解释题Carla fled away from her parents because she wanted to lead an authentic kind of life.

解释题With a clamour of bells that set the swallows soaring, the Festival came to Omelas.

解释题Science is committed to the universal.

解释题On certain levels of the American race there seems to be a positive libido for the ugly.

解释题Those who sought power by riding the back of the tiger ended up inside.

解释题She thinks her sister has held life always in the palm of one hand, that “no” is a word the world never learned to say to her.

解释题They are symptoms of an underlying problem broader in scope and more serious than any we have ever faced.

解释题It is going to pay off in cold dollars and cents to management.

复合题Could the bad old days of economic decline be about to return? Since OPEC agreed to supply-cuts in March, the price of crude oil has jumped to almost $26 a barrel, up from less than $10 last December. This near-tripling of oil prices calls up scary memories of the 1973 oil shock, when prices quadrupled, and 1979-80, when they also almost tripled. Both previous shocks resulted in double-digit inflation and global economic decline. So where are the headlines warning of gloom and doom this time?The oil price was given another push up this week when Iraq suspended oil exports. Strengthening economic growth, at the same time as winter grips the northern hemisphere, could push the price higher still in the short term.Yet there are good reasons to expect the economic consequences now to be less severe than in the 1970s. In most countries the cost of crude oil now accounts for a smaller share of the price of petrol than it did in the 1970s. In Europe, taxes account for up to four-fifths of the retail price, so even quite big changes in the price of crude have a more muted effect on pump prices than in the past.Rich economies are also less dependent on oil than they were, and so less sensitive to swings in the oil price. Energy conservation, a shift to other fuels and a decline in the importance of heavy, energy-intensive industries have reduced oil consumption. Software, consultancy and mobile telephones use far less oil than steel or car production. For each dollar of GDP (in constant prices) rich economies now use nearly 50% less oil than in 1973. The OECD estimates in its latest Economic Outlook that, if oil prices averaged $22 a barrel for a full year, compared with $13 in 1998, this would increase the oil import bill in rich economies by only 0.25-0.5% of GDP. That is less than one-quarter of the income loss in 1974 or 1980. On the other hand, oil-importing emerging economies—to which heavy industry has shifted—have become more energy-intensive, and so could be more seriously squeezed.One more reason not to lose sleep over the rise in oil prices is that, unlike the rises in the 1970s, it has not occurred against the background of general commodity-price inflation and global excess demand. A sizable portion of the world is only just emerging from economic decline. The Economist’s commodity price index is broadly unchanging from a year ago. In 1973 commodity prices jumped by 70%, and in 1979 by almost 30%.

复合题The idea that some groups of people may be more intelligent than others is one of those hypotheses that dare not speak its name. But Gregory Cochran is【A1】______ to say it anyway. He is that【A2】______ bird, a scientist who works independently 【A3】______ any institution. He helped popularize the idea that some diseases not 【A4】______ thought to have a bacterial cause were actually infections, which aroused much controversy when it was first suggested.【A5】______ he, however, might tremble at the【A6】______ of what he is about to do. Together with another two scientists, he is publishing a paper which not only 【A7】______ that one group of humanity is more intelligent than the others, but explains the process that has brought this about. The group in 【A8】______ are a particular people originated from central Europe. The process is natural selection.This group generally do well in IQ test, 【A9】______ 12-15 points above the 【A10】______ value of 100, and have contributed【A11】______ to the intellectual and cultural life of the West, as the【A12】______ of their elites, including several world-renowned scientists, 【A13】______. They also suffer more often than most people from a number of nasty genetic diseases, such as breast cancer. These facts,【A14】______, have previously been thought unrelated. The former has been 【A15】______ to social effects, such as a strong tradition of【A16】______ education. The latter was seen as a (an) 【A17】______ of genetic isolation. Dr. Cochran suggests that the intelligence and diseases are intimately 【A18】______. His argument is that the unusual history of these people has【A19】______ them to unique evolutionary pressures that have resulted in this 【A20】_____ state of affairs.

复合题Imagine waking up and finding the value of your assets has been halved. No, you’re not an investor in one of those hedge funds that failed completely. With the dollar slumping to a 26-year low against the pound, already-expensive London has become quite unaffordable. A coffee at Starbucks, just as unavoidable in England as it is in the United States, runs about $8.The once all-powerful dollar isn’t doing a Titanic against just the pound. It is sitting at a record low against the euro and at a 30-year low against the Canadian dollar. Even the Argentine peso and Brazilian real are thriving against the dollar.The weak dollar is a source of humiliation (屈辱)， for a nation’ s self-esteem rests in part on the strength of its currency. It’s also a potential economic problem, since a declining dollar makes imported food more expensive and exerts upward pressure on interest rates. And yet there are substantial sectors of the vast U.S. economy—from giant companies like Coca-Cola to mom-and-pop restaurant operators in Miami—for which the weak dollar is most excellent news.Many Europeans may view the U. S. as an arrogant superpower that has become hostile to foreigners. But nothing makes people think more warmly of the U. S. than a weak dollar. Through April, the total number of visitors from abroad was up 6.8 percent from last year. Should the trend continue, the number of tourists this year will finally top the 2000 peak? Many Europeans now apparently view the U. S. the way many Americans view Mexico-as a cheap place to vacation, shop and party, all while ignoring the fact that the poorer locals can’t afford to join the merrymaking.The money tourists spend helps decrease our chronic trade deficit. So do exports, which thanks in part to the weak dollar, soared 11 percent between May 2006 and May 2007. For first five months of 2007, the trade deficit actually fell 7 percent from 2006.If you own shares in large American corporations, you’re a winner in the weak-dollar gamble. Last week Coca- Cola’s stick bubbled to a five-year high after it reported a fantastic quarter. Foreign sales accounted for 65 percent of Coke’s beverage (饮料) business. Other American companies profiting from this trend include McDonald’s and IBM.American tourists, however, shouldn’t expect any relief soon. The dollar lost strength the way many marriages break up-slowly, and then all at once. And currencies don’t turn on a dime. So if you want to avoid the pain inflicted by the increasingly pathetic dollar, cancel that summer vacation to England and look to New England. There, the dollar is still treated with a little respect.

复合题In many businesses, computers have largely replaced paperwork, because they are fast, flexible, and do not make mistakes. As one banker said, “Unlike humans, computers never have a bad day.” And they are honest. Many banks advertise that their transactions are “untouched by human hands” and therefore safe from human temptation. Obviously, computers have no reason to steal money. But they also have no conscience, and the growing number of computer crimes shows they can be used to steal.Computer criminals don’t use guns. And even if they are caught, it is hard to punish them because there are no witness and often no evidence. A computer cannot remember who used it: it simply does what it is told. The head teller at a New York bank used a computer to steal more than one and a half billion dollars in just four years. No one noticed this theft (盗窃) because he moved the money from one account to another. Each time a customer he had robbed questioned the balance in his account, the teller claimed a computer error, then replaced the missing money from someone else’s account. This man was caught only because he was a gambler. When the police broke up an illegal gambling operation, his name was in the records.Some employees use the computer’s power to get revenge (报复) on their employers they consider unfair. Recently, a large insurance company fired its computer-tape librarian for reasons that involved her personal rather than her professional life. She was given thirty days’ notice. In those thirty days, she erased all the firm’s computerized records.Most computer criminals have been minor employees. Now police wonder if this is “the tip of the iceberg” As one official says, “I have the feeling that there is more crime out there than we are catching. What we are seeing now is all so poorly done. I wonder what the real experts are doing—the ones who know how a computer works.”

复合题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 modern 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 undertreatment 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 1icense suspension.”

复合题“The Heart of the Matter,” the just-released report by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS), deserves praise for affirming the importance of the humanities and social sciences to the prosperity and security of liberal democracy in America. Regrettably, however, the report’s failure to address the true nature of the crisis facing liberal education may cause more harm than good.In 2010, leading congressional Democrats and Republicans sent letters to the AAAS asking that it identify actions that could be taken by “federal, state and local governments, universities, foundations, educators, individual benefactors and others” to “maintain national excellence in humanities and social scientific scholarship and education.” In response, the American Academy formed the Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences. Among the commission’s 51 members are top-tier-university presidents, scholars, lawyers, judges, and business executives, as well as prominent figures from diplomacy, filmmaking, music and journalism.The goals identified in the report are generally admirable. Because representative government presupposes an informed citizenry, the report supports full literacy; stresses the study of history and government, particularly American history and American government; and encourages the use of new digital technologies. To encourage innovation and competition, the report calls for increased investment in research, the crafting of coherent curricula that improve students’ ability to solve problems and communicate effectively in the 21st century, increased funding for teachers and the encouragement of scholars to bring their learning to bear on the great challenges of the day. The report also advocates greater study of foreign languages, international affairs and the expansion of study abroad programs.Unfortunately, despite 2½ years in the making, “The Heart of the Matter” never gets to the heart of the matter: the illiberal nature of liberal education at our leading colleges and universities. The commission ignores that for several decades America’s colleges and universities have produced graduates who don’t know the content and character of liberal education and are thus deprived of its benefits. Sadly, the spirit of inquiry once at home on campus has been replaced by the use of the humanities and social sciences as vehicles for publicizing “progressive,” or left-liberal propaganda.Today, professors routinely treat the progressive interpretation of history and progressive public policy as the proper subject of study while portraying conservative or classical liberal ideas—such as free markets and self-reliance—as falling outside the boundaries of routine, and sometimes legitimate, intellectual investigation.The AAAS displays great enthusiasm for liberal education. Yet its report may well set back reform by obscuring the depth and breadth of the challenge that Congress asked it to illuminate.

复合题Minimizing the environmental damage that new roads cause is generally regarded as a good thing. But to do that, it helps to understand just how new roads cause the damage of which they are accused.Recently, a group of researchers led by Dr. Gonzalez conducted an experiment which shows what ecologists have long suspected, but never been able to prove: that immigration is good for the health of animal populations.A road destroys only a small part of the habitat it traverses, and thus annihilates just a few local populations of creatures. So the argument that road-building itself is bad for biodiversity is not self-evidently correct. Those who nevertheless hold this view usually point to a piece of ecological theory called “meta-population dynamics”. This says that apparently separate local populations of animals are, in fact, parts of much larger populations connected via migration.According to this theory, when a local population flounders—because of an epidemic, for example—individuals from neighboring communities can fill the gaps. So the more such communities there are, the better the chance of a given local population remaining healthy.The implications of the theory for conservation are straightforward. Cut local populations off from each other and each is more likely to disappear. And roads are good at doing just that. Testing the theory with experimental roads, however, would be expensive. Dr. Gonzalez’s brainwave was to do the whole thing on a much smaller scale.Instead of studying, say, a forest, the team looked at moss-covered rocks. These support diverse population of tiny arthropods (insects, mites and so on). On some rocks the researchers left the moss untouched; on others they scraped “roadways” across to leave “isolated” parts. After waiting six months, they found that in the disturbed habitats nearly all the bug populations had declined compared with the undisturbed moss, and 40% of the species had become extinct.The real test of the recta-population hypothesis came in the second part of the experiment. In this, the researchers scraped away moss much as before, but they left narrow moss paths to bridge the no-bug’s-land between islands. These connected patches were still not as healthy after six months as the unsullied moss, but they did far better than isolated islands—a result that supports the notion that population exchange is necessary to keep an ecosystem healthy.Whether these results can be translated to large-scale ecosystems remains uncertain. But if they can, they would cause more, not less, concern about the ecological effects of road-building. On the other hand, they also suggest a way out.In Britain, tunnels are often built under roads for animals of regular habits, such as badgers, to be able to travel their traditional routes without having to tangle with the traffic. Extending that principle, perhaps with special bridges that can support local vegetation and thus allow animals the illusion of an uninterrupted habits, might be a cheap way of letting man and nature rub along a bit better.

复合题In the college-admissions wars, we parents are the true fights. We’re pushing our kids to get good grades, take SAT preparatory courses and build resumes so they can get into the college of our first choice. I’ve twice been to the wars, and as I survey the battlefield, something different is happening. We see our kids’ college background as a prize demonstrating how well we’ve raised them. But we can’t acknowledge that our obsession(痴迷) is more about us than them. So we’ve contrived various justifications that turn out to be half-truths, prejudices or myths. It actually doesn’t matter much whether Aaron and Nicole go to Stanford.We have a full-blown prestige panic; we worry that there won’t be enough prizes to go around. Fearful parents urge their children to apply to more schools than ever. Underlying the hysteria(歇斯底里) is the belief that scarce elite degrees must be highly valuable. Their graduates must enjoy more success because they get a better education and develop better contacts. All that is plausible—and mostly wrong. We haven’t found any convincing evidence that selectivity or prestige matters. Selective schools don’t systematically employ better instructional approaches than less selective schools. On two measures—professors’ feedback and the number of essay exams selective schools do slightly worse.By some studies, selective schools do enhance their graduates’ lifetime earnings. The gain is reckoned at 2-4% for every 100-point increase in a school’s average SAT scores. But even this advantage is probably a statistical fluke (偶 然). A well-known study examined students who got into highly selective schools and then went elsewhere. They earned just as much as graduates from higher-status schools.Kids count more than their colleges. Getting into Yale may signify intelligence, talent and ambition. But it’s not the only indicator and, paradoxically, its significance is declining. The reason: so many similar people go elsewhere. Getting into college is not life’s only competition. In the next competition—the job market and graduate school—the results may change. Old-boy networks are breaking down. Princeton economist Alan Krueger studied admissions to one top Ph. D. program. High scores on the GRE helped explain who got in; degrees of prestigious universities didn’t.So, parents, lighten up. The stakes have been vastly exaggerated. Up to a point, we can rationalize our pushiness. America is a competitive society; our kids need to adjust to that. But too much pushiness can be destructive. The very ambition we impose on our children may get some into Harvard but may also set them up for disappointment. One study found that, other things being equal, graduates of highly selective schools experienced more job dissatisfaction. They may have been so conditioned to being on top that anything less disappoints.

复合题The human nose is an underrated tool. Humans are often thought to be insensitive smellers compared with animals, 【A1】______ this is largely because,【A2】______ animals, we stand upright. This means that our noses are【A3】______ to perceiving those smells which float through the air, 【A4】______ the majority of smells which stick to surfaces. In fact, 【A5】______, we are extremely sensitive to smells, 【A6】______ we do not generally realize it. Our noses are capable of 【A7】______ human smells even when these are【A8】______ to far below one part in one million.Strangely, some people find that they can smell one type of flower but not another,【A9】______ others are sensitive to the smells of both flowers. This may be because some people do not have the genes necessary to generate【A10】______ smell receptors in the nose. These receptors are the cells which sense smells and send 【A11】______ to the brain. However, it has been found that even people insensitive to a certain smell【A12】______ can suddenly become sensitive to it when 【A13】______ to it often enough.The explanation for insensitivity to smell seems to be that the brain finds it 【A14】______ to keep all smell receptors working all the time but can 【A15】______ new receptors if necessary. This may【A16】______ explain why we are not usually sensitive to our own smells—we simply do not need to be. We are not 【A17】______ of the usual smell of our own house, but we 【A18】______ new smells when we visit someone else’s. The brain finds it best to keep smell receptors 【A19】______ for unfamiliar and emergency signals 【A20】______ the smell of smoke, which might indicate the danger of fire.

复合题The US$3-million Fundamental physics prize is indeed an interesting experiment, as Alexander Polyakov said when he accepted this year’ s award in March. And it is far from the only one of its type. As a News Feature article in Nature discusses, a string of lucrative awards for researchers have joined the Nobel Prizes in recent years. Many, like the Fundamental Physics Prize, are funded from the telephone-number-sized bank accounts of Internet entrepreneurs. These benefactors have succeeded in their chosen fields, they say, and they want to use their wealth to draw attention to those who have succeeded in science.What’s not to like? Quite a lot, according to a handful of scientists quoted in the News Feature. You cannot buy class, as the old saying goes, and these upstart entrepreneurs cannot buy their prizes the prestige of the Nobels. The new awards are an exercise in self-promotion for those behind them, say scientists. They could distort the achievement- based system of peer-review-led research. They could cement the status quo of peer-reviewed research. They do not fund peer-reviewed research. They perpetuate the myth of the lone genius.The goals of the prize-givers seem as scattered as the criticism. Some want to shock, others to draw people into science, or to better reward those who have made their careers in research.As Nature has pointed out before, there are some legitimate concerns about how science prizes—both new and old— are distributed. The Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, launched this year, takes an unrepresentative view of what the life sciences include. But the Nobel Foundation’ s limit of three recipients per prize, each of whom must still be living, has long been outgrown by the collaborative nature of modern research—as will be demonstrated by the inevitable row over who is ignored when it comes to acknowledging the discovery of the Higgs boson. The Nobels were, of course, themselves set up by a very rich individual who had decided what he wanted to do with his own money. Time, rather than intention, has given them legitimacy.As much as some scientists may complain about the new awards, two things seem clear. First, most researchers would accept such a prize if they were offered one. Second, it is surely a good thing that the money and attention come to science rather than go elsewhere. It is fair to criticize and question the mechanism—that is the culture of research, after all—but it is the prize-givers’ money to do with as they please. It is wise to take such gifts with gratitude and grace.

复合题The percentage of immigrants (including those unlawfully present) in the United States has been creeping upward for years. At 12.6 percent, it is now higher than at any point since the mid-1920s.We are not about to go back to the days when Congress openly worried about inferior races polluting America’s bloodstream. But once again we are wondering whether we have too many of the wrong sort newcomers. Their loudest critics argue that the new wave of immigrants cannot, and indeed do not want to, fit in as previous generations did.We now know that these racist views were wrong. In time, Italians, Romanians and members of other so-called inferior races became exemplary Americans and contributed greatly, in ways too numerous to detail, to the building of this magnificent nation. There is no reason why these new immigrants should not have the same success.Although children of Mexican immigrants do better, in terms of educational and professional attainment, than their parents UCLA sociologist Edward Telles has found that the gains don’t continue. Indeed, the fourth generation is marginally worse off than the third. James Jackson, of the University of Michigan, has found a similar trend among black Caribbean immigrants. Tells fears that Mexican-Americans may be fated to follow in the footsteps of American blacks—that large parts of the community may become mired (陷入) in a seemingly permanent state of poverty and underachievement. Like African-Americans, Mexican-Americans are increasingly relegated to (降入) segregated, substandard schools, and their dropout rate is the highest for any ethnic group in the country.We have learned much about the foolish idea of excluding people on the presumption of the ethnic/racial inferiority. But what we have not yet learned is how to make the process of Americanization work for all. I am not talking about requiring people to learn English or to adopt American ways; those things happen pretty much on their own, but as arguments about immigration hear up the campaign trail, we also ought to ask some broader question about assimilation, about how to ensure that people , once outsiders , don’ t forever remain marginalized within these shores.That is a much larger question than what should happen with undocumented workers, or how best to secure the border, and it is one that affects not only newcomers but groups that have been here for generations. It will have more impact on our future than where we decide to set the admissions bar for the latest ware of would-be Americans. And it would be nice if we finally got the answer right.

复合题Sustainable development is applied to just about everything from energy to clean water and economic growth, and as a result it has become difficult to question either the basic assumptions behind it or the way the concept is put to use. This is especially true in agriculture, where sustainable development is often taken as the sole measure of progress without a proper appreciation of historical and cultural perspectives.To start with, it is important to remember that the nature of agriculture has changed markedly throughout history, and will continue to do so. Medieval agriculture in northern Europe fed, clothed and sheltered a predominantly rural society with a much lower population density than it is today. It had minimal effect on biodiversity, and any pollution it caused was typically localized. In terms of energy use and the nutrients(营养成分) captured in the product it was relatively inefficient.Contrast this with farming since the start of the industrial revolution. Competition from overseas led farmers to specialize and increase yields. Throughout this period food became cheaper, safe and more reliable. However, these changes have also led to habitat (栖息地) loss and to diminishing biodiversity.What’ s more, demand for animal products in developing countries is growing so fast that meeting it will require an extra 300 million tons of grain a year by 2050. Yet the growth of cities and industry is reducing the amount of water available for agriculture in many regions.All this means that agriculture in the 21 st century will have to be very different from how it was in the 20th. This will require radical thinking. For example, we need to move away from the idea that traditional practices are inevitably more sustainable than new ones. We also need to abandon the notion that agriculture can be “zero impact”. The key will be to abandon the rather simple and static measures of sustainability, which center on the need to maintain production without increasing damage.Instead we need a more dynamic interpretation, one that looks at the pros and cons(正反两方面) of all the various way land is used. There are many different ways to measure agricultural performance besides food yield: energy use, environmental costs, water purity, carbon footprint and biodiversity. It is clear, for example, that the carbon of transporting tomatoes from Spain to the UK is less than that of producing them in the UK with additional heating and lighting. But we do not know whether lower carbon footprints will always be better for biodiversity.What is crucial is recognizing that sustainable agriculture is not just about sustainable food production.