单选题In our contemporary culture, the prospect of communicating with—or even looking at—a stranger is virtually unbearable. Everyone around us seems to agree by the way they cling to their phones, even without a 1 on a subway. It"s a sad reality—our desire to avoid interacting with other human beings—because there"s 2 to be gained from talking to the stranger standing by you. But you wouldn"t know it, 3 into your phone. This universal protection sends the 4 : "Please don"t approach me." What is it that makes us feel we need to hide 5 our screens? One answer is fear, according to Jon Wortmann, an executive mental coach. We fear rejection, or that our innocent social advances will be 6 as "weird." We fear we"ll be 7 . We fear we"ll be disruptive. Strangers are inherently 8 to us, so we are more likely to feel 9 when communicating with them compared with our friends and acquaintances. To avoid this uneasiness, we 10 to our phones." Phones become our security blanket," Wortmann says. "They are our happy glasses that protect us from what we perceive is going to be more 11 " But once we rip off the band-aid, tuck our smartphones in our pockets and look up, it doesn"t 12 so bad. In one 2011 experiment, behavioral scientists Nicholas Epley and Juliana Schroeder asked commuters to do the unthinkable: Start a 13 . They had Chicago train commuters talk to their fellow 14 "When Dr. Epley and Ms. Schroeder asked other people in the same train station to 15 how they would feel after talking to a stranger, the commuters thought their 16 would be more pleasant if they sat on their own," The New York Times summarizes. Though the participants didn"t expect a positive experience, after they 17 with the experiment, " not a single person reported having been embarrassed." 18 , these commuters were reportedly more enjoyable compared with those without communication, which makes absolute sense, 19 human beings thrive off of social connections. It"s that 20 : Talking to strangers can make you feel connected.

单选题Germany's economic success presents something of an educational puzzle. On the one hand, its schools turn out a workforce capable of producing the goods that have made its companies the export champions of the world. On the other hand, the academic achievements of its school children, measured in international tests, look only moderate. The reading abilities of German 15-year-old, according to the PISA studies published by the OECD, are below the average for rich countries. In a world where brainpower matters more and more, how does German business thrive? The answer is that a combination of schooling and apprenticeship has proved a reliable supplier and shaper of the sort of labor German businesses need to make goods of high quality, even as similar jobs have disappeared in other rich economies. At the age of 10 or 11 about two-fifths of children are selected to go to a Gymnasium. A lot of these go eventually to universities. Most who do not, and many of those at least academic schools, go ultimately into specialized training for one of around 350 trades, from gardening to glass-blowing. Students divide their time between classrooms and the factory floor, acquiring a lot of knowledge on the job. According to many company bosses, this makes them both expert and flexible. Because German jobs are fairly secure, many employees invest time in learning new skills. Companies invest in teaching them, too—for example, to use computers to design parts-because their workers are not like to quit. Moreover, basic education seems to be getting better. The first PISA study, published in 2001, in which German children did poorly, caused much national soul-searching. Germany's position in the OECD rankings has improved a great deal in the past few years. Even so, the system has flaws. Some worry, for example, that the stronger general education is needed to equip young Germans to change trades should demand for their specific expertise dry up. A bigger concern is that early selection fails children form poor and immigrant families, who are likeliest to attend the least academic schools and to miss out on apprenticeships. Partly for this reason, there is a large group of students at the bottom of the rankings—which explains why the German average is still below standard. Some think that this may eventually cost the economy. Ludger Wossmann, of the Ifo Institute at Munich University, reckons that the best long-run predictor of a country's economic growth rate is the performance of its children in comparative tests in science, math and so forth. Germany's scores, he points out, do not predict well.

单选题At work, as in life, attractive women get a lot of the breaks. Studies have shown that they are more likely to be promoted than their plain-Jane colleagues. Because people tend to project positive traits onto them, such as sensitivity and poise, they may also be at an advantage in job interviews. The only downside to hotness is having to fend off ghastly male colleagues; or so many people think. But research by two Israelis suggests otherwise. Bradley Ruffle at Ben-Gurion University and Ze"ev Shtudiner at Ariel University Centre looked at what happens when job hunters include photos with their curricula vitae , as is the norm in much of Europe and Asia. The pair sent fictional applications to over 2,500 real-life vacancies. For each job, they sent two very similar résumés, one with a photo, one without. Subjects had previously been graded for their attractiveness. For men, the results were as expected. Hunks were more likely to be called for an interview if they included a photo. Ugly men were better off not including one. However, for women this was reversed. Attractive females were less likely to be offered an interview if they included a mugshot. When applying directly to a company (rather than through an agency) an attractive woman would need to send out 11 CVs on average before getting an interview; an equally qualified plain one just seven. At first, Mr. Ruffle considered what he calls the "dumb-blonde hypothesis" that people assume beautiful women to be stupid. However, the photos had also been rated on how intelligent people thought each subject looked; there was no correlation between perceived intellect and beauty. So the cause of the discrimination must lie elsewhere. Human resources departments tend to be staffed mostly by women. Indeed, in the Israeli study, 93% of those tasked with selecting whom to invite for an interview were female. The researchers" unavoidable and unpalatable conclusion is that old-fashioned jealousy led the women to discriminate against pretty candidates. So should attractive women simply attach photos that make them look dowdy? No. Better, says Mr. Ruffle, to discourage the practice of including a photo altogether. Companies might even consider the anonymous model used in the Belgian public sector, where CVs do not even include the candidate"s name.

单选题Given journalists" penchant for sticking the suffix "gate" onto anything they think smells of conspiracy, a public-relations consultant might have suggested a different name. But ResearchGate, a small firm based in Berlin, is immune to such trivia. It is ambitious, too—aiming to do for the academic world what Mark Zuckerberg did for the world in general, by creating a social network for scientists. And it is successful. About 1.4 million researchers have signed up already, and that number is growing by 50,000 a month. Non-scientists might be surprised that such a network is needed. After all, the internet was originally created mainly by academics for academics and Mr. Zuckerberg"s invention, Facebook, got its start on college campuses. But though the internet has speeded things up, it has not fundamentally changed how researchers are connected. Academic communities are still pretty fragmented, frequently making it hard for scientists to find others doing similar research. And results often are not shared across disciplines. To make things more efficient and interdisciplinary, ResearchGate wants to help the academic world to grow more connective tissue, as Ijad Madisch, one of the firm"s founders, puts it. As on Facebook, users create a profile page with biographical information, list their interests and research skills, and join groups. They can see what others with similar interests are up to and post comments. They can also upload their papers and create invitation-only workgroups. At the moment, most of those users are in their 20s. Their favourite activity is to ask each other questions about practical research problems, from DNA-sequencing techniques to statistical tricks. They are also busy reading each other"s papers: more than 10 million have been uploaded. The service certainly saves these young researchers trial and error, and therefore time and money. They will probably also like a new feature ResearchGate is planning to introduce in April: a feedback system which lets users rate each other"s contributions. This would allow them to build a reputation other than by publishing papers. Scientists whose reputations are established may be more hesitant, though, and not just because they are set in their ways. Science is not only about collaboration but also about competition. This limits what people are willing to share. But Dr. Madisch is optimistic. Those who have grown up with Facebook, he says, know that sharing will improve their research. And their older colleagues will eventually come around—or retire.

单选题 The word science is heard so often in modern times that almost everybody has some notion of its meaning. On the other hand, its definition is difficult for many people. The meaning of the term is confused, but everyone should understand its meaning and objectives. Just to make the explanation as simple as possible, suppose science is defined as classified knowledge (facts) . Even in the true sciences distinguishing fact from fiction is not always easy. For this reason great care should be taken to distinguish between beliefs and truths. There is no danger as long as a clear difference is made between temporary and proved explanations. For example, hypotheses (假设) and theories are attempts to explain natural phenomena. From these positions the scientist continues to experiment and observe until they are proved or discredited (使不相信). The exacts status of any explanation should be clearly labeled to avoid confusion. The objectives of science are primarily the discovery and the subsequent understanding of the unknown. Man cannot be satisfied with recognizing that secrets exist in nature or that questions are unanswerable; he must solve them. Toward that end specialists in the field of biology and related fields of interest are directing much of their time and energy. Actually, two basic approaches lead to the discovery of new information. One, aimed at satisfying curiosity, is referred to as pure science. The other is aimed at using knowledge for specific purpose—for instance, improving health, raising standards of living, or creating new consumer products. In this case knowledge is put to economic use. Such an approach is referred to as applied science. Sometimes practical-minded people miss the point of pure science in thinking only of its immediate application for economic rewards. Chemists responsible for many of the discoveries could hardly have anticipated that their findings would one day result in applications of such a practical nature as those directly related to life and death. The discovery of one bit of information opens the door to the discovery of another. Some discoveries seem so simple that one is amazed they were not made years ago ; however, one should remember that the construction of the microscope had to precede the discovery of the cell. The host of scientists dedicating their lives to pure science are not apologetic (抱歉) about ignoring the practical side of their discoveries; they know from experience that most knowledge is eventually applied.

单选题As any human being knows, many factors govern whether people are happy or unhappy. External circumstances are important: employed people are happier than unemployed ones and better-off people than poor ones. Age has a role, too . But personality is the single biggest determinant: extroverts are happier than introverts, and confident people happier than anxious ones. That personality, along with intelligence, is at least partly heritable is becoming increasingly clear; so, presumably, the tendency to be happy or miserable is, to some extent, passed on through DNA. To try to establish just what that extent is, a group of scientists examined over 1,000 pairs of twins from a huge study on the health of American adolescents. They conclude that about a third of the variation in people"s happiness is heritable. But while twin studies are useful for establishing the extent to which a characteristic is heritable, they do not finger the particular genes at work. One of the researchers, Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, of University College, London, and the London School of Economics, has tried to do just that, by picking a popular suspect—the gene that encodes the serotonin-transporter protein, and examining how variants of that gene affect levels of happiness. Serotonin is involved in mood regulation. Serotonin transporters are crucial to this job. The serotonin-transporter gene comes in two functional variants—long and short. People have two versions (known as alleles). The adolescents in Dr. De Neve"s study were asked to grade themselves from very satisfied to very dissatisfied. Dr. De Neve found that those with one long allele were 8% more likely than those with none to describe themselves as very satisfied; those with two long alleles were 17% more likely. Which is interesting. Where the story could become controversial is when the ethnic origins of the volunteers are taken into account. All were Americans, but they were asked to classify themselves by race as well. On average, the Asian Americans in the sample had 0.69 long genes, the black Americans had 1.47 and the white Americans had 1.12. There is growing interest in the study of happiness, not just among geneticists but also among economists and policymakers dissatisfied with current ways of measuring humanity"s achievements. Future work in this field will be read avidly in those circles.

单选题In a sweeping change to how most of its 1,800 employees are paid, the Union Square Hospitality Group will eliminate tipping at Union Square Care and its 12 other restaurants by the end of next year, the company"s chief executive, Danny Meyer, said on Wednesday. The move will affect New York City businesses. The first will be the Modem, inside the Museum of Modem Art, starting next month. The others will gradually follow. A small number of restaurants around the country have reduced or eliminated tipping in the last several years. Some put a surcharge on the bill, allowing the restaurants to set the pay for all their employees. Others, including Bruno Pizza, a new restaurant in the East Village, factor the cost of an hourly wage for servers into their menu prices. Union Square Hospitality Group will do the latter. The Modem will be the pilot restaurant, Mr. Meyer said, because its chef, Abram Bissell, has been agitating for higher pay to attract skilled cooks. The average hourly wage for kitchen employees at the restaurant is expected to rise to $15.25 from $11.75. Mr. Meyer said that restaurants such as his needed to stay competitive as the state moved to a $15 minimum wage for fast-food workers. If cooks" wages do not keep pace with the cost of living, he said, "it"s not going to be sustainable to attract the culinary talent that the city needs to keep its edge." Mr. Meyer said he hoped to be able to raise pay for junior dining room managers and for cooks, dishwashers and other kitchen workers. The wage gap is one of several issues cited by restaurateurs who have deleted the tip line from checks. Some believe it is unfair for servers" pay to be affected by factors that have nothing to do with performance. A rash of class-action lawsuits over tipping irregularities, many of which have been settled for millions of dollars, is a mounting worry. Scott Rosenberg, an owner of Sushi Yasuda in Manhattan, said in an interview in 2013 that he had eliminated tipping so his restaurant could more closely follow the customs of Japan, where tipping is rare. He said he also hoped his customers would enjoy leaving the table without having to solve a math problem. While Drew Nieporent, who owns nine restaurants in New York City and one in London, said he doubted the average diner would accept an increase in prices. "Tipping is a way of life in this country," he said. "It may not be the perfect system, but it"s our system. It"s an American system."

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单选题 Could the bad old days of economic decline be about to return? Since OPEC agreed to supply-cuts in March, the price of crude oil has jumped to almost $26 a barrel, up from less than $10 last December. This near-tripling of oil prices calls up scary memories of the 1973 oil shock, when prices quadrupled, and 1979-1980, when they 'also almost tripled. Both previous shocks resulted in double-digit inflation and global economic decline. So where are the headlines warning of gloom and doom this time? The oil price was given another push up this week when Iraq suspended oil exports. Strengthening economic growth, at the same time as winter grips the northern hemisphere, could push the price higher still in the short term. Yet there are good reasons to expect the economic consequences now to be less severe than in the 1970s. In most countries the cost of crude oil now accounts for a smaller share of the price of petrol than it did in the 1970s. In Europe, taxes account for up to four-fifths of the retail price, so even quite big changes in the price of crude have a more muted effect on pump prices than in the past. Rich economies are also less dependent on oil than they were, and so less sensitive to swings in the oil price. Energy conservation, a shift to other fuels and a decline in the importance of heavy, energyintensive industries have reduced oil consumption. Software, consuhancy and mobile telephones use far less oil than steel or car production. For each dollar of GDP (inconstant prices) rich economies now use nearly 50% less oil than in 1973. The OECD estimates in its latest Economic Outlook that, if oil prices averaged $22 a barrel for a full year, compared with $13 in 1998, this would increase the oil import bill in rich economies by only 0.25-0.5% of GDP. That is less than one-quarter of the income loss in 1974 or 1980. On the other hand, oil-importing emerging economies—to which heavy industry has shifted—have become more energy-intensive, and so could be more seriously squeezed. One more reason not to lose sleep over the rise in oil prices is that, unlike the rises in the 1970s, it has not occurred against the background of general commodity-price inflation and global excess demand. A sizable portion of the world is only just emerging from economic decline. The Economist's commodity price index is broadly unchanging from a year ago. In 1973 commodity prices jumped by 70%, and in 1979 by almost 30%.

单选题If the trade unionist Jimmy Hoffa were alive today, he would probably represent civil servant. When Hoffa's Teamsters were in their prime in 1960, only one in ten American government workers belonged to a union; now 36% do. In 2009 the number of unionists in America's public sector passed that of their fellow members in the private sector. In Britain, more than half of public- sector workers but only about 15% of private- sector ones are unionized. There are three reasons for the public- sector unions' thriving. First, they can shut things down without suffering much in the way of consequences. Second, they are mostly bright and well-educated. A quarter of America's public-sector workers have a university degree. Third, they now dominate left-of- centre politics. Some of their ties go back a long way. Britain's Labor Party, as its name implies, has long been associated with trade unionism. Its current leader, Ed Miliband, owes his position to votes from public-sector unions. At the state level their influence can be even more fearsome. Mark Baldassare of the Public Policy Institute of California points out that much of the state's budget is patrolled by unions. The teachers' unions keep an eye on schools, the CCPOA on prisons and a variety of labor groups on health care. In many rich countries average wages in the state sector are higher than in the private one. But the real gains come in benefits and work practices. Politicians have repeatedly "backloaded" public-sector pay deals, keeping the pay increases modest but adding to holidays and especially pensions that are already generous. Reform has been vigorously opposed, perhaps most egregiously in education, where charter schools, academies and merit pay all faced drawn-out battles. Even though there is plenty of evidence that the quality of the teachers is the most important variable, teachers' unions have fought against getting rid of bad ones and promoting good ones. As the cost to everyone else has become clearer, politicians have begun to clamp down. In Wisconsin the unions have rallied thousands of supporters against Scott Walker, the hardline Republican governor. But many within the public sector suffer under the current system, too. John Donahue at Harvard's Kennedy School points out that the norms of culture in Western civil services suit those who want to stay put but is bad for high achievers. The only American public-sector workers who earn well above $250,000 a year are university sports coaches and the president of the United States. Bankers' fat pay packets have attracted much criticism, but a public-sector system that does not reward high achievers may be a much bigger problem for America.

单选题The standardized educational or psychological tests, which are widely used to aid in selecting, assigning or promoting students, employees and military personnel, have been the target of recent attacks in books, magazines, the daily press, and even in Congress. The target is wrong, for, in attacking the tests, critics divert attention from the fault that lies with ill-informed or incompetent users. The tests themselves are merely tools. Whether the results will be valuable, meaningless, or even misleading depends partly upon the tool itself but largely upon the user. All informed predictions of future performance are based upon some knowledge of relevant past performance. How well the predictions will be validated by hater performance depends upon the amount, reliability and appropriateness of the information used and on the skill and wisdom with which it is interpreted. Anyone who keeps careful score knows that the information available is always incomplete and that the predictions are always subject to error. Standardized tests should be considered in this context: they provide a quick, objective method of getting some kind of information about what a person has learned, the skills he has developed, or the kind of person he is. The information so obtained has, qualitatively, the same advantages and shortcomings as other kinds of information. Whether to use tests, other kinds of information, or both in a particular situation depends, therefore, upon the empirical evidence concerning comparative validity and upon such factors as cost and availability. In general, the tests work most effectively when the traits or qualities to be measured can be most precisely defined (for example, ability to do well in a particular course of training program) and least effectively when what is to be measured or predicted cannot be well defined, for example, personality or creativity. Properly used, they provide a rapid means of getting comparable information about many people. Sometimes they identify students whose high potential has not been previously recognized.

单选题A deal is a deal-except, apparently, when Entergy is involved. The company, a major energy supplier in New England, provoked justified outrage in Vermont last week when it announced it was reneging on a longstanding commitment to abide by the strict nuclear regulations. Instead, the company has done precisely what it had long promised it would not challenge the constitutionality of Vermont's rules in the federal court, as part of a desperate effort to keep its Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant running. It's a stunning move. The conflict has been surfacing since 2002, when the corporation bought Vermont's only nuclear power plant, an aging reactor in Vernon. As a condition of receiving state approval for the sale, the company agreed to seek permission from state regulators to operate past 2012. In 2006, the state went a step further, requiring that any extension of the plant's license be subject to Vermont legislature's approval. Then, too, the company went along. Either Entergy never really intended to live by those commitments, or it simply didn't foresee what would happen next. A string of accidents, including the partial collapse of a cooling tower in 2007 and the discovery of an underground pipe system leakage, raised serious questions about both Vermont Yankee's safety and Entergy's management-especially after the company made misleading statements about the pipe. Enraged by Entergy's behavior, the Vermont Senate voted 26 to 4 last year against allowing an extension. Now the company is suddenly claiming that the 2002 agreement is invalid because of the 2006 legislation, and that only the federal government has regulatory power over nuclear issues. The legal issues in the case are obscure: whereas the Supreme Court has ruled that states do have some regulatory authority over nuclear power, legal scholars say that Vermont case will offer a precedent-setting test of how far those powers extend. Certainly, there are valid concerns about the patchwork regulations that could result if every state sets its own rules. But had Entergy kept its word, that debate would be beside the point. The company seems to have concluded that its reputation in Vermont is already so damaged that it has nothing left to lose by going to war with the state. But there should be consequences. Permission to run a nuclear plant is a public trust. Entergy runs 11 other reactors in the United States, including Pilgrim Nuclear station in Plymouth. Pledging to run Pilgrim safely, the company has applied for federal permission to keep it open for another 20 years. But as the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) reviews the company's application, it should keep it mind what promises from Entergy are worth.

单选题A new study suggests that contrary to most surveys, people are actually more stressed at home than at work. Researchers measured people"s cortisol, which is a stress marker, while they were at work and while they were at home and found it higher at what is supposed to be a place of refuge. "Further contradicting conventional wisdom, we found that women as well as men have lower levels of stress at work than at home," writes one of the researchers, Sarah Damaske. In fact women even say they feel better at work, she notes. "It is men, not women, who report being happier at home than at work." Another surprise is that the findings hold true for both those with children and without, but more so for nonparents. This is why people who work outside the home have better health. What the study doesn"t measure is whether people are still doing work when they"re at home, whether it is household work or work brought home from the office. For many men, the end of the workday is a time to kick back. For women who stay home, they never get to leave the office. And for women who work outside the home, they often are playing catch-up-with-household tasks. With the blurring of roles, and the fact that the home front lags well behind the workplace in making adjustments for working women, it"s not surprising that women are more stressed at home. But it"s not just a gender thing. At work, people pretty much know what they"re supposed to be doing: working, making money, doing the tasks they have to do in order to draw an income. The bargain is very pure: Employee puts in hours of physical or mental labor and employee draws out life-sustaining moola. On the home front, however, people have no such clarity. Rare is the household in which the division of labor is so clinically and methodically laid out. There are a lot of tasks to be done, there are inadequate rewards for most of them. Your home colleagues—your family—have no clear rewards for their labor; they need to be talked into it, or if they"re teenagers, threatened with complete removal of all electronic devices. Plus, they"re your family. You cannot fire your family. You never really get to go home from home. So it"s not surprising that people are more stressed at home. Not only are the tasks apparently infinite, the co-workers are much harder to motivate.

单选题Biologists estimate that as many as 2 million lesser prairie chickens—a kind of bird living on stretching grasslands—once lent red to the often grey landscape of the midwestern and southwestern United States. But just some 22,000 birds remain today, occupying about 16% of the species" historic range. The crash was a major reason the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) decided to formally list the bird as threatened. "The lesser prairie chicken is in a desperate situation," said USFWS Director Daniel Ashe. Some environmentalists, however, were disappointed. They had pushed the agency to designate the bird as "endangered," a status that gives federal officials greater regulatory power to crack down on threats. But Ashe and others argued that the"threatened" tag gave the federal government flexibility to try out new, potentially less confrontational conservation approaches. In particular, they called for forging closer collaborations with western state governments, which are often uneasy with federal action, and with the private landowners who control an estimated 95% of the prairie chicken"s habitat. Under the plan, for example, the agency said it would not prosecute landowners or businesses that unintentionally kill, harm, or disturb the bird, as long as they had signed a range-wide management plan to restore prairie chicken habitat. Negotiated by USFWS and the states, the plan requires individuals and businesses that damage habitat as part of their operations to pay into a fund to replace every acre destroyed with 2 new acres of suitable habitat. The fund will also be used to compensate landowners who set aside habitat. USFWS also set an interim goal of restoring prairie chicken populations to an annual average of 67,000 birds over the next l0 years. And it gives the Western Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies (WAFWA), a coalition of state agencies, the job of monitoring progress. Overall, the idea is to let "states remain in the driver"s seat for managing the species," Ashe said. Not everyone buys the win-win rhetoric. Some Congress members are trying to block the plan, and at least a dozen industry groups, four states, and three environmental groups are challenging it in federal court. Not surprisingly, industry groups and states generally argue it goes too far; environmentalists say it doesn"t go far enough. "The federal government is giving responsibility for managing the bird to the same industries that are pushing it to extinction," says biologist Jay Lininger.

单选题In 2007 Safaricom, the biggest mobile operator in Kenya, launched M-PESA, a service that allows money to be sent and received using mobile phones. It is used by 70% of the adult population and has become central to the economy: around 25% of Kenya's GNP flows through it. Similar schemes have had some success elsewhere. There has been a particular push in east Africa. Yet in many poor countries where mobile money should be flourishing, it isn't. Mobile-money services are especially useful in developing countries. A worker in the city can send money to his family in the village without having to waste a day travelling on a rickety bus. Indeed, he can pay his family's household bills directly from his phone. It is safer too, nobody wants to carry wads of currency on public transport. Mobile money also gives its users—many of whom are poor and have no access to banks—a way to save small amounts of money. Mobile transactions are more traceable than cash, making it harder for corrupt officials to embezzle undetected. And lately Kenya has discovered a further benefit: the success of M-PESA has provided the foundation for a group of start-ups in Nairobi that are building new products and services on top of it. Not all countries need mobile money, of course. Rich countries, with cash machines, credit cards and Interact banking, have little use for it. And among developing countries, not all have Kenya's specific mix of circumstances. Safaricom had a dominant market share when it launched M- PESA, giving the service a large base of potential customers. But there is also a bad reason why mobile money has failed to spread. Many of the poor countries that would most benefit from mobile money seem intent on keeping its suppliers out—mainly by insisting they should be regulated like banks. Nobody disputes the idea that financial transactions need to be monitored. But there is also, equally clearly, a rather big difference between a cheap money-transfer system like M-PESA and a full lending bank like Citicorp. The security worries are usually fairly easily dealt with. Placing a limit on the size of transactions and the total balance that can be stored reduces the risk of mobile money being used to launder cash. Another concern is consumer protection: cunning operators could steal cash. One compromise, which has been adopted in several African countries, is to get operators to form partnerships with banks. Indeed, rather than fighting mobile money, governments should use it themselves.

单选题"It"s such a simple thing," said John Spitzer, managing director of equipment standards for the United States Golf Association. "I"m amazed that so many people spend so much time and energy on trying to change it." The simple thing to which he refers is the humble golf tee, a peg made of wood that most of us grab by the handful or buy for a few pennies each, stick in our pockets, and don"t give a second thought to. The road to the tee began with a Boston-area dentist named George F. Grant, who received a patent in 1899 for "an Improvement in Golf-Tees." Grant"s tees consisted of a small piece of rubber tubing attached to a tapered wooden peg to be pushed into the ground. The rubber held the ball, and yielded when the club contacted it. He had them produced by a nearby manufacturing concern and gave them out to his friends but never tried to sell or market them. That fell to William Lowell—another tooth doctor, coincidentally—who created the Reddy Tee in 1921. It was a one-piece implement of solid wood, painted red at the top so it could be easily found and cleverly named. He paid Walter Hagen and trick-shot artist Joe Kirkwood to endorse and use the device, and it was a commercial success, with more than $100,000 in sales by the time it was patented in 1925. The introduction of the oversize metal driver in the 1980s led most golfers to adopt longer tees to go along with the larger and higher sweet spot of those clubs. The USGA has banned tees longer than 4 inches, a height that is well past the point of diminishing returns. Even back in the 1960s, Jack Nicklaus understood the value of teeing the ball high, which he explained by saying, "Through years of experience I have found that air offers less resistance than dirt." Golfers who have fairly steep swings (like me) break a lot of tees. We can only envy the legendary Canadian pro Moe Norman, who could play for weeks with a single tee. When his playing partners asked him how he managed to stripe his drives without dislodging the peg, he answered, "I"m trying to hit the ball, not the tee." So are we all, Moe. So are we all.

单选题Loneliness has been linked to depression and other health problems. Now, a study says it can also spread. A friend of a lonely person was 52% more likely to develop feelings of loneliness. And a friend of that friend was 25% more likely to do the same. Earlier findings showed that happiness, fatness and the ability to stop smoking can also grow like infections within social groups. The findings all come from a major health study in the American town of Framingham, Massachusetts. The study began in 1948 to investigate the causes of heart disease. Since then, more tests have been added, including measures of loneliness and depression. The new findings involved more than 5,000 people in the second generation of the Framingham Heart Study. The researchers examined friendship histories and reports of loneliness. The results established a pattern as people reported fewer close friends. For example, loneliness can affect relationships between next-door neighbors. The loneliness spreads as neighbors who were close friends now spend less time together. The study also found that loneliness spreads more easily among women than men. Researchers from the University of Chicago, Harvard and the University of California, San Diego, did the study. The findings appeared last month in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology . The average person is said to experience feelings of loneliness about 48 days a year. The study found that having a lonely friend can add about 17 days. But every additional friend can decrease loneliness by about 5%, or two and a half days. Lonely people become less and less trusting of others. This makes it more and more difficult for them to make friends—and more likely that society will reject them. John Cacioppo at the University of Chicago led the study. He says it is important to recognize and deal with loneliness. He says people who have been pushed to the edges of society should receive help to repair their social networks. The aim should be to aggressively create what he calls a "protective barrier" against loneliness. This barrier, he says, can keep the whole network from coming apart.

单选题Natural disasters strike rich countries as well as needy ones, but the trail of devastation they leave behind is usually far greater in poor places. Worse, insurance payouts cover a much larger chunk of the costs of recovery in rich countries than in poor ones, where few individuals or companies take out disaster cover. Most of the burden of financing reconstruction falls on foreign governments and multilateral agencies. It will be no different in Haiti after the earthquake that struck this month. Developing countries have some options to help them manage the fallout from natural disasters. The World Bank helped the Mexican government raise $290m in October by placing "catastrophe bonds", which pay investors generous yields against the loss of their principal in the event that disaster strikes. Until now such bonds have largely been the preserve of rich-country issuers: in 2009 Munich Re estimates that 80% of issuance was to cover risks in America. But Francis Ghesquiere of the World Bank doubts that a country as poor as Haiti, with no experience on international bond markets, will start issuing catastrophe bonds. Risk-sharing mechanisms can enable the poorest nations to pool their insurance-buying power. Haiti is getting a payout of around $8m from the Caribbean Catastrophe Risk Insurance Facility. (CCRIF), which came into being in 2007. The CCRIF has a fund made up of contributions from donors and member countries, which allows it to cover payouts of up to $10m itself and has additional capacity of $110m obtained through international reinsurance markets. Payouts are based simply on the severity of the disaster (in Haiti's case, the magnitude of the earthquake), and the amount of coverage purchased, and are paid out in two weeks. The money is intended to ensure that lack of cash does not hamper basic government functions. But Pamela Cox, the World Bank's vice-president for Latin America and the Caribbean, points out that it is sometimes politically difficult for the government of a poor country to explain why it is spending scarce money on insurance premiums rather than things that may seem more pressing in normal times. Not every disaster triggers a payout. Haiti purchased significantly more hurricane insurance than earthquake insurance through the CCRIF. And purchasing enough cover to meet the need for funds after something like the Haitian quake would prove prohibitively expensive. Countries as poor as Haiti are far more likely to have their premiums paid by donors, who funded its CCRIF premium of $385,000.

单选题In the villages of the English countryside there are still people who remember the good old days when no one bothered to lock their doors. There simply wasn"t any crime to worry about. Amazingly, these happy times appear still to be with us in the world"s biggest community. A new study by Dan Farmer, a gifted programmer, using an automated investigative program of his own called SATAN, shows that the owners of well over half of all World Wide Web sites have set up home without fitting locks to their doors. SATAN can try out a variety of well-known hacking tricks on an Internet site without actually breaking in. Farmer has made the program publicly available, amid much criticism. A person with evil intent could use it to hunt down sites that are easy to burgle. But Farmer is very concerned about the need to alert the public to poor security and, so far, events have proved him right. SATAN has done more to alert people to the risks than cause new disorder. So is the Net becoming more secure? Far from it. In the early days, when you visited a Web site your browser simply looked at the content. Now the Web is full of tiny programs that automatically download when you look at a Web page, and run on your own machine. These programs could, if their authors wished, do all kinds of nasty things to your computer. At the same time, the Net is increasingly populated with spiders, worms, agents and other types of automated beasts designed to penetrate the sites and seek out and classify information. All these make wonderful tools for antisocial people who want to invade weak sites and cause damage. But let"s look on the bright side. Given the lack of locks, the Internet is surely the world"s biggest (almost) crime-free society. Maybe that is because hackers are fundamentally honest. Or that there currently isn"t much to steal. Or because vandalism isn"t much fun unless you have a peculiar dislike for someone. Whatever the reason, let"s enjoy it while we can. But, expect it all to change, and security to become the number one issue, when the most influential inhabitants of the Net are selling Services they want to be paid for.

单选题If I ask you what constitutes "bad" eating, the kind that leads to obesity and a variety of connected diseases, you"re likely to answer, "Salt, fat and sugar." Yet that"s not a(n) 1 answer. We don"t know everything about the dietary 2 to chronic disease, but the best-qualified people argue that real food is more likely to promote health and less likely to cause disease than hyper-processed food. And we can further 3 that message: Minimally processed food—Real Food—should 4 our diets. Real food solves the salt/fat/sugar problem. Yes, excess salt may cause high blood pressure, and 5 sodium intake in people with high blood pressure helps. 6 salt is only one of several risk factors in developing high blood pressure, and those who eat a diverse diet and few processed foods need not 7 about salt intake. "Fat" is a complicated topic. Most naturally occurring fats are probably essential, but too much of some fats seems 8 . Eat real food 9 your fat intake will probably be fine. "Sugar" has come to 10 the entire group of processed, nutritionally worthless caloric sweeteners. All appear to be damaging because they"re added sugars, as 11 to naturally occurring ones. 12 : Sugar is not the only enemy. The enemy is hyper-processed food, 13 sugar. We know that eating real food is a general solution, but a large part of our dietary problems might 14 from the consumption of caloric sweeteners and/or hyper-processed carbs. For example, how to limit the intake of sugar? A soda tax is a (n) 15 , proper labeling would be helpful, and—quite possibly most important, 16 it"s going to take us a generation or two to get out of this mess—restrictions 17 marketing sweet "food" to children. There"s no reason to 18 action on those kinds of moves. But let"s get the science straight so that firm, 19 , sound recommendations can be made 20 the best possible evidence. And meanwhile, let"s also get the simple message straight: It"s "Eat Real Food."