The world is undergoing tremendous changes. The rise of globalization, both an economic and cultural trend that has swept throughout the world, has forged new ground as we enter the 21st century. But are the effects of globalization always positive? Some say no. Michael Tenet, head of the International Institute for Foreign Relations in Atlanta, is worried about current resentment throughout the world toward the rise of globalization. "Ever since the 1980s and the economic collapse of the Asian Tigers in the late 1990s, there has been a re-evaluation of the role of globalization as a force for good", he said. "Incomes in many countries have declined and the gap between the most rich and the most poor has been aggravated. Without further intervention by governments, we could see a tragedy expressed in an increased level of poverty throughout the Latin America and Asia". Yet George Frank, an influential economist who works on Wall Street, sees no such danger. "Economic liberalization, increased transparency and market-based reforms have positive effect in the long run, even if market mechanisms can produce short-term destabilization problems", he said. "What is most important is that barriers to trade continue to fall so that active competition for Consumer goods reduces prices and in turn raises the average level of income". Others feel that globalization"s cultural impact may be more important than its economic implications. Janice Yawee, a native of Africa, feels strongly that globalization is undermining her local culture and language. "Most of the world"s dialects will become extinct under globalization. We"re paving the world with McDonald"s and English slang. It tears me up inside", she said. Governments of different countries have had mixed responses to the wave of globalization. The United States is generally seen as an active proponent of greater free trade, and it certainly has enormous cultural influence by virtue of its near monopoly on worldwide entertainment. But other countries, most notably in Europe and developing nations, have sought to reduce the impact that globalization has on their domestic affairs. "When I was a boy we had very little to speak of", says one Singaporean resident. "Now our country has developed into a booming hub for international finance". Others, however, are not so optimistic. "Globalization is an evil force that must be halted", a union official at a car plant in Detroit recently commented, "It"s sucking away jobs and killing the spirit of our country". (401 words)Notes:slang 俚语。tear up 撕碎，挖开。proponent 支持者，拥护者。hub 轮毂。suck away减少。

The collapse of Enron, the largest bankruptcy in American history, has rung out a banner year for American business failures. In Europe, the fallout from the Swissair and Sabena insolvencies continues. In the current global slump, more companies are likely to go under. Now is a perfect time to reconsider how to handle such failures, let them sink, or give them a chance to swim? In America, bankruptcy has come to mean a second chance for bust businesses. The famous "Chapter 11" law aims to give a company time to get back on its feet, by shielding it from debt payments and prodding banks to negotiate with their debtor. It even allows an insolvent company to receive fresh finance after it goes bust. On the other side of the Atlantic, when companies stumble, almost as much effort is spent in fingering the guilty as in trying to salvage a viable business. British and French laws, for example, can make a failing company"s directors face criminal penalties and personal liability. Moreover, bankers have the power, at the first sign of trouble, to push a company into the arms of the receivers. Some modest changes are afoot, however. Britain is considering moves that would bring its rules closer to America"s. New laws in Germany should also make it easier to revive sick companies, although trade unions still have their say. But even with the arrival of the euro and moves towards a single financial market, going bust in Europe is a strictly local affair. Long before America had a single currency, the American constitution provided uniform bankruptcy laws, observes Elizabeth Warren of the Harvard Law School. Europe"s patchwork of national laws, according to Bill Brandt of Development Specialists, a consultancy, inhibits lending and makes it difficult to fix ailing firms. Transatlantic insolvencies are even harder, as a Belgian-based software company, Lernout and Hauspie, discovered this year. Its American reorganization plan was thwarted by a Belgian judge, who ordered a sale of the firm"s assets. As the European Union inches toward greater harmonization, should it try to mimic America? Critics of Chapter 11 think not. They argue that America"s bankruptcy system is wasteful, lets failed managers go unpunished, and gives some companies an unfair advantage. In Chapter 11, admittedly, lawyers and advisers gobble up fees, but a recent study argues that the fees are no larger than those for most mergers and acquisitions. One common complaint, that managers enjoy the high life while creditors go begging, fails to stand up to the data from America"s previous wave of bankruptcies in the early 1990s. Stuart Gilson of the Harvard Business School found that more than two-thirds of top managers were ousted within two years of a bankruptcy filing. More troubling is that some American firms seem to enjoy second and third trips to bankruptcy court, cheekily termed Chapters 22 and 33. Some see this as evidence that, too often, they use Chapter 11 to keep running. But there is more to the story.

There are a great many careers in which the increasing emphasis is on specialization. You find these careers in engineering, in production, in statistical work, and in teaching. 【F1】 But there is an increasing demand for people who are able to take in great area at a glance, people who perhaps do not know too much about any one field. There is, in other words, a demand for people who are capable of seeing the forest rather than the trees, of making general judgments. We can call these people "generalists." 【F2】 And these "generalists" are particularly needed for positions in administration, where it is their job to see that other people do the work, where they have to plan for other people, to organize other people' s work, to begin it and judge it. The specialist understands one field; his concern is with technique and tools. He is a "trained" man; and his educational background is properly technical or professional. The generalist—and especially the administrator—deals with people; his concern is with leadership, with planning, and with direction giving. He is an "educated" man; and the humanities are his strongest foundation. 【F3】 Very rarely is a specialist capable of being an administrator, and very rarely is a good generalist also a good specialist in particular field. Any organization needs both kinds of people, though different organizations need them in different proportions. 【F4】 It is your task to find out, during your training period, one of the two kinds of jobs into which you fit, and to plan your career accordingly. Your first job may turn out to be the right job for you—but this is pure accident. Certainly you should not change jobs constantly or people will become suspicious of your ability to hold any job. 【F5】 At the same time you must not look upon the first job as the final job; it is primarily a training job, an opportunity to understand yourself and your fitness for being an employee.

BPart CDirections: Read the following text carefully and then translate the underlined segments into Chinese./B

In her novel of "Reunion, American Style", Rona Jaffe suggests that a class reunion "is more than a sentimental journey. It is also a way of answering the question that lies at the back of nearly all our minds. Did they do better than I?" Jaffe' s observation may be misplaced but not completely lost. 【F1】 According to a study conducted by social psychologist Jack Sparacino, the overwhelming majority who attend reunions aren 't there invidiously to compare their recent accomplishments with those of their former classmates. Instead, they hope, primarily, to relive their earlier successes. Certainly, a few return to show their former classmates how well they have done; others enjoy observing the changes that have occurred in their classmates (not always in themselves, of course). 【F2】 But the majorities who attend their class reunions do so to relive the good times they remember having when they were younger. 【F3】 In his study, attendees had been more popular, more often re garded as attractive, and more involved in extracurricular activities than those classmates who chose not to attend. For those who turned up at their reunions, then, the old times were also the good times! It would appear that Americans have a special fondness for reunions, judging by their prevalence. Major league baseball players, fraternity members, veterans groups, high school and college graduates, and former Boy Scouts all hold reunions on a regular basis. In addition, family reunions frequently attract blood relatives from faraway places who spend considerable money and time to reunite. 【F4】 Actually, in their affection for reuniting with friends, family or colleagues, Americans are probably no different from any other people, except that Americans have created an amazing number and variety of institutionalized forms of gatherings to facilitate the satisfaction of this desire. Indeed, reunions have increasingly become formal events that are organized on a regular basis and, in the process, they have also become big business. Shell Norris of Class Reunion, Inc., says that Chicago alone has 1,500 high school reunions each year. A conservative estimate on the national level would be 10,000 annually. At one time, all high school reunions were organized by volunteers, usually female homemakers. 【F5】 In the last few years, however, as more and more women have entered the labour force, alumni reunions are increasingly being planned by specialized companies rather than by part-time volunteers. The first college reunion was held by the alumni of Yale University in 1792. Graduates of Pennsylvania, Princeton, Stanford, and Brown followed suit. And by the end of the 19th century, most 4-year institutions were holding alumni reunions.

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. Since white was the color of the kind of paradise! So much longed to live in someday, grey left behind nothing more than a bitter taste of emptiness and depression. I can remember how noticed once, that any other color must be a symbol for something, a feeling or whatever. Only grey seemed to stand for absolutely nothing. This was the world I lived in, and so did he.B. I used to work in a mechanical way, following the same rhythm over and over again, and so did he. But every time I was about to give up, he would lift his head and give me a little smile, as if he could guess my thoughts. I think it was actually his eyes that impressed me most. They were so dark and straight, and though they seems to be hiding anything, I couldn"t get rid of the impression that somehow he must be hiding something.C. Those days were more than hard for all of us. There seemed to be no way to escape from the greyness of our everyday life, which was the only color that surrounded us. The huge concrete blocks we lived in was grey, the grey of the factory dust, even the color of our clothes, that once might have been white was grey. It must have been a bright and shining white.., and I can"t exactly recall how much time I spent trying to imagine the kind of white it might have been.D. Well, to make a long story short, he died only a year after he started working with us. It was a car accident and he didn"t have to suffer very long. I went to his funeral and the only person I met there was an old lady, maybe his mother. She told me that he had lost his family just the year before and after that he didn"t speak any more. He hadn"t said a single word. First I didn"t believe her. I just thought that he was a fairly quiet person; besides there was nothing much to say anyway. But suddenly I realized that I couldn"t recall ever having heard his voice at all. Only then did I realize it!E. Having our job in the factory was still luxury though, considering the fact that most of us had families to feed. And not long after he started to work there, I would always find him working at the machine next to mine. We"d work for hours next to each other, staying quiet, with our thoughts drifting away to a different place but still aware of our hands doing the same movements over and over again. We were doing that until the bell would ring to end the work for the day.F. He gave me so much and I knew so little about him. He had been my friend and now I had lost him without having had the chance to give anything back. He had been so strong that he was able to give whatever had happened. I felt weak and guilty in those days. But after that I started to care for the people around me. I think I started to live.G. He wasn"t a guy of big words, and he seemed to live entirely in his own world. I remember that during the days he worked with us, none of us exactly knew who he was, where he came from or what he was looking for, and afterwards he disappeared. Nobody knew where he had gone, what he was doing or if he had friends or a family to stay with. I guess, we didn"t even know his name—and even if we did, I"ve forgotten it anyway.Order: G is the first paragraph and F is the last one.

Latin America—a place long associated with financial disaster—has remained improbably calm, while the ripples of America's subprime-mortgage crisis have spread all over the place. Banks have reported no unpleasant surprises. Brazil and Peru have been blessed with coveted investment-grade ratings. Surprisingly, perhaps the fleetest country of all has been Argentina. Since it emerged from the financial crisis of 2001-02, it has been one of the world's fastest-growing economies. It is expected to expand faster than most of its neighbors again this year. How has such a perennial economic miscreant proven so resilient to the credit crunch? Quite simply, it barely has no credit. Back when its economy virtually collapsed, the country suffered a run on its banks, followed by a freeze on withdrawals, and a massive currency devaluation. As a result, bank lending to the private sector shrivelled, from 23.8% of GDP in 2000 to 10.8% in 2003. Since then, it has rebounded to a piddling 13%; by contrast, the ratio in Brazil was 36.5% in 2006. Almost all of these loans in Argentina are accessible only on a short-term basis. Once its recovery began in June 2002, Argentina became a paradise for business. Unemployment of over 20% kept wages down, and the devaluation gave exporters an edge on foreign competitors. The ample productive capacity left idle by the crisis meant firms could expand without making big investments. And the windfall profits reaped by agricultural exporters, thanks to record commodities prices, enabled many of them to finance new projects out of earnings. Hence the economy could grow at almost 9% a year with little need for credit. But such a fortuitous confluence of factors could not last. Starting in early 2005, inflation picked up, a sign that the installed capacity was starting to limit output. Salaries and prices for raw materials increased sharply, cutting into profits. And farmers were particularly hard hit when the government nearly doubled the taxes it leaves on farm exports. Now, just as companies need to embark on big investments if they are to keep growing, their margins are no longer big enough to pay for the expansion and they need to borrow. So, the time is ripe for the country's financial system to recover. But a number of things are in the way. Foremost is Argentina's business risk. Those in the informal economy (which represents over 40% of GDP) can neither save nor borrow legally, lest they become known to the taxmen. The rest remain cowed by memories of the crisis. Although Argentines have poured their savings into property, fuelling a construction boom, they still hold about four-fifths of their deposits abroad. Inflation, fuelled by a public-spending binge, state-mandated wage increases, and a cheap currency, is not helping either. No one knows how high it is. The consumer-price index is doctored to keep the official rate below 10%, but private estimates suggest it is near 25%. Without a reliable index of inflation, lending is all but impossible, even for the medium term. And the central bank has kept interest rates strongly negative in real terms, encouraging workers to spend their wages rather than to save.

Richard Rorty was one of the most talked-about thinkers in America. Every professional philosopher in the English-speaking world had to study his masterpiece, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, published in 1979.【F1】 But the reason why he was a superstar is that it was not only philosophers who read him; students and teachers in many other branches of the humanities fellunder his spell as well. This wide appeal was partly due to his approachable style and breadth of learning. It also helped that he attacked philosophy as a self-important pretender with no monopoly on deep truths. In fact, for Rorty there weren"t really any deep truths at all. He saw himself as a pragmatist in the American tradition of William James and (especially) John Dewey.【F2】 He says that beliefs should be.judged by their usefulness, and not by any supposed correspondence with an ultimate reality that hides behind the landscape of everyday life. This sort of pragmatism reduces philosophy to just one form of enlightening conversation among many. Rorty began studies at the University of Chicago at the age of 15. He was married, divorced and remarried. There were rows with departmental colleagues. He wrote a lot and died of cancer.【F3】 If Neil Gross, who is an American sociologist, had set out to write a traditional biography of Rorty, he would not have had a gripping tale to tell. Instead he has used Rorty as a case study in the sociological analysis of academe. Why did he do it?【F4】 Unfortunately for anyone who is not a professional sociologist, Mr.Gross is more interested in distinguishing subtly different ways of answering this question than he is in the question itself. And his writing seems almost designed to make pedestrian generalizations sound as if they are insights:【F5】 "As thinkers move across the life course and are affiliated with different institutions, they may pick up from some of them the same elements that they integrate into their self-concept narratives." Almost by accident, Mr.Gross does shed some light on Rorty"s development. He shows that his estrangement from his colleagues at Princeton was a natural evolution from his early studies in Chicago and graduate work at Yale. Those who agree with Rorty"s critique of philosophy will be tempted to conclude from this volume that sociology is even worse.

"Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine." It"s a classic quote from the film Casablanca, but can a computer【C1】______the magic of such classic lines? Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil and colleagues at Cornell University have taught a computer to【C2】______classic quotes with an accuracy【C3】______that of mankind. It means computers might one day help film【C4】______test their latest classic lines. The Cornell team collected quotes from the Internet Movie Database, which contains a list of lines flagged by users as deserving to be【C5】______. The context【C6】______a line is uttered can make a quote more notable, so as a control, the team【C7】______each classic quote with an ordinary one from the【C8】______context It was the same【C9】______and spoken by the same character at around the same point in the film. The computer analysed the pairs of quotes— around 2200 in total—for language【C10】______, unusual words, and word combinations. The computer【C11】______to recognize several characteristics【C12】______to the classic quotes, creating a model that could help find them. "The phrases contain【C13】______combinations of words, but at the same time they have a sentence structure that is common, so they are【C14】______to use," says Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil. The analysis also showed that classic lines often have a(n) 【C15】______: they can be widely used because they don"t contain words that【C16】______them to a specific context. The model was able to【C17】______between classic and ordinary quotes with 64 percent accuracy.【C18】______scored 78 percent The team【C19】______that political candidates could use the model to assess their【C20】______.

You are ill and can not go to school. There fore you have to write a sick leave which should include: 1) the description of your illness; 2) your aim of writing the sick leave. You should write about 100 words. Do not sign your own name at the end of the note. Use "Li Ming" instead. (10 points)

BPart ADirections: Write a composition/letter of no less than 100 words on the following information./B

A. Title; ON MAKING FRIENDS B. Time limit: 40 minutes C. Word limit; 120 - 150 words (not including the given opening sentence) D. Your composition should be based on the OUTLINE below and should start with the given opening sentence; "As a human being, one can hardly do without a friend. " E. Your composition must be written neatly on the ANSWER SHEET 2. (15 points) Outline: 1. The need for friends 2. True friendship 3. My principle in making friends

Apart from a new football stadium and some smart university buildings, most of Middlesbrough looks as though it came to a dead halt in the 1980s. It boomed on steel and chemicals after iron ore was discovered in 1850. Just over a century later, as Britain"s traditional industries failed, it seemed to have reached the end of the road. Now government leaders hope that splendor and glamour can revive it. The most startling sign of this improbable ambition is an expensive art gallery. The ￡19.2 million Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (MIMA) houses the local council"s collection of modern British paintings and ceramics. It opens on January 28th with works on loan for the occasion by artists rarely seen in the region—Picasso, Matisse, Jackson Pollock—alongside pictures by contemporary names such as Chris ofili and Damien Hirst. The glass-fronted modernist gallery, by Dutch architect Erick van Egeraat, sits on once-ruined land opposite the Victorian town hall and 1960s council buildings. The landscaped space in between has become a vast new square. "Middlesbrough lost its heart years ago," says Ray Mallon, the town"s frank elected mayor. "Now we have created a new heart." Locals are dubious. It looks nice, but they can"t see many people going to it; those who want culture go to Newcastle. Mr. Mallon is not worried by such comments. He says MIMA will lure some of the 7 million people who live within an hour and a halfs drive from the town, and persuade them to spend money there. With 5% of the town"s 137,600 residents claiming unemployment—twice the national average—and business registrations at half the national rate, outside money is needed. Using art for regeneration is a well-tried process, especially in northern England. Liverpool"s Tate North gallery and Salford"s Lowry Centre succeed because they are part of bigger attractions and in big cities. But Gateshead"s Baltic Mills art gallery and Sunderland"s National Glass Centre have struggled to draw visitors, and both have needed extra subsidies. Godfrey Worsdale, MIMA"s director, reckons he will achieve his aim of 110,000 visitors a year. Galleries that run into trouble, he says, tend to have single themes with niche appeal. Still, since 96% of MIMA"s cost has come from public funds and as two-thirds of the ￡1 million running cost will fall on local taxpayers, the council is taking a risk. "It is not going to be profitable," says Mr. Mallon bravely. "What it can do is make the town profitable."

BSection I Use of EnglishDirections: Read the following text. Choose the best word(s) for each numbered blank and mark A, B, C or D./B

With the pace of technological change making heads spin, we tend to think of our age as the most innovative ever. We have smartphones and supercomputers, big data and stem-cell transplants. Governments, universities and firms together spend around $1.4 trillion a year on R and the drop-off since 2004 probably has more to do with the economic crisis than with underlying lack of invention. [B]Economic growth is a modern invention: 20th-century growth rates were far higher than those in the 19th century, and pre-1750 growth rates were almost imperceptible by modern standards. [C]Rather as electrification changed everything by allowing energy to be used far from where it was generated, computing and communications technologies transform lives and businesses by allowing people to make calculations and connections far beyond their unaided capacity. [D]And it wasn't just modern sanitation that sprang from late-19th and early-20th-century brains : they produced cars, planes, the telephone, radio and antibiotics. [E]Many more brains are at work now than were 100 years ago: American and European inventors have been joined in the race to produce cool new stuff by those from many other countries. [F]If the pessimists are right, the implications are huge. Economies can generate growth by adding more stuff;more workers, investment and education. But sustained increases in output per person, which are necessary to raise incomes and welfare, entail using the stuff we already have in better ways—innovating, in other words. [G]Life expectancy in America, for instance, has risen more slowly since 1980 than in the early 20th century. The speed of travel, in the rich world at least, is often slower now than it was a generation earlier, after rocketing a century or so ago.

A report consistently brought back by visitors to the US is how friendly, courteous, and helpful most Americans were to them. To be fair, this observation is also frequently made of Canada and Canadians , and should best be considered North American. There are, of course, exceptions. Small-minded officials, rude waiters, and ill-mannered taxi drivers are hardly unknown in the US. Yet it is an observation made so frequently that it deserves comment. For a long period of time and in many parts of the country, a traveler was a welcome break in an otherwise dull existence. Dullness and loneliness were common problems of the families who generally lived distant from one another. Strangers and travelers were welcome sources of diversion, and brought news of the outside world. The harsh realities of the frontier also shaped this tradition of hospitality. Someone traveling alone, if hungry, injured, or ill, often had nowhere to turn except to the nearest cabin or settlement. It was not a matter of choice for the traveler or merely a charitable impulse on the part of the settlers. It reflected the harshness of daily life: if you didn't take in the stranger and take care of him, there was no one else who would. And someday, remember, you might be in the same situation. Today there are many charitable organizations which specialize in helping the weary traveler. Yet, the old tradition of hospitality to strangers is still very strong in the US, especially in the smaller cities and towns away from the busy tourist trails. "I was just traveling through, got talking with this American, and pretty soon he invited me home for dinner—amazing. "Such observations reported by visitors to the US are not uncommon, but are not always understood properly. The casual friendliness of many Americans should be interpreted neither as superficial nor as artificial, but as the result of a historically developed cultural tradition. As is true of any developed society, in America a complex set of cultural signals, assumptions, and conventions underlies all social interrelationships. And, of course, speaking a language does not necessarily mean that someone understands social and cultural patterns. For example, when an American uses the word "friend", the cultural implications of the word may be quite different from those it has in the visitor's language and culture. It takes more than a brief encounter on a bus to distinguish between courteous convention and individual interest. Yet, being friendly is a virtue that many Americans value highly and expect from both neighbors and strangers.

Even for overachievers who are used to multitasking, the idea of watching two versions of the same television show at the same time—one on television and one on a computer—is something that is probably foreign to most people over the age of 30. To the eternally young brains that nm MTV, however, it is the next step in reshaping their business. Beginning this summer with the MTV Video Music Awards and continuing in the fall with the cable channel"s live afternoon program, "Total Request Live", MTV will offer two simultaneous versions of each show, one on television and another, focusing on a behind-the-scenes narrative, on its broadband channel, MTV Overdrive. "We do tons of research on our audience, and it shows that they are instant messaging and listening to music and watching TV all at the same time", said Christina Norman, president of MTV. "We"ve definitely seen them become more adept at navigating through multiple media. They live comfortably in several worlds at once". The Overdrive component, located at mtv.com, will feature a sort of video digression that will continue to stream live while the television show is broadcasting commercials. For example, if a viewer wants to watch an entire music video after a snippet is shown on the "Total Request Live" video countdown, or take a backstage tour with Jamie Foxx after he finishes his onstage appearance on the set of "T.R.L". (as the show is familiarly known), Overdrive will be the place to turn. "Doing three things at once when you"re 19 years old is not hard", said Dave Sirulnick, an executive vice president at MTV who oversees multiplatform production, news and music. Last Thursday at MTV"s studios in Times Square, Mr. Sirulnick proved adept at doing at least two things at once, dashing between two control rooms that were steps away from each other just down the hallway from the "T.R.L" set. It was the second test-run of simultaneous production, and in each control room-one for Overdrive, one for "T.R.L".—separate sets of directors and producers guided cameramen and the show"s hosts, known as V. J."s, through their paces. "No one that we know has done a live stream of a different signal of an existing show". Mr. Sirulnick said. "It"s a live parallel experience, one that very quickly turns into an on-demand experiment" with portions of each show archived and kept on the Overdrive site for fans to replay at will.

A Letter of Acknowledgement Write a letter of acknowledgement of about 100 words based on the following situation: You are taking charge of the recruitment of the Dance Association in your university, and you just received an application letter from a freshman Wendy. Now write her a letter of acknowledgement and tell her to wait for your reply next week. Do not sign your own name at the end of the letter. Use "Li Ming" instead. Do not write the address.

For the past 250 years, politicians and hard-headed men of business have diligently ignored what economics, has to say about the gains from trade—much as they may pretend, or in some cases even believe, that they are paying close attention. Except for those on the hard left, politicians of every ideological stripe these days swear their allegiance to the basic principle of free trade. Businessmen say the same. So when either group issues its calls for barriers against foreign competition, it is never because free trade is wrong in principle, it is because foreigners are cheating somehow, rendering the principles void. Or else it is because something about the way the world works has changed, so that the basic principles, ever valid in themselves, need to be adjusted. And those adjustments, of course, then oblige these staunch defenders of free-trade-in-principle to call for all manners of restrictions on trade. In this way, protectionism is periodically refreshed and reinvented. Anti-trade sentiment, especially in the United States, is currently becoming one of its strongest revivals in years. Earlier bogus "new conditions" that were deemed to undermine the orthodox case for liberal trade included the growth of crossborder capital flows, the recognition that some industries exposed to foreign competition may have strategic significance for the wider economy, and concerns over exploitation of workers in developing countries. Today"s bogus new condition, which is proving far more potent in political terms than any of the others, is the fact that international competition is now impinging on industries previously sheltered from it by the constraints of technology and geography. It is no longer just manufacturing that is feeling the pressure of toreign competition. It is no longer just dirty blue-collar jobs that are moving offshore. Jobs in services are now migrating as well, some of them requiring advanced skills, notably in computer programming. Services constitute much the larger part of every advanced economy. At the end of this process, what will be left? Gosh, Adam Smith never thought of this. Trade policy needs to be, completely rethought. Well, actually , no Gregory Mankiw, chairman of the President"s Council of Economic Advisers , pointed out recently that if services can be sourced more cheaply overseas than at home, it is to America"s advantage to seize that opportunity. This simple restatement of the logic of liberal trade brought derision down on Mr. Mankiw"s head—and the supposedly pro-trade administration he works for conspicuously failed to defend the plain truth he had advanced. That was disturbing. The fact that foreign competition now impinges on services as well as manufacturing raises no new issues of principle whatever. If a car can be made more cheaply in Mexico, it should be. If a telephone enquiry can be processed more cheaply in India, it should be. All such transactions raise real incomes on both sides, as resources are advantageously redeployed, with added investment and growth in the exporting country, and lower prices in the importing country. Yes, trade is a positive-sum game. (Adam Smith did think of that.)

The mythology of a culture can provide some vital insights into the beliefs and values of that culture. By using fantastic and sometimes incredible stories to create an oral tradition by which to explain the wonders of the natural world and teach lessons to younger generations, a society exposes those ideas and concepts held most important. Just as important as the final lesson to be gathered from the stories, however, are the characters and the roles they play in conveying that message. Perhaps the epitome of mythology and its use as a tool to pass on cultural values can be found in Aesop " s Fables, told and retold during the era of the Greek Empire. Aesop, a slave who won the favor of the court through his imaginative and descriptive tales, almost exclusively used animals to fill the roles in his short stories. Humans, when at all present, almost always played the part of bumbling fools struggling to learn the lesson being presented. This choice of characterization allows us to see that the Greeks placed wisdom on a level slightly beyond humans, implying that deep wisdom and understanding is a universal quality sought by, rather than steanning from, human beings. Aesop" s fables illustrated the central themes of humility and self-reliance, reflecting the importance of those traits in early Greek society. The folly of humans was used to contrast against the ultimate goal of attaining a higher level of understanding and awareness of truths about nature and humanity. For example, one notable fable features a fox repeatedly trying to reach a bunch of grapes on a very high vine. After failing at several attempts, the fox gives up, making up its mind that the grapes were probably sour anyway. The fable" s lesson, that we often play down that which we can" t achieve so as to make ourselves feel better, teaches the reader or listener in an entertaining way about one of the weaknesses of the human psyche. The mythology of other cultures and societies reveal the underlying traits of their respective cultures just as Aesop"s fables did. The stories of Roman gods, Aztec ghosts and European elves all served to train ancient generations those lessons considered most important to their community, and today they offer a powerful looking glass by which to evaluate and consider the contextual environment in which those culture existed.