单选题Like many Americans, Mark Seery watched the Virginia Tech School shooting unfold on the cable news networks in April 2007. It wasn"t just the catastrophe that disturbed him—it was how some psychologists were advising the campus community to respond in the wake of the devastating tragedy. "There"s a sense that"s very much alive within the professional community that if people don"t talk about what they"re feeling, and try to suppress it that somehow it will only rebound down the road and make things worse," says Seery, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Buffalo. That, says Seery, is one of many examples of situations in which the first response to a tragedy"s psychological ramifications is to encourage victims and bystanders to talk about their emotions in the wake of the event. That idea is constantly reinforced by a battery of television therapists who harp on the importance of sharing your feelings. But is that really the best medicine? Seery"s new research offers an alternative to that philosophy. His work suggests that those who do not reveal their feelings in the wake of a collective trauma turn out just fine, if not better, than those who do. Seery used an online survey to query a national sample about their reactions to the 9/11 attacks, beginning on the day itself. The respondents were divided into two groups: those who said they were initially unwilling to talk about their feelings, and the rest. At the end of the two-year survey period, those who decided not to share their feelings reported fewer related mental and physical problems. That effect was even more pronounced among those who lived close to the tragedy. Seery also found an interesting correlation between the level of sharing and well-being. Participants could decide how much they wanted to report about their feelings on the survey. Seery found that there was a correlation between those who wrote the lengthier, more in-depth descriptions of their feelings and those who had worse mental and physical statuses. Does the study turn conventional wisdom completely on its head, suggesting that it"s better to stay quiet in the aftermath of a traumatic event? Not quite. Seery explains that the respondents who felt the need to divulge their emotions started off in a worse mental and physical state in the first place, likely a bit more susceptible to the stress of a collective traumatic event. "The people who were talking were probably more distressed by the event," says Seery. "The initial distress motivated them to want to have some place to talk about it... whereas people who chose not to talk were less likely to say that they were trying to cope." The take-home message, then, is that there is no one right way to react to traumatic events; there is a wide range of normal and healthy responses to tragedy.

单选题The State of North Carolina is set to execute a man for two murders he may not have committed. Had a jury heard all of the evidence in David Junior Brown"s case, he likely would not be contemplating death by lethal injection on November 19, 1999. The deaths of Shelly Diane Chalflinch and her daughter, Christine, surely deserve justice, but justice is not served by the execution of a man whom prosecutors cheated of the opportunity to prove his innocence. Concerned citizens, international human rights organizations, and religious leaders throughout the state are calling on Governor Jim Hunt to grant clemency. Brown was arrested in Pinehurst, N.C., on August 28, 1980, after the medical examiner found Brown"s ring in Ms. Chalflinch"s body. After the sensational discovery of the ring, law enforcement authorities effectively ended their investigation, ignoring or not pursuing evidence and leads that raise serious doubts about Brown"s guilt. Those doubts cry out for Governor Hunt, who has never granted clemency to a death row inmate, to do so in Brown"s case. The US Supreme Court has identified the Governor"s clemency power as an important safeguard for innocent persons condemned to death who for procedural reasons might be beyond the reach of the Court"s ability to protect. The Court writes, "Clemency is deeply rooted in our Anglo-American tradition of law, and is the historic remedy for preventing miscarriages of justice where judicial process has been exhausted. " The criminal justice system and the clemency process are not perfect: two credible researchers, Hugo Adam Bedau and Michael L. Radelet, have identified at least 23 innocent people who were executed in the US in this century. The Governor should also consider the role racism played in Brown"s prosecution. Brown is African American; his jury was all white. In February 1999, nearly 20 years since the trial, the state was ordered to turn over all of its files. In the state"s files was a trial note, written by an assistant district attorney prosecuting the case, re{erring to "two nigger hairs". At 8:30 a. m. Tuesday, August 26, 1980, the bodies of Ms. Chalflinch and her 9-year-old daughter, who had been stabbed repeatedly, were discovered, and two days later Brown was arrested. The jury never heard evidence that raises not only serious questions about the prosecution"s theory of the murder, but evidence that in some cases directly contradicts it. It is impossible to dispute the assertion that Brown did not receive a fair trial. It is also certain that there are grave doubts about his guilt. The murders of Diane and Christine Chalflinch were horrific and incomprehensible. The execution of an innocent man, in an attempt to acknowledge their family"s and society"s devastation and fear, would only compound the horror.

单选题When we worry about who might be spying on our private lives, we usually think about the Federal agents. But the private sector outdoes the government every time. It"s Linda Tripp, not the FBI, who is facing charges under Maryland"s laws against secret telephone taping. It"s our banks, not the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), that pass our private financial data to telemarketing firms. Consumer activists are pressing Congress for better privacy laws without much result so far. The legislators lean toward letting business people track our financial habits virtually at will. As an example of what"s going on, consider U.S. Bancorp, which was recently sued for deceptive practices by the state of Minnesota. According to the lawsuit, the bank supplied a telemarketer called MemberWorks with sensitive customer data such as names, phone numbers, bank account and credit-card numbers, Social Security numbers, account balances and credit limits. With these customer lists in hand, MemberWorks started dialing for dollars—selling dental plans, videogames, computer software and other products and services. Customers who accepted a "free trial offer" had 30 days to cancel. If the deadline passed, they were charged automatically through their bank or credit-card accounts. U.S. Bancorp collected a share of the revenues. Customers were doubly deceived, the lawsuit claims. They didn"t know that the bank was giving account numbers to MemberWorks. And if customers asked, they were led to think the answer was no. The state sued MemberWorks separately for deceptive selling. The company defends that it did anything wrong. For its part, U.S. Bancorp settled without admitting any mistakes. But it agreed to stop exposing its customers to nonfinancial products sold by outside firms. A few top banks decided to do the same. Many other banks will still do business with MemberWorks and similar firms. And banks will still be mining data from your account in order to sell you financial products, including things of little value, such as credit insurance and credit-card protection plans. You have almost no protection from businesses that use your personal accounts for profit. For example, no federal law shields" transaction and experience" information—mainly the details of your bank and credit-card accounts. Social Security numbers are for sale by private firms. They"ve generally agreed not to sell to the public. But to businesses, the numbers are an open book. Self-regulation doesn"t work. A firm might publish a privacy protection policy, but who enforces it? Take U.S. Bancorp again. Customers were told, in writing, that "all personal information you supply to us will be considered confidential." Then it sold your data to MemberWorks. The bank even claims that it doesn"t "sell" your data at all. It merely "shares" it and reaps a profit. Now you know.

单选题Of all things in the world, I most dislike filling up forms; in fact, I have a 1 horror of it. Applying for a driving license, 2 for an evening course, booking a holiday abroad—everything nowadays seems to 3 giving information about one"s personal life and habits that has little or nothing to do with the matter 4 hand. When I apply for a job, it may be of some 5 interest to a 6 employer to learn that I collect stamps or had measles as a child, but why 7 he conceivably wants to know that my father was a tobacconist who died in 1988? The authorities who 8 one to fill up forms, frequently demand answers to questions that one would 9 to put to one"s intimate friends. The worst of it is that, when 10 with such questions, I find my mind goes blank. Have I ever suffered from a serious illness? My mother always 11 me I was "delicate". Do I suffer from any personal defects? Well, I wear 12 lenses and my upper teeth are not my own, but perhaps the word "defects" 13 to my character. Am I supposed to 14 that I like gambling, and find it difficult to get up in the morning? 15 of them are true. Of all, I think job applications are the 16 . "Education"—previous experience—post held— give 17 ...Terrified by the awful warning about giving false 18 which appears at the bottom of the form, I 19 to remember what exams I passed and how long I worked for what firms. However hard I try, there always seems to be a year or two for which I cannot satisfactorily account and which I am certain, if left 20 , will give the impression that I was in prison or engaged in some occupation too dubious to mention.

单选题For years, sports fanatics have turned to statistics to help them gauge the relative strength or weaknesses of different teams, though some have been more amenable to the process than others. Baseball and football, for example, seem to have a statistic for every action that occurs on the field of play, with different players ranked and rated by their numbers. International football, aka soccer on the other hand has generally defied such attempts due to their being far fewer things to measure with the sport and the continuity of play. That may change however, as mathematicians Javier López Pe ? a and Hugo Touchette of University College and Queen Mary University respectively, have applied network theory to the unique style of play of the European Championship 2012 victor, Spain. And as they describe in the paper they"ve uploaded to the preprint server arXiv, the graphic that results gives some clues as to why the team is considered one of the best of all time. Anyone who has watched the Spanish team knows that their style of play is different from other teams. It"s been given a name by fans: tiki-taka. It"s all about quick passes and exquisite teamwork. But trying to describe what the team does only leads to superlatives, which don"t really get to the heart of the matter. To help, Pe ? a and Touchette turned to network theory, which makes sense, because soccer is played as a network of teammates working efficiently together. The two used a simple drawing depicting players as nodes and their relationship to one another on the team, the amount of passing that is done between them, the way it is done and to whom, as lines between the nodes. What shows up in the drawing first, is what everyone already knows, namely, that the team passes the ball among its players a lot. More than a lot actually. In one match during 2010"s World Cup between Spain and the Netherlands, the Spanish players out-passed their opponent 417 to 266. The drawing also highlights the fact that two players on the team are "well connected" i.e. easy for others to get to, versus just one for the opponent. In many ways the graphic confirms what most suspect, that Spain wins more because it relies more on precise teamwork rather than the special skills of one or two superstars.

单选题The Bible is the great work of the religious literature and was in process of formation for about twelve hundred years. The Bible is composed of 1 , legend, biography, genealogies, ethics, law, proverbial wisdom, sermons, prophesy, lyric poetry, hymns and theology. It is not only 2 a book but a 3 of books. The Bible 4 two major 5 , the Old Testament and the New Testament . The Old Testament was written originally almost entirely 6 Hebrew with a little Aramaic, from the eleventh to the second century BC. It is the national 7 literature of the people of Israel. The New Testament was written in Greek from about 40 AD to 150. It 8 the earliest documents 9 the life, teaching, crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus and the establishment of the 10 church. The 11 work is from the first book Genesis, to the last, Revelations. The 12 and richness of the Bible 13 literature 14 the Old Testament are unparalleled. In the literary 15 , poetry, The Bible is 16 The Bible is an assemblage of literature. It is in a unique 17 among the world"s books 18 the richness of its 19 and spiritual values. It can be called the 20 of books.

单选题For years, studies have found that first-generation college students—those who do not have a parent with a college degree—lag other students on a range of education achievement factors. Their grades are lower and their dropout rates are higher. But since such students are most likely to advance economically if they succeed in higher education, colleges and universities have pushed for decades to recruit more of them. This has created "a paradox" in that recruiting first-generation students, but then watching many of them fail, means that higher education has "continued to reproduce and widen, rather than close" an achievement gap based on social class, according to the depressing beginning of a paper forthcoming in the journal Psychological Science . But the article is actually quite optimistic, as it outlines a potential solution to this problem, suggesting that an approach (which involves a one-hour, next-to-no-cost program) can close 63 percent of the achievement gap (measured by such factors as grades) between first-generation and other students. The authors of the paper are from different universities, and their findings are based on a study involving 147 students (who completed the project) at an unnamed private university. First generation was defined as not having a parent with four-year college degree. Most of the first-generation students (59.1 percent) were recipients of Pell Grants, a federal grant for undergraduates with financial need, while this was true only for 8.6 percent of the students with at least one parent with a four-year degree. Their thesis—that a relatively modest intervention could have a big impact—was based on the view that first-generation students may be most lacking not in potential but in practical knowledge about how to deal with the issues that face most college students. They cite past research by several authors to show that this is the gap that must be narrowed to close the achievement gap. Many first-generation students "struggle to navigate the middle-class culture of higher education, learn the "rules of the game," and take advantage of college resources," they write. And this becomes more of a problem when colleges don"t talk about the class advantages and disadvantages of different groups of students. "Because US colleges and universities seldom acknowledge how social class can affect students" educational experiences, many first-generation students lack of sight about why they are struggling and do not understand how students "like them" can improve."

单选题Conspicuous consumption has been an object of fascination going back at least as far as 1899, when the economist Thorstein Veblen published The Theory of the Leisure Class, a book that analyzed, in part, how people spent their money in order to demonstrate their social status. And it"s been well-known for a long time that extra cash always makes life a little easier. Studies over the last few decades have shown that money, up to a certain point, makes people happier because it lets them meet basic needs. The latest round of research is, for lack of a better term, all about emotional efficiency, how to reap the most happiness for your dollar. So just where does happiness reside for consumers? Scholars and researchers haven"t determined whether Armani will put a bigger smile on your face than Dolce hence, anything that promotes stronger social bonds has a good chance of making us feel all warm and fuzzy. And the creation of complex, sophisticated relationships is a rare thing in the world. As Professor Dunn and her colleagues point out in their forthcoming paper, only termites, naked mole rats and certain insects like ants and bees construct social networks as complex as those of human beings. In that elite little club, humans are the only ones who shop.

单选题Aimee Hunter, a research psychologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, has long studied individual responses to antidepressants. Being skeptical of the true effectiveness of the drugs, she says she was originally interested in researching the impact of placebos. But over the years, her own data began convincing her otherwise. "I"ve come to see now, by doing the research myself and spending hours looking at numbers, that the medication is absolutely doing something," Hunter says. In an earlier study that Hunter published in 2009, she and her team used the same QEEG technique on 58 patients, who were given a placebo daily for one week before being randomized to take either placebo or an active drug. Researchers found distinct patterns of brain activity in the patients; not everyone responded to the placebo the same way. "We found that changes in brain function occurring during the first week of placebo predicted who will do well on medication," she says. The region where changes were recorded--in the prefrontal lobe--is thought to be involved in generating expectations. A common explanation for the placebo effect is that the mere anticipation of improvement begets real benefit. But in the case of Hunter"s patients, the changes in brain activity predicted actual response to the antidepressant, not to placebo. Intriguingly, in patients who showed the specific brain response associated with antidepressant-related recovery, the most significant improvement was seen in what psychologists call interpersonal sensitivity--how people respond to either positive or negative social events. When suffering from depression, patients tend to become inured to positive social cues and oversensitized to negative ones. They may interpret a passerby"s frown as being directed at them, for instance, and some research has found that depressed people are more likely to misidentify smiling faces as conveying neutral or negative emotions. The patients who improved with medication in Hunter"s study "were less sensitive to rejection and more comfortable with others," she says. Reducing emotional sensitivity--not treating depression 0 per se —is what medications like Prozac, which affect the levels of serotonin in the brain, do best, according to Healy. If that entire class of drugs had been studied and marketed as pills to reduce emotional reactivity rather than depression, he says, "the placebo response would be very small compared to the drug." Still, treating a patient"s oversensitivity does not necessarily help depression. For some people whose illness is marked by social dread and misperceived rejections, reducing that anxiety could be critical. But for someone whose depression is primarily experienced as deep sadness and inability to feel pleasure, blunting emotional sensitivity may do little good. These differences further explain why the drugs may produce such varied individual responses. Evidence suggests that about 80% of people with depression can be helped by drugs, talk therapy or a combination of the two, so although it is critical to figure out which treatments work for which patients, the larger question remains: Why aren"t most patients getting good care, and why do we continue to insist that so many of those taking antidepressants don"t really need them?

单选题Barack Obama invited a puzzling group of people into the White House on December 5th: university presidents. Whatever they might be, they are at the heart of a political firestorm. Anger about the cost of college extends from the parents to Occupiers. Mr. Obama is trying to urge universities to address costs with "much greater urgency". This sense of urgency is justified: ex-students have debts approaching $1 trillion. But calm reflection is needed too. America"s universities suffer from many maladies besides cost. And rising costs are often symptoms of much deeper problems: problems that were irritating during the years of affluence but which are fatal in an age of austerity. The first problem is the inability to say "no". For decades American universities have been offering more of everything—more courses for undergraduates, more research students for professors and more athletics for everybody—on the merry assumption that there would always be more money to pay for it all. The second is Ivy League Envy. The vast majority of American universities are obsessed by rising up the academic hierarchy, becoming a bit less like Yokel-U and a bit more like Yale. Ivy League Envy leads to an obsession with research. This can be a problem even in the best universities: students feel short-changed by professors fixated on crawling along the frontiers of knowledge with a magnifying glass. At lower-level universities it causes dysfunction. American professors of literature crank out 70,000 scholarly publications a year, compared with 13,757 in 1959. Most of these simply molder: Mark Bauerlein of Emory University points out that, of the 16 research papers produced in 2004 by the University of Vermont"s literature department, a fairly representative institution, 11 have since received between zero and two citations. The time wasted writing articles that will never be read cannot be spent teaching. Popular anger about universities" costs is rising just as technology is shaking colleges to their foundations. The internet is changing the rules. Star academics can lecture to millions online rather than the chosen few in person. And for-profit companies such as the University of Phoenix are stripping out costs by concentrating on a handful of useful courses as well as making full use of the internet. The Sloan Foundation reports that online enrolments grew by 10% in 2010, against 2% for the sector as a whole. Nearly 100 years ago American universities faced similar worries about rising costs and detachment from the rest of society. Lawrence Lowell, the president of Harvard, argued that "Institutions are rarely murdered; they meet their end by suicide... They die because they have outlived their usefulness, or fail to do the work that the world wants done." America"s universities quickly began "the work that the world wants done" and started a century of American dominance of higher education. They need to repeat the trick if that century is not to end in failure.

单选题Directions: Read the following text. Choose the best word(s) for each numbered blank and mark A, B, C or D on the ANSWER SHEET. Public image refers to how a company is viewed by its customers, suppliers, and stockholders, by the financial community, by the communities {{U}} {{U}} 1 {{/U}} {{/U}}it operates, and by federal and local governments. Public image is controllable {{U}} {{U}} 2 {{/U}} {{/U}}considerable extent, just as the product, price, place, and promotional efforts are. A firm's public image plays a vital role in the {{U}} {{U}} 3 {{/U}} {{/U}}of the firm and its products to employees, customers, and to such outsiders {{U}} {{U}} 4 {{/U}} {{/U}}stockholders, suppliers, creditors, government officials, as well as {{U}} {{U}} 5 {{/U}} {{/U}}special groups. With some things it is impossible to {{U}} {{U}} 6 {{/U}} {{/U}}all the diverse publics: for example, a new highly automated plant may meet the approval of creditors and stockholders, {{U}} {{U}} 7 {{/U}} {{/U}}it will undoubtedly find {{U}} {{U}} 8 {{/U}} {{/U}}from employees who see their jobs {{U}} {{U}} 9 {{/U}} {{/U}}. On the other hand, high-quality products and service standards should bring almost complete approval, {{U}} {{U}} 10 {{/U}} {{/U}}low-quality products and {{U}} {{U}} 11 {{/U}} {{/U}}claims would be widely looked down upon. A firm's public image, if it is good, should be treasured and protected. It is a valuable {{U}} {{U}} 12 {{/U}} {{/U}}that usually is built up over a long and satisfying relationship of a firm with publics. If a firm has learned a quality image, this is not easily {{U}} {{U}} 13 {{/U}} {{/U}}or imitated by competitors. Such an image may enable a firm to {{U}} {{U}} 14 {{/U}} {{/U}}higher prices, to win the best distributors and dealers, to attract the best employees, to expect the most {{U}} {{U}} 15 {{/U}} {{/U}}creditor relationships and lowest borrowing costs. It should also allow the firm's stock to command higher price-earnings {{U}} {{U}} 16 {{/U}} {{/U}}than other firms in the same industry with such a good reputation and public image. A number of factors affect the public image of a corporation. {{U}} {{U}} 17 {{/U}} {{/U}}include physical {{U}} {{U}} 18 {{/U}} {{/U}}, contacts of outsiders {{U}} {{U}} 19 {{/U}} {{/U}}company employees, product quality and dependability, prices {{U}} {{U}} 20 {{/U}} {{/U}}to competitors, customer service, the kind of advertising and the media and programs used, and the use of public relations and publicity.

单选题Despite increased airport security since September 11th, 2001, the technology to scan both passengers and baggage for weapons and bombs remains largely unchanged. Travellers walk through metal detectors and carry-on bags pass through x-ray machines that superimpose colour-coded highlights, but do little else. Checked-in luggage is screened by "computed tomography", which peers inside a suitcase rather like a CAT scan of a brain. These systems can alert an operator to something suspicious, but they cannot tell what it is. More sophisticated screening technologies are emerging, albeit slowly. There are three main approaches: enhanced x-rays to spot hidden objects, sensor technology to sniff dangerous chemicals, and radio frequencies that can identify liquids and solids. A number of manufacturers are using "reflective" or "backscatter" x-rays that can be calibrated to see objects through clothing. They can spot things that a metal detector may not, such as a ceramic knife or plastic explosives. But some people think they can reveal too much. In America, civil-liberties groups have stalled the introduction of such equipment, arguing that it is too intrusive. To protect travellers" modesty, filters have been created to blur genital areas. Machines that can detect minute traces of explosive are also being tested. Passengers walk through a machine that blows a burst of air, intended to dislodge molecules of substances on a person"s body and clothes. The air is sucked into a filter, which instantaneously analyses it to see whether it includes any suspect substances. The process can work for baggage as well. It is a vast improvement on today"s method, whereby carry-on items are occasionally swabbed and screened for traces of explosives. Because this is a manual operation, only a small share of bags are examined this way. The most radical of the new approaches uses "quadrupole resonance technology". This involves bombarding an object with radio waves. By reading the returning signals, the machines can identify the molecular structure of the materials it contains. Since every compound—solid, liquid or gas—creates a unique frequency, it can be read like a fingerprint. The system can be used to look for drugs as well as explosives. For these technologies to make the jump from development labs and small trials to full deployment at airports they must be available at a price that airports are prepared to pay. They must also be easy to use, take up little space and provide quick results, says Chris Yates, a security expert with Jane"s Airport Review . Norman Shanks, an airport security expert, says adding the new technologies costs around $100,000 per machine; he expects the systems to be rolled out commercially over the next 12 months. They might close off one route to destroying an airliner, but a cruel certainty is that terrorists will try to find others.

单选题The American dream is that any child can make it from the bottom to the top. That may still be true in politics; the son of a Kenyan immigrant, raised partly by his grandparents, is now president of the United States. But it is much less true, in economic terms, than most Americans think. Social mobility is less easy in America than in other countries. For example, three-quarters of Danes born in the lowest-earning 20% of the population escape their plight in adulthood. Seven out of ten poor children in supposedly class-ridden Britain achieve the same feat. But fewer than six in ten Americans do so. Similarly, with rags-to-riches stories. It is far less common for Americans from the bottom 20% in childhood to move into the top 20% in adulthood than it is in Denmark or in Britain. On the whole, America"s wealthy prosper while the average citizen struggles. The pay workers get has failed to move in line with productivity in the past 30 years. But Americans have yet to realise the extent of this tectonic shift. Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel prize-winner in economics and a regular critic of liberal capitalism, addresses this issue in his new book, which he wrote in response to the Occupy Wall Street protesters. Indeed, he argues that their slogan, "We are the 99% ", echoes an article entitled, "Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1% ", that he wrote in Vanity Fair in May 2011. To Mr Stiglitz, this inequality is the result of public policy being captured by an elite who have feathered their own nests at the expense of the rest. They have used their power to distort political debate, pushing through tax cuts to favour the rich and adjusting monetary policy to favour the banks. Many of the new rich are not entrepreneurs but "rent-seekers", he says, who use monopoly power to boost profits. When it comes to solutions to the inequality problem, Mr Stiglitz wants a top income tax rate of "well in excess of" 50%, targeted fiscal stimulus and greater bank regulation. Here, perhaps, he might have been more open about the tradeoffs. Controls on bank leverage, caps on interest rates and greater protection for bankrupts are all likely to reduce bank lending at a time when there already is a credit squeeze. He admits that the 2009 fiscal stimulus was "not as well designed as it could have been", but blithely hopes that the convoluted American budget-setting process will result in much better stimulus packages in future. Whether or not he has the right answers, Mr Stiglitz is surely right to focus on the issue. Across the developed world, the average worker is suffering a squeeze in living standards while bankers and chief executives are still doing very nicely. This dichotomy is bound to have social and political consequences.

单选题For centuries, explorers have risked their lives venturing into the unknown for reasons that were to varying degrees economic and nationalistic. Columbus went west to look for better trade routes to the Orient and to promote the greater glory of Spain. Lewis and Clark journeyed into the American wilderness to find out what the U.S. had acquired when it purchased Louisiana, and the Apollo astronauts rocketed to the moon in a dramatic show of technological muscle during the cold war. Although their missions blended commercial and political- military imperatives, the explorers involved all accomplished some significant science simply by going where no scientists had gone before. Today Mars looms as humanity"s next great terra incognita. And with doubtful prospects for a shor-tterm financial return, with the cold war a rapidly fading memory and amid a growing emphasis on international cooperation in large space ventures, it is clear that imperatives other than profits or nationalism will have to compel human beings to leave their tracks on the planet"s reddish surface. Could it be that science, which has long played a minor role in exploration, is at last destined to take a leading role? The question naturally invites a couple of others: Are there experiments that only humans could do on Mars? Could those experiments provide insights profound enough to justify the expense of sending people across interplanetary space? With Mars the scientific stakes are arguably higher than they have ever been. The issue of whether life ever existed on the planet, and whether it persists to this day, has been highlighted by mounting evidence that the Red Planet had abundant stable, liquid water and by the continuing controversy over suggestions that bacterial fossils rode to Earth on a meteorite from Mars. A more conclusive answer about life on Mars, past or present, would give researchers invaluable data about the range of conditions under which a planet can generate the complex chemistry that leads to life. If it could be established that life arose independently on Mars and Earth, the finding would provide the first concrete clues in one of the deepest mysteries in all of science: the prevalence of life in the universe.

单选题Working at nonstandard times—evenings, nights, or weekends—is taking its toll on American families. One-fifth of all employed Americans work variable or rotating shifts, and one-third work weekends, according to Harriet B. Presser, sociology professor at the University of Maryland. The result is stress on familial relationships, which is likely to continue in coming decades. The consequences of working irregular hours vary according to gender, economic level, and whether or not children are involved. Single mothers are more likely to work nights and weekends than married mothers. Women in clerical, sales, or other low-paying jobs participate disproportionately in working late and graveyard shifts. Married-couple households with children are increasingly becoming dual-earner households, generating more split-shift couples. School-aged children, however, may benefit from parents" nonstandard work schedules because of the greater likelihood that a parent will be home before or after school. On the other hand, a correlation exists between nonstandard work schedules and both marital instability and a decline in the quality of marriages. Nonstandard working hours mean families spend less time together for dinner but more time together for breakfast. One-on-one interaction between parents and children varies, however, based on parent, shift, and age of children. There is also a greater reliance on child care by relatives and by professional providers. Working nonstandard hours is less a choice of employees and more a mandate of employer. Presser believes that the need for swing shifts and weekend work will continue to rise in the coming decades. She reports that in some European countries there are substantial salary premiums for employees working irregular hours-sometimes as much as 50% higher. The convenience of having services available 24 hours a day continues to drive this trend. Unfortunately, says Presser, the issue is virtually absent from public discourse. She emphasizes the need for focused studies on costs and benefits of working odd hours, the physical and emotional health of people working nights and weekends, and the reasons behind the necessity for working these hours. "Nonstandard work schedules not only are highly prevalent among American families but also generate a level of complexity in family functioning that needs greater attention," she says.

单选题Today, it"s certainly difficult to think of any other single thing that represents modern America as powerfully as the company Disney that created Mickey Mouse. The reasons for Disney"s success are varied and numerous, but ultimately the credit belongs to one person, Walt Disney. He was a genius in plenty of other respects. But what really distinguished Disney was his ability to identify with his audiences. Disney always made sure his films championed the "little guy", and made him feel proud to be American. This he achieved by creating characters that reflected the hopes and fears of ordinary people. Disney"s other great virtue was the fact that his company had a human face. His Hollywood studio operated just like a democracy, where everyone was on first name terms and had a say in how things should be run. He was also regarded as a great patriot because not only did his cartoons celebrate America, but, during World War Ⅱ, studios made training films for American soldiers. The reality, of course, was less ideal. As the public would later learn, Disney"s patriotism had an unpleasant side. After a strike by cartoonists in 1941, he agreed to work for the FBI as a spy, identifying and spying on colleagues whom he suspected were subversives. But, apart from his affiliations with the FBI, Disney was more or less the genuine article . A book, The Magic Kingdom: Walt Disney and the American Way of Life , by Steven Watts, confirms that he was very definitely on the side of ordinary Americans—in the 1930s and 1940s he voted for Franklin Roosevelt, believing he was a champion of the workers. Also, Disney was not an apologist for the FBI, as some have suggested. In fact, he was always suspicious of large, bureaucratic organizations, as is evidenced in films like That Darn Cat, in which he portrayed FBI agents as incompetents. By the time he died in 1966, Walt Disney was an icon like Thomas Edison and the Wright Brothers. To business people and filmmakers, he was a role model; to the public at large, he was "Uncle Walt"—the man who had entertained them all their lives, the man who represented them all their lives, the man who represented all that was good about America.

单选题Every fall, like clockwork, Linda Krentz of Beaverton, Oregon, felt her brain go on strike. "I just couldn"t get going in the morning," she says. "I"d get depressed and gain 10 pounds every winter and lose them again in the spring." Then she read about seasonal affective disorder, a form of depression that occurs in fall and winter, and she saw the light—literally. Every morning now she turns on a specially constructed light box for half an hour and sits in front of it to trick her brain into thinking it"s still enjoying those long summer days. It seems to work. Krentz is not alone. Scientists estimate that 10 million Americans suffer from seasonal depression and 25 million more develop milder versions. But there"s never been definitive proof that treatment with very bright lights makes a difference. After all, it"s hard to do a double-blind test when the subjects can see for themselves whether or not the light is on. That"s why nobody has ever separated the real effects of light therapy from placebo effects. Until now, in three separate studies published last month, researchers report not only that light therapy works better than a placebo but that treatment is usually more effective in the early morning than in the evening. In two of the groups, the placebo problem was resolved by telling patients they were comparing light boxes to a new anti-depressant device that emits negatively charged ions. The third used the timing of light therapy as the control. Why does light therapy work? No one really knows. "Our research suggests it has something to do with shifting the body"s internal clock," says psychiatrist Dr. Lewey. The body is programmed to start the day with sunrise, he explains, and this gets later as the days get shorter. But why such subtle shifts make some people depressed and not others is a mystery. That hasn"t stopped thousands of winter depressives from trying to heal themselves. Light boxes for that purpose are available without a doctor"s prescription. That bothers psychologist Michael Terman of Columbia University. He is worried that the boxes may be tried by patients who suffer from mental illness that can"t be treated with light. Terman has developed a questionnaire to help determine whether expert care is needed. In any event, you should choose a reputable manufacturer. Whatever product you use should emit only visible light, because ultraviolet light damages the eyes. If you are photosensitive, you may develop a rash. Otherwise, the main drawback is having to sit in front of the light for 30 to 60 minutes in the morning. That"s an inconvenience many winter depressives can live with.

单选题Many animals have some level of social intelligence, allowing them to coexist and cooperate with other members of their species. Wolves, for example—the probable ancestors of dogs—live in packs that hunt together and have a complex hierarchy. But dogs have evolved an extraordinarily rich social intelligence as they"ve adapted to life with us. All the things we love about our dogs—the joy they seem to take in our presence, the many ways they integrate themselves into our lives—spring from those social skills. Hare Brian, assistant professor of evolutionary anthropology at Duke University, and others are trying to figure out how the intimate coexistence of humans and dogs has shaped the animal"s remarkable abilities. Hare suspects that the evolutionary pressures that turned suspicious wolves into outgoing dogs were similar to the ones that turned combative apes into cooperative humans. "Humans are unique. But how did that uniqueness evolve?" asks Hare. "That"s where dogs are important." The first rule for scientists studying dogs is, Don"t trust your hunches. Just because a dog looks as if it can count or understand words doesn"t mean it can. "We say to owners, Look, you may have intuitions about your dog that are valuable," says Marc Hauser, a cognitive psychologist at Harvard University. "But they might be wrong." Alexandra Horowitz, a cognitive scientist at Barnard College, and other scientists are now running experiments to determine what a behavior, like a kiss, really means. In some cases, their research suggests that "our pets are manipulating us rather than welling up with human-like feeling. "They could be the ultimate charlatans," says Hauser. We"ve all seen guilty dogs slinking away with lowered tails, for example. Horowitz wondered if they behave this way because they truly recognize they"ve done something wrong, so she devised an experiment. First she observed how dogs behaved when they did something they weren"t supposed to do and were scolded by their owners. Then she tricked the owners into believing the dogs had misbehaved when they hadn"t. When the humans scolded the dogs, the dogs were just as likely to look guilty, even though they were innocent of any misbehavior. What"s at play here, she concluded, is not some inner sense of right and wrong but a learned ability to act submissive when an owner gets angry. "It"s a white-flag response," Horowitz says. While this kind of manipulation may be unsettling to us, it reveals how carefully dogs pay attention to humans and learn from what they observe. That same attentiveness also gives dogs—or at least certain dogs—a skill with words that seems eerily human.

单选题Scot Case was not happy. Vice president of the environmental marketing firm TerraChoice, Case last year sent his researchers into a big retail store to evaluate the green advertising claims of some of the products on its shelves. The results were startling, of the 1,018 products TerraChoice surveyed, all but one failed to live up fully to their green boasts. Words like nontoxic were used in meaninglessly vague ways. Terms like Energy Star certified were in fact not backed up by certification. Many consumers may not have heard the term greenwashing, but they"ve surely experienced it—misleading marketing about the environmental benefits of a product. Greenwashing isn"t new—ever since the environment emerged as an issue in the early 1970s, there have been advertising firms trying to convince consumers that buying Brand X is the only way to save the earth. But as going green has become big business—sales of organic products alone went from $10 billion in 2003 to more than $20 billion in 2007—companies appear eager to associate themselves with the environment, deservedly or not. If you"re not yet sick of seeing rotating wind turbines and solar panels on TV, you will be. the new fall season is likely to feature a flood of green advertising. It"s gotten so bad that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has been holding hearings over the past year to define the difference between genuine environmental claims and empty greenwash. It"s not easy—and environmental advocates worry that truly green companies could get lost in all the clamor. "We have such a challenge ahead of us on climate change," says Kevin Tuerff, a co-founder of the marketing consultancy EnviroMedia. "Greenwashing harms the effort we need to be making." The first step to cleaning up greenwashing is to identify it, and Tuerff and his partners have hit on an innovative way to direct public attention to particularly bad examples. They"ve launched the Greenwashing Index (www.greenwashingindex.com), a website that allows consumers to post ads that might be examples of greenwashing and rate them on a scale of 1 to 5—1 is a little green lie; 5 is an outright falsehood. It"s a simple device, but it shows the power of the Internet to trace misleading ads; with a simple Web search, any consumer can find out if a car manufacturer boasting of its fuel-efficient hybrids actually earns the majority of its revenue selling gas-consuming trucks and SUVs. "We try to make it a little more transparent with the index," says Kim Sheehan, a communications professor at the University of Oregon and a co-founder of the site. "It teaches people to be a little more cautious about the claims they hear."

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