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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

单选题Death is a difficult subject for anyone, but Americans want to talk about it less than most. They have a cultural expectation that whatever may be wrong with them, it can be fixed with the right treatment, and if the first doctor does not offer it they may seek a second, third or fourth opinion. Legal action is a constant threat, so even if a patient is very ill and likely to die, doctors and hospitals will still persist with aggressive treatment, paid for by the insurer or, for the elderly, by Medicare. That is one reason why America spends 18% of its GDP on health care, the highest proportion in the world. That does not mean that Americans are getting the world"s best health care. For the past 20 years doctors at the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice have been compiling the "Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care", using Medicare data to compare health-spending patterns in different regions and institutions. They find that average costs per patient during the last two years of life in some regions can be almost twice as high as in others, yet patients in the high-spending areas do not survive any longer or enjoy better health as a result. Ira Byock is the director of palliative medicine at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Centre. His book is a plea for those near the end of their life to be treated more like individuals and less like medical cases on which all available technology must be let loose. With two decades" experience in the field, he makes a good case for sometimes leaving well alone and helping people to die gently if that is what they want. That does not include assisted suicide, which he opposes. But it does include providing enough pain relief to make patients comfortable, co-coordinating their treatment among the different specialists, keeping them informed, having enough staff on hand to see to their needs, making arrangements for them to be cared for at home where possible—and not officiously keeping them alive when there is no hope. But it is not easy to decide when to stop making every effort to save someone"s life and allow them to die gently. The book quotes the case of one HIV-positive young man who was acutely ill with multiple infections. He spent over four months in hospital, much of the time on a ventilator, and had countless tests, scans and other interventions. The total bill came to over $1m. He came close to death many times, but eventually pulled through and has now returned to a normal life. It is an uplifting story, but such an outcome is very rare. Dr Byock"s writing style is not everybody"s cup of tea, but he is surely right to suggest better management of a problem that can only get worse. As life expectancy keeps on rising, so will the proportion of old people in the population. And with 75m American baby-boomers now on the threshold of retirement, there is a limit to what the country can afford to spend to keep them going on and on.

单选题In 2010, Pamela Fink, an employee of a Connecticut energy company, made a new kind of discrimination claim: she charged that she had been fired because she carries genes that predispose her to cancer. Fink quickly became the public face for the cutting edge of civil rights: genetic discrimination. The Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act, which was passed out of concern for just such cases in the wake of huge advances in genetics testing, took effect in late 2009. GINA, as it is known, makes it illegal for employers to fire or refuse to hire workers based on their "genetic information"— including genetic tests and family history of disease. GINA doesn"t just apply to employers: health-insurance companies can be sued for using genetic information to set rates or even just for investigating people"s genes. The numbers of genetic-discrimination complaints will almost certainly increase greatly in coming years, for the reason that, as biological science advances, there is likely to be even more genetic information available about people. Even though this sort of medical information should remain private, employers and insurance companies will have strong financial incentives to get access to it—and to use it to avoid people who are most likely to get sick. When genetic-discrimination claims start showing up in the courts in significant numbers, they are likely to get a sympathetic hearing. There are two major reasons that so many people—even congressional Republicans who are highly skeptical of civil rights laws—like GINA. First, there is the kind of discrimination it is aimed at: penalizing people for strands of DNA and RNA that they inherited from their parents through no fault of their own. In general, our society has decided to protect people for qualities that are " immutable "—that is, something about them that is impossible or, at least, very difficult to change. So we make it illegal to discriminate on the basis of race, national origin, skin color and sex. On the other hand, we generally do not protect people who are not hired because they lack a high school diploma or because they wear a beard. Our response to those people is that if you want the job you should get more education or shave. Genes are a classic immutable characteristic: outside of some complicated medical procedures, we"re pretty much stuck with the genes we were born with. The second major reason genetic-discrimination laws are popular is that this is a kind of bias everyone feels they could be exposed to. None of us has perfect genes—and for the most part, we have no idea what is lurking in our DNA and RNA. Our genes are complex enough that we all have some negative information encoded in there—and none of us wants to lose a job or be denied insurance over it. When juries begin to hear these cases, they are far more likely to identify with the plaintiffs than with the companies that discriminate. That doesn"t mean that there won"t be plenty of companies looking to benefit from genetic information, but if they use it, they may well have to pay.

单选题 After World War II the glorification of an ever-larger GNP formed the basis of a new materialism, which became a sacred obligation for all Japanese governments, businesses and trade unions. Anyone who mentioned the undesirable by-products of rapid economic growth was treated as a heretic. Consequently, everything possible was done to make conditions easy for the manufacturers. Few dared question the wisdom of discharging untreated waste into the nearest water body or untreated smoke into the atmosphere. This silence was maintained by union leaders as well as by most of the country's radicals; except for a few isolated voices, no one protested. An insistence on treatment of the various {{U}}effluents{{/U}} would have necessitated expenditures on treatment equipment that in turn would have given rise to higher operating costs. Obviously, this would have meant higher prices for Japanese goods, and ultimately fewer sales and lower industrial growth and GNP. The pursuit of nothing but economic growth is illustrated by the response of the Japanese government to the American educational mission that visited Japan in 1947. After surveying Japan's educational program, the Americans suggested that the Japanese fill in their curriculum gap by creating departments in chemical and sanitary engineering. Immediately, chemical engineering departments were established in all the country's universities and technical institutions. In contrast, the recommendation to form sanitary engineering departments was more or less ignored, because they could bring no profit. By 1960, only two second-rate universities, Kyoto and Hokkaido, were interested enough to open such departments. The reluctance to divert funds from production to conservation is explanation enough for a certain degree of pollution, but the situation was made worse by the type of technology the Japanese chose to adopt for their industrial expansion. For the most part, they simply copied American industrial methods. This meant that methods originally designed for use in a country that stretched from the Atlantic to the Pacific with lots of air and water to use as sewage receptacles were adopted for an area a fraction of the size. Moreover, the Japanese diet was much more dependent on water as a source of fish and as an input in the irrigation of rice; consequently discharged wastes built up much more rapidly in the food chain.

单选题In 1929 John D. Rockefeller decided it was time to sell shares when even a shoe-shine boy offered him a share tip. During the past week The Economist"s economics editor has been advised by a taxi driver, a plumber and a hairdresser that "you can"t go wrong" investing in housing—the more you own the better. Is this a sign that it is time to get out? At the very least, as house prices around the world climb to ever loftier heights, and more and more people jump on to the buy-to-let ladder, it is time to expose some of the fallacies regularly trotted out by so many self-appointed housing experts. One common error is that house prices must continue to rise because of a limited supply of land. For instance, it is argued that "house prices will always rise in London because lots of people want to live here". But this confuses the level of prices with their rate of change. Home prices are bound to be higher in big cities because of land scarcity, but this does not guarantee that urban house prices will keep rising indefinitely—just look at Tokyo"s huge price-drops since 1990. And, though it is true that a fixed supply of homes may push up house prices if the population is rising, this would imply a steady rise in prices, not the 20% annual jumps of recent years. A second flawed argument is that low interest rates make buying a home cheaper, and so push up demand and prices. Lower interest rates may have allowed some people, who otherwise could not have afforded a mortgage, to buy a home. But many borrowers who think mortgages are cheaper are suffering from money illusion. Interest rates are not very low in real, inflation-adjusted terms. Initial interest payments may seem low in relation to income, but because inflation is also low it will not erode the real burden of debt as swiftly as it once did. So in later years mortgage payments will be much larger in real terms. To argue that low nominal interest rates make buying a home cheaper is like arguing that a car loan paid off over four years is cheaper than one repaid over two years. Fallacy number three is a favourite claim of Alan Greenspan, chairman of America"s Federal Reserve. This is that price bubbles are less likely in housing than in the stock market because higher transaction costs discourage speculation. In fact, several studies have shown that both in theory and in practice bubbles are more likely in housing than in shares. A study by the IMF finds that a sharp rise in house prices is far more likely to be followed by a bust than is a share-price boom.

单选题Convenience food helps companies by creating growth, but what is its effect on people? For people who think cooking was the foundation of civilization, the microwave is the last enemy. The communion of eating together is easily broken by a device that liberates household citizens from waiting for mealtimes. The first great revolution in the history of food is in danger of being undone. The companionship of the campfire, cooking pot and common table, which have helped to bond humans in collaborative living for at least 150,000 years, could be destroyed. Meals have certainly suffered from the rise of convenience food. The only meals regularly taken together in Britain these days are at the weekend, among rich families struggling to retain something of the old symbol of togetherness. Indeed, the day"s first meal has all but disappeared. In the 20th century the leisure British breakfast was undermined by the cornflake; in the 21st breakfast is vanishing altogether, a victim of the quick cup of coffee in Starbucks and the cereal bar. Convenience food has also made people forget how to cook. One of the apparent paradoxes of modern food is that, while the amount of time spent cooking meals has fallen from 60 minutes a day in 1980 to 13 minutes a day in 2002, the number of books and television programmes on cooking has multiplied. But perhaps this isn"t a paradox. Maybe it is because people can"t cook any more, so they need to be told bow to do it. Or maybe it is because people buy books about hobbies-golf, yachting-not about chores. Cooking has ceased to be a chore and has become a hobby. Although everybody lives in the kitchen, its facilities are increasingly for display rather than for use. Mr. Silverstein"s new book, Trading Up , look at mid-range consumer"s willingness to splash out. He says that industrial-style Viking cooktops, with nearly twice the heat output of other ranges, have helped to push the "kitchen as theater" trend in home goods. They cost from $1,000 to $9,000. Some 75% of them are never used. Convenience also has an impact on the healthiness, or otherwise, on food. Of course, there is nothing bad about ready-to-eat food itself. You don"t get much healthier than an apple, and all supermarkets sell a better-for-you range of ready-meals. But there is a limit to the number of apple people want to eat; and these days it is easier for people to eat the kind of food that makes them fat. The three Harvard economists in their paper "Why have Americans become more obese?" point out that, in the past, if people wanted to eat fatty hot food, they had to cook it. That took time and energy—a good chip needs frying twice, once to cook the potato and once to get it crispy—which discouraged consumption of that sort of food. Mass preparation of food took away that constraint. Nobody has to cut and double-cook their own fries these days. Who has the time?

单选题They may not be the richest, but Africans remain the world"s staunchest optimists. An annual survey by Gallup International, a research outfit, shows that, when asked whether this year will be better than last, Africa once again comes out on top. Out of 52,000 people interviewed all over the world, under half believe that things are looking up. But in Africa the proportion is close to 60%—almost twice as much as in Europe. Africans have some reasons to be cheerful. The continent"s economy has been doing fairly well with South Africa, the economic powerhouse, growing steadily over the past few years. Some of Africa"s long-running conflicts, such as the war between the north and south in Sudan and the civil war in Congo, have ended. Africa even has its first elected female head of state, in Liberia. Yet there is no shortage of downers too. Most of Africa remains dirt poor. Crises in places like Cote d"Ivoire, Sierra Leone and Zimbabwe are far from solved. And the democratic credentials of Ethiopia and Uganda, once the darlings of western donors, have taken a bad knock. AIDS killed over 2 million Africans in 2005, and will kill more this year. So is it all just a case of irrational exuberance? Meril James of Gallup argues that there is, in fact, usually very little relation between the survey"s optimism rankings and reality. Africans, this year led by Nigerians, are consistently the most upbeat, whether their lot gets better or not. On the other hand, Greece— hardly the worst place on earth—tops the gloom-and-doom chart, followed closely by Portugal and France. Ms James speculates that religion may have a lot to do with it. Nine out of ten Africans are religious, the highest proportion in the world. But cynics argue that most Africans believe that 2006 will be golden because things have been so bad that it is hard to imagine how they could possibly get worse. This may help explain why places that have suffered recent misfortunes, such as Kosovo and Afghanistan, rank among the top five optimists. Moussaka for thought for those depressed Greeks.