But a study found that at some American universities, black applicants who scored 450 points worse than Asians on entrance tests were【C15】______likely to win a place. That is neither fair on Asians, nor a(n) 【C16】______to blacks to study in high school. The book "Mismatch" produces evidence that【C17】______affirmative action reduces the number of blacks who【C18】______as lawyers by placing black students in law schools for which they are【C19】______, causing many to drop out Had they attended less demanding schools, they might have 【C20】______.

BPart B/B

Write a letter to Mr. Terry Thompson, recommending a Chinese university for him to study in China. You should write about 100 words. Do not sign your own name at the end of the letter; use "Li Ming" instead. Do not write the address.

At school we went over our social networking guidelines. 【C1】______the obvious—don"t be inappropriate with students through texting and Facebooking—we were further【C2】______to "always think and write like an educator" and "never use a blog to【C3】______your job duties" and "never blog or write about extremely personal【C4】______". The handout told us that any Facebook pictures that show "the use of alcohol or anything students are prohibited from doing," could【C5】______discipline. All of this is because "community members may hold you to a【C6】______standard of conduct than the【C7】______ person." It is also advised that teachers should【C8】______"discussion or revealing【C9】______students personal matters about their private lives" making me【C10】______every piece of writing I have ever shared with my students. Educators have been expected to be super-heroes for a while now, 【C11】______poverty, dysfunction,【C12】______curriculums, and time. But now we are expected to be the faultless and faceless【C13】______opinions or personal lives. I understand the Public Face and I have gotten pretty good at【C14】______ it And I【C15】______am not forgiving inappropriate behavior with or around children. But with policies like this, I am【C16】______to buy beer at the grocery store or wear clothes 【C17】______break dress code out in public on hot days. But while the rest of the population gets to【C18】______into their averageness (【C19】______President Obama can drink beer in public without losing his job), teachers are expected to live their average lives behind【C20】______doors.

Ever since this government's term began, the attitude to teachers has been overshadowed by the mantra that good teachers cannot be rewarded if it means bad teachers are rewarded, too. That's why, despite the obvious need for them, big pay rises have not been awarded to teachers across the board. The latest pay rise was 3.6 percent—mad in the present situation. That's why, as well, the long battle over performance-related pay was fought as teacher numbers slid. The idea is that some kind of year zero can eventually be achieved whereby all the bad teachers are gone and only the good teachers remain. That is why the government's attempts to relieve the teacher shortage have been so focused on offering incentives to get a new generation of teachers into training. The assumption is that so many of the teachers we have already are bad, that only by starting again can standards be raised. But the teacher shortage is not caused only because of a lack of new teachers coming into the profession. It is also because teaching has a retention problem with many leaving the profession. These people have their reasons for doing so, which cannot be purely about wanting irresponsibly to "abandon" pupils more permanently. Such an exodus suggests that even beyond the hated union grandstanding, teachers are not happy. Unions and government appear to be in broad agreement that the shortage of teachers is a parlous state of affairs. Oddly, though, they don't seem entirely to agree that the reasons for this may lie in features of the profession itself and the way it is run. Instead, the government is so suspicious of the idea that teachers may be able to represent themselves, that they have set up the General Teaching Council, a body that will represent teachers whether they want it to or not, and to which they have to pay ￡25 a year whether they want to or not. The attitudes of both sides promise to exacerbate rather than solve the problem. Teachers are certainly exacerbating the problem by stressing just how bad things are. Quite a few potential teachers must be put off. And while the government has made quite a success of convincing the public that bad education is almost exclusively linked to bad teachers represented by destructive unions, it also seems appalling that in a survey last year, working hours for primary teachers averaged 53 hours per week, while secondary teachers clocked up 51 hours. At their spring conferences, the four major teaching unions intend to ballot their members on demanding from government an independent inquiry into working conditions. This follows the McCrone report in Scotland, which produced an agreement to limit hours to 35 per week, with a maximum class contact-time of 22 and a half hours. That sounds most attractive.

Writeanessayof160-200wordsbasedonthefollowingdrawing.Inyouressay,youshould1)describethepicturebriefly,2)explaintheintendedmeaningand3)giveyourpointofview.

BSection III Writing/B

Niall FitzGerald would have liked to leave Unilever in a blaze of glory when he retires at the end of September. The co-chief executive of the Anglo-Dutch consumer-goods group was one of the godfathers of Unilever"s "Path to Growth" strategy of focusing on its brands, which was launched five years ago. But the plan failed to deliver on many of its promises. On September 20th, Unilever warned that it would not report its promised double-digit growth in profits this year. It is a tough time for producers of branded consumer goods. Unilever and its competitors have to cope with pressure on prices and stiff competition from supermarkets" own brands. Colgate-Palmolive warned of lower profits on the same day. Nestle recently disappointed investors with its latest results. Even so, Unilever admits the bulk of its troubles are self-inflicted. The "Path to Growth" strategy aimed to make the firm more efficient. Unilever saved about 4 billion euro ($4.9 billion) in costs over the past five years and reduced its portfolio of brands from 1,600 to some 450. But it still failed to meet its targets for profit and sales, reporting a sales decline of 0.@7% for the second quarter of this year. Andrew Wood at Sanford Bernstein, an investment-research firm, thinks the main problem is under-investment in advertising and marketing, an infatuation with brands and unrealistic performance targets. Unilever cut its ad and marketing expenditure at the worst moment, says Mr. Wood. Com-moditised products are especially: vulnerable to the onslaught of retailers" own brands. In margarine, for instance, retailers" own brands now capture as much as one-fifth of the market. Unilever also over-extended some successful brands, for instance Bertolli"s olive oils and pasta sauces. According to Mr. Wood, Unilever can sustainably grow its business about 3% a year; it was shooting for 5-6%. Unilever"s chief financial officer (CFO) counters that consumers look for a product and then buy a brand, so his firm needs to focus on brands. Unilever intends to step up its marketing efforts, although ad spending is supposed to remain at current levels. At present, Unilever spends 14.@5% of sales on ads. But even the CFO admits the company has "issues of competitiveness". After seven quarters of disappointing performance, it needs to regain credibility with investors. Over the next few months, management will rethink its strategy for the next five-year plan. Patrick Cescau, a Frenchman who will take over from Mr. FitzGerald, is inheriting a tricky legacy.

Homework has never been terribly popular with students and even many parents, but in recently years it has been particularly scorned. School districts across the country, most recently Los Angeles Unified, are revising their thinking on this educational ritual. Unfortunately, L.A. Unified has produced an inflexible policy which mandates that with the exception of some advanced courses, homework may no longer count for more than 10% of a student"s academic grade. This rule is meant to address the difficulty that students from impoverished or chaotic homes might have in completing their homework. But the policy is unclear and contradictory. Certainly, no homework should be assigned that students cannot complete on their own or that they cannot do without expensive equipment. But if the district is essentially giving a pass to students who do not do their homework because of complicated family lives, it is going riskily close to the implication that standards need to be lowered for poor children. District administrators say that homework will still be a part of schooling; teachers are allowed to assign as much of it as they want. But with homework counting for no more than 10% of their grades, students can easily skip half their homework and see very little difference on their report cards. Some students might do well on state tests without completing their homework, but what about the students who performed well on the tests and did their homework? It is quite possible that the homework helped. Yet rather than empowering teachers to find what works best for their students, the policy imposes a flat, across-the-board rule. At the same time, the policy addresses none of the truly thorny questions about homework. If the district finds homework to be unimportant to its students" academic achievement, it should move to reduce or eliminate the assignments, not make them count for almost nothing. Conversely, if homework matters, it should account for a significant portion of the grade. Meanwhile, this policy does nothing to ensure that the homework students receive is meaningful or appropriate to their age and the subject, or that teachers are not assigning more than they are willing to review and correct. The homework rules should be put on hold while the school board, which is responsible for setting educational policy, looks into the matter and conducts public hearings. It is not too late for L.A. Unified to do homework right.

BPart BDirections: Write an essay of 160-200 words based on the following information./B

Many countries have a tradition of inviting foreigners to rule them. The English called in William of Orange in 1688, and, depending on your interpretation of history, William of Normandy in 1066. 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.

Judith Vogtli, director of an upstate New York-based abstinence(the practice of refraining from sex, alcohol, etc)organization called Project Truth, is worried that the golden age of "abstinence-only" education may have come to an end. George W. Bush helped increase funding for this kind of sex education—which focuses on chastity as the way to prevent pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases, and discusses condoms only in terms of failure—to over $175m a year. The fate of that money, and of abstinence education itself, is uncertain under a new administration and Congress. Ms Vogtli need only wait a few weeks. Barack Obama will submit the first draft of his budget to Congress later this month. In the meantime, her organization, funded entirely by a government grant, is trying to go about business as usual. That means teaching about abstaining from sex, drugs and alcohol in New York schools and holding its sixth annual abstinence Creativity Contest, to which students submitted essays, poems, artwork and music on the theme of "Waiting is easier because..." Abstinence-only education programs have been controversial ever since they were introduced under Ronald Reagan in 1981. Some liberals have labeled it "ignorance-only" education and most favor a curriculum that includes discussion of both abstinence and contraception(the method to prevent pregnancy). Since the start of abstinence-only programs, the federal government has spent over $1.5 billion on them, but the United States still has one of the highest teen-pregnancy rates of any developed country. Supporters of abstinence-only education mostly think that the media and a culture of casual sexual behaviors are to blame for this and that more government support for abstinence could help offset the rise of teenage pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease. But opponents blame abstinence-only education. There is some evidence to support their case. According to Sarah Brown of the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, an advocacy organization, there has been no randomized study showing that abstinence-only education delays sexual activity, and research from the University of Washington suggests that teens who receive comprehensive sex education have a 50% lower risk of becoming pregnant than those enrolled in abstinence-only courses. Abstinence-only advocates want the government to let school districts choose which type of sex education they prefer. But in an unfavorable sign for them, the new Congress is already shifting its emphasis. Louise Slaughter, a congresswoman from New York and a former scientist, has introduced a bill that would fund "medically accurate" comprehensive sex education in schools. It is likely to pass.