问答题Our modern understanding of the importance of workplace group dynamics dates to a series of experiments conducted in the 1920s and 1930s at a telephone-equipment plant in Cicero, IL. The Hawthorne studies, overseen by Harvard Business School professor Elton Mayo and named after the factory where they took place, set out to examine the relationship between working conditions—the amount of light in a room, say—and productivity. In one experiment, six women from the shop floor were put into a group and then observed while Mayo"s researchers adjusted such variables as the number of rest breaks and their meals. Any change, it seemed, led to increased productivity, feeding the theory of the Hawthorne effect—that what really mattered was change itself and the experimenters" attention.
But Mayo later wrote about the six women and offered a more nuanced explanation, things changed when the women started thinking about one another and not about the boss looming overhead. "What actually happened," Mayo wrote, "was that six individuals became a team."
By illustrating the power of interpersonal relationships, the Hawthorne studies helped birth the field of industrial psychology and the obsession with teamwork that we feel every time we haul ourselve, s to a corporate retreat designed to help us better bond with co-workers. But the world of work has changed quite a bit during the past 80 years. The idea that the power of the group comes primarily from the group itself is as outdated as the rotary dial, according to Deborah Ancona, a professor at MIT"s Sloan School of Management, and Henrik Bresman, an assistant professor of organizational behavior at INSEAD, who have written a book, X-Teams: How to Build Teams That Lead, Innovate and Succeed.
The authors harness decades of their research and conclude that external relationships are just as important as internal ones in predicting team success. A lot of the time that a team spends building trust and a collegial spirit, they find, would be better spent scouting for outside sources of new ideas, generating enthusiasm for what the team is doing among upper managers and communicating with everyone the group"s work touches, from customers to tech support.
Ancona started in the 1970s studying groups of professionals, including nurses, communications-equipment salesmen and drug researchers. She notes that the conventional wisdom about what makes a team work, such as clearly delineated roles and team spirit, tends to correspond to team-member satisfaction, but those variables often don"t line up with financial metrics like sales revenue. "The internal model is burned into our brains," she says, "but research and the actual experience of many managers demonstrate that a team can function very well internally and still not deliver desired results. In the real world, good teams, according to our own definition, often fail."
The nature of work has changed since Hawthorne, so teamwork alone isn"t enough. Companies that thrive in the knowledge-driven global economy are spread out, with loose hierarchies, not rigid centralized structures. They depend on complex, constantly changing streams of information that can"t be contained by any one source. And the tasks of groups within these firms link them to people within the company and without. The distributed-yet-interconnected character of contemporary work dictates reaching outward, but years of morale-building retreats and consultants persuade us to keep looking in.
So Ancona and Bresman have laid out a framework for doing it another way. In X-Teams—their name for groups that get it right—the authors dive into the nitty-gritty details of engineering a better team: how to reach outward, build a support structure, be more flexible and navigate a corporate culture that might be less than enthusiastic about border crossing. They use examples from teams at Microsoft, Motorola, Toyota and Southwest Airlines and describe in depth how a team at Merrill Lynch created a distressed-equities desk that spanned debt and equity—something that had never been done before—one of some hundred X-team projects Ancona has helped foster.
The authors don"t entirely ignore the internal workings of teams. They acknowledge that what happens between team members is half the game but argue that it"s the overemphasized, overanalyzed half. In their rendering, inner dynamics are best understood as they relate to the team"s efforts to reach outward. That means shared timelines, transparent decision making and frequent meetings to integrate knowledge and efforts. And a bedrock for any successful team is a culture that supports frank discussion, even if it"s about bad news or mistakes. How do you cultivate that sort of environment? Well, there might just be some use for corporate retreats after all.
问答题舒舍予，字老舍，现年四十岁，面黄无须，生于北平，三岁失怙，可谓无父，志学之年，帝王不存，可谓无君，无父无君，特别孝爱老母。幼读三百篇，不求甚解。继学师范，遂奠教书匠之基。及壮，糊口四方，教书为业。甚难发财，每购奖券，以得末奖为荣，示甘为寒贱也。二十七岁，发愤著书，科学哲学无所终，故写小说，博大家一笑，没什么了不得。三十四岁结婚，今已有一男一女，均狡猾可喜。书无所不读，全无所惑，并不着急，教书做事，均甚认真，往往吃亏，也不后悔，如此而已。再活四十年，也许能有点出息。
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问答题What is globalization? Most answers lead quickly to abstractions about trade, finance and the movement of people. Carlo Ratti, by contrast, has come up with something far more concrete. Working with data from AT ＆ T, the U. S. telecommunications operator, Ratti and his team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed luminous and fluctuating maps that show how international phone calls and data traffic travel between New York and more than 200 countries. "It's like having a real-time view of globalization," says Ratti, who directs mapping research at MIT. Phone calls and data flows are good indicators of how the world is organizing itself. The wall-size maps, on display at New York's Museum of Modern Art, are "as engaging as a good movie," says curator Paola Antonelli. (The maps, called "New York Time Exchange," are part of an exhibition entitled "Design and the Elastic Mind," which runs through May 12.) As flows of telecommunications data change, arcs of light, glowing dots and landmasses expand and shrink. The result is a vivid and emotional picture of a united world. The information may also yield insight into social patterns. On one map, regions expand as the number of phone connections with New York increases. This reveals a global pecking order of sorts, when it is day in New York, callers in other time zones get up very early, or stay up very late, to talk to the Big Apple. But the reverse isn't true; the world accommodates New York, but New Yorkers don't accommodate the world. "It's as if these [time-zone] lines get distorted and bend inwards into the city of New York," says Kristian Kloeckl, project leader at MIT's SENSEable City Laboratory, which designed the maps. The maps are not pure art, but part of ongoing research into how the world exchanges data. MIT researcher studied British Telecom data to gauge, among other things, the influence of New York with that of rival London. MIT's findings? New York has more telephone contact than London not just with Latin America, as was expected, but also with Asia. This shows up as more calls and more minutes connected, even for certain parts of the Middle East despite the greater time difference. Saskia Sassen, a globalization sociologist at Columbia University who was privy to the BT data, refers to these mapped phone calls as "a geography of power." She notes that tallies of international phone calls is a good approximate measure of globalization. Unlike statistics that measure high-level economic activity such as foreign investment, telephony also captures global interactions among people in lower socioeconomic groups, such as poor immigrants, thus giving a more complete picture of overall activity. MIT's approach to mapping live data may appeal to audiences beyond museum-goers. Maps of telecommunications would come in handy for the airline industry, which is always looking for ways to better understand the degree of "connectedness" between cities. At present, to gauge the potential profitability of a route, airlines rely essentially on passenger records from other flights. Knowing how much talking "connects" any two cities would be "incredibly helpful" to route planners who must estimate the number of likely passengers, says Jon Woolf, senior consultant at ASM, an airline-route consultancy in Manchester, UK. The local detail provided in the maps is another potential treasure trove of information. The MIT charts break down AT ＆ T phone traffic at 100 points, or "switches," throughout New York. This breakdown allows for a high level of detail—down to the neighborhood—which would be useful to advertisers or political campaign operatives. Globalization's losers also stand out starkly on MIT's maps. A glance shows that the information age has left much of Africa behind: few of the gold arcs representing intense Internet traffic touch the continent. Jagdish Bhagwati, an economics professor at Columbia University in New York who has served as an adviser on globalization to the United Nations, says a well-developed telecommunications infrastructure and culture can help nudge populations in the developing world toward wealth but also democracy. When people are able to communicate wide and far and access information online, they see themselves as empowered stakeholders in a society that they can improve, Bhagwati says. Phone networks in particular are powerful tools for democracy and modernity because immigrants call loved ones abroad to deliver eyewitness reports, unfiltered by the media, of new ways of living. MIT's maps are a poignant reminder that humanity has never been so connected. William Mitchell, a professor at MIT's Media Lab, says the "tremendous emotional charge" of the maps matches the rush he felt decades ago when he first looked at a NASA photograph of a blue Earth floating in dark space.
问答题It"s a safe bet that the millions of Americans who have recently changed their minds about global warming—deciding it isn"t happening, or isn"t due to human activities such as burning coal and oil, or isn"t a serious threat—didn"t just spend an intense few days poring over climate-change studies and decide, holy cow, the discrimination of continuous equations in general circulation models is completely wrong! Instead, the backlash (an 18-point rise since 2006 in the percentage who say the risk of climate change is exaggerated, Gallup found this month) has been stoked by scientists" abysmal communication skills, plus some peculiarly American attitudes, both brought into play now by how critics have spun the "Climategate" e-mails to make it seem as if scientists have pulled a fast one.
Scientists are lousy communicators. They appeal to people"s heads, not their hearts or guts, argues Randy Olson, who left a professorship in marine biology to make science films. "Scientists think of themselves as guardians of truth," he says. "Once they have spewed it out, they feel the burden is on the audience to understand it" and agree.
That may work if the topic is something with no emotional content, such as how black holes form, but since climate change and how to address it make people feel threatened, that arrogance is a disaster. Yet just as smarter-than-thou condescension happens time after time in debates between evolutionary biologists and proponents of intelligent design (the latter almost always win), now it"s happening with climate change. In his 2009 book,
Don"t Be Such a Scientist:
Talking Substance in an Age of Style
, Olson recounts a 2007 debate where a scientist contending that global warming is a crisis said his opponents failed to argue in a way "that the people here will understand". His sophisticated, educated Manhattan audience groaned and, thoroughly insulted, voted that the "not a crisis" side won.
Like evolutionary biologists before them, climate scientists also have failed to master "truthiness" (thank you, Stephen Colbert), which their opponents—climate deniers and creationists—wield like a shiv. They say the Intergovernmental Panel on climate Change is a political, not a scientific, organization; a climate mafia (like evolutionary biologists) keeps contrarian papers out of the top journals; Washington got two feet of snow, and you say the world is warming?
There is less backlash against climate science in Europe and Japan, and the U.S. is 33rd out of 34 developed countries in the percentage of adults who agree that species, including humans, evolved. That suggests there is something peculiarly American about the rejection of science. Charles Harper, a devout Christian who for years ran the program bridging science and faith at the Templeton Foundation and who has had more than his share of arguments with people who view science as the Devil"s spawn, has some hypotheses about why that is. "In America, people do not bow to authority the way they do in England," he says. "When the lumpenproletariat are told they have to think in a certain way, there is a backlash," as with climate science now and, never-endingly, with evolution. (Harper, who studied planetary atmospheres before leaving science, calls climate scientists "a smug community of true believers". )
Another factor is that the ideas of the Reformation—no intermediaries between people and God; anyone can read the Bible and know the truth as well as a theologian—inform the American character more strongly than they do that of many other nations. "It"s the idea that everyone has equal access to the divine," says Harper. That has been extended to the belief that anyone with an Internet connection can know as much about climate or evolution as an expert. Finally, Americans carry in their bones the country"s history of being populated by emigrants fed up with hierarchy. It is the American way to distrust those who set themselves up—even justifiably—as authorities. Presto: climate backlash.
One new factor is also at work: the growing belief in the wisdom of crowds (Wikis, polling the audience on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire). If tweeting for advice on the best route somewhere yields the right answer. Americans seem to have decided, it doesn"t take any special expertise to pick apart evolutionary biology or climate science. My final hypothesis: the Great Recession was caused by the smartest guys in the room saying, trust us, we understand how credit default swaps work, and they"re great. No wonder so many Americans have decided that experts are idiots.
问答题Just as human history has been shaped by the rise and fall of successive empires, so the computer industry has, in the few decades of its existence, been dominated by one large company after another. Now, at the dawn of the new era of internet services, Google is widely seen as the heir to the kingdom. As the upstart has matured into a powerful industry giant, the suggestion that "Google is the new Microsoft" has become commonplace in computing circles.
Yet there are some crucial ways in which Google differs from Microsoft. For a start, it is a far more innovative company, and its use of small, flexible teams has so far allowed it to remain innovative even as it has grown. Microsoft, in contrast, has stagnated as a result of its size and dominance. It is least innovative in the markets in which it faces the least competition—operating systems, office software and web browsers.
More important, however, are the differences that suggest that Google will not be able to establish an IBM or Microsoft-style lock on the industry. In the PC eras hardware became a commodity and Microsoft established a lucrative monopoly centered on its proprietary operating system, Windows. But in the new era of internet services, open standards predominate, rivals are always just a click away, and there is far less scope for companies to establish a proprietary lick-in.
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问答题行路难，但人生之路谁都要走。有的人在赶路，心急切切，步急匆匆，眼中只有目标却忽略了风景，可路迢迢不知哪是终点。有的人如游客，不急不慌，走走停停，看花开花落，看云卷云舒。有时也在风中走，雨中行，心却像张开的网，放过焦躁苦恼。人生之路谁不走?只是走路时别忽略了一路的良辰美景。 一个人工作的地方是小的，居住的家是小的，社交的圈子是小的，有的人就越来越不满这缺乏 变化的单调。有的人却总是怡然自得，随遇而安。世界浩渺，一个人只能居于一隅。比海洋大的是天空，比天空大的是心灵，因为这小小的心灵内住着一只时起时落的想象鸟。人生旅途上，有人背负着名利急急奔走，有人回归自然，飘逸而行。
问答题越来越多的中国人发现，每天挤时间看书越来越困难。而在过去10年中，中国的互联网用户数量激增，这表明人们的阅读习惯正在发生巨大变化。
专家将这一趋势归因于当今社会鼓励一夜成名或快速成功的社会价值观，而摒弃了过去的那种靠勤奋努力获得成功的观念。在当今的读图时代，人们更喜欢新奇的、带有视觉冲击的东西。然而，书集聚了知识的精华，这仅靠在互联网上浏览“速食”信息是无法得来的。
问答题[此试题无题干]
问答题Amid the hubbub over a few less-bad-than-expected statistics, America's economic debate has turned to the nature of the recovery. Optimists expect a vigorous rebound as confidence returns, pent-up demand is unleashed and massive government stimulus takes effect. Most observers are bracing for a long slog, as debt-laden consumers rebuilt their savings, output growth remains weak and unemployment continues to rise. There is, however, something that eventually will have a much bigger impact on Americans' prosperity than the slope of the recovery. That is the effect of the crisis on America's potential rate of growth itself. An economy's long-term speed limit(its "trend" or "potential" rate of growth)is the pace at which GDP can expand without affecting unemployment and, hence, inflation. It is determined by growth in the supply of labor along with the speed with which productivity improves. The pace of potential growth helps determine the sustainability of everything from public debt to the prices of shares. Unfortunately, the outlook for America's potential growth rate was darkening long before the financial crisis hit. The IT-induced productivity revolution, which sent potential output soaring at the end of the 1990s, has waned. More important, America's labor supply is growing more slowly as the population ages, the share of women working has leveled off and that of students who work has fallen.
问答题吾生三愿，纯朴却激越：一日渴望爱情，二日求索知识，三日悲悯吾类之无尽苦难。此三愿，如疾风，迫吾无助飘零于苦水深海之上，直达绝望之彼岸。
吾求爱，盖因其赐吾狂喜——狂喜之剧足令吾舍此生而享其片刻；吾求爱，亦因其可驱寂寞之感，吾人每生寂寞之情辄兢兢俯视天地之缘，而见绝望之无底深渊；吾求爱还因若得爱，即可窥视圣哲诗人所见之神秘天国。此吾生之所求，虽虑其之至美而恐终不为凡人所得，亦可谓吾之所得也。
吾求知亦怀斯激情。吾愿闻人之所思，亦愿知星之何以闪光。吾仅得此而已，无他。
问答题我们应该牢记国际金融危机的深刻教训，正本清源，对症下药，本着简单易行、便于问责的原则推进国际金融监管改革，建立有利于实体经济发展的国际金融体系。要强调国际监管核心原则和标准的一致性，同时要充分考虑不同国家金融市场的差异性，提高金融监管的针对性和有效性。 我们要牢牢把握强劲、可持续、平衡增长三者的有机统一。我们应该积极推动强劲增长，注重保持可持续增长，努力实现平衡增长。实现世界经济强劲、可持续、平衡增长是一个长期复杂的过程，不可能一蹴而就，既要持之以恒、坚定推进，也要照顾到不同国家国情，尊重各国发展道路和发展模式的多样性。
问答题Brains or beauty? Women are still in dilemma. A poll released Tuesday found 25 percent of those questioned would rather win the "America"s Next Top Model" TV show than the Nobel Peace Prize. And although 75 percent of women interviewed said they"d be willing to shave their heads to save the life of a stranger, more than a quarter of those taking part admitted they would make their best friend fat for life, if it meant they could be thin. The poll was made for U. S. television network Oxygen targeted at young women. And more than 2,000 women aged 18-34 were surveyed for the poll. It also found that 88 percent of 18- to 34-year-old women would happily give up their cell phone, jewelry and makeup to keep a friendship. This survey proves an interesting dissection of today"s woman and how she relates her personal image with what she values in her life. As shown in several results, women today are a complex combination of altruistic and materialistic, vain and insecure, loyal and self-serving. This survey highlights the dichotomy in all of us.
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John Reid became home secretary because of a prison scandal.
His predecessor, Charles Clarke, was forced to resign in May after admitting
that some 1,000 foreign prisoners who ought to have been considered for
deportation had been freed. This week Mr. Reid faced a prison crisis of his own,
made worse by new figures showing that offenders released early from jail on
electronic tags have committed more than 1,000 serious crimes.
In theory, the jails of England and Wales can accommodate just over 80,000
people. By October 6th they were just 210 short of that limit. The obvious
remedies—cramming two people into cells built for one, letting more prisoners
out on probation and moving convicts far from their families—have already been
taken. So, last-ditch measures were put in place this week. Some 500 police
cells will be used for prisoners. Foreign convicts' appeals against deportation
will no longer be contested, in order to liberate their beds. Others will be
paid to go home. This is one of history's less surprising
crises. By the late 1990s Home Office statisticians were not only predicting a
rapid rise in prisoner numbers, but also erring on the side of pessimism. Eight
years ago, when the prison population was just above 65,000, the department
predicted that it would rise to 83,000 by 2005. In 2002 the statisticians'
forecasts were also too pessimistic. Yet the politicians still appear to have
been caught by surprise. One reason the prisons are full is that
there are more police officers—141,000, compared with 122,000 in 2000. They can
now go after crimes that are hard to crack but attract long sentences, such as
drug trafficking. The number of people in prison for drug offences has trebled
since 1994. And, while the overall crime rate in England and Wales is improving,
it may be that some criminals are worse. Cindy Barnett, a London magistrate,
reckons the defendants she sees are more violent and have graver drug problems
these days. That helps to explain why magistrates sent 27% of robbers straight
to prison in 2004—up from just 10% in 1993. In the past few
years, the Home Office has prodded judges and magistrates to punish serious,
violent offenders more heavily, while encouraging them to go easier on petty
thieves. The former has certainly happened: the number of life sentences has
more than doubled since the early 1990s. The latter has not. Populist
politicians forgot that judges tend to have fixed ideas about the relative
seriousness of offences. Force them to increase sentences for murder, and they
will also hand out longer terms to armed robbers. Finally, there
is media pressure. Tabloid newspapers such as the Sun and the Daily Mail hound
judges who pass, or even seek to justify, lenient sentences. This week the Sun
accused one wig of "living in an ivory tower". Because most people's experience
of the criminal-justice system is rare and intermittent, such coverage strongly
influences the public mood. Ivory towers notwithstanding, it also stings judges.
Penny Derbyshire, an academic who has been following wigs for several years,
says they pore over press coverage. "And many of them have wives who read the
Daily Mail," she says.
问答题我们应该牢记国际金融危机的深刻教训，正本清源，对症下药，本着简单易行、便于问责的原则推进国际金融监管改革，建立有利于实体经济发展的国际金融体系。要强调国际监管核心原则和标准的一致性，同时要充分考虑不同国家金融市场的差异性，提高金融监管的针对性和有效性。
我们要牢牢把握强劲、可持续、平衡增长三者的有机统一。我们应该积极推动强劲增长，注重保持可持续增长，努力实现平衡增长。实现世界经济强劲、可持续、平衡增长是一个长期复杂的过程，不可能一蹴而就，既要持之以恒、坚定推进，也要照顾到不同国家国情，尊重各国发展道路和发展模式的多样性。
问答题你生而有自己的特殊天赋。你的特长可能是唱歌，写作，教书，绘画，劝导，布道，辩护或交友。你总有些特殊之处可以贡献给这个世界，有些事你可以做得比另外一万个人做得都好。你必须不断学习和尝试新的事物从而发现自己的特殊才能。世界需要你贡献才智。要明白即使是特殊才能如果不经常使用和锻炼也会失效。因此要尽力使自己的天赋与所有的技能跟上时代。
任何优势如果不用的话也就不称其为优势了。找到办法运用你的优势来确定并实现你的目标。同样，你应该意识到自己的不足之处并尽力将其不利影响限制在最低程度。切记并不是所有的优势都能够相互转换：你在某一方面有天赋并不意味着你在自己所尝试的一切事情上都有天赋。一个成功的房地产投资商很可能因为开餐馆而亏本。因此要固守自己的优势，在没有理性的判断之前不要轻易离开自己擅长的领域。
问答题Cycling awakens my inner Trotwood. David Copperfield"s great-aunt Betsey was obsessed with donkeys trespassing on the green outside her cottage. My pet peeve recently has been delivery vans parking in a cycle lane I use every day. Honed by repetition, it now takes less than a minute to photograph the offending vehicle on my phone, find an email address and the names of the company"s directors, and fire off the picture and a complaint. However therapeutic such efforts may be for me—I also have video cameras, so I can record and report road-rage incidents and other diversions they only nibble at the problem. Our roads are mostly designed for cars. And as a new report by the all-party cycling group illustrates, the justice system is still skewed in favour of the four-wheelers. Injuries on the road are only drifting down, but convictions for dangerous driving have dropped by 30%. That reflects lax enforcement, not better driving.
No surprise then that nearly two thirds of people still think cycling on the road is too risky. That is a pity. In 40 years on two wheels I"ve suffered nothing worse than a bump. Cycling is not only healthy for the pedal-pushers: it reduces pollution and congestion. I support every proposal for safer streets, more cycle lanes and tougher treatment of bad drivers. Yet my tribal loyalties to my fellow cyclists are mixed. A survey shows that 39% of British drivers admit to getting angry with us. In the southeast, 80% have "verbally abused" a cyclist. I wonder if the other 20% are telling the truth. Some of that anger may stem from misguided beliefs: that cyclists don"t belong on the roads. But it is not all baseless. Why should cyclists be allowed on the road without insurance. blithely pedalling away if they clip a wing mirror or scratch paintwork? Why do they ride without lights? Or flout traffic rules with impunity? And why are they so blasted smug?
Behind these gripes is an important point: people who are inconsiderate, or worse, in their treatment of others cannot be surprised when they in turn are treated as nuisances. Particularly indefensible are the grim-faced dispatch riders who treat pavements as racetracks, and pedestrians as contemptible inferiors to be shooed or whistled aside. We cyclists are the weaker folk when we are on the roads. We should remember how frightening a fast approach on two wheels can be for those tottering on two feet. My own remonstrations with speed crazed cyclists are mostly as fruitless and expletive-ridden as attempting to chat to drivers about their overtaking habits. (What sometimes works is to start by admiring the vehicle: "Lovely car!" may prompt a surprised grin, after which I add "but you did give me a bit of a fright back there".)
I have more luck with my afterdark project. Every autumn I buy a hundred or so small Chinese-made strap-on bike lights. When I see a grey-clad cyclist, bereft of any illumination or reflector, flitting down a dark street, I politely offer him a pair of lights. The reaction is sometimes splenetic, but more often shamefaced gratitude. The culture war between cyclists and motorists is marked by the same mutual paranoia and selfrighteousness that plague other parts of life, such as politics. Rather than escalating recriminations, the counterintuitive way out is for cyclists to improve their behaviour. I am surprised how few of us give a friendly wave to motorists who make an effort to help us. We could even try smiling. It would also help our image if the cycling pressure groups would acknowledge that motorists* exasperation is not wholly unfounded.
But the real problem is enforcement. My daily commute includes a Kensington Gardens cycle route where the authorities have optimistically erected signs urging us to "Slow Down, Enjoy the Park". They might as well write in Tibetan. To save a few seconds, cyclists also skirt the speed bumps, scarring the grass. Lately the authorities have replaced the damaged turf and protected it with large barriers, complete with flashing lamps, to try to deter us from taking these trivial but annoying detours. Rather than these costly and unsightly efforts, I would prefer to see police officers levying on-the-spot fines for dangerous or antisocial behaviour. A friend of mine was recently fined ￡60 for cycling through a central London park and she hasn"t done it since.
This does not mean a draconian clampdown on every minor bit of naughtiness: I have some sympathy for cyclists who avoid the traffic by trundling carefully down a deserted pavement, or take a left-hand turn at a red light. But treating truly antisocial behaviour with at least some severity not only reduces the risk of accidents, it also protects the law-abiding. Impunity, in short, cuts both ways. And my Trotwoodian crusade against the delivery vans? It has come to a salutary if unexpected conclusion. The council resurfaced the road—and abolished that bit of cycle lane.
问答题因工作关系，我30年来，年年要外出公干，足迹几乎遍布全国，没有到过的地方只有西藏、内蒙和澳门。可惜远行奔波间，车马劳顿，总是行色匆匆，山水的怡情悦目，都如过眼的云烟，只不过领略了一个大概，不能去探寻幽僻的妙境。我凡事喜欢有自己的见解，不屑于人云亦云，即使是论诗品画，都是持一种别人珍贵的东西我抛弃、别人遗弃的东西我收取的态度。佛家有云，境由心生，因此，所谓的名胜，全在于你怎么看，有的名胜，你并不觉得它有多好；有的不是名胜，你自己却以为是个妙境。这里且将我平生的游历逐一道来，与诸君共享。
问答题Questions 1～3
Contrary to popular belief, people who sleep six to seven hours a night live longer, and those who sleep eight hours or more die younger, according to the latest study ever conducted on the subject. The study, which tracked the sleeping habits of 1.1 million Americans for six years, undermines the advice of many sleep doctors who have long recommended that people get eight or nine hours of sleep every night.
"There"s an old idea that people should sleep eight hours a night, which has no more scientific basis than the gold at the end of the rainbow," said Daniel Kripke, a professor of psychiatry at the University of California at San Diego who led the study, published in a recent issue of the Archives of General Psychiatry. "That"s an old wives" tale. " The study was not designed to answer why sleeping longer may be deleterious or whether people could extend their life span by sleeping less. But Kripke said it was possible that people who slept longer tended to suffer from sleep apnea, a condition where impaired breathing puts stress on the heart and brain. He also speculated that the need for sleep was akin to food, where getting less than people want may be better for them.
The study quickly provoked cautions and criticism, with some sleep experts saying that the main problem in America"s sleep habits was deprivation, not sleeping too much. "None of this says sleep kills people," said Daniel Buysse, a University of Pittsburgh psychiatrist and the immediate past president of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine. "You should sleep as much as you need to feel awake, alert and attentive the next day," Buysse added. "I"m much more concerned about people short-changing themselves on sleep than people sleeping too long. "
Sleeplessness produces a variety of health consequences that were not measured in the study, critics said. "The amount of sleep you get impacts how alert you are, your risk for accidents, how you perform at work and school," said James Walsh, president of the National Sleep Foundation, a non-profit that advocates for better sleep habits. "There"s much more to life than how long you live."
The study used data from an extensive survey conducted by the American Cancer Society from 1992 to 1998. Women sleeping 8, 9 and 10 hours a night had 13 percent, 23 percent and 41 percent higher risk of dying, respectively, than those who slept 7 hours, the study found. Men sleeping 8, 9 and 10 hours a night had 12 percent, 17 percent and 34 percent greater risk of dying within the study period. By contrast, sleeping five hours a night increased the risk for women by only 5 percent, and for men, by 11 percent. Among people who slept just three hours a night, women had a 33 percent increase in death, and men had a 19 percent increase, compared with those who slept seven hours.
Kripke, the new study"s leader, pointed out that relatively few people slept so little—1 in 1,000—where as almost half of all people slept eight hours or more. The study also found that taking a sleeping pill every day increased the risk of death by 25 percent. He recommended that people should not routinely take pills to get eight hours of sleep. While acknowledging that the sleeping pills used from 1992 to 1998 were not the same pills being used today, Kripke said, "without data showing that contemporary pills are safe, these data provide the best information about whether sleeping pills are safe for long-term use. "
Kripke, whose study was funded by federal tax dollars, said doctors" recommendations that everyone get eight hours of sleep a night may have been partly influenced by the drug companies that make sleeping pills. He cited a report from a public relations firm representing the medicine Ambien, which gave money to the National Sleep Foundation to alert people about an insomnia "public health crisis" as part of a marketing campaign.
Both Buysse and Walsh have served as paid consultants to makers of sleeping, pills, but both denied being influenced by that role. Walsh said most researchers in the field had accepted consulting fees from the companies, because "99 percent of the funding to support this type of research is from pharmaceutical companies. "
Buysse, who wrote an editorial accompanying Kripke"s article, said more research was needed to pin down exactly what the connection was between sleep and the risk of death. The study relied on people"s own reports of their sleeping habits, which can be faulty. When people are asked how long they sleep, they usually report how long they spend in bed, Buysse said. That could mean that people who reported sleeping eight hours were really sleeping around seven and a half hours, which would bring them into the study"s lower risk category. Buysse also disagreed that sleep was like food, arguing that while people can restrict sleep, they cannot "choose" to sleep longer.
Donald Bliwise, a psychologist at Emory University, in Atlanta, said studies had shown that when people were allowed to sleep however long they wanted, without cues from alarm clocks and watches, they often slept 14 to 15 hours a day for the first few days. "Everyone," Bliwise said, "walks around somewhat sleep deprived. "