The produce departments of the future may look like nothing on earth, and with good reason. Chinese scientists have been growing tomatoes the size of softballs, cucumbers as long as baseball bats and other outsize fruits and vegetables, using seeds that have been shot into space. The seeds are then exposed to seven types of extraterrestrial conditions, from zero gravity and cosmic radiation to subatomic particles. (46) As these space veggies grow back on earth, they are selected for desirable traits—bulk, appearance or certain nutrients—then bred through successive generations to ensure that the mutations are consistent. Chinese scientists don"t understand exactly how a trip into space alters the seeds" DNA and yields such effects, but it"s not just size that changes. (47) Tong Yichao, whose firm, the Beijing Flying Eagle Green Foods Group, has been sending seeds and seedlings aboard Chinese spacecraft since 1999, says it has grown space tomatoes with 27 percent more of the antioxidant beta carotene than ordinary ones, and six-foot-tall cotton plants that produce longer, more flexible threads. Using conventional methods, "a scientist might create just three new plants in his lifetime", says Tong. "We"ve developed more than 50 since 1999". (48) A dozen or so Chinese firms are paying up to $45,000 a gram to place various flora aboard satellites and manned spacecraft. The long-term goal: to feed more people and help endangered species escape extinction. To date, nearly 3,000 botanical species-including garden vegetables, medicinal herbs and flowers—have been sent into orbit and brought back to earth. (49) The commercial promise of China"s space veggies has yet to, er, bear fruit. It"s legal to sell the cosmic produce, and commercial farms have purchased some space plants. But most are being developed in labs or experimental greenhouses because no one wants to go to market before the safety and quality of the produce have been established. Even so, the idea of space flora is proving irresistible to a novelty-loving Chinese public. (50) When Tong displayed a handful of monster space eggplants—the largest of which weighed more than four pounds—at an expo, one disappeared before the show opened. Hot stuff, for sure.

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

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. Here is a guideline to evaluate your current posture. Step in front of a mirror and observe the following. Are you shoulders parallel to the floor or are they inclined to any side? They have to be parallel to the floor and at the same level. Is your chin parallel to the floor? The chin has to be parallel to the floor. Are your ears in line with your shoulders? This helps to keep the head in the right place. Are your knees straight or are you locking them back? The knees should be relaxed and centered, not forward, and not locked-on at the back.B. Once you determine the problem with your posture that is what you need to work on. Try to correct it to get the right posture, you can do a few things yourself and also use a chiropractor. It will take practice. You probably have had many years of bad posture; so it will take time to make the new positions a habit. Practice and practice every time you remember and hold the right position as long as you can.C. If we do not have good posture, we put more weight in some joints and muscles than others and this muses pain. Bad posture affects your health, general well being, and your appearance. If you do not have perfect posture you can improve it. It requires practice, but it is worth it.D. Is your head relaxed, centered, and held back (ears over shoulders)? If your head is forward, backward or tilted to any side it is bad posture. Do you have an arc on your chest? The chest has to be erect, center and a slightly uplifted. Are you arching your back forward or back? There is an arch in the back but is relatively moderate. If yours look bigger, you need to correct your posture. Are your hips at the same level or one is higher than the other? They have to be at the same level. Are your ankles straight? They have to be.E. The best thing to do when you experience lower back pain or other pain when correcting your posture is to go to a doctor or a chiropractor to eliminate the possibility of any other health problems. However, if you cannot go, you may try to strengthen you abdominal muscles. These muscles are the ones that help us to keep straight and up. You can strengthen these muscles with abdominal exercises. The same exercises you do to tighten your tummy: crunches.F. Yoga and ballet exercises are probably the best way to improve your posture because they work the muscles that suffer the most from poor posture. Swimming is also a great option.G. Think about one physical attribute that all models and most celebrities have in common. You never have seen anybody on the red carpet walking with a slouched back. These people know how to walk: they have good posture. This article discusses how to have a good posture. Many of us spend long hours at our desk and forget about good posture. Good posture is important not only for appearance, but also for health reasons.Order: G is the first paragraph and F is the last.

I was addressing a small gathering in a suburban Virginia living room—a women" s group that had invited men to join them. Throughout the evening, one man had been particularly talkative, frequently offering ideas and anecdotes,while his wife sat silently beside him on the couch. Toward the end of the evening, I commented that women frequently complain that their husbands don"t talk to them. This man quickly nodded in agreement He gestured toward his wife and said, "She"s the talker in our family." The room burst into laughter; the man looked puzzled and hurt. "It" s true," he explained. "When I come home from work I have nothing to say. If she didn"t keep the conversation going, we"d spend the whole evening in silence." This episode crystallizes the irony that although American men tend to talk more than women in public situations, they often talk less at home. And this pattern is wreaking havoc with marriage. The pattern was observed by political scientist Andrew Hacker in the late 1970s. Sociologist Catherine Kohler Riessman reports in her new book Divorce Talk that most of the women she interviewed—but only a few of the men—gave lack of communication as the reason for their divorces. Given the current divorce rate of nearly 50 percent, that amounts to millions of cases in the United States every year—a virtual epidemic of failed conversation. In my own research, complaints from women about their husbands most often focused not on tangible inequities such as having given up the chance for a career to accompany a husband to his, or doing far more than their share of daily life-support work like cleaning, cooking and social arrangements. Instead, they focused on communication: "He doesn"t listen to me." "He doesn"t talk to me." I found, as Hacker observed years before, that most wives want their husbands to be, first and foremost, conversational partners, but few husbands share this expectation of their wives. In short, the image that best represents the current crisis is the stereotypical cartoon scene of a man sitting at the breakfast table with a newspaper held up in front of his face, while a woman glares at the back of it, wanting to talk.

Why does cream go bad faster than butter? Some researchers think they have the answer, and it comes down to the structure of the food, not its chemical composition—a finding that could help rid some processed foods of chemical preservatives.

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

So far as I know, Miss Hannah Arendt was the first person to define the essential difference between work and labor. To be happy, a man must feel, firstly, free and, secondly, important. He cannot be really happy if he is compelled by society to do what he does not enjoy doing, or if what he enjoys doing is ignored by society as of no value or importance. In a society where slavery in the strict sense has been abolished, the sign that what a man does is of social value is that he is paid money to do it, but a laborer today can rightly be called a wage slave. A man is a laborer if the job society offers him is of no interest to himself but he is compelled to take it by the necessity of earning a living and supporting his family. The antithesis to labor is play. When we play a game, we enjoy what we are doing, otherwise we should not play it, but it is a purely private activity; society could not care less whether we play it or not. Between labor and play stands work. A man is a worker if he is personally interested in the job which society pays him to do; what from the point of view of society is necessary labor is from his own point of view voluntary play. Whether a job is to be classified as labor or work depends, not on the job itself, but on the tastes of the individual who undertakes it. The difference does not, for example, coincide with the difference between a manual and a mental job; a gardener: or a cobbler may be a worker, a bank clerk a laborer, which a means can be seen from his attitude toward leisure. To a worker, leisure means simply the hours he needs to relax and rest in order to work efficiently. He is therefore more likely to take too little leisure than too much; workers die of coronaries and forget their wives" birthdays. To the laborer, on the other hand, leisure means freedom from compulsion, so that it is natural for him to imagine that the fewer hours he has to spend laboring, and the more hours he is free to play, the better. What percentage of the population in a modem technological society are, like myself, in the fortunate position of being workers? At a guess I would say sixteen percent, and I do not think that figure is likely to get bigger in the future. Technology and the division of labor have done two things: by eliminating in many fields the need for special strength or skill, they have made a very large number of paid occupations which formerly were enjoyable work into boring labor, and by increasing productivity they have reduced the number of necessary laboring hours. It is already possible to imagine a society in which the majority of the population, that is to say, its laborers, will have almost as much leisure as in earlier times was enjoyed by the aristocracy. When one recalls how aristocracies in the past actually behaved, the prospect is not cheerful. Indeed, the problem of dealing with boredom may be even more difficult for such a future mass society than it was for aristocracies. The latter, for example, ritualized their time; there was a season to shoot grouse, a season to spend in town, etc. The masses are more likely to replace an unchanging ritual by fashion which it will be in the economic interest of certain people to change as often as possible. Again, the masses cannot go in for hunting, for very soon there would be no animals left to hunt. For other aristocratic amusements like gambling, dueling, and warfare, it may be only too, easy to find equivalents in dangerous driving, drag-taking, and senseless acts of violence. Workers seldom commit acts of violence, because they can put their aggression into their work, be it physical like the work of a smith, or mental like the work of a scientist or an artist. The role of aggression in mental work is aptly expressed by the phrase" getting one"s teeth into a problem".

BSection III Writing/B

Nuclear fission is the splitting of the nucleus of an atom. Only a few elements are suitable for use in this way, the most important ones being Uranium-235, Uranium-233, and Plutonium-239. When a nucleus of one of these elements is struck by a free neutron it breaks down into two lighter nuclei which fly apart at high speed, colliding with surrounding atoms. Their kinetic energy is converted into heat energy. At the same time, two or three free neutrons are released and one of them enters the nucleus of a neighbouring atom, causing fission to occur again; and so on. The reaction spreads very quickly, with more and more heat energy released. This is called a "chain" reaction because the splitting of each nucleus is linked to another, and another and another. If this reaction takes place in an atomic bomb, where nothing is done to slow it down, the result is a violent explosion that can destroy a town in a few seconds. Fission can also, however, take place within a construction called a nuclear reactor, or atomic pile. Here the highly fissile material (U-235, U-233, Pu-239) is surrounded by a substance that is non-fissile, for instance graphite. This material is called a moderator. The neutrons lose some of their energy and speed through colliding with the atoms of the moderator. Energy—heat energy—is still created on an enormous scale, but no expansion takes place. The moderator has another function: by slowing down the speed of the free neutrons, it makes it more likely that one of them will collide with the nucleus of a neighbouring atom to continue the chain reaction. The chief advantage of nuclear energy is that it does not depend on any local factors. A nuclear reactor, unlike an oil-well or a coalmine, does not have to be sited on top of a fossil-fuel source; unlike the solar energy unit, it does not have to go out of production when the sun is not shining; unlike hydro-electric power, it does not depend on a large flow of water which may be reduced during some seasons of the year. With an atomic power station, the only limiting factor is that of safety. In the opposite process, nuclear fusion, two nuclei come together, to form a new nucleus of a different kind and this process also releases energy on an enormous scale. Fusion can only occur under conditions of very great heat—at least 50,000,000 degrees Celsius. (The temperature at the centre of the sun is estimated as 130,000,000 degrees Celsius.) A fusion reaction on earth has already been created—the hydrogen bomb. This is an uncontrolled reaction. It is not yet possible to produce a controlled fusion reaction that can be used for the production of useful energy. Nuclear energy can be thought of as a kind of square, three of the quarters of the square are known and used, but the fourth cannot yet be used.

BSection III Writing/B

The euro represents a political leap of faith that Europe"s leaders hope will boost the continent"s economic power. Even if it succeeds in that regard, however, the single currency may do little to stop the brain drain of young scientist from the continent. The three largest nations within "Euroland"—Germany, France and Italy—each boast a rich scientific heritage. (46) But many of their young scientific high flyers cast their eyes across the Atlantic, or at least across the English Channel, when picturing their future careers. The dominance of the English language is a powerful factor, but it is not the sole reason for the net movement of scientific talent to North America and Britain. Also important are the highly individual academic career ladders that persist in different continent European countries. Employment rules and social security arrangements are also handled differently between countries. The fact "that Euroland is such an academic mess tends to discourage foreigners, and makes it difficult for natives who have gone abroad to return. Some progress is being made. The European Commission has supported various programmers to promote the movement of young researchers between the European countries agreed to harmonize aspects of their higher-education systems. (47) These countries have pledged to introduce by 2010 comparable systems of Bachelors and Masters degrees, and a system of academic credits that will allow students to move between countries. But despite these welcome initiatives, national isolation remains the rule, and no identifiable "Euroland" scientific career is in sight. It is no wonder that the continent"s young scientists are carrying out for more consideration to be paid to their troubles. (48) In countries such as Italy and Spain, for instance, the academic powers-that-be seem unwilling to reform recruitment systems that favour those who stay at home over—often stronger—candidates who have sought experience in foreign labs. Even programmes established with the goal of bringing back talented scientists working abroad have been destroyed in this way. Elsewhere, attempts to address national peculiarity have left some problems unsolved. (49) Germany, for instance, the dominant producer of PhDs in Europe, has embarked on an academic reform aimed at creating better opportunities for young scientists. But there are concerns that the reforms have not been adequately resourced, and also that they will leave trapped those researchers who have been employed on fixed-term contracts for more than 12 years. They must find a permanent post, or leave academia. The French government, meanwhile, recently opened up more tenured posts in response to fears about creating a "lost generation" of researchers, who would not be available to replace the ageing baby-boomer generation. But it has not tackled the underlying problem of a system that gives postdocs no official social security status or contract rights, and so forces many French nationals wanting postdoctoral experience to go abroad. (50) If Euroland"s best young minds are to move between its nations with the same enthusiasm that currently lures them to North America and Britain, university administrators, immigration offices and society at large must learn that foreign researchers are not troublesome inconveniencies, but highly motivated workers who offer their skills to be the benefit of their hosts.

In recent years, railroads have been combining with each other, merging into super systems, causing heightened concerns about monopoly. As recently as 1995, the top four railroads accounted for under 70 percent of the total ton-miles moved by rails. Next year, after a series of mergers is completed, just four railroads will control well over 90 percent of all the freight moved by major rail carriers. Supporters of the new super systems argue that these mergers will allow for substantial cost reductions and better coordinated service. Any threat of monopoly, they argue, is removed by fierce competition from trucks. But many shippers complain that for heavy bulk commodities traveling long distances, such as coal, chemicals, and grain, trucking is too costly and the railroads therefore have them by the throat. The vast consolidation within the rail industry means that most shippers are served by only one rail company. Railroads typically charge such "captive" shippers 20 to 30 percent more than they do when another railroad is competing for the business. Shippers who feel they are being overcharged have the right to appeal to the federal government"s Surface Transportation Board for rate relief, but the process is expensive, time consuming, and will work only in truly extreme cases. Railroads justify rate discrimination against captive shippers on the grounds that in the long run it reduces everyone" s cost. If railroads charged all customers the same average rate, they argue, shippers who have the option of switching to trucks or other forms of transportation would do so, leaving remaining customers to shoulder the cost of keeping up the line. It"s a theory to which many economists subscribe, but in practice it often leaves railroads in the position of determining which companies will flourish and which will fail. "Do we really want railroads to be the arbiters of who wins and who loses in the marketplace?" asks Martin Bercovici, a Washington lawyer who frequently represents shipper. Many captive shippers also worry they will soon be hit with a round of huge rate increases. The railroad industry as a whole, despite its brightening fortunes, still does not earn enough to cover the cost of the capital it must invest to keep up with its surging traffic. Yet railroads continue to borrow billions to acquire one another, with Wall Street cheering them on. Consider the $10.2 billion bid by Norfolk Southern and CSX to acquire Conrail this year. Conrail"s net railway operating income in 1996 was just $427 million, less than half of the carrying costs of the transaction. Who"s going to pay for the rest of the bill? Many captive shippers fear that they will, as Norfolk Southern and CSX increase their grip on the market.

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

In 1971, according to the Association of Departments of English, about eight out of every 100 bachelor"s degrees were awarded to English majors. Today, that figure stands at just a shade over four out of 100, with an equally precipitous decline evident in foreign literature enrollments as well. As the nation"s lit departments go begging for students, they would do well to consult John Carey"s brilliant, funny, and insightful What Good Are the Arts, which makes a compelling and persuasive case that creative expression—especially the written word—is absolutely central to a rich and thoughtful life. "Literature does not make you a better person, though it may help you to criticize what you are," writes Carey, a former Oxford professor and author of, among other books, 1992"s The Intellectuals and the Masses, a stunning reappraisal of British modernists as hate-filled class warriors terrified by the breakdown of social hierarchy. " But it enlarges your mind, and it gives you thoughts, words and rhythms that will last you for life. " Ironically, in making his case for the arts, Carey spends most of his book tearing down what he considers specious justifications for them. Where Kant, Hegel and Schopenhauer argued for art as sacred, spiritual and transcendent, Carey insists simply that "anything can be a work of art" and that standards of taste and beauty are irreducibly subjective. Nor does he have any sympathy for left-wing critics of mass art such as Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin, who viewed popular culture as a means of social control. Similarly, new theories about aesthetics rooted in cognitive science and evolutionary psychology, while interesting, fail to explain the wide range of individual responses to specific pieces of art, not to mention changing tastes over time. If Carey finds no theory of the arts fully convincing, he remains their adamant champion. In what smacks of special pleading, Carey contends that literature is first among the arts, mainly because it is the only art that is explicitly capable of reasoning. The chief implication of this is that literature can moralize in the best way possible. Not in a William Bennett Book of Virtues sense, which holds that if people consume the right sort of messages, they will be upright citizens. Rather, Carey writes that the world"s boundless literary canon "is a field of comparisons and contrasts, spreading infinitely outwards", challenging readers to be more thoughtful about the past from which they spring, the present in which they live, and the future which they will create.

BPart B/B

BPart B/B

On a five to three vote, the Supreme Court knocked out much of Arizona" s immigration law Monday— a modest policy victory for the Obama Administration. But on the more important matter of the Constitution, the decision was an 8-0 defeat for the Administration"s effort to upset the balance of power between the federal government and the states. In Arizona v. United States, the majority overturned three of the four contested provisions of Arizona" s" controversial plan to have state and local police enforce federal immigration law. The Constitutional principles that Washington alone has the power to "establish a uniform Rule of Naturalization" and that federal laws precede state laws are noncontroversial. Arizona had attempted to fashion state policies that ran parallel to the existing federal ones. Justice Anthony Kennedy Joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and the Court"s liberals, ruled that the state flew too close to the federal sun. On the overturned provisions the majority held the congress had deliberately "occupied the field" and Arizona had thus intruded on the federal"s privileged powers. However, the Justices said that Arizona police would be allowed to verity the legal status of people who come in contact with law enforcement. That"s because Congress has always envisioned joint federal-state immigration enforcement and explicitly encourages state officers to share information and cooperate with federal colleagues. Two of the three objecting Justice—Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas—agreed with this Constitutional logic but disagreed about which Arizona rules conflicted with the federal statute. The only major objection came from Justice Antonin Scalia, who offered an even more robust defense of state privileges going back to the Alien and Sedition Acts. The 8-0 objection to President Obama turns on what Justice Samuel Alito describes in his objection as "a shocking assertion of federal executive power". The White House argued that Arizona"s laws conflicted with its enforcement priorities, even if state laws complied with federal statutes to the letter. In effect, the White House claimed that it could invalidate any otherwise legitimate state law that it disagrees with. Some powers do belong exclusively to the federal government, and control of citizenship and the borders is among them. But if Congress wanted to prevent states from using their own resources to check immigration status, it could. It never did so. The administration was in essence asserting that because it didn"t want to carry out Congress"s immigration wishes, no state should be allowed to do so either. Every Justice rightly rejected this remarkable claim.

Only two animals have entered the human household otherwise than as prisoners and become domesticated by other means than those of enforced servilities: the dog and the cat. Two things they have in common, namely, that both belong to the order of carnivores and both serve man in their capacity of hunters. In all other characteristics, above all in the manner of their association with man, they are as different as the night from the day. There is no domestic animal which has so rapidly altered its whole way of living, indeed its whole sphere of interests, that has become domestic in so true a sense as the dog; and there is no animal that, in the course of its century old association with man, has altered so little as the cat. There is some truth in the assertion that the cat, with the exception of a few luxury breeds, such as Angoras, Persians and Siamese, is no domestic animal but a completely wild being. Maintaining its full independence it has taken up its abode in the houses and outhouses of man, for the simple reason that there are more mice they"re than elsewhere: The whole charm of the dog lies in the depth of the friendship and the strength of the spiritual ties with which he has bound himself to man, but the appeal of the cat lies in the very fact that she has formed no close bond with him, that she has the uncompromising independence of a tiger or a leopard while she is hunting in his stables and barns; that she still remain mysterious and remote when she is rubbing herself gently against the legs of her mistress or purring contentedly in front of the fire. The purring cat is, for me, a symbol of the heart side and the hidden security, which it stands for. I should no more like to be without a cat, in my home than to be without the dog that trots behind me in field or street, since my earliest youth I have always had dogs and cats about me. Business like friends have advised me to write a dog book and a cat book separately, because dog lovers often dislike cats and cat lovers frequently abhor dogs. But I consider, it the finest test of genuine love and understanding of animals if a person has sympathies for both these creatures, and can appreciate in each its own special virtue.

Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge. (46) Its goal is to find out how the world works, to seek what regularities there may be, to penetrate to the connections of things—from subnuclear particles, which may be the constituents of all matter, to living organisms, the human social community, and hence to the cosmos as a whole. Our intuition is by no means an infallible guide. Our perceptions may be distorted by training and prejudice or merely because of the limitations of the phenomena of the world. (47) Even so straightforward a question as whether in the absence of friction a pound of lead falls faster than a gram of fluff was answered incorrectly by Aristotle and almost everyone else before the time of Galileo. Science is based on experiment, on a willingness to challenge old dogma, on an openness to see the universe as it really is. Accordingly, science sometimes requires courage—at the very least the courage to question the conventional wisdom. (48) Beyond this the main trick of science is to really think of something: the shape of clouds and their occasional sharp bottom edges at the same altitude everywhere in the sky; the formation of a dewdrop on a leaf; the origin of a name or a word; the reason for human social customs—the incest taboo, for example; how it is that a lens in sunlight can make paper burn; how a "walking stick" got to look so much like a twig; why the Moon seems to follow us as we walk; what prevents us from digging a hole down to the center of the Earth; what the definition is of "down" on a spherical earth; how it is possible for the body to convert yesterday"s lunch into today"s muscle and sinew; or how far is up—does the universe go on forever, or if it does not, is there any meaning to the question of what lies on the other side? Some of these questions are pretty easy. Others, especially the last, are mysteries to which no one even today knows the answer. They are natural questions to ask. (49) Every culture has posed such questions in one way or another, and almost always the proposed answers are in the nature of "Just So Stories", attempted explanations divorced from experiment, or even from careful comparative observations. But the scientific cast of mind examines the world critically as if many alternative worlds might exist, as if other things might be here which are not. Then we are forced to ask why what we see is present and not something else. Why are the Sun and the Moon and the planets spheres? Why not pyramids, or cubes, or dodecahedra? Why not irregular, jumbly shapes? Why so symmetrical, worlds? (50) If you spend any time spinning hypotheses, checking to see whether they make sense, whether they conform to what else we know, thinking of tests you can pose to substantiate or deflate your hypotheses, you will find yourself doing science. And as you come to practice this habit of thought more and more you will get better and better at it.

Many things make people think artists are weird. But the weirdest may be this: artists" only job is to explore emotions, and yet they choose to focus on the ones that feel bad. This wasn"t always so. The earliest forms of art, like painting and music, are those best suited for expressing joy. But somewhere from the 19th century onward, more artists began seeing happiness as meaningless, phony or, worst of all, boring, as we went from Wordsworth"s daffodils to Baudelaire"s flowers of evil. You could argue that art became more skeptical of happiness because modern times have seen so much misery. But it"s not as if earlier times didn"t know perpetual war, disaster and the massacre of innocents.The reason, in fact, may be just the opposite: there is too much damn happiness in the world today. After all, what is the one modern form of expression almost completely dedicated to depicting happiness? Advertising. The rise of anti-happy art almost exactly tracks the emergence of mass media, and with it, a commercial culture in which happiness is not just an ideal but an ideology. People in earlier eras were surrounded by reminders of misery. They worked until exhausted, lived with few protections and died young. In the West, before mass communication and literacy, the most powerful mass medium was the church, which reminded worshippers that their souls were in danger and that they would someday be meat for worms. Given all this, they did not exactly need their art to be a bummer too. Today the messages the average Westerner is surrounded with are not religious but commercial, and forever happy. Fast-food eaters, news anchors, text messengers, all smiling, smiling, smiling. Our magazines feature beaming celebrities and happy families in perfect homes. And since these messages have an agenda—to lure us to open our wallets—they make the very idea of happiness seem unreliable. "Celebrate!"commanded the ads for the arthritis drug Celebrex, before we found out it could increase the risk of heart attacks. But what we forget—what our economy depends on us forgetting—is that happiness is more than pleasure without pain. The things that bring the greatest joy carry the greatest potential for loss and disappointment. Today, surrounded by promises of easy happiness, we need art to tell us, as religion once did, Memento mori: remember that you will die, that everything ends, and that happiness comes not in denying this but in living with it. It"s a message even more bitter than a clove cigarette, yet, somehow, a breath of fresh air.