单选题Education is all enormous and expensive part of American life. Its size is matched by its variety. Differences in American schools compared with those found in the majority of other countries lie in the fact that education here has long been intended for everyone—not just for a privileged elite. Schools are expected to meet the needs of every child, regardless of ability, and also the needs of society itself. This means that public schools offer more than academic subjects. It surprises many people when they come here to find high schools offering such courses as typing, sewing, radio repair, computer programming or driver training, along with traditional academic subjects such as mathematics, history, and languages. Students choose their curricula depending on their interests, future goals, and level of ability. The underlying goal of American education is to develop every child to the utmost of his or her own possibilities, and to give each one a sense of civic (公民的) and community consciousness. Schools have traditionally played an important role in creating national unity and "Americanizing" the millions of immigrants who have poured into this country from many different backgrounds and origins. Schools still play a large role in the community, especially in the small towns. The approach to teaching may seem unfamiliar to many, not only because it is informal, but also because there is not much emphasis on learning facts. Instead, Americans try to teach their children to think for themselves and to develop their own intellectual and creative abilities. Students spend much time, learning how to use resource materials, libraries, statistics and computers. Americans believe that if children are taught to reason well and to research well, they will be able to find whatever facts they need throughout the rest of their lives. Knowing how to solve problems is considered more important than the accumulation of facts. This is America"s answer to the searching question that thoughtful parents all over the world are asking themselves in the fast-moving time. "How can one prepare today"s child for a tomorrow that one can neither predict nor understand?"

单选题Yawning can be a problem at the office for Lindsay Eierman, which makes her embarrassed. "I"ve explained, "I"m sorry, I didn"t get much sleep last night,"" says Ms Eierman, a 26-year-old social worker from Durham, North Carolina. But a lack of sleep may not be the problem. Researchers are starting to unravel the mystery surrounding the yawn, one of the most common and often embarrassing behaviours. Yawning, they have discovered, is much more complicated than previously thought. Although all yawns look the same, they appear to have many different causes and to serve a variety of functions. Yawning is believed to be a means to keep our brains alert in times of stress. Contagious yawning appears to have evolved in many animal species as a way to protect family and friends, by keeping everyone in the group vigilant. Changes in brain chemistry trigger yawns, which typically last about six seconds and often occur in clusters. To unravel the mystery of yawning, scientists built upon early, observed clues. Yawning tends to occur more in summer. Most people yawn upon seeing someone else do it, but infants and people with autism or schizophrenia aren"t so affected by this contagion effect. And certain people yawn at surprising times, like parachutists who are about to jump out of a plane or Olympic athletes getting ready to compete. A leading hypothesis is that yawning plays an important role in keeping the brain at its cool, optimal working temperature. The brain is particularly sensitive to overheating, according to Andrew Gallup, an assistant professor of psychology at the State University of New York at Oneonta. Reaction times slow and memory wanes when the brain"s temperature varies even less than a degree from the ideal 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit. There are some practical applications. Dr. Gallup said managers might want to keep in mind the brain-cooling role of yawning when a meeting is long and boring. "One way to diminish yawning frequency in an office would be to keep it air-conditioned. If it"s very cold in the room, yawning rates are going to be quite low," Dr. Gallup said.

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

单选题There were some consistent patterns among the heavier readers: For the younger children— ages 6 to 11—being read aloud to regularly and having restricted online time were correlated with frequent reading; for the older children—ages 12 to 17—one of the largest predictors was whether they had time to read on their own during the school day. The finding about reading aloud to children long after toddlerhood may come as a surprise to some parents who read books to children at bedtime when they were very young but then tapered off. Last summer, the American Academy of Pediatrics announced a new policy recommending that all parents read to their children from birth. "A lot of parents assume that once kids begin to read independently, that now that is the best thing for them to do," said Maggie McGuire, the vice president for a website for parents operated by Scholastic. But reading aloud through elementary school seemed to be connected to a love of reading generally. According to the report, 41 percent of frequent readers ages 6 to 10 were read aloud to at home, while only 13 percent of infrequent readers were being read to. Of course, children who love to read are generally immersed in households with lots of books and parents who like to read. So while parents who read to their children later in elementary school may encourage those children to become frequent readers on their own, such behavior can also result from "a whole constellation of other things that goes on in those families," said Timothy Shanahan, a past president of the International Reading Association. There is not yet strong research that connects reading aloud at older ages to improved reading comprehension. But some literacy experts said that when parents or teachers read aloud to children even after they can read themselves, the children can hear more complex words or stories than they might tackle themselves. "It"s this idea of marinating children in higher-level vocabulary," said Pare Allyn, founder of LitWorld.Org, a nonprofit group that works to increase literacy among young people. "The read-aloud can really lift the child." Other literacy experts say the real value of reading to children is helping to develop background knowledge in all kinds of topics as well as exposure to sophisticated language.

单选题When it comes to the slowing economy, Ellen Spero isn't biting her nails just yet. But the 47- year-old manicurist isn't cutting, filling or polishing as many nails as she'd like to, either. Most of her clients spend $12 to $50 weekly, but last month two longtime customers suddenly stopped showing up. Spero blames the softening economy. "I'm a good economic indicator," she says. "I provide a service that people can do without when they're concerned about saving some dollars." So Spero is downscaling, shopping at middle-brow Dillard's department store near her suburban Cleveland home, instead of Neiman Marcus. "I don't know if other clients are going to abandon me, too", she says. Even before Alan Greenspan's admission that America's red-hot economy is cooling, lots of working folks had already seen signs of the slowdown themselves. From car dealerships to Gap outlets, sales have been lagging for months as shoppers temper their spending. For retailers, who last year took in 24 percent of their revenue between Thanksgiving and Christmas, the cautious approach is coming at a crucial time. Already, experts say, holiday sales are off 7 percent from last year's pace. But don't sound any alarms just yet. Consumers seem only concerned, not panicked, and many say they remain optimistic about the economy's long-term prospects, even as they do some modest belt- tightening. Consumers say they're not in despair because, despite the dreadful headlines, their own fortunes still feel pretty good. Home prices are holding steady in most regions. In Manhattan, "there's a new gold rush happening in the $4 million to $10 million range, predominantly fed by Wall Street bonuses," says broker Barbara Corcoran. In San Francisco, prices are still rising even as frenzied overbidding quiets. "Instead of 20 to 30 offers, now maybe you only get two or three," says John Tealdi, a Bay Area real-estate broker. And most folks still feel pretty comfortable about their ability to find and keep a job. Many folks see silver linings to this slowdown. Potential home buyers would cheer for lower interest rates. Employers wouldn't mind a little fewer bubbles in the job market. Many consumers seem to have been influenced by stock-market swings, which investors now view as a necessary ingredient to a sustained boom. Diners might see an upside, too. Getting a table at Manhattan's hot new Alain Ducasse restaurant need to be impossible. Not anymore. For that, Greenspan & Co. may still be worth toasting.

单选题 Talk to any parent of a student who took an adventurous gap year (a year between school and university when some students earn money, travel, etc. ) and a misty look will come into their eyes. There are some disasters and even the most motivated, organized gap student does require family back-up, financial, emotional and physical. The parental mistiness is not just about the brilliant experience that has matured their offspring; it is vicarious living. We all wish pre-university gap years had been the fashion in our day. We can see how much tougher our kids become; how much more prepared to benefit from university or to decide positively that they are going to do something other than a degree. Gap years are fashionable, as is reflected in the huge growth in the number of charities and private companies offering them. Pictures of Prince William toiling in Chile have helped, but the trend has been gathering steam for a decade. The range of gap packages starts with backpacking, includes working with charities, building hospitals and schools and, very commonly, working as a language assistant, teaching English. With this trend, however, comes a danger. Once parents feel that a well structured year is essential to their would-be undergraduates' progress to a better university, a good degree, an impressive CV and well paid employment, as the gap companies blurbs suggest it might be, then parents will start organizing and paying for the gaps. Where there are disasters, according to Richard Oliver, director of the gap companies umbrella organization, the Year Out Group, it is usually because of poor planning. That can be the fault of the company or of the student, he says, but the best insurance is thoughtful preparation. "When people get it wrong, it is usually medical or, especially among girls, it is that they have not been away from home before or because expectation does not match reality. " The point of a gap year is that it should be the time when the school leaver gets to do the thing that he or she fancies. Kids don't mature if mum and dad decide how they are going to mature. If the 18-year-old's way of maturing is to slob out on Hampstead Heath soaking up sunshine or spending a year working with fishermen in Cornwall, then that's what will be productive for that person. The consensus, however, is that some structure is an advantage and that the prime mover needs to be the student. The 18-year-old who was dispatched by his parents at two weeks' notice to Canada to learn to be a snowboarding instructor at a cost of ￡5,800, probably came back with little more than a hangover. The 18-year-old on the same package who worked for his fare and spent the rest of his year instructing in resorts from New Zealand to Switzerland, and came back to apply for university, is the positive counterbalance.

单选题 Names have gained increasing importance in the competitive world of higher education. As colleges strive for market share, they are looking for names that project the image they want or reflect the changes they hope to make. Trenton State College, for example, became the College of New Jersey 9 years ago when it began raising admissions standards and appealing to students from throughout the state. "All I hear in higher education is, brand, brand, brand," said Tim Westerbeck, who specializes in branding and is managing director of Lipman Hearne, a marketing firm based in Chicago that works with universities and other nonprofit organizations. "There has been a sea change over the last 10 years. Marketing used to be almost a dirty word in higher education." Not all efforts at name changes are successful, of course. In 1997, the New School for Social Research became New School University to reflect its growth into a collection of eight colleges, offering a list of majors that includes psychology, music, urban studies and management. But New Yorkers continued to call it the New School. Now, after spending an undisclosed sum on an online survey and a marketing consultant's creation of "naming structures," "brand architecture" and "identity systems," the university has come up with a new name: the New School. Beginning Monday, it will adopt new logos (标志), banners, business cards and even new names for the individual colleges, all to include the words "the New School". Changes in names generally reveal significant shifts in how a college wants to be perceived. In altering its name from Cal State, Hayward, to Cal State, East Bay, the university hoped to project its expanding role in two mostly suburban counties east of San Francisco. The University of Southern Colorado, a state institution, became Colorado State University at Pueblo two years ago, hoping to highlight many internal changes, including offering more graduate programs and setting higher admissions standards. Beaver College turned itself into Arcadia University in 2001 for several reasons: to break the connection with its past as a women's college, to promote its growth into a full-fledged (完全成熟) university and, officials acknowledged, to eliminate some jokes about the college's old name on late-night television and "morning zoo" radio shows. Many college officials said changing a name and image could produce substantial results. At Arcadia, in addition to the rise in applications, the average student's test score has increased by 60 points, Juli Roebeck, an Arcadia spokeswoman, said.

单选题Scientists have long argued over the relative contributions of practice and native talent to the development of elite performance. This debate swings back and forth every century, it seems, but a paper in the current issue of the journal Psychological Science illustrates where the discussion now stands and hints—more tantalizingly, for people who just want to do their best—at where the research will go next. The value-of-practice debate has reached a stalemate. In a landmark 1993 study of musicians, a research team led by K. Anders Ericsson found that practice time explained almost all the difference (about 80 percent) between elite performers and committed amateurs. The finding rippled quickly through the popular culture, perhaps most visibly as the apparent inspiration for the "10,000-hour rule" in Malcolm Gladwell"s best-selling "Outliers"—a rough average of the amount of practice time required for expert performance. The new paper, the most comprehensive review of relevant research to date, comes to a different conclusion. Compiling results from 88 studies across a wide range of skills, it estimates that practice time explains about 20 percent to 25 percent of the difference in performance in music, sports and games like chess. In academics, the number is much lower—4 percent—in part because it"s hard to assess the effect of previous knowledge, the authors wrote. One of those people, Dr. Ericsson, had by last week already written his critique of the new review. He points out that the paper uses a definition of practice that includes a variety of related activities, including playing music or sports for fun or playing in a group. But his own studies focused on what he calls deliberate practice: one-on-one lessons in which an instructor pushes a student continually, gives immediate feedback and focuses on weak spots. "If you throw all these kinds of practice into one big soup, of course you are going to reduce the effect of deliberate practice," he said in a telephone interview. Zach Hambrick, a co-author of the paper of the journal Psychological Science , said that using Dr. Ericsson"s definition of practice would not change the results much, if at all, and partisans on both sides have staked out positions. Like most branches of the nature-nurture debate, this one has produced multiple camps, whose estimates of the effects of practice vary by as much as 50 percentage points.

单选题Ellen Pao spent the last few years spotlighting the technology industry"s lack of diversity, in court and beyond. Erica Baker caused a stir at Google when she started a spreadsheet last year for employees to share their salaries, highlighting the pay disparities between those of different genders doing the same job. Laura I. Gómez founded a start-up focused on improving diversity in the hiring process. Now the three are starting an effort to collect and share data to help diversify the rank-and-file employees who make up tech companies. The nonprofit venture, called Project Include, was unveiled on Tuesday. As part of Project Include, the group plans to extract commitments from tech companies to track the diversity of their work forces over time and eventually share that data with other start-ups. The effort will focus on start-ups that employ 25 to 1,000 workers, in the hope of spurring the companies to think about equality sooner rather than later. The project will also ask for participation from venture capital firms that advise and mentor the start-ups. Project Include aims to have 18 companies as part of its first cohort; a few have already signed up. The group will meet regularly for seven months to define and track specific metrics. At the end of that period, the group will publish an anonymized set of results to show the progress—or lack thereof—that the start-ups have made around diversity. The group"s push is intended to cut through tech"s slow pace of change on diversity. Large companies, including Google, Facebook and Microsoft, have openly admitted their failings in creating diverse work forces, and some have started programs to move the needle. But that has not seemed to spur much movement in views on the issue. In December, for instance, Michael Moritz, a partner at the venture capital firm Sequoia Capital, made headlines when he said in an interview that his firm—which had no female investment partners in the United States—would focus on hiring women but would not "lower its standards" to do so. He also said the firm was blind to gender and race. "It is this incredibly self-serving mythology that we are the best and the brightest, and that the best ideas rise to the top and will get funded," said Ms. Kapor Klein, noting there is plenty of data to show that minority access to tech programs and networks is worse than that of white males. "Despite an avalanche of rigorous data to the contrary, the belief in pure meritocracy persists."

单选题The Supreme Court"s decisions on physician-assisted suicide carry important implications for how medicine seeks to relieve dying patients of pain and suffering. Although it ruled that there is no constitutional right to physician-assisted suicide, the Court in effect supported the medical principle of "double effect", a centuries-old moral principle holding that an action having two effects—a good one that is intended and a harmful one that is foreseen—is permissible if the actor intends only the good effect. Doctors have used that principle in recent years to justify using high doses of morphine to control terminally ill patients" pain, even though increasing dosages will eventually kill the patient. Nancy Dubler, director of Montefiore Medical Center, contends that the principle will shield doctors who "until now have very, very strongly insisted that they could not give patients sufficient mediation to control their pain if that might hasten death." George Annas, chair of the health law department at Boston University, maintains that, as long as a doctor prescribes a drug for a legitimate medical purpose, the doctor has done nothing illegal even if the patient uses the drug to hasten death. "It"s like surgery," he says. "We don"t call those deaths homicides because the doctors didn"t intend to kill their patients, although they risked their death. If you"re a physician, you can risk your patient"s suicide as long as you don"t intend their suicide." On another level, many in the medical community acknowledge that the assisted-suicide debate has been fueled in part by the despair of patients for whom modem medicine has prolonged the physical agony of dying. Just three weeks before the Court"s ruling on physician-assisted suicide, the National Academy of Science (NAS) released a two-volume report, Approaching Death: Improving Care at the End of Life. It identifies the under treatment of pain and the aggressive use of "ineffectual and forced medical procedures that may prolong and even dishonor the period of dying" as the twin problems of end-of-life care. The profession is taking steps to require young doctors to train in hospices, to test knowledge of aggressive pain management therapies, to develop a Medicare billing code for hospital-based care, and to develop new standards for assessing and treating pain at the end of life. Annas says lawyers can play a key role in insisting that these well-meaning medical initiatives translate into better care. "Large numbers of physicians seem unconcerned with the pain their patients are needlessly and predictably suffering," to the extent that it constitutes "systematic patient abuse". He says medical licensing boards "must make it clear.., that painful deaths are presumptively ones that are incompetently managed and should result in license suspension. "

单选题 In the idealized version of how science is done, facts about the world are waiting to be observed and collected by objective researchers who use the scientific method to carry out their work. But in the everyday practice of science, discovery frequently follows an ambiguous and complicated route. We aim to be objective, but we cannot escape the context of our unique life experience. Prior knowledge and interest influence what we experience, what we think our experiences mean, and the subsequent actions we take. Opportunities for misinterpretation, error, and self-deception abound. Consequently, discovery claims should be thought of as proto science. Similar to newly staked mining claims, they are full of potential. But it takes collective scrutiny and acceptance to transform a discovery claim into a mature discovery. This is the credibility process; through which the individual researcher's me, here, now becomes the community's anyone, anywhere, anytime. Objective knowledge is the goal, not the starting point. Once a discovery claim becomes public, the discoverer receives intellectual credit. But, unlike with mining claims, the community takes control of what happens next. Within the complex social structure of the scientific community, researchers make discoveries; editors and reviewers act as gatekeepers by controlling the publication process; other scientists use the new finding to suit their own purposes; and finally, the public (including other scientists) receives the new discovery and possibly accompanying technology. As a discovery claim works it through the community, the interaction and confrontation between shared and competing beliefs about the science and the technology involved transforms an individual's discovery claim into the community's credible discovery. Two paradoxes exist throughout this credibility process. First, scientific work tends to focus on some aspect of prevailing Knowledge that is viewed as incomplete or incorrect. Little reward accompanies duplication and confirmation of what is already known and believed. The goal is new-search, not research. Not surprisingly, newly published discovery claims and credible discoveries that appear to be important and convincing will always be open to challenge and potential modification or refutation by future researchers. Second, novelty itself frequently provokes disbelief. Nobel Laureate and physiologist Albert Azent-Gyorgyi once described discovery as "seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought. " But thinking what nobody else has thought and telling others what they have missed may not change their views. Sometimes years are required for truly novel discovery claims to be accepted and appreciated. In the end, credibility " happens" to a discovery claim-a process that corresponds to what philosopher Annette Baier has described as the commons of the mind. "We reason together, challenge, revise, and complete each other's reasoning and each other's conceptions of reason. "

单选题What sort of glass you drink from predicts how fast you drink. "Would you like that in a straight or a jug, sir?" was once a common response to Britishers" request for a pint in a pub. Like the Lilliputians in Gulliver"s Travels, who argued whether a boiled egg should be opened at the pointed or the rounded end, beer drinkers were adamant that only from their preferred shape of glass did their drinks taste best. Straight-sided glasses—sometimes with a bulge a little below the lip—have largely won the day. Jugs equipped with handles are now rare. But that is probably because straight glasses are easier for bar staff to collect and stack. The shape of a beer glass does, nevertheless, matter. For a group of researchers at the University of Bristol have shown that it can regulate how quickly someone drinks. Angela Attwood and her colleagues asked 160 undergraduates—80 women and 80 men—to do one of four things: drink beer out of a straight glass; drink beer out of a flute—a tall narrow wineglass; or drink lemonade from one of these two sorts of glass. To complicate matters further, some of the glasses were full whereas others were half-full. What Dr. Attwood and her team were really interested in was how quickly the various drinks would be drunk. The answer was that a full straight glass of beer was polished off in 11 minutes, on average. A full flute, by contrast, was finished off in seven, which was also the amount of time it took to drink a full glass of lemonade, regardless of the type of vessel. If a glass started half-full, however, neither its shape nor its contents mattered. It was drunk in an average of five minutes. Though beer flutes are not common in British pubs, her observation that the shape of a glass can affect how fast it is drunk from bears investigation. Both health campaigners and breweries would be interested in the results, though they would probably draw opposite conclusions about what is the best-shaped glass in which to serve a bevvy.

单选题It's an annual back-to-school routine. One morning you wave goodbye, and that (1) evening you're burning the late-night oil in sympathy. In the race to improve educational standards, (2) are throwing the books at kids. (3) elementary school students are complaining of homework (4) What's a well-meaning parent to do? "As hard as (5) may be, sit back and chill, experts advise. Though you've got to get them to do it, (6) helping too much, or even examining (7) too carefully, you may keep them (8) doing it by themselves. "I wouldn't advise a parent to cheek every (9) assignment," says psychologist John Rosemond, author of Ending the Tough Homework. "There's a (10) of appreciation for trial and error. Let your children (11) the grade they deserve." Many experts believe parents should gently look over the work of younger children and ask them to rethink their (12) . But "you don't want them to feel it has to be (13) ," she says. That's not to say parents should (14) homework—first, they should monitor how much homework their kids (15) . Thirty minutes a day in the early elementary years and an hour in (16) four, five, and six is standard, says Rosemond. For junior-high students it should be " (17) more than an hour and a half," and two for high-school students, If your child (18) has more homework than this, you may want to check (19) other parents and then talk to the teacher about (20) assignment.

单选题Taking charge of yourself involves putting to rest some very prevalent myths. At the top of the list is the notion that intelligence is measured by your ability to solve complex problems; to read, write and compute at certain levels; and to resolve abstract equations quickly. This vision of intelligence asserts formal education and bookish excellence as the true measures of self fulfillment. It encourages a kind of intellectual prejudice that has brought with it some discouraging results. We have come to believe that someone who has more educational merit badges, who is very good at some form of school discipline is "intelligent." Yet mental hospitals are filled with patients who have all of the properly lettered certificates. A truer indicator of intelligence is an effective, happy life rived each day and each present moment of every day. If you are happy, if you live each moment for everything it"s worth, then you are an intelligent person. Problem solving is a useful help to your happiness, but if you know that given your inability to resolve a particular concern you can still choose happiness for yourself, or at a minimum refuse to choose unhappiness, then you are intelligent. You are intelligent because you have the ultimate weapon against the Nervous Break Down. Intelligent people do not have breakdown because they are in charge of themselves. They know how to choose happiness over depression, because they know how to deal with the problems of their lives. You can begin to think of yourself as truly intelligent on the basis of how you choose to feel in the face of trying circumstances. The life struggles are pretty much the same for each of us. Every one who is involved with other human beings in any social context has similar difficulties. Disagreements, conflicts and compromises are a part of what it means to be human. Similarly, money, growing old, sickness, deaths, natural disasters and accidents are all events which present problems to virtually all human beings. But some people are able to make it, to avoid immobilizing depression and unhappiness despite such occurrences, while others collapse or have an breakdown. Those who recognize problems as a human condition and don"t measure happiness by an absence of problems are the most intelligent kind of humans we know; also, the most rare.

单选题 People kill each other over diamonds; countries go to war over oil. But the world's most expensive commodities are worth nothing in the absence of water. Fresh water is essential for life, with no substitute. Although mostly unpriced, it is the most valuable stuff in the world. Nature has decided that the supply of water is fixed. Meanwhile demand rises as the world's populati on increases and enriches itself. Homes, factories and offices are sucking up ever more. But it is the planet's growing need for food that matters most. Farming accounts for 70% of withdrawals. Few of the world's great rivers that run through grain-growing areas now reach the sea all the year round or, if they do, they do so as a trickle. Less obvious, though even more serious, are the withdrawals from underground, which are hidden from sight but big enough to produce changes in the Earth's gravitational field that can be monitored by NASA's satellites in space. Water tables are now failing in many parts of the world, including America, India and China. So far {{U}}the world has been spared a true water war{{/U}}, and competition for water can sometimes bring rivals together as well as drive them apart. But since over 60% of the world's population lives in a river basin shared by two or more countries, the scope for squabbles is plain. Even if acute water shortages were to become widespread in just one country—India, say, or China—they could lead to mass migration and fighting. Although the supply of water cannot be increased, mankind can use what there is better—in four ways. One is through the improvement of storage and delivery, by creating underground reservoirs, replacing leaking pipes, lining earth-bottomed canals, irrigating plants at their roots with just the right amount of water, and so on. A second route focuses on making farming less thirsty—for instance by growing newly bred, perhaps genetically modified, crops that are drought-resistant or higher-yielding. A third way is to invest in technologies to take the salt out of sea water and thus increase supply of the fresh stuff. The fourth is of a different kind: release the market on water-users and let the price mechanism bring supply and demand into balance. And once water is properly priced, trade will encourage well-watered countries to make water-intensive goods, and arid ones to make those that are water-light.

单选题 Wholesale prices in July rose more sharply than expected and at a faster rate than consumer prices, {{U}} {{U}} 1 {{/U}} {{/U}}that businesses were still protecting consumers {{U}} {{U}} 2 {{/U}} {{/U}}the full brunt (冲击) of higher energy costs. The Producer Price Index, {{U}} {{U}} 3 {{/U}} {{/U}}measures what producers receive for goods and services, {{U}} {{U}} 4 {{/U}} {{/U}}1 percent in July, the Labor Department reported yesterday, double {{U}} {{U}} 5 {{/U}} {{/U}}economists had been expecting and a sharp turnaround from flat prices in June. Excluding {{U}} {{U}} 6 {{/U}} {{/U}}and energy, the core index of producer prices rose 0.4 percent, {{U}} {{U}} 7 {{/U}} {{/U}}than the 0.1 percent that economists had {{U}} {{U}} 8 {{/U}} {{/U}}Much of that increase was result of an {{U}} {{U}} 9 {{/U}} {{/U}}increase in car and truck prices. On Tuesday, the Labor Department said the {{U}} {{U}} 10 {{/U}} {{/U}}that consumers paid for goods and services in July were {{U}} {{U}} 11 {{/U}} {{/U}}0.5 percent over all, and up 0.1 percent, excluding food and energy. {{U}} {{U}} 12 {{/U}} {{/U}}the overall rise in both consumer and producer prices {{U}} {{U}} 13 {{/U}} {{/U}}caused by energy costs, which increased 4.4 percent in the month. (Wholesale food prices {{U}} {{U}} 14 {{/U}} {{/U}}0.3 percent in July.) {{U}} {{U}} 15 {{/U}} {{/U}}July 2004, wholesale prices were up 4.6 percent; the core rate {{U}} {{U}} 16 {{/U}} {{/U}}2.8 percent, its fastest pace since 1995. Typically, increases in the Producer Price Index indicate similar changes in the consumer index {{U}} {{U}} 17 {{/U}} {{/U}}businesses recoup (补偿) higher costs from customers. {{U}} {{U}} 18 {{/U}} {{/U}}for much of this expansion, which started {{U}} {{U}} 19 {{/U}} {{/U}}the end of 2001, that has not been the {{U}} {{U}} 20 {{/U}} {{/U}}. In fact, many businesses like automakers have been aggressively discounting their products.

单选题Picture-taking is a technique both for reflecting the objective world and for expressing the singular self. Photographs depict objective realities that already exist, though only the camera can disclose them. And they depict an individual photographer's temperament, discovering itself through the camera's cropping of reality. That is, photography has two directly opposite ideals: in the first, photography is about the world and the photographer is a mere observer who counts for little; but in the second, photography is the instrument of fearlessness, questing subjectivity and the photographer is all. These conflicting ideals arise from uneasiness on the part of both photographers and viewers of photographs toward the aggressive component in "taking" a picture. Accordingly, the ideal of a photographer as observer is attracting because it implicitly denies that picture-taking is an aggressive act. The issue, of course, is not so clear-cut. What photographers do cannot be characterized as simply predatory or as simply, and essentially, benevolent. As a consequence, one ideal of picture-taking or the other is always being rediscovered and championed. An important result of the coexistence of these two ideals is a recurrent ambivalence toward photography's means. Whatever are the claims that photography might make to be a form of personal expression just like painting, its originality is closely linked to the power of a machine. The steady growth of these powers has made possible the extraordinary informativeness and imaginative formal beauty of many photographs, like Harold Edgerton's high-speed photographs of a bullet hitting its target or of the swirls and eddies of a tennis stroke. But as cameras become more sophisticated, more automated, some photographers are tempted to disarm themselves or to suggest that they are not really armed, preferring to submit themselves to the limit imposed by pre-modern camera technology because a cruder, less high-powered machine is thought to give more interesting or emotive results, to leave more room for creative accident. For example, it has been virtually a point of honor for many photographers, including Walker Evans and Cartier Bresson, to refuse to use modern equipment. These photographers have come to doubt the value of the camera as an instrument of "fast seeing". Cartier Bresson, in fact, claims that the modern camera may see too fast. This ambivalence toward photographic means determines trends in taste. The cult of the future (of faster and faster seeing) alternates over time with the wish to return to a purer past when images had a handmade quality. This longing for some primitive state of the photographic enterprise is currently widespread and underlies the present-day enthusiasm for daguerreotypes and the work of forgotten nineteenth-century provincial photographers. Photographers and viewers of photographs, it seems, need periodically to resist their own knowingness.

单选题You've now heard it so many times, you can probably repeat it in your sleep. President Obama will no doubt make the point publicly when he gets to Beijing: the Chinese need to consume more; they need—believe it or not—to become more like Americans, for the sake of the global economy. And it's all true. But the other side of that equation is that the U. S. needs to save more. For the moment, American households actually are doing so. After the personal-savings rate dipped to zero in 2005, the shock of the economic crisis last year prompted people to snap shut their wallets. In China, the household-savings rate exceeds 20%. As we've seen, wage earners are expected to care for not only their children but their aging parents. And there is, to date, publicly-funded health care and pension systems which increases incentives for individuals to save while they are working. But China is a society that has long esteemed personal financial prudence (谨慎). There is no chance that will change anytime soon, even if the government creates a better social safety net and successfully encourages greater consumer spending. Why does the U. S. need to learn a little frugality (节俭)? Because healthy savings rates are one of the surest indicators of a country's long- term financial health. High savings lead, over time, to increased investment, which in turn generates productivity gains, innovation and job growth. In short, savings are the seed corn of a good economic harvest. The U. S. government thus needs to act as well. By running constant deficits, it is dis-saving, even as households save more. Peter Orszag, Obama's Budget Director, recently called the U. S. budget deficits unsustainable and he's right. To date, the U. S. has seemed unable to see the consequences of spending so much more than is taken in. That needs to change. That's what happens when you're the world's biggest creditor: you get to drop hints like that, which would be enough by themselves to create international economic chaos if they were ever leaked. (Every time any official in Beijing deliberates publicly about seeking an alternative to the U. S. dollar for the $2.1 trillion China holds in reserve, currency traders have a heart attack.) If Americans saved more and spent less, consistently over time, they wouldn't have to worry about all that.

单选题More and more, the operations of our businesses, governments, and financial institutions are controlled by information that exists only inside computer memories. Anyone clever enough to modify this information for his own purposes can reap substantial rewards. Even worse, a number of people who have done this and been caught at it have managed to get away without punishment. It"s easy for computer crimes to go undetected if no one checks up on what the computer is doing. But even if the crime is detected, the criminal may walk away not only unpunished but with a glowing recommendation from his former employers. Of course, we have no statistics on crimes that go undetected. But it"s disturbing to note how many of the crimes we do know about were detected by accident, not by systematic inspections or other security procedures. The computer criminals who have been caught may been the victims of uncommonly bad luck. For example, a certain keypunch operator complained of having to stay overtime to punch extra cards. Investigation revealed that the extra cards she was being asked to punch were for dishonest transactions. In another case, dissatisfied employees of the thief tipped off the company that was being robbed. Unlike other lawbreakers, who must leave the country, commit suicide, or go to jail, computer criminals sometimes escape punishment, demanding not only that they not be charged but that they be given good recommendations and perhaps other benefits. All to often, their demands have been met. Why? Because company executives are afraid of the bad publicity that would result if the public found out that their computer had been misused. They hesitate at the thought of a criminal boasting in open court of how he juggled the most confidential records right under the noses of the company"s executives, accountants, and security staff. And so another computer criminal departs with just the recommendations he needs to continue his crimes elsewhere.

单选题If you intend using humor in your talk to make people smile, you must know how to identify shared experiences and problems. Your humor must be relevant to the audience and should help to show them that you are one of them or that you understand their situation and are in sympathy with their point of view. Depending on whom you are addressing, the problems will be different. If you are talking to a group of managers, you may refer to the disorganized methods of their secretaries; alternatively if you are addressing secretaries, you may want to comment on their disorganized bosses. Here is an example, which I heard at a nurses" convention, of a story which works well because the audience all shared the same view of doctors. A man arrives in heaven and is being shown around by St. Peter. He sees wonderful accommodations, beautiful gardens, sunny weather, and so on. Everyone is very peaceful, polite and friendly until, waiting in a line for lunch, the new arrival is suddenly pushed aside by a man in a white coat, who rushes to the head of the line, grabs his food and stomps over to a table by himself. "Who is that?" the new arrival asked St. Peter. "Oh, that"s God," came the reply, "but sometimes he thinks he"s a doctor." If you are part of the group which you are addressing, you will be in a position to know the experiences and problems which are common to all of you and it"ll be appropriate for you to make a passing remark about the inedible canteen food or the chairman"s notorious bad taste in ties. With other audiences you mustn"t attempt to cut in with humor as they will resent an outsider making disparaging remarks about their canteen or their chairman. You will be on safer ground if you stick to scapegoats like the Post Office or the telephone system. If you feel awkward being humorous, you must practice so that it becomes more natural. Include a few casual and apparently off-the-cuff remarks which you can deliver in a relaxed and unforced manner. Often it"s the delivery which causes the audience to smile, so speak slowly and remember that a raised eyebrow or an unbelieving look may help to show that you are making a light-hearted remark. Look for the humor. It often comes from the unexpected. A twist on a familiar quote "If at first you don"t succeed, give up" or a play on words or on a situation. Search for exaggeration and understatements. Look at your talk and pick out a few words or sentences which you can turn about and inject with humor.