{{B}}SECTION 4 LISTENING TEST{{/B}}

BStatementsDirections: In this part of the test, you will hear several short statements. These statements will be spoken ONLY ONCE, and you will not find them written on the paper, so you must listen carefully. When you hear a statement, read the answer choices and decide which one is closest in meaning to the statement you have heard. Then write the letter of the answer you have chosen in the corresponding space in your ANSWER BOOKLET./B

We all have problems and barriers that block our progress or prevent us from moving into new areas. When that happens, consider the following three ways of dealing with a【B1】______. One way is to pretend it doesn't exist. 【B2】______it, deny it, and lie about it. However, this approach leaves the barrier【B3】______. A second approach is to fight the barrier. This often【B4】______the barrier's magnitude. The more one struggles, the【B5】______the problem gets. The third 【B6】______is to love the barrier. Accept it. Totally experience it. Tell the【B7】______about it. When you do this, the barrier【B8】______its power. Suppose one of your barriers is being afraid of【B9】______in front of a group. You can use any of these three approaches. First, you can【B10】______you're not afraid about speaking in public. The second way is to【B11】______the barrier. You could tell yourself, "I'm not scared," and then try to keep your knees from knocking. Generally, this doesn' t【B12】______. The third approach is to get up and look out into the【B13】______, and say to yourself, "Yup, I'm scared and that's OK. I'm going to【B14】______ this speech even though I'm scared. " And you might discover if you examine the fear, accept it, and totally【B15】______it, the fear itself also【B16】______. Remember two ideas: First, loving a problem is not necessarily the same as【B17】______it. Love in this sense means total and unconditional acceptance. Second, "unconditional acceptance" is not the same as unconditional 【B18】______. Often the most effective【B19】______come when we face a problem squarely—diving into it headfirst and getting to know it in【B20】______.

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{{B}}SECTION 4 LISTENING TEST{{/B}}

The US economy should expand modestly in coming months as a healthy job market continues to trump weakness in housing prices, a gauge of future business activity showed on Thursday. The Conference Board said its index of leading economic indicators rose a higher-than-expected 0.3 percent in May, boosted by rising stock prices, higher consumer expectations and the availability of jobs. Economists said that jobs should continue to be plentiful, despite an unexpected surge in jobless claims last week. The Labor Department reported Thursday that unemployment claims totaled 324,000 last week, up 10,000 from the previous week, to the highest level since mid-April. While the big increase was unexpected, analysts said it did not change their view that the labor market remains hardy. Even with the increase, analysts noted claims remain close to their average—319,000—over the first 5.5 months of the year. While the overall US economy grew at a lackluster 0.6 percent in the first three months of this year, many analysts believe the pace has picked up significantly in the spring. The Conference Board's upbeat report shows that the impact of the housing slump has been fairly contained so far, said Patrick Newport, an economist with Global Insight. "It just hasn't spilled over to the rest of the economy," he said. It also indicates the economy is doing better than last month's leading indicators report suggested, Newport said. May's increase reversed a revised 0.3 percent drop in April, down from the original 0.5 percent decline that economists blamed on soaring gas prices and a drop in building permits. The report, designed to forecast economic activity over the next three to six months, tracks 10 economic indicators. The advancing contributors in May, starting with the largest, were weekly unemployment insurance claims, stock prices, building permits, consumer expectations and vendor performance. The negative contributors, beginning with the largest, were real money supply, average weekly manufacturing hours and interest rate spread. With the latest report, the cumulative change in the index over the past six months has gone up 0.3 percent. Wall Street is fairly confident that falling home prices and rising mortgage defaults won't damage the broader economy. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said Wednesday the housing slump is nearing an end and that the losses so far have been contained. But if mortgage rates keep rising, fewer people will want to buy homes and fewer homeowners will be able to refinance. If that happens, the residential real estate market's troubles could snowball and dampen consumer spending. The Federal Reserve's Open Market Committee, which sets short-term interest rates, meets next week and is widely expected to leave rates unchanged as they have been for about a year. A pickup in the economy has raised worries about rising inflation, however. Stocks slipped on Thursday, after the Philadelphia Federal Reserve's report on manufacturing activity in its region jumped a stronger-than-expected 18 in June, up from 4.2 in May. In midday trading, the Dow Jones industrial average fell moderately, declining 36.66, or 0.27 percent, to 13,452.76 after dropping 146 points Wednesday on a surge in bond yields. Broader stock indicators moved sideways. The Standard & Poor's 500 index fell 1.71, or 0.11 percent, to 1,511.13 and the Nasdaq composite index advanced 1.48, or 0.06 percent, to 2,601.44. On Tuesday, the Commerce Department said construction of new homes fell in May as the nation's homebuilders were battered by the crisis in sub-prime lending and rising mortgage rates. Industry sentiment about the housing market fell in June to the lowest point in more than 16 years.Secondary effects from the housing downturn like layoffs and restrained consumer spending could also start surfacing, said Aaron Smith, an economist with Moody's Economy.com. But the overall drag on the economy from the housing industry should decline in coming months, he said. "Building permits cannot continue declining at the pace they have," Smith said.

I once attended a Downing Street reception where Tony Blair invited questions from leading magazine editors. One woman, from a big consumer title, asked if New Labour had plans to tax one-use plastic bags that were destroying the environment. Blair pulled a mock-baffled "Hey, guys, I'm busy running the country here" face and answered in a tone of purest condescension. This was around 2005, a few years after Ireland, with little fuss at all, had introduced a small charge for plastic bags. Within a year, everyone had learnt to keep a jute sack or string shopper under their desk, and this young, adaptable, upbeat nation had cut the number of bags cluttering Irish hedgerows by 94 %. It is such an easy, clever bit of nudge politics, which has already worked right across northern Europe.(Is it not strange that we each use 158 plastic bags a year but a Dane only four?)And yet here we are in England—four years after Wales, two after Northern Ireland, a year after Scotland— bringing it in at last on Monday. And unlike the devolved nations, England can't just keep it simple and charge 5p for bags in all stores, but only those with more than 250 employees. Corner shops in Aberdeen have coped, yet those in London can't. The light from an explosion in deep space can take billions of years to be seen on Earth. And the gap between a social ill being identified, backed by irrefutable scientific evidence, and parliament changing the law, is often almost as long. That cigarettes are poisonous and young lungs fragile have been beyond doubt since the 1950s, yet it only became illegal for smokers to inflict their fumes upon children in cars this week. Even now, some libertarians grumble that enjoying an après school pick-up fag is every parent's right and, besides, haven't the police got better things to do? Yes, they have. But, still, progress is worth defending. And improvements in our lives are rarely brought about by vast, sweeping changes but by small, incremental shifts. Those simple life-savers, the Clean Air Acts, seatbelt and motorcycle helmet legislation: all regarded as quirky and inconvenient in their time. Every generation looks upon the unthinking habits of its parents and asks: why the hell did you do that? In Mad Men Don Draper is shown taking a last swig of his beer in a picnic, then lobbing the bottle deep into the forest. According to creator Matthew Weiner this was the show's most controversial scene: horrified young people would ask him if their grandparents were really so crass? But in early-1960s America there was little stigma in dumping your trash. Back in the 1970s being capable of driving when lashed was a prized adult skill, we let our dogs defile parks and would have thought anyone who scooped up still-warm poop in little bags totally mad. And maybe we will look back at the plastic bag era in similar terms. How could these people use up all the oil, choke turtles and block flood defences, just to make carrying shopping home easier? A non-brand plastic bag flapping about on a tree, too high up to reach, is the ensign of our age. It is the saddest, most hopeless manifestation of a disposable age built upon laziness and greed. In the film American Beauty the misfit Ricky videos a bag dancing in the wind: the peculiar poignancy comes from seeing the most unloved, worthless object on Earth appearing to express joy. "Do you need a bag?" I've come to resent that question. Because I don't want to say "yes". But my handbag is small. I don't want to crease this book I've bought as a present. And sometimes a purchase without nice packaging feels less of a treat. But usually I say "no". Ten virtue points for that. Twenty for remembering to carry my bags-for-life from the car. It is irksome to forget, then watch the checkout lady unfurl dozens from the roll, pull each one open with a flourish: all that waste just to get my shopping home. Really this is just pretence of virtue. The 5p charge may reduce bags, and in Scotland usage has declined by 80 % in a year: that' s 147 million fewer. But the oceans are already clogged with every other type of plastic: vast islands of detritus, micro-particles of broken-up Evian bottles and biscuit wrappers absorbed by sea life and then, in due course, us. But sometimes laws are there as much for society to declare intent as to have an effect. With smoking in cars I wonder if it is not a proxy for more sweeping legislation that would forbid low-life mums in supermarkets screaming swear words at their sobbing toddlers or pouring Coke in a baby's tippy cup. It is a way of saying, we are watching, we have standards: your parenting is being judged. We'd like to police your home: but we can't, so let's start with your car. Likewise, the plastic bag law is a displacement activity for the bigger, dreary, ecological changes that are too daunting for us to make. Those five pences are tithes to the Church of Green. And dragging home our hessian totes of virtue we can feel less hopeless. The world is broken: but don't blame me.

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The dirty little secret about Europe's "Grand Tour of Contemporary Art" this summer is that there simply isn't enough good art to go around. The Grand Tour, of course, is this year's unprecedented coincidence of well-established major art extravaganzas—the Venice Biennale, the bi-annual ArtBasel in Switzerland, the quinquennial Documenta in Kassel, Germany—all of which opened during the same week in mid-June. And they've even added the Sculpture Project at Muenster in Germany, which is only held once every 10 years. That means Europe's curators have had to hang and install more than 1,400 works by some 400 artists. Clearly, it can't all be of prime quality. In fact, sometimes, they've had to scrape the bottom of the barrel. "Everybody knows there's just not enough good art to meet this kind of demand," says Maria Finders, a London-based art event organizer. "But the positive side of that is that it's giving younger artists a chance to emerge." It's not hard to tell where the mega-shows are coming up short. At Venice (which carries on till Nov. 21), the large, haunting installations Felix Gonzales Torres produced for the United States Pavilion are widely admired. So are the oversized photo theatricals of German artist Thomas Demand, like "Embassy", which reproduces the Niger Embassy room in Rome where the now infamous forged Iraqi "yellowcake uranium" document was purloined. But a 3-D video "Last Riot", by the Russian artist team AES+F, purporting to show the cutthroat chaos of our cybernetic video-game-like future, is more creepy than apocalyptic. And a series of wiseacre sketches and a neon installation by British bad-girl artist Tracey Emin—who shot to fame in 1999 when she installed her own unmade bed in the Tate Modern—have been panned as banal. Similarly, if there were enough good new art, a deeply affecting picture of a child warrior in fatigues by Congolese artist Cheri Samba, might find itself flanked by more where that came from, instead of familiar abstracts by established artists Ellsworth Kelly and Gerhard Richter.Obviously, the fairs have a powerful impact on the hot—some say overheated—modern and contemporary art market. At ArtBasel, which unlike the "curated" Biennale and Dokumenta is an openly commercial fair, the Marlborough Gallery sold a Francis Bacon, "Orange Male Nude before Mirror," for $20 million. Jeff Wall light-boxes went for $672,000. And it became clear that "signature-value" rather than any original quality was at play when Roy Lichtenstein silk-screens—in an edition of 50—drew $47,000 each. At those prices, younger artists were certainly bound to benefit. A leading Berlin gallery, Eigen +Art, which discovered the Leipzig School, sold a large work by young German sculptress Stella Hamberg for $114,000, while another by young Italian sculptor Arcangelo Sassolino was sold by Gallery von Senger for $45,000. Dokumenta exhibited some dazzling showpieces. Visitors stopped in their tracks at the sight of Brazilian artist Iole de Freitas's untitled 30-meter length of curving steel and silver plexiglas that glides over itself like a highway to heaven. They marveled, too, at famous Chinese artist Ai Weiwei's "Template", an 8-meter-high installation composed of interlocked wooden doors and windows from the Ming and Qing dynasties. And they strived to fathom meaning from big, darkly symbolic canvases by German painter Monika Baer, the Chilean-Australian Juan Davila and African-American Kelly James Marshall. But they also noted that a number of them were not new at all, but dated back even to the '50s and '60s. Where was the rest of the new, truly contemporary material? Clearly, if there had been enough strong art to go around, viewers wouldn't have had to doze off in front of politically correct, excruciatingly prolonged videos such as one about Barcelona prostitution, a child rolling around on an Iraqi prayer rug, or "This Is How We Walk on the Moon." That one should more aptly have been titled "My Perfectly Ordinary Home Movie About Sailing in Scotland".

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Most people have seen bullies in action, making life miserable for others. Their targets often escape the intimidation relatively unharmed, but sometimes it is too much to bear. That can be true whether the victim is a 12-year-old girl or a 136-kilogram American football player. A member of the Miami Dolphins left the National Football League team recently because he was repeatedly insulted and threatened by a teammate, Richie Incognito. Many fans were disgusted by details of Incognito's expletive-filled voice mail and text messages, while others defended his behavior as a natural part of a rough-and-tumble sport. Some people are astonished that Jonathan Martin, who is 1. 95 meters tall, "could actually be emotionally damaged by taunts from a teammate," the columnist Timothy Egan wrote recently in The Times. "Can you possibly hurt a hulk with words?" Based on his own experience playing football in high school, Mr. Egan argues that you can. He was smaller than the other guys and had a big, unruly head of hair that made him stand out. His teammates taunted him. "Did it hurt? Yes it did," he wrote. "I knew very well what it felt like to give so much to a game and have people who were part of it, his teammates, hurt him. " Bullies aren't all men. The Times reported recently that scientists had made big strides in understanding aggression by young women. "The existence of female competition may seem obvious to anyone who has been in a high school cafeteria or singles bar," John Tierney wrote, "but analyzing it has been difficult because it tends to be more subtle and indirect(and a lot less violent)than the male variety. " Researchers found that women were more likely to make mean comments about other women if they saw them as competition for male attention. In an experiment, a group of female college students reacted negatively when a woman wearing a low-cut blouse and a short skirt entered the room, while they barely noticed the same woman dressed in a T-shirt and jeans. But in perhaps one difference between the sexes, instead of confronting the woman directly, the others made fun of her once she left the room. "Women are indeed very capable of aggressing against others, especially women they perceive as rivals," said Dr. Tracy Vaillancourt, a psychologist at the University of Ottawa. For those on the receiving end who are young or otherwise vulnerable, the damage can be tragic. In September, a 12-year-old girl in Florida named Rebecca Ann Sedwick killed herself after other girls bullied her online. She went to an abandoned cement plant, climbed to a platform and jumped. "Rebecca became one of the youngest members of a growing list of children and teenagers apparently driven to suicide, at least in part, after being maligned, threatened and taunted online," The Times reported. And teenagers aren't just using Facebook or Instagram to pick on one another. New applications appear constantly, making it difficult for parents to keep tabs on their children's activity. Rebecca's mother, Tricia Norman, didn't know her daughter was receiving messages that said: "You're ugly" and "Can u die please?" "You hear about this all the time," Ms. Norman said of cyberbullying. "I never, ever thought it would happen to me or my daughter. "

In the near future, professors will run their courses over digital platforms capable of collecting data on each student's progress. These platforms were initially developed for massive open online courses. However, universities are now folding these platforms back into their traditional classes because they make it easier to share content, host discussions and keep track of student work. Soon, these platforms will be able to monitor which students are spending 15 minutes on a calculus problem and which ones slog away for an hour. This can raise red flags for professors about who might need extra help. As more classes move partially or entirely online, the requirements of having a uniform start and end date diminish. It means some students could sail through a semester's worth of classes in a few weeks and then start again with new courses. It used to be that getting accepted to a prestigious university was how you accessed the best professors and could hang out with the smartest students. That's because universities were, for the most part, closed information systems that distributed out their content among a select few. That's changing.

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{{B}}Part A Spot DictationDirections: In this part of the test, you will hear a passage and read the same passage with blanks in it. Fill in each of the blanks with the word or words you have heard on the tape. Write your answer in the corresponding space in your ANSWER BOOKLET. Remember you will hear the passage ONLY ONCE.{{/B}}

{{B}}SECTION 6 TRANSLATION TESTDirections: Translate the following passage into English and write your version in the corresponding space in your ANSWER BOOKLET.{{/B}}

{{B}}SECTION 2 READING TESTDirections: In this section you will read several passages. Each one is followed by several questions about it. You are to choose ONE best answer, A, B, C or D, to each question. Answer all the questions following each passage on the basis of what is stated or implied in that passage and write tile letter of the answer you have chosen in the corresponding space in your ANSWER BOOKLET.{{/B}}

On October 14, 2015 tracker dogs led game scouts to a group of armed poachers who were on the run after shooting and killing a well-known old elephant bull just outside Tarangire National Park, Tanzania. This was the latest in a string of successes by Tanzania's tracker dogs, which are proving to be an effective weapon in the bloody war on elephant poaching in East Africa. "Apart from their incredible tracking abilities, dogs are wonderful to work with because they don't have any political agenda—they can't be compromised," said Damien Bell, director of Big Life Tanzania, the conservation organization that manages the Big Life Tracker Dog Unit. "Our dogs have tracked elephant poachers for up to eight hours at a time or more, through extreme conditions—heat, rain, wetlands, mountains—and still turned up results," he said. "They love their handlers, and they do a job until the job is done. " The Big Life Foundation first began using dogs for anti-poaching efforts in 2011, after adopting four Alsatians(German shepherds)from kennels in the Netherlands and honing their skills with the help of Canine Specialist Services International, a dog training facility based in northern Tanzania. Alsatians were picked over bloodhounds as they have more stamina and can better handle the African heat. Two of the dogs, Max and Jazz, were stationed in southern Kenya. The other two, Rocky and Jerry, were sent to Tanzania to help out in the Amboseli/Kilimanjaro ecosystem, important elephant habitat that straddles the two countries. Since their arrival, Rocky and Jerry have helped with countless anti-poaching operations, leading to numerous arrests. In fact, the dog teams have become so popular that Tanzania National Parks , the Wildlife Division, the police, and even the military have requested their assistance. Canine sleuths aren't limited to the plains of East Africa, either. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, bloodhounds are assisting in the fight against poaching in forested Virunga National Park, where the world's last remaining mountain gorillas live. In South Africa, Weimaraner and Malinois dogs are helping to find wounded animals and track poachers on foot through the reserves around Kruger National Park. Anatolian shepherd dogs are also used in Africa to mitigate human-wildlife conflict on farms, where the instinctively protective dogs defend livestock from predators. Rocky arrived with his handlers, and soon he was pacing and sniffing up and down beside the dead elephant, about to explode with excitement. He quickly picked up the human scents from footprints near the carcass. It seemed that multiple people had been at the crime scene the night before. Now the dogs were on their dusty trail. The hunters had become the hunted. Rocky led the chase through the foothills and scrublands of the Lesimingori, frantically tugging his handler at the end of the lead. But after five hours of relentless progress, the heat wore even him down, and his protege, Rosdus, took over. Rosdus is a new dog on the team—fresh from extensive training at Canine Specialist Services International, at Usa River. Rosdus didn't disappoint his mentor. He took the team all the way to the main highway, where the unit followed a hot trail through the town and to a particular home. There,seven suspects were arrested. Six of the suspects have been charged and are now in custody in Arusha, without bail.

When Dana Hale adopted her son four years ago, she says she had to "play hardball" with her boss to get the same paid leave granted colleagues who give birth. The Washington employment lawyer knew then that if she and her self-employed husband adopted again, it would be under new management. So Hale began researching adoption-friendly workplaces, and soon focused on Capital One. The big financial-services company, headquartered in McLean, Va., offers $5,000 in assistance per adopted child, plus six weeks of paid leave. More important to Hale, the company fosters a supportive culture for adoptive parents, who network through a corporate intranet site. "I specifically chose Capital One so I could adopt more children," says Hale, 44, on the eve of a trip to Ukraine to bring home two teenage sisters. Adoption has become an employment issue. Because more women delay parenthood to pursue careers during their prime childbearing years, some seek alternative avenues to build their families. With each adoption costing up to $30,000 and often demanding mounds of paperwork and weeks of travel, workers are asking their employers for help. They're getting it, mainly from companies in competitive industries hungry to attract and keep talent. Google, JPMorgan Chase, Abbott Laboratories, Avon and Motorola have all added adoption assistance to their buffet of benefits. In 1990, only 12% of 1,000 companies surveyed by Hewitt Associates offered financial assistance for adoption. By 2006, 45% of companies did. Rita Sorensen, executive director of the Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption, estimates that in 2007 fully half of employers provide adoption benefits and that within five years those offerings will be considered standard. Dave Thomas, founder of Wendy's, may have kicked off the trend 15 years ago when he began urging other CEOs to assist employees with adoption. Himself an adoptee, Thomas started his foundation to help find permanent homes for children in the US foster-care system. (More than 140,000 currently await adoption, according to Sorensen.) This year the foundation began tracking corporations and ranking them according to the generosity of their benefits. f companies that provide adoption assistance, it found that $4,700 is offered on average per adoption and about double that if a child has special needs or is from foster care. Companies are also giving workers an average of five weeks of paid parental leave. Even as employers retreat from providing expensive benefits like lifetime health coverage, they are finding that adoption assistance is relatively inexpensive—and yields disproportionately high rewards in employee loyalty, community goodwill and solid-gold p.r. Unlike maternity benefits, adoption assistance isn't covered by medical or disability insurance, meaning the entire cost must come directly from an employer's pocket. Still, only 0.5% of employees tap adoption benefits, but the assistance is so appreciated that workers gush about it to colleagues, spreading the warm, fuzzy corporate feelings. "Not to cheapen it, but it's cost-effective goodwill," says Sorensen, "one that doesn't hit the bottom line very hard." Greg Rasin, a partner with Proskauer Rose who advises employers on benefits, points out that at the very least, the Families and Medical Leave Act compels employers with more than 50 workers to provide up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave. Legal bonus: offering adoption benefits might shield them from lawsuits by workers seeking parity with those who receive maternity leave. Offering adoption assistance was an easy call for Steve Steinour, CEO of Citizens Financial Group and the father of two adopted children. "We knew from experience that for most Americans, adoption is an unaffordable option," he says. Citizens—a bank based in Providence, R.I., with 25,000 employees—provides up to $21,000 in aid, a sum that helped put it at the top of the Dave Thomas Foundation's list of adoption-friendly workplaces. Though Steinour says retention is much greater among the 100 or so workers who have used the benefits, he admits that this impact is hard to quantify for shareholders. "You can't translate everything into a direct payback," he says. Payback comes in the form of loyalty and gratitude from employees like Paula Cavallaro, a Citizens trust administrator. Already the parents of Amanda, 12, Cavallaro and her husband had "talked and talked" about adopting another child. The Cavallaros received $10,000 from Citizens to adopt Anny, 13, from Colombia last summer (employees receive more for special-needs adoptions). "We would still have done it, but having the benefit just made it so much easier," says Cavallaro, 48. "I will always, always, always be grateful for the help."

Marjorie McMillan, head of radiology at a veterinary hospital, found out by reading a letter to the editor in her local newspaper. Pamela Goodwin, a labor-relations expert at General Motors, happened to see a computer printout. Stephanie Odle, an assistant manager at a Sam's Club store, was slipped a co-worker's tax form. Purely by accident, these women learned they were making less than their male or, in Goodwin's case, white colleagues at work. Each sued for pay discrimination under federal law, lucky enough to discover what typically stays a secret. "People don't just stand around the watercooler to talk about how much they make," says McMillan. This, as they say, is the real world, one in which people would rather discuss their sex lives than salaries. And about a third of private employers actually prohibit employees from sharing pay information. It is also a world that the US Supreme Court seems unfamiliar with. The Justices recently decided 5 to 4 that workers are out of luck if they file a complaint under Title VII—the main federal antidiscrimination law—more than 180 days after their salary is set. That's six measly months to find out what your co-workers are making so that you can tell whether you're getting chiseled because of your sex, race, religion or national origin. How many of the roughly 2,800 such complaints pending before the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission will fizzle because of this new rule is hard to say. Less of a mystery, though just as troubling, is how the court reached its decision. Lilly Ledbetter filed the case against Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. because at the end of a 19-year career, she was making far less than any of 15 men at her level. She argued that Goodyear violated Title VII every time it gave her a smaller paycheck. Her complaint was timely, she said, because she filed it within 180 days of her last check. But the court majority read the statute to mean that only an actual decision to pay Ledbetter less could be illegal, and that happened well outside the 180-day period. A statute's ambiguous wording is fair game, but why read it to frustrate Title VII's purpose: to ease pay discrimination in a nation where women make only 770￠ on average for every $1 that men earn? And while employers might like this decision, they could end up choking on the torrent of lawsuits that might now come their way. "The real message is that if you have any inkling that you are being paid differently, you need to file now, before the 180 days are up," says Michael Foreman of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights. All this sounds familiar. In June 1989, the Supreme Court issued three decisions that sharply limited the right to sue over employment discrimination. A day after the most prominent ruling, in Wards Cove v. Atonio, Senator Howard Metzenbaum (D., Ohio) declared that he would introduce a bill to overturn the decisions. It took civil rights advocates and their congressional allies eight months to introduce legislation. President George H.W. Bush vetoed the first version, arguing that it would encourage hiring quotas. Finally, in late 1991, the Democratic Congress and the Republican President reached a compromise fashioned by Senators John Danforth (R., Mo.) and Edward Kennedy (D., Mass.). It became the Civil Rights Act of 1991 and overturned parts of eight high-court decisions. Now, Foreman and others are working on a bill to overturn the Ledbetter case, and Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, among others, have expressed interest. A Democratic Congress may well cooperate, though with a Republican again in the White House, final legislation before next year's elections isn't guaranteed. In any event, we probably won't see the kind of groundswell that shifted the law toward workers in 1991 because civil rights advocates aren't sure these Justices are a threat to workers' rights. Last June, for example, they made it harder for employers to retaliate against employees who complain of discrimination. That left the Ledbetter ruling looking particularly clueless. "I heard the decision and thought, What is wrong with this court?" says McMillan. "It just doesn't live in the real world."

Despite the row over Russian missiles that preceded it and the mob of angry protestors outside, the G8 meeting probably helped in the quest for global stability. The top industrial countries ended their summit in Heiligendamm on Friday June 8th with a handful of agreements aimed at just that goal. The most positive outcome of the three-day summit was America's apparent shift closer to the G8 mainstream. The most important agreement was on climate change: a commitment at least to "consider seriously" the goal of halving global greenhouse-gas emissions by 2050. There was also a pledge of $60 billion to combat HIV and AIDS, with the aim of giving all victims access to treatment by 2010. The G8, without surrendering their status as the world's most powerful countries, also invited leaders of the strongest developing economies—Brazil, Mexico, India, China and South Africa—to join them in four initiatives: on climate change, safeguarding intellectual property, encouraging cross-border investment, and developing Africa. Africa was in the spotlight at the final day of meetings. The German hosts coined the term "Heiligendamm Process" to describe the inclusion of the big developing countries, in some of the G8's endeavours. The intention is to bind these countries, particularly China, more closely to policies of the G8, and to avoid "China-bashing", according to German officials. It was not clear, after meetings of this quasi G13, whether the Heiligendamm Process would catch on. The summit, held at a wedding-cake hotel on the Baltic coast, brought a surprise offer from Russia's president, Vladimir Putin. Russia's threat to target Europe if America put its planned missile-defence stations there had looked as if it might overshadow proceedings. But in bilateral talks with America's president, George Bush, Mr. Putin proposed joint use of radar stations in Azerbaijan, as an answer to American defence concerns east of Europe. Mr. Bush said he would consider the offer. The agreement on climate change is a modest triumph for Angela Merkel, the German chancellor and the summit's host. Although there was no firm commitment on numbers, the agreement accepts the need to develop a global framework, under UN auspices, by the end of next year, ready to replace the Kyoto Protocol on climate change when it expires in 2012. There had been fears that Mr. Bush would reject a UN-sponsored programme just as America has refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol whereby leading countries pledge to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions at least 5% below 1990 levels. Another German initiative, to introduce a code of conduct for hedge funds in the interests of financial stability, got no further. American and British financial regulators, and the financial firms they oversee, believe that improving best practice and their own vigilance are enough to prevent a problem in the $1.6 trillion hedge-fund industry from triggering a wider financial crisis. Beyond the smooth lawns and swish setting of Heiligendamm, well-organised bands of anti-G8 protesters kept a 16,000-strong police force busy. Several times they evaded the police and occupied areas near a specially built perimeter fence. The protests were mainly peaceful, though they had been heralded at the weekend in nearby Rostock by violent clashes between police and black-clad radical protesters known as Autonomen. The main message of the protesters was rejection of policy-making that kow-tows to "global capitalism". As helicopters roared overhead, and water cannon readied for action, they pleaded for more debt forgiveness for the world's poorest countries, as did a rock concert against poverty in Rostock, led by the combined vocal talents Bob Geldof, Bono and Herbert Gronemeyer. Non-governmental organisations said the G8 pledges fell short. Oxfam, an aid group, argued that the $60 billion proffered to combat disease added only $3 billion a year to what had already been promised up to 2010. Greenpeace, an environmental group, said that despite the inclusion of America in work to reduce emissions, the Bush administration was "as far away as ever" from agreeing such reductions itself. For Ms. Merkel, at any rate, such objections are swept away. The headline in Bild, a popular daily newspaper, hailed her as "Miss World" for achieving three goals: on climate change, more money for Africa, and detente between Mr. Bush and Mr. Putin. And, given the inauspicious lead up to the meeting, she may well have earned the title.