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

Japanese firms have achieved the highest levels of manufacturing efficiency in the world automobile industry. (46) Some observers of Japan have assumed that Japanese firms use the same manufacturing equipment and techniques as United States firms but have benefited from the unique characteristics of Japanese employees and the Japanese culture. However, if this were true, then one would expect Japanese auto plants in the United States to perform no better than factories run by United States companies. This is not the case. (47) Japanese-run automobile plants located in the United States and staffed by local workers have demonstrated higher levels of productivity when compared with factories owned by United States companies. Other observers link high Japanese productivity to higher levels of capital investment per worker. But a historical perspective leads to a different conclusion. (48) When the two top Japanese automobile makers matched and then doubled United States productivity levels in the mid-sixties, capital investment per employee was comparable to that of United States firms. Furthermore, by the late seventies, the amount of fixed assets required to produce one vehicle was roughly equivalent in Japan and in the United States. Since capital investment was not higher in Japan, it had to be other factors that led to higher productivity. A more fruitful explanation may lie with Japanese production techniques. Japanese automobile producers did not simply implement conventional processes more effectively; they made critical change in United "States procedures. (49) For instance, the mass-production philosophy of United States automakers encouraged the production of huge lots of cars in order to utilize fully expensive, component-specific equipment and to occupy fully workers who have been trained to execute one operation efficiently. Japanese automakers chose to make small-lot production feasible by introducing several departures from United States practices, including the use of flexible equipment that could be altered easily to do several different production tasks and the training of workers in multiple jobs. (50) Automakers could schedule the production of different components or models on single machines, thereby eliminating the need to store the spare stocks of extra components that result when specialized equipment and workers are kept constantly active.

What's a man? Or, indeed, a woman? Biologically, the answer might seem obvious. A human being is a(n) 【C1】______who has grown from a fertilised egg which【C2】______genes from both father and mother. A growing band of biologists, 【C3】______, think this definition incomplete. They【C4】______people not just as individuals, but also as ecosystems. In their view, the descendant of the fertilised egg is【C5】______one component of the system. The others are trillions of bacteria, each equally an individual, 【C6】______are found in a person' s gut, his mouth, his skin and all of the crevices and orifices that exist in his body's surface. A【C7】______adult human harbours some 100 trillion bacteria in his gut alone. That is ten times as many bacterial cells as he has cells【C8】______from the sperm and egg of his parents. These bugs, moreover, are【C9】______. Egg and sperm provide about 23, 000 different genes. The microbiome, as the body's commensal bacteria are collectively known, is reckoned to have around 3million.【C10】______, many of those millions are variations on common themes, but equally many are not, and even the number of【C11】______that are adds something to the body' s genetic mix. And it really is a system, for evolution has【C12】______the interests of host and bugs. In exchange for raw materials and shelter the microbes that live in and【C13】______people feed and protect their hosts, and are thus integral to that host's well-being. Neither wishes the other harm. In bad【C14】______, though, this alignment of interest can【C15】______. Then, the microbiome may misbehave in ways which cause disease. That bacteria can cause disease is no【C16】______. But the diseases in question are. Often, they are not acute infections of the【C17】____ 20th-century medicine has been so good at dealing with. They are, rather, the chronic illnesses that are now, 【C18】______in the rich world, the main focus of medical attention.【C19】______, from obesity and diabetes, via heart disease and asthma to neurological conditions such as autism, the microbiome seems to play a(n) 【C20】______role.

[A]ThereisalsoconcernaboutfallingwatertablesintheUS,oneoftheworld'sthreelargestfood-producingcountries."IntheUnitedStatestheirrigatedareaisshrinkinginleadingfarmstateswithrapidpopulationgrowth,suchasCaliforniaandTexas,asaquifersaredepletedandirrigationwaterisdivertedtocities."[B]ThesituationismostseriousintheMiddleEast.AccordingtoBrown:"AmongthecountrieswhosewatersupplyhaspeakedandbeguntodeclineareSaudiArabia,Syria,IraqandYemen."By2016SaudiArabiaprojectsitwillbeimportingsome15mtonnesofwheat,rice,cornandbarleytofeeditspopulationof30millionpeople.Itisthefirstcountrytopubliclyprojecthowaquiferdepletionwillshrinkitsgrainharvest.[C]BrownwarnsthatSyria'sgrainproductionpeakedin2002andsincethenhasdropped30%;Iraqhasdroppeditsgrainproduction33%since2004;andproductioninIrandropped10%between2007and2012asitsirrigationwellsstartedtogodry.[D]WellsaredryingupandunderwatertablesfallingsofastintheMiddleEastandtheUSthatfoodsuppliesareseriouslythreatened,oneoftheworld'sleadingresourceanalystshaswarned.InamajornewessayLesterBrown,headoftheEarthPolicyInstituteinWashington,claimsthat18countries,togethercontaininghalftheworld'speople,arenowoverpumpingtheirundergroundwatertablestothepoint—knownas"peakwater"—wheretheyarenotreplenishingandwhereharvestsaregettingsmallereachyear.[E]ThesituationinIndiamaybeevenworse,giventhatwelldrillersarenowusingmodifiedoil-drillingtechnologytoreachwaterhalfamileormoredeep."Theharvesthasbeenexpandingrapidlyinrecentyears,butonlybecauseofmassiveoverpumpingfromthewatertable.ThemarginbetweenfoodconsumptionandsurvivalisprecariousinIndia,whosepopulationisgrowingby18millionperyearandwhereirrigationdependsalmostentirelyonundergroundwater.Farmershavedrilledsome21mirrigationwellsandarepumpingvastamountsofundergroundwater,andwatertablesaredecliningatanacceleratingrateinPunjab,Haryana,Rajasthan,GujaratandTamilNadu."[F]IntheUS,farmersareoverpumpingintheWesternGreatPlains,includinginseveralleadinggrain-producingstatessuchasTexas,Oklahoma,KansasandNebraska.Irrigatedagriculturehasthrivedinthesestates,butthewaterisdrawnfromtheOgallalaaquifer,ahugeundergroundwaterbodythatstretchesfromNebraskasouthwardstotheTexasPanhandle."Itis,unfortunately,afossilaquifer,onethatdoesnotrecharge.Onceitisdepleted,thewellsgodryandfarmerseithergobacktodrylandfarmingorabandonfarmingaltogether,dependingonlocalconditions,"saysBrown."InTexas,locatedontheshallowendoftheaquifer,theirrigatedareapeakedin1975andhasdropped37%sincethen.InOklahomairrigationpeakedin1982andhasdroppedby25%.InKansasthepeakdidnotcomeuntil2009,butduringthethreeyearssincethenithasdroppedprecipitously,fallingnearly30%.Nebraskasawitsirrigatedareapeakin2007.Sincethenitsgrainharvesthasshrunkby15%."[G]"Iranisalreadyindeeptrouble.Itisfeelingtheeffectsofshrinkingwatersuppliesfromoverpumping.Yemenisfastbecomingahydrologicalbasketcase.Grainproductionhasfallentherebyhalfoverthelast35years.By2015irrigatedfieldswillbeararityandthecountrywillbeimportingvirtuallyallofitsgrain."

In 2010, a federal judge shook America"s biotech industry to its core. Companies had won patents for isolated DNA for decades—by 2005 some 20% of human genes were patented. But in March 2010 a judge ruled that genes were unpatentable. Executives were violently agitated. The Biotechnology Industry Organi-zation(BIO), a trade group, assured members that this was just a "preliminary step" in a longer battle. On July 29th they were relieved, at least temporarily. A federal appeals court overturned the prior decision, ruling that Muriad Genetics could indeed hold patents to two genes that help forecast a woman"s risk of breast cancer. The chief executive of Mytiad, a company in Utah, said the ruling was a blessing to firms and patients alike. But as companies continue their attempts at personalised medicine, the courts will remain rather busy. The Myriad case itself is probably not over. Critics make three main arguments against gene patents: a gene is a product of nature, so it may not be patented; gene patents suppress innovation rather than reward it; and patents" monopolies restrict access to genetic tests such as Myriad"s. A growing number seem to agree. Last year a federal task-force urged reform for patents related to genetic tests. In October the Department of Justice filed a brief in the Myriad case, arguing that an isolated DNA molecule "is no less a product of nature ... than are cotton fibres that have been separated from cotton seeds." Despite the appeals court"s decision, big questions remain unanswered. For example, it is unclear whether the sequencing of a whole genome violates the patents of individual genes within it. The case may yet reach the Supreme Court. As the industry advances, however, other suits may have an even greater impact. Companies are unlikely to file many more patents for human DNA molecules—most are already patented or in the public domain. Firms are now studying how genes interact, looking for correlations that might be used to determine the causes of disease or predict a drug" s efficacy. Companies are eager to win patents for "connecting the dots," explains Hans Sauer, a lawyer for the BIO. Their success may be determined by a suit related to this issue, brought by the Mayo Clinic, which the Supreme Court will hear in its next term. The BIO recently held a convention which included sessions to coach lawyer on the shifting landscape for patents. Each meeting was packed .

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

Writeanessayof160-200wordsbasedonthefollowingdrawing.Inyouressay,youshould1)describethedrawingbriefly,2)explainitsintendedmeaning,and3)giveyourcomments.YoushouldwriteneatlyontheANSWERSHEET.

Without an oversized calendar tacked to their kitchen wall, Fern Reiss and her family could never keep track of all the meetings, appointments, home-schooling lessons, and activities that fill their busy days. "I"m not sure they make a calendar large enough for us", says Ms. Reiss of Newton, Mass., explaining that her life revolves around "two companies, three children, a spouse, a lot of community involvement, a social life, the kids" social life, and volunteering in a soup kitchen every week". "Everybody we know is leading a frenetic life", she adds. "Ours is frenetic, too, but we"re spending the bulk of our time with our kids. Even though we"re having a crazy life, we"re having it in the right way". Although extreme busyness is hardly a new phenomenon, the subject is getting renewed attention from researchers. "A good life has to do with life having a direction, life having a narrative with the stories we tell ourselves", Chuck Darrah, an anthropologist, says. "Busyness fragments all that. We"re absolutely focused on getting through the next hour, the next day, the next week. It does raise questions: If not busyness, what? If we weren"t so busy, what would we be doing? If people weren"t so busy, would they be a poet, a painter?" For the Reisses, part of living a good life, however busy, means including the couple"s children in volunteer work and community activities. "We want the kids to see that that"s a priority", she says, Between working full time as a publicist, caring for her home, spending time with her husband and extended family, and helping her grandmother three times a week, a woman says, "I am exhausted all the time". Like others, she concedes that she sets "somewhat unrealistic expectations" for what she can accomplish in a day, Being realistic is a goal Darrah encourages, saying, "We can do everything, but we can"t do everything well and at the same time". He cautions that busyness can result in "poor decisions, sloppy quality, and neglect of the things and people that matter most in the long run". He advises: "Stop taking on so much, and keep in perspective what"s most important to you". Darrah"s own schedule remains full, but he insists he does not feel busy. His secret? Confining activities to things he must do and those he wants to do. He and his wife do not overschedule their children. To those with one eye on the calendar and the other on the deck, Darrah offers this advice: "Before you take anything on, ask yourself: Do you have to do this? Do you want to do this? Live with a kind of mindfulness so you don"t wake up and discover that your life is a whirl of transportation and communication, and you"ve hollowed yourself out".

You have bought a brand-new computer in a dealer"s office. But much to your disappointment, it could not be normally operated when you got it back. Write a letter to the manager, 1) launching your complaints, 2) specifying its troubles, 3) and proposing solutions. Write your letter in no less than 100 words and write it neatly. Do not sign your own name at the end of the letter, use "Li Ming" instead. Do not write the address.

Blast injuries, caused by the sort of explosions that occurred in Boston Monday, can be sonic of the most difficult and complex injuries to treat. The "blast wave" from the explosion acts like "an invisible wall of energy. " Its tremendous energy can inflict massive internal injuries, says Mark Morocco, associate professor of emergency medicine. Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center. "Blast injury is one of the most challenging constellations of injuries," says John Chovanes, trauma surgeon at Cooper University Hospital in Camden, N. J. , and an Army reservist who has done three combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. He has treated dozens of blast victims. In one explosive event, Chovanes says, a victim can suffer the blunt trauma of a high-speed auto accident from the high-pressure blast wave, the penetrating destruction of multiple bullet wounds from the shrapnel and potentially a swath of disfiguring burns. The rapid pressure wave can instantly inflate the stomach with air, then immediately suck it out. Such pressure is many times worse than the sudden pressure changes that people feel in their ears when a plane changes altitude. The force can rupture intestines, collapse lungs and knock the brain around inside the skull, he says. "You can have disruption of brain function without any physical finding," Morocco says," You can have internal injuries even without any obvious bleeding. " Boston hospitals reported that many patients had injuries to their lower legs. That"s consistent with a bomb placed at ground level, such as in a backpack, Morocco says. "Bits of leg can be blown away from the pressure wave, which is like a big wind," Morocco says. "It knocks you down." In addition to creating a massive shock wave, an explosion can also cause shrapnel or other bits of metal to slice through flesh like a knife, Morocco says. While no city is ever completely prepared for the kind of horror that beset Boston Monday, the city" s emergency management system is about as good as it gets, says Richard Zane, chair of emergency medicine at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. "Boston has the most robust mass casualty plan of any city in the United States," says Zane. who previously worked in Boston" s Brigham and Women"s Hospital for 14 years. "I"m certain this response was so well orchestrated because they have planned for this before, they have drilled for this before. " Boston is home to some of the best regarded hospitals in the world. Beyond the skill of its surgeons and staff, however, the city also has an integrated emergency response system-including police, fire and others—to coordinate and direct care in an emergency. That ensures that patients are portioned out to hospitals evenly, so that individual facilities aren"t overwhelmed. Coordinating care at the scene of a disaster can save lives, Morocco says, through making hard choices about which patients need to be taken first to a hospital, which can wait and which is too injured to even try. Even patients with extensive injuries are likely to survive if treated within "the golden hour," Morocco says. Patients who languish more than an hour without treatment often don"t make it.

The Theory of Continental Drift has had a long and turbulent history since it was first proposed by Alfred Wegener in 1910.【F1】 Vigorously challenged yet widely ignored, the theory had languished for half a century, primarily due to its lack of a plausible mechanism to support the proposed drift. With the discovery of sea-floor spreading in the late 1950's and early 60's, the idea was reinvigorated. Plate tectonics is now almost universally accepted. Many details of the mechanism are to be worked out. The surface of the Earth is divided into approximately six large plates, plus a number of smaller ones. The plates are bounded by an interconnected network of ridges, transform faults, and trenches. Ridges, also called spreading centers, occur where two plates are moving away from each other. As the plates separate, hot molten mantle material flows up to fill the void.【F2】 The increased heat resulting from this flow reduces the density of the plates, causing them to float higher, thus elevating the boundaries by many thousands of feet above the colder surrounding sea floor. 【F3】 Ridges on the ocean floor form the longest continuous ranges of mountains on the planet, but only in a very few places on the Earth do these mountains rise above the ocean surface. New sea floor is constantly being created along spreading centers. Obviously somewhere else old sea floor must be going away. This occurs in trenches, also called subduction zones. Trenches occur along the boundary between two plates that are moving towards each other.【F4】 Where this occurs, one plate is bent downwards at about a 40°angle and plunges under the other plate's leading edge, eventually to melt back into the liquid mantle below. As the subducting plate is heated back up to mantle temperatures, certain minerals in the plate melt sooner than others.【F5】 Minerals that melt at lower temperatures and are lighter than the surrounding material tend to rise, melting their way up through the overriding plate to erupt as volcanoes on the ocean floor. As these volcanoes grow, they rise above the ocean surface to form lines of islands along the leading edge of the overriding plate. Numerous islands of Micronesia and Melanesia in the western Pacific were created in this way.

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

A recent article in The New York Times noted that Hollywood types now are wearing flip-flops(拖鞋)—shoes appropriate for beachcombers—to business meetings. Decades ago, Californians were forgiven their sloppy attire as unique to their somewhat frivolous culture. Elsewhere during that bygone era, people were careful how they dressed when seen in public and certainly when going to the office. No one would think of traveling by plane in shorts or wearing anything but their best clothes for attending a church service, concert, wedding, or funeral. Look at old newsreels of baseball games and you will see most of the men in a shirt and tie. Walk through an airport today and you have to strain to find a man wearing a jacket (forget the shirt and tie) or a woman in a nice shirt. If so, they clearly are over 60. The standard for dressing down continues to decline. Neckties and suits no longer are fashionable; male models think it cool to have a face full of stubble(胡子茬). A rock star slouches onto the stage in his undershirt. Think about it: Dean Martin never failed to appear in Las Vegas in anything but his tux, and Frank Sinatra always was dressed to the nines when seen in public. That was the standard. Dress reflects many things about us and our culture. It tells us about standards, deportment, pride, and character. Somewhere along the way, our elites lost their self-confidence. Codes of dress fell by the wayside and, with them, standards of language and behavior. In a world stable and peaceful with no enemies lurking in the shadows to do us unspeakable harm, why would it matter what standards of courtesy we follow? Life would go on as it is. Sadly, this is not a relaxed era such as the 1990s. It matters now what kind of the society we are. We must recapture the seriousness of a generation that won World War II and persevered through the Cold War. We may be involved in a struggle even more lengthy, deadly, and demanding than the Cold War. The watchwords must be sacrifice, vigilance, and determination. A sloppy, self-indulgent culture will not produce an effective effort against an enemy as fanatical as the Japanese Kamikaze(日本神风敢死队) pilots. Our seriousness in World War II and the early Cold War reflected the qualities of a generation of American leaders, embodying the virtues of public spiritedness, selflessness, courage, and integrity. These leaders were human and made mistakes, but they set the tone for an entire era. Their tough-minded policies and dignified appearance reflected their character. That is why it matters how we present ourselves in public. For in a time as serious as theirs—and ours—it is character that eventually will triumph.

The people who run Facebook are furious about a new movie that depicts the existence of Face-book. They're upset because much of the story about The Social Network is just completely made up. But the really interesting thing about this movie is that the story tells a lager truth about Silicon Valley's get-rich-quick culture and the kind of people—like Mark Zuckerberg—who thrive in this environment. The Valley used to be a place run by scientists and engineers. But now the Valley has become a casino, a place where smart kids arrive hoping to make an easy fortune building companies that seem at least not as serious as old-guard companies. The three hottest tech companies today are Facebook, Twitter, and Zynga. Facebook lets you keep in touch with your friends; it will generate about $1.5 billion in revenue this year by bombarding its 500 million members with ads. Twitter is a noisy circus of spats and celebrity watching, and its hapless founders still can't figure out how to make money. The biggest of Facebook app-makers, reportedly will rake in $500 million this year by getting people addicted to cheesy games like Far-mville and Mafia Wars. Meanwhile, among some longtime techies, there' s a sense that something important has been lost. "The old Silicon Valley was about solving really hard problems, making technical bets. But there's no real technical bet being made with Facebook or Zynga," says Nathan Myhrvold, the former chief technology officer at Microsoft who now runs an invention lab in Seattle. "Today almost everyone in the Valley will tell you there is too much 'me-tooism', too much looking for a gold rush and not enough people who are looking to solve really hard problems." Sure, there are still entrepreneurs and investors chasing serious technology challenges in the Valley. Myhrvold says he means no disrespect to Facebook and Zynga. "What bother me are the millions of wannabes who will follow along, and the expectation that every company ought to be focused on doing really short-term, easy things to achieve giant paydays. I think that' s unrealistic, and it's not healthy." What he worries are "the unknown engineers and professors who have good ideas will get funded or will they be talked out of it and told they should do something like Zynga? " We' ve already fallen behind in areas like alternative energy, better batteries, and nanotechnolo-gy. Instead of racing to catch up, we're buying seeds and garden gnomes on Facebook. This won't end well.

Studythefollowingpicturecarefullyandwriteanessayto1)describethepicture,2)deducethepurposeofthepainterofthepicture,and3)giveyourcommentsonthepicture.Youshouldwrite160-200wordsneatly.

To the people of the Bijagos archipelago, the shark is sacred. In (1)_____ ceremonies young men from these islands (2)_____ the coast of Guinea-Bissau must spear a shark and present the liver to their (3)_____ But can this ancient ceremony (4)_____ the economic fact that a bowl of shark"s fin soup can cost $150 in the Far East? In the archipelago, and all along West Africa"s coast, sharks are being "finned" to (5)_____ Fishermen can earn $50-80 (6)_____ a kilo of sharks" fins, far more than ordinary fish. By the time they (7)_____ the Far East, they could be (8)_____ $500 a kilo or more valuable (9)_____ aphrodisiacs as well as for gourmets. The high demand is (10)_____ shark populations in West Africa and elsewhere. Most fish, vulnerable to (11)_____ eaten by bigger fish, protect their species by laying millions of eggs. But the shark has no natural enemy (12)_____ man, and gives birth to just a (13)_____ of young. (14)_____ female harks are often caught (15)_____ pregnant, the result has been predictably disastrous. Shark-like sawfish, which are also "finned", are already virtually (16)_____ off the Bijagos islands, and guitarfish are (17)_____ threat. In some parts of West Africa, when sharks and other similar fish have been finned, the rest of the flesh is often (18)_____, salted and exported to places like Ghana, where there is a (19)_____ for lt. Dried shark is used much (20)_____ a stock cube would be elsewhere. But in the Bijagos islands, where traders are uninterested in exporting dried shark, carcasses are often left to rot on the beach.

You"ve been working for two years, and now you are planning to study in Sydney University for an MBA degree. Write a letter to their International Students Admission Office to 1)introduce yourself briefly, and 2)enquire about enrollment requirements. You should write about 100 words on ANSWER SHEET 2. Do not sign your own name at the end o"f the letter. Use "Li Ming" instead. Do not write the address.

Information technologists have dreamt for decades of making an electronic display that is as good as paper: cheap enough to be pasted on to wails and billboards, clear enough to be read in broad daylight, and thin and flexible enough to be bound as hundreds of flippable leaves to make a book. Over the past few years they have got close. In particular, they have worked out how to produce the display itself, by sandwiching tiny spheres that change colour in response to an electric charge inside thin sheets of flexible, transparent plastic. What they have not yet found is a way to mass-produce flexible electronic circuitry with which to create that charge. But a paper just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that this, too, may be done soon. The process described by John Rogers and his colleagues from Bell Laboratories, an arm of Lucent Technologies, in New Jersey, and E Ink Corporation, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, starts with E Ink"s established half-way house towards true electronic paper. This is based on spheres containing black, liquid dye and particles of white, solid pigment. The pigment particles are negatively charged, so they can be pushed and pulled around by electrodes located above and below the sheet. The electrodes, in turn, are controlled by transistors under the sheet. Each transistor manipulates a single picture element (pixel), making it black or white. The pattern of pixels, in turn, makes up the picture or text on the page. The problem lies in making the transistors and connections. Established ways of doing this, such as photolithography, use silicon as the semiconductor in the transistors. That is all right for applications suck as pesters. It is too fragile and too expensive, though, for genuine electronic paper—which is why cheap and flexible electronic components are needed. For flexibility, Dr. Rogers and his colleagues chose pentacene as their semiconductor, and gold as their wiring. Pentacene is a polymer whose semiconducting properties were discovered only recently. Gold is the most malleable metal known, and one of the best electrical conductors. Although it is pricey, so little is needed that the cost per article is tiny. To make their electronic paper the researchers started with a thin sheet of Mylar, a tough plastic, that was coated with indium-tin oxide (ITO), a transparent electrical conductor. To carve this conductor into a suitable electric circuit, they used an innovation called microcontact printing lithography. This trick involves printing the pattern of the circuit on to the ITO using a rubber stamp. The "ink" in the process is a solvent-resistant chemical that protects this part of the ITO while allowing the rest to be dissolved.

The quest for wisdom is as old as Socrates, but it"s also an up-to-the-minute economic indicator. A contrarian one: when things are going well, you don"t have to go searching for wisdom. It streams nonstop over CNBC, its avatars sit atop the Forbes list of billionaires and each day it proves again the eternal truthsof the free market.Then in duecoursethingsgo to hell;theelites humbly confess their ignorance to Congress or a grand jury, and the search for new patterns begins. Tellingly, scholars date the modern scientific study of wisdom to the work of the American psychologist Vivian Clayton in the malaise-ridden 1970s. Clayton devised the first empirical tests for wisdom, which she defined as the ability to acquire knowledge and analyze it both logically and emotionally—picking up on the work begun by Socrates. So it"s no coincidence that several dozen researchers in fields ranging from neuroscience to art, music and law have just received wisdom-seeking grants under the auspices of the University of Chicago. The $2.7 million program, funded by the Templeton Foundation, is called Defining Wisdom, a name that implies the researchers will know what they were looking for once they find it. Wisdom, according to Robert J. Sternberg of Tufts University, the author of several books on the topic, is still an obscure field with minimal academic cachet. With so much at stake, the program"s directors, psychologists John Cacioppo and Howard Nusbaum, dismissed the traditional approach to wisdom research; rather they cast their nets wide and deep into the pools of academy. The 38 proposals they approved include ones aimed at finding wisdom in computer operations and in classical literature. Starting at the beginning, one scholar observes that "language is the medium by which wisdom-related knowledge is usually conveyed." That sounds self-evident, but another scientist proposes to "explore music as a form of wisdom." "We are trying to think out of the box," says Nusbaum. Cacioppo and Nusbaum dismiss arguments about the inherent circularity of searching for wisdom at the same time as defining it. But they have some preconceptions about what they expect to find. They see "wisdom" in part as a corrective to the "rational choice" pattern of decision making, the foundation of free-market economics. Rational choice holds that everyone"s happiness is best served when people maximize their short-term individual gains, even at the expense of the broad interests of society or the long-term future. That is precisely opposite the approach of, for example, ants, which are entirely indifferent to their individual fates and don"t, as a rule, over-expand out of reckless greed.

Winston Churchill, who fought on the Afghan border in 1897, warned of the dangers of peacekeeping among the Pathans, and of mixing politics and war (46) "Except at harvest-time, when self-preservation enjoins a temporary pause, the Pathan tribes are always engaged in private or public war. Every man is a warrior, a politician and a theologian. Every large house is a real feudal fort...with battlements, turrets and drawbridges. Every village has its defence. Every family cultivates its hate; every clan its feud. "The numerous tribes and combinations of tribes all have their accounts to settle with one another. Nothing is ever forgotten, and very few debts are left unpaid...(47) The life of the Pathan is thus full of interest; and his valleys, nourished alike by endless sunshine and abundant water are fertile enough to yield with little labour the material requirements of a small population. "Into this happy world the nineteenth century brought two new facts: the breech-loading rifle and the British government. The first was an enormous luxury and blessing; the second a continuous trouble. The convenience of the breech-loading, and still more of the magazine rifle, was nowhere more appreciated than in the Indian highlands. (48) A weapon which would kill with accuracy au fifteen hundred yards opened a whole new scene of delights to every family or clan which could acquire it. One could actually remain in one"s own house and fire at one"s neighbor nearly a mile away... "The action of the British government on the other hand was entirely unsatisfactory. The great organizing, advancing, absorbing power to the southward seemed to be little better than a monstrous spoil-sport. "No one would have minded these expeditions if they had simply come had a fight and then gone away again...But towards the end of the nineteenth century these intruders began to make roads through many of the valleys...All along the road people were expected to keep quiet, not to shoot one another. and, above all, not m shoot at travelers along the road. (49) It was too much to ask, and a whole series of quarrels took their origin from this source. "The Political Officers who accompanied the force...were very unpopular with the army officers...(50) They were accused of the severe crime of "shilly-shallying", which being interpreted means doing everything you possibly can before you shoot. We had with us a very brilliant political officer...who was much disliked because he always stopped military operations. Just when we were looking forward to having a splendid fight and all the guns were loaded and everyone keyed up, he would come along and put a stop to it".