单选题In his new book, Going Solo, New York University sociologist Eric Klinenberg argues that we"re poised to become a nation dominated by single people. Just 51 percent of American adults are married, according to recent census data, and more than a quarter of all U. S. households consist of only one person. Yet singles often don"t get a lot of love—and we"re not talking about their romantic lives. Activists say that unmarried people are systematically discriminated against. "Singleism—stereotyping, stigmatizing, and discrimination against people who are single—is largely unrecognized and unchallenged," says activist Bella DePaulo, the author of Singled Out. DePaulo says: "People don"t notice singleism, and if their attention is called to it, they think there"s nothing wrong." That"s why, for instance, car and health insurance companies get away with charging less for couples and families. "They can attract more business that way," DePaulo notes. In the process, they leave single people to essentially subsidize the benefit by paying more. "When married workers can add spouses to a health-care plan at a discount and single workers can"t add someone important to them, that"s discrimination," says DePaulo. The U. S. government not only turns a blind eye to the problem of "singleism," but helps enforce it, activists say. Just look at Social Security. "A childless singleton can work side by side with a childless married person, doing the same job, for the same number of years, at the same level of accomplishment—and when the married person dies, that worker can leave his or her Social Security benefits to a spouse," says DePaulo. "The single person"s benefits go back into the system." That"s especially true given how much they contribute to society—more, activists argue, than married couples with families. "On average, singles have more disposable income," Klinenberg says. "They"re fueling urban economies that would be in much worse shape without them. And compared to married people, they"re more likely to spend time with neighbors, to participate in public events, and to volunteer." Singles may also be contributing more at the office, without being compensated for it, activists say. "Studies have shown that singles are often paid less than married people, even if they share the same title, responsibilities, and years of experience," says Langburt. "And if you agree that time equals dollars, then it doesn"t stop there: there"s maternity leave, all the time off leading up to the pregnancy for doctors" visits, and sick days." Historically, governments have passed laws encouraging marriage and families in the hopes that doing so would decrease the likelihood that the state would need to care for abandoned children. But policies that benefit the married shouldn"t be substitutes for more universal social programs, says marriage historian Stephanie Coontz, the director of research and public education for the Council on Contemporary Families. "The penalties for being single in this country are worse than in Europe, where individuals have guaranteed access to health care, and they have options beyond a spouse"s death benefits for staying above the poverty line as they age."

单选题Most episodes of absent-mindedness—forgetting where you left something or wondering why you just entered a room—are caused by a simple lack of attention, says Schacter. "You"re supposed to remember something, but you haven"t encoded it deeply." Encoding, Schacter explains, is a special way of paying attention to an event that has a major impact on recalling it later. Failure to encode properly can create annoying situations. If you put your mobile phone in a pocket, for example, and don"t pay attention to what you did because you"re involved in a conversation, you"ll probably forget that the phone is in the jacket now hanging in your wardrobe. "Your memory itself isn"t failing you," says Schacter. "Rather, you didn"t give your memory system the information it needed." Lack of interest can also lead to absent-mindedness. "A man who can recite sports statistics from 30 years ago," says Zelinski, "may not remember to drop a letter in the mailbox." Women have slightly better memories than men, possibly because they pay more attention to their environment, and memory relies on just that. Visual cues can help prevent absent-mindedness, says Schacter. "But be sure the cue is clear and available," he cautions. If you want to remember to take a medication with lunch, put the pill bottle on the kitchen table—don"t leave it in the medicine chest and write yourself a note that you keep in a pocket Another common episode of absent-mindedness: walking into a room and wondering why you"re there. Most likely, you were thinking about something else. "Everyone does this from time to time," says Zelinski. The best thing to do is to return to where you were before entering the room, and you"ll likely remember.

单选题For an industry said to be on the verge of a renaissance, nuclear power has not been coping very well with an exceptionally hot European summer. On August 8th the firm that runs Finland"s grid announced that the country might run short of power in 2009, partly as a result of the delay in the construction of a new nuclear reactor, Europe"s first in over a decade. Earlier this month the Swedish government ordered the indefinite closure of four reactors while it investigated the failure of several safety systems during a power surge at one of them. The most serious incident took place at Forsmark I, one of the three reactors 80 miles north of Stockholm. On July 25th a short circuit on the national grid cut the plant off from the mains. An accompanying power surge knocked out two of the four generators that provide the back-up power needed to shut down the reactor. Somehow, both a mechanism that protects against power surges and an auxiliary connection to the grid failed. Happily, other safety systems worked as advertised, and staff were able to shut the reactor down safely within 45 minutes. Despite the claims of some alarmist commentators, says Vattenfall, the utility that owns the reactor, it was always several failsafes away from a meltdown. Spokesmen were quick to point out that most of Europe"s reactors follow different designs, and so could not suffer from the same flaw. But the episode has revived a political row over nuclear power ahead of elections next month. In theory, Sweden is weaning itself off nuclear power, as mandated by a referendum in 1980. In practice, the government has not set a date to decommission any of the ten remaining plants, for want of a more efficient alternative. In fact, a prolonged drought has been sapping Sweden"s other main source of power, hydroelectric plants. Elsewhere in Europe, hot, dry weather has not only drained reservoirs and pushed up demand for power to run air conditioners; it has also warmed up the rivers used as a source of water to cool many nuclear reactors. In most countries, environmental rules prevent nuclear power stations from releasing water above a certain temperature back into rivers. Last month, a few nuclear plants in Spain and Germany had to scale back their operations to meet the rules. In late July, as a result of all this, European wholesale electricity prices hit record levels. Such spikes will become more frequent if, as many project, global warming brings more stifling summers, and more power-hungry appliances to cope with them. If that happens, Europe will clearly need extra generating capacity—but the past few weeks have given many reasons to wonder whether nuclear is the right source.

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. Sitting around a restaurant table, six workers discuss the progress of their labour action. Five of them are women, {{U}} {{U}} 1 {{/U}} {{/U}}are most of their several hundred {{U}} {{U}} 2 {{/U}} {{/U}}who have been occupying the toy factory since mid-April. They have been sleeping on floors, braving rats and mosquitoes, to stop the owner {{U}} {{U}} 3 {{/U}} {{/U}}down the factory without giving them fair {{U}} {{U}} 4 {{/U}} {{/U}}. Those at the table are all migrants from the countryside. A couple are tearful. All are angry and determined not to {{U}} {{U}} 5 {{/U}} {{/U}}. In Guangdong province, where nearly 30% of China's exports are made, women usually far outnumber men on labour-intensive production lines {{U}} {{U}} 6 {{/U}} {{/U}}those at the toy factory in the city of Shenzhen, next to Hong Kong. {{U}} {{U}} 7 {{/U}} {{/U}}women are {{U}} {{U}} 8 {{/U}} {{/U}}for their supposed docility (温顺，顺从), nimble (灵活的) fingers and attention to detail. {{U}} {{U}} 9 {{/U}} {{/U}}in recent years Guangdong's workforce has changed. The supply of cheap unskilled labour, once seemingly {{U}} {{U}} 10 {{/U}} {{/U}}, has started to dry up. Factory bosses are {{U}} {{U}} 11 {{/U}} {{/U}}all but begging their female workers to {{U}} {{U}} 12 {{/U}} {{/U}}. At the same time the women who have migrated to the factory towns have become better-educated and more aware of their {{U}} {{U}} 13 {{/U}} {{/U}}. In labour-intensive factories, stereotypes of female passivity (被动) are beginning to break down. {{U}} {{U}} 14 {{/U}} {{/U}}the past three decades the migration of tens of millions of women from the countryside to factories in Guangdong and other coastal provinces has helped to {{U}} {{U}} 15 {{/U}} {{/U}}the worldview of an especially downtrodden (受压迫的) sector of Chinese society. Conditions in the factories have often been harsh—{{U}} {{U}} 16 {{/U}} {{/U}}safety, illegally long working hours, cramped accommodation, few {{U}} {{U}} 17 {{/U}} {{/U}}and little leave. Leslie Chang, an American journalist, spent three years {{U}} {{U}} 18 {{/U}} {{/U}}on women workers in Dongguan, a city near Shenzhen. In her 2008 book "Factory Girls" Ms. Chang wrote that, {{U}} {{U}} 19 {{/U}} {{/U}}men, the women she encountered were "more motivated to {{U}} {{U}} 20 {{/U}} {{/U}}themselves and more likely to value migration for its life-changing possibilities."

单选题At work, as in life, attractive women get a lot of good lucks. Studies have shown that they are more likely to be 1 than their plain-Jane colleagues because people tend to project 2 traits 3 them, such as a sensitive heart and a cool head, they may also be at a/an 4 in job interviews. But research suggests otherwise. Brad Hanks at Georgia State University looked at what happens when job hunters include photos with their resume, as is the 5 in much of Europe and Asia. The pair sent made-up applications to over 2,500 real-life 6 . For each job, they sent two very similar resume, one with a photo, one without. Subjects had previously been graded for their attractiveness. For men, the results were 7 expected. Hunks were more likely to be called for an interview if they included a photo. Ugly men were better off not including one. However, for women this was 8 Attractive females were less likely to be offered an interview if they included a mugshot. When applying directly to a company (rather than through an agency) an attractive woman would need to send out 11 CVs on average 9 getting an interview; a/an 10 qualified plain one just seven. At first, Mr. Hanks considered 11 he calls the "dumb-blonde hypothesis"—that people 12 beautiful women to be stupid. 13 , the photos had also been rated on how 14 people thought each subject looked; there was no 15 between perceived intellect and beauty. So the cause of the discrimination must 16 elsewhere. Human resources departments tend to be 17 mostly by women. Indeed, in the Israeli study, 93% of those tasked with selecting whom to invite for an interview were female. The researchers" unavoidable—and unpalatable—conclusion is that old-fashioned 18 led the women to discriminate 19 pretty candidates. So should attractive women simply attach photos that make them look dowdy? No. Better, says Mr. Hanks, to discourage the practice of including a photo altogether. Companies might even consider the 20 model used in the Belgian public sector, where CVs do not even include the candidate"s name.

单选题The simple act of surrendering a telephone number to a store clerk may seem innocuous—so much so that many consumers do it with no questions asked. Yet that one action can set in motion a cascade of silent events, as that data point is acquired, analyzed, categorized, stored and sold over and over again. Future attacks on your privacy may come from anywhere, from anyone with money to purchase that phone number you surrendered. If you doubt the multiplier effect, consider your e-mail inbox. If it"s loaded with spam, it"s undoubtedly because at some point in time you unknowingly surrendered your e-mail to the wrong Web site. Do you think your telephone number or address is handled differently? A cottage industry of small companies with names you"ve probably never heard of—like Acxiom or Merlin—buy and sell your personal information the way other commodities like corn or cattle futures are bartered. You may think your cell phone is unlisted, but if you"ve ever ordered a pizza, it might not be. Merlin is one of many commercial data brokers that advertises sale of unlisted phone numbers compiled from various sources—including pizza delivery companies. These unintended, unpredictable consequences that flow from simple actions make privacy issues difficult to grasp, and grapple with. In a larger sense, privacy also is often cast as a tale of "Big Brother" —the government is watching you or a big corporation is watching you. But privacy issues don"t necessarily involve large faceless institutions. A spouse takes a casual glance at her husband"s Blackberry, a co-worker looks at e-mail over your shoulder or a friend glances at a cell phone text message from the next seat on the bus. While very little of this is news to anyone—people are now well aware there are video cameras and Internet cookies everywhere—there is abundant evidence that people live their lives ignorant of the monitoring, assuming a mythical level of privacy. People write e-mails and type instant messages they never expect anyone to see. Just ask Mark Foley or even Bill Gates, whose e-mails were a cornerstone of the Justice Department"s antitrust case against Microsoft. And polls and studies have repeatedly shown that Americans are indifferent to privacy concerns. The general defense for such indifference is summed up a single phrase. "I have nothing to hide." If you have nothing to hide, why shouldn"t the government be able to peek at your phone records, your wife see your e-mail or a company send you junk mail? It"s a powerful argument, one that privacy advocates spend considerable time discussing and strategizing over. It is hard to deny, however, that people behave different when they"re being watched. And it is also impossible to deny that Americans are now being watched more than at any time in history.

单选题A New Zealand man who was asked by scientists to agree with everything his wife said had to call off the experiment after 12 days because it was proved so harmful to his mental health. The study was set up to examine the old marriage advice about whether it"s more important to be happy or to be right. Couples therapists sometimes suggest that in a bid to avoid constant arguments, spouses weigh up whether pressing the point is worth the misery of marital discord. The researchers, who are doctors and professors at the University of Auckland, noticed that many of their patients were adding stress to their lives by insisting on being right, even when it worked against their well-being. So they found a couple who were willing to record their quality of life on a scale of 1 to 10. They told the man, who wanted to be happy more than right, about the purpose of the study and asked him to agree with every opinion and request his wife had without complaint, even when he profoundly didn"t agree. The wife was not informed of the purpose of the study and just asked to record her quality of life. Things went rapidly downhill for the couple. The man"s quality-of-life scores fell, from 7 to 3, over the course of the experiment. The wife"s scores rose modestly, from 8 to 8.5, before she became hostile to the idea of recording the scores. Rather than causing harmony, the husband"s agreeableness led to the wife becoming increasingly critical of what he did and said (in the husband"s opinion). After 12 days he broke down and the study was called off because of "severe adverse outcomes". The researchers concluded, shockingly, that humans need to be right and acknowledged as right, at least some of the time, to be happy. In politics, people often note that there can be no peace without justice, and that"s true of the domestic sphere as well. The researchers also noted that this was further proof that if given too much power, humans tend to "assume the alpha position and, as with chimpanzees, they become very aggressive and dangerous." Obviously the results are to be taken with extreme caution, since this was just one couple with who-knows- what underlying issues beforehand. But the study"s chief author, Dr. Bruce, maintains that the question of happiness vs. rightness, theoretically, could be settled by scientific inquiry with a wider sample. "This would include a randomized controlled trial," he says. "However we would be reluctant to do the definitive study because of the concern about divorce or homicide."

单选题New research suggests that speaking more than one language may delay different kinds of dementia, that is the lost of mental ability. In fact, researchers say, speaking two languages appears to be more important than the level of education in defending against dementias. A study in India examined the effect of knowing more than one language in delaying the first signs of several disorders. Researchers studied nearly 650 people whose average age was 66. 240 of those studied suffered from Alzheimer"s, the most common form of mental decline. 391 of the subjects spoke two or more languages. Investigators found the dementias began about four-and-a-half years later in those who spoke two languages compared to those who spoke only one language. Thomas Bak helped to organise the study. He is with the Center of Cognitive Aging at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. He suggests that individuals who speak more than one language train their brains by moving back and forth between different words and expressions. Mr. Bak believes this effort improves what scientists called executive functioning or attention to tasks, this mental ability often weakens in people with dementias. Researchers found there was no extra gain in speaking more than two languages. They also did not see a delay in the first signs of Lewy bodies dementia, the disorder causes patients to see or experience things that do not real exist. They can also cause sufferers to move back and forth between being wide awake and really sleeping. Mr. Bak says it does not appear important whether you learn a language at a young age or later in life. "So it"s not something you sort of say that "you missed the boat when you do not do it as a baby". It is something that is still quite useful and powerful when you do it as an adult," he said. Scientists found that speaking more than one language help delay the first signs of dementias, even in those who could not read.

单选题Seventh graders figure out direction by mapping the sculptures of the north, south, east and west winds that serve as compass points for the building. And fifth graders study astronomy by searching for Cassiopeia in an inlaid night sky that stretches across the lobby floor. The Columbus school incorporates sculpture and other art into nearly every corner of its year old building with the hope that it will inspire students in this working-class Hispanic neighborhood to learn. It is one of a growing number of newly built or renovated public schools across the country that look more like cultural centers than the austere, utilitarian houses of learning of the past, displaying museum-worthy pieces commissioned from artists alongside more traditional finger paintings and statues of school mascots. Columbus even drew up a curriculum guide this fall for using this untraditional architecture in class lessons. "Looking at art is not just an aesthetic; it"s a learning resource," said Abie Benitez, principal of the Columbus academy. "We"ve created a framework for everybody to find a connection to the art in the building—and to the building itself." New Haven has emerged at the forefront of a movement to build schools that are aesthetically pleasing as well as functional, and to turn plain brick-and-mortar walls into show-and-tell lessons. Fourteen of the 31 public schools built or renovated here in the past decade have merged art and architecture with education in some fashion. Educators and architects say that these new schools challenge long-accepted notions dating back to the 1950s of school buildings as no-frills projects designed to fulfill safety specifications and to be completed as quickly and cheaply as possible, particularly in fast-growing cities and suburbs. Mr. Roger and others say that thinking began to change as health and environmental concerns over indoor air quality and lighting led to higher standards for school buildings. Newer cost-efficient technology also allowed architects to customize schools in a way not possible before. And now art has become an integral part of many new and existing schools, supported with donations from parents and local government grants. Here in New Haven, the new Columbus school replaced a building from the early 1970s that resembled a concrete bunker and whose sole piece of art—a mural in the cafeteria—was hard to see because of poor lighting. Barry Svigals, the architect in charge of the project, said he envisioned a place that would promote the school"s mission of education through discovery while delighting students. A series of 11 fiberglass panels, which look as if they were made of terra cotta, run along the outside of the building, resembling a children"s puzzle with an array of wind-and water-themed figures, including parachutes, birds and Columbus"s ships. Monica Maldonado, the president of the Columbus parent association, said that more students want to come to school now because they find so many things to look at in the building. Passers-by with no children have also stopped by to ask for tours.

单选题For most of my working life I have been a practicing scientist. I have worked in industrial and academic laboratories—as a laboratory assistant—and as a consultant. I have also taught chemistry from "O" level to the supervision of PhD students. But it is only in recent years that I have begun to look seriously beyond my own personal experience to the role of women in science in a wider context. To my dismay, it seemed that there had been little improvement since I had embarked on my own career. The dice are still so heavily loaded against girls and women choosing a scientific career that I was astonished that so many had succeeded, against all the odds, rather than that there were so few. Many factors deter girls from choosing a scientific career and one of these is undoubtedly the attitudes adopted by parents, teachers, friends and society in general. It was this area which I decided to investigate and my studies so far have indicated that negative attitudes towards women scientists have always existed and still prevail. These attitudes need to be demonstrated and combated because they adversely affect women"s careers, role models for girls and boy"s expectations of women. Science is dominated by men, most of its practitioners are men and it is said to have a masculine image. Society does not expect women to become scientists so those that do know that they are "stepping out of line. " This, in itself, makes them "special" in some way because the men, in a male dominated profession, are not, in any sense, rebels. In an attempt to discover whether women scientists have any other characteristics in common, I have been gathering information about their lives, the way they work, the nature of that work and what they say about themselves. If one includes both past and present women scientists one finds, superficially at least, a great diversity, particularly in their backgrounds, which range from poor, working-class to rich aristocracy. Some are married, with children, while some are unmarried and childless. However, it is evident that most of them developed habits of independent thought at an early age. Often these seem to have been fostered by parents who, in some cases, were subsequently dismayed when their daughters insisted on following their own inclinations and rejected traditional roles. Perhaps the parents inadvertently sowed the seeds of rebellion. Not all of the women scientists had to struggle against adversity as we normally think of it. The privileged ones who could have led idle, comfortable lives, chose not to, but all were quietly confident that what they were doing was right for them.

单选题 America has seen a drop in crime rates that in earlier years would have been universally viewed as impossible. The overall crime rate has plummeted by 45% since peaking in 1991 and by 13% just since 2007—counter intuitively continuing to drop through the recession and sharp spike in unemployment. Since 1991, according to FBI data, the number of violent crimes has fallen 36% nationally and 64% in the nation's largest cities. And in New York and Los Angeles, the nation's two largest cities, it has fallen even further. Property crime has also become increasingly rare. Incredibly, in New York City, car thefts have plunged 94% in the past two decades. How is this possible? In the mid-1990s, few saw this decline coming, and many warned that crime would surge once again as teens of that era grew into young adults. Today, criminologists still differ on what has caused the nationwide turnaround in crime rates and why those dire predictions never came to pass. But crime-fighting technology, better policing, aging societies, growing urban populations and declining usage of hard drugs are widely cited. For many Americans, the drop in crime has resulted not only in a much higher quality of life but in a reduced economic burden as well. Safer cities generally mean stronger urban economies. In the same category of big surprises, teen-pregnancy rates have fallen to their lowest level in more than 30 years, according to the widely respected Guttmacher Institute. They have declined 51% from their 1990 peak, based on the latest available data, and the teenage birthrate is down 43% from that year's level. Today, fewer teens are becoming pregnant and becoming mothers than at any point since reliable data has been collected by the National Center for Health Statistics. This is also true for women in the 20-to-24 age group. To put it mildly, there were very few predictions to this effect a generation ago. In addition, overall birth rates in the U.S. have turned up for the first time since 2007—including for children born to women in a college education—to just shy of 4 million.

单选题Steven Pinker is the very model of a modern intellectual. Since the 1994 publication of his first bestseller, The Language Instinct, he"s been known for his ability to boil down complex ideas into accessible, often-funny, cocktail-party-chatter-worthy sound bites. The Better Angels of Our Nature (the phrase comes from Abraham Lincoln) is a huge book, 696 pages of text plus 74 pages of notes and references. But "it has to be," Pinker writes. First he has to convince his readers violence has gone down in the face of all their incredulity—then he needs to explain how it happened. Pinker"s magic is done with numbers, starting with the hunter-gatherer societies of 10,000 years ago when life was, as philosopher Thomas Hobbes put it, "nasty, brutish, and short." Data shows that back then the likelihood of a man dying at the hands of another was as high as 60 percent in some regions, more than 50 times the same calculation for the United States and Europe in the 20th century—and that includes two world wars. "If the death rate in tribal warfare had prevailed during the 20th century," Pinker says, "there would have been 2 billion deaths from wars and homicide, rather than 100 million." Pinker looks for explanations for these advances within the individual. Human nature consists of a constant pull of good and evil. He identifies five "innerdemons" —sadism, revenge, dominance, violence in pursuit of a practical benefit, violence in pursuit of an ideology—that struggle with four "better angels", self-control, empathy, morality, and reason. Over the years the forces of civilization have increasingly given the good in us the upper hand. Strong centralized governments, international trade, the empowerment of women all help make us kinder, gentler beings, cultures that empower women...are less likely to breed dangerous subcultures of rootless young men. Also important is what Pinker calls "the escalator of reason," in which people reframe conflict as a problem to be solved through brain instead of muscles. Pinker realizes his message could encourage complacency, since people might not feel like working to make the world a better place if they find out that the world is actually pretty good already. But he"s an optimist by temperament, and he thinks that his message will lead not to complacency but to action: "I think it will embolden people to work harder, if they see that the stuff that people do has made a difference." Starry-eyed? Maybe. But the hopefulness is an outgrowth not only of Pinker"s temperament but of his larger worldview. He calls himself a scientist and a humanist who "sees reason and science and knowledge as progressive forces, as the source of the flourishing of individuals". Let us hope his faith in the human race holds up against those devils on our shoulders.

单选题Mr Mitsuyasu Ota, the Mayor of Hirate, in western Japan, made this week"s news columns after imposing a one-day-a-week ban on the use of computer equipment in the town"s municipal offices. The step was taken on the grounds that young staff "mistakenly think they are working" when sitting attentively at their computer screens. At the same time, Mr Ota lamented that "young people are not in the habit of writing by hand any more". One of the favourite arguments brought out by the opposition in technology wars is the notion that a technical short cut is simultaneously a kind of mental impoverishment, and that the man with the pen will think and write more effectively than the man with the Compaq. Leaving aside the question of whether advanced technology makes you think less dynamically, the idea that there should be recognisable stylistic discrepancies between the work of pen-pushers and key-tappers shouldn"t in the least surprise us. Historically, literary styles have always borne a strong relationship to the available technology. The quill pen, most obviously, allowed its owner only a certain number of words between refills, thereby encouraging all those lengthy Gibbonian sentences crammed with subordinate clauses. The fountain pen—which allowed you to write as many words as you wanted—and the manual typewriter created further revolutions. It is not particularly far-fetched, for example, to suggest that the elliptical prose of early-20th-century Modernist masters such as Hemingway derives in part from its having been typed, rather than written down. But what about the computer screen? What effect does that have on the elemental patterns by which the writer downloads the words in his or her head? Without wanting to sound like Mayor Ota, I suspect that to a certain kind of writer it is as much a hindrance as a help. A single glance at the average bookshop will demonstrate that novels are getting longer. There are excellent aesthetic reasons for that, of course, but there is also a technical explanation. Which is to say that computers allow you to write more words and to write them more quickly, without the restraint of having to alter everything by hand and then rewrite. Every so often, as a reviewer, one stumbles with a sinking heart across one of these enormous wordy affairs, which, however assiduous the attentions of its editor, betrays its origin as a screen-aided mental show-off. Perhaps, like the municipal employees of Mayor Ota"s Hirate, we should all try banning computers one day a week.

单选题There aren"t a whole lot of scientific disciplines that haven"t had something to say about climate change over the years—and with good reason. When a problem is global in scale there"s a universe of specialists and subspecialists who have to try hard to fix it. But one field—psychology—has never had much skin in the game. It"s less important to consider how humans feel about the mess we"ve made of our planet, after all, than how we clean it up. That, at least, has always been the thinking. Increasingly, however, psychologists are making the case that the best way to resolve any crisis and prevent it from happening again is to understand the minds of the people who caused it. And that means all six billion of US. The newest issue of the American Psychologist is devoted largely to making that case, with a series of articles by a team of psychologists from around the country exploring the thinking, feelings and other cognitive processes that have allowed us to be so neglectful of our world—and could be harnessed to help us take better care of it. The papers are by and large illuminating, surprising and, well, occasionally absurd—which is what often happens when scientists are feeling their way in a relatively new field and fall back on jargon and other linguistic terms to try to make it make sense. Still, with climate change only growing worse and the U.S. in particular seeming unable or unwilling to do much about it, new perspectives are always welcome and badly needed. One of the first things scientists do in trying to wrestle a big problem to the ground is simplify and clarify it, with a nice, clear equation if possible—and the climate psychologists are no exception. If you want to devise policies to make people more climate conscious, they argue, all you have to remember is I=tpn . More specifically put, that means the impact of any behavioral change will be equal its technical potential to fix the problem, times the behavioral plasticity required to comply with it, times the number of people who actually do comply. "Behavioral science understandably focuses on the p ," writes psychologist Paul Stern of the National Research Council, "though in setting policy priorities, t and n are critical to take into account." Insulating your attic is technically simple and very effective, but it takes a lot of behavioral plasticity before anyone will actually get up and do it. Buying a hybrid car can do a lot of good too—but until the prices come way down and the selection goes way up not a lot of people are going to do it. There"s still time, of course, to reverse—or at least slow—our environmental decline. Psychologists may always play more of a supporting than leading role in making that happen, but it"s a critical role nonetheless.

单选题Oil prices, an economic scourge in decades past, have soared to record levels in recent years. But the fallout often seemed negligible: Americans kept spending; employment kept growing; factories, construction crews and retail stores stayed busy. Now, however, the economy may be starting to sputter as damage from the weak housing market drags down growth. If payrolls drop significantly, will high-price crude oil begin to cause pain in a way that it hasn"t in nearly three decades? Many economists do not think so, maintaining that if the United States entered a recession, the price of oil would quickly drop. "The United States is the single largest oil-consuming nation in the world," said Stephen P. A. Brown, director of energy economics at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. "A slowdown here ought to bring the price of oil down." That view is by no means unanimous. The global economy has been growing rapidly, and oil consumption overseas keeps rising. A few economists say it is possible that even if the American economy weakens, demand abroad will be strong enough to keep oil prices high. "Our relative importance in the global markets is diminishing," said Larry Goldstein, president of the Petroleum Industry Research Foundation in New York. "An American economic slowdown", he said, "won"t have a visible impact on high oil demand and it won"t have a visible impact on high oil prices." If that view proves to be right, the United States could conceivably find itself in a situation reminiscent of the 1970s, with weak economic growth and high-price oil taking a double bite out of consumers" pocketbooks. The situation is murky in part because there is little historical precedent for understanding today"s oil market. Less than a decade ago, oil fell below $11 a barrel. Oil at $50 was a distant prospect, and the prevailing wisdom was that a run-up of that extent would do serious economic damage. But as the global economy boomed, oil blew past $50 late in 2004, then past $60 in mid- 2005. Many Americans complained about the rising price of gasoline, but the economy shrugged off pump prices that would exceed $3 a gallon, and kept growing. On Sept. 20, crude oil for next-month delivery settled at a record price of $83.32 a barrel and has stayed above $80 most days since, ending yesterday at $81.44, up $1.50 from Wednesday. (Adjusted for inflation, the record high for oil was nearly $102 a barrel early in 1980, after the Iranian revolution, but that price level did not last long.) Part of the reason that costly oil has not done too much damage, it seems clear, is that the economy has become less sensitive to energy prices than it was in the 1970s.

单选题Like a lot of carless New Yorkers, I am generally confused by bursts of populist outrage over high gas prices. But I have always assumed that the anger is genuine. But amid the recent mania over prices hitting $4 a gallon, I decided to figure out whether this fury is economically rational. So I took a look at data from the Census Bureau, which conducts a quarterly survey of American spending habits. During these last few years of historically high oil prices, Americans spent about $40 a week, or $2,000 a year, on gas. That"s around 5 percent of our overall spending. It"s less than half of what we spend on restaurants and entertainment. High gas prices must be forcing Americans to cut back in other ways, right? That"s what the economist Lutz Kilian at the University of Michigan wondered. He looked at personal spending habits during periods of high energy prices and discovered that "somewhat surprisingly, there is no significant decline in total expenditures on recreation," which was one place they expected to find frugality. In other words, Americans may protest loudly, but their economic behavior indicates a remarkable indifference to the price of oil. While sustained high gas prices would certainly produce some turmoil, so would potential spikes in countless other globally traded commodities. But there"s a reason populist outcries don"t start around soybean prices or magnesium spikes. Oil is the only volatile commodity that most Americans deal with directly: we are buffered from most other price swings by our relative wealth. Unlike people in poor countries, consumers here don"t generally buy raw commodity foods; we buy our meals processed or prepared. With most goods, the commodity price has even less impact on cost. "When people buy a phone," Kilian says, "they don"t buy the copper that makes the wiring." With gas, though, hurtling prices are unavoidable. Every day, U. S. drivers pay a price determined by forces all over the world that are hard to understand and harder for the United States to control. Even if we invested in better refineries and exploited every possible energy source, from the Keystone pipeline to the Alaskan wilderness, the impact could be minimal. It could eventually lower prices at the pump—but only if nothing else affects them, like OPEC lowering its production to drive prices back up again. The price of oil is, of course, affected by hundreds of interrelated factors. Many analysts I"ve spoken with suggest that oil prices should fall fairly soon. This will be welcome news to the less-fortunate American families who are not impervious to the price at the pump and to anyone who claims to be pinching pennies because of gas. But as unpopular as it may sound, the best possible future for most Americans may involve much higher gas prices. As billions of people, throughout the world, enter the middle class in the coming decades, there will be an enormous increase in the demand for gas. This, along with rising environmental considerations, is likely to send the prices far higher than they are today.

单选题Tinkering again with enforcement of the No Child Left Behind education law, the government plans to let some states fundamentally change how they measure yearly student progress. In an experiment that"s been months in the making, up to 10 states will be allowed to measure not just how students are performing, but how that performance is changing over time. Currently, schools are judged based only on how today"s students compare to last year"s students in math and reading such as fourth-graders in 2005 vs.fourth-graders in 2004. Many state leaders don"t like the current system of comparing two different years of kids because it doesn"t recognize changes in the population or growth by individual students. Frustrated states have been pleading for permission to measure growth by students, which may make it easier for schools to meet their goals and avoid penalties. Other recent changes have dealt with testing, teacher quality and students with disabilities. Yet student progress is the cornerstone of the law. How it is measured has big implications. Schools that receive federal poverty aid but don"t make "adequate yearly progress" for at least two years face mounting penalties, from allowing students to transfer and providing tutoring to poor children to eventual restructuring of the school and its staff. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings said it makes sense to give schools credit for progress that students make. The states that win approval for the new flexibility, however, must do more than show growth. They still will have to get all children up to par in reading and math by 2014, as the law requires, and show consistent gains along the way. The Education Department has not chosen the 10 states that will be part of the experiment. In practical terms, many states won"t qualify because they don"t have the kind of data systems to track individual students across grades. And others may not find the change helpful. To start, states that gain approval to measure student growth will also be required to chart progress the old way, comparing this year"s students with last year"s. The Education Department wants to see that data to help determine whether charting growth is a fair, accurate measure. Patricia Sullivan, director of the independent Center on Education Policy, praised federal leaders for showing flexibility and clearly outlining what states must do to get it. A growth model could benefit not just struggling students but also gifted ones who may be challenged again to show their own yearly progress, beyond the school"s standard benchmark. "This is clearly what states have been asking for," Sullivan said. "It"s so discouraging for teachers when students make tremendous gains but don"t get the credit because they don"t get all the way over the bar."

单选题It is easier to negotiate initial salary requirement because once you are inside, the organizational constraints influence wage increases. One thing, however, is certain: your chances of getting the raise you feel you deserve are less if you don"t at least ask for it. Men tend to ask for more, and they get more, and this holds true with other resources, not just pay increases. Consider Beth"s story: I did not get what I wanted when I did not ask for it. We had cubicle offices and window offices. I sat in the cubicles with several male colleagues. One by one they were moved into window offices, while I remained in the cubicles. Several males who were hired after me also went to offices. One in particular told me he was next in line for an office and that it had been part of his negotiations for the job. I guess they thought me content to stay in the cubicles since I did not voice my opinion either way. It would be nice if we all received automatic pay increases equal to our merit, but "nice" isn"t a quality attributed to most organizations. If you feel you deserve a significant raise in pay, you"ll probably have to ask for it. Performance is your best bargaining chip when you are seeking a raise. You must be able to demonstrate that you deserve a raise. Timing is also a good bargaining chip. If you can give your boss something he or she needs (a new client or a sizable contract, for example) just before merit pay decisions are being made, you are more likely to get the raise you want. Use information as a bargaining chip too. Find out what you are worth on the open market. What will someone else pay for your services? Go into the negotiations prepared to place your chips on the table at the appropriate time and prepared to use communication style to guide the direction of the interaction.

单选题The old saying of never forgetting a pretty face might be untrue as psychologists believe beautiful people are less likely to be recognized. A new study suggests that attractiveness can actually prevent the recognition of faces, unless a pretty face is particularly distinctive. German psychologists think the recognition of pretty faces is distorted by emotions. Scientists at the University of Jena, Germany, discovered that photos of unattractive people were more easily remembered than pretty ones when they showed them to a group of people. Researchers Holger Wiese, Carolin Altmann and Stefan Schweinberger from the university, wrote in their study: "We could show that the test subjects were more likely to remember unattractive faces than attractive ones, when the latter didn"t have any particularly noticeable traits." For the study, which was published in science magazine Neuropsychologia , the psychologists showed photos of faces to test subjects. Half of the faces were considered to be more attractive and the other half as less attractive, but all of them were being thought of as similarly distinctive looking. The test subjects were shown the faces for just a few seconds to memorize them and were shown them again during the test so that they could decide if they recognized them or not. The scientists were surprised by the result. "Until now we assumed that it was generally easier to memorize faces which are being perceived as attractive, just because we prefer looking at beautiful faces," Dr. Wiese said. But the study showed that such a connection cannot be easily sustained. He assumes that remembering pretty faces is distorted by emotional influences, which enhance the sense of recognition at a later time. The researchers" idea is backed up by evidence from EEG-recordings which show the brain"s electric activity, which the scientists used during their experiment. The study also revealed that in the case of attractive faces, considerably more false positive results were detected. In other words, people thought they recognized a face without having seen it before. "We obviously tend to believe that we recognize a face just because we find it attractive." Dr. Wiese said.

单选题In 1981 Kenji Urada, a Japanese factory worker, climbed over a safety fence at a Kawasaki plant to carry out some maintenance work on a robot. In his haste, he failed to switch the robot off properly. Unable to sense him, the robot"s powerful hydraulic arm kept on working and accidentally pushed the engineer into a grinding machine. His death made Urada the first recorded victim to die at the hands of a robot. This gruesome industrial accident would not have happened in a world in which robot behaviour was governed by the Three Laws of Robotics drawn up by Isaac Asimov, a science fiction writer. The laws appeared in I, Robot, a book of short stories published in 1950 that inspired a recent Hollywood film. But decades later the laws, designed to prevent robots from harming people either through action or inaction, remain in the realm of fiction. Indeed, despite the introduction of improved safety mechanisms, robots have claimed many more victims since 1981. With robots now poised to emerge from their industrial cages and to move into homes and workplaces, roboticists are concerned about the safety implications beyond the factory floor. To address these concerns, leading robot experts have come together to try to find ways to prevent robots from harming people. Inspired by the Pugwash Conferences—an international group of scientists, academics and activists founded in 1957 to campaign for the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons—the new group of robo-ethicists met earlier this year in Genoa, Italy, and announced their initial findings in March at the meeting. Should robots that are strong enough or heavy enough to crush people be allowed into homes? Is "system malfunction" a justifiable defence for a robotic fighter plane that violates the Geneva Convention and mistakenly fires on innocent civilians? These questions may seem esoteric but in the next few years they will become increasingly relevant. According to the UN Economic Commission for Europe"s World Robotics Survey, in 2002 the number of domestic and service robots more than tripled, nearly outstripping their industrial counterparts. By the end of 2003 there were more than 600,000 robot vacuum cleaners and lawn mowers. In light of all this, it is crucial that we start to think about safety and ethical guidelines now. Regulating the behaviour of robots is going to become more difficult in the future, since they will increasingly have self learning mechanisms built into them, says Gianmarco Veruggio, a roboticist at the Institute of Intelligent Systems for Automation in Genoa, Italy. As a result, their behaviour will become impossible to predict fully, since they will not be behaving in predefined ways but will learn new behaviour as they go.