单选题Plato asked "What is man?" and St Augustine asked "Who am I?' A new breed of criminals has a novel answer: "I am you!" Although impostors have existed for ages, the growing frequency and cost of identity theft is worrisome. Around 10m Americans are victims annually, and it is the leading consumer-fraud complaint over the past five years. The cost to businesses was almost $50 billion, and to consumers $5 billion, in 2002, the most recent year that America's Federal Trade Commission collected figures. After two recent, big privacy disasters, people and politicians are calling for action. In February, ChoicePoint, a large data-collection agency, began sending out letters warning 145,000 Americans that it had wrongly provided fraudsters with their personal details, including Social Security numbers. Around 750 people have already spotted fraudulent activity. And on February 25th, Bank of America revealed that it lost data tapes that contain personal information on over lm government employees, including some Senators. Although accident and not illegality is suspected, all must take precautions against identity theft. Faced with such incidents, state and national lawmakers are calling for new regulations, including over companies that collect and sell personal information. As an industry, the firms—such as ChoicePoint, Acxiom, LexisNexis and Westlaw—are largely unregulated. They have also grown enormous. For example, ChoicePoint was founded in 1997 and has acquired nearly 60 firms to amass databases with 19 billion records on people. It is used by insurance firms, landlords and even police agencies. California is the only state, with a law requiring companies to notify individuals when their personal information has been compromised—which made ChoicePoint reveal the fraud (albeit five months after it was noticed, and after its top two bosses exercised stock options). Legislation to make the requirement a federal law is under consideration. Moreover, lawmakers say they will propose that rules governing credit bureaus and medical companies are extended to data-collection firms. And alongside legislation, there is always litigation. Already, ChoicePoint has been sued for failing to safeguard individuals' data. Yet the legal remedies would still be far looser than in Europe, where identity theft is also a menace, though less frequent and costly. The European Data Protection Directive, implemented in 1998, gives people the right to access their information, change inaccuracies, and deny permission for it to be shared. Moreover, it places the cost of mistakes on the companies that collect the data, not on individuals. When the law was put in force, American policymakers groaned that it was bad for business. But now they seem to be reconsidering it,

单选题It's a cliche—but true—that a huge obstacle to a stronger economic recovery is the lack of confidence in a strong recovery. If consumers and businesses were more confident, they would be spending, hiring and lending more freely. Instead, we're deluged with reports suggesting that, because the recession was so deep, it will take many years to regain anything like the pre-crisis prosperity. Just last week, for example, the McKinsey Global Institute released a study estimating that the country needs 21 million additional jobs by 2020 to reduce the unemployment rate to 5 percent. The study was skeptical that this would happen. Pessimism and slow growth become a vicious cycle. Battered confidence most obviously reflects the ferocity and shock of the financial collapse and the ensuing recession, including the devastating housing collapse. But there's another, less appreciated cause: disillusion with modern economics. Probably without realizing it, most Americans had accepted the fundamental promises of contemporary economics. These were: First, we know enough to prevent another Great Depression; second, although we can't prevent every recession, we know enough to ensure sustained and, for the most part, strong recoveries. These propositions, endorsed by most economists, had worked themselves into society's belief structure. Embracing them does not preclude economic disappointments, setbacks, worries or risks. But for most people most of the time, it does preclude economic calamity. People felt protected. If you stop believing them, then you act differently. You begin shielding yourself, as best you can, against circumstances and dangers that you can't foresee but that you fear are there. You become more cautious. You hesitate more before making a big commitment-buying a home or car, if you're a consumer; hiring workers, if you're an employer; starting a new business, if you're an entrepreneur; or making loans, if you're a banker. Almost everyone is hunkered down in some way. One disturbing fact from the McKinsey report is this: The number of new businesses, a traditional source of jobs, was down 23 percent in 9,010 from 2007; the level was the lowest since 1983, when America had about 75 million fewer people. Large corporations are standoffish. They have about $2 trillion of cash and securities on their balance sheets, which could be used for hiring and investing in new products. It's not that economics achieved nothing. The emergency measures thrown at the crisis in many countries exceptionally low interest rates, "stimulus" programs of extra spending and tax cuts—probably averted another Depression. But it's also true that there's now no consensus among economists as to how to strengthen the recovery. Economists suffer from what one of them calls "the pretense-of-knowledge syndrome." They act as if they understand more than they do and presume that their policies, whether of the left or right, have benefits more predictable than they actually are. It's worth remembering that the recovery's present slowdown is occurring despite measures taken to speed it up. So modern economics has been oversold, and the public is now disbelieving. The disillusion feeds stubbornly low confidence.

单选题The author made a list of Sachs's positions to show that

单选题What is the expression "knock cheaters off stride" mean?

单选题{{B}}Text 1{{/B}} In 1957 a doctor in Singapore noticed that hospitals were treating an unusual number of influenza-like cases. Influenza is sometimes called “flu” or a “bad cold”. He took samples from the throats of patients in his hospital and was able to find the virus of this influenza. There are three main types of the influenza virus. The most important of these are types A and B, each of them having several sub-groups. With the instruments at the hospital the doctor recognized that the outbreak was due to a virus group A, but he did not know the sub-group. He reported the outbreak to the World Health Organization in Geneva. W. H.O. published the important news alongside reports of a similar outbreak in Hong Kong, where about 15%—20% of the population had become ill. As soon as the London doctors received the package of throat samples, they began the standard tests. They found that by reproducing itself at very high speed, the virus had multiplied more than a million times within two days. Continuing their careful tests, the doctors checked the effect of drugs used against all the known sub-groups of virus type A. None of them gave any protection. This then, was something new: a new influenza virus against which the people of the world had no ready help whatsoever. Having isolated the virus they were working with, the two doctors now dropped it into the noses of some specially selected animals, which contact influenza in the same way as human beings do. In a short time the usual signs of the disease appeared. These experiments revealed that the new virus spread easily, but that it was not a killer. Scientists, like the general public, called it simply “Asian” flu. The first discovery of the virus, however, was made in China before the disease had appeared in other countries. Various reports showed that the influenza outbreak started in China, probably in February of 1957. By the middle of March it had spread all over China. The virus was found by Chinese doctors early in March. But China was not a member of the World Health Organization and therefore did not report outbreaks of disease to it. Not until two months later, when travelers carried the virus into Hong Kong, from where it spread to Singapore, did the news of the outbreak reach the rest of the world. By this time it was started on its way around the world. Thereafter, WHO’s Weekly Reports described the steady spread of this virus outbreak, which within four months swept through every continent.

单选题 Few men who find themselves cast as heroes early in life continue to command universal esteem till the end. Sir Edmund Hillary was one. To be the first to reach the top of the world's highest mountain ensured international celebrity and a place in history, but the modesty of a slightly awkward New Zealand beekeeper never departed him. Nor was mountaineering, or indeed beekeeping, his only accomplishment. Two views are often expressed about his life. One is that conquering Everest was everything. No one would play down the role of Tenzing Norgay, the Sherpa who reached the peak with him, possibly even before him; their partnership was like that of Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire. But it was Sir Edmund who first struggled his way up a crack in the 12-metre (40-foot) rockface that had to be overcome after the south summit if the real one was to be achieved, and below which only oblivion awaited. News of the British-led expedition's triumph on May 29th 1953 reached the world through a report in the London Times four days later. The Times, a sponsor of the expedition, had used an elaborate code to trick any rivals monitoring the radio waves. Its scoop was indeed a coup: June 2nd was the day of Queen Elizabeth's coronation, at which her majesty was crowned. Sir Edmund was a man of action. After Everest came more expeditious in Nepal, a race to the South Pole and further adventures in the Antarctic, the Himalayas and India. But for some onlookers neither these nor even the Everest expedition was especially remarkable: fitness and physical courage are all very well, they argued, but the world's highest peak was simply waiting to be scaled, and a steady traffic nowadays makes its way to the top unnoticed, except for the litter it leaves. Both the indifferent and the awe-struck, however, agree that Sir Edmund's other life was wholly admirable, and he himself said he was prouder of it than of anything else. This was his tireless work for the Sherpas, of whom he had become so fond. Through his efforts, and those of Tenzing, hospitals, clinics, bridges, runways and nearly 30 schools have been built in the Solo Khumbu region of Nepal just south of Everest. If New Zealand claimed Sir Edmund's loyalist, Nepal, and especially its Sherpas, could surely claim his heart.

单选题Text 2 The modern cult of beauty is a success in so far as more women retain their youthful appearance to a greater age than in the past. "Old ladies" are already becoming rare. In a few years, we may well believe, they will be extinct. White hair and wrinkles, a bent back and hollow cheeks will come to be regarded as medievally old-fashioned. The crone of the future will be golden, curly and cherry-lipped, and slender. This desirable consummation will be due in part to skin foods and injections of paraffin-wax, facial surgery, mud baths, and paint, in part to improved health, due in its turn to a more rational mode of life. Ugliness is one of the symptoms of disease, beauty of health. In so far as the campaign for beauty is also a campaign for more health, it is admirable and, up to a point, genuinely successful. Beauty that is merely the artificial shadow of these symptoms of health is intrinsically of poorer quality than the genuine article. Still, it is a sufficiently good imitation to be sometimes mistakeable for the real thing. The apparatus for mimicking the symptoms of health is now within the reach of every moderately prosperous person; the knowledge of the way in which real health can be achieved is growing, and will in time, no doubt, be universally acted upon. When that happy moment comes, will every woman be beautiful—as beautiful, at any rate, as the natural shape of her features, with or without surgical and chemical aid, permits? The answer is emphatically: No. For real beauty is as much an affair of the inner as of the outer self. The beauty of a porcelain jar is a matter of shape, of color, of surface texture. The jar may be empty or tenanted by spiders, full of honey or stinking slime—it makes no difference to its beauty or ugliness. But a woman is alive, and her beauty is therefore not skin deep. The surface of the human vessel is affected by the nature of its spiritual contents. I have seen women who, by the standards of a connoisseur of porcelain, were ravishingly lovely. Their shape, their colour, their surface texture were perfect. And yet they were not beautiful. For the lovely vase was either empty or filled with some corruption. Spiritual emptiness or ugliness shows through. And conversely, there is an interior light that can transfigure forms that the pure aesthetician would regard as imperfect or downright ugly. There are numerous forms of psychological ugliness. There is an ugliness of stupidity, for example, of unawareness (distressingly common among pretty women). An ugliness also of greed, of lasciviousness, of avarice. All the deadly sins, indeed, have their own peculiar negation of beauty. On the pretty faces of those especially who are trying to have a continuous "good time", one sees very often a kind of bored sullenness that ruin all their charm. I remember in particular two young American girls I once met in North Africa. Form the porcelain specialist's point of view, they were extremely beautiful. But a sullen boredom was so deeply stamped into their fresh faces, their gait and gestures expressed so weary a listlessness, that it was unbearable to look at them. These exquisite creatures were positively repulsive.

单选题The slogan on the poster for Enduring Love indicates that