John Lee likes to tinker with vehicles: his four-wheel-drive resembles a tractor more than a car. "It's watertight," he smiles. For the past week he has been driving down sodden lanes in Surrey, southwest of London, transporting people and medicines. Flooding is a misery, but at least it provides an opportunity to show off a set of wheels. Much of southern England is now sodden, and parts of the Thames Valley and Somerset are simply underwater. In Shepperton, a town in Surrey, the village green used for the summer fete is best reached by canoe. In Devon a sea wall has collapsed, shutting down a vital railway link to the south-west. As The Economist went to press, 16 severe flood warnings had been issued by the Environment Agency, a much-criticised quango that oversees flood defence. Floods are like snowflakes, says Andrew McKenzie of the British Geological Survey, a research body: none is quite like another. Rivers can overflow, as in Somerset. Groundwater can flood, as in the Thames Valley. Tides can surge, inundating villages, as they have in Lincolnshire. Rain can pound down too quickly to be absorbed. None of these is rare on its own. But over the past two months Britain has been subject to the whole lot, often in combination, over a large area. Last month was the wettest January in southern England since 1910. The rain was unusually prolonged, falling on 23 days out of 31, a four-decade record. Rain continues to fall on this sodden ground. As a result, the Thames river has been running high for longer than at any point since records began in 1883. The calamitous floods that struck England in 1947, by contrast, were over much more quickly. Fingers have been pointed at the government, for squeezing the Environment Agency's budget. According to the Committee on Climate Change, an independent body, government funding for flood management between 2011 and 2015 will be less than in the previous four years, even in cash terms. The maintenance budget was cut particularly savagely, says Iain Sturdy of the Somerset drainage board.

More and more people are starting to work from home, re-assessing their "work-life balance" and capitalising on what industry calls "remote working". A recent survey of British companies showed that eight out of ten businesses have now agreed new working arrangements for their personnel. The object of the exercise was to improve the work-life balance of employees and encourage greater levels of efficiency. During 2003/2004, some 900,000 requests to work flexibly were made under a new Gov-eminent scheme and 800,000 of the applications were granted. Furthermore, seven out of ten businesses said that they also would be prepared to consider flexible working requests from other staff who did not qualify under the Government scheme. One of the new technological developments that makes remote working possible is the Asymmetrical Digital Subscriber Line (ADSL), broadband that can carry both voice and data at high-speed. Re mote workers can connect to their company"s Virtual Private Network either through Digital Sub scriber Line (DSL) internet, which is permanently connected, or through a Remote Access Service (RAS), which involves having to dial in each time. "People started thinking about remote working back in the Eighties but the technology was not available to consider it a possibility," says Meyrick Vevers, Commercial Director of Telewest Broadband, one of UK"s communication and media groups. "However, now with the increased availability and use of DSL to home users, remote working is definitely on the increase. Of course, security is very important and IT directors are understandably cautious. But they are now beginning to feel more comfortable about allowing their staff a higher level of access from home. Telewest Business"s experience in putting together product solutions is based on the company"s focus on understanding their customers" needs. Because customers" needs are diverse and Telewest Business"s possible solutions are wide-ranging, the company invites businesses seeking further information to visit their web site or call direct. Call centre workers, mobile staff, such as sales executives and local authority social workers or parents at home, are among those for whom remote working appears to be increasingly attractive. "People in industry in the UK have some of the longest working hours in the world," says Vevers. "Doing those hours solely in the office is more disruptive to the personal life of the individual than having the flexibility to work from home." "Remote working is all about personal choice and giving people more flexibility that suits their personal lives. At Telewest Business, we aim to try and help play a part in enabling companies to give their employees that flexibility."

You are going to read a text about the approaches to creating championship, followed by a list of examples. Choose the best example. (41) What do you need in order to be a record breaker? Sports experts agree that the single most important factor in creating a champion is genetic make-up, the possession of genes that impart an innate ability to stride leap, burn energy efficiently or suck lots of oxygen from the air. "The great athletes are genuine statistical outliers...physiological freaks," says sports scientist Craig Sharp of Brunel University in Middlesex, UK. (42) How will we find or create the next generation of champion athletes? The most likely way is to widen our search to find someone with a genetic makeup that allows him or her to surpass other athletes. When East African runners began competing internationally, for example, it became apparent that their light frame make them uniquely economical in their use of energy. (43) Have we reached the limit of human performance? No, but records are being broken by ever narrower margins. When statisticians plot how the best performance in a given event changes over time, they see the graph leveling off. And the shorter the event, the smaller are the slivers of time being shaved off. So al though Paula Radcliffe has sliced whole seconds off the marathon world record, sprinters are improving by mere hundredths of a second. (44) Will we ever reach an absolute limit? Theoretically, an absolute time to how far or fast the human body can go does, but "where it is we don"t know," says Millar. Perhaps the only way we can recognize the ultimate performance will be retrospectively, after a record has stood for years. (45) In future, will athletes simply test their limits in new ways? As records become harder and harder to break, we may start comparing athletes by other standards, such as the number of gold medals or their performance over time. Lance Armstrong"s six consecutive wins in the Tour de France, for example, may never be surpassed. "The elite might be defined by how many times they win", says Millar.A. Athletes might also invent new sports to test themselves. The emergence of the triathlon in the 1970s was fuelled by runners, swimmers and cyclists looking for a new challenge; it made its debut as an Olympic event in 2000.B. Once scientists have identified the genes that confer a genetic advantage in sport, athletes might also be screened to pick out the ones with most genetic potential. "There are all sorts of people out there, and we don"t know what they can do", says exercise and sports scientist Carl Foster of the University of Wisconsin in La Crosse. Because the rewards are growing and competition is becoming more intense, athletes are being driven more and more towards drugs to gain the edge. Experts predict that the next generation of champions will include many doped ones. They are particularly fearful of "gene doping" in which athletes boost the performance of key genes.C. Psychology is vital. Athletes need enormous focus and drive to win. Many people think that the main barrier to breaking the four-minute mile was a psychological one: once Roger Bannister did it in 1954, several others clocked sub-four-minute times shortly afterwards. Sometimes breaking a record involves taking a risk in an event, such as breaking from the pack with a full lap to go, and that takes a certain state.D. Not every sport can be accurately measured, of course. Running and jumping can be quantified with stick or stopwatch, but football and tennis performances are much harder to gauge.E. On top of this, however, training and technique are vital. They allow athletes to sculpt muscles, for example, so that they burn less energy while achieving the same speeds as others. State-of-the-art technology can be essential, particularly in sports that rely on specialized equipment, such as tennis or pole vaulting. Chance also plays a part: cool temperatures or wind might add that extra push for a runner or long jumper. Ultimately, a record breaking performance depends on bringing all of these factors together on the right day.F. Some experts have tried to calculate the absolute limit of performance. They take the highest value for each crucial physiological factor ever recorded in an athlete, such as the maximum oxygen uptake, the greatest efficiency with which energy is burned and the best stamina. Then they figure out how fast someone might go if these were all combined in one body. By these calculations, we may one day see a sub two hour marathon or even a three-and-a-half-minute mile. But the probability of finding someone with these exceptional abilities is pretty low.

Most children with healthy appetites are ready to eat almost anything that is offered them and a child rarely dislikes food (1)_____ it is badly cooked. The (2)_____ a meal is cooked and served is most important and an (3)_____ served meal will, often improve a child"s appetite. Never ask a child (4)_____ he likes or dislike a food and never (5)_____ likes and dislikes in front of him or allow (6)_____ else to do so. If the father says he hates fat meat or the mother (7)_____ vegetables in the child"s hearing he is (8)_____ to copy this procedure. Take it (9)_____ granted that he likes everything and he probably (10)_____. Nothing healthful should be omitted from the meal because of a (11)_____ dislike. At meal times it is a good (12)_____ to give a child a small portion and let him (13)_____ back for a second helping rather than give him as (14)_____ as he is likely to eat all at once. Do not talk too much to the child (15)_____ meal times, but let him get on with his food: and do not (16)_____ him to leave the table immediately after a meal or he will (17)_____ learn to swallow his food (18)_____ he can hurry back to his toys. Under (19)_____ circumstances must a child be coaxed (20)_____ forced to eat.

Science and its practical applications in the form of technology, or the "science" of the industrial arts, as Webster defines the term, have had an enormous impact on modern society and culture. For generations it was believed that science and technology would provide the solutions to the problem of human suffering disease, famine, war, and poverty. But today these problems remain; infact, many argue that they are expanding. Some even conclude that science and technology as presently constituted are not capable of meeting the collective needs of mankind.A more radical position is that modern scientific methods and institutions, because of their very nature and structure, thwart basic human needs and emotions; the catastrophes of today"s world, and the greatest threat to its future, some claim, are the direct consequences of science and technology. A major paradox has been created: scientific rationality taken as the supreme form of the application of the rational faculties of human beings and which, along with its practical applications in the form of technological development, have liberated man from ignorance, from the whims and oppressions of a relentless nature and while having subordinated the earth to man, has become the potential instrument of the self-destruction of the human species. War, pollution, and economic oppression are seen as the inevitable results of scientific advance by large sections of the public. The atomic disaster of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings are seen as the products of an uninterested scientific rationality. In recent decades in the West there has emerged a wave of anti-scientific, antirational moods, especially among the young people, which threatens a complete rejection not simply of the technological fruits of science, but of scientific rationalism as well, in favor of one or another version of mysticism,irrationalism, and primitivism—or as one philosopher of science has called it, of blood and soil philosophy. Wartovsky has described the argument of the anti-science people as one in which we are warned to "listen to the blood, get back to our roots, and cast out the evil demons of a blind and inhuman rationality, and thereby we will save ourselves". The only "reasonable thing" to do, according to the oppositionist, is to reject reason itself—at least in its scientific form. The very rejection of that reason, in "reasonable" terms, is in itself a paradox.

Writeanessayof160-200wordsbasedonthefollowingdrawing.Inyouressay,youshould1.describethedrawingbriefly,2.interpretitsintendedmeaning,and3.giveyourcomments.YoushouldwriteneadyontheANSWERSHEET.(20points)

To get help, Internet addicts tired of their square-eyed, keyboard tapping ways need look no further than the Web for counseling. There is now an online counseling service at www. relate, org. nz for Internet obsessives. Just e-mail the details of your Internet-induced crisis and help comes direct to your inbox. (46) The new breed of cybertherapists see nothing strange about offering help through the very medium that is swallowing their clients" free time and splitting their marriages. Getting hooked on the Internet isn"t confined to a few computer nerds. It"s on the rise everywhere—and women are the most likely addicts. The old stereotypical addict was a young man who spent hours playing games, downloading software or reading messages on newsgroups. (47) Yet, the new image is of a young woman who fritters away hours e-mailing friends, buying books and CDs online, talking in chatrooms and looking for information for next year"s holiday. Ingrid Parker, once a slave to Internet chatrooms, found her experiences so devastating that she wrote a book to help other addicts break the habit. (48) Her computer dream turned to nightmare when she sold up and moved to be with her cyberpal (who had just left his wife), only to be told a week later that the couple were getting back together. The heart-breaking turn of events gave her the motivation to control her addiction—and write the book Caught in the Web. For Ingrid Parker, anyone who is married or in a sound relationship should not really be spending hours talking to someone else and ignoring their nearest and dearest. (49) While Parker provided her own therapy by putting her experiences down on paper, she recommends others take up the online counseling offer, or log off from the Worldwide Web gradually. She said, "It"s like smoking. It"s not a good idea to suddenly go cold turkey. People often e mail me about the problem and I tell them to gradually wean themselves off and not to switch to a scheme where you pay per hour for online time. (50) If they break their resolution, all they end up with then is the same old problem plus money difficulties for the long hours they have spent logged in to the Internet. " Of course, the Internet is definitely addictive but if you can keep it in control it has advantages, too. Using it can be a steep learning curve so it helps you become very quick at learning. Also there is a huge demand for people in the field of Information Technology (IT) and hours on the Internet are great training.

TheFoundationofEnergyDevelopmentWriteanessayof160-200wordsbasedonthedrawing.Inyouressay,youshould1)describethedrawingbriefly,2)explainitsintendedmeaning,andthen3)giveyourcomments.

You are going to read a text about the tips on business on the Internet, followed by a list of examples. Choose the best example from the list A-F for each numbered subheading (1-5). There is one extra example which you do not need to use. Today, some 30% of small business owners don"t have a Web presence at all, while the vast majority who do are watching their sites sit stale, waiting and wanting for business. Where did things go wrong? There are common principles followed by those whose dreams of online success have become reality. 【C1】Build your site around your customer: Thinking of your site as your online storefront, built around delivering the highest-quality customer experience from the moment your customer steps through the "door". 【C2】Just because you built it doesn"t mean they"ll come: If you aren"t seeing a large volume of targeted traffic to your site, it"s time to up the ante. 【C3】Integrate customer loyalty programs and promotions: Methods contain discounts, news, or friendly service reminders. Use discount promotional offers to stay in touch with past visitors to your site. 【C4】Justify your monthly spending through product bundling: While pay-per-click Internet advertising is much more cost-effective than traditional media channels, bundling products together will not only increase your sales revenue, but also enable you to get more out of your per-click ad rates. 【C5】Measure your progress: Your site may be live, but how is it performing? Armed with these simple lessons, vow to make your business realize the true promise of the Internet.[A] A manufacturing company selling $50 items was having trouble justifying the cost of online keyword ads. By bundling products to create packages of $100 or more and advertising to wholesale customers looking to buy in bulk, the manufacturer dropped its sales representative agencies and focused on large-volume buyers, such as Wal-Mart and Target. Needless to say, the company had no trouble exceeding its yearly sales quota.[B] One of my past clients had a well-designed physical storefront, solid prices, and quality offerings. However, he wasn"t able to drive enough store traffic despite targeted advertising efforts in print publications and other offline venues. We decided to shift those ad dollars to an online pay-per-click campaign—in which the advertiser pays whenever someone clicks on its entry posted during the course of a site search based on keywords relevant to his business. The immediate impact was staggering. Online revenue soared tenfold to $1 million from $100,000 within only a few months.[C] With today"s technology, your return can be easily measured. If you rely on your Web site as a sales tool, you can"t afford not to invest in site analytics. Make sure your Web solution includes an easy-to-use reporting tool that presents this information in a clear, concise format. After all, while metrics are a critical part of the Web equation, you don"t have the time to spend hours digging through reams of data.[D] Years ago, I worked with a woman who sold purses online through a home-built site that lacked critical e -commerce components. After a simple redesign including product descriptions, comprehensive navigation, and a secure, user-friendly ordering system, her revenue increased fivefold. And she began receiving rave reviews from customers impressed with the ease and convenience of the online shopping experience.[E] Online success demands more than simple presence. Your Internet investment should pay for itself with new customers and increased sales. Find a trusted partner who can help you navigate today"s (and tomorrow"s) technology and who understands the bottom-line realities of your business.[F] One villa rental company had a Web site that generated very few calls and online bookings. I helped the company set up a "last minute deals" distribution list. By subscribing, site visitors would receive weekly e-mails offering 11th-hour discounts on villa rentals. As a result, the company captured contact information for thousands of possible customers, reduced its unused inventory to almost zero, and increased revenue significantly.

Writeanessayof160-200wordsbasedonthefollowingcartoon.Inyourwriting,youshould1)describethedrawingbriefly,2)interpretitsintendedmeaning,and3)giveyourcomments.YoushouldwriteneatlyontheANSWERSHEET.(20points)

During recent years we have heard much about "race": how this race does certain things and that race believes certain things and so on. Yet, the (1)_____ phenomenon of race consists of a few surface indications. We judge race usually (2)_____ the coloring of the skin: a white race, a brown race, a yellow race and a black race. But (3)_____ you were to remove the skin you could not (4)_____ anything about the race to which the individual belonged. There is (5)_____ in physical structure, the brain or the internal organs to (6)_____ a difference. There are four types of blood. (7)_____ types are found in every race, and no type is distinct to any race. Human brains are the (8)_____. No scientists could examine a brain and tell you the race to which the individual belonged. Brains win (9)_____ in size, but this occurs within every race. (10)_____ does size have anything to do with intelligence. The largest brain (11)_____ examined belonged to a person of weak (12)_____. On the other hand, some of our most distinguished people have had (13)_____ brains. Mental tests which are reasonably (14)_____ show no differences in intelligence between races. High and low test results both can be recorded by different members of any race. (15)_____ equal educational advantages, there will be no difference in average standings, either on account of race or geographical location. Individuals of every race (16)_____ civilization to go backward or forward. Training and education can change the response of groups of people, (17)_____ enable them to behave in a (18)_____ way. The behavior and ideals of people change according to circumstances, but they can always go back or go on to something new (19)_____ is better and higher than anything (20)_____ the past.

(46) A recent phenomenon in present-day science and technology is the increasing trend toward "directed" or "programmed" research; i.e. research whose scope and objectives are predetermined by private or government organizations rather than researchers themselves. Any scientist working for such organizations and investigating in a given field therefore tends to do so in accordance with a plan or program designed beforehand. At the beginning of the century, however, the situation was quite different. At that time there were no industrial research organizations in the modern sense: the laboratory unit consisted of a few scientists at the most, assisted by one or two technicians. (47) Nevertheless, the scientist, often working with inadequate equipment in unsuitable rooms, was free to choose any subject for investigation he liked, since there was no predetermined program to which he had to conform. (48) As the century developed, the increasing magnitude and complexity of the problems to be solved made it impossible, in many cases, for the individual scientist to deal with the huge mass of new data, techniques and equipment that were required for carrying out research accurately and efficiently. The increasing scale and scope of the experiments needed to test new hypotheses and develop new techniques and industrial processed to the setting up of research groups or teams using highly-complicated equipment in elaborately-designed laboratories. (49) Owing to the large sums of money involved, it was then felt essential to direct these human and material resources into specific channels with clearly defined objectives. In this way it was considered that the quickest and most practical results could be obtained. This, then, was programmed (programmatic) research. One of the effects of this organized and standardized investigation is to cause the scientist to become increasingly involved in applied research (development), especially in the branches of science which seem most likely to have industrial applications. Private industry and even government departments tend to concentrate on immediate results and show comparatively little interest in long-range investigations. (50) In consequence, there is a steady shift of scientists from the pure to the applied field, where there are more jobs available, frequently more highly-paid and with better technical facilities than jobs connected with pure research in a university. Owing to the interdependence between pure and applied science, it is easy to see that this system, if extended too far, carries considerable dangers for the future of science—and not only pure science, but applied science as well.

Maintaining Cultural Heritages of Traditional Holidays A. Title: Maintaining Cultural Heritages of Traditional Holidays 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: "Traditional holidays, passed down from generation to generation, have stories behind with significant cultural heritages."" OUTLINE: 1. The significance of traditional holidays 2. People"s improper attitudes towards traditional holidays 3. My opinion on maintaining cultural heritages of traditional holidays

Good looks, the video-games industry is discovering, will get you only so far. The graphics on a modern game may far outstrip the pixellated blobs of the 1980s, but there is more to a good game than eye candy. Photo-realistic graphics make the lack of authenticity of other aspects of gameplay more apparent. It is not enough for game characters to look better—their behavior must also be more sophisticated, say researchers working at the interface between gaming and artificial intelligence(AI). Today"s games may look better, but the gameplay is "basically the same" as it was a few years ago, says Michael Mateas, the founder of the Experimental Game Lab at the Georgia Institute of Technology. AI, he suggests, offers an "untapped frontier" of new possibilities. "We are topping out on the graphics, so what"s going to be the next thing that improves gameplay?" asks John Laird, director of the A1 lab at the University of Michigan. Improved Al is a big part of the answer, he says. Those in the industry agree. The high-definition graphics possible on next-generation games consoles, such as Microsoft"s Xbox 360, are raising expectatious across the board, says Neff Young of Electronic Arts, the world"s biggest games publisher. "You have to have high-resolution models, which requires high-resolution animation", he says", so now I expect high-resolution behavior". Representatives from industry and academia will converge in Marina del Rey, California, later this month for the second annual Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment(AIIDE) conference. The aim, says Dr. Laird, who will chair the event, is to Increase the traffic of people and ideas between the two spheres. "Games have been very important to AI through the years", he notes. Alan Turing, one of the pioneers of computing in the 1940s, wrote a simple chess-playing program before there were any computers to run it on; he also proposed the Turing test, a question-and-answer game that is a yardstick for machine intelligence. Even so, AI research and video games existed in separate worlds until recently. The Al techniques used in games were very simplistic from an academic perspective, says Dr. Mateas, while Al researchers were, in turn, clueless about modern games. But, he says, "both sides are learning, and are now much closer". Consider, for example, the software that controls an enemy in a first-person shooter (FPS)—a game in which the player views the world along the barrel of a gun. The behavior of enemies used to be pre-scripted: wait until the player is nearby, pop up from behind a box, fire weapon, and then roll and hide behind another box, for example. But some games now use far more advanced" planning systems" imported from academia. "Instead of scripts and hand-coded behavior, the AI monsters in an FPS can reason from first principles", says Dr. Mateas. They can, for example, work out whether the player can see them or not, seek out cover when injured, and so on. "Rather than just moving between predefined spots, the characters in a war game can dynamically shift, depending on what"s happening", says Fiona Sperry of Electronic Arts. If the industry is borrowing ideas from academia, the opposite is also true. Commercial games such as "Unreal Tournament", which can be easily modified or scripted, are being adopted as research tools in universities, says Dr. Laird. Such tools provide flexible environments for experiments, and also mean that students end up with transferable skills. But the greatest potential lies in combining research with game development, argues Dr. Mateas. "Only by wrestling with real content are the technical problems revealed, and only by wrestling with technology does it give you insight into what new kinds of content are possible, "he says.

You are a student of Beijing Science and Engineering University. Write an application to get a scholarship for your overseas study in a university in America. 1. You should write about 100 words. 2. Do not sign your own name at the end of your letter. Use "Li Ming" instead. 3. Do not write the address.

The first clue came when I got my hair cut. The stylist offered a complimentary nail-polish change while I waited for my hair to dry. Maybe she hoped this little amenity would slow the growing inclination of women to stretch each haircut to last four months. Suddenly everything is on sale. The upside to the economic downturn is the immense incentive it gives retailers to treat you like a queen for a day. But now the customer rules, just for showing up. Finger the scarf, then start to walk away, and its price floats silkily downward. When the mechanic calls to tell you that brakes and a timing belt and other services will run close to $ 2,000, it's time to break out the newly perfected art of the considered pause. You really don't even have to say anything pitiful before he'll offer to knock a few hundred dollars off. Restaurants are also caught in a fit of ardent hospitality, especially around Wall Street. New York Times restaurant critic Frank Bruni characterizes the new restaurant demeanor as "extreme solicitousness tinged with outright desperation." Now everyone is hoping to restart the economy. But human nature is funny that way. In dangerous times, we clench and squint at the deal that looks too good to miss, suspecting that it must be too good to be true. Store owners will tell you horror stories about shoppers with attitude, who walk in demanding discounts and flaunt their new power at every turn. These store owners wince as they sense bad habit forming: Will people expect discounts forever? Will their hard-won brand luster be forever cheapened, especially for items whose allure depends on their being ridiculously priced? There will surely come a day when things go back to "normal"; retail sales even inched up in January after sinking for the previous six months. Bargain-hunting can be addictive regardless of the state of the markets, and haggling is a low-risk, high-value contact sport. Trauma digs deep into habit, like my 85-year-old mother still calling her canned-goods cabinet "the bomb shelter." The children of the First Depression were saving string and preaching sacrifice long after the skies cleared. They came to be called the "greatest generation." As we learn to be decent stewards of our resources, who knows what might come of it? We have lived in an age of wanton waste, and there is value in practicing conservation that goes far beyond our own bottom line.

【F1】 Polls, including one carried out in four large countries by the Kaiser Family Foundation, an American think-tank, and The Economist, find that most people in good health hope that, when the time comes, they will die at home. And few, when asked about their hopes for their final days, say that their priority is to live as long as possible. Rather, they want to die free from pain, at peace, and surrounded by loved ones for whom they are not a burden. Some deaths are unavoidably miserable. Not everyone will be in a condition to toast death's imminence with champagne, as Anton Chekhov did. What people say they will want while they are well may change as the end nears (one reason why doctors are sceptical about the instructions set out in "living wills" ). Dying at home is less appealing if all the medical kit is at the hospital. 【F2】 A treatment that is unbearable in the imagination can seem like the lesser of two evils when the alternative is death. Some patients will want to fight until all hope is lost. 【F3】 But too often patients receive drastic treatment in spite of their dying wishes—by default, when doctors do "everything possible", as they have been trained to, without talking through people's preferences or ensuring that the prognosis is clearly understood. Just a third of American patients with terminal cancer are asked about their goals at the end of life, for example whether they wish to attend a special event. 【F4】 This newspaper has called for the legalisation of doctor-assisted dying, so that mentally fit, terminally ill patients can be helped to end their lives if that is their wish. But the right to die is just one part of better care at the end of life. The evidence suggests that most people want this option, but that few would, in the end, choose to exercise it. To give people the death they say they want, medicine should take some simple steps. More palliative care is needed. This neglected branch of medicine deals with the relief of pain and other symptoms, such as breathlessness, as well as counselling for the terminally ill. 【F5】 Until recently it was often dismissed as barely medicine at all; mere tea and sympathy when all hope has gone. Even in Britain, where the hospice movement began, access to palliative care is patchy. Recent studies have shown how wrongheaded that is. Providing it earlier in the course of advanced cancer alongside the usual treatments turns out not only to reduce suffering, but to prolong life, too.

The last-minute victory of the Texas Longhorns in this year"s Rose Bowl— America"s college football championship—was the kind of thing that stays with fans forever. Just as well, because many had paid vast sums to see the game. Rose Bowl tickets officially sold for $175 each. On the Internet, resellers were hawking them for as much as $3,000 a pop. "Nobody knows how to control this," observed Mitch Dorger, the tournament"s chief executive. Re-selling tickets for a profit, known less politely as scalping in America or touting in Britain, is booming. In America alone, the "secondary market" for tickets to sought-after events is worth over $10 billion, reckons Jeffrey Fluhr, the boss of StubHub, an online ticket market. Scalping used to be about burly men lurking outside stadiums with fistfuls of tickets. Cries of "Tickets here, tickets here" still ring out before kick-off. But the Internet has created a larger and more efficient market. Some Internet-based ticket agencies, such as tickco. com and dynamiteticketz, corn act as traditional scalpers, buying up tickets and selling them on for a substantial mark-up. But others like StubHub have a new business model—bring together buyers and sellers, and then take a cut. For each transaction, StubHub takes a juicy 25%. Despite its substantial commission—far higher than those charged by other online intermediaries including eBay or Craigslist—StubHub is flourishing. The firm was set up in 2000 and this year"s Rose Bowl was its biggest event ever. The Super Bowl in early February will bring another nice haul, as have U2 and Rolling Stones concerts. Unlike eBay, which is the largest online trader in tickets, StubHub guarantees each transaction, so buyers need not worry about fraud. The company"s revenues, now around $200 million, are tripling annually (despite its start in the dotcom bust). And there is plenty more room to grow. Mr. Fluhr notes that the market remains "highly fragmented", with tiny operations still flourishing and newspaper classified not yet dead. But there are risks. Some events are boosting prices to cut the resale margins; others are using special measures to crack down. This summer, tickets to the soccer World Cup in Germany will include the name and passport number of the original purchaser and embedded chips that match the buyer to the tickets. Then there are legal worries. In America, more than a dozen states have anti-scalping laws of various kinds. New Mexico forbids the reselling of tickets for college games; Mississippi does so for all events on government-owned property. Such laws are often ignored, but can still bite. In Massachusetts, where reselling a ticket for more than $2 above face value is unlawful, one fan brought a lawsuit last autumn against 16 companies (including StubHub) over his pricey Red Sox tickets.

Canada"s premiers(the leaders of provincial governments), if they have any breath left after complaining about Ottawa at their late July annual meeting, might spare a moment to do something, together, to reduce health-care costs. They"re all groaning about soaring health budgets, the fastest-growing component of which are pharmaceutical costs. 【C1】______. What to do? Both the Romanow commission and the Kirby committee on health care—to say nothing of reports from other experts—recommended the creation of a national drug agency. Instead of each province having its own list of approved drugs, bureaucracy, procedures and limited bargaining power, all would pool resources, work with Ottawa, and create a national institution. 【C2】______. But "national" doesn"t have to mean that "National" could mean interprovincial—provinces combining efforts to create one body. Either way, one benefit of a "national" organization would be to negotiate better prices, if possible, with drug manufacturers. Instead of having one province—or a series of hospitals within a province— negotiate a price for a given drug on the provincial list, the national agency would negotiate on behalf of all provinces. Rather than, say, Quebec, negotiating on behalf of seven million people, the national agency would negotiate on behalf of 31 million people. Basic economics suggests the greater the potential consumers, the higher the likelihood of a better price. 【C3】______. A small step has been taken in the direction of a national agency with the creation of the Canadian Coordinating Office for Health Technology Assessment, funded by Ottawa and the provinces. Under it, a Common Drug Review recommends to provincial lists which new drugs should be included. Predictably, and regrettably, Quebec refused to join. A few premiers are suspicious of any federal-provincial deal-making. They(particularly Quebec and Alberta)just want Ottawa to fork over additional billions with few, if any, strings attached. That"s one reason why the idea of a national list hasn"t gone anywhere, while drug costs keep rising fast. 【C4】______. Premiers love to quote Mr. Romanow"s report selectively, especially the parts about more federal money. Perhaps they should read what he had to say about drugs: "A national drug agency would provide governments more influence on pharmaceutical companies in order to try to constrain the ever-increasing cost of drugs." 【C5】______. So when the premiers gather in Niagara Falls to assemble their usual complaint list, they should also get cracking about something in their jurisdiction that would help their budgets and patients. [A]Quebec"s resistance to a national agency is provincialist ideology. One of the first advocates for a national list was a researcher at Laval University. Quebec" s Drug Insurance Fund has seen its costs skyrocket with annual increases from 14.3 percent to 26.8 percent! [B]Or they could read Mr. Kirby"s report: "the substantial buying power of such an agency would strengthen the public prescription-drug insurance plans to negotiate the lowest possible purchase prices from drug companies." [C]What does "national" mean? Roy Romanow and Senator Michael Kirby recommended a federal-provincial body much like the recently created National Health Council. [D]The problem is simple and stark: health-care costs have been, are, and will continue to increase faster than government revenues. [E]According to the Canadian Institute for Health Information, prescription drug costs have risen since 1997 at twice the rate of overall health-care spending. Part of the increase comes from drugs being used to replace other kinds of treatments. Part of it arises from new drugs costing more than older kinds. Part of it is higher prices. [F]So, if the provinces want to run the health-care show, they should prove they can run it, starting with an interprovincial health list that would end duplication, save administrative costs, prevent one province from being played off against another, and bargain for better drug prices. [G]Of course, the pharmaceutical companies will scream. They like divided buyers; they can lobby better that way. They can use the threat of removing jobs from one province to another. They can hope that, if one province includes a drug on its list, the pressure will cause others to include it on theirs. They wouldn"t like a national agency, but self-interest would lead them to deal with it.

It was just a footnote compared with the more infectious disaster that killed millions more people in 1918, but the 1957 influenza pandemic that sickened some 25 to 30 percent of the American population was a medical watershed for the clues that it offered about how a new strain of influenza could spread.Americansfirst gota whiff of theso-called Asian fluwhenMaurice Hilleman, a physician at Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, D.C., read about an unusually large number of people—some 250,000—who had come down with flu-like symptoms in Hong Kong. Concerned, he immediately requested samples from American servicemen in Asia and within days had his answer. The genetic structure of this strain was like nothing immunologists had ever seen before. When the virus finally hit America: "It went like a house on fire," recalls D.A.Henderson, then the chief of the United States Epidemic Intelligence Service. Worsened by school openings that fall, the flu spread so rapidly from a few counties in Louisiana that just eight weeks later it had heavily infected more than half the counties in nearly all 50 states. Although it wasn"t particularly potent, the 1957 strain killed about 80,000 Americans. The victims were predominantly the very old and the very young, although the infection occasionally killed otherwise healthy adults as well. Pharmaceutical companies worked furiously to produce a vaccine, ultimately distributing some 40 million doses. But "they were just a little bit too late," says Arnold Monto, an influenza specialist at the University of Michigan. "They only had significant doses available when the pandemic was peaking." Earlier, scarcities raised questions about who deserved the vaccine first. A set of official rules gave priority to military personnel and necessary civic workers, but that didn"t stop members of the San Francisco 49ers football team from getting vaccinated before police and firemen. Despite some manufacturing improvements, experts say the same shortages could occur with a pandemic today. And that concern has caused preparedness officials to plan for community interventions such as school closings and isolation of sick people. But Henderson says, "It won"t work. And you don"t need a better example than "57.When you go from just a few scattered outbreaks in the end of August to the whole country infected in eight weeks, at a time when people didn"t travel as much as they do today and cities were not as densely populated, what do you think we"re going to see today?" Better, he says, to have good vaccines and to ensure that the medical system can handle the extra load.