Americans are now flying the crowded, cranky skies. Flight delays in January were the worst for that month since 1999. Weather is always the primary cause of delays. Add to that the US Airways Christmas baggage meltdown and Comair"s computer failure, the combination of which left hundreds of thousands of fliers stranded at airports. But airline employees see a deeper reason for both the increase in delays and passenger complaints: a demoralized and frustrated workforce that"s being asked to do more even as it"s getting paid lass. The airlines and unions are quick to praise their workers for rising to the challenge during these very difficult times, as well as for carrying the brunt of the cost cutting. But unease is growing within the ranks. And passengers have noticed. For instance, some of the so-called older carriers now require gate agents to clean the planes as well as check people in. So some passengers have found themselves without a customer-service agent to talk to until just before the plane leaves. Pilots find themselves stuck at the gate because their Crew of flight attendants has already worked as long as the FAA would allow them to. "They"ve cut employees to such a degree that they don"t have enough employees to do the job and serve the customers properly", says one pilot. The major airlines contend that"s not the case at all. Jeff Green, a spokesman for United Airlines, says the major carriers have shrunk significantly since 9/11. While there are far fewer employees, the airline also has far fewer flights. He also notes that United has had its best on-time performance in the past two years and that internal gauges of customer satisfaction are up. "What our employees are going through is not having an effect on our customer service", says Mr. Green. Employees on the front line tell a different story. "They"re just closing the doors and releasing the brake so they can report an on-time departure, when in reality they may still be loading cargo for 30 minutes". Aviation experts contend that if that"s the case, the major airlines may find even more challenges ahead. As their fare structures and prices come closer to those of the successful low-cost carriers, customer service will become even more crucial in determining which airlines succeed. "The way you"re treated on the plane speaks a lot as to whether you"ll fly that airline again", says Helane Becker, an airline analyst. "It"s not the be-all and end-all. It"s not going to put an airline out of business. But it"s not going to help it a lot either if they"re already in trouble".

The rigid higher-education business is about to experience a welcome earthquake. Traditional universities now face a new【C1】______in the form of massive open online courses, or MOOCs. These digitally-delivered courses, which teach students via the【C2】______or tablet apps, have big【C3】______over their established rivals. With low startup costs and powerful economies of scale, online courses【C4】______lower the price of learning and【C5】______access to it, by【C6】______the need for students to be taught at set times or places. The low cost of【C7】______courses—creating a new one costs about $70,000— means they can be sold【C8】______, or even given away. Clayton Christensen of Harvard Business School considers MOOCs a【C9】______"disruptive technology" that will kill off many【C10】______universities. "Fifteen years from now more than half of the universities in America will be in bankruptcy," he【C11】______last year. 【C12】______, traditional universities have a few favorable aspects. As well as teaching, examining and certification, college education creates social capital. Students learn how to【C13】______present themselves, make contacts and roll joints. How can a digital college experience give all of that? The answer may be to【C14】______the two. Anant Agarwal, who runs edX-, one of established MOOCs, proposes an alternative to the【C15】______American four-year degree course. Students could spend an introductory year learning via a MOOC,【C16】______by two years attending university and a final year starting part-time work while【C17】______their studies online. This sort of【C18】______learning might prove more attractive than a four-year online degree. It could also【C19】______those who want to integrate learning with work or child-rearing, freeing them from timetables assembled to【C20】______academics.

"TheHeartoftheMatter,"thejust-releasedreportbytheAmericanAcademyofArtsandSciences(AAAS),deservespraiseforaffirmingtheimportanceofthehumanitiesandsocialsciencestotheprosperityandsecurityofliberaldemocracyinAmerica.Regrettably,however,thereport'sfailuretoaddressthetruenatureofthecrisisfacingliberaleducationmaycausemoreharmthangood.In2010,leadingcongressionalDemocratsandRepublicanssentletterstotheAAASaskingthatitidentifyactionsthatcouldbetakenby"federal,stateandlocalgovernments,universities,foundations,educators,individualbenefactorsandothers"to"maintainnationalexcellenceinhumanitiesandsocialscientificscholarshipandeducation."Inresponse,theAmericanAcademyformedtheCommissionontheHumanitiesandSocialSciences.Amongthecommission's51membersaretop-tier-universitypresidents,scholars,lawyers,judges,andbusinessexecutives,aswellasprominentfiguresfromdiplomacy,filmmaking,musicandjournalism.Thegoalsidentifiedinthereportaregenerallyadmirable.Becauserepresentativegovernmentpresupposesaninformedcitizenry,thereportsupportsfullliteracy;stressesthestudyofhistoryandgovernment,particularlyAmericanhistoryandAmericangovernment;andencouragestheuseofnewdigitaltechnologies.Toencourageinnovationandcompetition,thereportcallsforincreasedinvestmentinresearch,thecraftingofcoherentcurriculathatimprovestudents'abilitytosolveproblemsandcommunicateeffectivelyinthe21stcentury,increasedfundingforteachersandtheencouragementofscholarstobringtheirlearningtobearonthegreatchallengesoftheday.Thereportalsoadvocatesgreaterstudyofforeignlanguages,internationalaffairsandtheexpansionofstudyabroadprograms.Unfortunately,despiteyearsinthemaking,"TheHeartoftheMatter"nevergetstotheheartofthematter:theilliberalnatureofliberaleducationatourleadingcollegesanduniversities.ThecommissionignoresthatforseveraldecadesAmerica'scollegesanduniversitieshaveproducedgraduateswhodon'tknowthecontentandcharacterofliberaleducationandarethusdeprivedofitsbenefits.Sadly,thespiritofinquiryonceathomeoncampushasbeenreplacedbytheuseofthehumanitiesandsocialsciencesasvehiclesforpublicizing"progressive,"orleft-liberalpropaganda.Today,professorsroutinelytreattheprogressiveinterpretationofhistoryandprogressivepublicpolicyasthepropersubjectofstudywhileportrayingconservativeorclassicalliberalideas—suchasfreemarkets,self-reliance—asfallingoutsidetheboundariesofroutine,andsometimeslegitimate,intellectualinvestigation.TheAAASdisplaysgreatenthusiasmforliberaleducation.YetitsreportmaywellsetbackreformbyobscuringthedepthandbreadthofthechallengethatCongressaskedittoilluminate.

Clouds may have silver linings, but even the sunniest of us seldom glimpse them on foot. The marvelous Blur Building that hovers above the lake of Yverdon les Bains in Switzerland provides such an opportunity. It gives anyone who has ever wanted to step into the clouds they watch from the airplane window a chance to realize their dream. Visitors wear waterproof ponchos before setting off along a walkway above the lake that takes them into the foggy atmosphere of the cloud. The experience of physical forms blurring before your eyes as you enter the cloud is both disorientating and liberating. However firmly your feet are planted on the floor, it is hard to escape the sensation of floating. On the upper deck of this spaceship-shaped structure, the Angel Bar, a translucent counter lit in tones of aqueous blue, beckons with a dozen different kinds of mineral water. To enter this sublime building situated in the landscape of the Swiss Alps feels like walking into a poem—it is part of nature but removed from reality, Its architects, Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio of New York, designed it as a pavilion for the Swiss Expo 2002 in the Three Lakes region of Switzerland, an hour"s train ride from Geneva, which features a series of exhibits on the lakes. The Blur Building is easily the most successful. Indeed, you can skip the rest of the Expo—a Swiss kitsch version of Britain"s Millennium Dome—and head straight for the cloud, which is there until the end of October. The architects asked themselves what was the ideal material for building on a lake and decided on water itself." the element of the lake, the snow. the rivers and the mist above it. They wanted to play on and lay bare the notion of a world"s fair pavilion by creating an ethereal ghost of one in which there is nothing to see. The result is a refuge from the surveillance cameras and high-definition images of our everyday world—a particular tease in Switzerland, where clarity and precision are so prized. (Anti- architecture or not, the Blur Building cost a cool $7.5 million.) Out-of-the-box thinking is a trademark of Diller Scofidio. a husband-and-wife team of architecture professors who became the first architects to win a genius grant from the MacArthur Foundation in 1999. Although they have built very little, they are interested in the social experience of architecture, in challenging people"s ideas about buildings. They treat architecture as an analytical art form that combines other disciplines, such as visual art and photography, dance and theatre. To realize its Utopian poetry, the Blur Building has to be technologically state-of-the-art. Water from the lake is pumped through 32,000 fog nozzles positioned throughout the skeleton-like stainless steel structure; so the building does not just look like a cloud on the outside, it feels like a cloud on the inside. And while the 300-foot-wide platform can accommodate up to 400 people, visitors vanish from each other in the mist at about five paces, so you really can wander lonely as a cloud. Wordsworth must be smiling.

No Nobel prize has yet been awarded for the invention of an elixir of life, but the prize itself seems to be one. That, at least, is the conclusion of Matthew Rablen and Andrew Oswald of the University of Warwick, in England【F1】 Dr. Rablen and Dr. Oswald have just published a study on the university's working-paper site which concludes that Nobel science laureates live significantly longer than those of their colleagues who were nominated for a prize, but failed to receive one. The theory they were testing was that status per se rather than the trappings of status, such as wealth, act to prolong life. This idea was first promulgated by Sir Michael Marmot, of University College, London. 【F2】 Sir Michael studied the health of British civil servants and discovered, contrary to his and everyone else's expectations, that those at the top of the hierarchy—whom the stress of the job was expected to have affected adversely—were actually far healthier than the supposedly unstressed officials at the bottom of the heap. Subsequent research has confirmed this result, and suggested it is nothing to do with the larger salaries of those at the top. But Dr. Rablen and Dr. Oswald thought it would be interesting to refine the observation still further, by studying individuals who were all, in a sense, at the top. By comparing people good enough to be considered for a Nobel, they could measure what the status of having one was worth. 【F3】 Comparing winners and also-rans from within the same countries, to avoid yet another source of bias, Dr. Rablen and Dr. Oswald found that the winners lived, on average, two years longer than those who had merely been nominated. Exactly what causes this increased longevity is unclear. It is not the cash, though. The inflation-adjusted value of the prize has fluctuated over the years, so the two researchers were able to see if the purchasing power of the money was correlated with longevity. It was not.【F4】 With the hierarchically ordered individuals studied by Sir Michael and his successors, both medical records and experiments on animals suggest stress hormones are involved. It is, indeed, more stressful to be at the bottom than the top, even if being at the top involves making decisions on the fate of nations.【F5】 The result Dr. Rablen and Dr. Oswald have come up with, though, suggests a positive effect associated with high status, rather than the absence of a negative effect, since unsuccessful nominees never know that they have been nominated.

If open-source software is supposed to be free, how does anyone selling it make any money? It"s not that different from how other software companies make money. You"d think that a software company would make most of its money from, well, selling software. But you"d be wrong. For one thing, companies don"t sell software, strictly speaking; they license it. The profit margin on a software license is nearly 100 percent, which is why Microsoft gushes billions of dollars every quarter. But what"s the value of a license to a customer? A license doesn"t deliver the code, provide the utilities to get a piece of software running, or answer the phone when something inevitably goes wrong. The value of software, in short, doesn"t lie in the software alone. The value is in making sure the soft ware does its job. Just as a traveler should look at the overall price of a vacation package instead of obsessing over the price of the plane ticket or hotel room, a smart tech buyer won"t focus on how much the license costs and ignore the support contract or the maintenance agreement. Open-source is not that different. If you want the software to work, you have to pay to ensure it will work. The open-source companies have refined the software model by selling subscriptions. They roll together support and maintenance and charge an annual fee, which is a healthy model, though not quite as wonderful as Microsoft"s money-raking one. Tellingly, even Microsoft is casting an envious eye at aspects of the open-source business model. The company has been taking halting steps toward a similar subscription scheme for its software sales. Microsoft"s subscription program, known as Soft ware Assurance, provides maintenance and support together with a software license. It lets you up grade to Microsoft"s next version of the software for a predictable sum. But it also contains an implicit threat: If you don"t switch to Software Assurance now, who knows how much Microsoft will charge you when you decide to upgrade? Chief information officers hate this kind of "assurance", since they"re often perfectly happy running older versions of software that are proven and stable. Microsoft, on the other hand, rakes in the software-licensing fees only when customers upgrade. Software Assurance is Microsoft"s attempt to get those same licensing fees but wrap them together with the service and support needed to keep systems running. That"s why Microsoft finds the open-source model so threatening: open-source companies have no vested interest in getting more licensing fees and don"t have to pad their service contracts with that extra cost. In the end, the main difference between open-source and proprietary software companies may be the size of the check you have to write.

[A]Studythefollowingtwopicturescarefullyandwriteanessayofatleast150words.[B]YouressaymustbewrittenneatlyonANSWERSHEET2.(15points)[C]Youressayshouldmeettherequirementsbelow:1.Describethepictures.2.Deducethepurposeofthepainterinthepictures.3.Suggestcounter-measures.

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

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

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

Virtually everything astronomers know about objects outside the solar system is based on the detection of photons-quanta of electromagnetic radiation. Yet there is another form of radiation that permeates the universe: neutrinos. With (as its name implies) no electric charge, and negligible mass, the neutrino interacts with other particles so rarely that a neutrino can cross the entire universe, even traversing substantial aggregations of matter, without being absorbed or even deflected. Neutrinos can thus escape from regions of space where light and other kinds of electromagnetic radiation are blocked by matter. Not a single, validated observation of an extraterrestrial neutrino has so far been produced despite the construction of a string of elaborate observatories, mounted on the earth from Southern India to Utah to South Africa. However, the detection of extraterrestrial neutrinos are of great significance in the study of astronomy. Neutrinos carry with their information about the site and circumstances of their production; therefore, the detection of cosmic neutrinos could provide new information about a wide variety of cosmic phenomena and about the history of the universe. How can scientists detect a particle that interacts so infrequently with other matter? Twenty-five years passed between Pauli"s hypothesis that the neutrino existed and its actual detection; since then virtually all research with neutrinos has been with neutrinos created artificially in large particle accelerators and studied under neutrino microscopes. But a neutrino telescope, capable of detecting cosmic neutrinos, is difficult to construct. No apparatus can detect neutrinos unless it is extremely massive, because great mass is synonymous with huge numbers of nucleons (neutrons and protons), and the more massive the detector, the greater the probability of one of its nucleon"s reacting with a neutrino. In addition, the apparatus must be sufficiently shielded from the interfering effects of other particles. Fortunately, a group of astrophysicists has proposed a means of detecting cosmic neutrinos by harnessing the mass of the ocean. Named DUMAND, for Deep Underwater Muon and Neutrino Detector, the project calls for placing an array of light sensors at a depth of five kilometers under the ocean surface. The detecting medium is the sea water itself: when a neutrino interacts with a particle in an atom of seawater, the result is a cascade of electrically charged particles and a flash of light that can be detected by the sensors. The five kilometers of seawater above the sensors will shield them from the interfering effects of other high-energy particles raining down through the atmosphere. The strongest motivation for the DUMAND project is that it will exploit an important source of information about the universe. The extension of astronomy from visible light to radio waves to x-rays and gamma rays never failed to lead to the discovery of unusual objects such as radio galaxies, quasars, and pulsars. Each of these discoveries came as a surprise. Neutrino astronomy will doubtlessly bring its own share of surprises.

Two months ago you got a job as an editor for the magazine Designs & Fashions. But now you find that the work is not what you expected. You decide to quit. Write a letter to your boss, Mr. Wang, telling him your decision, stating your reason(s), and making an apology. Write your letter with no less than 100 words. Write it neatly on ANSWER SHEET 2. Do not sign your own name at the end of the letter. Use "Li Ming" instead. You do not need to write the address. (10 points)

Studythefollowingtablegivenbelowandwriteanessayofabout200words.Youressayshouldcovertheinformationofthetableandmeetthefollowingrequirement:1)interpretthetable;2)explainthechanges;3)yourcomments.

Come on—Everybody's doing it. That whispered message, half invitation and half forcing, is what most of us think of when we hear the words peer pressure. It usually leads to no good—drinking, drugs and casual sex. But in her new book Join the Club, Tina Rosenberg contends that peer pressure can also be a positive force through what she calls the social cure, in which organizations and officials use the power of group dynamics to help individuals improve their lives and possibly the word. Rosenberg, the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize, offers a host of examples of the social cure in action: In South Carolina, a state-sponsored antismoking program called Rage Against the Haze sets out to make cigarettes uncool. In South Africa, an HIY-prevention initiative known as loveLife recruits young people to promote safe sex among their peers. The idea seems promising, and Rosenberg is a perceptive observer. Her critique of the lameness of many pubic-health campaigns is spot-on: they fail to mobilize peer pressure for healthy habits, and they demonstrate a seriously flawed understanding of psychology. "Dare to be different, please don't smoke!" pleads one billboard campaign aimed at reducing smoking among teenagers—teenagers, who desire nothing more than fitting in. Rosenberg argues convincingly that public-health advocates ought to take a page from advertisers, so skilled at applying peer pressure. But on the general effectiveness of the social cure, Rosenberg is less persuasive. Join the Club is filled with too much irrelevant detail and not enough exploration of the social and biological factors that make peer pressure so powerful. The most glaring flaw of the social cure as it's presented here is that it doesn't work very well for very long. Rage Against the Haze failed once state funding was cut. Evidence that the loveLife program produces lasting changes is limited and mixed. There' s no doubt that our peer groups exert enormous influence on our behavior. An emerging body of research shows that positive health habits—as well as negative ones—spread through networks of friends via social communication. This is a subtle form of peer pressure: we unconsciously imitate the behavior we see every day. Far less certain, however, is how successfully experts and bureaucrats can select our peer groups and steer their activities in virtuous directions. It' s like the teacher who breaks up the troublemakers in the back row by pairing them with better-behaved classmates. The tactic never really works. And that' s the problem with a social cure engineered from the outside: in the real world, as in school, we insist on choosing our own friends.

Title: The Importance of Science and Technology in Modern LifeOutline:1. Science and technology are necessary nowadays.2. Many changes in people"s life caused by the development of science and technology.3. Science and technology also play an important role in our socialist construction.You should write about 160-200 words neatly.

In their idle moments, historians occasionally speculate on how the world would be different if Adolf Hitler had passed the entrance exam to the Art Academy of Vienna, where he applied twice in the early years of the 20th century.【F1】______. On the contrary, the world is better off that a certain British statesman with a gift for inspiringrhetoric never allowed his love of painting to interfere with his career in politics.【F2】______One can"t helpwishing that Hitler had been a better artist—and being grateful that Winston Churchill wasn"t. That, anyway, is one lesson to be drawn from the PBS documentary series, whose first segment airs this week, "Chasing Churchill," a travelogue narrated by the late prime minister"s granddaughter Celia Sandys, of the places he visited and loved. Whether he was headed for the gentle flower-draped hills of Provence or the stark deserts of North Africa, his habit, except during the war, was the same— painting. He was especially partial to romantically rugged scenery by sunset; if the light was better at dawn, says Sandys, he would not have been awake to see it. Churchill bonded over painting with the American general, later president, Dwight Eisenhower. Eisenhower"s tastes ran to plashing streams, run-down barns and birch-studded snowscapes in a style that might be called Greeting Card Pastoral. He was appropriately modest about his works, which he described as "daubs." Churchill, a far more accomplished and ambitious artist, was well aware of his amateur status.【F3】______ Politics is not a profession that ordinarily rewards creativity, which may be why so few politicians are willing to display it; it"s probably no coincidence that these three were among the most conspicuously self-assured world leaders of the 20th century. The American invasion of Iraq in 2003 interrupted plans to release a novel by Saddam Hussein with the forthright title Get Out of Here, Curse You! He had published three others, all critically acclaimed in the Iraqi press and best sellers, presumably because they were required reading in Iraqi schools.【F4】______ Safely out of office in 1995, former president Jimmy Carter published a book of poetry on subjects ranging from childhood reminiscence to geopolitics. The habits of a longtime politician die hard, even when he turns his hand to poetry; the slim volume bears 14 dedications spread over two pages. Poetry is, of course, the most self-revelatory of arts.【F5】______.Hitler,too,was theonly oneof thethree who occasionally populated his drawings with human figures, usually drawn badly and tiny compared with the real estate Admittedly people are harder to draw than mountains and clouds, but perhaps the choice of subject by men who ruled vast territories is no coincidence. Alone in his aerie, the great man surveys his unpopulated domain: the artist as commander in chief. A.The 19th-century British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli wrote 18 novels, some of them fairly racy by the standards of the time. B.Unfortunately, doubt has been cast on his literary credentials in the form of allegations that the books were actually written by a committee of officials from the Ministry of Information and Culture. C.But paintings, too, can reveal something about the hands that made them: Eisenhower"s blandness; Hitler"s bombastic obsession with monumental buildings such as the Vienna and Munich opera houses. D.Presumably, if he"d been allowed to pursue his dream, he would have inflicted on the world only a large number of mediocre watercolors, rather than World War II and the Holocaust. E.Otherwise Britain might have gained a collection of derivative post-impressionist landscapes to clutter the antiques shops of Portobello Road, and lost the war to Nazi Germany. F.Equipped with canvas, oils and camel"s-hair brushes, he parked himself behind an easel and in front of the landscape and commenced to smoke cigars, drink champagne and paint. G. But Hitler for many years regarded himself as an artist by profession. An authorized book of his watercolors referred to him in 1937 as "at once the First Fuehrer and the First Artist of our Reich."

TheLighthouseofKnowledgeWriteanessayof160-200wordsbasedonthedrawing.Inyouressay,youshould1)describethedrawingbriefly,2)explainitsintendedmeaning,and3)giveyourcomments.

In the first years of the 21st century, no area of the American economy has excited more emotion than the property market. First came the excitement of soaring prices. Then spirits came crashing down with the subprime crisis, and now homeowners are agonizing over how far values could fall. An even bigger story , however, may be yet to come. America should be bracing itself for the end of the "generational housing bubble", according to a new study by Dowell Myers and SungHo Ryu of the University of Southern California. As the country"s 78 million baby-boomers retire, the report argues, the housing market will change dramatically. For three decades baby-boomers have helped push prices up: they settled down, and then bought bigger houses and second homes. But as the first of them celebrate their 65th birthdays in 2011, this may change. The old sell more homes than they buy. The ratio of old to working-age people is expected to grow by 67% over the next two decades. Will the younger generation be able to buy all the homes on the market? Young adults make up the bulk of new demand, with most purchasing homes when they reach their early 30s. The flood of elderly people selling their homes, Mr. Myers suggests, may lead to a drawn-out buyers" market. Prices may fall further as younger people, perceiving a downturn, delay purchasing. This phenomenon will unfold differently across the country. Some states will begin the sell-off later than others. In 15 southern and western states—including the retirement magnets of Florida and Arizon-a—the elderly do not become net sellers until their 70s. Expensive states such as California and the cold states of the mid-west and northeast are likely to lose them more quickly. The mismatch between buyers and sellers may be most acute in the rustbelt, where numbers of young people and immigrants are rising slowly, if at all, says William Frey of the Brookings Institution, a think-tank. Of course, there may be other outcomes. Suburbs, which swelled with the baby-boomers, may begin to decline. If the building industry contracts, home prices may remain more stable. Or developers may switch to serving the old, building more compact housing near amenities. Towns may make new efforts to attract immigrants, who already accounted for 40% of the growth in homeownership between 2000 and 2006. Among these unknowns, one thing is more certain: the housing market is about to enter a long period of transition. The youngest baby-boomers will not turn 65 until 2029.

AMERICA"S central bank sent a clear message this week. For the second consecutive meeting, the Federal Open Market Committee, the central bank"s policy-making committee, left short-term interest rates unchanged at 1.75%. But it said that the risks facing the economy had shifted from economic weakness to a balance between weakness and excessive growth. This shift surprised no one. But it has convinced many people that interest rates are set to rise again—and soon. Judging by prices in futures markets, investors are betting that short-term interest rates could start rising as early as May, and will be 1.25 percentage points higher by the end of the year. That may be excessive. Economists at Goldman Sachs, who long argued that the central bank would do nothing this year, now expect short-term rates to go up only 0.75% this year, starting in June. But virtually everyone reckons some Fed tightening is in the offing. The reason? After an unprecedented 11 rate-cuts in 2001, short-term interest rates are abnormally low. As the signs of robust recovery multiply, analysts expect the Fed to take back some of the rate-cuts it used as an "insurance policy" after the September 11th terrorist attack. They think there will be a gradual move from the Fed"s current "accommodative" monetary stance to a more neutral policy. And a neutral policy, many argue, ultimately implies short-term interest rates of around 4%. Logical enough. But higher rates could still be further off, particularly if the recovery proves less robust than many hope. Certainly, recent economic indicators have been extraordinarily strong, unemployment fell for the second consecutive month in February and industrial production rose in both January and February. The manufacturing sector is growing after 18 months of decline. The most optimistic Wall Streeters now expect GDP to have expanded by between 5% and 6% on an annual basis in the first quarter. But one strong quarter does not imply a sustainable recovery. In the short term, the bounce-back is being driven by a dramatic restocking of inventories. But it can be sustained only if corporate investment recovers and consumer spending stays buoyant. With plenty of slack capacity around and many firms stuck with huge debts and lousy profits, it is hard to see where surging investment will come from. And, despite falling unemployment, America"s consumers could disappoint the bulls. These uncertainties alone suggest the central bank will be cautious about raising interest rates. Indeed, given the huge pressure on corporate profits, the Federal Reserve might be happy to see consumer prices rise slightly. In short, while Wall Street frets about when and how much interest rates will go up. The answer may well be not soon and not much.

The Federal Communications Commission is not alone in worrying about television stations that air corporate advertisements masquerading as news stories. In fact, the FCC requires that broadcast stations disclose the corporate backers of "video news releases" or face a maximum fine of $32,500 for each violation. Enough violations and a station could lose its license. The FCC sets out a clear policy: All outside news reporting must be identified, disclosing the source of any video news release aired on a news program. There are occasional declines. A nonprofit consumer watchdog group reported to the FCC that 77 stations broadcast video features about products from 49 companies without pointing out that they were produced by public relations firms representing these corporations. Public relations firms have one goal: to make their video news releases look as if they are legitimate news reports, not propaganda. However, PR-produced video news releases merely are the tip of the iceberg. Ever since newspapers began, special-interest groups have tried to influence the quality and quantity of the news printed. Often, in exchange for advertising revenue, newspapers would print glowing stories of their sponsors and suppress any news that might hurt their heavy advertisers. Those without the ability to inform the press, either through news releases or contacts usually are ignored unless they commit a crime or act in attention-getting ways. For most of the 20th century, women and people of color found it almost impossible to break the special-interest news barriers. Their stories were ignored unless there was a sensational or unique element. Usually, though, items concerning these minorities required an enormous wrongdoing, such as the murder of someone in the white community or some attack on the status quo that threatened the peace and quiet, as well as the productivity, of a neighborhood. There have been splendid exceptions, but not many. One reason the Hispanic news media has been so successful is that it caters to its audience in the same manner all media does. While its bias may seem different, it actually is the same bias all media has: an overwhelming concern to keep its supporters happy. So, while the hue and cry over PR-created video news releases are well and good, they really do not attack the problem of biased news, and appeals to a specific group that shares the same prejudices and concerns about the present and future. All of this is one key reason Americans so often are surprised when the news outlets are forced to report stories that do not please advertisers or consumers. Better to continue, when possible, a steady supply of news about the latest celebrity baby or yet another piece about sex offenders or restaurant health violations.