单选题The author of Cours de Linguistique Generale is ______.

单选题Water shortages plague a fifth of southern Europe. And with temperatures in the region forecast to rise several degrees this century -reducing rainfall another 30% -things will only get worse. Several thousand miles to the northwest, however, global warming is increasing the number of icebergs calving off Greenland; they now number about 15,000 a year. An iceberg is a floating reservoir. Water from icebergs is the purest water, which was formed some 10,000 years ago. All those bergs eventually dissolve in the ocean's brine. Why not capture and haul some of them to Europe's arid south? The idea of towing icebergs to the world's thirstiest regions goes back to the 1950s. Georges Mougin, a French engineer and eco-entrepreneur, began looking seriously at the concept in the mid-1970s. Technologies to handle such a massive undertaking didn't exist then. But they do now, thanks to Mougin, who at 86 is still working full tilt. A few years ago, he came up with the idea to enclose the bottom half of an iceberg with a skirt fashioned from insulating geotextile material to reduce melting en route. Then he imagined a scenario in which ocean currents could be used to help steer the tugboat pulling the iceberg and drastically reduce fuel consumption -a principle Mougin calls assisted drift. But a trial tow of a 7 million-ton iceberg would cost about $10 million -a sum that chilled investors. The problem was that he couldn't show them his vision -until now. Thanks to a virtualreality boost from French software company Dassault Syst~mes, he can simulate an iceberg's entire journey from Newfoundland to the Canary Islands. The collaboration is part of an effort by Dassault, which sells high-end product-testing software to such companies as Boeing and Toyota, to offer modeling expertise to researchers like Mougin whose lofty ideas often dwarf their budgets. Two years ago, Dassault placed its 3-D-imaging technologies and 15 of its engineers at Mougin's disposal. Many hours and algorithms later, the team concluded recently that Mougin's big idea would work. One standard-size tug traveling at 1 knot, using assisted drift, could get a skirted 7 miUion-ton berg to the Canaries in about 141 days with only 38% of it melting. Better yet, larger bergs would lose proportionately less, because the amount of ice that melts off the sides is fairly static. Mougin was inspired to approach Dassault after watching a documentary that used the company's 3-D modeling to bring to life architect Jean-Pierre Houdin's theory on how the Great Pyramid of Giza was built. Dassault believes sharing the modeling software is a highprofile way to show off the cool things its products can do while simultaneously supporting scientific inquiry. "It's a way to contribute to the community of innovators," says Crdric Simard, project director. Aside from supporting innovators, Dassault gives the software to French and U. S. programs aimed at improving science, technology and engineering education in schools. Engineers on the iceberg project charted the journey under numerous scenarios. The model relied heavily on historical meteorologic and oceanographic data as well as forecasts in real time culled from satellites, buoys and balloons. Temperature, salinity, winds, swells, currents and eddies were all calculated; the model even factored in a fierce storm on day 22 of a trip. The model was also able to track the melt rate and the tugboat's fuel consumption. Using 3-D glasses, Mougin's team virtually examined the berg from all angles and inspected both the insulation skirt and the seine used to capture and tow it. While ultimately proving Mougin's theories were correct, the simulation wasn't without drama. Indeed, the first trial was a disaster, which confirmed the wisdom of modeling. The simulated tug hit a huge eddy and spent a month circling in place before moving on, resulting in too much melting and heavy fuel consumption. Despite some initial hand-wringing, the necessary fix proved quite simple: moving the departure date from mid-May to mid-June. The next step for Mougin is to secure funding -from $ 2.96 million to $ 4.44 million -for a pilot study using a smaller fragment of ice to give the theory a real-world test. He and Wadhams got an encouraging response but no money when they sought a European Union grant a few years ago, but that was before the Dassault simulation. They expect the 3-D visuals will improve their chances of landing a grant or a commercial partner. Mougin hopes to launch the pilot test next year and advance to a full-scale trial a year or two later. He's also confident of the gambit's commercial potential and has formed a company called WPI to exploit it. After nearly 40 years of effort, Mougin anticipates serving frozen drinks en masse soon.

单选题 The chancellor has blamed bad weather for a shock contraction in the UK economy, but how can snow have such a dramatic effect? Official figures showed that the economy had taken quite a hit from the snow at the end of 2010. Last year, it was discussed whether snow might actually be good for the economy. Why has it been so bad this time round? That winter there was much talk of snow effects, but little sign of permanent impact on the official figures. The figures on the construction sector, for example, showed it had a very difficult time in the first three months of 2010, which could be partly blamed on the weather, but then recovered extremely strongly in the following three months as builders caught up on delayed projects. It is important to distinguish between a genuine dead loss for the economy and spending that is just being delayed. The snow this winter appears to have had a greater effect than last winter. Once again, the construction sector has taken a hit, which we can probably expect to be made up in 201t. But other areas may not be made up. Last week's retail sales figures showed a fall of more than 10% in sales at petrol stations in December, which reflects people leaving their cars at home as a result of difficult driving conditions. Lots of people could not get into work as a result of the snow, but not all of them cost the economy anything. Some freelance or casual workers will not have been paid for the days they did not work, and cafes, restaurants, taxi drivers and train operators will not make back all of the money that they lost as a result of people staying at home. Some people work in sectors where a missed day cannot be made up with a bit of overtime or slightly delayed deliveries, but if you are a hairdresser, for example, then the people who were going to come in for a trim but cancelled because of snow are pretty likely to make another appointment. It is also important not to forget the gains to the economy from snow. Utility companies had a bumper December as people were forced to turn up their heating to cope with the coldest December on record. Also, last week's retail sales figures showed significant growth in sales of winter clothing. Halfords announced in a trading statement that its sales of car maintenance products had risen. The big difference between this winter's snow and last winter's snow was the timing. Several big shopping centers were forced to close in the weekend before Christmas, meaning that some people did not get their gifts until January, if at all. This is the crucial point. If you were planning to go out in the first week in December to buy a drill and actually you had to go and buy it in the second week, the economy would barely bat an eyelid. But if you were going to buy it on 23 December and instead had to buy it on 27 December, it is a big deal. The difference to the economy of having buying sprees at full-price pre-Christmas and at cut-price in the sales is significant and will not be made up later in the year. Also, many people will have been planning pre-Christmas drinks and meals with friends and colleagues, which will have been cancelled or delayed. Even the part of the Office for National Statistics (ONS) that calculates the official growth figures for the economy had to postpone its Christmas party because of the weather, and will not be holding it until April. Last winter, the snow was timed much more favorably, coming mainly in January. This year's Christmas trading statements from big retailers were full of comments about the weather. The boss of Tesco said that its performance had been "hindered" by the "disruptive effects of the severe winter weather conditions", while Dixons said, "The adverse weather conditions reduced footfall in the run up to Christmas Day." So while last year it could be argued that in the medium term the snow had not done the economy much harm, this year the effect has been muelayed more damaging. The ONS said that the snow had knocked 0.5% off the economic growth figures, which is a considerable amount of lost growth. Some of that will be made back, perhaps by the construction sector as happened last time, and perhaps by bumper January sales shopping and delayed parties, but a significant proportion of it is probably lost to the economy for ever.

单选题How living creatures evolve has been pretty well understood for the past 150 years. How they came to exist in the first place, though, remains a mystery. Part of the reason for this mystery is that subsequent evolution has done a good job of erasing the evidence. But not a complete one. Some features are shared by all organisms, and may thus go back to the beginning of life. And one of the most bizarre of these features is that a lot of the molecules of which life is made are left-handed. A left-handed molecule is one that causes polarized light to rotate to the left (i.e., anticlockwise). Most molecules which behave this way have a right-handed equivalent that is, in its arrangement of atoms, their mirror image. Ordinary chemical processes cannot tell the difference between the two forms, so they are usually equally abundant. But the enzymes that govern biochemistry are such precise tools that, often, only one-handedness is acceptable. In the case of amino acids, the subunits of which proteins are made, the acceptable form is the sinister one. Many people feel that understanding why this is so would illuminate the origin of life—and two groups of researchers, pursuing separate lines of enquiry, have come up with what may be the pieces of the jigsaw. One further puzzle is that the amino acids found in meteorites (which are assumed to be similar to those of the primitive Earth) have been modified by a process called methylation into a form that is biologically useless. Nevertheless, since such methylated amino acids are the starting point, it is where Ronald Breslow and his student Mindy Levine, who work at Columbia University, started. A couple of years ago they revealed the first piece of the jigsaw when they found that an initial imbalance in favor of left-handed methylated amino acids in a solution can be amplified by repeated evaporation. During evaporation, the left-and right-handed molecules mate up and fall out of solution, leaving a left-handed excess. A mere two cycles of evaporation can push a starting ratio that is just 1% in favor of the left to one that is 90% left-handed. Now, as Dr. Breslow has revealed to a meeting of the American Chemical Society, in New Orleans, Ms. Levine has discovered a process that favors the production of left-handed biologically active amino acids. The presence of copper in solutions that contain the chemical precursors of amino acids, together with left-handed methylated amino acids to seed the reaction, gives amino-acid formation a sinister bias. When Ms. Levine made an amino acid called phenylalanine this way she got 37% more of the left-handed form than the right-handed. With another, valine, the excess was 23% and with alanine, 20%. The connection between the two pieces of work is that the left-handed methylated amino acids required to seed the second could have been provided by the evaporative process of the first—if, of course, a slightly biased supply of them had previously existed. This is where Sandra Pizzarello of Arizona State University comes in. She has shown that the methylated amino acids found in meteorites do, indeed, have a bias of 1% or more in favor of the left-handed, suggesting that methylated amino acids kicking around on the primitive Earth would have shared a similar bias. The mistake previous researchers made, therefore, was thinking of the methylated amino acids of meteorites as ingredients of life. Actually, if this work is pointing in the right direction, they were merely seeds. Taken together, these results argue that life formed in places with a lot of evaporation going on (suggesting heat) and a significant amount of copper present. This is speculation, of course, but it favors the idea that living things were created in land-locked ponds, rather than at sea, and probably in a volcanic environment. (Volcanic heat would drive the chemical reactions, as well as causing lots of evaporation.) It also suggests that biochemical left-handedness confers no selective advantage. What makes meteoritic amino acids left-handed has yet to be discovered. But it seems just a matter of chance that the living world is sinister.

单选题After reading the passage, we learn that______

单选题Which of the following is NOT written by John Galsworthy?A. A Room with a View. B. The White Monkey.C. The Silver Spoon. D. Swan Song.

单选题Which of the following conclusions about mammoths does the passage support?

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单选题 In 1880, Sir Joshua Waddilore, a Victorian philanthropist, founded Provident Financial to provide affordable loans to working-class families in and around Bradford, in northern England. This month his company, now one of Britain's leading providers of "home credit" — small, short-term, unsecured loans — began the nationwide rollout of Vanquis, a credit card aimed at people that mainstream lenders shun. The card offers up to ￡200 ($380) of credit, at a price: for the riskiest customers, the annual interest rate will be 69%. Provident says that the typical interest rate is closer to 50% and that it charges no fees for late payments or breaching credit limits. Still, that is triple the rate on regular credit cards and far above the 30% charged by store cards. And the Vanquis card is being launched just when Britain's politicians and media are full of worry about soaring consumer debt. Last month, a man took his own life after running up debts of ￡130,000 on 22 different credit cards. Credit cards for "sub-prime" borrowers, as the industry delicately calls those with poor credit records, are new in Britain but have been common in America for a while. Lenders began issuing them when the prime market became saturated, prompting them to look for new sources of profit. Even in America, the sub-prime market has plenty of room for growth. David Robertson of the Nilson Report, a trade magazine, reckons that outstanding sub-prime credit-card debt accounts for only 3% of the $597 billion that Americans owe on plastic. The sub- prime sector grew by 7.9% last year, compared with only 2.6% for the industry as a whole. You might wonder, though, how companies can make money from lending to customers they know to be bad risks — or at any rate, how they can do it legitimately. Whereas delinquencies in the credit-card industry as a whole are around 4%-5%, those in the sub- prime market are almost twice as high, and can reach 15% in hard times. Obviously, issuers charge higher interest rates to compensate them for the higher risk of not being repaid. And all across the credit-card industry, the assessment and pricing of risks has been getting more and more refined, thanks largely to advances in technology and data processing. Companies also use sophisticated computer programs to track slower payment or other signs of increased risk. Sub-prime issuers pay as much attention to collecting debt as to managing risk; they impose extra charges, such as application fees; and they cap their potential losses by lending only small amounts ($500 is a typical credit limit). All this is easier to describe than to do, especially when the economy slows. After the bursting of the technology bubble in 2000, several sub-prime credit-card providers failed. Now there are only around 100, of which nine issue credit cards. Survivors such as Metris and Providian, two of the bigger sub-prime card companies, have become choosier about their customers' credit histories. As the economy recovered, so did lenders' fortunes. Fitch, a rating agency, says that the proportion of sub-prime credit-card borrowers who are more than 60 days in arrears (a good predictor of eventual default) is the lowest since November 2001. But with American interest rates rising again, some worry about another squeeze. As Fitch's Michael Dean points out, sub-prime borrowers tend to have not just higher-rate credit cards, but dearer auto loans and variable-rate mortgages as well. That makes a risky business even riskier.

单选题A couple of years ago a group of management scholars from Yale and the University of Pittsburgh tried to discover if there was a link between a company's success and the personality of its boss. To work out what that personality was, they asked senior managers to score their bosses for such traits as an ability to communicate an exciting vision of the future or to stand as a good model for others to follow. When the data were analyzed, the researchers found no evidence of a connection between how well a firm was doing and what its boss was like. As far as they could tell, a company could not be judged by its chief executive any better than a book could be judged by its cover. A few years before this, however, a team of psychologists from Tufts University, led by Nalini Ambady, discovered that when people watched two-second-long film-clips of professors lecturing, they were pretty good at determining how able a teacher each professor actually was. At the end of the study, the perceptions generated by those who had watched only the clips were found to match those of students taught by those self-same professors for a full semester. Now, Dr Ambady and her colleague, Nicholas Rule, have taken things a step further. They have shown that even a still photograph can convey a lot of information about competence—and that it can do so in a way which suggests the assessments of all those senior managers were poppycock. Dr Ambady and Mr. Rule showed 100 undergraduates the faces of the chief executives of the top 25 and the bottom 25 companies in the Fortune 1,000 list. Half the students were asked how good they thought the person they were looking at would be at leading a company and half were asked to rate five personality traits on the basis of the photograph. These traits were competence, dominance, likeability, facial maturity (in other words, did the individual have an adult-looking face or a baby-face) and trustworthiness. By a useful (though hardly unexpected) coincidence, all the businessmen were male and all were white, so there were no confounding variables of race or sex. The study even controlled for age, the emotional expression in the photos and the physical attractiveness of the individuals by obtaining separate ratings of these from other students-and using statistical techniques to remove their effects. This may sound like voodoo. Psychologists spent much of the 20th century denigrating the work of 19th-century physiognomists and phrenologists who thought the shapes of faces and skulls carry information about personality. However, recent work has shown that such traits can, indeed, be assessed from photographs of faces with a reasonable accuracy. And Dr Ambady and Mr. Rule were surprised by just how accurate the students' observations were. The results of their study, which are about to be published in Psychological Science, show that both the students' assessments of the leadership potential of the bosses and their ratings for the traits of competence, dominance and facial maturity were significantly related to a company's profits. Moreover, the researchers discovered that these two connections were independent of each other. When they controlled for the "power" traits, they still found the link between perceived leadership and profit, and when they controlled for leadership they still found the link between profit and power. These findings suggest that instant judgments by the ignorant (nobody even recognized Warren BuffeR) are more accurate than assessments made by well-informed professionals. It looks as if knowing a chief executive disrupts the ability to judge his performance. Sadly, the characteristics of likeability and trustworthiness appear to have no link to company profits, suggesting that when it comes to business success, being warm and fuzzy does not matter much (though these milts are not harmful). But this result also suggests yet another thing that stock market analysts might care to take into account when preparing their reports: the physiognomy of the chief executive.

单选题we can infer from the first two paragraphs that the industrialists disregard environmental protection chiefly because______.

单选题______ is the British festival to remember the people who died in the two world wars.A. Armistice Day B. Boxing DayC. Guy Fawkes Day D. Memorial Day

单选题{{B}}TEXT C{{/B}} Last year's economy should have won the Oscar for best picture. Growth in gross domestic product was 4.1 percent; profits soared; exports flourished; and inflation stayed around 3 percent for the third year. So why did so many Americans give the picture a lousy B rating? The answer is jobs. The macroeconomic situation was good, but the microeconomic numbers were not. Yes, 3 million new jobs were there, but not enough of them were permanent, good jobs paying enough to support a family. Job insecurity was rampant. Even as they announced higher sales and profits, corporations acted as if they were in a tailspin, cutting 516,069 jobs in 1994 alone, almost as many as in the recession year of 1991. Yes, unemployment went down. But over 1 million workers were so discouraged they left the labor force. More than 6 million who wanted full-time work were only partially employed; and another large group was either overqualified or sheltered behind the euphemism of self-employment. We lost a million good manufacturing jobs between 1990 and 1995, continuing the trend that has reduced the blue-collar work force from about 30 percent in the 1950s to about half that today. White-collar workers found out they were no longer immune. For the first time, they were let go in numbers virtually equal to those for blue-collar workers. Many resorted to temporary work—with lower pay, fewer benefits and less status. All this in a country where people meeting for the first time say, "What do you do?" Then there is the matter of remuneration. Whatever happened to wage gains four years into a recovery? The Labor Department recently reported that real wages fell 2.3 percent in the 12-month period ending this March. Since 1973, wages adjusted for inflation have declined by about a quarter for high school dropouts, by a sixth for high school graduates and by about 7 .percent for those with some college education. Only the wages of college graduates are up, by 5 percent, and recently starting salaries, even for this group, have not kept up with inflation. While the top 5 percent of the population was setting new income records almost every year, poverty rates rose from 11 percent to 15 percent. No wonder this is beginning to be called the Silent Depression. What is going on here? In previous business cycles, companies with rising productivity raised wages to keep labor. Is the historical link between productivity improvements and income growth severed? Of all the reasons given for the wage squeeze—international competition, technology, deregulation, the decline of unions and defense cuts--technology is probably the most critical. It has favored the educated and skilled. Just think that in 1976, 78 percent of auto workers and steelworkers in good mass production jobs were high school dropouts. But these jobs are disappearing fast. Education and job training are what count. These days college graduates can expect to earn 1.9 times the likely earnings of high school graduates, up from 1.45 times in the 1970s. The earning squeeze on middle-class and working-class people and the scarcity of "good, high-paying" jobs will be the big political issue of the 1990s. Americans have so far responded to their failing fortunes by working harder. American males now toil about a week and a half longer than they did in 1973, the first time this century working hours have increased over an extended period of time. Women, particularly in poorer families, are working harder, too. Two-worker families rose by more than 20 percent in the 1980s. Seven million workers hold at least two jobs, the highest proportion in half a century. America is simply not growing fast enough to tighten the labor market and push up real wages. The danger of the information age is that while in the short run it may be cheaper to replace workers with technology, in the long run it is potentially self-destructive because there will not be enough purchasing power to grow the economy. To avoid this dismal prospect, we must get on the virtuous cycle of higher growth and avoid the vicious cycle of retrenchment. Otherwise, an angry, disillusioned and frustrated population—whose rage today is focused on big government, excess taxes, immigration, welfare and affirmative action--may someday be brought together by its sense of diminished hopes. Then we will all be in for a very difficult time.

单选题In this section you will hear everything ONCE ONLY. Listen carefully and then answer the questions that follow. Mark the best answer to each question on ANSWER SHEET TWO.

单选题The underclass suffers from relatively high rates of unemployment, alcoholism, drug addiction, illiteracy, juvenile delinquency, and crime. For them, schools have deteriorated, and affordable housing is increasingly difficult to find. Neighborhoods lack adequate police protection, fire services, and shops, as well as hospitals, clinics, and other health-care facilities. Future prospects are especially bleak for the underclass because they are increasingly unable to compete for jobs. Inner-city residents lack the technical skills needed to obtain most jobs, because fewer than half complete high school. The gap between the skills typically demanded by employers and the training of inner-city residents is getting much larger. In the past, people with limited education could become factory workers or filing clerks, but today these jobs require knowledge of computing and handling electronics. Meanwhile, inner-city residents don't even have access to the remaining low-skilled jobs, such as janitors and fast-food servers, which are increasingly located in the suburbs. {{B}}Fiscal problems.{{/B}} The concentration of low-income minority residents in the central cities has produced financial problems. Despite higher taxes generated by new CBD projects, central cities face a growing gap between the cost of needed services and the availability of funds to pay for them. The percentage of people below the poverty level living in U.S. central cities increased during the 1980s and is more than twice as high as in the suburbs. Since 1950, overall population has declined by more than 40 percent in the central cities of Buffalo, Cleveland, Detroit, and St. Louis, and by more than one-fourth in a number of other cities. The number of tax-paying middle-class families and industries has invariably declined by higher percentages in these cities. A city has two choices to close the gap between the cost of services and the amount of available taxes. One alternative is to raise taxes, a move that could drive remaining wealthier people and industries from the city. The other alternative is to reduce services by closing libraries, eliminating some public-transit routes, collecting trash less frequently, and delaying replacement of outdated school equipment. Aside from the hardship imposed on those laid off from work, cutbacks in public services could also encourage middle-class residents and industries to move from the city. To avoid this dilemma, cities have increasingly sought funds from the state and federal governments. The federal government increased its share of contribution to city budgets from I percent in the 1950s to 25 percent in the early 1980s. Since the early 1980s, though, the federal government has substantially reduced its contributions to local governments. State governments and private corporations have increased financial assistance to cities to offset partially the loss of federal funds. The high level of outside financial support has obscured the intensity of the fiscal crisis faced by cities as a result of shifting patterns of land use.

单选题The allusion "A Pound of Flesh" comes from Shakespeare' s ______.

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单选题In this section you will hear everything ONCE ONLY. Listen carefully and then answer the questions that follow. Mark the best answer to each question on ANSWER SHEET TWO.

单选题{{B}}TEXT B{{/B}} Britain's east midlands were once the picture of English countryside, alive with flocks, shepherds, skylarks and buttercups the stuff of fairytales. In 1941 George Marsh left school at the age of 14 to work as a herdsman in Nottinghamshire, the East Midlands countryside his parents and grandparents farmed. He recalls skylarks nesting in cereal fields, which when accidentally disturbed would fly singing into the sky. But in his lifetime, Marsh has seen the color and diversity of his native land fade. Farmers used to grow about a ton of wheat per acre; now they grow four tons. Pesticides have killed off the insects upon which skylarks fed, and year-round harvesting has driven the birds from their winter nests. Skylarks are now rare. "Farmers kill anything that affects production," says Marsh. "Agriculture is too efficient." Anecdotal evidence of a looming crisis in biodiversity is now being reinforced by science. In their comprehensive surveys of plants, butterflies and birds over the past 20 to 40 years in Britain, ecologists Jeremy Thomas and Carly Stevens found significant population declines in a third of all native species. Butterflies are the furthest along--71 percent of Britain's 58 species are shrinking in number, and some, like the large blue and tortoiseshell, are already extinct. In Britain's grasslands, a key habitat, 20 percent of all animal, plant and insect species are on the path to extinction. There's hardly a corner of the country's ecology that isn't affected by this downward spiral. The problem would be bad enough if it were merely local, but it's not: because Britain's temperate ecology is similar to that in so many other parts of the world, it's the best microcosm scientists have been able to study in detail. Scientists have sounded alarms about species' extinction in the past, but always specific to a particular animal or place--whales in the 1980s or the Amazonian rain forests in the 1990s. This time, though, the implications are much wider. The Amazon is a "biodiversity hot spot" with a unique ecology. But in Britain, "the main drivers of change are the same processes responsible for species' declines worldwide," says Thomas. The findings, published in the journal Science, provide the first clear evidence that the world is in the throes of a massive extinction. Thomas and Stevens argue that we are facing a loss of 65 to 95 percent of the world's species, on the scale of an ice age or the meteorite that may have wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. If so, this would be only the sixth time such devastation had occurred in the past 600 million years. The other five were associated with one-off events like the ice ages, a volcanic eruption or a meteor. This time, ecosystems are dying a thousand deaths--from overfishing and the razing of the rain forests, but also from advances in agriculture. The British study, for instance, finds that one of the biggest problems is nitrogen pollution. Nitrogen is released when fossil fuels burn in cars and power plants--but also when ecologically rich heath lands are plowed and fertilizers are spread. Nitrogen-rich fertilizers fuel the growth of tall grasses, which in turn overshadow and kill off delicate flowers like harebells and eyebrights. Even seemingly innocuous practices are responsible for vast ecological damage. When British farmers stopped feeding horses and cattle with hay and switched to silage, a kind of preserved short grass, they eliminated a favorite nesting spot of corncrakes, birds known for their raspy nightly mating calls; corncrake populations have fallen 76 percent in the past 20 years. The depressing list goes on and on. Many of these practices are being repeated throughout the world, in one form or another, which is why scientists believe that the British study has global implications. Wildlife is getting blander. "We don't know which species are essential to the web of life so we're taking a massive risk by eliminating any of them," say's David Wedin, professor of ecology at the University of Nebraska. Chances are we'll be seeing the results of this experiment before too long.