单选题In 1929 John D. Rockefeller decided it was time to sell shares when even a shoeshine boy offered him a share tip. During the past week The Economist's economics editor has been advised by a taxi driver, a plumber and a hairdresser that "you can't go wrong" investing in housing—the more you own the better. Is this a sign that it is time to get out.? At the very least, as house prices around the world climb to everloftier heights, and more and more people jump on to the buy-to-let ladder, it is time to expose some of the fallacies regularly trotted out by so many self-appointed housing experts. One common error is that house prices must continue to rise because of a limited supply of land. For instance, it is argued that "house prices will always rise in London because lots of people want to live here". But this confuses the level of prices with their rate of change. Home prices are bound to be higher in big cities because of land scarcity, but this does not guarantee that urban house prices will keep rising indefinitely—just look at Tokyo's huge price-drops since 1990. And, though it is true that a fixed supply of homes may push up house prices if the population is rising, this would imply a steady rise in prices, not the 20% annual jumps of recent years. A second flawed argument is that low interest rates make buying a home cheaper, and so push up demand and prices. Lower interest rates may have allowed some people, who otherwise could not have afforded a mortgage, to buy a home. But many borrowers who think mortgages are cheaper are suffering from money illusion. Interest rates are not very low in real, inflation-adjusted terms. Initial interest payments may seem low in relation to income, but because inflation is also low it will not erode the real burden of debt as swiftly as it once did. So in later years mortgage payments will be much larger in real terms. To argue that low nominal interest rates make buying a home cheaper is like arguing that a car loan paid off over four years is cheaper than one repaid over two years. Fallacy number three is a favourite claim of Alan Greenspan, chairman of America's Federal Reserve. This is that price bubbles are less likely in housing than in the stock- market because higher transaction costs discourage speculation. In fact, several studies have shown that both in theory and in practice bubbles are more likely in housing than in shares. A study by the IMF finds that a sharp rise in house prices is far more likely to be followed by a bust than a share-price boom.

单选题Stratford-on-Avon, as we all know, has only one industry—William Shakespeare—but there are two distinctly separate and increasingly hostile branches. There is the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC), which presents superb productions of the plays at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre on the Avon. And there are the townsfolk who largely live off the tourists who come, not to see the plays, but to look at Anne Hathaway"s Cottage, Shakespeare"s birthplace and the other sights. The worthy residents of Stratford doubt that the theatre adds a penny to their revenue. They frankly dislike the RSC"s actors, them with their long hair and beards and sandals and noisiness. It"s all deliciously ironic when you consider that Shakespeare, who earns their living, was himself an actor (with a beard) and did his share of noise-making. The tourist streams are not entirely separate. The sightseers who come by bus—and often take in Warwick Castle and Blenheim Palace on the side—don"t usually see the plays, and some of them are even surprised to find a theatre in Stratford. However, the playgoers do manage a little sight-seeing along with their play going. It is the playgoers, the RSC contends, who bring in much of the town"s revenue because they spend the night (some of them four or five nights) pouring cash into the hotels and restaurants. The sightseers can take in everything and get out of town by nightfall. The townsfolk don"t see it this way and local council does not contribute directly to the subsidy of the Royal Shakespeare Company. Stratford cries poor traditionally . Nevertheless every hotel in town seems to be adding a new wing or cocktail lounge. Hilton is building its own hotel there, which you may be sure will be decorated with Hamlet Hamburger Bars, the Lear Lounge, the Banquo Banqueting Room, and so forth, and will be very expensive. Anyway, the townsfolk can"t understand why the Royal Shakespeare Company needs a subsidy. (The theatre has broken attendance records for three years in a row. Last year its 1,431 seats were 94 percent occupied all year long and this year they"ll do better.) The reason, of course, is that costs have rocketed and ticket prices have stayed low. It would be a shame to raise prices too much because it would drive away the young people who are Stratford"s most attractive clientele. They come entirely for the plays, not the sights. They all seem to look alike (though they come from all over)—lean, pointed, dedicated faces, wearing jeans and sandals, eating their buns and bedding down for the night on the flagstones outside the theatre to buy the 20 seats and 80 standing-room tickets held for the sleepers and sold to them when the box office opens at 10:30 a.m..

单选题From the third paragraph, besides shelter, the seawater is used as

单选题The opinion of the author on media reporting is that______.

单选题We learn from the passage that the date of sowing cotton is usually______.

单选题According to Dr. Walter Willett, for good health, people could drink

单选题Trying to get Americans to eat a healthy diet is a frustrating business. Even the best-designed public-health campaigns cannot seem to compete with the tempting flavors of the snack-food and fast-food industries and their fat-and sugar-laden products. The results are apparent on a walk down any American street—more than 60% of Americans are overweight, and a full quarter of them are overweight to the point of obesity. Now, health advocates say, an ill-conceived redesign-has taken one of the more successful public-health campaigns--the Food Guide Pyramid--and rendered it confusing to the point of uselessness. Some of these critics worry that America' s Department of Agriculture caved to pressure from parts of the food industry anxious to protect theft products. The Food Guide Pyramid was a graphic which emphasizes that a healthy diet is built on a base of gains, vegetables and fruits, followed by ever-decreasing amounts of dairy products, meat, sweets and oils. The agriculture department launched the pyramid in 1992 to replace its previous program, which was centered on the idea of four basic food groups. The "Basic Four" campaign showed a plate divided into quarters, and seemed to imply that meat and dairy products should make up haft of a healthy diet, with grains, fruits and vegetables making up the other half. It was replaced only over the strenuous objections of the meat and dairy industries. The old pyramid was undoubtedly imperfect. It failed to distinguish between a doughnut and a whole-grain roll, or a hamburger and a skinless chicken breast, and it did not make clear exactly how much of each foodstuff to eat. It did, however, manage to convey the basic idea of proper proportions in an easily understandable way. The new pyramid, called "My Pyramid", abandons the effort to provide this information. Instead, it has been simplified to a mere logo. The food groups are replaced with unlabelled, multi-colored vertical stripes which, in some versions, rise out of a cartoon jumble of foods that look like the aftermath of a riot at a grocery store. Anyone who wants to see how this translates into a healthy diet is invited to go to a website, put in their age, sex and activity level, and get a custom-designed pyramid, complete with healthy food choices and suggested portion sizes. This is free for those who are motivated, but might prove too much effort for those who most need such information. Admittedly, the designers of the new pyramid had a tough job to do. They were supposed to condense the advice in the 84-page United States' Dietary Guidelines into a simple, meaningful graphic suitable for printing on the back of a cereal box. And they had to do this in the face of pressure from dozens of special interest groups--from the country' s Potato Board, which thought potatoes would look nice in the picture, to the Almond Board of California, which felt the same way about almonds. Even the National Watermelon Promotion Board and the California Avocado Commission were eager to see their products recognized. Nevertheless, many health advocates believe the new graphic is a missed opportunity. Although officials insist industry pressure had nothing to do with the eventual design, some critics suspect that political influence was at work. On the other hand, it is not clear how much good even the best graphic could do. Surveys found that 80% of Americans recognized the old Food Guide Pyramid--a big success in the world of public-health campaigns. Yet only 16% followed its advice.

单选题In a science-fiction movie called "Species", a mysterious signal from outer space turns out to describe the genome of an unknown organism. When the inevitable mad scientist synthesizes the DNA described by the instructions, the creature he breeds from it turns out to resemble Natasha Henstridge, an athletic actress. Unfortunately, the alien harbors within her delicate form the destructive powers of a Panzer division, and it all ends badly for the rash geneticist and his laboratory. Glen Evans, chief executive of Egea Biosciences in San Diego, California, acknowledges regretfully that despite seeking his expert opinion--in return for which he was presented with the poster of the striking Mr Henstridge that hangs on his office wall--the producers of "Species" did not hew very closely to his suggestions about the feasibility of their script ideas. Still, they had come to the right man. Dr Evans believes that his firm will soon be able to create, if not an alien succubus, at least a tiny biological machine made of artificial proteins that could mimic the behavior of a living cell. Making such proteins will require the ability to synthesize long stretches of DNA. Existing technology for synthesizing DNA can manage to make genes that encode a few dozen amino acids, but this is too short to produce any interesting proteins. Egea's technology, by contrast, would allow biologists to manufacture genes wholesale. The firm's scientists can make genes long enough to encode 6,000 amino acids. They aim to synthesize a gene for 30,000 amino acids within two years. Using a library of the roughly 1,500 possible "motifs" or folds that a protein can adopt, Egea's scientists employ computers to design new proteins that are likely to have desirable shapes and properties. To synthesize the DNA that encodes these proteins, Egea uses a machine it has dubbed the "genewriter". Dr Evans likens this device to a word-processor for DNA, on which you can type in the sequence of letters defining a piece of DNA and get that molecule out. As Egea extends the length of DNA it can synthesize, Dr Evans envisages encoding not just proteins, but entire biochemical pathways, which are teams of proteins that conduct metabolic processes. A collection of such molecules could conceivably function as a miniature machine that would operate in the body and attack disease, just as the body's own defensive cells do. Perhaps Dr Evans and his colleagues ought to get in touch with their friends in Hollywood.

单选题The history of Norwalk virus tells us that

单选题The passage suggests that the existence of a Roman conception of slavery in Spanish and Portuguese colonies had the effect of

单选题Education Secretary Arne Duncan is joining forces with two unlikely allies, the Rev. A1 Sharpton and Republican former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, to push cities to fix failing schools. The trio will visit Philadelphia, New Orleans and Baltimore later this year. They plan to add more stops as their tour progresses. "These are cities that have real challenges but also tremendous hope and opportunity," Duncan told reporters on a conference call Thursday. The idea came from a meeting they had with President Barack Obama in May at the White House. Education is high on Obama"s priority list. He is seeking to boost achievement, keep kids from dropping out of high school and push every student to pursue some form of higher education. The president has vowed to make the United States the world leader in the number of people who graduate from college. He argues that students who do better in school will help themselves in a work force that increasingly depends on high-skilled jobs, and that the country will benefit as well. Obama discussed education issues in an interview with Damon Weaver, an 11-year-old Florida student. "On Sept. 8, when young people across the country will have just started or are about to go back to school, I"m going to be making a big speech to young people all across the country about the importance of education, the importance of staying in school, how we want to improve our education system and why it"s so important for the country," Obama said. Sharpton, the liberal Democrat and community activist, said teachers and administrators aren"t the only ones responsible for improving schools. "The parents need to be challenged with the message of "no excuses"," Sharpton said. Interviewed on NBC"s Today show Friday, Gingrich and Sharpton were asked how they had agreed to work together on education in view of the many differences they"ve had on other issues. "I think that he has it exactly right, that education has to be the No. 1 civil right of the 21st century and I"ve been passionate about reforming education," Gingrich said. "And we can"t get it done as a partisan issue." Sharpton said the time has come to "change the conversation...to say we need to put everybody"s hands on the table". Gingrich also said he believes that "if there"s anything Americans should be mature enough about to have a decent conversation, it"s the education of their children". He applauded Obama for showing "real courage on the issue of charter schools". Obama wants to increase the number of charter schools, which have a controversial history and are a divisive issue for his party"s base.

单选题 The problems of the elderly are attracting greater attention largely because the American population is growing steadily older as the proportion of its aged members increase. At the time of the first United States census in 1790, half of the people in the country were 16 or younger. By the turn of the present century the median age of the population had risen to 22.9 years; by 1970, it was 27.7 ; and by 1977 it had reached 28.9 ; the median age will reach 35 by the year 2000, and will approach 40 by the year 2030. In time the burden of the years affects even the healthiest individual. Aging is accompanied by physiological changes that are not necessarily the result of any disease: apart from the more obvious signs of age—such as baldness, wrinkling, changes in body form, and stiffness of limbs—there is a general process of atrophy of the cells and gradual degeneration. However, the rate of physiological aging varies greatly from one person to another. Some people show noticeable signs of aging as early as fifty. Others seem relatively young and vital at seventy, and may even continue to enjoy a vigorous sex life. In general, however, ill health becomes more common with advancing age. More than three quarters of those over sixty-five suffer from some chronic health condition. But ill health need not have only physiological causes; it can have social and psychological causes as well. People tend to follow social expectations to fill the roles that are offered to them. In a sense, all we offer the aged is a sick role—the role of the infirm person who has outlived his or her usefulness to society. An urbanized, industrialized society such as the United States is oriented toward youth, mobility, and activity. It does little to integrate the old into the social structure. Unlike the elders in a traditional society, the American aged can no longer lay automatic claim on their kin for support and social participation; on the contrary, they are more likely to have to try not to be a "nuisance" to their now independent adult offspring. Nor are they regarded as the wisest members of the community as the elders in a traditional society would be; instead, any advice they give is likely to be considered irrelevant in a changing world about which their descendants consider themselves much better informed. In America, childhood is romanticised, youth is idolised, middle age does the work, wields the power and pays the bills, and old age gets little or nothing for what it has already done. For many elderly Americans old age is a tragedy, a period of quiet despair, deprivation, desolation and muted rage. The tragedy of old age is not that each of us must grow old and die but that the process of doing so has been made unnecessarily painful, humiliating and isolating through insensitivity, ignorance, and poverty.

单选题Unwillingness to face death is

单选题It is hard to box against a southpaw, as Apollo Creed found out when he fought Rocky Balboa in the first of an interminable series of movies. While "Rocky" is fiction, the strategic advantage of being left-handed in a fight is very real, simply because most right-handed people have little experience of fighting left-handers, but not vice versa. And the same competitive advantage is enjoyed by left-handers in other sports, such as tennis and cricket. The orthodox view of human handedness is that it is connected to the bilateral specialization of the brain that has concentrated language-processing functions on the left side of that organ. Because, long ago in the evolutionary past, an ancestor of humans ( and all other vertebrate animals ) underwent a contortion that twisted its head around 180~ relative to its body, the left side of the brain controls the right side of the body, and vice versa. In humans, the left brain (and thus the right body) is usually dominant. And on average, lefthanders are smaller and lighter than right-handers. That should put them at an evolutionary disadvantage. Sporting advantage notwithstanding, therefore, the existence of left-handedness poses a problem for biologists. But Charlotte Faurie and Michel Raymond, of the University of Montpellier Ⅱ , in France, think they know the answer. As they report in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, there is a clue in the advantage seen in boxing. As any schoolboy could tell you, winning fights enhances your status. If, in prehistory, this translated into increased reproductive success, it might have been enough to maintain a certain proportion of left-handers in the population, by balancing the costs of being left-handed with the advantages gained in fighting. If that is true, then there will be a higher proportion of left-handers in societies with higher levels of violence, since the advantages of being left-handed will be enhanced in such societies. Dr Faurie and Dr Raymond set out to test this hypothesis. Fighting in modem societies often involves the use of technology, notably firearms, that is unlikely to give any advantage to left-handers. So Dr Faurie and Dr Raymond decided to confine their investigation to the proportion of left-handers and the level of violence ( by number of homicides) in traditional societies. By trawling the literature, checking with police departments, and even going out into the field and asking people, the two researchers found that the proportion of left-handers in a traditional society is, indeed, correlated with its homicide rate. One of the highest proportions of left-handers, for example, was found among the Yanomamo of South America. Raiding and warfare are central to Yanomamo culture. The murder rate is 4 per 1 000 inhabitants per year (compared with, for example, 0.068 in New York). And, according to Dr Faurie and Dr Raymond, 22.6% of Yanomamo are left-handed. In contrast, Dioula-speaking people of Burkina Faso in West Africa are virtual pacifists. There are only 0. 013 murders per 1 000 inhabitants among them and only 3.4% of the population is left-handed. While there is no suggestion that left-handed people are more violent than the right-handed, it looks as though they are more successfully violent. Perhaps that helps to explain the double meaning of the word "sinister".

单选题As any diplomat from Britain, Austria or Turkey can tell you, handling the legacy of a vanished, far-flung empire is a tricky business. But for Georgia, the gap between old glory and present vulnerability is especially wide. Today's Georgia is diminished by war, buffeted by geopolitics and recovering from post-Soviet chaos. But 800 years ago the country was a mighty military, cultural and ecclesiastical force. Its greatest monarch, Queen Tamara, defeated many foes (including her first husband) and built fine monuments. In her time, Georgia also had a big stake in the Christian life of the Holy Land. From Jerusalem to the Balkans, Georgia's priests, artists and church-builders were active and respected. So too were its poets, like Shota Rustaveli, the national bard who dedicated an epic to his beloved queen. In between seeking western aid and coping with power cuts, modern Georgia has pledged to keep a wary eye on every place where churches, inscriptions and frescoes testify to its golden age. That includes Greece, Turkey, Bulgaria, Romania and above all, Israel. Last year, Georgians were enraged when a fresco of Rustaveli, in a Jerusalem church under the care of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate, was defaced, then badly restored. This year, a better restoration was done, but Georgians now want a promise that in all future restoration their own experts can take part. They also want to stop the seepage of Georgian frescoes and icons, supposedly under the Patriarchate's care, on to the art market. Several times, Georgia has had to use its meagre resources to buy back pieces of the national heritage. The hope is that things will improve with the recent election of a new Jerusalem Patriarch, after his predecessor was ousted under a cloud of scandal. Georgia's ties with Israel are good, thanks to a thriving Georgian-Jewish community with happy memories of its homeland. Georgia also gets along with Greece, amid a fug of sentimentality over legends about the Argonauts that link the two nations. But can these warm, fuzzy feelings translate into better protection for an ancient culture? That will be a challenge for Geld Bezhuashvili, who succeeds Salome Zourabichvili, the French-born diplomat who was sacked, after a power struggle, as Georgian foreign minister on October 19th.