单选题Opponents of the retirement policy say

单选题That rapscallion who leaps off the monkey bars, landing smack onto an innocent 3-year-old bystander, and skips off, giggling all the while? According to a new paper out of Israel, he may not feel all that bad about the incident. The study, conducted by Dr. In bal Kivenson Bar-On at the University of Haifa, shows that high levels of fearlessness in 3-and 4-year-olds is strongly associated with aggression and a lack of sympathy. This news will likely surprise risk-loving America, where parents typically beam with pride when their undaunted child mounts the big slide. Fearlessness is a far-end point on the spectrum of what psychologists call the "approach and withdrawal dimension"—people"s tendency to approach new stimuli (to gain information and acquire new skills ) and withdraw from unfamiliar stimuli (to avoid danger). Striking the right balance is considered crucial to man"s survival. But what about preschoolers"? There"s a clear downside, Dr. Kivenson Bar-On discovered, after she observed lots of preschool play and machinations. In total, she documented 80 children at preschool, home and in the lab, measuring their propensity for fearlessness and other social and emotional characteristics at the beginning and end of one year. Fearlessness was measured by observing reactions to various fright-inducing situations: separation from parents, the roar of a vacuum cleaner, a jack-in-the-box and the like. Those who displayed greater levels of fearlessness, the study found, had no trouble recognizing facial expressions of anger, surprise, happiness and sadness in other children—but they had a hard time identifying fear. Over all, they were "emotionally shallow" and showed lower levels of sympathy. They took advantage of friends and lacked regret over inappropriate conduct. "These findings," the paper explains, " suggest that fearlessness in preschool constitutes a clear risk factor for developmental pathways that lead to problems in morality, conscience development, and severe antisocial behaviors. " At the same time, fearless children tended to be highly sociable. "One of the most interesting findings was that we could discriminate between friendliness and sympathy," Dr. Kivenson Bar-On said. "These kids are curious, easygoing and friendly, but they have a hard time recognizing emotional distress in others. " Jamie Ostrov, a psychology professor at the State University at Buffalo who studies aggression, says that children at the extreme end of the fearless spectrurn "may be charming, but they"re also highly manipulative and deceptive and skilled at getting their way—even at age 3 or 4. " It could be that fearless children need stronger distress cues to active their autonomic nervous systems, limiting their ability to detect distress cues in others. It seems to be, if I"m not worried about this, you can"t be, either. But should we be?

单选题Over the last decade, demand for the most common cosmetic surgery procedures, like breast enlargements and nose jobs, has increased by more than 400 percent. According to Dr. Dai Davies, of the Plastic Surgery Partnership in Hammersmith, the majority of cosmetic surgery patients are not chasing physical perfection. Rather, they are driven to fantastic lengths to improve their appearance by a desire to look normal. "What we all crave is to look normal, and normal is what is prescribed by the advertising media and other external pressures. They give us a perception of what is physically acceptable and we feel we must look like that." In America, the debate is no longer about whether surgery is normal; rather, it centers on what age people should be before going under the knife. New York surgeon Dr. Gerard Imber recommends "maintenance" work for people in their thirties. "The idea of waiting until one needs a heroic transformation is silly," he says. "By then, you've wasted 20 great years of your life and allowed things to get out of hand." Dr. Imber draws the line at operating on people who are under 18, however, "It seems that someone we don't consider old enough to order a drink shouldn't be considering plastic surgery. ' In the UK cosmetic surgery has long been seen as the exclusive domain of the very rich and famous. But the proportionate cost of treatment has fallen substantially, bringing all but the most advanced laser technology within the reach of most people, Dr. Davies, who claims to "cater for the average person", agrees. He says: "I treat a few of the rich and famous and an awful lot of secretaries. Of course, 3, 000 for an operation is a lot of money. But it is also an investment for life which costs about half the price of a good family holiday." Dr. Davies suspects that the increasing sophistication of the fat injecting and removal techniques that allow patients to be treated with a local anaesthetic in an afternoon has also helped promote the popularity of cosmetic surgery. Yet, as one woman who recently paid ￡2,500 for liposuction to remove fat from her thighs admitted, the slope to becoming a cosmetic surgery Veteran is a deceptively gentle one. "I had my legs done because they'd been bugging me for years. But going into the clinic was so low key and effective it whetted my appetite. Now I don't think there's any operation that I would rule out having if I could afford it./

单选题In 1956, when the cold war was at its peak, America deployed a "secret sonic weapon", as a newspaper headline put it at the time. That weapon was Dizzy Gillespie, a famed jazz musician, who was given the task of changing the world"s view of American culture through rhythm and beat. Crowds poured into the street to dance. Cultural diplomacy died down after the cold war ended. But the attacks of September 11th 2001 convinced the State Department to send out America"s musicians once again to woo hearts and minds with melody. Rhythm Road, a program run by the State Department and a non-profit organization, Jazz at Lincoln Centre, has made informal diplomats out of both musicians and audiences. Since it began in 2005, musicians have travelled to 96 countries. One band went to Mauritania, a country in northwestern Africa, after last year"s coup; many depart for countries that have strained relationships with America. The musicians travel to places where some people have never seen an American. Jazz, so participants in the program, is well-suited to diplomacy. It is collaborative, allowing individuals both to harmonize and play solo—much like a democracy, says Ari Roland, who plays bass for a band that left New York to tour the Middle East on March 31st. Jazz is also a reminder of music"s power. It helped break down racial barriers, as enthusiasts of all colors gathered to listen to jazz when segregation was still the law of the land. The State Department spent 10 million U.S. dollars on cultural diplomacy programs in the year to September 30th 2008. But most expect funding for the initiative to increase under Barack Obama, who pledged his support for cultural diplomacy during his campaign. Rhythm Road now sends out hip-hop and bluegrass bands as well. There are some dissenters. Nick Cull, the director of the Public Diplomacy Program at the University of Southern California, thinks that these diplomatic projects would be more productive if they were not administered by the same agency that oversees the country"s foreign-policy agenda. And there is also clamor for Mr. Obama to appoint a secretary of culture in his cabinet. What good, they ask, is sending American culture abroad, when the country is not giving it proper attention at home?

单选题 The sale of the Washington Post to Jeff Bezos is just the most recent episode in the decline and fall of professional journalism. By selling out to a mega-billionaire without any newspaper experience, the Graham family has put a priceless national asset at the mercy of a single outsider. Perhaps Jeff Bezos will use his new plaything responsibly; perhaps not; if not, one of the few remaining sources of serious journalism will be lost. The crisis in the English-speaking world will turn into a catastrophe in smaller language zones. The English-speaking market is so large that advertisers will pay a lot to gain access to the tens of millions of readers who regularly click onto the New York Times or the Guardian. But the Portuguese-reading public is far too small to support serious journalism on the internet. What happens to Portuguese democracy when nobody is willing to pay for old-fashioned newspapers? The blogosphere can't be expected to take up the {{U}}slack{{/U}}. First-class reporting on national and international affairs isn't for amateurs. It requires lots of training and lots of contacts and lots of expenses. It also requires reporters with the well-honed capacity to write for a broad audience. The modem newspaper created the right incentives, but without a comparable business model for the new technology, blogging will degenerate into a postmodern nightmare-with millions spouting off without any concern for the facts. We can't afford to wait for the invisible hand to come up with a new way to provide economic support for serious journalism. To be sure, the financial press has proved moderately successful in persuading readers to pay for online access; and mainstream media are now trying to emulate this success. But if tens of millions of readers don't surrender to the charms of PayPal—and quickly—now is the time for some creative thinking. For starters, it would be a mistake to rely on a BBC-style solution. After all it is one thing for government to serve as a major source of news; quite another to give it a virtual monopoly on reporting. Enter the Internet news voucher. Under our proposal, each news article on the web will end by asking readers whether it contributed to their political understanding. If so, they can click the yes-box, and send the message to a National Endowment for Journalism—which would obtain an annual appropriation from the government. This money would be distributed to news .organization s on the basis of a strict mathematical formula: the more clicks, the bigger the check from the Endowment. This way, serious journalism will succeed in gaining mass support. Common sense, as well as fundamental liberal values, counsels against any governmental effort to regulate the quality of news.

单选题No one doubts the power of the media, and no one doubts the media is useful to those in power. Newspapers have vast (1) compared with any other published print, they are published frequently, and are (2) through wide distribution networks. For most people, they (3) the most substantial consumption of printed discourse (语段). (4) the powerful in society should attempt to control and influence them is (5) question. (6) there is also a conflicting myth of the freedom of the press, that journalists are free to give an objective (7) of anything they think newsworthy. And that, (8) journalists on a particular newspaper may be constrained (限制) about what they can report, the reader has a choice because of the variety of newspapers on (9) Newspapers in this regard have been (10) as the third estate, an essential ingredient of democracy; the information they give is (11) to be sufficiently important and trustworthy to allow voters to make judgments about the record of the political parties (12) elections and to make informed decisions about which party to (13) . Lord Northcliffe, the newspaper owner, once said that real news is something (14) somewhere wants to hide, and that all the rest is advertising. He obviously saw the (15) of the press as a watchdog for any inefficiency, irrationality, injustice, corruption of scandalous (丑恶可耻的) behavior for which those in power may have been (16) However the press as we know it has been hi-jacked by those with political and economic power. First, they have done this through ownership. Second, they have done so by the dependence of newspapers on advertising. Third, they have (17) the ambiguities in what is newsworthy to their own (18) And lastly they dominate the way the world is represented in the news since they are gatekeepers controlling the (19) of the news and are being (20) quoted in it.

单选题Craig Anderson would probably agree that ______.

单选题{{B}}Text 3{{/B}} Most firms' annual general meetings (AGMs) owe more to North Korea than ancient Greece. By long-standing tradition, bosses make platitudinous speeches, listen to lone dissidents with the air of psychiatric nurses towards patients and wait for their own proposals to be rubber-stamped by the proxy votes of obedient institutional investors. According to Manifest, a shareholder-advice firm, 97% of votes cast across Europe last year backed management. So should corporate democrats be cheered by the rebellion over pay at Royal Dutch Shell? At the oil giant's AGM on May 19th, 59% of voting shareholders sided against pay packages for top executives. In particular they disliked 4.2 million ($ 5.8 million) in shares dished out to five executives, which comprised about 12% of their total pay for 2008．Under the firm's rules, such awards should be granted only if Shell's total return in the year is in the top three of its peer group. In 2007 and 2008, Shell came a very close fourth, so the firm decided to pay out anyway. Shell is hardly a poster child for malfeasance: it is performing well, its pay is similar to that at other big oil firms and its shareholders previously gave directors discretion to bend the rules. They have used it to cut pay in the past. Still, although the vote is not binding, it is seriously embarrassing. The turnout was decent, at about 50%, and several big fund managers were clearly furious. The payouts have already been made and probably cannot be reversed, but Shell will be in disgrace for a while. Jorma Ollila, its chairman, said he took the vote "very seriously" and promised to "reflect carefully". After GSK, a British drugs firm, had a rebellion on pay in 2003, it completely redrew its pay policy. It is not just Shell that is facing unrest. Rough markets and a wider political uproar over pay have fuelled discontent across corporate Europe. Almost half of the voting shareholders at BP, another oil giant, failed to support its pay policies in April. At Rio Tinto, a mining firm with a habit of digging holes for itself, a fifth of voting shareholders rejected its remuneration policy. So far this year 15% of votes cast on pay in Britain have dissented, compared with 7% last year. In continental Europe owners are grumpy, too: in February almost a third of voting shareholders at Novartis, a Swiss drugs firm, demanded the right to approve its remuneration policy each year. But taking bosses to task for their ever-escalating salaries is not a substitute for keen oversight of performance and strategy. At Royal Bank of Scotland, which had to be rescued by taxpayers last year, 90% of voting shareholders rejected its pay policies last month. Yet back in August 2007, 95% of them ticked the box in support of the acquisition of ABN AMRO, the deal that brought the bank to its knees.

单选题The author believes that our knowledge of social systems is more secure than that of physical systems because ______.