He is not humorous at all.

It's not just lonely at the top; it can be "disengaging" too. Many of the most unhappy, unproductive and potentially【B1】______employees can be found in the executive suite. These top dogs may put in the 【B2】______, but not the heart. They are common to most companies and number 【B3】______ the thousands. That may come as a surprise to the rank and file. 【B4】______ , one of the first rules of success is to do what you enjoy. It's taken for【B5】______that top executives have found the magic, 【B6】______ surely they would have flamed out【B7】______short of the summit. But if executives are so【B8】______to their jobs, why would a 2002 Starwood Hotels & Resorts survey find that among 401 executives who play golf, 10% have called 【B9】______ sick to play a round? While it may make sense that lower-ranking workers are less likely to be engaged, many high-ranking executives are in the same 【B10】______. For example, 49% of top executives are engaged, vs. 43% of managers and 32% of non-managers. Striking is【B11】______ 9 % of top executives, nearly one in 10, are【B12】______disengaged. These executives are beyond the point of even going through the【B13】______. It can【B14】______the entire company, because companies with disengaged executives are likely to have disengaged employees【B15】______. Most people probably assume that big paychecks are enough【B16】______. But raises and pay scales don't matter much【B17】______way, according to several studies. It shows no 【B18】______ between CEO pay and engagement, or even CEO pay and company 【B19】______. Big paychecks may even make executives feel【B20】______in their jobs, because they can't try something else without sacrificing a small fortune.

Familiar as it may seem, gravity remains a mystery to modern physics. Despite several decades of trying, scientists have failed to fit Einstein"s general theory of relativity, which describes how gravity holds big objects together, with the quantum mechanics(an extension of statistical mechanics based on quantum theory)he pioneered, which describes the tiny fundamental particles of which matter consists and the forces by which they interact Recent discoveries have highlighted further problems. Many physicists are therefore entertaining the idea that Einstein"s ideas about gravity must be wrong or at least incomplete. Showing exactly how and where the great man erred is the task of the scientists who gathered at the "Rethinking Gravity" conference at the University of Arizona in Tucson this week. One way to test general relativity is to examine ever more closely the assumptions on which it rests, such as the equivalence principle: that gravity accelerates all objects at the same rate, regardless of their mass or composition. This principle was famously demonstrated by Galileo Galilei some 400 years ago when he simultaneously dropped cannon and musket balls, and balls made of gold, silver and wood, from the Tower of Pisa. Each appeared to hit the ground at the same time. A more precise test requires a taller tower. In effect, researchers are sending balls all the way to the moon and back. Tom Murphy, of the University of California, San Diego, and his colleagues fire laser beams from the deserts of New Mexico at reflectors placed on the moon by American and Russian spacecraft in the late 1960s and early 1970s. They use a telescope to capture the small fraction of the light that returns. Because the speed of light is known, they can calculate the distance between the Earth and the moon from the time taken for light to pass through it. According to general relativity, because the Earth and the moon orbit the sun, they should "fall" towards it at the same rate, in the same way as Galileo"s balls fell to the ground. By repeatedly measuring the distance between them, scientists can calculate the orbits of the Earth and the moon around the sun relative to each other. If the equivalence principle were violated, the moon"s orbit around the Earth would not appear straight, either towards or away from the sun. So far, Dr Murphy told the conference, these experiments have merely confirmed the equivalence principle to one part in 10 trillion. Dr Murphy and his colleagues hope that even more precise measurements could ultimately show general relativity to be only approximately correct. This would usher in a new revolution in physics.

LoveHimorHisMoney?Writeanessayof160-200wordsbasedonthedrawing.Inyouressay,youshould1)describethedrawingbriefly,2)explainitsintendedmeaning,and3)giveyourcomments.

On Campus Marriage A. Title: On Campus Marriage B. Word limit: 160~200 words (not including the given opening sentence) C. Your composition should be based on the OUTLINE below and should start with the given opening sentence: "Sensitive as it might be, campus marriage has gained more support in recent years with the improvement of civil right consciousness in China." OUTLINE: 1. The current situation of campus marriage 2. People"s different views on it 3. My opinion

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. Although it does not look appealing, in reality these people have good lives. Their jobs do not pay a fortune but they love them and their lives are stress-free. And no one would guess that they make so little because they live much Better than many of their friends who make a lot more. So if you want more money you have to count your pennies; there is no other way than to spend wisely.B. When it comes to money management you need to think long term. Money management is not only how you manage your money right now; it is how you will make sure your income and wealth will increase over time. In order to make more money, most Americans take the easiest route: get a second job. This is easy; it will give more money immediately, but it may come at a very high cost.C. Look at the case of Melissa and her husband. They own a nice home, beautifully decorated in a nice neighborhood, they have regular cars in good condition (though with more than 100K miles on each car), they dress well and travel to exotic destinations once a year. How do they do it? They live wisely. They do not buy a new ear just because people say that after 100K miles a ear is good for nothing. Their cars look good and run well bemuse they take care of them. They are not planning on buying a new car anytime soon. This is a huge expense that they do not want to take; they own their cars right now and they do not want additional debt.D. If you have children, it may come at the cost of precious time with them or your family. If you are single and have no children, it may cost you peace and time for relaxation. But beyond that, it may cost you long term: not being able to pursue bigger dreams.E. You can save money in many ways including buying less, or buying cheaper, or even buying smarter. People who seem to have money for everything and still do not carry credit card debt should be admired.F. Money and career wise you have to be smart and not take the shortest path, but the best, high-value path. Beside what you do for a living, the money you save has to be invested well so that you have good returns. One of the best investments you can have is a home (unless you need to rent since you will be in a specific location only for a very short time). To pay rent is to literally put money down the drain. The home you buy has to be such that you can make profit in a few years so that you can buy a bigger home or a similar home and save the rest.G. In other words, if you devote your time to learn a new skill or start your own business, this will not give you money immediately, but in the long term it will give more money and personal satisfaction than a stupid second job.Order: B is the first paragraph and A is the last.

During the 1990s boom Dell Computer"s customers got hooked on speed. Most were willing to pay a premium to have their computers shipped by overnight air express. But today, the equation has flipped. Customers prize cost savings over speed. "Now, most of our computers [in the U.S. are shipped on the ground—and we can still reach just about everyone within two days," says Fred Montoya, Dell"s vice president for worldwide logistics. Express air shipping isn"t in a death spiral. But recession-spooked consumers and manufacturers are less willing to pay for overnight delivery, which is three to five times more expensive than ground shipping. Even when they pay, satisfaction is not guaranteed. After September 11, security scrutiny of air freight can result in long delays—which means roads may actually be faster. That"s another reason why the number of packages shipped by air domestically fell 7.6% in 2001. And even with the recovery under way, air express volume is forecast to rebound by just 3% this year. "There"s a mass migration from air to trucks," says Jerry Levy, marketing director for air shipper Bax Global Inc. The industry"s giants are ready to roll with the change. In the past several years, FedEx and UPS have rebuilt their ground networks as a series of regional hubs able to deliver most packages overnight within a 700 mile radius. "Now, we can move a package in the most expedient way ground or air or a combination of both," says Tom Weidemeyer, UPS" chief operating officer and president of its airline unit. New technologies—including bar coding, satellite tracking, online billing and status—are easing the transition. Even impatient customers are willing to do without overnight delivery "if they know when a shipment will arrive," notes Brian Clancy, a principal at industry consultant Merge-Global Inc. The grounding of so much freight is solidifying the lead of UPS and FedEx. "We"re able to keep business in the family that we might have lost," says William Margaritis, FedEx"s corporate vice-president for worldwide communications. His company has invested $700 million in a new ground-delivery network while deferring the delivery of 123 aircraft. And strict new security requirements have forced the passenger airlines to stop carrying packages for the U.S. Postal Service, notes Richard Lung, director of revenue management at United Airlines Inc."s cargo unit. And small shippers, whether air or truck, lack the capital to build hybrid networks. "We got caught with our pants down," says Levy of Bax Global, which added a ground-delivery unit in 2000. Slow and steady really does win the race.

Can"tTalkNowWriteanessayof160-200wordsbasedonthedrawing.Inyouressay,youshould1)describethedrawingbriefly,2)explainitsintendedmeaning,and3)giveyourcomments.

To understand how astrology works, we should first take a quick look at the sky. Although the stars are at enormous distances, they do indeed give the impression of being affixed to the inner surface of a great hollow sphere surrounding the earth. Ancient people, in fact, literally believed in the existence of such a celestial sphere. As the earth spins on its axis, the celestial sphere appears to turn about us each day, pivoting at points on a line with the earth"s axis of rotation. This daily turning of the sphere carries the stars around the sky, causing most of them to rise and set, but they, and constellations they define, maintain fixed patterns on the sphere, just as the continent of Australia maintains its shape on a spinning globe of the earth. Thus the stars were called fixed stars. The motion of the sun along the ecliptic is, of course, merely a reflection of the revolution of the earth around the sun, but the ancients believed the earth was fixed and the sun had an independent motion of its own, eastward among the stars. The glare of sunlight hides the stars in daytime, but the ancients were aware that the stars were up there even at night, and the slow eastward motion of the sun around the sky, at the rate of about thirty degrees each month, caused different stars to be visible at night at different times of the year. The moon, revolving around the earth each month, also has an independent motion in the sky. The moon, however, changes it position relatively rapidly. Although it appears to rise and set each day, as does nearly everything else in the sky, we can see the moon changing position during as short an interval as an hour or so. The moon"s path around the earth lies nearly in the same plane as the earth"s path around the sun, so the moon is never seen very far from the ecliptic in the sky. There are five other objects visible to the naked eye that also appear to move in respect to the fixed background of stars on the celestial sphere. These are the planets Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. All of them revolve around the sun in nearly the same plane as the earth does. So they, like the moon, always appear near the ecliptic. Because we see the planets from the moving earth, however, they behave in a complicated way, with their apparent motions on the celestial sphere reflecting both their own independent motions around the sun and our motion as well.

In 1929 John D. Rockefeller decided it was time to sell shares when even a shoeshine boy offered him a share tip. During the past week The Economist's economics editor has been advised by a taxi driver, a plumber and a hairdresser that "you can't go wrong" investing in housing—the more you own the better. Is this a sign that it is time to get out? At the very least, as house prices around the world climb to ever loftier heights, and more and more people jump on to the buy-to-let ladder, it is time to expose some of the fallacies regularly trotted out by so many self-appointed housing experts. One common error is that house prices must continue to rise because of a limited supply of land. For example, it is argued that "house prices will always rise in London because lots of people want to live here". But this confuses the level of prices with their rate of change. Home prices are bound to be higher in big cities because of land scarcity, but this does not guarantee that urban house prices will keep rising indefinitely—just look at Tokyo's huge price-drops since 1995. And, though it is true that a fixed supply of homes may push up house prices if the population is rising, this would imply a steady rise in prices, not the 20% annual jumps of recent years. A second flawed argument is that low interest rates make buying a home cheaper, and so push up demand and prices. Lower interest rates may have allowed some people, who otherwise could not have afforded a mortgage, to buy a home. However, many borrowers who think mortgages are cheaper are suffering from money illusion. Interest rates are not very low in real, inflation-adjusted terms. Initial interest payments may seem low in relation to income, but because inflation is also low it will not erode the real burden of debt as swiftly as it once did. So in later years mortgage payments will be much larger in real terms. To argue that low nominal interest rates make buying a home cheaper is like arguing that a car loan paid off over four years is cheaper than one repaid over two years. Fallacy number three is a favourite claim of Alan Greenspan, chairman of America's Federal Reserve. This is that price bubbles are less likely in housing than in the stock-market because higher transaction costs discourage speculation. In fact, several studies have shown that both in theory and in practice bubbles are more likely in housing than in shares. A study by the IMF finds that a sharp rise in house prices is far more likely to be followed by a bust than a share-price boom.

In his book The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell argues that "social epidemics" are driven in large part by the actions of a tiny minority of special individuals, often called influentials, who are unusually informed, persuasive, or well-connected. The idea is intuitively compelling, but it doesn"t explain how ideas actually spread. The supposed importance of influentials derives from a plausible-sounding but largely untested theory called the "two-step flow of communication": Information flows from the media to the influentials and from them to everyone else. Marketers have embraced the two-step flow because it suggests that if they can just find and influence the influentials, those selected people will do most of the work for them. The theory also seems to explain the sudden and unexpected popularity of certain looks, brands, or neighborhoods. In many such cases, a cursory search for causes finds that some small group of people was wearing, promoting, or developing whatever it is before anyone else paid attention. Anecdotal evidence of this kind fits nicely with the idea that only certain special people can drive trends. In their recent work, however, some researchers have come up with the finding that influentials have far less impact on social epidemics than is generally supposed. In fact, they don"t seem to be required of all. The researchers" argument stems from a simple observation about social influence: With the exception of a few celebrities like Oprah Winfrey—whose outsize presence is primarily a function of media, not interpersonal, influence—even the most influential members of a population simply don"t interact with that many others. Yet it is precisely these noncelebrity influentials who, according to the two-step-flow theory, are supposed to drive social epidemics, by influencing their friends and colleagues directly. For a social epidemic to occur, however, each person so affected must then influence his or her own acquaintances, who must in turn influence theirs, and so on; and just how many others pay attention to each of these people has little to do with the initial influential. If people in the network just two degrees removed from the initial influential prove resistant, for example the cascade of change won"t propagate very far or affect many people. Building on the basic truth about interpersonal influence, the researchers studied the dynamics of social influence by conducting thousands of computer simulations of populations, manipulating a number of variables relating to people"s ability to influence others and their tendency to be influenced. They found that the principal requirement for what is called "global cascades"—the widespread propagation of influence through networks—is the presence not of a few influentials but, rather, of a critical mass of easily influenced people.

Typically, the death of a language is discussed in the same vein as the disappearance of moas and passenger pigeons. The problem is actually more rampant than species attrition : A hundred years from now, today"s 6,000 languages will likely number only 600. But that"s not necessarily a bad thing. Now, to be clear, as someone who has taught himself languages as a hobby since childhood, I hardly rejoice when a language dies. Languages can put concepts together in ways more fascinatingly different from English than most of us are aware. Yet supposing that we could keep 6,000 languages alive is like supposing that we could stop, say, ice from getting soft under the sun. As people speaking many indigenous languages migrate to cities, inevitably they learn globally dominant languages like English and use them with one another. Their children may use their parents" indigenous languages at home. But they never knew the lifestyle that those languages were born to express, and will be more comfortable in the public language of the world in which they grow up. They will speak mostly the public one to their own children. This is how languages die. Many hope that we can turn back the tide with programs to revive indigenous languages, but the sad fact is that this will almost never be seriously effective. I once taught a class of Native Americans their ancestral language in a summer program. This had the positive effect of helping them feel connected to their ancestors, but there was no possible way they were going to be able to converse in the language. In any case, language death is actually a healthy outcome of diversity. If people speaking different languages truly come together, as the Beatles urged us, then they need to speak a common language. Then the age-old process begins: The first generation is more comfortable in the old language, the second uses it as an at-home language and the third knows only some words and phrases. But cultural diversity persists despite the common language. When people use their distinct language down the generations, It"s usually bad, indicating discrimination or segregation—precisely what "diversity" fans would otherwise consider a scourge. Jews in shtetls spoke Yiddish at home and other languages elsewhere because they lived in Jewish ghettos, not because they delighted in being bilingual. I hope that dying languages can be recorded and described, but their individual deaths are not something to be mourned. Indeed a single "world" language would not be in itself catastrophic.

BeTolerantofYourselfButStrictwithOthers?Writeanessayof160-200wordsbasedonthedrawing.Inyouressay,youshould1)describethedrawingbriefly,2)explainitsintendedmeaning,and3)giveyourcomments.

BSection III Writing/B

She found it difficult to get along with him.

To live in the United States today is to gain an appreciation for Dahrendorfs assertion that social change exists everywhere. Technology, the application of knowledge for practical ends, is a major source of social change. Yet we would do well to remind ourselves that technology is a human creation; it does not exist naturally. A spear or a robot is as much a cultural as a physical object. (46) Until humans use a spear to hunt game or a robot to produce machine parts, neither is much more than a solid mass of matter. For a bird looking for an object on which to rest, a spear or robot serves the purpose equally well. The explosion of the Challenger space shuttle and the Russian nuclear accident at Chernobyl drive home the human quality of technology: they provide cases in which well-planned systems suddenly got into a mess and there was no ready hand to set them right. Since technology is a human creation, we are responsible for what is done with it. Pessimists worry that we will use our technology eventually to blow our world and ourselves to pieces. But they have been saying this for decades, and so far we have managed to survive and even flourish. Whether we will continue to do so in the years ahead remains uncertain. Clearly, the impact of technology on our lives deserves a closer examination. Few technological developments have had a greater impact on our lives than the computer revolution. Scientists and engineers have designed specialized machines that can do the tasks that once only people could do. (47) There are those who assert that the switch to an information-based economy is in the same camp as other great historical milestones, particularly the Industrial Revolution. Yet when we ask why the Industrial Revolution was a revolution, we find that it was not the machines. The primary reason why it was revolutionary is that it led to great social change. (48) It gave rise to mass production and, through mass production, to a society in which wealth was not confined to the few. (49) In somewhat similar fashion, computers promise to revolutionize the structure of American life, particularly as they free the human mind and open new possibilities in knowledge and communication. The Industrial Revolution supplemented and replaced the muscles of humans and replaced some aspects of the mind of human beings by electronic methods. (50) It is the capacity of the computer for solving problems and making decisions that represents its greatest potential and that poses the greatest difficulties in predicting the impact on society.

Companies have embarked on what looks like the beginnings of a re-run of the mergers and acquisitions (M&A) wave that defined the second bubbly half of the 1990s. That period, readers might recall, was characterized by a collective splurge that saw the creation of some of the most indebted companies in history, many of which later went bankrupt or were themselves broken up. Wild bidding for telecoms, internet and media assets, not to mention the madness that was Daimler"s $40 billion motoring takeover in 1998—1999 of Chrysler or the Time-Warner/AOL megs-merger in 2000, helped to give mergers a thoroughly bad name. A consensus emerged that M&A was a great way for investment banks to reap rich fees, and a sure way for ambitious managers to betray investors by trashing the value of their shares. Now M&A is back. Its return is a global phenomenon, but it is perhaps most striking in Europe, where so far this year there has been a stream of deals worth more than $600 billion in total, around 40% higher than in the same period of 2004. The latest effort came this week when France"s Saint-Gobain, a building-materials firm, unveiled the details of its 3.6 billion ($6.5 billion) hostile bid for BPB, a British rival. In the first half of the year, cross-border activity was up threefold over the same period last year. Even France Telecom, which was left almost bankrupt at the end of the last merger wave, recently bought Amena, a Spanish mobile operator. Shareholder"s approval of all these deals raises an interesting question for companies everywhere: are investors right to think that these mergers are more likely to succeed than earlier ones."? There are two answers. The first is that past mergers may have been judged too harshly. The second is that the present rash of European deals does look more rational, but—and the caveat is crucial—only so far. The pattern may not hold. M&A"s poor reputation stems not only from the string of spectacular failures in the 1990s, but also from studies that showed value destruction for acquiring shareholders in 8.0% of deals. But more recent studies by economists have introduced a note of caution. Investors should look at the number of deals that succeed or fail (typically measured by the impact on the share price), rather than (as you might think) weighing them by size. For example, no one doubts that the Daimler-Chrysler merger destroyed value. The combined market value of the two firms is still below that of Daimler alone before the deal. This single deal accounted for half of all German M&A activity by value in 1998 and 1999, and probably dominated people"s thinking about mergers to the same degree. Throw in a few other such monsters and it is no wonder that broad studies have tended to find that mergers are a bad idea. The true picture is more complicated.

"My own feelings went from disbelief to excitement to downright fear", says Carl Hergenrother, 23, an Arizona undergraduate who verified a large asteroid barreling toward Earth with a 230cm telescope atop nearby Kitt Peak. "It was scary, because there was the possibility that we were confirming the demise of some city somewhere, or some state or small country". Well, not quite. Early last week, his celestial interloper whizzed by Earth, missing the planet by 450,620 km—a hairbreadth in astronomical terms. Perhaps half a kilometer across, it was the largest object ever observed to pass that close to Earth. Duncan Steel, an Australian astronomer, has calculated that if the asteroid had struck Earth, it would have hit at some 93460 km/h. The resulting explosion, scientists estimate, would have been in the 3000-to-12000-megaton range. That says astronomer Eugene Shoemaker, a pioneer asteroid and comet hunter, "is like taking all of the U.S. and Soviet nuclear weapons, putting them in one pile and blowing them all up". And what if one of them is found to be on a collision course with Earth? Scientists at the national laboratories at Livermore, California, and Los Alamos, New Mexico, have devised a number of ingenious plans that, given enough warning time, could protect Earth from a threatening NEO. Their defensive weapons of choice include long distance missiles with conventional or, more likely, nuclear warheads that could be used either to nudge an asteroid into a safe orbit or blast it to smithereens. Many people including some astronomers—are understandably nervous about putting a standby squadron of nuclear tipped missiles in place. Hence the latest strategy, which in some cases would obviate the need for a nuclear defense: propelling a fusillade of cannonball-size steel spheres at an approaching asteroid. In a high-velocity encounter with a speeding NEO, explains Gregory Canavan, a senior scientist at Los Alamos, "the kinetic energy of the balls, would change into heat energy and blow the thing apart". Some astronomers oppose any immediate defensive preparations, citing the high costs and low odds of a large object"s striking Earth in the coming decades. But at the very least, Shoemaker contends, NEO detection should be accelerated. "There"s this thing called the "giggle factor" in Congress", he says. "people in Congress and also at the top level in NASA still don"t take it seriously. But we should move ahead. It"s a matter of prudence". The world, however, still seems largely unconcerned with the danger posed by large bodies hurtling in from space, despite the spectacle two years ago of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 riddling the planet Jupiter with mammoth explosions. It remains to be seen whether last week"s record near-miss has changed any minds.

In some countries, societal and familial treatment of the elderly usually reflects a great degree of independence and individualism. Their【C1】______support is often provided by social security or welfare systems, which【C2】______dependence on their family.【C3】______, older people may seek their own friends【C4】______become too emotionally dependent on their children. Senior citizens centers provide a(n) 【C5】______for peer-group association within one's own age groups. There are problems,【C6】______with growing old, in the United States. Glorification of youth and【C7】______to the aged have left many older people alienated and alone. Some families send their older relatives to nursing homes rather than【C8】______them into the homes of the children or grandchildren This【C9】______of the elderly from the young has contributed【C10】______the isolation of an increasingly large segment of society. On the other hand, there are many older people who【C11】______to live in retirement communities【C12】______they have the companionship of other older people and【C13】______of many recreational and social activities close to home. The【C14】______of the elderly can be further understood by distinguishing between nuclear and extended family structures. In the United States the nuclear family, which consists【C15】______the father, the mother, and the children, is considered "the family". The extended family,【C16】______in other cultures, includes grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, nephews, nieces, and children in law. The【C17】______between the nuclear and extended family is important【C18】______it suggests the extent of family ties and obligations. In extended families the children and parents have【C19】______ties and obligations to relatives. It is common in these families to support older family members,【C20】______intensive contact with relatives, and to establish communal housing.

These are dark days for the book business. Borders, a once-huge bookseller, 【C1】______on July 18th that it will close down its remaining stores, 【C2】______nearly 10,700 staff jobless. Publishers will lose a showcase for their books, 【C3】______could mean more laid-off editors. 【C4】______the problem is not the【C5】______: writers will still scribble for scraps. 【C6】______demand: American book publishers reported【C7】______across all platforms last year. It is just that no one is making money. The business needs fresh ideas. 【C8】______Unbound, a British effort to "crowd-fund" books. Visitors to its website can【C9】______money for a book that is only part-written. 【C10】______ enough money is raised, the author can【C11】______to finish it—and the pledgers will get a copy. Having launched in May, the firm announced its first【C12】______on July 18th. Terry Jones, of Monty Python fame, has【C13】______the funds to finish a book of quirky stories. Handsome edited volumes and e-books will follow. "We can make books work at a much lower level of【C14】______," explains John Mitchin-son, who co-founded Unbound. Visitors can【C15】______￡10 for an e-book and a nod in the afterword, or up to ￡250 for such【C16】______as lunch with the author. Over 3,000 pledges have come in, averaging ￡30 apiece Authors see a new way to nurture fans and make money, 【C17】______publishing budgets dwindle. Readers【C18】______enjoy feeling like part of the【C19】______process. Most readers won"t pay ￡8.99 for an acclaimed book, yet some will spend ￡50 on a signed unwritten one. In these digitally isolating times, the personal touch may【C20】______.