单选题In the late morning of April 20th, 1999 a pair of teenagers, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, walked into the cafeteria at Columbine High School in Colorado and began gunning down their classmates. The two senior-year students killed 13 people in a 45-minute rampage before turning their weapons on themselves. The massacre remains the deadliest high-school shooting in American history. In the days after the killings it emerged that, besides enjoying violent movies, the two liked playing "Doom", a bloody video game from the mid-1990s in which the heavily armed players use shotguns and rocket launchers to dispose of armies of zombies and demons. Parents, politicians and psychiatrists worried that exposure to virtual violence had prepared the ground for the real-world killings. Two years later the parents of some of the victims sued dozens of gaming companies, including id Software, the developers of "Doom", alleging that their products had contributed to the murders. The massacre fed long-standing worries about video games, particularly in America, the industry"s biggest national market. The critics say there is a crucial difference between films, plays or books, where the players are just passive onlookers, and video games, where they are active participants in the simulated slayings. That, the argument goes, makes it more likely that they will resort to violence in the real world, too. But the evidence is hard to pin down. Violent crime in America, Britain and Japan, the three biggest video-game markets, has dropped over the past decade at the same time as sales of video games have soared. That does not, by itself, exonerate the industry—after all, without games violent crime might have fallen still further. And several studies purport to show that playing violent video games raises aggression levels. But Chris Ferguson, a psychologist at Texas A&M International University, points out that much of this work is of poor quality. In a meta-analysis published in 2007, he found no evidence that games made their players violent. Indeed, after decades of research, he has concluded that violence in any media has little or no effect on their consumers. Again, critics point to the interactive nature of video games, which allows their designers to tweak risks and rewards to make them irresistible. Some countries, including China and South Korea, are attempting to limit the number of hours that youngsters can play online games. Even games developers themselves have expressed concern about online games that rely on keeping players hooked. But there is no suggestion that games are addictive in the sense that they create physical dependence in their players. That makes them akin to other compelling but legal pastimes, such as gambling, following a football club or collecting stamps. There is a long tradition of dreadful warnings about new forms of media, from translations of the Bible into dialects to cinema and rock music. But as time passes such novelties become uncontroversial, and eventually some of them are elevated into art forms. That mellowing process may already be under way as the average game-player gets older.

单选题The longest bull run in a century of art-market history ended on a dramatic note with a sale of 56 works by Damien Hirst, "Beautiful Inside My Head Forever", at Sotheby"s in London on September 15th 2008. All but two pieces sold, fetching more than ￡70m, a record for a sale by a single artist. It was a last victory. As the auctioneer called out bids, in New York one of the oldest banks on Wall Street, Lehman Brothers, filed for bankruptcy. The world art market had already been losing momentum for a while after rising bewilderingly since 2003. At its peak in 2007 it was worth some $65 billion, reckons Clare McAndrew, founder of Arts Economics, a research firm—double the figure five years earlier. Since then it may have come down to $50 billion. But the market generates interest far beyond its size because it brings together great wealth, enormous egos, greed, passion and controversy in a way matched by few other industries. In the weeks and months that followed Mr. Hirst"s sale, spending of any sort became deeply unfashionable. In the art world that meant collectors stayed away from galleries and salerooms. Sales of contemporary art fell by two-thirds, and in the most overheated sector, they were down by nearly 90% in the year to November 2008. Within weeks the world"s two biggest auction houses, Sotheby"s and Christie"s, had to pay out nearly $200m in guarantees to clients who had placed works for sale with them. The current downturn in the art market is the worst since the Japanese stopped buying Impressionists at the end of 1989. This time experts reckon that prices are about 40% down on their peak on average, though some have been far more fluctuant. But Edward Dolman, Christie"s chief executive, says: "I"m pretty confident we"re at the bottom." What makes this slump different from the last, he says, is that there are still buyers in the market. Almost everyone who was interviewed for this special report said that the biggest problem at the moment is not a lack of demand but a lack of good works to sell. The three Ds—death, debt and divorce—still deliver works of art to the market. But anyone who does not have to sell is keeping away, waiting for confidence to return.

单选题Cannes was quiet this week. Although the stars and the paparazzi went through the usual red-carpet routine, there was less extravagance and a smaller contingent of film-buyers than usual. Yet for makers of independent films, that was not the end of the world. In their business the action increasingly takes place not on the French Riviera but in American living rooms. Tricky, intelligent films are finding a home in the least glamorous corner of the television business. Getting independent films into cinemas, never easy, has become much harder in the past year. Some specialist distributors, such as Warner Independent Pictures, have closed and others are buying fewer films. The credit crunch and the strong dollar have cut foreign sales. Meanwhile cheap digital-video cameras and editing software have produced a flood of content. Some 5,500 films are chasing buyers in Cannes this year. Last year just 606 new films were released in American cinemas. Many lost money. "The economics just do not make sense," says Jonathan Sehring of IFC Films, an independent distributor. Hence the rapid growth of an alternative. This year IFC will release about 100 films "on demand", meaning they can be called up for a fee in most households that get their television via cable or satellite. Many will be available on the same day that they first appear at film festivals such as Sundance and South by Southwest. Later this year IFC plans to launch a new on-demand channel to showcase documentary films. Cinetic, a powerful independent-film broker, will also get into the game this summer. The reason for the rush is that, for low-budget films, the economics of video on demand do make sense. Cable companies, which take a cut when they sell a film, help with advertising. Mr Sehring says IFC makes about as much when a film is sold on demand as when a customer buys a cinema ticket, even though the ticket costs almost twice as much. He reckons he recoups his costs and returns money to filmmakers more than half the time—not bad for films that might otherwise have disappeared without trace. Distributors are learning what kinds of films are best suited to video on demand. Whether accessed via cable television or the Internet, video on demand is likely to grow. America"s suburbs are becoming much more diverse places, with more ethnic minorities, more people with degrees and more gays, according to Gary Gates, a demographer at the University of California, Los Angeles. The potential audience for independent films is thus dispersing beyond the places where independent cinemas are concentrated. Not everybody lives near an art-house cinema, but almost everybody has a remote control.

单选题 Barack Obama, in his state-of-the-union speech on February 12th, called fora new era of scientific discovery. "Now is the time to reach a level of research and development not seen since the height of the space race," he declared. He praised projects to map the human brain and accelerate regenerative medicine. This would mean spending more on research. As The Economist went to press, America's government was about to do the opposite. Federal spending is due to be cut on March 1st, the result of a long brawl over the deficit. Complex politics triggered this "sequester" (Congress excels at nothing if not elaborate dysfunction) but the sequester itself is brutally simple. America will cut $85 billion from this year's budget (about 2.5% of spending), split between military and non-military programmes. Among the areas to be squeezed is R companies pay for later stages of development. For example, the NIH supported early research into monoclonal antibodies. By 2010 such research underpinned five of America's 20 bestselling drugs. As drug firms trim their budget, the NIH's work is becoming even more vital. But since 2003, inflation-adjusted spending on medical research has declined.

单选题Marriage, and its many ups and downs, still often 1 the headlines on newspapers, magazines and the airwaves. Nearly 23m Americans watched Prince William being joined in holy marriage to Kate Middleton. Millions more have 2 in the break-up of Arnold Schwarzenegger"s marriage after revelations that he fathered a son with a maid. Less 3 are revelations about the sorry state of marriage across the United States. Data from the Census Bureau show that married couples, for the first time, now make up 4 than half (45%) of all households. The 5 American family, with morn, dad and kids under one roof, is 6 . In every state the numbers of unmarried couples, childless households and single-person households are growing faster than 7 comprised of married people with children, finds the 2010 8 . The latter accounted 9 43% of households in 1950, but now just 20%. And the trend has a distinct 10 dimension. Traditional marriage has 11 from a universal rite to a luxury for the educated and the 12 There 13 was a marriage gap in 1960: only four percentage points separated the wedded ways of college and high-school graduates (76% versus 72%). The gap has since 14 to 16 percentage points, according to the Pew Research Centre. A Census Bureau analysis released this spring found that brides are significantly more 15 to have a college degree than they were in the mid-1990s. "Marriage has become much more 16 , and that"s why the divorce rate has come down," said Bradford Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. The project found that divorce rates for couples with college degrees are only a third as high as for those with a high-school degree. "Less marriage means less income and more poverty," reckons Isabel Sawhill, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. She and other researchers have 17 as much as half of the inequality of wealth 18 in America to changes in family 19 : single-parent families (mostly those with a high-school degree or less) are getting poorer while married couples (with educations and dual incomes) are increasingly 20 . "This is a striking gap that is not well understood by the public," she says.

单选题If soldiering was for the money, the Special Air Service (SAS) and the Special Boat Service (SBS) would have disintegrated in recent years. Such has been the explosion in private military companies (PMCs) that they employ an estimated 30,000 in Iraq alone—and no government can match their fat salaries. A young SAS trooper earns about ￡2,000 ($3,500) a month; on the "circuit", as soldiers call the private world, he could get ￡15,000. Why would he not? For reasons both warm-hearted and cool-headed. First, for love of regiment and comrades, bonds that tend to be tightest in the most select units. Second, for the operational support, notably field medicine, and the security, including life assurance and pension, that come with the queen"s paltry shilling. Although there has been no haemorrhaging of special force (SF) fighters to the private sector, there has been enough of a trickle to cause official unease. A memo recently circulated in the Ministry of Defence detailed the loss of 24 SF senior non-commissioned officers to private companies in the past year. All had completed 22 years of service, and so were eligible for a full pension, and near the end of their careers. Yet there is now a shortage of hard-bitten veterans to fill training and other jobs earmarked for them, under a system for retaining them known as "continuance." America has responded to the problem by throwing cash at it, offering incentives of up to $150,000 to sign new contracts. The Ministry of Defence has found a cheaper ploy. It has spread the story of two British PMC employees, recently killed in Iraq, whose bodies were left rotting in the sun.

单选题Amazon is looking at drastically reducing its delivery times—to 30 minutes or less—as it plans a new service called Prime Air that it says could debut in a few years. The giant online retailer plans to use semi-autonomous drones to carry purchases to customers. CEO Jeff Bezos announced the plan Sunday on CBS" 60 Minutes. Bezos tells Charlie Rose that Amazon"s "octocopter" could be airborne within four to five years, using GPS coordinates to find customers. The drones would depart from the retailer"s "fulfillment centers," the huge warehouses it has built near many large population centers in the U. S. and elsewhere. They can carry about five pounds, Bezos says, a figure that covers around 85 percent of Amazon"s products. The delivery drones would be particularly useful in densely populated urban areas, Bezos says. Powered by electricity, their current range of operation is around 10 miles from the point of origin. Writing that "drones can explode, or run into things," the Quartz technology blog"s Heather Timmons notes that safety concerns may limit where the new delivery devices could be used. In addition to safety concerns, drones could face another challenge before they"re widely used for delivery: overcoming the possible suspicions of citizens who have mostly seen the unmanned aircraft mentioned in conjunction with military and surveillance uses. Rose"s interview of Bezos also touched on the retailer"s 10-year, $600 million contract with the CIA, through its Amazon Web Services unit. The company is using its technological expertise to build a computing cloud for the agency, Bezos said. When asked by Rose if that presented a conflict, Bezos answered, "We"re building what"s called a private cloud for them, Charlie, because they don"t want to be on the public cloud." Amazon isn"t alone in pursuing drone delivery. Earlier this year, a pilot project by Domino"s Pizza looked at flying hot pizzas to customers in Britain, posting a video of a successful test run. That led the site Singularity Hub to observe: "So why are drones such a big deal? In our robotic future, anything that can reduce urban congestion, minimize carbon emissions, save money and save trips to the emergency room (car accidents kill, you know) will drive huge value in the economy and make our lives better, to boot."

单选题Everyone complains that corporate America is 1 to hire additional workers. Far 2 attention has been paid to the flip side of the jobless recovery: the 3 improvement in American productivity. When the economy 4 in 2008, there was little of the fall in labor productivity that normally 5 a recession, and this was not just a one-off "batting average" effect (in which average productivity rises because the worst performers are fired). Rather, it was a productivity boost that has continued 6 expert predictions that workers can only be 7 so hard for a short while. In the third quarter of 2011, American labor productivity was 2.3% higher than in the same period a year earlier. Manufacturing productivity in that quarter rose by 2.9% compared with a year earlier. America"s productivity growth has been more 8 than most other rich countries"—a feat 9 to its flexible labor market and a culture of enterprise. Two things could keep productivity rising. First, workers are terrified of losing their jobs. This makes it easier to persuade them to put in extra hours or 10 new tasks. Second, tough times are forcing luaus to 11 every brain cell to become more efficient. Sealed Air, for example, has made numerous incremental tweaks, such as 12 a machine that makes absorbent pads for supermarket meat trays so that its output increased from 400 units per hour three years ago to 550—with the same number of workers. The 13 of firms to invest in such enhancements has varied 14 . Some would rather hoard cash or buy back their own shares 15 spend it on more efficient machinery or information technology. Yet there are 16 that leading industrial firms are starting to increase their capital spending, says Jeff Sprague of Vertical Research Partners, a research outfit. In particular, he has noticed firms investing in "debottlenecking" which, 17 its name suggests, means removing hold-ups in production processes, sometimes with an additional production line. 18 short, the recession has forced American firms to become more muscular. This should help them 19 when the good times realm. It should also give them an edge 20 foreign rivals.

单选题For many years, people believed that the brain, like the body, rested during sleep. After all, we are rendered unconscious by sleep. Perhaps, it was thought, the brain just needs to stop thinking for a few hours every day. Wrong. During sleep, our brain--the organ that directs us to sleep—is itself extraordinarily active. And much of that activity helps the brain to learn, to remember and to make connections. It wasn"t so long ago that the regretful joke in research circles was that everyone knew sleep had something to do with memory except for the people who study sleep and the people who study memory. Then, in 1994, Israeli researchers reported that the average performance for a group of people on a memory test improved when the test was repeated after a break of many hours—during which some subjects slept and others did not. In 2000, a Harvard team demonstrated that this improvement occurred only during sleep. There are several different types of memory—including declarative (fact-based information), episodic (events from your life) and procedural (how to do something)—and researchers have designed ways to test each of them. In almost every case, whether the test involves remembering pairs of words, tapping numbered keys in a certain order or figuring out the rules in a weather-prediction game, "sleeping on it" after first learning the task improves performance. It"s as if our brains squeeze in some extra practice time while we"re asleep. This isn"t to say that we can"t form memories when we"re awake. If someone tells you his name, you don"t need to fall asleep to remember it. But sleep will make it more likely that you do. Sleep-deprivation experiments have shown that a tired brain has a difficult time capturing memories of all sorts. Interestingly, sleep deprivation is more likely to cause us to forget information associated with positive emotion than information linked to negative emotion. This could explain, at least in part, why sleep deprivation can trigger depression in some people: memories stained with negative emotions are more likely than positive ones to "stick" in the sleep-deprived brain. Sleep also seems to be the time when the brain"s two memory systems—the hippocampus and the neocortex—"talk" with one other. Experiences that become memories are laid down first in the hippocampus, eliminating whatever is underneath. If a memory is to be retained, it must be shipped from the hippocampus to a place where it will endure the neocortex, the wrinkled outer layer of the brain where higher thinking takes place. Unlike the hippocampus, the neocortex is a master at weaving the old with the new. And partly because it keeps incoming information at bay, sleep is the best time for the "undistracted" hippocampus to shuttle memories to the neocortex, and for the neocortex to link them to related memories.

单选题 It's a safe bet that David Joyce knows more than you did when you were his birth age. That's not hard, since what you knew back then was pretty much nothing at all. You knew warmth, you knew darkness, you knew a sublime, drifting peace. You had been conceived 29 weeks earlier, and if you were like most people, you had 11 weeks to go before you reached your fully formed 40. It was only then that you'd emerge into the storm of stimuli that is the world. No such luck for David. He was born Jan. 28—well shy of his April 16 due date—in an emergency cesarean (剖腹产的) section after his mother had begun bleeding heavily. He weighed 2 lb. 11 oz., or 1,200g, and was just 15 in. (38cm) tall. An American Girl doll is 3 in. (8cm) taller. Immediately, he began learning a lot of things—about bright lights and cold hands, needle sticks and loud noises. He learned what it feels like to be hungry, to be frightened, to be unable to breathe. What all this meant was that if David wanted to stay alive, he'd have to work hard at it, and he was. Take drinking from a bottle—which he had never tried until a morning in late March, at the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) of the Children's Hospital of Wisconsin in Milwaukee. David had spent every day of his then seven-week life there, in the company of 58 other very fragile babies being looked after by a round-the-clock SWAT team of nearly 300 nutritionists, pharmacologists, pulmonary specialists, surgeons, nurses and dietitians and, for when the need arises, a pair of chaplains. Under their care, he had grown to 18.1 in (46cm) and weighed 5lb. 11.5 oz. (2594g), nourished by breast milk from his mother, which was fed to him through a nasogastric tube (鼻胃管) threaded through his nose to his stomach. David's father and mother live 90 minutes away in Randolph, Wis. They had been at the hospital every day after work for 51 days straight at that point—a three-hour round-trip—to spend a few more hours with David.

单选题Even in traditional offices, "the lingua franca of corporate America has gotten much more emotional and much more right-brained than it was 20 years ago," said Harvard Business School professor Nancy Koehn. She started spinning off examples. "If you and I parachuted back to Fortune 500 companies in 1990, we would see much less frequent use of terms like journey, mission, passion . There were goals, there were strategies, there were objectives, but we didn"t talk about energy ; we didn"t talk about passion ." Koehn pointed out that this new era of corporate vocabulary is very "team"-oriented—and not by coincidence. "Let"s not forget sports—in male-dominated corporate America, it"s still a big deal. It"s not explicitly conscious; it"s the idea that I"m a coach, and you"re my team, and we"re in this together. There are lots and lots of CEOs in very different companies, but most think of themselves as coaches and this is their team and they want to win." These terms are also intended to infuse work with meaning—and, as Rakesh Khurana, another professor, points out, increase allegiance to the firm. "You have the importation of terminology that historically used to be associated with non-profit organizations and religious organizations, terms like vision, values, passion , and purpose," said Khurana. This new focus on personal fulfillment can help keep employees motivated amid increasingly loud debates over work-life balance . The "mommy wars" of the 1990s are still going on today, prompting arguments about why women still can"t have it all and books like Sheryl Sandberg"s Lean In , whose title has become a buzzword in its own right. Terms like unplug, offline, life-hack, bandwidth , and capacity are all about setting boundaries between the office and the home. But if your work is your "passion," you"ll be more likely to devote yourself to it, even if that means going home for dinner and then working long after the kids are in bed. But this seems to be the irony of office speak: Everyone makes fun of it, but managers love it, companies depend on it, and regular people willingly absorb it. As a linguist once said, "You can get people to think it"s nonsense at the same time that you buy into it." In a workplace that"s fundamentally indifferent to your life and its meaning, office speak can help you figure out how you relate to your work—and how your work defines who you are.

单选题According to a survey, which was based on the responses of over 188,000 students, today"s traditional-age college freshmen are "more materialistic and less altruistic" than at any time in the 17 years of the poll Not surprising in these hard times, the student"s major objective "is to be financially well off. Less important than ever is developing a meaningful philosophy of life." It follows then that today the most popular course is not literature or history but accounting. Interest in teaching, social service and the "altruistic" fields is at a low. On the other hand, enrollment in business programs, engineering and computer science is way up. That"s no surprise either. A friend of mine (a sales representative for a chemical company) was making twice the salary of her college instructors her first year on the job—even before she completed her two-year associate degree. While it"s true that we all need a career, it is equally true that our civilization has accumulated an incredible amount of knowledge in fields far removed from our own and that we are better for our understanding of these other contributions-be they scientific or artistic. It is equally true that, in studying the diverse wisdom of others, we learn how to think. More important, perhaps, education teaches us to see the connections between things, as well as to see beyond our immediate needs. Weekly we read of unions who went on strike for higher wages, only to drive their employer out of business. No company; no job. How shortsighted in the long run! But the most important argument for a broad education is that in studying the accumulated wisdom of the ages, we improve our moral sense. I saw a cartoon recently which shows a group of businessmen looking puzzled as they sit around a conference table; one of them is talking on the intercom: "Miss Baxter," he says, "could you please send in someone who can distinguish right from wrong?" From the long-term point of view, that"s what education really ought to be about.

单选题 In the past, American colleges and universities were created to serve a dual purpose to advance learning and to offer a chance to become familiar with bodies of knowledge already discovered to those who wished it. To create and to impart, these were the distinctive features of American higher education prior to the most recent, disorderly decades of the twentieth century. The successful institution of higher learning had never been one whose mission could be defined in terms of providing vocational skills or as a strategy for resolving societal problems. Another purpose has now been assigned to the mission of American colleges and universities. Institutions of higher learning—public or private—commonly face the challenge of defining their programs in such a way as to contribute to the service of the community. This service role has various applications. Most common are programs to meet the demands of regional employment markets, to provide opportunities for upward social and economic mobility, to achieve racial, ethnic, or social integration, or more generally to produce "productive" as compared to "educated" graduates. Regardless of its precise definition, the idea of a service-university has won acceptance within the academic community. One need only be reminded of the change in language describing the two-year college to appreciate the new value currently being attached to the concept of a service-related university. The traditional two-year college has shed its {{U}}pejorative{{/U}} "junior" college label and is generally called a "community college", a clearly value-laden expression representing the latest commitment in higher education. Even the doctoral degree, long recognized as a required "union card" in the academic world, has come under severe criticism as the pursuit of learning for its own sake and the accumulation of knowledge without immediate application to the professor's classroom duties. The idea of a college or university that performs a triple function— communicating knowledge to students, expanding the content of various disciplines, and interacting in a direct relationship with society—has been the most important change in higher education in recent years. This novel development, however, is often overlooked. Educators have always been familiar with those parts of the two-year college curriculum that have a "service" or vocational orientation. It is important to know this. But some commentaries on American postsecondary education tend to underplay the impact of the attempt of colleges and universities to relate to, if not resolve, the problems of society. What's worse, they obscure a fundamental question posed by the service-university—what is higher education supposed to do?

单选题If there is one word I"m rapidly growing tired of, it"s passion. Not the sex and love type, but the workplace kind. Irately, it seems, I keep hearing career counselors advising the unemployed to identify and develop their passion. Then they need to turn that passion into paid work and presto! They"re now in a career they love. I know I"m being somewhat flippant, but I do wonder if passion is being oversold. Are we falling into a trap of believing that our work, and indeed, our lives, should always be fascinating and all-consuming? Are we somehow lacking if we"re bored at times or buried under routine tasks or failing to challenge ourselves at every turn? In these economic times, fewer of us are worried about being fulfilled and more of us are concerned about simply being paid. But as switching jobs and careers becomes increasingly common, as whole professions are disappearing, we"re more frequently forced to ask ourselves what we want to do with the rest of our lives. That"s where passion comes in. Professor Wart, who co-wrote the book "The Joy of Work? Jobs, Happiness and You", mentioned three factors for the workplace: supportive supervision, job security and the possibility of promotion, and fair treatment. He acknowledges that it is not easy to attain these goals, especially now. But it can still make a difference in your job satisfaction, he says, to examine what your strengths and needs are, and try, as much as possible, to match your work with those attributes. It doesn"t always mean getting a new job or career, but perhaps changing some things in your current employment. It would probably be better, Professor Warr suggested, to think less in terms of passion, and the inflated sense of drama that can go with that, and more in terms of job satisfaction or finding meaning in your work. The drive for passion or excitement, or whatever you call it, is deep in our genes. We feel good when the neurotransmitter dopamine is activated, and that"s what happens when we accomplish a given goal, said Gary Marcus, a professor of psychology at New York University. In fact, playing video games may not seem to be much of a passion, but if you"ve ever watched teenage boys going at it, their intensity and obliviousness to the outside world is the embodiment of flow. And that"s no accident. So maybe searching for a passion is not so bad. But it is also important to remember that there is no one way to find it, and someone else"s passion may be your idea of drudgery. And sometimes life—and work—is simply going to be putting one foot in front of the other. Or as Professor Warr said, "On the way to happiness, there must be unhappiness."

单选题Should the United States end its three quarters-of-a-century-long prohibition on drugs? Outraged by the seemingly endless deaths, violence, crime, corruption, border searches, and social costs generated by world drug trafficking, a growing number of public officials and scholars are arguing that it is time to consider the possibilities of selective drug legalization. The legalization argument rests on the proposition that drug laws—not drugs themselves—cause the greatest harm to society. If drugs were legal, the argument goes, drug black markets worth tens of billions of dollars would evaporate, the empires of drug traffickers would collapse, and addicts would stop committing street crimes to support their habit. But legalization would not only take the profit out of drug trafficking. Presumably police officers, courts, and prisons would no longer be overwhelmed with drug cases. And the nation would be spared the poisoning strains on its relations with important and otherwise friendly Latin American and Asian nations. Most advocates of legalization do no tolerate, let alone want to encourage, drug use. Rather they believe that making drugs a criminal matter has made the problem worse. They acknowledge that the nation would still have massive public health problems on its hands, but it would not be compounded by a big crime problem, a big corruption problem, and a big foreign policy problem. Government could also tax the sale of drugs and use the incomes to finance drug prevention and treatment programs. And civil libertarians cite another benefit: an end to violations of basic individual freedom, such as drug testing, that derive from excessive zeal for winning the drug war. In any event, proponents of legalization say the war on drugs is doomed. So long as there is demand for cocaine, heroin, and other drugs, someone is going to supply them, legally or illegally. Opponents of legalization regard the abandonment of antidrug laws as a frightening and dangerous policy, one morally equivalent to giving societal approval to what currently is taboo behaviour. With the legal stigma gone, opponents say, more law-abiding citizens would be tempted to experiment with drugs. Moreover, highly damaging substances would be cheaper, purer, and more widely available, thus causing a sharp jump in addiction, hospital costs, overdose deaths, family and social violence, and property damage. Now, at least, the expense and danger of purchasing illegal drugs limit the amount most people use. There is little information available that sheds light on what would happen to American society if cocaine and heroin were legalized. Indeed, the idea of legalization has been so far outside the realm of popular acceptance that virtually no financing of research into its potential effects has taken place. Of interest, however, is the fact that both advocates and opponents of drug legalization look to the nation"s experience with Prohibition as providing evidence for their respective cases.

单选题 At noon on May 4th the carbon-dioxide concentration in the atmosphere around the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii hit 400 parts per million (ppm). The average for the day was 399.73 and researchers at the observatory expect this figure, too, to exceed 400 in the next few days. The last time such values prevailed on Earth was in the Pliocene epoch (上新世) 4m years ago, when jungles covered northern Canada. There have already been a few readings above 400ppm elsewhere—those taken over the Arctic Ocean in May 2012, for example—but they were exceptional. Mauna Loa is the benchmark (标准) for CO2 measurement because Hawaii is so far from large concentrations of humanity. The Arctic, by contrast, gets a lot of polluted air from Europe and North America. The concentration of CO2 peaks in May, falls until October as plant growth in the northern hemisphere's summer absorbs the gas, and then goes up again during winter and spring. This year the average reading for the whole month will probably also reach 400ppm, according to Pieter Tans, who is in charge of monitoring at Mauna Loa, and the seasonally adjusted annual figure will reach 400ppm in the spring of 2014 or 2015. Mauna Loa's readings are one of the world's longest-running measurement series. The first, made in March 1958, was 315ppm. That means they have risen by a quarter in 55 years. In the early 1960s they were going up by 0.7ppm a year. The rate of increase is now 2.1ppm—three times as fast—reflecting the relentless rise in green-house-gas emissions. As a rule of thumb, CO2 concentrations will have to be restricted to about 450ppm if global warming is to be kept below 2 degree. Because CO2 stays in the atmosphere for decades, artificial emissions of the gas would have to be cut immediately, and then fall to zero by 2075, in order to achieve 450ppm. There seems no chance of that. Emissions are still going up. At current rates, the Mauna Loa reading will rise above 450ppm in 2037.

单选题 Education is one of the key words of our time. A man, without an education, many of us believe, is an unfortunate victim of adverse circumstances deprived of one of the greatest twentieth-century opportunities. Convinced of the importance of education, modem states "invest" in institutions of learning to get back "interest" in the form of a large group of enlightened young men and women who are potential leaders. Education, with its cycles of instruction so carefully worked out, is punctuated by textbooks—those purchasable wells of wisdom—what would civilization be like without its benefits? So much is certain: that we would have doctors and preachers, lawyers and defendants, marriages and births; but our spiritual outlook would be different. We would lay less stress on "facts and figures" and more on a good memory, on applied psychology, and on the capacity of a man to get along with his fellow citizens. If our educational system were fashioned after its bookless past we would have the most democratic form of "college" imaginable. Among the people whom we like to call savages all knowledge inherited by tradition is shared by all; it is taught to every member of the tribe so that in this respect everybody is equally equipped for life. It is the ideal condition of the "equal start" which only our most progressive forms of modem education try to reach again. In primitive cultures the obligation to seek and to receive the traditional instruction is binding on all. There are no "illiterates"—if the term can be applied to peoples without a script—while our own compulsory school attendance became law in Germany in 1642, in France in 1806, and in England in 1876, and is still non-existent in a number of "civilized" nations. This shows how long it was before we deemed it necessary to make sure that all our children could share in the knowledge accumulated by the "happy few" during the past centuries. Education in the wilderness is not a matter of monetary means. All are entitled to an equal start. There is none of the hurry that, in our society, often hampers the full development of a growing personality. There, a child grows up under the ever-present attention of his parents; therefore the jungles and the savannahs know of no "juvenile delinquency (违法行为)". No necessity of making a living away from home results in neglect of children, and no father is confronted with his inability to "buy" an education for his child.

单选题One major reason for Germany"s high unemployment and the evident weakness of business investment is the nature of the tax system, which tends to discourage both individual effort and investment. Nominal corporate tax rates are, in fact, very high and it is these rates that potential investors primarily look at. However, the actual burden borne by companies is not as great as it might seem, because the tax base is fairly narrow. This combination in itself tends to encourage tax avoidance at both the personal and corporate levels. Moreover, by international standards, firms in Germany are still taxed quite heavily. A reform of corporate taxation, therefore, should start by reducing tax rates, cutting subsidies and broadening the taxable base. The resulting positive impact on growth would be reinforced if there were also a substantial easing of the net burden. How do the current plans for a reform of corporate taxation measure up to these goals? The overall tax burden on companies is to be brought down significantly, with the ceiling of 35% being set. To this end, a dramatic reduction in the corporate tax on retained earnings is planned. The related drop in revenues is to be offset by changes in the rules governing tax breaks. An approach incorporating these basic features would be a welcome step. If realized in its present form, it should ensure that the objective of making tax rates more attractive for businesses is achieved. At the same time, however, it would be unfortunate if an excessive broadening of the taxable base made it impossible to attain the equally important goal of providing relief. Comprehensive tax reform is needed in Germany to spur investment and to create new jobs, thus putting the economy on a higher growth path. The drop in revenues caused by the tax relief granted to both companies and households would, in time, be at least partially offset by the larger volume of tax receipts produced by economic growth. The gaps that remained should primarily be closed through spending cuts. If measure of this sort proved inadequate, then, as a last resort, an increase in indirect taxes could perhaps be considered.

单选题Some desert animals can survive the very strong summer heat and dryness because they have very unusual characteristics. The camel, for example, can 1 an increase in the temperature of its body and its blood of 9℃. In addition, it can drink an enormous 2 of water at one time, then store 3 water in its red blood cells and other parts of its body to 4 its needs for two weeks or more. The kangaroo rat, on the other hand, 5 all the water it needs from water that it produces during 6 However, most animals need to 7 a fairly constant body temperature, and will die if it 8 more than 5℃. 9 , they need to find some ways to 10 the strong sun rays. Nor can many animals either store or 11 water in their bodies, as the camel and kangaroo rat 12 . So they must find ways to 13 water loss from their bodies to the lowest degree. Because very few desert animals can 14 the strong rays, the temperature, and the evaporation rate 15 a typical summer"s day, most of them are 16 during the night. Only after the sun has set does the desert come fully to life. The night is relatively cool, and the darkness provides 17 , not only from the sun, but also from other animals and from the birds. So the coming of darkness is the signal 18 the large majority of animals and insects 19 their search for water and food. When morning comes, most of them seek 20 again. Many go underground; nearly all find somewhere shady where they can avoid the sun rays.

单选题About six years ago I was eating lunch in a restaurant in New York City when a woman and a young boy sat down at the next table. I couldn"t help overhearing parts of their conversation. At one point the woman asked: "So, how have you been?" And the boy—who could not have been more than seven or eight years old—replied: "Frankly, I"ve been feeling a little depressed lately." This incident stuck in my mind because it confirmed my growing belief that children are changing. As far as I can remember, my friends and I didn"t find out we were "depressed" until we were in high school. The evidence of a change in children has increased steadily in recent years. Children don"t seem childlike anymore. Children speak more like adults, dress more like adults and behave more like adults than they used to. Whether this is good or bad is difficult to say, but it certainly is different. Childhood as it once was no longer exists. Why? Human development is based not only on innate biological states, but also on patterns of access to social knowledge. Movement from one social role to another usually involves learning the secrets of the new status. Children have always been taught adult secrets, but slowly and in stages: traditionally, we tell sixth graders things we keep hidden from fifth graders. In the last 30 years, however, a secret-revelation machine has been installed in 98 percent of American homes. It is called television. Television passes information, and indiscriminately, to all viewers alike, be they children or adults. Unable to resist the temptation, many children turn their attention from printed texts to the less challenging, more vivid moving pictures. Communication through print, as a matter of fact, allows for a great deal of control over the social information to which children have access. Reading and writing involve a complex code of symbols that must be memorized and practices. Children must read simple books before they can read complex materials.