infotainment

As it turned out to be a small house party, we ______ so formally.

残奥会

bill of lading

The majority of nurses are women, but in the higher ranks of the medical profession women are in a ______.

He was shivering ______ cold.

I won't see you off at the airport tomorrow, so I will wish you ______.

When the young man realized that the police had spotted him, he made ______ the exit as quickly as possible, only to find that two policemen were waiting outside.

The committee members resented ______ them of the meeting.

If you choose lobster from a menu, then wherever you are in the world, the odds are that your dinner may have come from Arichat in Nova Scotia. The lobster, trapped off the Canadian coast, would have been driven to Louisville, Kentucky, where, cocooned in gel packs and styrofoam, it went for a wild ride on the carousels of the UPS superhub, where 17,000 high-speed conveyor belts, carrying more than 8m packages a week, whisk your living lobster to a plane and on onto tables across the globe. John McPhee's new book is about supply lines: how a lobster shares a conveyor belt with Bentley spare parts and jockey underwear. It is about boats, trains and trucks, but mostly it is about the people who drive, tend and love the machines. Don Ainsworth owns an 18-wheeler with 'a tractor of such dark sapphire that only bright sunlight could bring forth its colour.' To wash his truck Mr. Ainsworth uses only water that has either been de-ionised or has undergone reverse-osmosis; anything else leaves spots. 'This is as close as a man will ever know', he says, 'what it feels like to be a truly gorgeous woman. People give us looks, going thumbs up. ' He carries chemicals all across North America where his enemies are gators, bears and four-wheelers. 'Gators are huge strips of shredded tyre littering the highways and just one of them 'can rip off your fuel-crossover line'. A bear is a policeman, while a four-wheeler is any vehicle that has fewer than 18 wheels. They buzz around like gnats, seemingly unaware that a real vehicle, one with 18 wheels or more, cannot stop on a dime. The Billy Joe Bolingis a towboat which, perversely, pushes 15 barges up the Illinois River. The barges carry 30,000 tons of pig-iron, steel, coils, fertiliser and furnace coke. Lashed together with steel cables which are then tightened with cheater bars, the Billy Joe Bolingshoves forward a metal raft that is longer than an aircraft carrier. Along the way, the captain copes with bridges, locks, currents, shoals, winter ice 18 inches thick and summer ladies flashing at him. 'We brought 12,000 tons of coke up the Illinois River,' the skipper tells the author, 'and now we're pushing 14,000 tons of coke down the Illinois River. One day they'll figure it out and put us out of a job. ' The bosses also want to put the drivers of the coal train out of a job. They dream of automated trains running endlessly along the 1,800 miles between the strip-mines of the Powder River Basin and Georgia's Plant Scherer, the world's largest coal-fired power station. A mile-and-half long train has 133 gondolas, each of which carries 115 tons of coal, and the whole trainload will keep Plant Scherer burning for just eight hours. This book will keep you much longer. It is Mr. McPhee at his wise, wry best, writing in top gear which, as Mr Ainsworth will tell you, is the 18th: 'the going home gear, the smoke hole'.

API

The couple departed ______ a heavy rain.

Passage One The world is going through the biggest wave of mergers and acquisitions ever witnessed. The process sweeps from hyperactive America to Europe and reaches the emerging countries with unsurpassed might. Many in these countries are looking at this process and worrying: 'Won't the wave of business concentration turn into an uncontrollable anti-competitive force?' There's no question that the big are getting bigger and more powerful. Multinational corporations accounted for less than 20% of international trade in 1982. Today the figure is more than 25% and growing rapidly. International affiliates account for a fast-growing segment of production in economies that open up and welcome foreign investment. In Argentina, for instance, after the reforms of the early 1990s, multinationals went from 43% to almost 70% of the industrial production of the 200 largest firms. This phenomenon has created serious concerns over the role of smaller economic firms, of national businessmen and over the ultimate stability, of the world economy. I believe that the most important forces behind the massive MA wave are the same that underlie the globalization process: falling transportation, and communication costs, lower trade and investment barriers and enlarged markets that require enlarged operations capable, of meeting customers' demands. All these are beneficial, not detrimental to consumers. As productivity grows, the world's wealth increases. Examples of benefits or costs of the current concentration wave are scanty. Yet it is hard to imagine that the merge of a few oil firms today could recreate the same threats to competition that were feared nearly a century ago in the U.S., when the Standard Oil trust was broken up. The mergers of telecom companies, such as World Corn, hardly seem to bring higher prices for consumers or a reduction in the pace of technical progress. On the contrary, the price of communications is coming down fast. In cars, too, concentration is increasing—witness Daimler and Chrysler, Renault and Nissan—but it does not appear that consumers am being hurt. Yet the fact remains that the merger movement must be watched. A few weeks ago, Alan Greenspan warned against the megamergers in the banking industry. Who is going to supervise, regulate and operate, as lender of last resort with the gigantic banks that are being created? Won't multinationals shift production from one place to another when a nation gets too strict about infringements to fair corn petition? And should one country take upon itself the role of 'defending competition' on issues that affect many other nations, as in the U. S..

Mike and Adam Hurewitz grew up together on Long Island, in the suburbs of New York City. They were very close, even for brothers. So when Adam's liver started failing, Mike offered to give him half of his. The operation saved Adam's life. But Mike, who went into the hospital in seemingly excellent health, developed a complication—perhaps a blood colt—and died last week. He was 57. Mike Hurewitz's death has prompted a lot of soul searching in the transplant community. Was it a tragic fluke or a sign that transplant surgery has reached some kind of ethical limit? The Mount Sinai Medical Center, the New York City hospital where the complex double operation was performed, has put on hold its adult living donor liver transplant program, pending a review of Hurewitz's death. Mount Sinai has performed about 100 such operations in the past three years. A 1-in-100 risk of dying may not seem like bad odds, but there's more to this ethical dilemma than a simple ratio. The first and most sacred rule of medicine is to do no harm. 'For a normal healthy person a mortality rate 1% is hard to justify,' says Dr. John Fung, chief of transplantation at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. 'If the rate stays at 1%, it's just not going to be accepted.' On the other hand, there's an acute shortage of traditional donor organs from people who have died in accidents or suffered fatal heart attacks. If family members fully understand the risks and are willing to proceed, is there any reason to stand in their way? Indeed, a recent survey showed that most people will accept a mortality rate for living organ donors as high as 20%. The odds, thankfully, aren't nearly that bad. For kidney donors, for example, the risk ranges from 1 in 2,500 to 1 in 4,000 for a healthy volunteer. That helps explain why nearly 40% of kidney transplants in the U. S. come from living donors. The operation to transplant a liver, however, is a lot trickier than one to transplant a kidney. Not only is the liver packed with blood vessels, but it also makes lots of proteins that need to be produced in the right ratios for the body to survive. When organs from the recently deceased are used, the surgeon gets to pick which part of the donated liver looks the best and to take as much of it as needed. Assuming all goes well, a healthy liver can grow back whatever portion of the organ is missing, sometimes within a month. A living-donor transplant works particularly well when an adult donates a modest portion of the liver to a child. Usually only the left lobe of the organ is required, leading to a mortality rate for living-donors in the neighborhood of 1 in 500 to 1 in 1, 000. But when the recipient is another adult, as much as 60% of the donor's liver has to be removed. 'There really is very little margin for error,' says Dr. Fung. By way of analogy, he suggests, think of a tree. 'An adult-to-child living-donor transplant is like cutting off a limb. With an adult-to-adult transplant, you're splitting the trunk in half and trying to keep both halves alive. ' Even if a potential donor understand and accepts these risks, that doesn't necessarily mean the operation should proceed. All sorts of subtle pressures can be brought to bear on such a decision, says Dr. Mark Siegler, director of the MacLean for Clinical Medical Ethics at the University of Chicago. 'Sometimes the sicker the patient, the greater the pressure and the more willing the donor will be to accept risks. ' If you feel you can't say no, is your decision truly voluntary? And if not, is it the medical community's responsibility to save you from your own best intentions? Transplant centers have developed screening programs to ensure that living donors fully understand the nature of their decision. But unexamined, for the most part, is the larger issue of just how much a volunteer should be allowed to sacrifice to save another human being. So far, we seem to be saying some risk is acceptable, although we're still vaguer about where the cutoff should be. There will always be family members like Mike Hurewitz who are heroically prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice for a loved one. What the medical profession and society must decide is if it's appropriate to let them do so.

The area qualifies for ______ as a site of special scientific interest.

In arguing against assertions that environmental catastrophe is imminent, her book does not ridicule all predictions of doom but rather claims that the risks of harm have in many cases been ______.

按揭货款

Just as it's more than OK to work overtime when it's appropriate, it's also more than OK to be alert ______ other work that needs to be done.

The eye tends to see distance as ______. In painting, this is sometimes called 'the vanishing point'.

No one was absent from the meeting, ______?