单选题Everybody knows that global fish stocks are heading for collapse. That is why governments try to limit the amount of fish taken out of the sea. But recent research suggests that the world is going about regulating fishing the wrong way—that fish stocks would fare better if efforts were made to protect entire ecosystems rather than individual species. There are plenty of data to prove the importance of diversity on dry land. Until recently, however, there was little evidence that the same was the case in the oceans, which make up 90% of the biosphere, and on which a billion people rely for their livelihoods. In order to establish whether diversity matters in the sea as well as on land, 11 marine biologists, along with three economists, have spent the past three years crunching all the numbers they could lay their hands on. These ranged from the current United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation"s database to information hundreds of years old, collected from kitchen records and archaeology. The results of their comprehensive analysis have been published in Science. Marine biodiversity, they report, matters because it is variety per se that delivers services—such as maintaining water quality and processing nutrients—to humans as well as the goods people reap from the sea. It also ensures these goods and services recover relatively rapidly after an accident or natural disturbance. The new work is silent on exactly how biodiversity protects these things—merely showing that it does. Earlier work though has shown some possible mechanisms. One example from a study in Jamaica showed that continuously removing algae grazers from a reef allowed the algae to overwhelm the coral. The latest study, led by Boris Worm of Dalhousie University, in Halifax, Canada, gathered the available material into four separate groups. The researchers found the same result from different pools of data, in different types of marine ecosystems and at different scales. The findings suggest that governments should rethink the way they try to manage fisheries. Marine reserves are common in the tropics, but policymakers in temperate countries tend to focus on one species at a time to control numbers of that species caught. They might do better to spend more time thinking about ecosystems and less bargaining over quotas. Some governments claim to have already come around to the idea. In America, Britain and Canada officials are considering how to redraft fisheries policy. Scientists hope that the move will push the inevitably unhappy compromise between their recommendations and fishermen"s aspirations closer to their way. Dr. Worm reckons that, the way things are going, commercial fish stocks will collapse completely by 2048. The date may be spuriously precise, but the danger is there. And so, if Dr. Worm is right, is a better way of making sure that it doesn"t happen.

单选题When school officials in Kalkaska, Michigan, closed classes last week, the media flocked to the story, portraying the town"s 2,305 students as victims of stingy taxpayers. There is some truth to that: the property-tax rate here is one-third lower than the state average. But shutting their schools also allowed Kalkaska"s educators and the state"s largest teachers" union, the Michigan Education Association, to make a political point. Their aim was to spur passage of legislation Michigan lawmakers are debating to increase the state"s share of school funding. It was no coincidence that Kalkaska shut its schools two weeks after residents rejected a 28 percent property-tax increase. The school board argued that without the increase it lacked the $1.5 million needed to keep schools open. But the school system had not done all it could to keep the schools open. Officials declined to borrow against next year"s state aid, they refused to trim extracurricular activities and they did not consider seeking a smaller—perhaps more acceptable—tax increase. In fact, closing early is costing Kalkaska a significant amount, including $600,000 in unemployment payments to teachers and staff and $250,000 in lost state aid. In February, the school system promised teachers and staff two months of retirement payments in case schools closed early, a deal that will cost the district $275,000 more. Other signs suggest school authorities were at least as eager to make a political statement as to keep schools open. The Michigan Education Association hired a public relations firm to stage a rally marking the school closings, which attracted 14 local and national television stations and networks. The president of the National Education Association, the MEA"s parent organization, flew from Washington, D.C., for the event. And the union tutored school officials in the art of television interviews. School supervisor Doyle Disbrow acknowledges the district could have kept schools open by cutting programs but denies the moves were politically motivated. Michigan lawmakers have reacted angrily to the closings. The state Senate has already voted to put the system into receivership and reopen schools immediately; the Michigan House plans to consider the bill this week.

单选题One of the most powerful strategic planning tools a business can possess is a marketing plan. Here is not referring to an academic exercise found in college marketing textbooks. Your marketing plan should be a simple (in some cases, one-page) document that specifically answers who you are, what you do, who needs what you do and how you plan to attract their attention. It"s a combination of the planning process and the completed action plan. Follow these seven simple steps to build the perfect marketing plan: Step 1: Narrow your market focus. Try to describe your ideal customer in the narrowest and most detailed terms possible, as though you"re describing him or her to a referral source. Step 2: Position your business. Figure out what you do best and what your target market wants. Maybe it"s how you serve a niche or package your products. If you don"t know what it is, call up three or four of your clients and ask them why they buy from you. Craft a core marketing message that allows you to quickly differentiate your business. Step 3: Create education-based marketing materials. Recreate all your marketing materials, including your website, to focus on education. Make certain every word in your marketing materials speaks of your core messages and to your target market. Step 4: Never cold call. Make sure all your advertising is geared toward creating prospects, not customers. You must find ways to educate before you sell. Your target market needs to learn how you provide value in a way that makes them want to pay a premium for your services or products. You simply can"t do this in a 3-inch-by-4-inch ad. Your ad must get viewers to ask for more information. Then you can proceed to selling. Determine all the ways you can get your education-based messages in front of your narrowly defined target market. Step 5: Earn media attention. Create a list of journalists who cover your industry or community, and build relationships with each by becoming a reliable resource of information. Plan out an entire year of new items you can promote by season or event. Step 6: Expect referrals. Create a referral marketing engine that systematically turns each client and referral network into a kind of unpaid sales pro. You must instill a referral marketing mind-set into your business"s culture. Do this by making every customer a marketing and referral contact. Map every contact and build processes that focus on referrals. Step 7: Live by a calendar. After you complete steps 1 through 6, determine what you need to do to put them into action. Then create an annual marketing calendar, noting the required monthly, weekly and daily appointments necessary to move your plan forward.

单选题A young man comes into Lucinda Roy"s office. She is the head of English at Virginia Tech, a university. He is a student whose bloodthirsty "creative writing" has set off alarm bells. He insists that his teacher is over-reacting. He is not really angry, he says. His poetry is satirical; it is supposed to make people laugh. He speaks "in the softest voice I have ever heard coming from a full-grown man," says Ms Roy. That was in October 2005. Eighteen months later the young man shot and killed 32 people, mostly fellow students, without uttering a word. Then he killed himself. As the second anniversary of the Virginia Tech massacre approaches, crazed gunmen are in the news again. Why do such horrors happen? Some people are turning to Ms Roy"s new memoir to find out. Ms Roy favors gun control. It annoys her that Virginia still allows gun shows to sell guns without background checks to weed out buyers who are criminal or insane. But she admits that the gun advocates occasionally have a point. Armed students do sometimes subdue school shooters. Ms Roy lists examples. Whether more guns on campus would lead to fewer deaths, as some claim, or more, as others insist, is impossible to prove. There are too many confounding factors, and too few school shootings, thank heavens. In any case, the gun advocates" thesis is unlikely to be tested. Few teachers would feel comfortable in a gun-filled classroom. How do you give an "F" grade to an armed adolescent? Another popular argument, after Virginia Tech, was that the media were partly to blame. The killer had watched coverage of a previous massacre, at Columbine High School in Colorado, and decided to copy it. He also wanted to be famous. He filmed himself posing with guns and issuing an incoherent manifesto of complaints. Between his first two murders and his last 30, he posted the footage to NBC, a television channel, hoping they would broadcast it. They obliged. He thus became an icon to other lonely madman. Ms Roy agrees that some of the reporters covering Virginia Tech were insensitive. And making killers famous surely encourages copycats. But Ms Roy cautions against a rush to judgment. The media allowed people at Virginia Tech to find out what was going on in real time—no small service. And investigative reporting, she argues, helps to hold institutions accountable. She thinks the university"s leaders should have been more open about their failure to provide the killer with adequate counselling, among other things. Virginia Tech now has better locks on classroom doors and a brightly-lit notice telling staff and students what to do in an emergency. But there is no reliable way to prepare for the unpredictable. And that, alas, is the only lesson to be drawn from April 16th 2007.

单选题During the recession, job losses were not equitably shared; employment rates fell more for some groups than others. It is also well-known that job losses were greater among men than among women—the so-called mancession—largely because men had been more likely to work in the residential construction and manufacturing industries that were hit hardest. What I"m going to reveal is the employment rates separately for married women and unmarried women who were heads of households. Not surprisingly, the latter are somewhat more likely to work. More surprising is that employment rates fell so much more for these unmarried women who were heads of household. Employment per capita fell 4.7 percentage points among the latter, compared with 1.6 percentage points among the former. The job-loss gap associated with marital status turns out to be as large as the more widely recognized job loss gap associated with gender. Neither group of women had many members working in construction, so the decline of construction cannot explain these differences. An "added-worker effect" has been observed during a number of recessions: more married women worked during a recession than during an expansion because wives sometimes begin work to help replace the income lost by their unemployed husbands. The employment rate among nonelderly married men fell 4 percentage points, to 83 percent from 87 percent. While that is a large decline by historical standards, it still means that roughly 95 percent of wives whose husbands were employed in 2007 had husbands who continued their employment during the recession. Among the 5 percent of wives who were not so fortunate, roughly two-thirds of them had already been working before the recession and therefore could not react to their husband"s unemployment by starting work. Therefore the added-worker effect is much too small to explain the sharply different job-loss rates by marital status. What seems to be especially different between married and unmarried women is their propensity to be unemployed for long periods. The point is that married and unmarried women enter unemployment at about the same rate, but unmarried women leave it more slowly. Part of the difference in labor-market experiences has to do with the safety net. Many safety-net programs, like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which provides food stamps, and Medicaid, base eligibility on family income. A married woman is usually ineligible for a number of safety-net programs because her family"s income is above the poverty line regardless of her employment status. Unmarried household heads, on the other hand, are usually the sole breadwinner for the family, and when their income falls to zero, the household income essentially does, too. For this reason, more unmarried women who are heads of households can expect anti-poverty programs to help them when they are out of work than married women can. An unintended but unavoidable consequence of providing someone a cushion when they are without work is that they are provided with less incentive to get back to work.

单选题{{B}}Directions:{{/B}} Read the following text. Choose the best word(s) for each numbered blank and mark A, B, C or D on the ANSWER SHEET. March 11th marks the second anniversary of the tsunami that killed 18,500 people in Japan. Good news is scant. Almost 315,000 evacuees still {{U}} {{U}} 1 {{/U}} {{/U}}in cramped temporary housing, and need new {{U}} {{U}} 2 {{/U}} {{/U}}. A different kind of suffering weighs on about 20m people (a sixth of the {{U}} {{U}} 3 {{/U}} {{/U}}) at this time of year which, though less than anguish-filled, is not trivial. {{U}} {{U}} 4 {{/U}} {{/U}}late February until May they {{U}} {{U}} 5 {{/U}} {{/U}}pollen allergies, mostly {{U}} {{U}} 6 {{/U}} {{/U}}by Japanese cedar, or sugi, trees. Usually the affliction, entailing sneezing, eye irritation and huge medical bills, is shrugged off—it can't be helped. {{U}} {{U}} 7 {{/U}} {{/U}}a way could be found to ease the allergies that could also {{U}} {{U}} 8 {{/U}} {{/U}}rebuild homes. It would involve thinning out the sugi and other conifer plantations that {{U}} {{U}} 9 {{/U}} {{/U}}about 40% of Japan's forest, most of which are now {{U}} {{U}} 10 {{/U}} {{/U}}as uneconomic. The timber could be used to restore and beautify lost villages. The sugi were planted across Japan after the war as material to {{U}} {{U}} 11 {{/U}} {{/U}}destroyed cities and {{U}} {{U}} 12 {{/U}} {{/U}}. Sugi, straight and tall, are {{U}} {{U}} 13 {{/U}} {{/U}}for construction. But after taxes fell, imported wood put the sugi foresters out of business. The higher they grow, the more pollen the magnificent, abandoned trees emit. Officials say some owners, many now in their 70s, reject {{U}} {{U}} 14 {{/U}} {{/U}}to plant new ones that emit less pollen {{U}} {{U}} 15 {{/U}} {{/U}}the payback is too long. As a result, {{U}} {{U}} 16 {{/U}} {{/U}}Kevin Short, a columnist for the Daily Yomiuri, an English-language newspaper, "immense clouds of yellow-green sugi pollen dust {{U}} {{U}} 17 {{/U}} {{/U}}down onto the urban areas, like some amorphous monster out of a science-fiction movie." {{U}} {{U}} 18 {{/U}} {{/U}}Kiyohito Onuma of the Forestry Agency says his sneezing wife and children often ask him to do more to {{U}} {{U}} 19 {{/U}} {{/U}}the problem, the public pressure is muted. Partly this is because the sugi have always {{U}} {{U}} 20 {{/U}} {{/U}}near temples and shrines, and are part of national folklore.

单选题We can see how the product life cycle works by looking at the introduction of instant coffee. When it was introduced, most people did not like it as well as "regular" coffee, and it took several years to gain general acceptance (introduction stage). At one point, though, instant coffee grew rapidly in popularity, and many brands were introduced (stage of rapid growth). After a while, people became attached to one brand and sales leveled off (stage of maturity). Sales went into a slight decline when freeze-dried coffees were introduced (stage of decline). The importance of the product life cycle to marketers is this: Different stages in the product life cycle call for different strategies. The goal is to extend product life so that sales and profits do not decline. One strategy is called market modification. It means that marketing managers look for new users and market sections. Did you know, for example, that the backpacks that so many students carry today were originally designed for the military? Market modification also means searching for increased usage among present customers or going for a different market, such as senior citizens. A marketer may re-position the product to appeal to new market sections. Another product extension strategy is called product modification. It involves changing product quality, features, or style to attract new users or more usage from present users. American auto manufacturers are using quality improvement as one way to recapture world markets. Note, also, how auto manufacturers once changed styles dramatically from year to year to keep demand from falling.

单选题No woman can be too rich or too thin. This saying often attributed to the late Duchess of Windsor embodies much of the odd spirit of our times. Being thin is deemed as such a virtue. The problem with such a view is that some people actually attempt to live by it. I myself have fantasies of slipping into narrow designer clothes. Consequently, I have been on a diet for the better—or worse—part of my life. Being rich wouldn"t be bad either, but that won"t happen unless an unknown relative dies suddenly in some distant land, leaving me millions of dollars. Where did we go off the track? When did eating butter become a sin, and a little bit of extra flesh unappealing, if not repellent? All religions have certain days when people refrain from eating and excessive eating is one of Christianity"s seven deadly, sins. However, until quite recently, most people had a problem getting enough to eat. In some religious groups, wealth was a symbol of probable salvation and high morals, and fatness a sign of wealth and well-being. Today the opposite is true. We have shifted to thinness as our new mark of virtue. The result is that being fat—or even only somewhat overweight—is bad because it implies a lack of moral strength. Our obsession with thinness is also fueled by health concerns. It is true that in this country we have more overweight people than ever before, and that, in many cases, being overweight correlates with an increased risk of heart and blood vessel disease. These diseases, however, may have as much to do with our way of life and our high-fat diets as with excess weight. And the associated risk of cancer in the digestive system may be more of a dietary problem—too much fat and a lack of fiber—than a weight problem. The real concern, then, is not that we weigh too much, but that we neither exercise enough nor eat well. Exercise is necessary for strong bones and both heart and lung health. A balanced diet without a lot of fat can also help the body avoid many diseases. We should surely stop paying so much attention to weight. Simply being thin is not enough. It is actually hazardous if those who get (or already are) thin think they are automatically healthy and thus free from paying attention to their overall life-style. Thinness can be pure vainglory.

单选题Scratchy throats, stuffy noses and body aches all spell misery, but being able to tel1 if the cause is a cold or flu may make a difference in how long the misery lasts. The American Lung Association (ALA) has issued new guidelines on combating colds and the flu, and one of the keys is being able to quickly tell the two apart. That"s because the prescription drugs available for the flu need to be taken soon after the illness sets in. As for colds, the sooner a person starts taking over-the-counter remedy, the sooner relief will come. The common cold and the flu are both caused by viruses. More than 200 viruses can cause cold symptoms, while the flu is caused by three viruses—flu A, B and C. There is no cure for either illness, but the flu can be prevented by the flu vaccine, which is, for most people, the best way to fight the flu, according to the ALA. But if the flu does strike, quick action can help. Although the flu and common cold have many similarities, there are some obvious signs to look for. Cold symptoms such as stuffy nose, runny nose and scratchy throat typically develop gradually, and adults and teens often do not get a fever. On the other hand, fever is one of the characteristic features of the flu for all ages. And in general, flu symptoms including fever and chills, sore throat and body aches come on suddenly and are more severe than cold symptoms. The ALA notes that it may be particularly difficult to tell when infants and preschool age children have the flu. It advises parents to call the doctor if their small children have flu-like symptoms. Both cold and flu symptoms can be eased with over-the-counter medications as well. However, children and teens with a cold or flu should not take aspirin for pain relief because of the risk of Reye syndrome, a rare but serious condition of the liver and central nervous system. There is, of course, no vaccine for the common cold. But frequent hand washing and avoiding close contact with people who have colds can reduce the likelihood of catching one.

单选题Over the last decade, Dr. Benjamin Van Voorhees has been trying to find the best way to teach coping strategies to adolescents who are at risk of suffering from severe depression. The idea is to help them keep depression at bay so that it doesn"t become a devastating part of their lives. The goal is to identify kids at risk and then use a combination of traditional counseling and Internet-based learning to keep off mental disorders and their accompanying medicines. Van Voorhees said he wants to change the way doctors, especially pediatricians, deal with mental illness by moving the focus, which is now so heavily trained on treatment, to prevention. He said, "We"re trying to develop a type of behavioral vaccine that functions the same way vaccines work in fighting infections. We hope this approach will be simple, culturally acceptable, universally deployable—and inexpensive." He said that initial depressive episodes tend to strike between the ages of 13 and 17. Once an adolescent develops into severe depression, episodes can recur across his or her lifetime. Van Voorhees said young people establish patterns of coping in adolescence and young adulthood. "There"s a period of plasticity in the brain during which it"s developing the capacity for learning new coping skills," he said. "You want to make youths elastic against mental disorders, and you try to give them ways to cope so that they don"t fall into substance abuse." His research has been testing the effectiveness of Internet use and other techniques to hone such skills. Project CATCH-IT is a multimillion-dollar study. CATCH-IT includes an initial motivational interview with a physician to get the young person to understand the importance of the program. It also has a self-contained learning component on the Internet that focuses on changing behavior and improving cognitive thinking and social skills. The website, which has evolved over time, teaches plasticity skills in part by allowing patients to read stories about other teens to learn how they overcame adversity and became more successful in school, their relationships or on the job. Van Voorhees said the goal is to reach as many young people as possible. They want to develop a model that will be embedded in primary care with pediatricians screening kids who are at risk for mental disorders and trying to prevent them ahead of time. Over the years CATCH-IT has shown some evidence of being effective. But in February a new study, called PATH, was begun to determine whether CATCH-IT does a better job of preventing depression than routine mental health care and health education that teens can find online. "With CATCH-IT alone, we saw depression dropping over the years, but we didn"t have anything to compare it to," said Monika Marko-Holguin, PATH"s project manager.

单选题 When, in the age of automation, man searches for a worker to do the tedious, unpleasant jobs that are more or less impossible to mechanize, he may very profitably consider the ape. If we tackled the problem of breeding for brains with as much enthusiasm as we devote to breeding dogs of surrealistic shapes, we could eventually produce assorted models of useful primates, ranging in size from the gorilla down to the baboon (狒狒), each adapted to a special kind of work. It is not putting too much strain on the imagination to assume that geneticists could produce a super-ape, which is able to understand some scores of words, and capable of being trained for such jobs as picking fruit, cleaning up the litter in parks, shining shoes, collecting garage, doing household chores, and even baby-sitting, although I have known some babies I would not care to trust with a valuable ape. Apes could do many jobs, such as cleaning streets and the more repetitive types of agricultural work, without supervision, though they might need protection from those {{U}}egregious{{/U}} specimens of human beings who think it amusing to tease or bully anything they consider lower on the evolutionary ladder. For other tasks, such as delivering papers and laboring on the docks, our man-ape would have to work under human overseers; and, incidentally, I would love to see the ending of the twenty-first century version of On the Waterfront in which {{U}}the honest but hairy hero{{/U}} will drum on his chest after—literally—taking the wicked labor leader apart. Once a supply of nonhuman workers becomes available, a whole range of low IQ jobs could be thankfully given up by mankind, to its great mental and physical advantage. What is more, one of the problems which has plagued so many fictional Utopias would be avoided: there would be none of the degradingly subhuman Epsilons of Huxley's Brave New World to act as a permanent reproach to society, for there is a profound moral difference between breeding sub-men and super-apes, though the end products are much the same. The first would introduce a form of slavery, but the second would be a biological triumph which could benefit both men and animals.

单选题New claims for unemployment insurance dipped last week, suggesting that companies are laying off fewer workers as the budding economic recovery unfolds. The Labor Department reported Thursday that for the work week ending April 27, new claims for jobless benefits went down by a seasonally adjusted 10,000 to 418,000, the lowest level since March 23. In another report, orders to US factories rose for the fourth straight month, a solid 0.4 percent rise in March. The figure was largely boosted by stronger demand for nondurable goods, such as food, clothes, paper products and chemicals. Total nondurable goods were up 1.6 percent in March, the biggest increase in two years. Orders also rose for some manufactured goods, including metals, construction machinery, household appliances and defense equipment. The report reinforces the view that the nation"s manufacturers—which sharply cut production and saw hundreds of thousands of jobs evaporate during the recession—are on the comeback trail. Stocks were rising again Thursday. In the first half-hour of trading, the Dow Jones industrial average was up 43 points and the Nasdaq index was up 14 points. In the jobless claims report, even with the decline, a government analyst said, the level was inflated as a result of a technical fluke. The distortion is coming from a requirement that laid-off workers seeking to take advantage of a federal extension for benefits must submit new claims. Congress recently passed legislation signed into law by President Bush that provided a 13-week extension of jobless benefits. The fluke has clouded the layoffs picture for several weeks. But the government analyst said the refiling requirement is having much less of an effect on the claims numbers than in previous weeks. The more stable four-week moving average of new claims, which smoothes out weekly fluctuations, also fell last week to 435,750, the lowest level since the beginning of April. But the number of workers continuing to receive unemployment benefits rose to 3.8 million for the work week ending April 20, evidence that people who are out of work are having trouble finding new jobs. Economists predict that job growth won"t be strong enough in the coming months to prevent the nation"s unemployment rate—now at 5.7 percent—from rising. Many economists are forecasting a rise in April"s jobless rate to 5.8 percent and estimating that businesses added around 55,000 jobs during the month. The government will release the April employment report Friday. Even as the economy bounces back from recession, some economists expect the jobless rate will peak to just over 6 percent by June. That"s because companies will be reluctant to quickly hire back laid-off workers until they are assured the recovery is here to stay. Given the fledgling rebound, many economists expect the Federal Reserve to leave short-term interest rates—now at 40-year lows—unchanged when it meets May 7. The Fed cut rates 11 times last year to rescue the economy from recession, which began in March 2001.

单选题 The American economy is growing, according to the most recent statistics, at the high rate of 7%, and is in the middle of the largest peacetime expansion in American history. We read in the newspapers that practically everyone who wants a job can get one. Microsoft is running advertisements in the New York Times practically begging Congress to issue more visas for foreign computer and information technology workers. In this environment, it is shocking that one group of Americans, people with disabilities, have such a high level of unemployment: 30% are not employed—the same percentage as when the Americans with Disabilities Act became law. Not only did their employment and labor earnings fall during the recession of the early 1990s, but employment and earnings continued to fall during the long economic expansion that followed. Many of these people are skilled professionals who are highly marketable in today's economy. Part of the problem is discrimination, and part recent court rulings favoring employers in ADA lawsuits. Discrimination against people with disabilities is, unfortunately, alive and well, despite the legal prohibitions against discrimination in hiring people with disabilities. 79% of disabled people who are unemployed cite discrimination in the workplace and lack of transportation as major factors that prevent them from working; studies have also shown that people with disabilities who find jobs earn less than their co-workers, and are less likely to be promoted. Unfavorable court rulings have not been helpful, either. Research by law professor Ruth Colker of Ohio State University has shown that in the eight years after the ADA went into effect, employer-defendants prevailed in more than 93% of the cases decided by trial. Of the cases appealed, employers prevailed 84% of the time. Robert Burgdorf. Jr., who helped draft the ADA, has written, "legal analysis has proceeded quite a way down the wrong road." Disability activists and other legal scholars point out that Congress intended the ADA as a national mandate for the ending of discrimination against people with disabilities. Instead, what has occurred, in the words of one writer, is that the courts "have narrowed the scope of the law, redefined 'disability', raised the price of access to justice and generally deemed disability discrimination as not worthy of serious remedy." But perhaps the greatest single problem is the federal government itself, where laws and regulations designed to help disabled people actually provide an economic disincentive to work. As Sen. Edward Kennedy wrote, "the high unemployment rate among people receiving federal disability benefits is not because their federal benefits programs have 'front doors that are too big', but because they have 'back doors that are too small'."

单选题Silicon Valley likes to think of itself as morally exceptional. When Google went public in 2004, the company"s founders penned a letter to prospective shareholders that has become the Internet industry"s version of the Magna Carta. In it, they pledged that Google was "not a conventional company" but one focused on "making the world a better place." Though Silicon Valley"s newest billionaires may anoint themselves the saints of American capitalism, they"re beginning to resemble something else entirely: robber barons . Like their predecessors in railroads, steel, banking, and oil a century ago, Silicon Valley"s new entrepreneurs are harnessing technology to make the world more efficient. But along the way, that process is bringing great economic and labor dislocation, as well as an unequal share of the spoils. Take Apple"s manufacturing practices in China. By systematically outsourcing the assembly of iPhones and other gadgets to contract manufacturers like China"s Foxconn, Apple has reduced its overall cost of production and increased profit margins for shareholders. That"s neither unique nor necessarily evil. It"s a practice regularly adopted by all kinds of industries. But establishing an arm"s-length commercial relationship does not absolve a company from moral responsibility for the way its chosen partners treat workers. Labor issues at Foxconn have attracted bad press for some time. It was not until that negative publicity on New York Times last year that Apple took more meaningful action, allowing the Fair Labor Association to conduct special audits of its suppliers" factories in China. A bigger battle remains to be fought on the privacy front, where Silicon Valley"s misdemeanors are even more upsetting. Pushing the boundaries of what is generally considered acceptable, even decent, when it comes to exploiting personal information is a daily sport in the online world. That"s because a tweak here or there to the privacy settings of a social network or a tiny change to the code on a mobile application can mean a world of difference in the value of information an advertiser can access about a usually unaware user. Perhaps swayed by Silicon Valley"s altruistic spin or slow to catch up with its rapid growth, Washington has, up to now, largely left the industry to regulate itself on privacy. That"s clearly not working. Hardly a day passes without some new revelation of an Internet or mobile company stepping a byte too far into the private business of its customers. The original robber barons had decent intentions when they built railroads to connect America"s emerging cities and drilled oil wells that fueled the nation"s growth, but their empires still needed to be regulated, reined in, and in some cases broken up by vigilant watchdogs. Lofty words and ideals are fine for motivating employees and even for spurring sales, but they can also serve as cover for motives that clash with the broader interests of consumers and society. We need more than fancy promises to ensure that the rise of the Silicon Valley engineer is good for the world.

单选题 Researchers are finding that boys and girls really are from two different planets. Boys and girls have different "crisis points", experts say, stages in their emotional and social development where things can go very wrong. Until recently, girls got all the attention. But boys are much more likely than girls to have discipline problems at school and to be diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD). Boys far outnumber girls in special-education classes. They're also more likely to commit violent crimes and end up in jail. Even normal boy behavior has come to be considered pathological (病态的) in the wake of the feminist movement. An abundance of physical energy and the urge to conquer — these are normal male characteristics, and in an earlier age they were good things, even essential to survival. "If Huck Finn or Tom Sawyer were alive today," says Michael Gurian, author of The Wonder of Boys, "we'd say they had ADD." He says one of the new insights we're gaining about boys is a very old one: boys will be boys. "They are who they are," says Gurian, "and we need to love them for who they are. Let's not try to {{U}}rewire{{/U}} them." But what exactly is the essential nature of boys? Even as infants, boys and girls behave differently. A recent study at Children's Hospital in Boston found that boy babies are more emotionally expressive; girls are more reflective. (That means boy babies tend to cry when they're unhappy; girl babies suck their thumbs) This could indicate that girls are innately more able to control their emotions. Boys have higher levels of testosterone and lower levels of neurotransmitter serotonin, which inhabits aggression and impulsivity. That may help explain why more males than females carry through with suicide or become alcoholics. There's struggle — a desire and need for warmth on the one hand and a pull toward independence on the other. Boys are going through what psychologists long ago declared an integral part of growing up: individualization and disconnection from parents, especially mothers. But now some researchers think that process is too abrupt. When boys repress normal feelings like love because of social pressure, says William Pollack, head of the Center for Men at Boston's McLean Hospital, "they've lost contact with the genuine nature of whom they are and what they feel. Boys are in a silent crisis. The only time we notice it is when they pull the trigger."

单选题Companies have embarked on what looks like the beginnings of a re-run of the mergers and acquisitions (M&A) wave that defined the second bubbly half of the 1990s. That period, readers might recall, was characterized by a collective splurge that saw the creation of some of the most indebted companies in history, many of which later went bankrupt or were themselves broken up. Wild bidding for telecoms, internet and media assets, not to mention the madness that was Daimler"s $40 billion motoring takeover in 1998-1999 of Chrysler or the Time- Warner/AOL mega-merger in 2000, helped to give mergers a thoroughly bad name. A consensus emerged that M&A was a great way for investment banks to reap rich fees, and a sure way for ambitious managers to betray investors by trashing the value of their shares. Now M&A is back. Its return is a global phenomenon, but it is perhaps most striking in Europe, where so far this year there has been a stream of deals worth more than $600 billion in total, around 40% higher than in the same period of 2004. The latest effort came this week when France"s Saint-Gobain, a building-materials firm, unveiled the details of its ￡3.6 billion ($6.5 billion) hostile bid for BPB, a British rival. In the first half of the year, cross-border activity was up threefold over the same period last year. Even France Telecom, which was left almost bankrupt at the end of the last merger wave, recently bought Amena, a Spanish mobile operator. Shareholder"s approval of all these deals raises an interesting question for companies everywhere: are investors right to think that these mergers are more likely to succeed than earlier ones? There are two answers. The first is that past mergers may have been judged too harshly. The second is that the present rash of European deals does look more rational, but—and the caveat is crucial—only so far. The pattern may not hold. M&A"s poor reputation stems not only from the string of spectacular failures in the 1990s, but also from studies that showed value destruction for acquiring shareholders in 80% of deals. But more recent studies by economists have introduced a note of caution. Investors should look at the number of deals that succeed or fail (typically measured by the impact on the share price), rather than (as you might think) weighing them by size. For example, no one doubts that the Daimler-Chrysler merger destroyed value. The combined market value of the two firms is still below that of Daimler alone before the deal. This single deal accounted for half of all German M&A activity by value in 1998 and 1999, and probably dominated people"s thinking about mergers to the same degree. Throw in a few other such monsters and it is no wonder that broad studies have tended to find that mergers are a bad idea. The true picture is more complicated.

单选题War has escaped the battlefield and now can, with modern guidance systems on missiles, touch virtually every square yard of the earth"s surface. It no longer involves only the military profession, but also entire civilian populations. Nuclear weapons have made major war unthinkable. We are forced, however, to think about the unthinkable because a nuclear war could come by accident or miscalculation. We must accept the paradox of maintaining a capacity to fight such a war so that we will never have to do so. War has also lost most of its utility in achieving the traditional goals of conflict. Control of territory carries with it the obligation to provide subject peoples certain administrative, health, education, and other social services; such obligations far outweigh the benefits of control. If the ruled population is ethnically or racially different from the rulers, tensions and chronic unrest often exist which further reduce the benefits and increase the costs of domination. Large populations no longer necessarily enhance state power and, in the absence of high levels of economic development, can impose severe burdens on food supply, jobs, and the broad range of services expected of modern governments. The benefits of forcing another nation to surrender its wealth are vastly outweighed by the benefits of persuading that nation to produce and exchange goods and services. Making war has been one of the most persistent of human activities in the 8 centuries since men and women settled in cities and became thereby "civilized", but the modernization of the past 80 years has fundamentally changed the role and function of war. In pre-modernized societies, successful warfare brought significant material rewards, the most obvious of which were the stored wealth of the defeated. Equally important was human labor—control over people as slaves—and the productive capacity of agricultural lands and mines. Warfare was also the most complex, broad-scale and demanding activity of premodernized people. The challenges of leading men into battle, organizing, moving and supporting armies, attracted the talents of the most vigorous, enterprising, intelligent and imaginative men in the society. "Warrior" and "statesman" were usually synonymous, and the military was one of the few professions in which an able, ambitious boy of humble origin could rise to the top. In the broader cultural context, war was accepted in the premodernized society as a part of the human condition, a mechanism of change, and an unavoidable, even noble, aspect of life. The excitement and drama of war made it a vital part of literature and legends.

单选题As a giant of the stock market, Apple is unusual. For much of the past 20 years, three companies have alternated in the role of the largest on the American stock market: Exxon Mobil, General Electric and Microsoft. The first two are very big companies by Apple standards. But Apple offers the kind of growth prospects that the shareholders of Exxon Mobil and GE can only dream of. Its sales in the latest quarter were almost double those of the previous year, and forecasts for 2013 revenues are nearly treble those recorded in 2010. It is the epitome of the modern company: short on physical capital but long on brainpower. So what does Apple"s dominance reveal about the economy and the stock market? First, it is a powerful reminder that the free market can still be remarkably innovative. In the past 11 years Apple has launched three products—the iPod, iPhone and iPad—that have created brand new markets, fulfilling desires that consumers did not even know they had. It is impossible to imagine any of those designs being dreamed up by a bureaucrat. Second, it shows that the internet industry has come of age . The dotcom bubble of the late 1990s featured companies that were heavy on ideas but light on revenues or profits. When the bubble burst a decade ago, it was feared that the internet would savage margins by "commoditizing" devices like phones and personal computers. Apple has so far proved that it is possible to earn high margins with brilliant design and by offering consumers ways to access the internet effortlessly wherever they go. It has made the mobile era its own. Third, Apple"s rise shows that, even in a period of austerity, consumers are willing to pay for the must-have gadget. The company is a huge beneficiary of globalization: able not only to source its products at low cost in Asia but to sell the finished goods there as well. A global elite is now willing to pay for the most desirable products, from luxury luggage to premium Scotch. And America"s soft power is still so strong that it can create aspiring brands for that elite. But does Apple"s surge to preeminence indicate that the stock market is back to the insane days of the late 1990s? There are certainly warning signs. Brokers are competing to come up with the highest potential price target for Apple"s shares, and the announcement of a share buy-back should remind investors that companies have a tendency to purchase their own equity at market peaks. But when Cisco, a technology giant, was briefly worth more than $500 billion in 2000, its price-earnings ratio was above 100; Apple trades on only 22 times its 2011 profits. Its new dividend yield will be almost as generous as that of the overall market. Even if its shares turn out to be overvalued, this would be more like a pimple than a bubble.

单选题In an essay, entitled "Making It in America," in the latest issue of The Atlantic , the author Adam Davidson relates a joke from cotton country about just how much a modern textile mill has been automated: The average mill has only two employees today, "a man and a dog. The man is there to feed the dog, and the dog is there to keep the man away from the machines." Davidson"s article is one of a number of pieces that have recently appeared making the point that the reason we have such stubbornly high unemployment and sagging middle-class incomes today is largely because of the big drop in demand because of the Great Recession, but it is also because of the quantum advances in both globalization and the information technology revolution, which are more rapidly than ever replacing labor with machines or foreign workers. Yes, new technology has been eating jobs forever, and always will. As they say, if horses could have voted, there never would have been cars. But there"s been an acceleration. As Davidson notes, "In the 10 years ending in 2009, factories shed workers so fast that roughly one out of every three manufacturing jobs—about 6 million in total—disappeared." Besides, what the new technology won"t do in an above average way a Chinese worker will. Consider this paragraph from an article in The Times about why Apple does so much of its manufacturing in China: "Apple had redesigned the iPhone"s screen at the last minute, forcing an assembly-line overhaul. New screens began arriving at the Chinese plant near midnight. A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company"s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within haft an hour started a 12-hour shift. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day. "The speed and flexibility is breathtaking," the executive said. "There"s no American plant that can match that."" There will always be change—new jobs, new products, new services. But the one thing we know for sure is that with each advance in globalization and the I. T. revolution, the best jobs will require workers to have more and better education to make themselves above average. Here are the latest unemployment rates from the Bureau of Labor Statistics for Americans over 25 years old: those with less than a high school degree, 13.8 percent; those with a high school degree and no college, 8.7 percent; those with some college or associate degree, 7.7 percent; and those with bachelor"s degree or higher, 4.1 percent. In a world where average is officially over, there are many things we need to do to buttress employment, but nothing would be more important than passing some kind of G. I. Bill for the 21st century that ensures that every American has access to post-high school education.

单选题"Opinion" is a word that is often used carelessly today. It is used to refer to matters of taste, belief, and judgment. This casual use would probably cause little confusion if people didn"t attach too much importance to opinion. Unfortunately, most do attach great importance to it. "I have as much right to my opinion as you to yours," and "Everyone"s entitled to his opinion," are common expressions. In fact, anyone who would challenge another"s opinion is likely to be branded intolerant. Is that label accurate? Is it intolerant to challenge another"s opinion? It depends on what definition of opinion you have in mind. For example, you may ask a friend "What do you think of the new Ford cars?" And he may reply, "In my opinion, they"re ugly." In this case, it would not only be intolerant to challenge his statement, but foolish. For it"s obvious that by opinion he means his personal preference, a matter of taste. And as the old saying goes, "It"s pointless to argue about matters of taste." But consider this very different use of the term. A newspaper reports that the Supreme Court has delivered its opinion in a controversial case. Obviously the justices did not state their personal preferences, their mere likes and dislikes. They stated their considered judgment, painstakingly arrived at after thorough inquiry and deliberation. Most of what is referred to as opinion falls somewhere between these two extremes. It is not an expression of taste. Nor is it careful judgment. Yet it may contain elements of both. It is a view or belief more or less casually arrived at, with or without examining the evidence. Is everyone entitled to his opinion? Of course, this is not only permitted, but guaranteed. We are free to act on our opinions only so long as, in doing so, we do not harm others.