Everyone must have had at least one personal experience with a computer error by this time. Bank balances are suddenly reported to have jumped from 379 into the millions, appeals for charitable contributions are mailed over and over to people with crazy-sounding names at your address, department stores send the wrong bills, utility companies write that they"re turning everything off, that sort of thing. (46) If you manage to get in touch with someone and complain, you then get instantaneously typed, guilty letters from the same computer, saying, "Our computer was in error, and an adjustment is being made in your account". These are supposed to be the sheerest, blindest accidents. Mistakes are not believed to be part of the normal behavior of a good machine. If things go wrong, it must be a personal, human error, the result of fingering, tampering, a button getting stuck, someone hitting the wrong key. The computer, at its normal best, is infallible. I wonder whether this can be true. (47) After all, the whole point of computers is that they represent an extension of the human brain, vastly improved upon but nonetheless human, superhuman maybe. (48) A good computer can think clearly and quickly enough to beat you at chess, and some of them have even been programmed to write obscure verse. They can do anything we can do, and more besides. It is not yet known whether a computer has its own consciousness, and it would be hard to find out about this. (49) When you walk into one of those great halls now built for the huge machines, and stand listening, it is easy to imagine that the faint, distant noises are the sound of thinking. And the turning of the spools gives them the look of wild creatures rolling their eyes in the effort to concentrate, choking with information. But real thinking, and dreaming, are other matters. On the other hand, the evidences of something like an unconscious, equivalent to ours, are all around, in every mail. (50) As extensions of the human brain, they have been constructed with the same property of error, spontaneous, uncontrolled, and rich in possibilities. Mistakes are at the very base of human thought, embedded there, feeding the structure like root nodules. If we were not provided with the art of being wrong, we could never get anything useful done. We think our way along by choosing between right and wrong alternatives, and the wrong choices have to be made as frequently as the right ones. We get along in life this way. We are built to make mistakes, coded for error.

There is no place in the country that will be more affected by the Supreme Court battle over President Obama's plan to shield millions of undocumented immigrants from deportation than sprawling Los Angeles County. There are an estimated 1 million undocumented people here, about 400,000 of whom could be eligible for the protected status that Obama says would bring them "out of the shadows." County officials plan an aggressive programto sign them up should the justices give the green light. "I'm looking at the return the county gets," said Hilda L. Solis, Obama's former labor secretary who is now chair of the powerful Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors. "Do I want them to pay taxes? Absolutely. Do I want them to be established, with some form of identification? Yes. I think we're all better off, we're safer." But the state with the second-largest concentration — Texas — is leading the fight against what it and 25 other states say wouldsaddle them with the cost of providing benefits for millions of people newly eligible for work permits and government programs. The crux of the states' legal argument is that the program, regardless of its merits, represents an unlawful power grab by the president." It is not whether this is the right solution or not," said Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, whose efforts have led lower courts to block the plan from being implemented. "It's whether the president is acting outside his constitutional authority." As Obama took immigration leniency plan to the Supreme Court, it is true that justices will concentrate on whether Obama ignored legal procedures in November 2014 when he announced the immigration changes that Congress refused to enact. And the court also will consider whether Texas and the other states have the legal standing to interfere in immigration policy that the White House insists belongs to the executive. But the societal impact of immigration is debated in the court filings. And there is a stark partisan and ideological divide in the case that Daniel Stein, president of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) , calls "Donald Trump huge." It is impossible to ignore the political backdrop as well. The case arrives during a presidential election year in which Trump promises a wall along the border to keep immigrants out and Sen. Ted Cruz is adamant that he would immediately reverse Obama's plans should the court uphold them. On the Democratic side, both candidates have taken positions on immigration to the left of the president.

There is a popular belief among parents that schools are no longer interested in spelling. No school I have taught in has ever ignored spelling or considered it unimportant as a basic skill. There are, however, vastly different ideas about how to teach it, or how much priority it must be given over general language development and writing ability. The problem is how to encourage a child to express himself freely and confidently in writing without holding him back with the complexities of spelling? If spelling became the only focal point of his teacher"s interest, clearly a bright child will be likely to "play safe". He will tend to write only words within his spelling range, choosing to avoid adventurous language. That"s teachers often en courage the early use of dictionaries and pay attention to content rather than technical ability. I was once shocked to read on the bottom of a sensitive piece of writing about a personal experience: "This work is terrible! There are far too many spelling errors and technical abilities in writing". But it was also a sad reflection on the teacher who had such feelings. The teacher was not wrong to draw attention to the errors, but if his priorities had centered on the child"s ideas, an expression of his disappointment with the presentation would have given the pupil more motivation(动力) to seek improvement.

"Innovation" died in 2008, killed off by overuse, misuse, narrowness, incrementalism and failure to evolve. It was done in by CEOs, consultants, marketeers, advertisers and business journalists who degraded and devalued the idea by conflating it with change, technology, design, globalization, trendiness, and anything "new. " It was done in by an obsession with measurement, metrics and math and a demand for predictability in an unpredictable world. (46) The concept was also done in, strangely enough, by a male-dominated economic leadership that rejected the extraordinary progress in "uncertainty planning and strategy" being done at key schools of design that could have given new life to "innovation". To them, "design" is something their wives do with curtains, not a methodology or philosophy to deal with life in constant beta—life in 2009. In the end, "Innovation" proved to be weak as both a tactic and strategy in the face of economic and social turmoil. It couldn"t get us safely through the troubles of 08 (indeed, financial innovation was to large degree responsible for the economic trainwreck). Most importantly, "innovation" cannot guide us into an uncertain and tumultuous future. (47) It is too narrow to generate radical alternative options and build risk-taking frontier skills needed to remake and restructure our lives, our economies and our countries. We need a deeper, more robust concept. "Transformation" captures the key changes already underway and can help guide us into the future. (48) It implies that our lives will increasingly be organized around digital platforms and networks that will replace large impressive buildings and big organizations. Global networks of trusted relationships working within ecosystems/platforms will make up our socio-economic and political worlds. It is already underway. The concept of "Transformation" takes these changes much further. (49) Most importantly, "Transformation" accepts the notion that we are in a post-consumer society, defined by two groups of economic players: manufacturers and consumers. "Transformation" deals with a new Creativity Society, in which we are all both producers and consumers of value. Look around and you can see Gen Y in particular creating practically from birth, mashing music, designing Facebook or MySpace pages, doing videos and podcasts-creating value. Frank Comes at McKinsey, puts it this way: In the past, economic value was generated by transaction. Increasingly, economic value is generated through interactions. The key is monetizing those interactions. That"s the heart of an economy built on social media. (50) "Transformation" takes the best of "design thinking" and "innovation" and integrates them into a strategic guide for the unknowable and uncertain years ahead. [420 words]

export and import

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. In any case, omnipresent chipping is years away. Undaunted, RFID chipmaker VeriChip is looking for big banks and credit-card firms interested in offering RFID-based e-wallets. If successful, they would truly give shouldering up to the bar for a drink a whole new meaning.B. As the Baja Beach Club trial shows, RFID can tag people as well as goods. Some hospitals ate using RFID bracelets on newborn babies and elderly patients with dementia. Children in one Japanese school wave RFID cards to alert their parents that they"ve arrived.C. For some retailers, RFID is a way to provide a more seamless shopping experience. British re tail giant Marks & Spencer is currently tagging men"s suits in several London stores as part of a test. When you buy a size 42, the stockroom—alerted by the tag—sends up another. In Prada"s New York store, if you hold a dress near a monitor, you"ll see models wearing it on a runway.D. Antoine Hazelaar has a chip on his shoulder—or rather just beneath the skin of his left arm. It"s a piece of silicon the size of a grain of rice, and it emits wireless signals that are picked up by scanners nearby. Ever since the 34-year-old Web-site producer had the chip implanted in his arm, he"s enjoyed VIP status at Barcelona"s Baja Beach Club. Instead of queuing up behind velvet ropes, Hazelaar allows the guard to scan his arm, and strolls right in. If he wants a drink, the bartender waves an electronic wand that deducts from the 100 Euro tab on Hazelaar"s chip.E. Such science-fictional clubbing is made possible by Radio Frequency Identification, or RFID, technology—tiny digital chips that broadcast wireless signals. RFID tags are cheap and small enough to be disposable, and they"re getting cheaper and smaller by the day. Retail stores are beginning to use them as glorified bar codes, putting them on cases of bananas or Coke so they can keep track of their inventory. The technology has the potential to transform our relationship to the objects around us. The prospect is exciting, but it raises troubling questions about the invasion of privacy.F. For now, businesses see it as a way to save money and improve service. Big groceries, department stores and other retailers around the world are asking suppliers to put RFID tags on shipments of goods. Staff will know exactly where items are and when they came in. Customers will never have to leave the store empty-handed because items will never run out—wireless signals will alert staffers to dwindling supplies of soap. What"s more, RFID will help combat theft or forging, problems that cost businesses $500 billion a year.G. Privacy implications remain a big obstacle. The fear is that companies or governments could use the tags as a means of monitoring. Proponents counter that RFID tags transmit for only a few meters, and the data can be deactivated once a product leaves the store. Nevertheless, CASP LAN and other watchdog groups have won concessions from retailers. Wal-Mart and Benetton will only use the tags on pallets, not on individual items, and Metro has gotten rid of RFID-enabled loyalty cards.Order: D is the first paragraph and A is the last.

You are going to read a list of headings and a text about periodicals in the world. Choose the most suitable heading from the list or each numbered paragraph. The first and last paragraphs of the text are not numbered. There is one extra heading which you do not need to use.A. Periodicals in initial stageB. The function of periodicalsC. Newspapers and other periodicals onlineD. The introduction of reviewsE. Features of periodicalsF. The emergence of modern periodicals Periodicals refer to publications released on a regular basis that may include news, feature articles, poems, fictional stories, or other types of writing. Many periodicals also include photographs and drawings. Periodicals that are aimed at a general audience, such as weekly news roundups or monthly special-interest publications, are also called magazines. Those with a more narrow audience, such as publications of scholarly organizations, can be termed journals. While newspapers are periodicals, the term generally has come to refer to publications other than dailies. (41)______. Historically, most periodicals have differed from newspapers in their format, publication schedule, and content. Most newspapers deal with the news of the day and are issued on pulp paper with relatively large, unbound pages. By contrast, other types of periodicals focus on more specialized material, and when they deal with news they tend to do so in the form of summaries or commentaries. For centuries these periodicals generally have been printed on finer paper than newspapers, with smaller bound pages, and issued at intervals longer than a day (weekly, every two weeks, monthly, quarterly, or even annually). (42)______. In the 1990s, with the growth of the Internet, publishers began to release newspapers and other periodicals online. This development blurred the line between the two forms because the general format and design of online newspapers and periodicals are similar, and the publication schedules of both forms became more flexible. For example, many newspaper publishers update their online versions throughout the day, and some online periodicals do the same. Despite these technological changes, the two forms" differing emphasis in choice of content remains a distinguishing factor. (43)______. The earliest periodicals include the German Erbauliche Monaths-Unterredungen (Edifying Monthly Discussions, 1663-1668), the French Journal des Sayahs (1665; subsequently titled Journal des Savants), and the English Philosophical Transactions (1665) of the Royal Society of London. These were essentially collections of summaries (later essays) on developments in art, literature, philosophy, and science. (44)______. The first periodical of the modern general type, devoted to a miscellany of reading entertainment, was the English publication The Gentleman"s Magazine (1731-1907)—the first instance of the use of the word magazine to denote a forum for entertaining reading. It contained reports of political debates, essays, stories, and poems and was widely influential. It served as the model for the first true American periodicals, General Magazine and Historical Chronicle and American Magazine. Both of these periodicals first appeared in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in January 1741 as rival publications; neither lasted more than a few months, however. The former was founded by the American statesman and scientist Benjamin Franklin and the latter by the American printer Andrew Bradford. (45)______. Monthly or quarterly reviews, usually partisan in polities, and with articles contributed by eminent authors and politicians, were introduced in Britain early in the 19th century. Of these, two became outstanding. The Edinburgh Review (1802-1929), founded in support of the Whig Party, was one of the most influential critical journals of its day and numbered among its contributors the English writers Sir Walter Scott, Thomas Carlyle, Matthew Arnold, and William Hazlitt. Blackwood"s Edinburgh Magazine (1817-1981), a Tory publication, was early in its career noted for its serialization of Scottish fiction and its satirical commentaries on Scottish affairs. One of the most important serious periodicals in the United States in the 19th century was the North American Review (1815-1940; revived in 1964). Editors during its long and illustrious career included such literary figures as James Russell Lowell, Charles Eliot Norton, and Henry Adams; contributors included Henry James, H. G. Wells, and Mark Twain. Among the European equivalents of such periodicals were the French Revue des Deux Mondes and the German Literarisches Wochenblatt.

Television, it is often said, keeps one informed about current events and allows one to follow the latest developments in science and politics.

BPart B/B

Suppose you are a college teacher in Chino, Write a letter of recommendation to support Chen Lili, one of your diligent students to study abroad You should write about 100 words. Do not sign your own name at the end of the letter. Use "Li Ming" instead. You do not need to write the address

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. Productivity growth juddered to a halt in 2000 as the economy turned sharply down. The recession in 2001 was the mildest on record, but the slowdown was sudden and sharp after the rapid economic expansion of the late 1990s. What has got Mr. Greenspan and his colleagues scratching their heads is the rapid pick up in productivity in the last 12 months.B. Trying to understand why the numbers are so big could help determine whether productivity will continue to grow at this pace. Will the miracle be sustained? Or is it a mirage in which the gains will be reversed?C. As the Fed chairman pointed out, this might not be all that unexpected if the economy had been recovering rapidly. Economies often grow quite quickly after recessions, and output per hour also grows rapidly. But after a brief spurt in the first quarter of this year, America"s economy has been expanding sluggishly—so sluggishly that some economists still worry about a double-dip recession.D. The argument will not be settled until, as Mr. Greenspan put it, "the books are closed". It is Simply too soon to be sure which gains were real and sustainable and which were transitory or illusory. The government figures for productivity in the late 1990s have already been revised down. They now look less impressive than they did at first, but they still show a clear improvement compared with earlier American productivity growth rates—more than 2.5% a year since 1995, com pared with about 1.5% in the preceding 20 years.E. Mr. Greenspan, as most economists know, has more than an academic interest in the answer. In recent years, he has staked a good deal of his reputation on the existence of the productivity miracle which appeared to accompany the high-tech boom of the late 1990s. The pricking of the dotcom bubble in early 2000 led many to conclude that the impressive productivity gains in the American economy from 1995 would turn out to be temporary, even if the figures weren"t subsequently revised downwards. As a consequence, Mr. Greenspan"s credibility would be tarnished. Some say it already is: that he is just another economist who believed all the hype.F. So, why is productivity growing so fast? There are several possible explanations, none of them mutually exclusive. One is simply the drive to cut costs as companies struggle to make a profit; getting rid of the "fat" acquired during the boom years will also contribute to that. Some of the improvement might be a re-allocation of resources in the economy. Some businesses have been buying up computers and other high-tech equipment from failed dotcom companies who probably didn"t use such resources very efficiently. Then, too, hard-pressed businesses try to do more with the same staff, rather than taking on extra workers. And a low inflation environment makes it more difficult for companies to put up prices and more important for them to improve productivity as far as they can.G. It is not often that Alan Greenspan admits to being puzzled by economic data. Yet on October 23rd, Mr. Greens pan confessed that he and the Fed were struggling to account for the recent surge in American productivity. He was talking about the spectacular growth in productivity-output per hour worked-over the past year. It was likely, he said, to be one of the biggest increases in the past 30 years.Order: G is the first paragraph and F is the last.

A Thank-you Speech Write a thank-you speech of about 100 words based on the following situation: You have received an award which means much to you. Now write a thank-you speech which you should deliver at the ceremony.

Scattered around the globe are more than 100 small regions of isolated volcanic activity known to geologists as hot spots. Unlike most of the world"s volcanoes, they are not always found at the boundaries of the great drifting plates that make up the earth"s surface; on the contrary, many of them lie deep in the interior of a plate. Most of the hot spots move only slowly, and in some cases the movement of the plates past them has left trails of dead volcanoes. The hot spots and their volcanic trails are milestones that mark the passage of the plates. That the plates are moving is not beyond dispute. Africa and South America, for example, are moving away from earth other as new material is injected into the sea floor between them. The complementary coastlines and certain geological features that seem to span the ocean are reminders of where the two continents were once joined. The relative motion of the plates carrying these continents has been constructed in detail, but the motion of one plate with respect to another cannot readily be translated into motion with respect to the earth"s interior. It is not possible to determine whether both continents are moving in opposite directions or whether one continent is stationary and the other is drifting away from it. Hot spots, anchored in the deeper layers of the earth, provide the measuring instruments needed to resolve the question. From an analysis of the hot spot population it appears that the African plate is stationary and that it has not moved during the past 30 million years. The significance of hot spots is not confined to their role as a frame of reference. It now appears that they also have an important influence on the geophysical processes that propel the plates across the globe. When a continental plate comes to rest over a hot spot, the material rising from deeper layer creates a broad dome. As the dome grows, it develops seed fissures(cracks); in at least a few cases the continent may break entirely along some of these fissures, so that the hot spot initiates the formation of a new ocean. Thus just as earlier theories have explained the mobility of the continents, so hot spots may explain their mutability(inconstancy).

Studythefollowingsetofpicturescarefullyandwriteanessayinwhichyoushould1)describethesetofpictures,2)interpretitsmeaning,and3)pointoutitsimplicationsinourlife.Youshouldwriteabout160—200wordsneatly.

It is often observed that the aged spend much time thinking and talking about their past lives, (1)_____ about the future. These reminiscences are not simply random or trivial memories, (2)_____ is their purpose merely to make conversation. The old person"s recollections of the past help to (3)_____ an identity that is becoming increasingly fragile: (4)_____ any role that brings respect or any goal that might provide (5)_____ to the future, the individual mentions their past as a reminder to listeners, that here was a life (6)_____ living. (7)_____, the memories form part of a continuing life (8)_____, in which the old person (9)_____ the events and experiences of the years gone by and (10)_____ on the overall meaning of his or her own almost completed life. As the life cycle (11)_____ to its close, the aged must also learn to accept the reality of their own impending death. (12)_____ this task is made difficult by the fact that death is almost a (13)_____ subject in the United States. The mere discussion of death is often regarded as (14)_____ As adults many of us find the topic frightening and are (15)_____ to think about it—and certainly not to talk about it (16)_____ the presence of someone who is dying. Death has achieved this taboo (17)_____ only in the modern industrial societies. There seems to be an important reason for our reluctance to (18)_____ the idea of death. It is the very fact that death remains (19)_____ our control; it is almost the only one of the natural processes (20)_____ is so.

Enjoy Leisure

I have vet to hear that report.

In the following text, some sentences have been removed. Choose the most suitable one from the list A—G to fit into each of the numbered blank. There are two extra choices, which do not fit in any of the gaps. This is the story of a sturdy-American symbol which has now spread throughout most of the world. The symbol is not the dollar. It is not even Coca-Cola. It is a simple pair of pants called blue jeans, and what the pants symbolize is what Alexis de Tocqueville called "a manly and legitimate passion for equality..." Blue jeans are favored equally by bureaucrats and cowboys; bankers and deadbeats; fashion designers and beer drinkers. They draw no distinctions and recognize no classes; they are merely American. (41)______. This ubiquitous American symbol was the invention of a Bavaraian-born Jew. His name was Levi Strauss. He was born in Bad Ocheim, Germany, in 1829, and during the European political turmoil of 1848 decided to take his chances in New York, to which his two brothers already had emigrated. Upon arrival, Levi soon found that his two brothers had exaggerated their tales of an easy life in the land of the main chance. He found them pushing needles, thread, pots, pans, ribbons, yarn, scissors and buttons to housewives. (42)______. It was the wrong kind of canvas for that purpose, but while talking with a miner down from the mother lode, he learned that pants-sturdy pants that would stand up to the rigors of the digging—were almost impossible to find. Opportunity beckoned on the spot, Strauss measured the man"s girth and inseam with a piece of string and, for six dollars in gold dust, had [the canvas] tailored into a pair of stiff but rugged pants. (43)______. When Strauss ran out of canvas, he wrote his two brothers to send more. He received instead a tough, brown cotton cloth made in Nimes, France. Almost from the first, Strauss had his cloth dyed the distinctive indigo that gave blue jeans their name, but it was not until the 1870s that he added the copper rivets which have long since become a company trademark. (44)______. For three decades thereafter the business remained profitable though small, with sales largely confined to the working people of the West-cowboys, lumberjacks, railroad workers, and the like. Levi"s jeans were first introduced to the East, apparently, during the dude-ranch craze of the 1930s, when vacationing Easterners returned and spread the word about the wonderful pants with rivets. (45)______. The pants have become a tradition, and along the way have acquired a history of their own so much so that the company has opened a museum in San Francisco. For example, there is the particularly terrifying story of the careless construction worker who dangled fifty two stories above the street until rescued, his sole support the Levi"s belt loop through which his rope was hooked.A. The miner was delighted with the result, word got around about "those pants of Levi"s", and Strauss was in business. The company has been in business very since.B. As a kind of joke, Davis took the pants to a blacksmith and had the pockets riveted; once again, the idea worked so well that word got around; in 1873 Strauss appropriated and patented the gimmick—and hired Davis as a regional manager.C. By this time, Strauss had taken both his brothers and two brothers-in-law into the company and was ready for his third San Francisco store. Over the ensuing years the company prospered locally, and by the time of his death in 1902, Strauss had become a man of prominence in California.D. For two years he was a lowly peddler, hauling some 180 pounds of sundries door-to-door to eke out a marginal living. When a married sister in San Francisco offered to pay his way West in 1850, he jumped at the opportunity, taking with him bolts of canvas he hoped to sell for tenting.E. Another boost came in World War Ⅱ, when blue jeans were declared an essential commodity and were sold only to people engaged in defense work. From a company with fifteen salespeople, two plants, and almost no business east of the Mississippi in 1946, the organization grew in thirty years to include a sales force of more than twenty-two thousand, with plants and offices in thirty-five countries.F. They adapt themselves to any sort of idiosyncratic use; women slit them at the inseams and convert them into long skirts, men chop them off above the knees and turn them into something to be worn while challenging the surf. Decorations and ornamentations abound.G. Yet they are sought after almost everywhere in the world-including Russia, where authorities recently broke up a teen-aged gang that was selling them on the black market for two hundred dollars a pair.

In the following article, some sentences have been removed. Choose the most suitable one from the list A—G to fit into each of the numbered blank. There are two extra choices, which do not fit in any of the gaps. (10 points) Long before Man lived on the Earth, there were fishes, reptiles, birds, insects, and some mammals. Although some of these animals were ancestors of kinds living today, others are now extinct, that is, they have no descendants alive now. (41)______. Very occasionally the rocks show impression of skin, so that, apart from color, we can build up a reasonably accurate picture of an animal that died millions of years ago. That kind of rock in which the remains are found tells us much about the nature of the original land, often of the plants that grew on it, and even of its climate. (42)______. Nearly all of the fossils that we know were preserved in rocks formed by water action, and most of these are of animals that lived in or near water. Thus it follows that there must be many kinds of mammals, birds, and insects of which we know nothing. (43)______. There were also crablike creatures, whose bodies were covered, with a horny substance. The body segments each had two pairs of legs, one pair for walking on the sandy bottom, the other for swimming. The head was a kind of shield with a pair of compound eyes, often with thousands of lenses. They were usually an inch or two long but some were 2 feet. (44)______. Of these, the ammonites are very interesting and important. They have a shell composed of many chambers, each representing a temporary home of the animal. As the young grew larger it grew a new chamber and sealed off the previous one. Thousands of these can be seen in the rocks on the Dorset Coast. (45)______. About 75 million years ago the Age of Reptiles was over and most of the groups died out. The mammals quickly developed, and we can trace the evolution of many familiar animals such as the elephant and horse. Many of the later mammals though now extinct, were known to primitive man and were featured by him in cave paintings and on bone carvings.A. The shellfish have a long history in the rock and many different kinds are knownB. Nevertheless, we know a great deal about many of them because their bones and shells have been preserved in the rocks as fossils. From them we can tell their size and shape, how they walked, the kind of food they ate.C. The first animals with true backbones were the fishes, first known in the rocks of 375 million years ago. About 300 million years ago the amphibians, the animals able to live both on land and in water, appeared. They were giant, sometimes 8 feet long, and many of them lived in the swampy pools in which our coal seam, or layer, or formed. The amphibians gave rise to the reptiles and for nearly 150 million years these were the principal forms of life on land, in the sea, and in the air.D. The best index fossils tend to be marine creature. There animals evolved rapidly and spread over large over large areas of the world.E. The earliest animals whose remains have been found were all very simple kinds and lived in the sea. Later forma are more complex, and among these are the sea-lilies, relations of the star-fishes, which had long arms and were attached by a long stalk to the sea bed, or to rocks.F. When an animal dies, the body, its bones, or shell, may often be carried away by streams into lakes or the sea and there get covered up by mud. If the animal lived in the sea its body would probably sink and be covered with mud. More and more mud would fall upon it until the bones or shell become embedded and preserved.G. Many factors can influence how fossils are preserved in rocks. Remains of an organism may be replaced by minerals, dissolved by an acidic solution to leave only their impression, or simply reduced to a more stable form.

Halfway through "The Rebel Sell", the authors pause to make fun of "free-range" chicken. Paying over the odds to ensure that dinner was not in a previous life, confined to tiny cages is all well and good. But "a free-range chicken is about as plausible as a sun-loving earthworm": given a choice, chickens prefer to curl up in a nice dark comer of the barn. Only about 15% of "free-range" chickens actually use the space available to them. This is just one case in which Joseph Heath, who teaches philosophy at the University of Toronto, and Andrew Potter, a journalist and researcher based in Montreal, find fault with well-meaning but, in their view, ultimately naive consumers who hope to distance themselves from consumerism by buying their shoes from Mother Jones magazine instead of Nike. Mr. Heath and Mr. Potter argue that "the counterculture", in all its attempts to be subversive, has done nothing more than create new segments of the market, and thus ends up feeding the very monster of consumerism and conformity it hopes to destroy. In the process, they cover Marx, Freud, the experiments on obedience of Stanley Milgram, the films" Pleasantville", "The Matrix" and "American Beauty", 15th-century table manners, Norman Mailer, the Unabomber, real-estate prices in central Toronto (more than once), the voluntary-simplicity movement and the world"s funniest joke. Why range so widely? The authors" beef is with a very small group: left-wing activists who eschew smaller, potentially useful campaigns in favor of grand statements about the hopelessness of consumer culture and the dangers of" selling out". Instead of encouraging useful activities, such as pushing for new legislation, would-be leftists are left to participate in unstructured, pointless demonstrations against" globalization", or buy fair-trade coffee and free-range chicken, which only substitutes snobbery for activism. Two authors of books that railed against brands, Naomi Klein ("No Logo") and Alissa Quart ("Branded"), come in for special derision for diagnosing the problems of consumerism but refusing to offer practical solutions. Anticipating criticism, perhaps, Messrs Heath and Potter make sure to put forth a few of their own solutions, such as the 35-hour working week and school uniforms (to keep teenagers from competing with each other to wear ever-more-expensive clothes). Increasing consumption, they argue throughout, is not imposed upon stupid workers by overbearing companies, but arises as a result of a cultural "arms race": each person buys more to keep his standard of living high relative to his neighbors", Imposing some restrictions, such as a shorter working week, might not stop the arms race, but it would at least curb its most offensive excesses. (This assumes one finds excess consumption offensive; even the authors do not seem entirely sure). But on the way to such modest suggestions, the authors want to criticize every aspect of the counterculture, from its disdain for homogenization, franchises and brands to its political offshoots. As a result, the book wanders: chapters on uniforms and on the search for" cool" could have been cut. Moreover, the authors make the mistake of assuming that the consumers they sympathize with—the ones who buy brands and live in tract houses—know enough to separate themselves from their purchases, whereas the free-trade-coffee buyers swallow the brand messages whole, as it were. Still, it would be a shame if the book"s ramblings kept it from getting read. When it focuses on explaining how the counterculture grew out of post-World War II critiques of modern society, "The Rebel Sell" is a lively read, with enough humor to keep the more theoretical stretches of its argument interesting. At the very least, it puts its finger on a trend: there will be plenty of future critics of capitalism lining up for their free-range chicken.