When squashed the stem and the leaves of the jewelweed exude a juice that soothe some skin irritations.

It is well-known that the retired workers in our country are ______ free medical care.

环境恶化

He was so ______ by his work that he did not notice that other employees had already left.

ASEAN

trust company

Passage Two The value of heat for the preservation of food has been known for thousands of years, but it was not realized until the nineteenth century that a very mild heat treatment far below the boiling point, made liquid foods such as milk keep much longer. The discovery followed the work of the French scientist Louis Pasteur on wine and beer. The process, called after him 'pasteurization', is a carefully controlled mild heat treatment. It was found that the process served two purposes, it prevented the souring of milk, and it destroyed the dangerous disease germs which sometimes occur in this product. It has long been known to bacteria experts that the tubercle bacillus is the germ in milk which host strongly resists heat treatment. To destroy this organism it is necessary to heat milk to about 60 degrees centigrade for 15 minutes, and its destruction has always been taken as a way of testing the efficiency of pasteurization. A heat treatment of this kind destroys about 99 percent of the common bacteria in milk, including nearly all those which cause milk to turn sour. To ensure the certain destruction of tuberculosis and other disease germs in milk, it must be held at a fixed temperature for a fixed time. In Britain, for example, these conditions were defined-coy law in 1923 as 63-66 degrees centigrade for 30 minutes. This became known as the 'holder' process, since the raw milk had to be pumped into a large tank, heated to just over 63 degrees centigrade, held in the tank for half an hour and then pumped out and cooled. This was a slow process and required a very large plant, so scientists worked for many years to produce a simpler, more convenient method, with less large equipment. The latest method, officially approved in Britain in 1949, is known as the high-temperature-short-time, or H. T. S. T. method. It has now almost entirely replaced the 'holder' process. In the H. T. S. T. system, the milk flows continuously through many sections of thin stainless steel pipes, During the process, the milk is held at 72 degrees centigrade for at least 15 seconds then, as it-cools, the heat is used, in part, to raise the temperature of the incoming milk in a device called a 'wheat exchanger'. Efficient pasteurization may reduce the bacteria in raw milk from, say, one million to only a few thousand per cubic centimeter. The bacteria left are chemically mostly of the inert type, thatis, they either do not.

Nazi

Although Simpson was ingenious at ______ to appear innovative and spontaneous, beneath the ruse he remained uninspired and rigid in his approach to problem-solving.

Although he suffered from discrimination, Martin Luther King is a man who believed in reconciliation and only rarely ______ a grudge during his Civil Rights movement.

We did hold a meeting yesterday, but you ______, so we did not inform you.

Mike and Adam Hurewitz grew up together on Long Island, in the suburbs of New York City. They were very close, even for brothers. So when Adam's liver started failing, Mike offered to give him half of his. The operation saved Adam's life. But Mike, who went into the hospital in seemingly excellent health, developed a complication—perhaps a blood colt—and died last week. He was 57. Mike Hurewitz's death has prompted a lot of soul searching in the transplant community. Was it a tragic fluke or a sign that transplant surgery has reached some kind of ethical limit? The Mount Sinai Medical Center, the New York City hospital where the complex double operation was performed, has put on hold its adult living donor liver transplant program, pending a review of Hurewitz's death. Mount Sinai has performed about 100 such operations in the past three years. A 1-in-100 risk of dying may not seem like bad odds, but there's more to this ethical dilemma than a simple ratio. The first and most sacred rule of medicine is to do no harm. 'For a normal healthy person a mortality rate 1% is hard to justify,' says Dr. John Fung, chief of transplantation at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. 'If the rate stays at 1%, it's just not going to be accepted.' On the other hand, there's an acute shortage of traditional donor organs from people who have died in accidents or suffered fatal heart attacks. If family members fully understand the risks and are willing to proceed, is there any reason to stand in their way? Indeed, a recent survey showed that most people will accept a mortality rate for living organ donors as high as 20%. The odds, thankfully, aren't nearly that bad. For kidney donors, for example, the risk ranges from 1 in 2,500 to 1 in 4,000 for a healthy volunteer. That helps explain why nearly 40% of kidney transplants in the U.S. come from living donors The operation to transplant a liver, however, is a lot trickier than one to transplant a kidney. Not only is the liver packed with blood vessels, but it also makes lots of proteins that need to be produced in the right ratios for the body to survive. When organs from the recently deceased are used, the surgeon gets to pick which part of the donated liver looks the best and to take as much of it as needed. Assuming all goes well, a healthy liver can grow back whatever portion of the organ is missing, sometimes within a month. A living-donor transplant works particularly well when an adult donates a modest portion of the liver to a child. Usually only the left lobe of the organ is required, leading to a mortality rate for living-donors in the neighborhood of 1 in 500 to 1 in 1, 000. But when the recipient is another adult, as much as 60% of the donor's liver has to be removed. 'There really is very little margin for error,' says Dr. Fung. By way of analogy, he suggests, think of a tree. 'An adult-to-child living-donor transplant is like cutting off a limb. With an adult-to-adult transplant, you're splitting the trunk in half and trying to keep both halves alive.' Even if a potential donor understand and accepts these risks, that doesn't necessarily mean the operation should proceed. All sorts of subtle pressures can be brought to bear on such a decision, says Dr. Mark Siegler, director of the MacLean for Clinical Medical Ethics at the University of Chicago. 'Sometimes the sicker the patient, the greater the pressure and the more willing the donor will be to accept risks.' If you feel you can't say no, is your decision truly voluntary? And if not, is it the medical community's responsibility to save you from your own best intentions? Transplant centers have developed screening programs to ensure that living donors fully understand the nature of their decision. But unexamined, for the most part, is the larger issue of just how much a volunteer should be allowed to sacrifice to save another human being. So far, we seem to be saying some risk is acceptable, although we're still vaguer about where the cutoff should be. There will always be family members like Mike Hurewitz who are heroically prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice for a loved one. What the medical profession and society must decide is if it's appropriate to let them do so.

Passage Four The other day an acquaintance of mine, a gregarious and charming man, told me he had found himself unexpectedly alone in New York for an hour or two between appointments. He went to the Whitney and spent the 'empty' time looking at things in solitary bliss. For him it proved to be a shock nearly as great as falling in love to discover that he could enjoy himself so much alone. What had he been afraid of, I asked myself? That, suddenly alone, he would discover that he bored himself, or that there was, quite simply, no self there to meet? But having taken the plunge, he is now on the brink of adventure ; he is about to be launched into his own inner space, space as immense, unexplored, and sometimes frightening as outer space to the astronaut. His every perception will come to him with a new freshness and, for a time, seem startlingly original. For anyone who can see things for himself with a naked eye becomes, for a moment or two, something of a genius. With another human being present vision becomes double vision, inevitably. We are busy wondering, what does my companion see or think of this, and what do I think of it? The original impact gets lost, or diffused. 'Music I heard with you was more than music. ' Exactly and therefore music itself can only be heard alone Solitude is the salt of personhood. It brings out the authentic flavor of every experience. 'Alone one is never lonely: the spirit adventures, walking in a quiet garden, in a cool house, abiding single there. ' Loneliness is most acutely felt with other people, for with others, even with a lover sometimes, we suffer from our differences of taste, temperament, mood Human intercourse often demands that we soften the edge of perception, or withdraw at the very instant of personal truth for fear of hurting, or of being inappropriately present, which is to say naked, in a social situation. Alone we can afford to be wholly whatever we are, and to feel whatever we feel absolutely. That is a great luxury! For me the most interesting thing about a solitary life, and mine has been that for the last twenty years, is that it becomes increasingly rewarding. When I can wake up and watch the sun rise over the ocean, as I do most days, and know that I have an entire day ahead, uninterrupted, in which to write a few pages, take a walk with my dog, lie down in the afternoon for a long think (why does one think better in a horizontal position?), read and listen to music, I am flooded with happiness. I am lonely only when I am overtired, when I have worked too long without a break, when for the time being I feel empty and need filling up. And I am lonely sometimes when I come back home after a lecture trip, when I have seen a lot of people and talked alot, and am full to the brim with experience that needs to be sorted out. Then for a little while the house feels huge and empty, and I wonder where my selfish hiding. It has to be recaptured slowly by watering the plants, perhaps, and looking again at each one as though it were a person, by feeding the two cats, by cooking a meal. It takes a while, as I watch the surf blowing up in fountains at the end of the field, hut the moment comes when the world falls away, and the self emerges again from the deep unconscious, bringing back all I have recently experienced to be explored and slowly understood, when I can converse again with my hidden powers, and so grow, and so be renewed, till death do us part.

______ when she started complaining.

The miserable fate of Enron's employees will be a landmark in business history, one of those awful events that everyone agrees must never be allowed to happen again. This urge is understandable and noble: thousands have lost virtually all their retirement savings with the demise of Enron stock. But making sure it never happens again may not be possible, because the sudden impoverishment of those Enron workers represents something even larger than it seems. It's the latest turn in the unwinding of one of the most audacious promises of the 20th century. The promise was assured economic security—even comfort—for essentially everyone in the developed world. With the explosion of wealth, that began in the 19th century it became possible to think about a possibility no one had dared to dream before. The fear at the center of daily living since caveman days—lack of food, warmth, shelter—would at last lose its power to terrify. That remarkable promise became reality in many ways. Governments created welfare systems for anyone in need and separate programs for the elderly (Social Security in the U.S.). Labour unions promised not only better pay for workers but also pensions for retirees. Giant corporations came into being and offered the possibility—in some cases the promise—of lifetime employment plus guaranteed pensions? The cumulative effect was a fundamental change in how millions of people approached life itself, a reversal of attitude that most rank as one of the largest in human history. For millennia the average person's stance toward providing for himself had been. Ultimately I'm on my own. Now it became, ultimately I'll be taken care of. The early hints that this promise might be broken on a large scale came in the 1980s. U.S. business had become uncompetitive globally and began restructuring massively, with huge Layoffs. The trend accelerated in the 1990s as the bastions of corporate welfare faced reality. IBM ended its no-layoff policy. ATT fired thousands, many of whom found such a thing simply incomprehensible, and a few of whom killed themselves. The other supposed guarantors of our economic security were also in decline. Labour-union membership and power fell to their lowest levels in decades. President Clinton signed a historic bill scaling back welfare. Americans realized that Social Security won't provide social security for any of us. A less visible but equally significant trend affected pensions. To make costs easier to control, companies moved away from defined benefit pension plans, which obligate them to pay out specified amounts years in the future, to defined contribution plans, which specify only how much goes into the play today. The most common type of defined-contribution plan is the 401(k). the significance of the 401(k) is that it puts most of the responsibility for a person's economic fate back on the employee. Within limits the employee must decide how much goes into the plan each year and how it gets invested—the two factors that will determine how much it's worth when the employee retires. Which brings us back to Enron? Those billions of dollars in vaporized retirement savings went in employees' 401(k) accounts. That is, the employees chose how much money to put into those accounts and then chose how to invest it. Enron matched a certain proportion of each employee's 401(k) contribution with company stock, so everyone was going to end up with some Enron in his or her portfolio; but that could be regarded as a freebie, since nothing compels a company to match employee contributions at all. At least two special features complicate the Enron case. First, some shareholders charge top management with illegally covering up the company's problems, prompting investors to hang on when they should have sold. Second, Enron's 401(k) accounts were locked while the company changed plan administrators in October, when the stock was falling, so employees could not have closed their accounts if they wanted to. But by far the largest cause of this human tragedy is that thousands of employees were heavily overweighed in Enron stock. Many had placed 100% of their 401(k) assets in the stock rather than in the 18 other investment options they were offered. Of course that wasn't prudent, but it's what some of them did. The Enron employees' retirement disaster is part of the larger trend away from guaranteed economic security. That's why preventing such a thing from ever happening again may be impossible. The huge attitudinal shift to I'll-be-taken-care-of took at least a generation. The shift back may take just as long. It won't be complete until a new generation of employees see assured economic comfort as a 20th-century quirk, and understand not just intellectually but in their bones that, like most people in most times and places, they're on their own.

Passage One The Roman language served as the first model for answering the question. Even to someone with no knowledge of Latin, the similarities among Roman languages would have made it natural to suggest that they were derived from a common ancestor. On the assumption that the shared characteristic of these languages came from the common ancestor, it would have been possible to reconstruct many of the characteristics of the original common language. In much the same way it became clear that the branches of the Indo-European family could be studied and a hypothetical family tree constructed, reading back to a common ancestor. This is the tree approach. The basic process represented by the tree model is one of divergence: when languages become isolated from one another, they differ increasingly, and dialects gradually become different until they become separate languages. Divergence is by no means the only possible tendency in language evolution. Johannes Schmidt introduced a 'wave' model, in which linguistic changes were like waves, eventually leading to convergence; that is, growing similarity among languages that were initially quite different. Today, however, most linguists think primarily in terms of familytrees. It is necessary to construct some models of how language change might occur according to a process-based view. There are four main classes of models. The first is the process of initial colonization, by which an uninhabited territory becomes populated; its language naturally becomes that of the colonizers. Second are processes of divergence, such as the linguistic divergence arising from separation or isolation mentioned above in relation to early models of the Indo-European languages. The third group of models is based on processes of linguistic convergence. The wave model, formulated by Schmidt in the 1870's, is an example, but convergence methods have not generally found favor among linguists. Now, the slow and rather static operation of these processes is complicated by another factor: linguistic replacement. That factor provides the basis for a fourth class of models, in many areas of the world the languages initially spoken by the indigenous people have come to be replaced, fully or partially, by languages spoken by people coming from outside. Were it not for this large complicating factor, the world's linguistic history could be faithfully described by the initial distribution of Homo Sapiens, followed by the gradual workings of divergence and convergence. So linguistic replacement also has a key role to play in explaining the origins of the Indo-European languages.

The earth is divided into three main layers—a hard outer crust, a soft middle layer and a center core. The outer crust is broken into massive, irregular pieces called 'plates.' These plates move very slowly, driven by energy forces deep within the earth. Earthquakes occur when these moving plates grind and scrape against each other. In California, the Pacific Plate and the North American Plate meet. The Pacific Plate covers most of the Pacific Ocean floor and the California coastline. The North American Plate stretches across the North American continent and parts of the Atlantic Ocean. The primary boundary between them is the San Andreas Fault. It is more than 650 miles long and extends 10 miles deep. Many smaller faults, such as the Hayward Fault, branch from the San Andreas Fault. The Pacific Plate grinds northwestward past the North American Plate at a rate of about two inches per year. Parts of the San Andreas Fault system adapt to this movement by a constant 'creep' resulting in frequent, moderate, earth tremors. In other areas, movement is not constant and strain can build up for hundreds of years resulting in strong earthquakes when it is released. Unlike other natural disasters, there is no warning for earthquakes. Future earthquakes are a serious threat to Californians, which is why the Fire Department recommends preparing before an earthquake hits.

Biologists have ascertained that specialized cells convert chemical energy into mechanical energy.

Research into the validity of selection methods has consistently shown that the unstructured interview, ______ the interviewer asks any questions he or she likes, is a poor predictor of future job performance.

AI