The Archbishop of Canterbury's story seemed rather extraordinary. Here was a deeply moral, responsible, successful family man whose whisky salesman father had been an alcoholic with few scruples and little sense of discipline. He forced his presumed son into midnight flits from creditors and couldn't even be honest about his real name: Weiler. Justin Welby, it seemed, was saved by a loving grandmother, caring mother and a great education at Eton. Nurture had won. The Most Rev Justin Welby had obviously inherited few of his father's predispositions. Only now we learn that his real father was Sir Anthony Browne, a member of the establishment and private secretary to Winston Churchill. So maybe it was all in the genes after all. The nature v nurture discussion is becoming increasingly heated. On the one hand there is the clinical psychologist Oliver James who recently published his book Not in Your Genes. He is convinced that when it comes to conditions such as bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, genes play little or no part, "there is just a mass of evidence that something has gone horribly wrong in the family". James is adamant that children are a product of the state of their parents' marriage, their birth order and gender, the amount of love they receive and the hopes and fears their parents project on them. No one is made bright or dim by their genes, he insists: parenting is everything. So if you have a schizophrenic child it's all your fault. This is a depressing point of view to say the least. On the other hand there is the opinion of some geneticists. They are so determined that it is only our genes that shape our lives that they believe parents will one day have to choose their babies' attributes: not just eye colour but mental disposition. Through IVF parents can already screen for inherited diseases. Hank Greely, a Stanford professor in law and biosciences, writes in his new book The End of Sex that there will soon be a brave new world where mothers can choose an embryo based on certain genetic characteristics. That would help us to engineer genes we pass down to our descendants. This is equally worrying. It is a form of eugenics. The Francis Crick Institute says its gene-editing research has nothing to do with eugenics: and British law prohibits pregnancies from gene-edited embryos. Others, though, may not be as scrupulous. Neurobiology lecturer Adam Perkins has pondered whether there is a group of people more likely to live on welfare as a result of genetic predispositions. Perhaps as parents we will soon feel an obligation only to produce children who will be naturally thin, clever, hard-working and mentally stable. From the point of view of a mother, both the "nurture" view and the "nature" one are deeply demoralising. The assumption is that unless you give your child the right genes and bring them up perfectly, you will have failed. From a child's viewpoint these two arguments are also devastating. Both assume that children have no control over their own fate and destroy a child' s hope that ultimately what matters is not their genetic make-up or their upbringing but what they decide to do with their life. If parents cannot help, schools must show children how to take responsibility for shaping their own future rather than allowing them to feel victimised by their history and family circumstances. Most successful people have overcome a series of genetic or environmental obstacles. David Blunkett showed you can beat both. Born blind, he was sent by the council to a boarding school at four and his father died when he was 12. He still regularly gets his face smashed when people in front of him go too fast through revolving doors but he never complains. He has been an impressive politician and a wonderful father. Oliver James will keep writing books suggesting that it is your parents who bring you up: and gene research will keep edging towards designer babies. Yet as the archbishop says, it doesn't actually matter what he inherited from his father and there is no point in blaming his childhood. As adults we can and must choose how to shape our lives

If Japan's economy has been pulled steadily out of the slough into which it had fallen for more than a decade, Japan's corporate sector has been doing almost all the pulling. Ever since the recovery that began tentatively in 2003 started to look solid, economists have predicted that households would soon take over the running, by starting to spend again after years of deflation and tightened belts. Yet every prediction of a consumption boom has proved premature, causing some to question the sustainability of the recovery as a whole. In February deflation, which last year had been declared vanquished, even made an unwelcome return. The corporate recovery, at least, has been remarkable. Companies have repaid huge amounts of debt incurred during the 1980s and 1990s. Demand for Japanese goods from overseas, notably China, gave the initial boost to company profits, which have grown for four consecutive years to record levels. Companies have ploughed back much of the cash they have earned into investment to replace neglected capital stock, from factory machines to computers to buildings. The latest quarterly Tankan survey of business prospects carried out by the central bank, the Bank of Japan, suggests that the recovery in capital expenditure is now spreading from big manufacturing companies to smaller ones, and from manufacturing into services. But sooner or later Japanese companies will have finished most of their upgrading, and worries about the American economy are growing among Japanese exporters, led by carmakers. The government also wants to cut its huge fiscal deficits: wise, perhaps, but this will dampen overall demand. All reasons to hope households will spend more. The oddity is that they have not so far, at a time when companies have been eager hirers: unemployment has fallen to just 4%. The scramble among companies for the new graduates who began work this month made a stark contrast with the fate of unemployed graduates a few years ago. But flat consumption is explained by stagnant wages—indeed, in January and February total cash wages per worker actually fell by 1.1% compared with a year earlier. Globalisation, combined with technological change, exerts downward pressure on wages. But other explanations are plausible. Jobs are shifting from manufacturing to lower-paid services. And younger workers, replacing a huge cohort of baby-boomers due to retire over the next three or four years, cannot command the salaries of their well-paid, portlier elders. But wages—and hence consumption—must now be likely to grow. A further fall in the unemployment rate would bring it closer to the point where wage pressures accelerate. Goldman Sachs, an investment bank, puts that critical point at unemployment of 2.5-3.5%, a range it expects to be reached towards the end of the year. Many newly hired workers were people who earlier this decade gave up hope of finding a job and who cannot afford to be too fussy now. But this return of "discouraged" workers may nearly have run its course. What is more, companies have since 2005 once again been hiring more permanent workers than those on part-time contracts. Permanent workers get paid more. For instance, they are eligible for annual bonuses, which typically account for one-fifth of income. Bonuses are on the rise. Moreover, thanks to those baby-boomers, retirement payments by companies, including traditional lump sums to the newly retired, are set to jump—from around￥10 trillion ($84 billion) last year to￥13.5 trillion in the fiscal year that began this month. Goldman Sachs guesses that will boost consumption by 0.3 percentage points a year. Camera shops, sellers of weekend fishing-boats and even restaurants report brisk business. Baby-boomers want to enjoy their coming leisure. As for the return of deflation, there may be little cause for alarm. Prices fell in February by 0.1% compared with a year earlier, when measured by "core" consumer prices that include energy but exclude fresh food. But the fall was chiefly thanks to a drop in the price of oil-related goods and mobile-phone costs—hardly unwelcome trends to consumers. Besides, the official inflation measure is skewed downward by an unrepresentative calculation of housing costs. Elsewhere, price increases are spreading through service industries as demand slowly grows. Japan's newly confident consumers may at last be about to make their presence felt.

______

Passage 1

{{B}}Part B Directions: In this part of the test, you will hear 2 passages in Chinese. After you have heard each passage, interpret it into English. Start interpreting at the signal.., and stop it at the signal…you may take notes while you're listening. Remember you will hear the passages ONLY ONCE.Now, let us begin Part B with the first passage.{{/B}}

On December 5, 1945, at 2:00 pm, a group of【C1】______ took off in perfect weather for a practice flight over the Atlantic Ocean. Two hours later,【C2】______, Lt. Charles Taylor, radioed back that he was "completely lost." He said that the planes' compasses were "going cra2y," and that he could see no land. And then his radio died. The navy sent another plane to【C3】______, but it disappeared too. By the end of that day,【C4】______had disappeared in a mysterious area known as the Bermuda Triangle. This is just one of many frightening stories that people love to tell about the Bermuda Triangle, which is located on the West Atlantic Ocean between Miami, Florida, the island of Bermuda, and the island of Puerto Rico. Over the years, more than a hundred planes, ships, and small boats【C5】______ have been lost in this area. Many of them disappeared in the middle of the day, in perfect weather. And in most cases, to make the stories even more mysterious,【C6】______ have ever been found. The planes and ships have simply disappeared. There is no doubt that there is something strange, perhaps even mysterious, about this part of the Atlantic; the question is, what is it? How can we explain the disappearance of so many ships and planes in this region? In this lecture, we will examine some of the official, as well as 【C7】______ that people have offered over the years. The United States Navy does not believe that there is anything mysterious about the Triangle. It says that all the accidents are the result of the【C8】______. These features include the Gulf Stream current, which flows rapidly through the area,【C9】______, and changeable, often violent, weather patterns. In addition, the Triangle【C10】______ that causes compasses in this area to point to true north instead of magnetic north. If the navigator of a ship or plane forgets this fact, he can easily get lost in the Bermuda Triangle. The navy believes that this is probably what happened to the five navy airplanes that I mentioned at the beginning of this talk. In conclusion, the navy believes that the disappearances【C11】______ can be explained by human errors, changing weather, or【C12】______. Some of the other theories concerning so many accidents in the Triangle are a little bit difficult to believe. For example, John Wallace Spencer, who wrote a book called Limbo of the Lost, believes that 【C13】______ have established a civilization in the Triangle's underwater canyons, which have never been explored. He thinks that【C14】______human beings for their underwater zoo, and that they caused the disappearances. A similar theory states that the planes and ships disappeared because【C15】______—UFOs—attacked them. People who believe this theory refer to the fact that many of the missing planes and ships reported【C16】______ before they suddenly disappeared. As you can see, there are【C17】______ the strange things that have happened in the Bermuda Triangle. There have been【C18】______ about this subject, and there was even a special exposition at the Library of Congress. Nevertheless,【C19】______ travel to this popular area. Do these tourists ever wonder if they, too, will disappear【C20】______ Bermuda Triangle?

中华文明历来注重社会和谐，强调团结互助。中国人早就提出了“和为贵”的思想，追求天人和谐、人际和谐、身心和谐，向往“人人相亲，人人平等，天下为公”的理想社会。 今天，中国提出构建和谐社会，就是要建设一个民主法治、公平正义、诚信友爱、充满活力、安定有序、人与自然和谐相处的社会，实现物质和精神、民主和法治、公平和效率、活力和秩序的有机统一。 中国人民把维护民族团结作为自己义不容辞的职责，把维护国家主权和领土完整作为自己至高无上的使命。一切有利于民族团结和国家统一的行为，都会得到中国人民真诚的欢迎和拥护。一切有损于民族团结和国家统一的举动，都会遭到中国人民强烈的反对和抗争。

Quipus are the mysterious bundles of colored and knotted threads that served as the Inca empire's means of recording information. The code of the quipus has long since been forgotten, and the only major advance in understanding them was the insight, made in 1923, that the knots were used to represent numbers. The quantity and positioning of the knots, at least in certain quipus, is agreed to represent a decimal system. A new and possibly significant advance in deciphering the quipu system may now have been gained by two Harvard researchers, Gary Urton and Carrie J. Brezine. They believe they may have decoded the first word—a place name—to be found in a quipu (pronounced KWEE-poo), and have also identified what some of the many numbers in the quipu records may be referring to. Though a single word would be just the first step in a very long road, it would open the possibility of discovering a whole new level of meaning in the quipus. It could also resolve a longstanding controversy by establishing that quipus included a writing system and were not just personal mnemonic devices understood only by the person who made them, as some scholars have maintained. That in turn would help explain the "Inca paradox," that among states of large size and administrative complexity the Inca empire stands out as the only one that apparently did not invent writing. The paradox would be resolved if indeed the quipu encodes a writing system as well as numbers. The Harvard researchers also have ideas about the nature of the item being so carefully tallied in the quipus under study: units of labor, like an ancient time log. The Inca empire, which lasted from about 1450 to 1532, depended on tribute levied in the form of a labor tax. Because of the importance of the tax for building the imperial roads and other public works, both the requisition and delivery of the labor days owed in tax were likely to have been carefully recorded by the Inca bureaucrats. Quipus were used both by high officials to issue instructions and by lower officials to report what they had done. It is easy to imagine a diligent accountant wanting to compare the outgoing quipu, or a copy of it, with the incoming response quipu. Since the quipu could represent instructions sent to the ruler of Puruchuco from the provincial governor, or accounting records sent from Puruchuco to the governor, it would have been useful for the records to carry a tag identifying the place they referred to. As it happens, all the quipu in the two top summarizing layers carry an initial set of knots designating three ones, as if 1-1-1 designated the place name for Puruchuco. The lowest level quipus do not carry this ZIP code, perhaps because they never left Puruchuco and so didn't need one. If this interpretation is accepted by other scholars, it would be the first meaning beyond the number system to be identified in quipus, Dr. Urton said. Galen Brokaw, a quipu expert at the State University of New York at Buffalo, said it was plausible to suggest the numbers being tallied in many quipu referred to the labor tax. Dr. Urton's identification of 1-1-1 as a place name would, if confirmed, be "a substantive contribution to understanding how quipu worked," Dr. Brokaw said. The proposal is fascinating, he said, but hard to verify because the provenance of most quipu is unknown. Only 700 or so quipus have been preserved, since the Spanish destroyed them as a matter of policy. About two-thirds are clearly numerical records, with knots placed in a series of levels, each corresponding to a power of 10. But scholars have been baffled by the nature of the remaining third, which embody some different meaning. Those who believe the nonnumerical quipus were just personal mnemonic devices cite a 17th-century Jesuit chronicler who reported that each quipu maker could understand only his own quipu, not those of others. But the chronicler may have been misinformed, Dr. Urton wrote in his book Signs of the Inka Khipu, because his report was made 70 years after the Spanish authorities in Lima had condemned quipu as idolatrous in a decree of 1583 and had ordered them burned. Dr. Urton believes that the Puruchuco hierarchy of quipus would have been made by different people and hence show information passing between them via quipu. This would be a significant finding, if true, since it points to the quipu encoding generally understood signs, not a personal set of signs.

Luanda was built by the【B1】______ on a sweeping bay over the【B2】______. It is certainly not "【B3】______" today. In the city centre the piles of【B4】______ have gone-public squares【B5】______clean, trees【B6】______, there's even the odd【B7】______. Its economy grew by more than【B8】______last year and it's been【B9】______ years of peace now. So people are【B10】______ into Luanda. For【B11】______ years it has been too dangerous for Angolans to travel around their own country but now they relish the【B12】______ to do so. The rest of the railway, all the way to the【B13】______, will be【B14】______, and【B15】______ within three【B16】______.People believed that if the trains ran there, they could send their【B17】______ to school and their【B18】______ to market. In theory Angola is a【B19】______ ruled by【B20】______.

Our feverish planet badly needs a cure. It was probably always too much to believe that human beings would be responsible stewards of the planet. Yet make a mess we have. If droughts and wildfires, floods and crop failures, collapsing climate-sensitive species and the images of drowning polar bears didn't quiet most of the remaining global-warming doubters, the hurricane-driven destruction of New Orleans did. This past year was the hottest on record in the US. The deceptively normal average temperature this winter masked record-breaking highs in December and record-breaking lows in February. That's the sign not of a planet keeping an even strain but of one thrashing through the alternating chills and night sweats of a serious illness. A crisis of this magnitude clearly calls for action that is both bottom-up and top-down. Though there is some debate about how much difference individuals can make, there is little question that the most powerful players— government and industry—have to take the lead. Still, individuals too can move the carbon needle. Cleaning up the wreckage left by our 250-year industrial bacchanal will require fundamental changes in a society hooked on its fossil fuels. Beneath the grass-roots action, larger tectonic plates are shifting. Science is attacking the problem more aggressively than ever. So is industry. So are architects and lawmakers and urban planners. The world is awakened to the problem in a way it never has been before.

Radio's got a problem. Although some 200 million people tune in each week to hear their favorite overcaffeinated DJ or catch those crucial rush-hour traffic updates, it's getting tougher to hold listeners' attention. Facing flat revenues and competition ranging from iPods to music phones, the 87-year-old industry is scrambling to reinvent itself. But not even satellite radio or the new HD format addresses this analog medium's fundamental flaw: it doesn't give people any say in which songs they hear. If you don't like a track or a DJ, your only option is to turn the dial—or turn it off. That could change if the pioneers behind personalized radio continue to win over music lovers who are burned out on regular radio but can't be bothered to constantly refresh their iPods with 99￠ iTunes. On websites such as Last.fm, Pandora.com and the new Slacker.com personalized radio lets you train it to understand your tastes. You can, of course, just listen to the music passively as it plays on your computer. But it's even better when you make it your own, by marking each song as a favorite, skipping past it or banishing it from the station's playlist altogether. And despite growing concern about how proposed new royalty fees for Internet radio stations could hamper the industry's growth, on May 23 Sprint became the first wireless carrier to offer personalized radio on its phones. Each customizable radio service has its own way of assessing what you like. Pandora refers to its database of more than 600,000 major-label songs—all of which have been categorized by musical attributes such as voice, tonality and chromatic harmony—then serves up similar-sounding tracks. That can get a little monotonous, so Slacker, which launched in March, uses professional DJs to dream up constantly changing playlists that give you more variety while still adhering to your basic tastes. If you ask for Gwen Stefani, for example, you'll also get the Cars, Talking Heads and Bjork in addition to more obvious matches such as Blondie and Madonna. And Last.fm, which is based in London, taps into the collective wisdom of its 20 million users worldwide. For example, if you like Beyonce, and other Last.fm members who like Beyonce also listen to Mary J. Blige, then the service will put Mary on your playlist as well. Personalized radio isn't just a quirky idea for tech geeks to fawn over and venture capitalists to gamble their millions on. Although its revenues are minuscule compared with the $21 billion of the terrestrial-radio industry, more than 4 million people in the US visit Pandora and Last.fm each month, according to comScore Media Metrix. That makes them the fifth and sixth most popular Web radio stations in the country. "It's the ideal middle ground between having an intact experience and being in control of what you receive," says Last.fm co-founder Martin Stiksel. Making personalized radio portable could be the key to its long-term success. "The biggest problem with Internet radio is that it's stuck on the PC," says Slacker CEO Dennis Mudd. "What you really want is this device you can play in your living room, in your car or in the desert walking around." In addition to Sprint's move to put Pandora on phones, SanDisk recently demonstrated a prototype portable player that could run Pandora, and Slacker plans to sell a $150 iPod-like player this summer that can get wireless music downloads from its website. Unlike iTunes, music from Slacker is free. "Most people don't want to pay for radio," says Mudd, who hopes to bring in revenue through audio advertising spots. That model is showing some promise. The overall Internet-radio market brought in more than $400 million in ad revenue last year, according to JPMorgan Chase. About half of that came from online ads on websites owned by conventional radio broadcasters like CBS Radio and Clear Channel. "Internet radio, when you tie it in with our business model, I think it works," says Clear Channel CEO Mark Mays, who is beefing up his stations' Web presence with online videos and promotions. Even old-school DJs see the appeal of personalized radio. Elvis Duran, who hosts a popular morning show on New York City's Z100, says he could imagine a future in which listeners wake up to some comedy and conversation from the show followed by three songs tailored to their tastes. But he doesn't expect live DJs to become obsolete: "When people wake up in the morning, it's good to hear some people who are talking about interesting topics and who let you know, hey, the world's still spinning and I can go out there." Good idea. No wonder Apple never built a radio tuner in the iPod: it's scared of the competition.

Suicide bombers in Iraq have staged a deadly surge of their own, striking three targets on Mondays— including the highly fortified Mansour Hotel in central Baghdad. Early reports put the combined death toll at 50, and climbing. But how are militant groups sneaking their bombs and bombers past the giant security dragnet around Baghdad? There are over 70,000 US and Iraqi soldiers and Iraqi policemen spread across the city, conducting house-to-house searches and street patrols, walling off entire neighborhoods and setting up hundreds of checkpoints. An ongoing TIME investigation has turned up several tactics insurgents use to evade detection and get past the security arrangements. Most of the tactics are designed to exploit the ineptitude of Iraqi security forces—the 30,000 soldiers and 21,000 police who are meant to support US troops. Lacking in training, equipment and motivation, the Iraqis are the soft underbelly of the surge. A US military internal assessment of the surge in late May showed that they are often unable to perform the simplest tasks, like manning checkpoints. And insurgent groups take full advantage, easily slipping men and munitions in and out of neighborhoods guarded by Iraqi soldiers and police. The simplest ruses work best, as the field commander of one insurgent group told me: "They never check cars with families, or children, or old people. If you have a woman passenger, you can drive past 50 checkpoints with a trunk full of C4, and you won't be stopped once." Even so, some insurgent groups are taking precautions, giving their fighters new ID cards and papers with government markings that look remarkably authentic. Some don't need to: another insurgent commander told me his group has recruited many government officials and even soldiers. "I'm bringing weapons into the city in official cars," he said. In the Abu Ghraib area west of Baghdad, some fighters in the Brigades of the 1920 Revolution say they have been ordered to sign up for the Iraqi Army in order to get official papers that would allow them to move freely in the city. Perhaps the most telling indication of the ineffectiveness of Iraq checkpoints is that the black market prices of weapons and ammunition have remained unchanged since the start of the surge. A Chinese-made AK-47, the cheapest on the market, goes for $200, the same price as in January; the Russian model is similarly unchanged at $700. A crate of 750 bullets is now cheaper at $325; the January price was $400. The incompetence of Iraqi forces helps to explain why, after a sharp drop in the early weeks of the surge, the civilian death toll from sectarian violence has begun to climb. Nearly 2,000 Iraqis were killed in May, the highest since the start of the security crackdown. The familiar signs of Shi'ite militia activity have returned: grossly mutilated bodies of Sunnis are turning up in the streets and Sunni residents in mixed neighborhoods are again being forced out of their homes. Sunni suicide bombings have multiplied, too. At least one Sunni group has adapted its "martyrdom operations" to eliminate the risk to its own fighters. The al-Qaeda-linked Ayesha Brigade plants bombs in cars owned by Shi'ites and, when the unwitting owners drive them into a crowded area, detonate them by remote control. The videotape of one such operation, bearing the date stamp March 26, was showed to TIME by an insurgent who said he had participated in at least six such operations. (We were not allowed to make a copy since the video had not been edited and the faces of several of the Ayesha Brigade fighters were clearly visible.) In the video, a Shi'ite man named Hassan is "kidnapped" by fighters claiming to represent the Mahdi Army, a well-known Shi'ite militia. When he claims to have connections in the militia, they let him go and follow his car at a discreet distance. The man operating the camera intones, "He doesn't know that while he was being interrogated, we put a bomb in the boot." Hassan's car is waved through two police checkpoints before it arrives at a crowded square named after the 19th century Iraqi poet al-Rusafi. When he stops, the cameraman begins to shout, "God is great! God is great!" A man sitting next to him is shown dialing a cellphone, evidently to set off the bomb. A huge explosion is heard, and the video ends with scenes of people fleeing from the scene. Iraqi authorities have confirmed that two men were killed and seven injured in a March 26 bombing in Rusafi Square, but would not say if the Ayesha Brigade was involved.

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

There may be nothing more American than the home-mortgage deduction which came into being in 1913— two years before the New York Yankees wore pinstripes. This deduction has helped make the American Dream affordable and has contributed to a run-up in the homeownership rate to 69% from 44% during World War II. In recent years, the mortgage deduction hasn't just helped folks get into a house, it has given them the most valuable tool for managing their finances since the piggy bank: tax-deductible home-equity loans and lines of credit. Just try to find a rate on a credit card or construction loan that, after adjusting for taxes, comes to around 4%, as it does with home-equity borrowing. People have been tapping into this low-cost source of funds for college tuition, vacations and other spending that bailed us out of the last recession. Now they want to take it away. A presidential panel last week suggested eliminating the interest deduction on all types of home-equity borrowing and replacing it with a 15% tax credit for a principal residence. Is this lunacy? From the homeowner's perspective, it sure seems like it. Lawmakers have toyed with curbing the mortgage deduction for 30 years, both for utilitarian reasons (to boost tax revenue) and philosophical ones (to make the tax code less favorable to the wealthy). Yet each time the idea has surfaced it has been swatted away amid public outrage and the battle cries of every real estate lobbyist not sunning at his second home on Fiji. This time the outrage may be even more shrill, given the fears of a real estate bubble about to burst. "We are raising the loudest possible alarms," said Tom Stevens, president of the National Association of Realtor, which along with the Mortgage Bankers Association and other industry players concludes that losing the deduction would drive home prices as much as 15% lower, sap consumer confidence and imperil the economy. "You could not pick a worse time to bring this up," says Edward Yingling, president of the American Bankers Association. "The housing market is already testy." Indeed, mortgage rates rose last week to 6.31% for the average 30-year, fixed-rate deal—the highest level in 16 months. With higher borrowing costs, mortgage applications have been falling and home prices have been leveling off in many markets. Taking away the mortgage deduction would further boost the cost of buying even proponents of scrapping the deduction concede that home prices would take a hit, though they say the brunt would be taken at the high end of the market-homes at $1 million and up. Yet from a broader economic perspective, dropping mortgage interest deductions has a certain appeal. For starters, it's only one part of a program that would reform the tax code without changing the burden on the average American. It would raise some taxes only as much as it cuts others. The real target is the alternative minimum tax (AMT), designed years ago to prevent millionaires from avoiding tax, but now increasingly encroaching upon the middle class. Next year the AMT will raise the burden of 21 million taxpayers earning as little as $75,000. But to replace the $12 trillion that the tax would bring in over the next 10 years, something sacred had to go, and that's where mortgage deductions come in. Of course, not extending the recent tax cut due to expire by 2010 (capital gains, estate, child credit) would do the same trick, economists say. But under the President's orders, that option was off-limits. On some levels the mortgage deduction has outlived its usefulness, anyway. Homeownership in the US is among the highest in the world. Deductible mortgage interest appears to be subsidizing vacation homes and McMansions now, not entry-level housing. As a nation we are throwing so many resources at real estate that we may be under investing in other critical parts of the economy. While spending on homes in at a record 18% of GDP, our savings rate is nil and the stock market is going nowhere. But don't worry: the proposal won't get past the blueprints soon. "We all realize the home mortgage deduction is near and dear to the taxpayer," says James Poterba, an economist at MIT. who was on the panel. "But whenever we get to the moment of truth, Congress and the President are going to have to look at it. We believe we've provided important guidelines." In fact, the debate may have another, hidden benefit. If it stirs concern, maybe we'll start to rethink our move-up plans, put our money someplace more productive—and gently let air out of the housing bubble before it's too late.

The British public's vote to leave the EU has set off political and scientific shock waves that could roil Europe and the world for years to come. The decision has dismayed scientists in the UK and across Europe, as it stands to disrupt scientific funding and the UK's stature in the European and international research communities. The UK could spend two years or more negotiating the terms of its divorce from the 28-member economic and political bloc. In that time, the country will have to work through many difficult questions about what the separation means for scientists and for global science policy. The breakup engenders concerns that the UK could suffer a brain drain, either because their funding suffers or because the loss of the EU guarantee of free movement across member states causes scientists to lose their status in the UK, or to not feel welcome. The Brexit might possibly cause potential damage to the UK's reputation as a destination for top-flight researchers. Also at stake is European funding for the UK's research universities, which totals more than a billion pounds per year. The UK's departure from the EU may also diminish the country's role in influencing the union's research plans. "In almost every area of science now, you can't be a lone wolf and do it on your own," says Philip Jones, research director of the University of East Anglia. "You have to work with others. And the EU provides that potential. "

______

Since a gigantic Sainsbury is my local corner shop, I have a purseful of those coupons: "Here's ￡l. 45 off your next visit", etc. But lately I've felt 1 deserve another voucher: "Here's a tax rebate on the cash you pay our low-paid workers so they can subsist. " The chances are they couldn't get by without you. A survey of Sainsbury employees by Unite last year found that 60% relied upon government working tax credits to top up their salaries. Even so, in the previous six months, a third had resorted to borrowing money to settle their bills. Low pay is always seen as a leftie, bleeding-heart issue. Poor oppressed workers. Aux barricades! Rather it should raise the blood pressure of every taxpayer. The constant conniptions of supermarkets competing for market share, discounting their rivals, fighting off the German upstarts Aldi and Lidl, distract from the fact that they are vastly wealthy. Sainsbury's underlying profits for 2012-13 were ￡758 million: these have trebled in a decade. Who could begrudge Sainsbury's new CEO Mike Coupe his ￡900,000 basic salary, if only he paid all his 157,000 retail staff enough to live on without you and me chipping in? But he doesn't and, bizarrely, no one is inclined to make him. Voters abhor a high welfare bill or the notion that benefits arc rising faster than wages. But if the chancellor wanted to take ￡300 a year from every low-paid household, ￡490 from families with children, could he not at least have added: "I call upon our friends in business to make up the difference: to help cut the welfare bill, by paying all their employees a living wage. " Because the problem is not just soaring welfare but stagnating wages. For the first time in British history, the majority of those classified in poverty already have jobs. In the last decade, food bills have increased by 44% , energy costs more than doubled, but even now that the economy has rallied, wages have barely picked up. Now 5. 2 million of the workforce are paid below a rate at which decent life is sustainable. And since, without government support, families on minimum wage would barely be able to feed their children, in-work benefits cost taxpayers ￡28 billion a year. During the Tory and Labour conferences, much was said about "political disconnect" —the angry distrust voters feel towards the major Westminster parties. It was ascribed to ideological differences on Europe. But deep down, it's about money, stupid. Life is a trudge and people see no one capable of lightening their step. The idea that prosperity should be shared, increased productivity linked to wages, fell apart in the 1980s. As Warren Buffett said recently, the class war was won "by my class, the rich class". Employees know that even low-paid jobs are precious, that if they contemplate something as audaciously retro as striking, a pool of labour could rush to take their place. Companies relish their upper hand, play the austerity card during pay rounds even now times are better. When the retailer Next was asked why, despite record profits, its wages were still below the living wage, it replied that since 30 people applied for every job advertised, how could it be paying too little? While the executive googles ski-breaks in Verbier, the cleaner emptying his bin walks to work to save on bus fares. The low-paid don't merely have less stuff: they have less stable relationships and weaker health. Are their struggles invisible to those who pay their terrible salaries, or do they not care? I was encouraged to read in the report by the Living Wage Commission that not all lack heart. Sir John Bond, then chairman of HSBC, was moved by a speech from a Canary Wharf cleaner. Both then introduced the living wage. Indeed Guy Stallard of KPMG, whose company has paid it since 2006, says staff turnover is lower and morale up. Give people the means to be fully human and they will be loyal. Now eight companies on the FTSE 100 index pay the living wage. But in retail, which has the biggest proportion of low-paid workers, not a single high street name has signed up. These days our only political muscle is as consumers, choosing Fairtrade, making ethical investments. And there would be great kudos for the first of the big four supermarkets who stopped sitting on its mega-profits while adding staff wage bills to the welfare tab.

While summer tourists floated through Venice's timeless splendor this week, the city was also hosting some visitors with little time to waste. Among them was the bishop from Jerusalem warning of the "hemorrhaging" of Christians from the Holy Land. Another prelate told of a letter sent last month by pro-Taliban elements to 50 Pakistani Christian families in the Afghan border town of Charsadda, offering them the choice between converting to Islam or being killed. And, amidst the mass exodus of Iraqi Christians and the recent killing of two priests by Muslim radicals, the Archbishop of Kirkuk had to cancel his trip to Venice, although his RSVP email was read aloud: "We don't have Christian militias to defend ourselves," wrote Archbishop Louis Sako. "The situation is getting worse, and I must stay with the faithful during these bad times." It was the challenge of Christian coexistence with Muslims that formed the focus of this week's gathering of 15 Catholic leaders and scholars from Islamic-majority countries who made it to Venice this week. And nowhere is that challenge more acute than among Christians living in Muslim countries. Says Fouad Twal, Coadjutor Archbishop of Jerusalem: "We ask that when Western leaders make decisions concerning the Middle East, they also consider the presence of Christians there. Rarely does anyone ask our opinion, for we can be of great help," says Twal. "We are rooted in the region. The Muslim world is our world." One Western leader who has made a point of listening to the concerns of the Christians of the Muslim world is Venice's Cardinal Angelo Scola, host of the two-day encounter at the 17th century Basilica di Santa Maria della Salute. Scola is rapidly becoming Catholicism's most influential voice—beyond the Pope himself—on matters related to the Muslim world. From Venice, which for centuries has served as a bridge between civilizations, the Cardinal founded Oasis, a cultural and study center and twice-annual journal that gathers perspectives from Catholics in Muslim countries. The initiative is both as a way to safeguard the rights of Christian minorities, and to promote mutual understanding between the Church and Islam. "We gain knowledge about the different forms of Islam by starting with what the Christians living in these various realities suggest to us," Scola said. In the past, many in the Vatican hierarchy believed it was too risky to raise the issues of religious liberty and violence in Islamic countries. "Sometimes we have been too timid," Scola said. "We can't stay quiet. We want the encounter. It is vital to distinguish fundamentalism not just from the so-called 'moderate' Muslims, which can be an ambiguous term, but from the masses in the Islamic world." Scola hopes that working with Christians in Islamic countries will also help Europe better face the challenges post by its growing Muslim immigrant population. Focused on what he calls the "hybridization" of cultures that comes with mass migration, Scola says the challenge is finding a balance between integrating new populations and maintaining the identity of the native culture. The current level of political tension in a number of different Muslim countries placed much of the event's attention on issues of security and violence. Several of the prelates asked not to be identified by name or country, fearing reprisal. One bishop said: "Extremists are very much still in the minority, but the situation is deteriorating, and there is more and more intolerance. Being here and listening to others, a similar picture emerges. The fundamentalists are networking." Though controversial, Pope Benedict XVFs speech last September in Regensberg about faith, reason and violence continues to be cited as a turning point in the Muslim-Christian debate. Scola, who has known the Pope since 1971, expands on the ideas in the Regensberg address. "Violence is not in itself a sign of the absence of religion. It occurs when the worst poisons of the surrounding culture have infested religion," says Scola. "You need a strong link between faith and reason in order to purify religion." Cairo-born, Beirut-based Professor Samir Khalil Samir, a Jesuit expert on Islam, says that Benedict is "going farther?(and) deeper" in his approach toward the Muslim world than Pope John Paul II. "He does not want to reduce or to chill the dialogue," Samir says of Benedict. "But he is looking for a dialogue that is real, rather than diplomatic. We are not looking for conflict, but we're also not going to avoid the hot points."

Sexual allure is often hinted as being the prize for buying this or that. Yet advertising wares during commercial breaks in programmes with an erotic theme can be tricky: the minds of viewers tend to be preoccupied with what they have just seen and the advertisement is ignored. New research now suggests that even if the commercial is made sexually enticing, people still fail to remember it. Ellie Parker and Adrian Furnham of University College London devised an experiment to test three ideas. The first was to confirm that men and women alike would struggle to remember the brand of a product that was advertised during a break in a programme that contained sex. The second was that commercials that had an erotic element would be recalled more readily than those that did not. Finally they wanted to know whether people would remember the advertisement more easily if its theme contrasted with the programme into which it had been inserted. They recruited 60 young adults and divided them into four groups. The first and third groups were treated to an episode of Sex and the City called "Was it good for you?" in which the four female characters try to ascertain whether they are good in bed. It includes kissing, foreplay, nudity and sex scenes, and a discussion of the merits of sex, sexual failings and homosexuality. The second and fourth groups were shown an episode of Malcolm in the Middle, about the second-eldest of three boys raised at home in a dysfunctional family. It contained no such titillating material. During a commercial break in the screenings, the researchers showed the first and second groups a series of six advertisements for products including shampoo, perfume and beer, all of which played on sex. The third and fourth groups were also shown a series of six advertisements for the same type of products that did not employ eroticism. They then asked their subjects about what they had seen. The results are published in the March issue of Applied Cognitive Psychology. Those who had watched Sex and the City could remember little other than the programme. They were less able to name which brands had been advertised than were the groups that had watched Malcolm in the Middle, whether or not the advertisement tried to be sexy. Even when the researchers prompted their recall, by naming the type of product that had been advertised, the viewers of Sex and the City failed to remember what they had seen, compared with the groups that had seen more mundane scenes. To test the second hypothesis, the researchers compared the recollections of those who had seen the advertisements that used the promise of sexual allure with those of the people who saw advertisements that did not titillate. They found no significant difference between the two groups. There was, however, a difference between the sexes: men were more likely to remember sexual advertisements (albeit not the brand advertised) whereas women were more likely to remember non-sexual advertisements. Finally the researchers tested to see whether the people who had watched Sex and the City combined with non-sexual commercials and those who had watched Malcolm in the Middle combined with sexual commercials remembered what was being advertised better than those shown more homogenous fare. Again, they found no significant difference between the two groups; this time, men and women reacted in the same way. Earlier work has suggested that sex and violence in television programmes deter people from paying attention to advertisements, but speculated that this may be overcome by using sex in the commercials as well. The new work suggests that this view is mistaken. It would appear that sex does not sell anything other than itself.

[此试题无题干]