单选题The evolution of the social sciences has reached a crucial point that might be called a phase change in which old, atomistic, and impressionistic ways of doing research are superseded by a far more systematic and united methodology. To bring social science to the level of rigor already achieved by some of the physical sciences, a new type Of facility will be needed. This will be a transdisciplinary, Internet-based collaborative endeavour that will provide social and behavioral scientists with the databases, software and hardware tools, and other resources to conduct worldwide research that integrates experimental, survey, geographic, and economic methodologies on a much larger scale than was possible previously. This facility will enable advanced research and professional education in economics, sociology, psychology, political science, social geography, and related fields. In many branches of social science, a new emphasis on the rigor of formal laboratory experimentation has driven researchers to develop procedure and software to conduct online interaction experiment using computer terminals attached to local area networks. The opportunity to open these laboratories to the Internet will reduce the cost per research participant and increase greatly the number of institutions, researchers, students, and research participants who can take part. The scale of social science experimentation can increase by an order of magnitude or more, examining a much wider range of phenomena and ensuring great confidence in results through multiple replication of crucial studies. Technology for administering questionnaires to very large numbers of respondents over the Internet will revolutionize survey research. Data from past questionnaire surveys can be the springboard for new surveys with vastly larger numbers of respondents at lower cost than by traditional methods. Integrated research studies can combine modules using both questionnaire and experimental methods. Results can be linked via geographic analysis to other sources of data including census information, economic statistics, and data from other experiments and surveys. Longitudinal studies will conduct time-series comparisons across data sets to chart social and economic trends. Each new study will be designed so that the data automatically and instantly become part of the archives, and scientific publications will be linked to the data sets on which they are based so that the network becomes a universal knowledge system.

单选题 The sharing economy is a little like online shopping, which started in America 15 years ago. At first, people were worried about security. But having made a successful purchase from, say, Amazon, they felt safe buying elsewhere. Similarly, using Airbnb or a car-hire service for the first time encourages people to try other offerings. Next, consider eBay. Having started out as a peer-to-peer marketplace, it is now dominated by professional "power sellers" (many of whom started out as ordinary eBay users). The same may happen with the sharing economy, which also provides new opportunities for enterprise. Some people have bought cars solely to rent them out, for example. Incumbents are getting involved too. Avis, a car-hire firm, has a share in a sharing rival. So do GM and Daimler, two car-makers. In future, companies may develop hybrid models, listing excess capacity (whether vehicles, equipment or office space) on peer-to-peer rental sites. In the past, new ways of doing things online have not displaced the old ways entirely. But they have often changed them. Just as internet shopping forced Walmart and Tesco to adapt, so online sharing will shake up transport, tourism, equipment-hire and more. The main worry is regulatory uncertainty. Will room-renters be subject to hotel taxes, for example? In Amsterdam officials are using Airbnb listings to track down unlicensed hotels. In some American cities, peer-to-peer taxi services have been banned after lobbying by traditional taxi firms. The danger is that although some rules need to be updated to protect consumers from harm, incumbents will try to destroy competition. People who rent out rooms should pay tax, of course, but they should not be regulated like a Ritz-Carlton hotel. The lighter rules that typically govern bed-and-breakfasts are more than adequate. The sharing economy is the latest example of the internet's value to consumers. This emerging model is now big and disruptive enough for regulators and companies to have woken up to it. That is a sign of its immense potential. It is time to start caring about sharing.

单选题It is hard to track the blue whale, the ocean"s largest creature, which has almost been killed off by commercial whaling and is now listed as an endangered species. Attaching radio devices to it is difficult, and visual sightings are too unreliable to give real insight into its behavior. So biologists were delighted early this year when, with the help of the Navy, they were able to track a particular blue whale for 43 days, monitoring its sounds. This was possible because of the Navy"s formerly top-secret system of underwater listening devices spanning the oceans. Tracking whales is but one example of an exciting new world just opening to civilian scientists after the cold war as the Navy starts to share and partly uncover its global network of underwater listening system built over the decades to track the ships of potential enemies. Earth scientists announced at a news conference recently that they had used the system for closely monitoring a deep-sea volcanic eruption for the first time and that they plan similar studies. Other scientists have proposed to use the network for tracking ocean currents and measuring changes in ocean and global temperatures. The speed of sound in water is roughly one mile a second—slower than through land but faster than through air. What is most important, different layers of ocean water can act as channels for sounds, focusing them in the same way a stethoscope does when it carries faint noises from a patient"s chest to a doctor"s ear. This focusing is the main reason that even relatively weak sounds in the ocean, especially low-frequency ones, can often travel thousands of miles.

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. In the United States, the first day nursery was opened in 1854. Nurseries were established in various areas during the {{U}} {{U}} 1 {{/U}} {{/U}}half of the 19th century; most of {{U}} {{U}} 2 {{/U}} {{/U}}were charitable. Both in Europe and in the U.S., the day nursery movement received great {{U}} {{U}} 3 {{/U}} {{/U}}during the First World War, when {{U}} {{U}} 4 {{/U}} {{/U}}of manpower caused the industrial employment of unprecedented numbers of women. In some European countries nurseries were established {{U}} {{U}} 5 {{/U}} {{/U}}in munitions plants, under direct government sponsorship. {{U}} {{U}} 6 {{/U}} {{/U}}the number of nurseries in the U. S. also rose {{U}} {{U}} 7 {{/U}} {{/U}}, this rise was accomplished without government aid of any kind. During the years following the First World War, {{U}} {{U}} 8 {{/U}} {{/U}}, Federal State and local governments gradually began to exercise a measure of control {{U}} {{U}} 9 {{/U}} {{/U}}the day nurseries, chiefly by {{U}} {{U}} 10 {{/U}} {{/U}}them. The {{U}} {{U}} 11 {{/U}} {{/U}}of the Second World War was quickly followed by an increase in the number of day nurseries in almost all countries, as women were {{U}} {{U}} 12 {{/U}} {{/U}}called up on to replace men in the factories. On this {{U}} {{U}} 13 {{/U}} {{/U}}the U.S. government immediately came to the support of the nursery schools, {{U}} {{U}} 14 {{/U}} {{/U}}＄6,000,000 in July, 1942, for a nursery school program for the children of working mothers. Many States and local communities {{U}} {{U}} 15 {{/U}} {{/U}}this Federal aid. By the end of the war, in August, 1945, more than 100,000 children were being cared {{U}} {{U}} 16 {{/U}} {{/U}}in daycare centers receiving Federal {{U}} {{U}} 17 {{/U}} {{/U}}. Soon afterward, the Federal government {{U}} {{U}} 18 {{/U}} {{/U}}cut down its expenditures for this purpose and later {{U}} {{U}} 19 {{/U}} {{/U}}them, causing a sharp drop in the number of nursery schools in operation. However, the expectation that most employed mothers would leave their {{U}} {{U}} 20 {{/U}} {{/U}}at the end of the war was only partly fulfilled.

单选题For most thinkers since the Greek philosophers, it was self-evident that there is something called human nature, something that constitutes the essence of man. There were various views about what constitutes it, but there was agreement that such an essence exists—that is to say, that there is something by virtue of which man is man. Thus man was defined as a rational being, as a social animal, an animal that can make tools, or a symbol-making animal. More recently, this traditional view has begun to be questioned. One reason for this change was the increasing emphasis given to the historical approach to man. An examination of the history of humanity suggested that man in our epoch is so different from man in previous times that it seemed unrealistic to assume that men in every age have had in common something that can be called "human nature". The historical approach was reinforced, particularly in the United States, by studies in the field of cultural anthropology. The study of primitive peoples has discovered such a diversity of customs, values, feelings, and thoughts that many anthropologists arrived at the concept that man is born as a blank sheet of paper on which each culture writes its text. Another factor contributing to the tendency to deny the assumption of a fixed human nature was that the concept has so often been abused as a shield behind which the most inhuman acts are committed. In the name of human nature, for example, Aristotle and most thinkers up to the eighteenth century defended slavery. Or in order to prove the rationality and necessity of the capitalist form of society, scholars have tried to make a case for acquisitiveness, competitiveness, and selfishness as innate human traits. Popularly, one refers cynically to "human nature" in accepting the inevitability of such undesirable human behavior as greed, murder, cheating and lying. Another reason for skepticism about the concept of human nature probably lies in the influence of evolutionary thinking. Once man came to be seen as developing in the process of evolution, the idea of a substance which is contained in his essence seemed untenable. Yet I believe it is precisely from an evolutionary standpoint that we can expect new insight into the problem of the nature of man.

单选题Lead deposits, which accumulated in soil and snow during the 1960s and 70s, were primarily the result of leaded gasoline emissions originating in the United States. In the twenty years that the Clean Air Act has mandated unleaded gas use in the United States, the lead accumulation world-wide has decreased significantly. A study published recently in the journal Nature shows that air-borne leaded gas emissions from the United States were the leading contributor to the high concentration of lead in the snow in Greenland. The new study is a result of the continued research led by Dr. Charles Boutron, an expert on the impact of heavy metals on the environment at the National Center for Scientific Research in France. A study by Dr. Boutron published in 1991 showed that lead levels in arctic snow were declining. In his new study, Dr. Boutron found the ratios of the different forms of lead in the leaded gasoline used in the United States were different from the ratios of European, Asian and Canadian gasolines and thus enabled scientists to differentiate the lead sources. The dominant lead ratio found in Greenland snow matched that found in gasoline from the United States. In a study published in the journal Ambio , scientists found that lead levels in soil in the Northeastern United States had decreased markedly since the introduction of unleaded gasoline. Many scientists had believed that the lead would stay in soil and snow for a longer period. The authors of the Ambio study examined samples of the upper layers of soil taken from the same sites of 30 forest floors in New England, New York and Pennsylvania in 1980 and in 1990. The forest environment processed and redistributed the lead faster than the scientists had expected. Scientists say both studies demonstrate that certain parts of the ecosystem respond rapidly to reductions in atmospheric pollution, but that these findings should not be used as a license to pollute.

单选题It would be enormously convenient to have a single, generally accepted index of the economic and social welfare of the people of the United States. A glance at it would tell us how much better or worse off we had become each year, and we would judge the desirability of any proposed action by asking whether it would raise or lower this index. Some recent discussion implies that such an index could be constructed. Articles in the popular press even criticize the Gross National Production because it is not such a complete index of welfare, ignoring, on the one hand, that it was never intended to be, and suggesting, on the other, that with appropriate changes it could be converted into one. The output available to satisfy our wants and needs is one important determinant of welfare. Whatever want, need, or social problem engages our attention, we ordinarily can more easily find resources to deal with it when output is large and growing than when it is not. GNP measures output fairly well, but to evaluate welfare we would need additional measures which would be far more difficult to construct. We would need an index of real costs incurred in production, because we are better off if we get the same output at less cost. Use of just man-hours for welfare evaluation would unreasonably imply that to increase total hours by raising the hours of eight women from 60 to 65 a week imposes no more burden than raising the hours of eight men from 40 to 45 a week, or even than hiring one involuntarily unemployed person for 40 hours a week. A measure of real costs of labor would also have to consider working conditions. Most of us spend almost half our waking hours on the job and our welfare is vitally affected by the circumstances in which we spend those hours. To measure welfare we would need a measure of changes in the need our output must satisfy. One aspect, population change, is now handled by converting output to a per capita basis on the assumption that, other things equal, twice as many people need twice as many goods and services to be equally well off. But an index of needs would also account for differences in the requirements for living as the population becomes more urbanized and suburbanized; for the changes in national defense requirements; and for changes in the effect of weather on our needs. The index would have to tell us the cost of meeting our needs in a base year compared with the cost of meeting them equally well under the circumstances prevailing in every other year. Measures of "needs" shade into measure of the human and physical environment in which we live. We all are enormously affected by the people around us. Can we go where we like without fear of attack? We are also affected by the physical environment—purity of water and air, accessibility of park land and other conditions. To measure this requires accurate data, but such data are generally deficient. Moreover, weighting is required, to combine robberies and murders in a crime index; to combine pollution of the Potamac and pollution of Lake Erie into a water pollution index; and then to combine crime and water pollution into some general index. But there is no basis for weighting these beyond individual preference. There are further problems. To measure welfare we would need an index of the "goodness" of the distribution of income. There is surely consensus that given the same total income and output, a distribution with fewer families in poverty would be the better, but what is the ideal distribution? Even if we could construct indexes of output, real costs, needs, state of the environment, we could not compute a welfare index because we have no system of weights to combine them.

单选题The tower of Pisa has been leaning so long—nearly 840 years—that it"s natural to assume it will 1 gravity forever. But the famous structure has been in danger of collapsing almost since its first brick was 2 . It began leaning shortly after construction began in 1173. Builders had only reached the third of the tower"s 3 eight stories when its foundation began to settle unevenly on soft soil composed 4 mud, sand and clay. As a result, the structure leaned 5 to the north. Laborers tried to 6 it by making the columns and arches of the third story on the sinking northern side slightly taller. Then political unrest halted construction. The tower sat 7 for nearly 100 years, but it wasn"t done moving. By the time work restarted in 1272, the tower tilted to the south—the 8 it still leans today. Engineers tried to make another 9 , only to have their work interrupted once again in 1278 with just seven stories completed. Unfortunately, the building continued to settle, sometimes at an 10 rate. Finally, between 1360 and 1370, workers finished the project, once again trying to correct the lean 11 angling the eighth story, with its bell room, northward. In 1989, a similarly constructed bell tower in Pavia, Italy, collapsed suddenly. Officials became 12 worried the tower of Pisa would suffer a similar fate that they closed the monument to the 13 . A year later, they rallied together an international team to see 14 the tower could be brought back from the brink. By 2001, the team had decreased the tower"s lean by 44 centimeters, enough to make officials 15 that they could reopen the monument. The actions taken by Burland and his team could, 16 , stabilize the structure forever. The real threat now comes from the masonry itself, especially the material in the 17 stories, where most of the forces caused by the centuries-long leaning have been directed. If any of this masonry crush, the tower could collapse. And even a 18 earthquake in the region could have devastating consequences. After 200 years, another intervention may be required, but the 19 available to make improvements could be far more advanced and 20 the tower for another 800 years.

单选题Foxes and farmers have never got on well. These small dog-like animals have long been accused of killing farm animals. They are officially classified as harmful and farmers try to keep their numbers down by shooting or poisoning them. Farmers can also call on the services of their local hunt to control the fox population. Hunting consists of pursuing a fox across the countryside, with a group of specially trained dogs, followed by men and women riding horses. When the dogs eventually catch the fox they kill it or a hunter shoots it. People who take part in hunting think of it as a sport; they wear a special uniform of red coats and white trousers, and follow strict codes of behavior. But owning a horse and hunting regularly is expensive, so most hunters are wealthy. It is estimated that up to 100,000 people watch or take part in fox hunting. But over the last couple of decades the number of people opposed to fox hunting, because they think it is brutal, has risen sharply. Nowadays it is rare for a hunt to pass off without some kind of confrontation between hunters and hunt saboteurs. Sometimes these incidents lead to violence, but mostly saboteurs interfere with the hunt by misleading riders and disturbing the trail of the fox"s smell, which the dogs follow. Noisy confrontations between hunters and saboteurs have become so common that they are almost as much a part of hunting as the pursuit of foxes itself. But this year supporters of fox hunting face a much bigger threat to their sport. A Labour Party Member of the Parliament, Mike Foster, is trying to get Parliament to approve a new law which will make the hunting of wild animals with dogs illegal. If the law is passed, wild animals like foxes will be protected under the ban in Britain.

单选题 In 2009 the European Commission carried out an investigation into Microsoft. The American software giant tied Internet Explorer, its web browser, into Windows, the operating system in the great majority of personal computers. This, thought the commission, might be an abuse of its dominance in operating systems: buy a PC, and unless you took the trouble of choosing otherwise, you would browse the web through Explorer. In December that year Microsoft promised that until 2014 it would provide a "choice screen", asking European Windows users whether they wanted to install another browser. The screen first turned up in March 2010. Jolly good—but Microsoft forgot to keep its word. On March 6th the competition commissioner, Joaquin Almunia, said he had fined it 561m ($732m) for not including the choice screen with 15m copies of Windows software between May 2011 and July 2012. Neither Microsoft nor the commission spotted the lapse. It seems that eventually other companies did. The fine must sting all the more because Microsoft's transgression brought it little if any gain. Explorer has fallen behind Chrome, made by Google, and Firefox, made by Mozilla, a non-profit organisation. And people are doing more and more browsing on smartphones and tablets, the domain of Apple, Google and their browsers. Microsoft's antitrust woes in Europe should have been over. In 2004 in was fined 497m for trying its media player and server operating systems with it PC system. In 2008 it copped another 899m penalty for failing to comply with the commission's ruling in that case. Lately it has been among the accusers—of Google, which Mr. Almunia has been investigating since 2010. He suspects Google of abusing a position in online search every bit as imposing as Microsoft's in PC operating systems. Bing, Microsoft's search engine, is a distant second. The commissioner believes that Google may be favouring its own specialised services at rival's expense; that its deals with publishers may unfairly exclude competitors; and that it prevents advertisers from taking their data elsewhere. Mr. Almunia asked Google to propose by the end of January ways of meeting his concerns. He has not yet said what it suggested or how he will respond. European antitrust cases have a habit of dragging on. Just ask Microsoft.

单选题Early in the age of affluence that followed World War Ⅱ, an American retailing analyst named Victor Lebow proclaimed, "Our enormously productive economy... demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction, in consumption.... We need things consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced and discarded at an ever increasing rate." Americans have responded to Lebow"s call, and much of the world has followed. Consumption has become a central pillar of life in industrial lands and is even embedded in social values. Opinion surveys in the world"s two largest economies—Japan and the United Sates—show consumerist definitions of success becoming ever more prevalent. Overconsumption by the world"s fortunate is an environmental problem unmatched in severity by anything but perhaps population growth. Their surging exploitation of resources threatens to exhaust or unalterably spoil forests, soils, water, air and climate. Ironically, high consumption may be a mixed blessing in human terms, too. The time-honored values of integrity of character, good work, friendship, family and community have often been sacrificed in the rush to riches. Thus many in the industrial lands have a sense that their world of plenty is somehow hollow—that, misled by a consumerist culture, they have been fruitlessly attempting to satisfy what are essentially social, psychological and spiritual needs with material things. Of course, the opposite of overconsumption—poverty—is no solution to either environmental or human problems. It is infinitely worse for people and bad for the natural world too. Dispossessed peasants slash-and-burn their way into the rain forests of Latin America, and hungry nomads turn their herds out onto fragile African grassland, reducing it to desert. If environmental destruction results when people have either too little or too much, we are left to wonder how much is enough. What level of consumption can the earth support? When does having more cease to add noticeably to human satisfaction?

单选题As the Big Three automakers seek a $25 billion federal government bailout to avoid financial collapse, angst is rising among the auto behemoths" suppliers, and in the communities they support. On Monday, an auto industry consulting firm, Planning Perspectives Inc., reported that 68% of participants in a survey of executives for industry suppliers said their companies would have to downsize if General Motors declared bankruptcy, while 12% said their businesses would likely close or would definitely do so. In the Midwest alone, some 275,000 jobs would be lost as a result of a GM bankruptcy. "If they go into bankruptcy, it"s going to have a catastrophic effect on businesses across the board," says John W. Henke Jr., president of PPI, based in Birmingham, Mich. Amid the economic downturn, Americans are buying fewer new cars and light-trucks, or even used cars. In recent weeks, GM announced a third-quarter loss of $2.5 billion. And the major automakers have stirred a vigorous debate over how much, if at all, the federal government should be involved in rescuing yet another ailing industry. Much of the automakers" argument hinges on the notion that the collapse of any of the key industry players would aggravate an already troubled economy. Fully one-third of automotive industry suppliers were deemed at risk of bankruptcy, according to a study earlier this year by Grant Thornton, a Southfield, Michigan, consulting firm. If General Motors files for bankruptcy, it will further impede its ability to pay its suppliers in full, on time. Many suppliers are already burdened with debt. So the extra burden will likely destroy suppliers" operating budgets—and, in turn, cripple their ability to deliver goods to surviving automakers. Experts say the suppliers most vulnerable to collapse are those whose businesses are heavily dependent on the ailing U.S. automakers, or on raw materials for which rising costs cannot be easily passed onto the automakers. Kimberly Rodriguez, automotive industry analyst at Grant Thornton, says concern about how suppliers will be impacted is justified. "It"s not hype. It"s huge." To understand how the angst is playing out, consider Tipton, Ind., population barely 5,000. In April 2007, the German manufacturer Getrag LLC announced it would build a $455 million plant about an hour"s drive north of Indianapolis. The plant"s sole purpose was to build energy-efficient transmissions for Chrysler. The plant would inject some 1,200 new jobs into a state whose economy is both ailing and heavily dependent on the automotive industry. Townsfolk talked of a new hotel, a new fast-food restaurant. Earlier this month, however, Getrag announced that the entity established to build the Tipton plant would file for bankruptcy and that the plant would not open, mainly because Chrysler backed out of its agreement. Meanwhile, some people in the industry have been calling and e-mailing their Congressional representatives, urging them to support a bailout for the major automakers. The consequences of a bankruptcy declaration from either of the Big Three, Rodriguez fears, are just too severe. "It"d kill us," he says.

单选题When my son started going to "school" full time in February, I readied myself for immunological battle. Day-care kids get sicker than children who stay at home, and I knew mine" would, too. But other parents assured me that by kindergarten he"d be the healthiest kid in class. Last week parenting message boards lit up when a University of California, Berkeley, researcher presented unpublished data showing that children who attend playgroups or day care have a 30 percent lower risk of developing childhood leukemia than kids who don"t, possibly because they are exposed to more infections early in life. The human immune system is an elegant mix of two parts—a built-in, or innate, system and an acquired one. The innate system has already read the manual on generic germs. The acquired system, by contrast, is a bookworm, reading on the go,, learning with every new microbial visitor and growing wiser as it ages. Together, the two systems assess the foods we eat, the particles we breathe, the bacteria we touch, then determine whether or not to attack. Can a young immune system handle so much new information? Research published over the past decade is reassuring. Scientists at the University of Arizona found that 2-year-olds who attend day care in the first six months of life have almost twice as many colds as stay-at-home kids. But they have a third fewer colds between the ages of 6 and 11. By 13, there"s no difference in the groups, suggesting that the kids" immune systems catch up with each other. Several studies have found that children who go to day care early in life are also less likely to develop asthma. The Arizona scientists discovered that high-risk children who start day care before 3 months old have lower levels of immunoglobutin E—a marker of allergic susceptibility connected to asthma-than non-day-care kids. Those levels remain low for the first three years of life. Anne Wright, the study"s lead author, says this doesn"t necessarily mean that kids benefit from being sick more often. She believes the findings support the "hygiene hypothesis," which suggests that simply being exposed to more microbes—which run rampant at day care—educates the immune system, making it less likely to launch unwarranted warfare. All this is good to know. But I had to ask the experts: why am I getting: so sick? "Because you live with the source," says Liu. And I hug and kiss him a lot, too, so I"m probably getting a big dose of germs. It"s also possible that my immune system"s memory has faded a bit, making old harmless viruses look new and dangerous. Or I may be meeting bugs my immune system has never seen before. The most comforting words I heard were from Columbia University pediatrician Philip L. Graham Ⅲ, who told me that pediatricians get horribly sick during their first year of treating patients. After that, they"re immunological powerhouses.

单选题Though not the ideal shape for a Christmas stocking, this slim little volume could nevertheless make a welcome seasonal gift. Launched in Britain at the end of October, and covering just under 100 pages, it is not much more than an extended essay. But it presents an interesting idea eloquently and clearly, offering digestible brain food in the middle of excessive turkey and television. The author of Hierarchy Is Not the Only Way, Gerard Fairtlough, was a senior executive with Shell for many years before he left in 1980 to found a new biotechnology company called Celltech—recently bought by UCB, a Belgian group, for over $2 billion. He knows how businesses are run—both well-established organisations, such as Shell, in which it can be hard to see an alternative to the "way things are done around here", and new firms, where the founders" enthusiasm can evaporate if it has to be organized into an organogram. The author"s thesis is that we are all addicted to hierarchy—partly because that is how we are hardwired, as are our simian cousins, but also because we do not realise there are other ways to run organisations. "The powerful status of hierarchy," writes Mr. Fairtlough, "makes us think the only alternative is disorganisation...we only compare hierarchy with anarchy or chaos." There are, he says, two alternatives to hierarchy. One is heterarchy; the other, "responsible autonomy." Heterarchy is the form of structure commonly found in professional-service firms, the partnerships of accountants or lawyers in which key decisions are taken by all the partners jointly. With responsible autonomy "an individual or a group has autonomy to decide what to do, but is accountable for the outcome of the decision." "Accountability," says Mr. Fairtlough, "is what makes responsible autonomy different from anarchy." The author says that hierarchy is so deeply rooted that it will take years before there is any significant change. But he perhaps gives too little credit to the many companies that have moved along the spectrum from hierarchy to responsible autonomy. BP, for example, a huge multinational, has managed to split authority into much smaller units in recent years and has reduced the staff in its headquarters. Toyota, likewise, evolved towards greater autonomy as it discovered that the only effective way to carry out its famous "just-in-time" system of stock control was by delegating responsibility for ordering stock to the person closest to the coal face. The fact that these are among the most successful companies in the world today strengthens Mr. Fairtlough"s case.

单选题Community courts and community justice prevailed in England at the time of the Norman Conquest. The legal system was ritualistic, dependent upon oaths at most stages of lawsuit. The proceedings were oral, very personal, and highly confrontative. Juries were unknown. One party publicly "appealed", or accused, the other before the community meeting at which the presence of both was obligatory. To be absent meant risking fines and outlawry. After the preliminary statements of the parties, the court rendered judgment, not on the merits ot7 the issue nor the question of guilt or innocence, but on the manner by which it should be resolved. Judgment, in other words, preceded trial because it was a decision on what form the trial should take. It might be by ordeal, or, after the Norman Conquest, by battle. Excepting trial by battle, only one party was tried or, more accurately, was put to his "proof". Proof being regarded as an advantage, it was usually awarded to the accused party; in effect he had the privilege of proving his own case. Ordeals were usually reserved for more serious crimes, for persons of bad reputation, for peasants, or for those caught with stolen goods. The accused underwent a physical trial in which he called upon God to witness his innocence by putting a miraculous sign upon his body. Cold water, boiling water, and hot iron were the principal ordeals, all of which the clergy administered. In the ordeal of cold water, the accused was trussed up and cast into a pool to see whether he would sink or float. On the theory that water which had been sanctified by a priest would receive an innocent person but reject the guilty, innocence was proved by sinking and guilt by floating. In the other ordeals, one had to plunge his hand into a cauldron of boiling water or carry a red hot piece of iron for a certain distance, in the hope that three days later, when the bandages were removed, the priest would find a "clean" wound, one that was healing free of infection. How deeply one plunged his arm into the water, how heavy the iron or great the distance it was carried, depended mainly on the gravity of the charge. The Normans brought to England still another ordeal, trial by battle. Trial by battle was a savage yet sacred method of proof which was also thought to involve divine judgment on behalf of the righteous. Rather than let a wrongdoer triumph, God would presumably strengthen the arms of the party who had sworn truly to the justice of his cause. Right, not might, would therefore conquer. Trial by battle was originally available for the settlement of all disputes but eventually was restricted to cases of serious crime.

单选题Humanity uses a little less than half the water available worldwide. Yet occurrences of shortages and droughts are causing famine and distress in some areas, and industrial and agricultural by-products are polluting water supplies. Since the world"s population is expected to double in the next 50 years, many experts think we are on the edge of a widespread water crisis. But that doesn"t have to be the outcome. Water shortages do not have to trouble the world—if we start valuing water more than we have in the past. Just as we began to appreciate petroleum more after the 1970s oil crises, today we must start looking at water from a fresh economic perspective. We can no longer afford to consider water a virtually free resource of which we can use as much as we like in any way we want. Instead, for all uses except the domestic demand of the poor, governments should price water to reflect its actual value. This means charging a fee for the water itself as well as for the supply costs. Governments should also protect this resource by providing water in more economically and environmentally sound ways. For example, often the cheapest way to provide irrigation water in the dry tropics is through small-scale projects, such as gathering rainfall in depressions and pumping it to nearby cropland. No matter what steps governments take to provide water more efficiently, they must change their institutional and legal approaches to water use. Rather than spread control among hundreds or even thousands of local, regional, and national agencies that watch various aspects of water use, countries should set up central authorities to coordinate water policy.

单选题When imaginative men turn their eyes towards space and wonder whether life exists in any part of it, they may cheer themselves by remembering that life need not resemble closely the life that exists on Earth. Mars looks like the only planet where life like ours could exist, and even this is doubtful. But there may be other kinds of life based on other kinds of chemistry, and they may multiply on Venus or Jupiter. At least we cannot prove at present that they do not. Even more interesting is the possibility that life on other planets may be in a more advanced state of evolution. Present-day man is in a peculiar and probably temporary stage. His individual units retain a strong sense of personality. They are, in fact, still capable under favorable circumstances of leading individual lives. But man"s societies are already sufficiently developed to have enormously more power than the individuals have. It is not likely that this transitional situation will continue very long on the evolutionary time scale. Fifty thousand years from now man"s societies may have become so close-knit that the individuals retain no sense of separate personality. Then little distinction will remain between the organic parts of the multiple organisms and the inorganic parts (machines) that have been constructed by it. A million years further on man and his machines may have merged as closely as the muscles of the human body and the nerve cells that set them in motion. The exploration of space should be prepared for such a situation. If they arrive on a foreign planet that has reached an advanced stage (and this is by no means impossible), they may find it being inhabited by a single large organism composed of many closely cooperating units. The units may be "secondary" —machines created millions of years ago by a previous form of life and given the will and ability to survive and reproduce. They may be built entirely of metals and other durable materials. If this is the case, they may be much more tolerant of their environment, multiplying under conditions that would destroy immediately any organism made of carbon compounds and dependent on the familiar carbon cycle. Such creatures might be relics of a past age, many millions of years ago, when their planet was favorable to the origin of life, or they might be immigrants from a favored planet.

单选题Faced with rising costs, decreased funding and laws in many states designed to keep public universities from raising tuition, many state school systems are making up for budget inadequacy by adding fees for everything from "technology" to "energy". Meanwhile, the average cost to attend a public school increased 47% between 2000 and 2007 (adjusted for inflation) according to the College Board, a non-profit that studies education costs and owns the SAT. State politicians are so eager to advocate low-cost higher education that "tuition" has become a dirty word. The F-word, on the other hand fees—has become a go-to charge for public universities strapped for cash. The 2006—2007 school year marked the first time fee increases outpaced tuition hikes, according to the College Board. Fees were up 8% and tuition 6% in 2007—2008 compared to the previous year. Why the fee frenzy? State legislatures across the country have instituted strict limits on tuition increases and require arduous bureaucratic and political procedures to change them. With financing for public universities on the decline since the 1980s, "everybody got very interested in what they could do to affect revenues, and fees Undoubtedly turned out to be one of the measures they could control," says David Brenaman, an economics professor at the University of Virginia who studies college financing. In Oregon, so many extras had been tacked on over the years that in 2007, fees added as much as 40% to the cost of tuition. When campuses saw their energy bills go up, students were charged a fee. When classrooms had to be wired for new technologies, students were charged a fee. "There were some that were one-time things that ended up staying a little bit longer," concedes Diane Saunders, director of communications for the Oregon University System. These covert tuition hikes did not go unnoticed. The Oregon Student Association, which represents pupils at the state"s seven public colleges, protested the enormous fees, arguing that they decreased transparency in the system and penalized students whose financial aid packages only covered tuition. In June, the system announced that mandatory fees would be rolled into tuition. "So families know what they"re facing up front and so students know what they"re facing up front," says Saunders, who credits the students for being "co-advocates" with the Oregon University System that is constantly lobbying the state legislature for more funding. With no state politician likely to campaign on a platform of dramatically increasing school tuitions, fees will continue to fill in the gaps. And as high oil prices continue to drive up the cost of energy and transportation—to name just two expensive items in any university budget—students are advised to read their bills carefully. And don"t forget to factor in the F-word.

单选题Once upon a time, the only ideologically acceptable explanations of mental differences between men and women were cultural. Any biologist who dared to suggest in public that perhaps evolution might work differently on the sexes, and that this might perhaps result in some underlying neurological inequalities, was likely to get tarred and feathered. Today, by contrast, biology tends to be an explanation of first resort in matters sexual. So it is beneficiary to come across an experiment which shows that a newly discovered difference which fits easily, at first sight, into the biological-determinism camp, actually does not belong there at all. Writing in Psychological Science, a team led by ran Spence of the University of Toronto describes a test performed on people"s ability to spot unusual objects that appear in their field of vision. Success at spatial tasks like this often differs between the sexes, so the researchers were not surprised to discover a discrepancy between the two. The test asked people to identify an "odd man out" object in a briefly displayed field of two dozen otherwise identical objects. Men had a 68% success rate. Women had a 55% success rate. Had they left it at that, Dr. Spence and his colleagues might have concluded that they had uncovered yet another evolved difference between the sexes, come up with a "Just So" story to explain it in terms of division of labour on the African savannah, and moved on. However, they did not leave it at that. Instead, they asked some of their volunteers to spend ten hours playing an action-packed, shoot-"em-up video game, called "Medal of Honour: Pacific Assault". As a control, other volunteers were asked to play a decidedly non-action-packed puzzle game, called "Ballance", for a similar time. Both sets were then asked to do the odd-man-out test again. Among the Ballancers, there was no change in the ability to pick out the unusual. Among those who had played "Medal of Honour", both sexes improved their performances. That is not surprising, given the different natures of the games. However, the improvement in the women was greater than the improvement in the men—so much so that there was no longer a significant difference between the two. Moreover, that absence of difference was long-lived. When the volunteers were tested again after five months, both the improvement and the lack of difference between the sexes remained. Though it is too early to be sure, it looks likely that the change in spatial acuity—and the abolition of any sex difference in that acuity—induced by playing "Medal of Honour" is permanent. That has several implications. One is that playing violent computer games can have beneficial effects. Another is that the games might provide a way of rapidly improving spatial ability in people such as drivers and soldiers. And a third is that although genes are important, upbringing matters, too. In this instance, exactly which bit of upbringing remains unclear. Perhaps it has to do with the different games that boys and girls play. But without further research, that suggestion is as much of a "Just So" story as those tales from the savannah.

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