问答题Some tourists complain that there are not enough restrooms in Shanghai. Some describe that the conditions of public restrooms in Shanghai are horrible. Some suggest that the directional signs should be set up to guide the visitors. In Mount Sheshan, which is a scenic spot located in Songjiang District, Shanghai, 5 million yuan has been spent in building a luxurious restroom, and it charges 5 yuan once. Topic: The Restrooms in Shanghai Questions for Reference: 1. What do you think of the restroom conditions in Shanghai? What"s your comment on the luxurious restroom? 2. Some people think that the restroom conditions reflect the civilization and modernization of a city. Do you agree or not? And why or why not? 3. The municipal government decides to build restrooms so that the citizens or travelers can find a restroom within the maximum distance of 300 meters. What"s your suggestion?

问答题 Unemployment in the state hit an all-time low of 2.1 percent this summer, the lowest in the nation. Though it has edged up a little since, it is still among the tightest labour markets in the US. And Connecticut is only the most extreme manifestation of the conditions that now prevail across America. Unemployment nationally is 4.1 percent, the lowest since 1970. The performance of the US labour market in the late 1990s is as much a feature of the puzzlingly benign so-called New Economy. For the past four years the US has enjoyed an average annual growth rate of 4 percent— up from an average of about 3 percent in the previous decade. Productivity improvements account for about two-thirds of that elevated output, as workers have increased their output per hour. The rest has come from a rapid increase in the total number of workers, what economists call labour inputs. There has been a surge in new jobs—7m in the last three years—that has pushed the unemployment rate down into the uncharted territory of barely 4 percent. Recent economic history suggests that, whenever unemployment has gone this low, the scramble for workers becomes so difficult that wages are rapidly bid up, and an inflationary spiral follows. But in the US in the past five years, wage growth has been muted. In the last year, total employee compensation in the private sector rose by just 3.3 percent, almost unchanged on the figure three years ago, when the unemployment rate was 5.4 percent. "In some ways it's a bigger puzzle than the productivity puzzle," says Paul Krugman, professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "How can we have such a low unemployment rate without an explosion of wages?" A number of factors appear to have contributed. In their search for workers to fill positions, companies have reached out to places they have not looked at in the past. As a result, more people are working than ever. The proportion of the population in employment reached a record high this year of more than 64 percent. This expanded labour supply helps explain why companies have kept the lid on pay over the last few years. The availability of new sources of labour—women, retirees, college students among them—means companies may not have to give big pay rises to hire new workers. It also helps explain why the benefits of the New Economy are not always widely felt—more people seem to be working longer hours than ever. But an expanded labour supply can only explain part of what has changed in the US in recent years. After all, unemployment—the proportion of the labour force out of work—has still declined, indicating that companies have drawn new workers not just from the pool of those not previously in the labour force, but also from the unemployed. And yet still wage costs have remained muted. One possible explanation is that companies have become more flexible in how they pay. "At Newfield, we use a much broader variety of means to reward workers, including performance related pay, year-end bonuses, and extended contracts," says Mr. Ostop.

问答题When it comes to going green, intention can be easier than action. Case in point, you decide to buy a T-shirt made from 100% organic cotton, because everyone knows that organic is better for Earth. And in some ways it is; in conventional cotton-farming, pesticides strip the soil of life. But that green label doesn"t tell the whole story—like the fact that even organic cotton requires more than 2,640 gal. (10,000 L) of water to grow enough fiber for one T-shirt. Or the possibility that the T-shirt may have been dyed using harsh industrial chemicals, which can pollute local groundwater. If you knew all that, would you still consider the T-shirt green? Would you still buy it? It"s a question that most of us are ill equipped to answer, even as the debate over what is and isn"t green becomes all-important in a hot and crowded world. That"s because as the global economy has grown, our ability to make complex products with complex supply chains has outpaced our ability to comprehend the consequences—for ourselves and the planet. We evolved to respond to threats that were clear and present. That"s why, when we eat spoiled food, we get nauseated and when we see a bright light, we shut our eyes. But nothing in evolution has prepared us to understand the cumulative impact that imperceptible amounts of industrial chemicals may have on our children"s health or the slow-moving, long-term danger of climate change. Scanning the supermarket aisles, we lack the data to understand the full impact of what we choose—and probably couldn"t make sense of the information even if we had it. But what if we could seamlessly calculate the full lifetime effect of our actions on the earth and on our bodies? Not just carbon footprints but social and biological footprints as well? What if we could think ecologically? That"s what psychologist Daniel Goleman describes in his forthcoming book, Ecological Intelligence. Using a young science called industrial ecology, businesses and green activists alike are beginning to compile the environmental and biological impact of our every decision—and delivering that information to consumers in a user-friendly way. That"s thinking ecologically—understanding the global environmental consequences of our local choices. "We can know that causes of what we"re doing, and we can know the impact of what we"re doing," says Goleman, who wrote the 1995 best seller Emotional Intelligence ."It"s going to have a radical impact on the way we do business." Over the past couple of decades, industrial ecologists have been using a method called life-cycle assessment (LCA) to break down that web of connection. The concept of the carbon footprint comes from LCA, but a deep analysis looks at far more. The manufacture and sale of a simple glass bottle requires input from dozens of suppliers; for high-tech items, it can include many times more. The good news is that industrial ecologists can now crunch those data, and smart companies like Coca-Cola are using the information to clean up their corporate ecology. Working with the World Wildlife Fund, Coke analyzed its globe-spanning supply chain—the company uses 5% of the world"s total sugar crop—to see where it could minimize its impact; today Coke is on target to improve its water efficiency 20% by 2012. Below the megacorporate level, start-ups like the website Good Guide are sifting through rivers of data for ordinary consumers, providing easy-to-understand ratings you can use to instantly gauge the full environmental and health impact of that T-shirt. Even better, they"ll get the information to you when you need it: Good Guide has an iPhone app that can deliver verdicts on tens of thousands of products. Good Guide and services like it "let us align our dollars with our values easily", says Goleman. But ecological intelligence is ultimately about more than what we buy. It"s also about our ability to accept that we live in an infinitely connected world with finite resources. Goleman highlights the Tibetan community of Sher, where for millenniums, villagers have survived harsh conditions by carefully conserving every resource available to them. The Tibetans think ecologically because they have no other choice. Neither do we. "We once had the luxury to ignore our impacts," says Goleman. "Not anymore."

问答题"You don"t have to wait for government to move … the really fantastic thing about Fairtrade is that you can go shopping!" So said a representative of the Fairtrade movement in a British newspaper this year. Similarly Marion Nestle, a nutritionist at New York University, argues that "when you choose organics, you are voting for a planet with fewer pesticides, richer soil and cleaner water supplies." The idea that shopping is the new politics is certainly seductive. Never mind the ballot box. vote with your supermarket trolley instead. Elections occur relatively rarely, but you probably go shopping several times a month, providing yourself with lots of opportunities to express your opinions. If you are worried about the environment, you might buy organic food; if you want to help poor farmers, you can do your bit by buying Fairtrade products; or you can express a dislike of evil multinational companies and rampant globalization by buying only local produce. And the best bit is that shopping, unlike voting, is fun; so you can do good and enjoy yourself at the same time. Sadly, it"s not that easy. There are good reasons to doubt the claims made about three of the most popular varieties of "ethical" food: organic food, Fairtrade food and local food. People who want to make the world a better place cannot do so by shifting their shopping habits: transforming the planet requires duller disciplines, like politics. Organic food, which is grown without man-made pesticides and fertilizers, is generally assumed to be more environmentally friendly than conventional intensive farming, which is heavily reliant on chemical inputs. But it all depends what you mean by "environmentally friendly". Farming is inherently bad for the environment: since humans took it up around 11,000 years ago, the result has been deforestation on a massive scale. But following the "green revolution" of the 1960s greater use of chemical fertilizer has tripled grain yields with very little increase in the area of land under cultivation. Organic methods, which rely on crop rotation, manure and compost in place of fertilizer, are far less intensive. So producing the world"s current agricultural output organically would require several times as much land as is currently cultivated. There wouldn"t be much room left for the rainforest. Fairtrade food is designed to raise poor farmers" incomes. It is sold at a higher price than ordinary food, with a subsidy passed back to the farmer. But prices of agricultural commodities are low because of overproduction. By propping up the price, the Fairtrade system encourages farmers to produce more of these commodities rather than diversifying into other crops and so depresses prices—thus achieving, for most farmers, exactly the opposite of what the initiative is intended to do. And since only a small fraction of the mark-up on Fairtrade foods actually goes to the farmer—most goes to the retailer—the system gives rich consumers an inflated impression of their largesse and makes alleviating poverty seem too easy. Surely the case for local food, produced as close as possible to the consumer in order to minimize "food miles" and, by extension, carbon emissions, is clear? Surprisingly, it is not. A study of Britain"s food system found that nearly half of food-vehicle miles (i.e., miles traveled by vehicles carrying food) were driven by cars going to and from the shops. Most people live closer to a supermarket than a farmer"s market, so more local food could mean more food-vehicle miles. Moving food around in big, carefully packed lorries, as supermarkets do, may in fact be the most efficient way to transport the stuff. What"s more, once the energy used in production as well as transport is taken into account, local food may turn out to be even less green. Producing lamb in New Zealand and shipping it to Britain uses less energy than producing British lamb, because farming in New Zealand is less energy-intensive. And the local-food movement~ s aims, of course, contradict those of the Fairtrade movement, by discouraging rich country consumers from buying poor-country produce. But since the local-food movement looks suspiciously like old-fashioned protectionism masquerading as concern for the environment, helping poor countries is presumably not the point. The best thing about the spread of the ethical-food movement is that it offers grounds for hope. It sends a signal that there is an enormous appetite for change and widespread frustration that governments are not doing enough to preserve the environment, reform world trade or encourage development. Which suggests that, if politicians put these options on the political menu, people might support them. The idea of changing the world by voting with your trolley may be beguiling. But if consumers really want to make a difference, it is at the ballot box that they need to vote.

问答题One of the surest signs of middle age is that you actually listen when outsiders tell you that maybe it's time that you started to slow down. Consider, if you will, what's happened lately with Microsoft, Amazon. com and Wal-Mart, all of which were once treated by Wall Street as high-growth companies. The more money they spent upgrading facilities and expanding into new markets, the more Wall Street loved them. All three had revolutionized their industries, were growing like mad and were more about tomorrow's potential payoff than about today. Well, today has arrives. The Street has issued a collective judgment on our three amigos—it's declared them to be middle-aged. It hasn't done this formally, of course. But if you look at how the Street has treated these three stocks lately, it's the only conclusion that you can draw. Being considered less-than-youthful isn't a total shock to Microsoft, which showed signs of middle-age onset when it started paying serious cash dividends a few years ago. But it's surprising to see Amazon and Wal-Mart act middle-aged. They both had seemed to be expanding without end but they've now decided it's time to slow their growth, at least in part to help keep Wall Street happy. Middle age, you see, has nothing to do with how old a company is—it has to do with how it thinks.

问答题Questions 7～10 News of the worst unemployment numbers in 16 years is enough to create plenty of job jitters for most workers. But, with performance-review season in full swing, some people are bound to hear negative comments. In a tough economy, a bad review can seem insurmountable. But you can recover if you are "willing to self-assess and be open-minded to what is being told" to you, says Barbara Mohl, president of HR Connected, a human resources consulting firm. Here"s how to bounce back: —Be open to feedback The review is a communication tool for you and your manager to begin the conversation about your performance. You should be ready and willing to accept feedback. Remember, what you hear is usually meant to help you do your job better. "Realize that this process is called a performance review, not a performance correction," says John Heins, senior vice president and chief human resources officer at staffing firm Spherion Corp. The review isn"t the time to debate and resolve the problems. "That conversation is best-suited for a follow-up meeting," says Mr. Heins. —Acknowledge your manager"s comments. Giving negative feedback can be stressful for a manager. Listen to and acknowledge what your manager is saying, regardless of whether you agree with the comments. "The worst thing you can do is to make excuses or put the blame on someone else," says Beth Carvin, CEO and president of Nobscot, a retention management consulting firm in Honolulu. After you have heard your manager"s comments and you understand what has been said, you can say "I appreciate your feedback and I understand the issues you have addressed." If you feel strongly and have proof that the assessment is unfair, then you can say "Thank you for your feedback, but I don"t necessarily agree with X and I look forward to scheduling a follow-up meeting to discuss your points more specifically. " Schedule that meeting before you leave the review. —Create an action plan. Take time to reflect and review your manager"s comments. You might want to discuss difficult issues with a mentor or friend. Then create an action plan that you can cover and add to in the" follow-up meeting. If you don"t agree with your boss on all points, give specific examples of where you think your manager is wrong. Keep in mind, though, you"ll need to be proactive about how to turn things around—regardless of whether you agree. "Plan with your manager exactly what he or she would like you to improve," says Mr. Heins. "Does something have to be done quicker or faster, or do you have to interact better with your colleagues? Ask if there might be a colleague who can mentor you and inquire about resources you can use to improve," recommends Ms. Mohl. —Schedule periodic follow-up meetings. Stay on top of the turnaround plan. "Many employees don"t take the time or initiative to check in with their supervisor to see how they"re doing," says Ms. Carvin. "Don"t be afraid to toot your own horn," she says, "and let your boss know what you"re accomplishing. Check in at least every two to three weeks or sooner if you"ve achieved a success at work. "

问答题Daily exercise makes you feel good. It helps you think better and believe it or not, it helps you sleep better and feel more relaxed. Once you start exercising regularly, you will feel stronger and keep improving at physical activities. When you exercise, you breathe more deeply and get more oxygen into your lungs with each breath. Your heart pumps more oxygen-filled blood to all parts of your body with each beat. Your muscles and joints feel flexible. Exercise also helps you to stay at a healthy weight.

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问答题I hope you won't mind my mentioning that it’s past five o'clock and we've still got tomorrow morning to talk things over.

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问答题"We changed South Korean politics and the media market, but I"m too shy to say that," says Oh Yeon Ho before he can catch his own irony. But Mr. Oh, the founder and boss of Ohmy News, a sort of online newspaper, has earned the right to boast, because Ohmy is the world"s most successful example to date of "citizen journalism" in action. Ohmy"s website currently gets an average of 700,000 visitors and 2m page views a day, which puts it in the same league as a large newspaper. But Ohmy has no reporters on its staff at all. Instead, it relies on amateurs—"citizens", as Mr. Oh prefers to call them—to contribute the articles, which are then edited by Mr. Oh, a former magazine journalist, and a few colleagues. Mr. Oh likes to think of Ohmy as a "playground" for South Korean hobbyists, where "adults" set certain rules and thus give the site credibility. The articles tend to be good, because "in South Korea we have good people power," says Mr. Oh. "They are highly educated and eager to change society." Ohmy also has built-in feedback and rating systems so that the best articles rise to the top. One of Ohmy"s biggest innovations is economic. The site has a "tipjar" system that invites readers to reward good work with small donations. All they have to do is click a little tip-jar button to have their mobile-phone or credit-card account debited. One particularly good article produced the equivalent of $ 30,000 in just five days. Ohmy"s own economics also appear to be working well. Even though Mr. Oh originally intended the company to be not-for-profit—"my aim was not to earn money but to create a new kind of journalism," he says—he turned it into a for-profit firm in 2003. He will not divulge how much profit he makes, but the advertising and syndication revenues (from other internet sites that run Ohmy"s articles) seem to keep him going nicely. Ohmy"s success has already had wide ramifications in South Korea"s media industry. Although it has not killed off any South Korean newspapers or broadcasters, it has forced all of them to adjust by becoming more like Ohmy. Several newspaper sites, for instance, now have feedback and conversation panes at the bottom of online articles and are trying to interact more with readers. Mr. Oh, who left his career in the mainstream media because he was sick of what he saw as their conservative bias, also reckons that Ohmy has helped to improve the balance. If the media scales used to be tilted 80% in favor of conservatives, he thinks, Ohmy has reduced that to 60%; he wants to make it 50%. Does South Korea, a country of early adopters in many ways, foreshadow the future everywhere? "The reality is that you can"t point to many successes; Ohmy News is the only one," says Dan Gillmor, a journalist who quit his job at the San Jose Mercury News, a newspaper widely read in Silicon Valley, in order to found Grassroots Media, an experiment in American citizen journalism. After a year or so of looking in vain for a good business model, Mr. Gillmor has put the idea on ice. But others are much more optimistic. Last year A1 Gore, a former American vice-president, and Joel Hyatt, his friend and business partner, set up Current TV, a cable-television channel that encourages its viewers to contribute their own video stories. And they do. "Viewer-created content"—or "VC2",as Current TV calls it—now accounts for 30% of the channel"s airtime, and rising. Mr. Hyatt, the chief executive, thinks it will eventually be half or more. To help people get started, Current TV has extensive online tutorials on storytelling techniques, camera equipment and so forth. And to organize the content that comes in, its website allows users to vote on the quality of each video clip. It is, in many ways, a pure meritocracy. When Current TV was launched, the traditional cable channels "didn"t get it" and sneered, Mr. Hyatt recalls with glee. "What people didn"t understand is that there are tens of thousands of people out there who can create something great for a few minutes." For instance, a story by an American traveler who found himself in the Gaza Strip during Israel"s pull-out was probably the best piece of video reporting on the subject that ran on television at the time. During Hurricane Katrina, some residents of New Orleans made excellent contributions by taking cameras onto their home-made boats and making videos of their own neighborhoods. For society as a whole, all this new talent—from bloggers, who are "journalists" in the classic sense, to citizen journalists—should amount to something overwhelmingly positive. "The more journalism the better; I don"t care who does it," says Dan Gillmor. That is not, however, how professional journalists, ostensibly speaking on behalf of the public, usually choose to see it. Their mood is gloomy.

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问答题之所以把论坛取名为“蓝厅论坛”，是因为蓝色让人联想到大海和天空，既包容万象又蕴含热情与活力，契合了和谐共存、开放共赢的理念。它寓意着我们将以海纳百川的包容精神，汲取各界智慧，深化对话交流；以纵论天下的开阔视野，把握时代脉搏，共谋发展大计。 对于21世纪的亚太，人们曾经有不同的看法。有人认为亚太人文荟萃，潜力巨大，前景光明。也有人认为亚太问题丛生，麻烦不断，不容乐观。如今，当21世纪第一个10年即将结束的时候，回顾亚太发展进程，我们不难发现，尽管亚太地区由于历史和现实的原因，还存在这样那样的问题和挑战，但谋和平、维稳定、求合作、促发展是人心所向、大势所趋，亚太正在成为一个充满活力、生机与希望的地区

问答题Why does the author say that the public pounding of CEOs for their lavish pay package is "amply justified" ?

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问答题August was once a time for dreaming, wandering the empty streets of this city, reading silly-season newspaper stories after a leisurely lunch, gazing at squares where fountains plashed and the pregnant or the old chatted on benches at dusk. Then something happened. The world speeded up. Stress levels soared. Idle moments evaporated. Egos expanded. Money outpaced politics. Rage surged. August aborted this year. It morphed into the serious season. The beach lost out to the barricades. A time of outrage is upon us. Now a feeling has grown in Western societies that uncontrollable forces are at work shrinking possibility. History has never seen a global power shift as radical as the current one that managed to be peaceful. Growth, jobs, expansion, excitement—and, yes, possibility—lie in the great non-Western arc from China through India to South Africa and Brazil. The world has been turned upside-down. What we are witnessing is how shaken Western societies are by such inversion. As new powers emerge, globalization has altered the relationship between capital and labor in the former's favor. Returns on capital have proved higher relative to wages. The gap between rich and poor has become a gulf. The only people who walked away unscathed from the great financial binge were its main architects and greatest beneficiaries: such as bankers and financiers. This, too, is fueling a time of outrage that has left Western politicians chasing shadows.

问答题弘扬中华文化，建设中华民族共有精神家园。中华文化是中华民族生生不息、团结奋进的不竭动力。要全面认识祖国传统文化，取其精华，去其糟粕，使之与当代社会相适应、与现代文明相协调，保持民族性，体现时代性。加强中华优秀文化传统教育，运用现代科技手段开发利用民族文化丰厚资源。加强对各民族文化的挖掘和保护，重视文物和非物质文化遗产保护，做好文化典籍整理工作。加强对外文化交流，吸收各国优秀文明成果，增强中华文化国际影响力。