The process of learning an art can be divided conveniently into two parts: one, the mastery of the theory; the other, the mastery of the practice. If I want to learn the art of medicine, I must first know the facts about the human body, about various diseases. When I have all this theoretical knowledge. I am by no means competent in the art of medicine. I shall become a master in this art only after a great deal of practice, until eventually the results of my theoretical knowledge and the result of my practice are blended into one—my intuition, the essence of the mastery of any art. But aside from learning the theory and practice, there is a third factor necessary to becoming a master in any art—the mastery of the art must be a matter of ultimate concern: there must be nothing else in the world more important than the art. This holds true for music, for medicine, for carpentry—and for love. And, maybe, here lies the answer to the question of why people in our country try so rarely to learn this art, in spite of their obvious failures: in spite of the deep-seated craving for love, almost everything else is considered to be more important than love: success, prestige, money, power—almost all our energy is used for the learning of how to achieve these aims, and almost none to learn the art of loving.

The president explained that the purpose of taxation was to ______ government spending.

Nowadays, our government advocates credit to whatever we do or whoever we contact with. Once you ______ your words, you will lose your social status and personal reputation.

The subject of safety must be placed at the top of the ______.

国际惯例

The gift was sent by ______.

boarding school

pyramid scheme

During a war, many of the normal basic rights of the individual are ______ in the national interest.

Passage Four Despite their names, satin and soman are exceptionally ugly sisters. They are organophosphorous nerve gases. They are cheap and simple to manufacture. And mere milligrams—just a drop—of either is enough to kill an adult in a couple of minutes. They therefore make particularly fine weapons of mass destruction, equally popular with rogue dictators who have not been able to build nuclear bombs and with weird cults such as Aum Shinrikyo, which gassed the Tokyo subway in 1995. Detecting them soon enough to prevent their effects can be difficult. Even detecting them after the event—if you are, for example, a United Nations weapon inspector—can be haphazard. But help may be at hand. A paper in this month's edition of Analytical Chemistry, by George Murray and his team at John Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, reports a new way of picking up minute qualities of the two gases without the risk of false alarms from legitimate organophosphorous compounds such as insecticides. Dr Murray's detector consists of a fiber-optic cable that has one end plugged into a laser and the other coated with a metal called europium. The laser generates blue light, and europium has the property of shining red when exposed to blue light of the correct wavelength—an effect that is exploited in many optical devices. But the metal possesses a second property that makes it uniquely suitable for Dr. Murray's purpose: it reacts strongly with organophosphates, and when it does so, the wavelength of the light that is emitting changes perceptibly. To stop his detector going off in response to the wrong signals such as insecticide on the flea collar of a dog, Dr Murray has resorted to a second trick. The europium is embedded in a plastic film that binds specifically to sarin or soman (they are very similar molecules), using special pockets called molecular imprints that have been chemically etched into it. The organophosphates commonly used as pesticides do not fit into these pockets; and so fail to react with the metal. The result is a detector that is both sensitive ( it can pick up concentrations of as seven nerve-gas molecules in a trillion) and reasonable fast (it is able to sound the alarm within 30 seconds). So far, Dr Murray has tested his device only on soman dissolved in water. This is mainly a safety measure, because water-borne nerve agents are easier to handle than those in gaseous form. But soman or sarin-contaminated water supplies are a real hazard in themselves—and not just in far-flung war zones. In America, for example, there are occasional leaks from military bases. The most recent was from Tooele Chemical Disposal Facility in Utah, one of the sites where the country's chemical weapons stockpile is being destroyed. At the moment it would be hard to work out if any material from such a spill had found its way into the water supply until people started to become ill. Dr Murray seems confident, however, that his technology will work just as well on sarin and saman gas, and has prepared 'smart' cards coated with the mixture of europium and plastic to detect airborne nerve gases. Unfortunately, he does not, at the moment, have access to any place where the safety regulations will permit him to try them out. But if UN inspectors were ever allowed back into Iraq, he might have a chance.

ecological deterioration

连锁反应

The Book of Rites

全方位外交

______ of the twins was arrested, because I saw both at a party last night.

Ravaged by pollution and war, many famous monuments have become eroded and stained.

《大学》

扫黄打黑

The World Bank is undeniably in crisis. But not because its president, Paul Wolfowitz, got hisgirlfriend a raise. It is the Wolfowitz saga that has been grabbing all the headlines, of course. The Iraq war architect was plucked from the Defense Department and deposited by President George W. Bush at the World Bank in 2005 (by tradition, the U. S. president picks the bank's chief). At the time, Wolfowitz informed the bank's ethics committee that he was seeing Shaha Riza, a communication adviser at the bank, and the in-house ethicists told him she should be moved to another agency and given a raise for her troubles. But the size of the pay hike (from $133,000 to $180,000, tax free) and other details about Riza's transfer raised hackles among bank staff and sparked an investigation. The bank's board will decide any day now whether Wolfowitz stays or goes. This dragged-out mess, though, is a distraction. The bigger issue is that the Washington-based bank and its sister organization, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), are struggling to justify their continued existence. The situation is most pressing for the smaller IMF, which pays its bills with the profits it makes by lending money to middle-income countries in financial trouble. With hardly any such countries in trouble these days, the organization is projecting a $224 million deficit for this fiscal year and asking its member nations if they can start selling off some of the gold they deposited with it after World War II (the answer so far. no). The World Bank isn't that desperate, but it faces similar pressure. Both organizations were created in 1944 by the soon-to-be-victorious Allied powers. At the time, says Harvard professor and former IMF chief economist Kenneth Rogoff, 'global financial markets barely existed, and domestic financial markets barely existed in Europe.' The World Bank's initial job was to finance reconstruction in Europe. The Marshall Plan rendered that task superfluous, so the bank—in the first of several reinventions— moved on to bankroll development in other countries. The idea was to lend to governments that were creditworthy but had no access to rich-country capital markets.'Now we live in a world where there are huge global capital markets, where, if anything, investors are too willing to invest in developing countries,' says Adam Lerrick, a former investment banker who teaches economics at Carnegie Mellon University. The World Bank's net lending has plummeted over the past few years, even as it keeps shopping loans to the likes of Brazil, Turkey, Russia and China, sometimes on hugely generous terms. This is the work of the biggest part of the World Bank, the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development. Member countries make deposits (the U. S. share is $2 billion down and $ 30 billion pledged); the bank sells bonds backed by those deposits and pledges, then lends the money out at a small profit. The other main arm of the World Bank, the International Development Association, gets regular infusions of cash from rich countries and lends funds on near giveaway terms to truly poor countries, mostly in Africa ( the U.S. contribution is just under $1 billion a year, or 0. 04% of federal spending). Lerrick wants the World Bank to stop lending to middle-income countries and restructure its loans to the poorest nations as outright grants. Nancy Birdsall, a former World Banker who runs a Washington think tank called the Center for Global Development, argues that the bank could have more impact on poverty by making better use of its best assets : the expertise of its staff and its ability to coordinate global action.'Lending and grant making at the country level should not be the end-all and be-all,' she says. 'It should be the vehicle for advice and constant rebuilding of the bank's knowledge.' Birdsall is a World Bank fan but agrees with critics like Lerrick that it must become smaller (it has a staff of 10,000) and less bank like to remain relevant. Wolfowitz's allies say he is the victim of backlash from entrenched bank staff upset that he is turning up the heat on an anticorruption campaign begun by his predecessor, James Wolfensohn. That's probably overstating things. But the potential backlash against slashing the bank's staff and getting it out of lending would surely be epic. Which may explain why no World Bank president, Wolfowitz included, has attempted it.

Because noises modulate radiofrequency, radio stations use a band of frequencies to prevent interference with other stations.