单选题"The world"s environment is surprisingly healthy. Discuss." If that were an examination topic, most students would tear it apart, offering a long list of complaints: from local smog to global climate change, from the felling of forests to the extinction of species. The list would largely be accurate, the concern legitimate. Yet the students who should be given the highest marks would actually be those who agreed with the statement. The surprise is how good things are, not how bad. After all, the world"s population has more than tripled during this century, and world output has risen hugely, so you would expect the earth itself to have been affected. Indeed, if people lived, consumed and produced things in the same way as they did in 1900 (or 1950, or indeed 1980), the world by now would be a pretty disgusting place: smelly, dirty, toxic and dangerous. But they don"t. The reasons why they don"t, and why the environment has not been ruined, have to do with prices, technological innovation, social change and government regulation in response to popular pressure. That is why today"s environmental problems in the poor countries ought, in principle, to be solvable. Raw materials have not run out, and show no sign of doing so. Logically, one day they must: the planet is a finite place. Yet it is also very big, and man is very ingenious. What has happened is that every time a material seems to be running short, the price has risen and, in response, people have looked for new sources of supply, tried to find ways to use less of the material, or looked for a new substitute. For this reason prices for energy and for minerals have fallen in real terms during the century. The same is true for food. Prices fluctuate, in response to harvests, natural disasters and political instability; and when they rise, it takes some time before new sources of supply become available. But they always do, assisted by new farming and crop technology. The long-term trend has been downwards. It is where prices and markets do not operate properly that this benign trend begins to stumble, and the genuine problems arise. Markets cannot always keep the environment healthy. If no one owns the resource concerned, no one has an interest in conserving it or fostering it: fish is the best example of this.

单选题No matter how many times you have seen images of the golden mask of Tutankhamen, come face to face with it in Egypt"s Cairo museum, and you will suck in your breath. It was on Nov 4, 1923, that British archaeologist Howard Carter accidentally found a stone at the base of a tomb in Luxor that eventually led to a sealed doorway. Then, on Nov 23, Carter found a second door and when he stuck his head through it, what he saw was to shock the world. Inside lay a great stone coffin enclosing three chests of gilded wood. A few months later, when the coffins were removed one after another, Carter found a solid block of gold weighing 110 kg. In it was the mummy of the 19-year-old Tutankhamen, covered in gold with that splendid funeral mask. And all this lay buried for more than 3,000 years. Cairo, a dusty city of 20 million people, is a place where time seems to both stand still and rush into utter chaos. It is a place where the ancient and contemporary happily go along on parallel tracks. Take the Great Pyramids of Giza, sitting on the western edge of the city. Even as the setting sun silhouettes these gigantic structures against the great desert expanse, a call for prayer floats over semi-finished apartment blocks filled with the activity of city life. While careful planning for the afterlife may lie buffed underground in Cairo, it is noise and confusion on the streets. Donkey carts battle for space with passers-by and the only operative road rule is "might is right". But it is a city that is full of life—from the small roadside restaurants to the coffee shops. Donkey carts piled high with flat-breads magically find their way in and out the maddening traffic; young women in long skirts and headscarves hold hands with young men in open collar shirts, while conversations revolve around Kuwait"s chances at the soccer World Cup.

单选题Paying $175 for the right to cram into Orlando"s Citrus Bowl Park with 50,000 other people for two days straight might not sound that appealing to some. But throw in nonstop live music on a number of open-air stages and people will turn up in large crowds, even in a state with one of the highest jobless rates in the country. That"s the thinking behind Los Angeles-based entertainment giant Live Nation"s latest endeavor in the music-festival business. Music festivals are a rare bright spot in the struggling music industry. The festival business has grown from almost nothing a few decades ago to roughly $1.36 billion in Britain, one of the world"s largest festival markets. In the U.S., live-music revenues have nearly doubled over the past decade, to $4.6 billion last year, fueled in part by the growth in festivals. That has shifted the music industry"s focus from recorded albums to live performances. After a decade of dwindling sales of recorded music, caused in part by free Internet downloads from music-sharing start-ups like Napster, live entertainment is the industry"s new cash cow—one that can"t be infinitely reproduced. According to trade group IFPI, global sales of recorded music have dropped more than 40% in the past 10 years, to $16 billion in 2010. Ticket sales for live music in Britain, meanwhile, have nearly quadrupled over the same period, to $2.4 billion. In the digital age, people "yearn for actual experiences, like concerts, and they"re willing to pay a premium price for them," says Nick George, a media analyst. The festival boom could mean big changes for the music industry and its customers. Digital media, which lend themselves to endless duplication and piracy, have driven down the value of recorded music over the past decade. But live shows, which are by definition a limited number of one-off events, promise to continue turning profits for years to come. That"s good news not just for big media corporations like Sony and Warner, which have been fishing for ways to redefine their music divisions in the digital age; it could also help boost the incomes of struggling musicians, especially independents who rely on even the smallest concerts to make a living. For music fans, festivals mean more access to live music in bulk and the chance to discover new bands in the flesh rather than through computer screens or on the radio. Festivals haven"t always held this kind of appeal in the music industry. A decade ago, many musicians viewed live performances as at times tedious marketing plugs for their latest albums. Nowadays the opposite is true. Corporate executives are seeing dollar signs too. For media-savvy companies, festivals have become a form of "experiential" media, interactive events through which they can market their brands. Unlike giveaways or ads, enjoyable experiences give brands "long-term engagement with a captive audience," says Bryan Duffy, a marketing executive at New York City consulting firm MKTG Inc.

单选题Priscilla Ouchida"s "energy-efficient" house turned out to be a horrible dream. When she and her engineer husband married a few years ago, they built a $100,000, three-bedroom home in California. Tightly sealed to prevent air leaks, the house was equipped with small double-paned windows and several other energy-saving features. Problems began as soon as the couple moved in, however. Priscilla"s eyes burned. Her throat was constantly dry. She suffered from headaches and could hardly sleep. It was as though she had suddenly developed a strange illness. Experts finally traced the cause of her illness. The level of formaldehyde gas in her kitchen was twice the maximum allowed by federal standards for chemical workers. The source of the gas? Her new kitchen cabinets and wall-to-wall carpeting. The Ouchidas are victims of indoor air pollution, which is not given sufficient attention partly because of the nation"s drive to save energy. The problem itself isn"t new. "The indoor environment was dirty long before energy conservation came along," says Moschandreas, a pollution scientist at Geomet Technologies in Maryland. "Energy conservation has tended to accentuate the situation in some cases." The problem appears to be more troublesome in newly constructed homes rather than old ones. Back in the days when energy was cheap, home builders didn"t worry much about unsealed cracks. Because of such leaks, the air in an average home was replaced by fresh outdoor air about once an hour. As a result, the pollutants generated in most households seldom build up to dangerous levels.

单选题People often think that other people are staring 1 them even when they aren"t, the research 2 by the University of Sydney has found. To be specific, when in doubt, the human brain is more 3 to tell its owner that he"s under the gaze of another person. To tell if they"re under someone"s gaze, people look at the 4 of the other person"s eyes and the direction of their heads. These 5 cues are then sent to the brain 6 there are specific areas that compute this information. However, the brain doesn"t just 7 receive information from the eyes. The study shows that when people have 8 visual cues, such as in dark conditions or when the other person is wearing sunglasses, the brain 9 with what it "knows". The researchers created images of faces and asked people to observe where the faces were looking. "We made it 10 for the observers to see where the eyes were pointed so they would have to 11 on their prior knowledge to judge the faces" direction of gaze," Professor Clifford explains. "It 12 that we"re likely to believe that others are staring at us, especially when we"re 13 ." "There are several 14 to why humans have this bias," Professor Clifford says. "Direct gaze can signal dominance or a threat, and if you perceive something as a threat, you would not want to miss it. So assuming 14 the other person is looking at you may simply be a safer strategy. Also, direct gaze is often a social cue that the other person wants to 15 with us, so it"s a signal for an upcoming interaction." "It"s important that we find out whether it"s 16 or learned—and how this might affect people with certain mental conditions," Professor Clifford said. Research has shown, for example, that people who have autism are 17 able to tell whether someone is looking at them. People 18 social anxiety, on the other hand, have a higher tendency to think that they are under the stare of others. "So if it is a learned behaviour, we could help them practice this task, letting them observe a lot of faces with different eyes and head directions, and 19 them feedback on whether their observations are accurate."

单选题Cultural responses to modernization often manifest themselves in the mass media. For example, Aldous Huxley, in Brave New World, created a fictional world in which he cautioned readers that modern science and technology posed a threat to individual dignity. Charlie Chaplin"s film Modern Times, set in a futuristic manufacturing plant, also told the story of the dehumanizing impact of modernization and machinery. Writers and artists, in their criticisms of the modern world, often point to technology"s ability to alienate people from one another, capitalism"s tendency to foster greed, and government"s inclination to create bureaucracies that oppress rather than help people. Among the major values of the modern period, four typically manifest themselves in the cultural environment, celebrating the individual, believing in rational order, working efficiently, and rejecting tradition. These values of the modern period were originally embodied in the printing press and later in newspapers and magazines. The print media encouraged the vision of individual writers, publishers, and readers who circulated new ideas. Whereas the premodern period was guided by strong beliefs in a natural or divine order, becoming modern meant elevating individual self-expression to a central position. Along with democratic breakthroughs, however, individualism and the Industrial Revolution triggered modern forms of hierarchy, in which certain individuals and groups achieved higher standing in the social order. For example, those who managed commercial enterprises gained more control over the economic ladder, while an intellectual class of modern experts, who mastered specialized realms of knowledge, gained increasing power over the nation"s social, political, and cultural agendas. To be modern also meant to value the capacity of organized, scientific minds to solve problems efficiently. Progressive thinkers maintained that the printing press, the telegraph, and the railroad in combination with a scientific attitude would foster a new type of informed society. At the core of this society, the printed mass media, particularly newspapers, would educate the citizenry, helping to build and maintain an organized social framework. Journalists strove for the premodern ideal through a more fact-based and efficient approach to reporting. They discarded decorative writing and championed a lean look. Modern front-page news de-emphasized description, commentary, and historical context. The lead sentences that reported a presidential press conference began to look similar, whether they were on the front page in Tupelo, Mississippi, or Wahpeton, North Dakota. Just as modern architecture made many American skylines look alike, the front pages of newspapers began to resemble one another. Finally, to be modern meant to throw off the rigid rules of the past, to break with tradition. Modern journalism became captivated by timely and immediate events. As a result, the more standardized forms of front-page journalism, on the one hand, championed facts and current events while efficiently meeting deadlines. But on the other hand, modern newspapers often failed to take a historical perspective or to analyze sufficiently the ideas underlying these events.

单选题 Thanks to the GPS, the apps on your phone have long been able to determine your general location. But what if they could do so with enough precision that a supermarket, say, could tempt you with digital coupons depending on whether you were hovering near the white bread or the bagels? It may sound far-fetched, but there's a good chance the technology is already built into your iPhone or Android device. All it takes for retailers to tap into it are small, inexpensive transmitters called beacons. Here's how it works: using Bluetooth technology, handsets can pinpoint their position to within as little as 2cm by receiving signals from the beacons stores install. Apple's version of the concept is called iBeacon; it's in use at its own stores and is being tested by Macy's, American Eagle, Safeway, the National Football League and Major League Baseball. Companies can then use your location to pelt (连续攻击) you with special offers or simply monitor your movements. But just as with GPS, they won't see you unless you've installed their apps and granted them access. By melding your physical position with facts they've already collected about you from rewards programs, {{U}}brick-and-mortar businesses{{/U}} can finally get the potentially profitable insight into your shopping habits that online merchants now take for granted. The possibilities go beyond coupons. PayPal is readying a beacon that will let consumers pay for goods without swiping a card or removing a phone from their pocket. Doug Thompson of industry site Beekn.net predicts the technology will become an everyday reality by year's end. But don't look for stores or venues to call attention to the devices. "People won't know these beacons are there," he says. "They'll just know their app has suddenly become smarter."

单选题It"s easy to condemn economics as not being a "real" science, and I try not to do things that are too easy. But in recent weeks I"ve really started to wonder. It is fascinating, and frightening, to me that smart economists can disagree about whether what the economy needs right now is more government spending or less. The debate isn"t about how much stimulus, or how much austerity, or the way such stimulus/austerity should be applied, but rather about which one is called for in the first place. How is this possible? It"s like a group of doctors not being able to agree whether a patient"s blood should be thinned or coagulated. What am I supposed to make of that? Roger Backhouse, a historian and philosopher of economics at the U.K."s University of Birmingham, helps me out in his new book, The Puzzle of Modern Economics: Science or Ideology? I"ve been reading it over the past few weeks and at first I thought Backhouse was going to confirm my worst fear: that it is so difficult to employ scientific methods in understanding super-complex large-scale economic phenomena (like the U.S. economy) that ideology is pretty much necessary if you want to come to any useful conclusions about what"s going on or what should be done. Most scientific disciplines don"t have esteemed members regularly going after one another in the op-ed pages. Economics, in an important way, feels different. But the more I read Backhouse"s book, the more I understood that it"s important to distinguish economics from economics as it is typically practiced. Backhouse shows how the current mathematics-heavy top-down approach to economics is not the only one. He traces the origin of the approach—which necessarily assumes that people are rational agents trying to optimize their resources to the 1930s, but points out that it took some 30 years to really catch on. Before that, the field was rooted in empirical work. Theories tended to be tentative and not all-encompassing. Economists would gather data, and insight from other fields about how people behave (like psychology), in an attempt to come up with explanations about how the world works. The current fashion, of course, is to come up with theories about how the world is supposed to work. The obvious problem: people aren"t always rational. They are, in fact, influenced by things like advertising and a sense of fairness. As a result, math-heavy top- down models can prove disastrously wrong. After all, the economy is as much a product of sociology and policy as it is pure-form economics. Yet we"d not expect a sociologist or a political scientist to be able to write a computer model to accurately capture system-wide decision-making. The conclusion I"ve come to: while economists may have an important perspective on whether it"s time for stimulus or austerity, maybe we should stop looking to them as if they are people who are in the ultimate position to know.

单选题Studies have found that roughly 40 percent of students planning engineering and science majors end up switching to other subjects or failing to get any degree. That increases to as much as 60 percent when pre-medical students, who typically have the strongest SAT scores and high school science preparation, are included, according to new data from the University of California at Los Angeles. That is twice the combined attrition rate of all other majors. For educators, the big question is how to keep the momentum being built in the lower grades from dissipating once the students get to college. "We"re losing an alarming proportion of our nation"s science talent once the students get to college," says Mitchell J. Chang, an education professor at U.C.L.A. who has studied the matter. "It"s not just a K-12 preparation issue." Professor Chang says that rather than losing mainly students from disadvantaged backgrounds or with poor records, the attrition rate can be higher at the most selective schools, where he believes the competition overwhelms even well-qualified students. The bulk of attrition comes in engineering and among pre-med majors, who typically leave STEM fields (fields of science, technology, engineering and math) if their hopes for medical school fade. There is no doubt that the main majors are difficult and growing more complex. Some students still lack math preparation or aren"t willing to work hard enough. Other barriers are the tough freshman classes, typically followed by two years of fairly abstract courses leading to a senior research or design project. In September, the Association of American Universities, which represents 61 of the largest research institutions, announced a five-year initiative to encourage faculty members in the STEM fields to use more interactive teaching techniques. The latest research also suggests that there could be more subtle problems at work, like the proliferation of grade inflation in the humanities and social sciences, which provides another incentive for students to leave STEM majors. It is no surprise that grades are lower in math and science, where the answers are clear-cut and there are no bonus points for talented answers. Professors also say they are strict because science and engineering courses build on one another, and a student who fails to absorb the key lessons in one class will have to struggle in the next. No one doubts that students need a strong theoretical foundation. But what frustrates education experts is how long it has taken for most schools to make changes. Notre Dame"s engineering dean, Peter Kilpatrick, will be the first to concede that sophomore and junior years, which focus mainly on theory, remain a "weak link" in technical education. He says his engineering school has gradually improved its retention rate over the past decade by creating design projects for freshmen and breaking "a deadly lecture" for 400 students into groups of 80. Only 50 to 55 percent of the school"s students stayed through graduation 10 years ago. But that figure now tops 75 percent, and efforts to create more labs in the middle years could help raise it further.

单选题Will the European Union make it? The question would have sounded strange not long ago. Now even the project"s greatest cheerleaders talk of a continent facing a "Bermuda triangle" of debt, population decline and lower growth. As well as those chronic problems, the EU faces an acute crisis in its economic core, the 16 countries that use the single currency. Markets have lost faith that the euro zone"s economies, weaker or stronger, will one day converge thanks to the discipline of sharing a single currency, which denies uncompetitive members the quick fix of devaluation. Yet the debate about how to save Europe"s single currency from disintegration is stuck. It is stuck because the euro zone"s dominant powers, France and Germany, agree on the need for greater harmonization within the euro zone, but disagree about what to harmonize. Germany thinks the euro must be saved by stricter rules on borrowing, spending and competitiveness, backed by quasi-automatic sanctions for governments that do not obey. These might include threats to freeze EU funds for poorer regions and EU mega-projects and even the suspension of a country"s voting rights in EU ministerial councils. It insists that economic co-ordination should involve all 27 members of the EU club, among whom there is a small majority for free-market liberalism and economic rigour; in the inner core alone, Germany fears, a small majority favour French interference. A "southern" camp headed by French wants something different: "European economic government" within an inner core of euro-zone members. Translated, that means politicians intervening in monetary policy and a system of redistribution from richer to poorer members, via cheaper borrowing for governments through common Eurobonds or complete fiscal transfers. Finally, figures close to the France government have murmured, euro-zone members should agree to some fiscal and social harmonization: e.g., curbing competition in corporate-tax rates or labour costs. It is too soon to write off the EU. It remains the world"s largest trading block. At its best, the European project is remarkably liberal, built around a single market of 27 rich and poor countries, its internal borders are far more open to goods, capital and labour than any comparable trading area. It is an ambitious attempt to blunt the sharpest edges of globalization, and make capitalism benign.

单选题For the typical American, the past decade has been economically brutal, the first time since the 1930s, according to some calculations, that inflation-adjusted incomes declined. While there are many causes, from declining unionization to the changing mix of needed skills, globalization has had the greatest impact. The phenomenon that free traders like me adore has created a nation of winners (think of those low-priced imported goods) but also many losers. Nowhere have these pressures been more intense than in the manufacturing sector. A typical General Motors worker costs the company about $56 per hour, which includes benefits. In Mexico, a worker costs the company $7 per hour, and in India, $1 per hour. Pressed by high unemployment and eager to keep jobs in this country, the United Auto Workers agreed that companies could cut their costs by hiring some workers at $14 an hour, with lower benefits. In these troubled times, any jobs are surely welcome. But we need to reverse the decline in incomes, and this requires a more thoughtful approach than the pervasive, politically attractive happy talk sentimentally centered on restoring lost manufacturing jobs. So let"s start by acknowledging that just as it occurred decades ago with agriculture, the declining role in our economy of manufacturing, which over the last half-century is down from 32 percent of the work force to 9 percent, will continue. Let"s also recognize that retreating into protectionism would turn a win-lose into a lose-lose. And even if organized labor could force wage rates back up, that would hardly help domestic manufacturing compete against lower-cost imports. Instead, we should follow the example of successful high-wage exporters in concentrating on products where we have an advantage, as Germany has done with products like sophisticated machine tools. While America still leads in sectors like defense and aviation, our greatest strength, and a source of high-paying jobs, lies in service industries with high intellectual content, like education, entertainment, digital media, and yes, even financial services. Facebook, Google and Microsoft are all American creations, as are the global credit card companies American Express, Visa and MasterCard. Achieving higher wages also requires a greater commitment to education. Following the German model of greater emphasis on engineering and technical training would also be advantageous. And there is the tricky question of what role government should play. While countries like China have put large resources behind industries they want to nurture, we should resist the temptation to plunge deeply into industrial policy. Particularly in its current dysfunctional condition, Washington is ill-equipped to pick winners and should concentrate its capital on infrastructure and other public investments that the private sector won"t make. To assist the private sector, particularly young companies, which are the biggest source of new hiring, tax incentives could be used to foster the creation of well-paying jobs. With global competition and its pressure on American wages intensifying, American workers deserve a more focused approach from Washington.

单选题The Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum recently set off a debate when he attacked America"s colleges as "indoctrination mills" from which Americans should keep their distance. Calling President Obama a "snob" for urging all Americans to go to college, he joined a long tradition that runs from Andrew Carnegie, who more than a century ago described colleges as places that prepare students for "life upon another planet," to Newt Gingrich, who has claimed that alumni donations are often used "to subsidize bizarre and destructive Visions of reality." Mr. Santorum"s remarks have been widely, and justly, rebutted. Yet defenders of college should do more than respond to its critics with contempt. We should seize the opportunity for introspection. Why does the anti-college mantra still touch a nerve among so many Americans? Consider the fact that SAT scores (a big factor in college admissions) correlate closely with family wealth. The total average SAT score of students from families earning more than $100,000 per year is more than 100 points higher than for students in the income range of $50,000 to $60,000. Or consider that a mere 3 percent of students in the top 150 colleges come from families in the bottom income quartile of American society. Only a very dogmatic Social Darwinist would conclude from these facts that intelligence closely tracks how much money one"s parents make. A better explanation is that students from affluent families have many advantages—test-prep tutors, high schools with good college counseling, parents with college savvy and so on. Yet once the beneficiaries arrive at college, what do they learn about themselves? It"s a good bet that the dean or president will greet them with congratulations for being the best and brightest ever to walk through the gates. A few years ago, the critic and essayist William Deresiewicz, who went to Columbia and taught at Yale, wrote that his Ivy education taught him to believe that those who didn"t attend "an Ivy League or equivalent school" were "beneath" him. Our oldest and most prestigious colleges are losing touch with the spirit in which they were founded. To the stringent Protestants who founded Harvard, Yale and Princeton, the mark of salvation was not high self-esteem but humbling awareness of one"s lowliness in the eyes of God. With such awareness came the recognition that those whom God favors are granted grace not for any worthiness of their own, but by God"s unmerited mercy—as a gift to be converted into working and living on behalf of others. That lesson should always be part of the curriculum. Benjamin Franklin, who founded the University of Pennsylvania, once defined true education as "an Inclination join"d with an Ability to serve Mankind, one"s Country, Friends, and Family; which Ability... should indeed be the great Aim and End of all Learning." We would be well served to keep this public-spirited conception of learning squarely in mind. Perhaps if our leading colleges encouraged more humility and less hubris, college-bashing would go out of style and we could get on with the urgent business of providing the best education for as many Americans as possible.

单选题Facebook has been 1 with fire and has got its fingers burned, again. On November 29th America"s Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced that it had reached a 2 settlement with the giant social network over 3 that it had misled people about its use of their personal data. The details of the settlement make clear that Facebook, which 4 over 800m users, betrayed its users" trust. It is also notable because it appears to be part of a broader 5 by the FTC to craft a new privacy framework to deal with the rapid 6 of social networks in America. The regulator"s findings come at a 7 moment for Facebook, which is said to be preparing for an initial public offering next year that could value it at around $100 billion. To 8 the way for its listing, the firm first needs to resolve its privacy 9 with regulators in America and Europe, 10 its willingness to negotiate the settlement 11 this week. Announcing the agreement, the FTC said it had found a number of cases where Facebook had made claims that were "unfair and deceptive, and 12 federal law". For instance, it 13 personally identifiable information to advertisers, and it failed to keep a promise to make photos and videos on deleted accounts 14 . The settlement does not 15 an admission by Facebook that it has broken the law, but it deeply 16 the company nonetheless. In a blog post published the same day, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook"s boss, tried to 17 the impact of the deal. First he claimed that "a small number of high-profile mistakes" were 18 the social network"s "good history" on privacy. The FTC is not relying on Facebook to police itself. Among other things, the company will now have to seek consumers" approval before it changes the way it shares their data. And it has agreed to an independent privacy audit every two years for the next 20 years. There is a clear pattern here. In separate cases over the past couple of years the FTC has insisted that Twitter and Google accept regular 19 audits, too, after each firm was accused of violating its customers" privacy. The intent seems to be to create a regulatory regime that is tighter than the status quo, 20 one that still gives social networks plenty of room to innovate.

单选题The clean-energy business is turning into the next big investment boom, in which risks are lightly ignored. Until recently, recalls Charlie Gay, a 30-year veteran of the solar-power business, venture capitalists were far too busy catering to captains of the information-technology industry to waste time on "hippy-dippy tree-huggers" like himself. But now the tree-huggers are in the ascendant and the IT barons are busy investing in clean-energy technology. Investors are failing over themselves to finance start-ups in clean technology, especially in energy. Venture Business Research reckons that investment in the field by venture capitalists and private-equity firms has quadrupled in the past two years, from some $500m in 2004 to almost $2 billion so far this year. The share of venture capital going into clean energy is rising rapidly. Clean-energy fever is being fuelled by three things: high oil prices, fears over energy security and a growing concern about global warming. The provision of energy, the industry"s cheerleaders say, will change radically over the coming decades. Polluting coal and gas-fired power stations will give way to cleaner alternatives such as solar and wind; fuels derived from plants and waste will replace petrol and diesel; and small, local forms of electricity generation will replace big power stations feeding far-flung grids. Eventually, it is hoped, fuel cells running on hydrogen will take the place of the internal combustion engine which is available everywhere. It is a bold vision, but if it happens very slowly, or only to a limited extent, boosters argue that it will still prompt tremendous growth for firms in the business. Analysts confidently predict the clean-energy business will grow by 20%～30% a year for a decade. Jefferies, an investment bank that organized a recent conference on the industry in London, asked participants how soon solar power would become competitive with old-fashioned generation technologies: in 2010, 2015 or 2020. About three-quarters of those present, one visitor happily observed, were "cheque-writers". This "megatrend", the keynote speaker advocated, "may be the biggest job and wealth-creation opportunity of the 21st century." Such exaggeration might remind people of dotcom bubble. But clean-energy advocates insist growth is sustainable because of the likes of Mr. Schwarzenegger. The Governor is a hero in green circles because of his enthusiasm for environmental regulation. He easily won reelection partly because he seized on global warming as a concern and signed into law—America"s first wide-ranging scheme to cap green-house-gas emissions.

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

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

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

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

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

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