翻译题 46 The relationship between humans and the land we live on has evolved over hundreds of thousands of years, but no period has involved such rapid change as the past century, when we began using land in new ways. A landmark U.N. report warns that humans now face a moment of reckoning over the way we use the planet's land: either we change our ways, particularly our diets, or risk devoting huge swaths of land to uses that spew far more carbon dioxide than we can afford. 47 The report, authored by more than 100 scientists from 52 countries found that emissions from land use—practices like agriculture and logging—cause nearly a quarter of human-induced greenhouse emissions. Still, land elsewhere on the planet has balanced the effects of those emissions. In the 10 years leading up to 2016, forests, wetlands and other land systems soaked up 11.2 billion metric tons more carbon dioxide per year than they emitted. That's more carbon than the world's coal-fired power plants release in a given year. But 'this additional gift from nature is not going to continue forever,' he says. 48 A series of practices like deforestation, soil degradation and the destruction of land-based ecosystems threaten to halt that trend, driving land to release more carbon dioxide than it absorbs. Adapting our diets can help. 49 Climate advocates are hoping this year's report can inspire a similar wake-up call to last year's, which warned of the extremely serious effects of more than 1.5℃ of warming. As global demand for food has grown, farmers have converted forests into agricultural land, leading to a release of carbon stored in trees. Soaring meat production, which requires other food products to feed livestock, has been especially damaging. A global shift from meat—to plant—based diets could yield big results, cutting as much as 8 billion metric tons of greenhouse gases per year. Eating less meat means lower emissions from livestock and the fertilizer needed to grow their food, and offers the chance to reforest land that farmers would have otherwise used for grazing. Changing the way we farm the remaining land would also make a difference. 50 Farmers can implement a range of practices—from changing livestock feed to adapting how soil is managed—that can significantly reduce emissions and even suck carbon out of the atmosphere. Some farmers, traditionally known as a conservative bunch, say they're open to new ways of doing business. 'We are ready to solve this problem,' says Matt Russell, a beef and produce farmer in central Iowa, adding, 'if we're asked to.'

翻译题It was only after I started to write a weekly column about the medical journals, and began to read scientific papers from beginning to end, that I realised just how bad much of the medical literature frequently was

翻译题 46 He is one of the truly great war correspondents, a monumental figure who reported from Afghanistan (阿富汗) for 20 years and won almost every literary prize offered in Italy; he is a writer whose description of his country's troubled history overthrows both official versions. They are some of the most important voices in the world today, honored intellectuals in their own countries. In the English-speaking world, in fact, major publishing houses are inexplicably resistant to any kind of translated material at all. The statistics are shocking in this age of so-called globalization. 47 In the United States and Britain, only 2 to 3 percent of books published each year are translations, compared with almost 35 percent in Latin America and Western Europe. But this is no mere national embarrassment. The dearth of translated literature in the English-speaking world represents a new kind of iron curtain we have constructed around ourselves. 48 We are choosing to block off access to the writing of a large and significant portion of the world, including movements and societies whose potentially dreadful political impact on us is made even more menacing by our general lack of familiarity with them. Publishers have their excuses, of course. 49 This is nothing but a publishing shibboleth (准则；教条) that leads to a chicken-and-egg question: Is a limited readership for translations the reason why so few are published in the English world? Or is that readership limited because English-language publishers provide their readers with so few translations? Certainly, the number of readers of literature—in any language-is on the decline, and serious, dedicated editors face real difficulties bringing good books to the marketplace. But that is not the fault of translation. 50 On the contrary, we need to ask what we lose as readers and as a society if we lose access to translated literature by voluntarily reducing its presence in our community or quietly standing by as it is drastically and arbitrarily reduced.

翻译题The virgin forest with its richness and variety of trees was a real treasure-house which extended from Maine all the way down to Georgia.

翻译题Chomsky’s grammar should show patterns of language change that are independent of the family tree or the pathway tracked through it.

翻译题Since culture is defined briefly as 'the totality of beliefs and practices of a society,' nothing is of greater strategic importance than the language through which its beliefs are expressed and transmitted and by which most interaction of its members takes place. 46 The relation between language and culture would not constitute such serious difficulties for cross-cultural understanding if it were not for the numerous misconceptions about language and its function within a society. Perhaps the most serious misconception is the idea that each language more or less controls the way people think, sometimes expressed as 'We think the way we think because we talk the way we talk.' 47 It is true that the particular structures of a language may reflect to a certain degree the way people think and they may be said to form 'the paths for thinking,' but they do not determine what or how people must think. Languages are too open-ended and human imagination is too creative to ever be rigidly ruled by the regulations of any feature of language. Some people have thought that each language is so distinct that there is no valid way in which the discourses of one language can be translated into another. But at least ninety percent of the fundamental structures of all languages are quite similar, and language universals far outweigh the distinctions. All languages employ figurative expressions and have a great number of literary forms. 48 One language-culture may emphasize the development and use of particular genres, e.g. epic poetry or animal folktales, which another language-culture may seldom employ and may even strongly reject. But the people of any language-culture have sufficient imagination and experience to understand how the people of another language-culture may rightly differ in their behavior and values, since the behavioral differences within a single culture are usually greater than those which exist between cultures. 49 The idea that some languages are far superior to other languages and that accordingly some cultures are far superior to other cultures is also a noted obstacle to understanding the relation between language and culture. When people speak about language superiority, they are usually talking about the literature which has been produced in such a language by creative writers. The oral and written literatures of different languages can differ considerably in quality, 50 but this is not the result of the formal structures of the language in question but of the ways in which the people of the society have invested creative talent in using the language as a medium for the production of valuable literary works. All languages have the potential for outstanding aesthetic expression. It is simply one of the 'accidents' of history which determines the emergence of literary genius.

翻译题American and Japanese researchers are developing a smart car that will help drivers avoid accidents by predicting when they are about to make a dangerous move. The smart car of the furore will be able to tell if drivers are going to turn, change lanes, speed up, slow down or pass another car. If the driver's intended action could lead to an accident, the car will activate a warning system or override the move. 46 'By shifting the emphasis of car safety away from design of the vehicle itself and looking more toward the driver's behavior, the developers believe that they can start to build cars that adapt to suit people's needs,' New Scientist magazine said. Alex Pentland of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology collaborated on the project with Andrew Liu who works for the Japanese carmaker Nissan. 47 Tests of their smart car using a driving simulator have shown that it is 95 percent accurate in predicting a drivels move 12 seconds in advance. 48 The system is based on driving behavior which the researchers say can be divided into chains of subactions which include preparatory moves. It monitors the driver's behavior patterns to predict the next move. 'To make its predictions, Nissan's smart car uses a computer and sensors on the steering wheel, accelerator and brake to monitor a person's driving patterns. 49 A brief training session, in which the driver is asked to perform certain maneuvers, allows the system to calculate the probability of particular actions occurring in two-second time segments,' the magazine said. Liu has also done work on tracking eye movement to predict driving behavior. 50 He said the smart car could be adapted to monitor eye movement which could give even earlier predictions of when a driver is about to make a wrong move.

翻译题Being neither a religion nor an ideology, the body of opinion termed conservatism possesses no Holy Writ and no Das Kapital to provide dogmata. 46 So far as it is possible to determine what conservatives believe, the first principles of the conservative persuasion are derived from what leading conservative writers and public men have professed during the past two centuries. Perhaps it would be well, most of the time, to use this word 'conservative' as an adjective chiefly. For there exists no Model Conservative, and conservatism is the negation of ideology: it is a state of mind, a type of character, a way of looking at the civil social order. In essence, the conservative person is simply one who finds the permanent things more pleasing than Chaos and Old Night. (Yet conservatives know, with Burke, that healthy 'change is the means of our preservation.') 47 A people's historic continuity of experience, says the conservative, offers a guide to policy far better than the abstract designs of coffee-house philosophers. But of course there is more to the conservative persuasion than this general attitude. The conservative believes that there exists an enduring moral order. That order is made for man, and man is made for it: human nature is a constant, and moral truths are permanent. This word order signifies harmony. There are two aspects or types of order: the inner order of the soul, and the outer order of the commonwealth. Twenty-five centuries ago, Plato taught this doctrine, but even the educated nowadays find it difficult to understand. 48 The problem of order has been a principal concern of conservatives ever since conservative became a term of politics. 49 It has been said by liberal intellectuals that the conservative believes all social questions, at heart, to be questions of private morality. Properly understood, this statement is quite true. 50 A society in which men and women are governed by belief in an enduring moral order, by a strong sense of right and wrong, by personal convictions about justice and honor, will be a good society—whatever political machinery it may utilize; while a society in which men and women are morally adrift, ignorant of norms, and intent chiefly upon gratification of appetites, will be a bad society—no matter how many people vote and no matter how liberal its formal constitution may be.

翻译题For years American conversation about Iraq has included a refrain about how we cannot expect to create a Jeffersonian democracy on the Euphrates. 46 The warning is true: if you think about it, America itself is not really a Jeffersonian democracy either; however, Jefferson keeps coming to mind as the events in Iran unfolds. The events there seem to be a chapter in the very Jeffersonian story of the death of theocracy, or rule by clerics, and the gradual separation of church and state. In one of the last letters of his life, in 1826, Jefferson said this of the Declaration of Independence: 47 'May it be to the world what I believe it will be, the signal of arousing men to burst the chains, under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves.' However strong they may be for a time, religions authorities cannot finally survive modernity. 48 And this is because one of the key features of modernity is the shift of emphasis from the privileges and power of institutions to the rights and relative autonomy of the individual. In many ways, the modem virtues are the ones we associate with democracy: a flee flow of ideas, capital and people in an ethos in which men and women are free to form their own opinions and follow the dictates of their own consciences. 49 By their very nature, religious authorities are at risk in the face of such a world, for they are founded on an un-modern and undemocratic idea. To say that religious authorities are doomed is not to argue that religion is any less important in our age. Quite the opposite! Religious faith is an intrinsic element of human experience, and religion can be the undoing of a religious establishment, for an individual's interpretation of the applications of faith to politics may well differ from the institutional interpretation. There is a deep irony at work here. 50 Religious authorities usually command the teaching of religion, but the teaching of religion can lead not to uniform public belief but to a questioning of orthodoxy, which is always a favorite activity of a new generation. The products of one world often react against the world of their parents, and yesterday's outsiders are today's insiders. The promise of theocracy has to go unfulfilled, for no one can bring sacred order to profane chaos.

翻译题 46 Is language, like food, a basic human need without which a child at a critical period of life can be starved and damaged? Judging from the drastic experiment of Frederick II in the thirteenth century, it may be. Hoping to discover what language a child would speak if he heard no mother tongue, he told the nurses to keep silent. All the infants died before the first year. But clearly there was more than lack of language here. What was missing was good mothering. Without good mothering, in the first year of life especially, the capacity to survive is seriously affected. Today no such severe lack exists as that ordered by Frederick. Nevertheless, some children are still backward in speaking. 47 Most often the reason for this backward speaking is that the mother is insensitive to the signals of the infant, whose brain is programmed to learn language rapidly. If these sensitive periods are neglected, the ideal time for acquiring skills passes and they might never be learned so easily again. A bird learns to sing and to fly rapidly at the right time, but the process is slow and hard once the critical stage has passed. 48 Experts suggest that speech stages are reached in a fixed sequence and at a constant age, but there are cases where speech has started late in a child who eventually turns out to be of high IQ. At twelve weeks a baby smiles and makes vowel-like sounds; at twelve months he can speak simple words and understand simple commands; at eighteen months he has a vocabulary of three to fifty words. At three he knows about 1,000 words which he can put into sentences, and at four his language differs from that of his parents in style rather than grammar. Recent evidence suggests that an infant is born with the capacity to speak. What is special about man's brain, compared with that of the monkey, is the complex system which enables a child to connect the sight and feel of, say, a toy-bear with the sound pattern 'toy-bear.' 49 And even more incredible is the young brain's ability to pick out an order in language from the mixture of sound around him, to analyze, to combine and recombine the parts of a language in new ways. 50 But speech has to be induced, and this depends on interaction between the mother and the child, where the mother recognizes the signals in the child's babbling and smiling, and responds to them. Insensitivity of the mother to these signals dulls the interaction because the child gets discouraged and sends out only the obvious signals. Sensitivity to the child's non-verbal signals is essential to the growth and development of language.

翻译题Pull a spring, let it go, and it will snap back into shape. Pull it further and yet further and it will go on springing back until, quite suddenly, it won't. What was once a spring has become a useless piece of curly wire. 46 And that, in a nutshell, is what many scientists worry may happen to the Each if its systems are overstretched like those of an abused spring. One result of this worry was the idea of planetary boundaries. In the run-up to that year's climate conference in Copenhagen, 47 a group of concerned scientists defined in a paper in Nature, what they thought of as a safe operating space for human development—a set of nine limits beyond which people should not push their planet. The eight areas of concern were: climate change; ocean acidification; the thinning of the ozone layer; intervention in the nitrogen and phosphate cycles; the conversion of wilderness to farms and cities; extinctions; the build up of chemical pollutants; and the level of particulate pollutants in the atmosphere. 48 For seven of these areas the paper's authors felt confident enough to put numbers on where the boundaries actually lay, but for chemicals and particulates, they deferred judgment. Planetary boundaries provide a useful way of thinking about environmental change, because in many cases they give scope for further change that has not already happened. But the concept has numerous drawbacks. 49 The actual location of the boundaries is, as their proponents acknowledge, somewhat arbitrary, partly because of the incomplete state of current knowledge, but it may remain so however much anyone knows. Some boundaries might be transgressed without irreversible harm occurring. Some may have been drawn around the wrong things altogether. And some academic opinion holds that spectacular global change could come about without breaking through any of them. Another problem for the idea of planetary boundaries is the assumption that they are independent of each other. That seems unlikely, and if they are not then a crisis might arise even if no single boundary were transgressed. On June 7th, Nature published a review of evidence which suggested that this may be happening. 50 It suggested that the Earth may be approaching a 'tipping point' past which simultaneous changes—to land use, climate and more—driven by an ever larger, ever richer human population, push the system into a very different state, with climate zones changed permanently, ecosystems functioning differently, and so on.

翻译题With its theme that “Mind is the master weaver,” creating our inner character and outer circumstances, the book As a Man Thinking by James Allen is an in-depth exploration of the central idea of self-help writing。 　　(46) U Allen’s contribution was to take an assumption we all share-that because we are not robots we therefore control our thoughts-and reveal its erroneous nature. /U Because most of us believe that mind is separate from matter, we think that thoughts can be hidden and made powerless; this allows us to think one way and act another. However, Allen believed that the unconscious mind generates as much action as the conscious mind, and (47) U while we may be able to sustain the illusion of control through the conscious mind alone, in reality we are continually faced with a question: “Why cannot I make myself do this or achieve that? ” /U 　　Since desire and will are damaged by the presence of thoughts that do not accord with desire, Allen concluded : “ We do not attract what we want, but what we are。” Achievement happens because you as a person embody the external achievement; you don’t “ get” success but become it. There is no gap between mind and matter。 　　Part of the fame of Allen’s book is its contention that “Circumstances do not make a person, they reveal him。” (48) U This seems a justification for neglect of those in need, and a rationalization of exploitation, of the superiority of those at the top and the inferiority of those at the bottom。/U 　　This ,however, would be a knee-jerk reaction to a subtle argument. Each set of circumstances, however bad, offers a unique opportunity for growth. If circumstances always determined the life and prospects of people, then humanity would never have progressed. In fat, (49) Ucircumstances seem to be designed to bring out the best in us and if we feel that we have been “wronged” then we are unlikely to begin a conscious effort to escape from our situation . /UNevertheless, as any biographer knows, a person’s early life and its conditions are often the greatest gift to an individual。 　　The sobering aspect of Allen’s book is that we have no one else to blame for our present condition except ourselves. (50) U The upside is the possibilities contained in knowing that everything is up to us; where before we were experts in the array of limitations, now we become authorities of what is possible。/U

翻译题As you will come to see, knowing that mental health is always available and knowing to trust it allow us to slow down to the moment and live life happily.

{{B}}Text 4{{/B}} An annual census of wolves at Yellowsto ne National Park has found a sharp drop in the population. But park biologists, who suspect a deadly disease, canine parvovirus, say they will let nature take its course. "Parvo can be vaccinated for and can be treated, but we wouldn't do it because we couldn't catch every animal," Daniel Stahler. a park waif biologist, said. "And this allows them to build up a natural resistance." The census found 22 pups, compared with 69 last year. The total count of wolves dropped m 118 from 171, the lowest since 2000. "It was somewhat devastating to have such poor pup survival," Mr. Stahler said. "But research shows that young pups can bounce back from it quite successfully." That pups have suffered the decline seems to suggest the culprit is parvo, said Ed Bangs, waif recovery coordinator for the United States Fish and Wildlife Service here. Nursing pups receive immunity from their mother's milk. but the immunity drops when nursing stops. The large number of wolves in the park might also be a factor. "When you have a big litter and adults are having trouble killing enough to feed all these pups, and the animals are stressed, parvo flares up," Mr. Bangs said. "If you have 15 brothers and sisters instead of 3, you don't get enough to eat; parvo kills you." Canine parvovirus was discovered in the United States in 1978. Extremely hardy, the disease spread rapidly to domestic dogs and then into wild animal populations. Biologists suspect that it was introduced to Yellowstone by a tourist's infected dog or a coyote. Because parvo is so hardy, it persists in the soil for months. A wolf could catch it from simply sniffing infectious soil. the biologists said. The disease has hit wolves on the northern range, the elk-filled meadows of the northern half of the park, especially hard. Out of 49 pups born there, 8 survived. Some scientists, including Mr. Bangs, theorize that the park may have overshot its capacity for wolves and that the numbers are naturally adjusting downward, with disease being one of the agents. The long-term carrying capacity of the park, he said, is probably 110 to 150 wolves. Wolves have been killed in other ways, too. Frequent encounters among competing wolf packs are the biggest cause of death among adults. In the first five years of their reintroduction to the park, one or two animals a year were killed by other wolves. That number has risen to four or five a year. Vehicles also take a toll, Fourteen wolves have been killed by vehicles in the last 10 years, eight of them near Mile Marker 30 on Route 191, a straight stretch on the western side of the park where motorists tend to speed and wolves are plentiful.

{{B}}Text 3{{/B}} The number of city schools put on a list for strict scrutiny by the state for poor academic performance went up slightly this year. and the number of city schools taken off the list by showing improvement dropped, the state's commissioner of education announced yesterday. Ten city schools—now at risk of being shut down—were added to the list of Schools Under Registration Review, known as SURR, bringing the total in the city m 40. Statewide. 61 schools are under review, said the commissioner, Richard Mills. The addition of 10 city schools reverses what had been a trend in the past few years: the number of schools on the list had been falling. There were 55 schools in 2003, 46 in 2004 and 35 last year, an all-time low. But this year a new factor was at work: The state raised the level of performance required to pass its standards. In addition, 6 of the 10 newly named schools are middle schools--and those schools have for years confounded educators by resisting the improvements that have worked in lower grades and even in high schools. Three city schools were removed from the list this year for improvement in academic performance, but that number was significantly lower than the number removed in each of the past several years. For instance, 16 schools were taken off the list last year. Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein observed that the number of endangered schools still remains at a near-record low. "Nevertheless. we cannot accept failing performance by any of our schools for any reason," he said. "If a school proves incapable of providing a high-quality education m our students despite efforts to improve it, it will be closed." He said 8 of the 40 schools that have been on the list were scheduled m be closed this year and 5 more will be closed next year. The state also expanded its review process for the first time this year m District 75, which covers special education schools, and one District 75 school, Public School 12 in the Bronx, was put on the list. Despite the additions, Mr. Mills said he was pleased. "I think it's impressive since we have been rinsing the bar," he said. "The city has essentially been staying ahead of a moving locomotive." Elsewhere in the state, three schools in Buffalo and two in Syracuse were added to the list. The 10 New York City schools on the list are Legacy School for Integrated Studies in Manhattan; P.S. 220, P.S. 12, Junior High School 123 and Middle School 302 in the Bronx; J.H.S. 265. J.H.S. 57, M.S. 143, Intermediate School 291 and P.S. 12 in Brooklyn. The three schools removed from the list are P.S. 140 in the Bronx. Repertory Company High School in Manhattan and EBC/ENY High School for Public Safety and Law in Brooklyn.

It is commonly supposed that the health of Long Island Sound is chiefly the responsibility of the shoreline communities in Long Island, Westchester County and Connecticut. This is largely true. It is also true, however, that New York City has long been a major contributor to the environmental ills that torture this noblest of American estuaries. The main reason is four old municipal sewage treatment plants on the East River. Every day of every year, these plants deposit hundreds of thousands of gallons of partly treated wastewater into the river, which then, with tidal certainty, propels the polluted water into the Sound itself The most damaging of the pollutants leaving the plants is nitrogen—useful as a fertilizer on land but, in sufficient quantities, fatal to bodies of water like the Sound, where it stimulates the growth of bacteria and algae and robs the water of oxygen. This condition is known as hypoxia, and it suppresses marine life. Roughly half the nitrogen comes from treatment plants and other sources in about 80 shoreline communities, the other half comes from the New York City plants. It is thus cause for great celebration that the city agreed last week to settle a longstanding legal action and spend at least $700 million to upgrade these four plants, cutting their nitrogen output by nearly 60 percent by 2017. Audubon New York, a leader among the environmental groups that helped shape the agreement and move it forward, when negotiations seemed to falter, called the agreement an historic moment in the struggle to restore the Sound to good health. In retrospect, the most important moment in that struggle the moment from which all else has flowed, including last week's agreement—came m 1994, when New York and Connecticut. after sustained pressure from the federal Environmental Protection Agency, approved a comprehensive plan to clean up the Sound. The city's main responsibility was to modernize its sewage treatment plants. The Giuliani administration left the bulk of the task to Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Alarmed by the project's estimated $1.3 billion price tag, Mr. Bloomberg dispatched Christopher Ward, then the environmental commissioner, to Europe and elsewhere to find new, more cost-efficient waste treatment technologies. In due course, Mr. Ward and his counterpart in Albany, Erin Crotty, reached an agreement in principle to reform the plants at well under the original cost. Mr. Ward and Ms. Crotty left public service, but after further debating aimed partly at ensuring that future city administrations could not wiggle out of the deal, and after further prodding by Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, their successors. Emily Lloyd and Denise Sheehan, brought the matter to a close. This does not mean the Sound is no longer at risk. The Sound passes through the densest population corridor in the country, and will remain forever stressed by the 20 million people who live within 50 miles of its shores. Thus the shoreline communities in Long Island, Westchester and Connecticut must do more than ever to contain pollution.

{{B}}Directions:{{/B}}Read the following text. Choose the best word(s) for each numbered blank and mark A, B, C or D on ANSWER SHEET 1. Punishment depends as much on politics as it does on crime: crime rates have been stable in recent years but there' s been a striking increase in the prison population, And because populism is coming so much to{{U}} (1) {{/U}}the political agendas, politicians are advocating sharp increases in penalties to take{{U}} (2) {{/U}}of public unease. The question is how far this will get. In the 21st century weak governments might try to win legitimacy by being especially{{U}} (3) {{/U}}on crime. That could mean high prison populations and draconian{{U}} (4) {{/U}}such as those adopted in the United States in recent years. Luckily, there remain significant differences between the UK and the USA: social divisions are less extreme and racial{{U}} (5) {{/U}}are not as high.{{U}} (6) {{/U}}there is a great deal of minor violent crime here, rates of murder—{{U}} (7) {{/U}}particularly fuel public anxieties—are much{{U}} (8) {{/U}}because guns have not been so widely{{U}} (9) {{/U}}. It' s unlikely that this will change greatly: the{{U}} (10) {{/U}}to tighten up the gun laws in Britain will continue ,and all{{U}} (11) {{/U}}the toughest criminals will still have a view about what is and what isn't "acceptable violence. So I don' t believe we will see a huge{{U}} (12) {{/U}}in violent crime, but I{{U}} (13) {{/U}}rates of property crime and crimes of opportunity to remain high. There will also be much more electronic fraud because it' s so hard to{{U}} (14) {{/U}}and prevent. This is an important problem for business, but not one that{{U}} (15) {{/U}}much popular agitation. It' s unlikely we'll see the return of the death penalty: the police are{{U}} (16) {{/U}}about its effectiveness and its reintroduction would be highly problematic{{U}} (17) {{/U}}the recent Council of Europe protocol outlawing its use.{{U}} (18) {{/U}}punishment remains a pretty accurate temperature gauge, though:{{U}} (19) {{/U}}there is significant political pressure for the death penalty, it' s a{{U}} (20) {{/U}} of harsher attitudes towards crime generally.

Tuning in round the clock, via satellite or internet blog, to any bout of mayhem anywhere, you might not think the world was becoming a more peaceable place. But in some ways it is, and measurably so. A recent Human Security Report released by the Liu Institute at the University of British Columbia registers a 40% drop in the number of armed conflicts between 1992 and 2003, with the worst wars, those claiming more than a thousand lives in battle, down by 80%. While 28 armed struggles for self-determination ignited or reignited between 1991 and 2004, an encouraging 43 others were contained or doused. Yet measured in a different way, from the point of view of the half of the world"s population that is female, argues the Geneva Centre for the Democratic Control of the Armed Forces, the world is an awfully violent place, and not just in its war zones. Men still fill most of the body bags in wartime, including in civil wars, even on DCAF"s figures, but their sisters, mothers, wives and daughters, it argues in a new report entitled "Women in an Insecure World", face nothing short of a "hidden gendercide". Violence against women is nothing new. DCAF"s contribution is to collate the many figures and estimates—not all of them easily verifiable, it has to be said—on everything from infanticide to rape (in both war and peace), dowry deaths, sex trafficking and domestic violence (in richer countries as well as poorer ones). According to one UN estimate cited by DCAF, between 113m and 200m women are now demographically "missing". This gender gap is a result of the aborting of girl foetuses and infanticide in countries where boys are preferred; lack of food and medical attention that goes instead to brothers, fathers, husbands and sons; so-called "honour killings" and dowry deaths; and other sorts of domestic violence. It implies that each year between 1.5m and 3m women and girls are lost to gender-based violence. In other words, every two to four years the world looks away from a victim count on the scale of Hitler"s Holocaust. Women between the ages of 15 and 44 are more likely to be maimed or die from violence inflicted one way or another by their menfolk than through cancer, malaria, traffic accidents or war combined. Poor health care means that 600,000 women are lost each year to childbirth (a toll roughly equal annually to that of the Rwandan genocide). The World Health Organisation estimates that 6,000 girls a day (more than 2m a year), mostly in the poor world, undergo genital mutilation. Other WHO figures suggest that, around the world, one woman in five is likely to be a victim of rape or attempted rape in her lifetime.

This year the combined advertising revenues of Google and Yahoo! will rival the combined prime-time ad revenues of America's three big television networks, ABC, CBS and NBC, predicts Advertising Age. 41. ______. And this week online advertising made another leap forward. The latest innovation comes from Google, which has begun testing a new auction-based service for display advertising. It already provides a service called AdSense. It works rather like an advertising agency, automatically placing sponsored links and other ads on third-party websites. Google then splits the revenue with the owners of those websites, who can range from multinationals to individuals publishing blogs, as online journals are known. Google's new services extend AdSense in three ways. 42. ______ This provides both more flexibility and control, says Patrick Keane, Google's head of sales strategy. Companies trying to raise awareness of a brand often want a high level of control over where their ads appear. The second change involves pricing. 43. ______. Click-through marketing tends to be aimed at people who already know they want to buy something and are searching for product and price information, whereas display advertising is more often used to persuade people to buy things in the first instance. The third change is that Google will now offer animated ads--but nothing too flashy or annoying, insists Mr. Keane. Google has long been extremely conservative about the use of advertising; it still plans to use only small, text-based ads on its own search sites. 44. ______. This could fuel online ad-growth even further. Worldwide ad revenue on the internet grew by 21% in 2004, and it is expected to continue at that pace for the next few years, says ZenithOptimedia, a research firm. As Google and Yahoo! are two of the most widely visited sites, this greatly benefits them. 45. ______. Terry Semel, Yahoo!' s chief executive, believes there is a lot more growth to come as companies become more familiar with online advertising. Other innovations in online marketing are said to be in the pipeline. Local search and its associated advertising opportunities are one huge growth area. This week, Yahoo! appointed another top executive to its media group, fuelling industry speculation that the website may start to produce its own entertainment content. Television stations would then have a lot more to worry about than just losing ad revenue to the internet. [A] Instead of Google's software analyzing third-party websites to determine from their content what relevant ads to place on them, advertisers will instead be able to select the specific sites where they want their ads to appear. [B] Google recently announced a net profit of $ 369m in its first quarter from revenue that soared to $1.3 billion, up 93% compared with the same period a year earlier. Yahoo!'s first-quarter net profits more than doubled to $ 205m on revenue of $1.2 billion, up 55% from a year earlier. [C] Many big firms still allocate only 2-4% of their marketing budgets to the internet, although it represents about 15% of consumers' media consumption--a share that is growing. Many young people already spend more time online than they do watching TV. [D] It will, says the trade magazine, represent a "watershed moment" in the evolution of the internet as an advertising medium. A 30-second prime-time TV ad was once considered the most effective--and the most expensive--form of advertising. But that was before the internet got going. [E] But many of its AdSense partners might well be tempted by the prospect of earning a share of revenue from display and animated ads too, especially as such ads are likely to be more appealing to some of the big-brand advertisers.[F] Sites such as eBay, the leading online auctioneer, and Craigslist, which hosts local sites, are soaking up large amounts of spending that might otherwise have gone on classified advertising-and for everything from used cars to job vacancies. Yahoo! is expanding heavily into entertainment, with film and video clips providing another avenue for advertisers.[G] Potential internet advertisers must bid for their ad to appear on a "cost-per-thousand" (known as CPM) basis. CPM bids will have to compete against rival bids for the same ad space from those wanting to pay on a "cost-per-click" basis, the way search terms are presently sold.

Occasional self-medication has always been part of normal living. The making and selling of drugs has a long history and is closely linked, like medical practice itself, with the belief in magic. Only during the last hundred years or so has the development of scientific techniques made it possible for some of the causes of symptoms to be understood, so that more accurate diagnosis has become possible. The doctor is now able to follow up the correct diagnosis of many illnesses with specific treatment of their causes. In many other illnesses, of which the causes remain unknown, it is still limited, like the unqualified prescriber, to the treatment of symptoms. The doctor is trained to decide when to treat symptoms only and when to attack the cause—this is the essential difference between medical prescribing and self-medication. The advance of technology has brought about much progress in some fields of medicine, including the development of scientific drug therapy. In many countries public health organization is improving and people"s nutritional standards have risen. Parallel with such beneficial trends are two which have an adverse effect. One is the use of high-pressure advertising by the pharmaceutical industry, which has tended to influence both patients and doctors and has led to the overuse of drugs generally. The other is the emergence of the sedentary society with its faulty ways of life: lack of exercise, over-eat-ing, unsuitable eating, insufficient sleep, excessive smoking and drinking. People with disorders arising from faulty habits such as these, as well as from unhappy human relationships, often resort to self-medication and so add the taking of pharmaceuticals to the list. Advertisers go to great lengths to catch this market. Clever advertising, aimed at chronic sufferers who will try anything because doctors have not been able to cure them, can induce such faith in a preparation, particularly if steeply priced, that it will produce—by suggestion—a very real effect in some people. Advertisements are also aimed at people suffering from mild complaints such as simple colds and coughs, which clear up by themselves within a short time. These are the main reasons why laxatives, indigestion remedies, painkillers, tonics, vitamin and iron tablets and many other preparations are found in quantity in many households. It is doubtful whether taking these things ever improves a person"s health ; it may even make it worse. Worse because the preparation may contain unsuitable ingredients; worse because the taker may become dependent on them; worse because they might be taken in excess; worse because they may cause poisoning, and worse of all because symptoms of some serious underlying cause may be masked and therefore medical help may not be sought.