Adeline的economist阅读分析帖

AdelineShenUID：2630498

Robert W. Taylor（computer scientist) (born 1932).
Taylor is, arguably, the major figure in the development of the Internet, the personal computer, and the technologies that support the computer revolution worldwide.
His work is recognized in 1999 by the award of the National Medal of Technology. The citation reads: "For visionary leadership in the development of modern computing technology, including initiating the ARPAnet project -- forerunner of today's Internet -- and advancing groundbreaking achievements in the development of the personal computer and computer networks."
In 2004, the National Academy of Engineering awarded him along with Butler W. Lampson, Charles P. Thacker and Alan Kay their highest award, the Draper Prize. The citation reads: "for the vision, conception, and development of the first practical networked personal computers."
He was director of ARPA's Information Processing Techniques Office (1965–69), founder and later manager of Xerox PARC's Computer Science Laboratory (CSL) (1970–83), and founder and manager of Digital Equipment Corporation's Systems Research Center (SRC) (1983–96).[1] Taylor is retired and living in California.
Taylor early recognized that "The Internet is not about technology; it's about communication. The Internet connects people who have shared interests, ideas and needs, regardless of geography."
The Mother of All Demos could not have happened without Bob Taylor who directed funding to the famous Douglas Engelbart 1968 public demonstration in San Francisco to several thousand computer experts. Dr. Engelbart, Bill English, Jeff Rulifson and the rest of the Human Augmentation Research Center team at SRI showed on a big screen how he could manipulate a computer remotely located in Menlo Park, while sitting on a San Francisco stage, using his mouse.
"It was stunning," Bob Taylor says. "It really woke a lot of people up to a whole new way of thinking about computers -- not just as number crunchers."
Looking forward, Bob Taylor in 2000,[2] voiced two concerns about the future of the Internet: control and access.
1. Comparing the Internet to a highway network, he argues there needs to be a system of licensing users of the Internet just as people need licenses to drive on the roads. "There are many worse ways of endangering a larger number of people on the Internet than on the highways," he warns. "It's possible for people to generate networks that reproduce themselves and are very difficult or impossible to kill off. I want everyone to have the right to use it, but there's got to be some way to insure responsibility."
2. Bob Taylor feels strongly that there should be no economic barrier to going on-line. "Will it be freely available to everyone? If not, it will be a big disappointment."

AdelineShenUID：2630498

唔。。。已经5月19号了，离6月26日托福二战还有37天，如果我打算8月18号考G，那么离GRE还有12+30+31+17=90天 OMG，我每天做个倒计时吧。。。时间越来越紧迫了，不能再玩儿了。。。

T的主要任务：口语和听力。阅读写作还是每天economist吧，我要把debate拿来好好回味一下整理一下，然后aw的那些官方范文的精析继续做一下。每天早上8点到9点半好好听和说。晚上用来做economist和阅读精析，还要继续研究ETS官网充分掌握北美机考G的特点。

G的主要任务：作文、类反、阅读都得抓。阅读和作文现在还是看economist吧，到6月再做新的调整，到时需要更系统的做些事情了。类反要重新开始抓，准备先过猴哥。

5月19日 离二战T还有37天 离二战G还有90天

tasks：

8：00-9：30 听力口语

上课时间 猴哥类反

明晚可能有个跟MSU一些dean的opening dinner，回来后看economist

other tasks：

查找国内外环保企业区别和运行概况

AdelineShenUID：2630498

嗯，起床了洗完头了，听力时间。。。

AdelineShenUID：2630498

今晚去跟一些MSU的老师吃饭了，顺便叫上了Bela和小HK一起。
聊的很开心，主要是8G。

Rose@MayUID：2797727

5月20日 离二战T还有36天，离二战G还有89天。

昨天只小小做了听力，口语都没练。不过晚上跟Nathan见面倒是不得不用英语交流，加上后来和各位Professor的晚餐，四个多小时英语环境，权当练口语吧。。。

为什么老被米国老师夸口语好，口语考出来就这么点分数。。。反省反省。。。

昨天也没看economist。

task for today：

economist debate

听力口语

实验报告

Rose@MayUID：2797727

占位总结innovation的for & against

Rose@MayUID：2797727

Women

This house believes that women in the developed world have never had so good.


About this debate

Women in the rich world have made remarkable progress over the past few decades. They make up almost half the workforce. They run some of the world's great companies, such as PepsiCo and Alcatel. They earn more university degrees than men. But they continue to lag behind their male colleagues in terms of pay and promotion. They continue to drop out of the full-time workforce in order to have children, and continue to bear the main burden for looking after children and elderly relatives. Women CEOs can be counted on the fingers of two hands(good expression).

Is this proof that women have never had it so good? Or is it proof that, in a world of growing prosperity and opportunity, women are continuing to get a raw deal(不公平待遇）?

AdelineShenUID：2630498

Reporting the gender pay gap
Jul 25th 2007, 17:14 by The Economist | Lisbon
THE Equal Opportunities Commission (EOC), Britain’s gender-equity watchdog, has just issued its valedictory report before it is subsumed into the all purpose Commission for Equality and Human Rights.
They note, quite rightly, that things are better than when they started, but there is still some way to go before full gender equality is achieved. However, one minor note, a blogging point if you will, about the way in which certain statistics are presented. They state that:

Women who work full-time earn, on average, 17% less per hour than men working full-time. For women who work part-time, the gap in pay relative to full-time men is a huge 38% per hour.

While this is true, it is a little misleading, as has been noted before. Why compare female part time wages to male full time? Why not to male part time? It's difficult to shake off the feeling that it is deliberate, done in the knowledge that the qualifier will get dropped. As indeed happens in The Guardian:

A "part-time pay gap" will take 25 years to close and the "full-time pay gap" 20 years, in a system that now pays women 38% less per hour than men for working part time and 17% for full-timers;

The Independent unfortunately manages to garble it completely:

...women working part-time earn 38 per cent less than men working part-time.

But enough of such Disrealian observations. It is accepted in a certain sector of the political landscape that the very existence of such a pay gap is proof positive that discrimination exists. In American politics, a similar figure (women earn 71 cents to every dollar received by men) is routinely employed to the same purpose.
Which rather means that someone has some explaining to do about Table 13 here (please note that these are exactly the same figures from which  the EOC originally derived their estimations of the gender pay gap: same year, same source). One group of workers receives, on average, only 90% of the mean hourly wage of the other. For men the gap is 12%. For women 20%. For part time workers (comparing part time to part time) the gap widens to 25%. Beleaguered male part time workers suffer a 39% gap.
It's worth noting, however, that all of those receiving the higher pay also have earlier retirement ages, higher pensions and greater job security. They're even also more likely to receive a gong at the end of their careers as a note of the self-sacrifice with which they have pursued public service careers.
For, yes, on every count, public sector hourly mean wages are higher than those in the private sector. If we take the first argument seriously, that the existence of a pay gap is proof of discrimination, then we must ask why almost everyone is so viciously bigoted against workers in the private sector?
Of course, the more parsimonious explanation seems to be that there are alternative explanations of the gap.  Perhaps public sector workers are more highly skilled, or more productive, or take fewer career breaks, or simply have stronger unions. (Would it be unworthy to suggest that it helps, too, when you can vote your boss out of office?)  But if we’re willing to accept such arguments to explain the public/private gap, we should be at least as prepared to entertain them in the case of women.
Othwerwise, there's a problem.  While the gender pay gap is widely acknowleged to be shrinking, even if too slowly for some, the public/private gap is growing, as Table 13 shows.  That’s even before we look into the increasing disparity in pension provision. Perhaps it's time for a new unit to be created in the Commission for Equality and Human Rights to deal with this clear and obvious bias? And if we do create such a creature, how do we induce civil servants to stamp out discrimination in their favour?

Rose@MayUID：2797727

鬼谷子有一篇讲如何写例子的文章写得很不错，摘录了他引用的一篇文章。

Composition Patterns: Using Examples


One of the most impressive forms of argument (which is not really an argument at all) is to use examples of whatever it is we're talking about. It is also one of the most common forms of discourse and we use it constantly, even in the most informal discussions. Ask people what they mean, and they will surely answer with an example, an illustration.

When writing an illustration or example assignment, we will have to decide how many examples will be enough to make our point and then, if we use more than one, in what order should we use them. Do we work up to the most persuasive point or illustration, or do we begin with that and then fill in with more details? No one pattern will work all the time, and it's going to depend on the argument we choose to back up with examples. You'll also have to decide when to stop. If you're trying to define what it means to be a good teacher, how many examples of good teaching do you have to give before you make your point? You need enough examples to make a valid point, but not so many that your reader will put down the essay and walk out the door.

Be careful of the transitions（逻辑连接词很重要！） you use to connect your examples. It is too easy simply to number them, but then our essay begins to sound like a mathematical exercise. If it helps to organize your paper, you can number your examples at first and then go back over the paper and provide other transitions (another advantage of word-processing). Get in the habit of providing steps, though, from one piece of the puzzle to another.




from the Purdue University Online Writing Lab -- edited by Tomasz Szczegóła



Ten Pointers for Writing Good Illustration Essays

1. Illustration compositions are those that contain examples to illustrate an idea. Examples make abstract ideas more concrete, down to earth, and easier to understand. Examples will make your writing more interesting and attention-grabbing. Whenever you introduce an idea, you should ideally provide your readers with a number of examples to clarify that idea.

2. You should use specific examples in your paper. These are examples taken from your own life or the lives of people you know. They are unique examples shared by no other people. For example, if you are wanting to explain a vague and abstract concept, such as loyalty, kindness, generosity, embarrassment, fear, courage, joy, curiosity, or industriousness, you can provide a unique, illustrative incident from your own life to explain the concept. You can write a whole narrative that is, in effect, one big example, or you can provide different examples from your life -- a catalogue of examples -- one for each paragraph of your essay that will illustrate the one concept you are trying to explain.

3. You should use typical examples in your paper as well. These are examples of events that are common in the lives of most people. These examples represent the experience of many people. For instance, if you wanted to illustrate the concept of bravery in one paragraph, you could mention a series of typical examples that everyone would be familiar with: firemen saving children from a house fire, rescue teams saving skiers trapped by an avalanche, American soldiers protecting a U.S. embassy when it is under attack, overcoming one’s fear when skydiving for the first time, receiving an injection without complaint although you know it’s going to hurt, protecting the weak by fighting people who are bigger and more powerful, or undertaking a risky underwater project although the waters are infested with sharks. These examples are not unique to one person’s experience. They are things that we can all identify with. If you were to illustrate the concept of perseverance by mentioning how some injured people never give up their hope of walking again, how some students overcome great odds to earn their college degrees, how some single parents cope with raising their children although they have no help from absent spouses, how some business people fail and start all over again until they achieve success, and how some mountain climbers make many different attempts to reach the highest peaks, then you would be using typical examples, ones that we can all identify with.

4. You should use hypothetical examples in your essays if you can think of no specific or typical examples or if those examples are not powerful enough to illustrate the point you are trying to make. If you want to give an example of, say, a tragedy, you may wish to exercise your imagination and come up with a tragedy that beats all tragedies. However, you should always make it clear to your readers that you are actually using hypothetical (made-up) examples. You can do this by opening your essay’s body with something like this: “Let’s imagine a forty-one-year-old woman named Louise standing on the window ledge of an office building some twenty stories up. She has lost her job as an executive assistant.” Such a beginning will set up a fictional scenario that will hold a reader’s interest and can well provide you with a perfect example that you may not otherwise have at your disposal.

5. You are permitted to use mixed examples in your composition, that is, combinations of specific, typical, and hypothetical examples.

6. An entire essay may be one long example of an abstract idea, or an essay may have five or six paragraphs, each providing a different example of one single idea. You can even have examples at the sentence level. In other words, a single sentence can contain a series or list of examples. In this case, you can use exemplifiers to introduce those examples. Do you remember what the seven exemplifiers in English are? Here are the seven: for example, for instance, namely, that is, including, such as, and like.
a. Brenda brought snacks to the party, for example, chips, pretzels, and popcorn.
b. Brenda bought some decorations for the party, for instance, crèpe paper, balloons, and flowers.
c. Brenda likes only one party game, namely, blind man’s bluff.
d. Brenda told everyone to bring a French cadeau, that is, a gift.
e. Brenda selected theme colors for the party, including red, white, and green.
f. Brenda needed different flavors of ice cream for the party, such as vanilla, strawberry, and chocolate.
g. Brenda invited only her relatives to the party, like her cousin, her aunt, and her grandmother.

7. When writing an illustrative essay, you have the opportunity of using not only exemplifiers (with their respective commas), but you can replace those with colons.
a. Brenda brought snacks to the party: chips, pretzels, and popcorn.
b. Brenda bought some decorations for the party: crèpe paper, balloons, and flowers.
c. Brenda likes only one party game: blind man’s bluff.
d. Brenda told everyone to bring a French cadeau: a gift.
e. Brenda selected theme colors for the party: red, white, and green.
f. Brenda needed different flavors of ice cream for the party: vanilla, strawberry, and chocolate.
g. Brenda invited only her relatives to the party: her cousin, her aunt, and her grandmother.

8. You can organize your essay in any number of ways. For example, if you wish to illustrate the idea of philanthropy, you could write about a famous philanthropist, like Andrew Carnegie, and in a series of paragraphs, give five or six examples from his life of his spending his fortune to help other people.
You may wish to mention his greatest contribution as your last example: his giving America thousands of free, public libraries. On the other hand, you can approach the topic quite differently. You can illustrate the idea of philanthropy by mentioning four or five famous philanthropists in four or five paragraphs and what the major contribution of each was. However, it is always better to give examples from your own life. You could say in your introduction that we all know the names of famous philanthropists, like Andrew Carnegie, Paul Mellon, John Rockefeller, Bill Gates, and John Paul Getty. However, the philanthropist that has had the most direct influence on your life is good, old Aunt Frieda, who left you ten thousand dollars when she died. Then you could go on to explain all the ways her philanthropy helped you. Personalization is the key to interesting essays!

9. Do not trivialize your illustrative essay by using examples that are too trite, too obvious, or too commonplace. Of the hundreds of examples you could possibly use, choose only those that are most fitting and most interesting. If you wish to illustrate the idea of pain, telling me how you struck your thumb with a hammer by accident just is not significant enough for a meaningful essay. Telling me how you were forced to give up your child for adoption and the mental pain it caused you is a much better topic for an illustrative composition.

10. Finally, you should use examples in all your essays, not just illustrative essays. Just as you can use deep description in a narrative essay or little stories in illustrative essays, you can use examples in any essay regardless of the major rhetorical strategy that essay is focusing on. Try using examples in description essays, narrative essays, process-analysis essays, comparison-contrast essays, division-classification essays, definition essays, cause-effect essays, and argumentation-persuasion essays.
http://www.wvup.edu/Academics/hu ... writing_good_il.htm

Rose@MayUID：2797727

A special report on water
For want of a drink
Finite, vital, much wanted, little understood, water looks unmanageable. But it needn’t be, argues John Grimond (interviewed here)May 20th 2010 | From The Economist print edition

WHEN the word water appears in print these days, crisis is rarely far behind. Water, it is said, is the new oil: a resource long squandered, now growing expensive and soon to be overwhelmed by insatiable demand. Aquifers are falling, glaciers vanishing, reservoirs drying up and rivers no longer flowing to the sea. Climate change threatens to make the problems worse. Everyone must use less water if famine, pestilence and mass migration are not to sweep the globe. As it is, wars are about to break out between countries squabbling over dams and rivers. If the apocalypse is still a little way off, it is only because the four horsemen and their steeds have stopped to search for something to drink.

The language is often overblown, and the remedies sometimes ill conceived, but the basic message is not wrong. Water is indeed scarce in many places, and will grow scarcer. Bringing supply and demand into equilibrium will be painful, and political disputes may increase in number and intensify in their capacity to cause trouble. To carry on with present practices would indeed be to invite disaster.

Why? The difficulties start with the sheer number of people using the stuff. When, 60 years ago, the world’s population was about 2.5 billion, worries about water supply affected relatively few people. Both drought and hunger existed, as they have throughout history, but most people could be fed without irrigated farming. Then the green revolution, in an inspired combination of new crop breeds, fertilisers and water, made possible a huge rise in the population. The number of people on Earth rose to 6 billion in 2000, nearly 7 billion today, and is heading for 9 billion in 2050. The area under irrigation has doubled and the amount of water drawn for farming has tripled. The proportion of people living in countries chronically short of water, which stood at 8% (500m) at the turn of the 21st century, is set to rise to 45% (4 billion) by 2050. And already 1 billion people go to bed hungry each night, partly for lack of water to grow food.

People in temperate climates where the rain falls moderately all the year round may not realise how much water is needed for farming. In Britain, for example, farming takes only 3% of all water withdrawals. In the United States, by contrast, 41% goes for agriculture, almost all of it for irrigation. In China farming takes nearly 70%, and in India nearer 90%. For the world as a whole, agriculture accounts for almost 70%.
Farmers’ increasing demand for water is caused not only by the growing number of mouths to be fed but also by people’s desire for better-tasting, more interesting food. Unfortunately, it takes nearly twice as much water to grow a kilo of peanuts as a kilo of soyabeans, nearly four times as much to produce a kilo of beef as a kilo of chicken, and nearly five times as much to produce a glass of orange juice as a cup of tea. With 2 billion people around the world about to enter the middle class, the agricultural demands on water would increase even if the population stood still.

Industry, too, needs water. It takes about 22% of the world’s withdrawals. Domestic activities take the other 8%. Together, the demands of these two categories quadrupled in the second half of the 20th century, growing twice as fast as those of farming, and forecasters see nothing but further increases in demand on all fronts.

That’s your lotMeeting that demand is a different task from meeting the demand for almost any other commodity. One reason is that the supply of water is finite. The world will have no more of it in 2025, or 2050, or when the cows come home, than it has today, or when it lapped at the sides of Noah’s ark. This is because the law of conservation of mass says, broadly, that however you use it, you cannot destroy the stuff. Neither can you readily make it. If some of it seems to come from the skies, that is because it has evaporated from the Earth’s surface, condensed and returned.
Most of this surface is sea, and the water below it—over 97% of the total on Earth—is salty. In principle the salt can be removed to increase the supply of fresh water, but at present desalination is expensive and uses lots of energy. Although costs have come down, no one expects it to provide wide-scale irrigation soon.

Of the 2½% of water that is not salty, about 70% is frozen, either at the poles, in glaciers or in permafrost. So all living things, except those in the sea, have about 0.75% of the total to survive on. Most of this available water is underground, in aquifers or similar formations. The rest is falling as rain, sitting in lakes and reservoirs or flowing in rivers where it is, with luck, replaced by rainfall and melting snow and ice. There is also, take note, water vapour in the atmosphere.

These geophysical facts affect the use of language in discussions about water, and the ways in which to think about the problems of scarcity. As Julia Bucknall, the World Bank’s water supremo, points out, demand and supply are economic concepts, which the matchmakers of the dismal science are constantly trying to bring into balance. In the context of water, though, supply is also a physical concept and its maximum is fixed.

Use is another awkward word. If your car runs out of petrol, you have used a tankful. The petrol has been broken down and will not soon be reconstituted. But if you drain a tank of water for your shower, have you used it? Yes, in a sense. But could it not be collected to invigorate the plants in your garden? And will some of it not then seep into the ground to refill an aquifer, or perhaps run into a river, from either of which someone else may draw it? This water has been used, but not in the sense of rendered incapable of further use. Water is not the new oil.

However, there are some “uses” that leave it unusable for anyone else. That is either when it evaporates, from fields, swimming pools, reservoirs or cooling towers, or when it transpires, in the photosynthetic process whereby water vapour passes from the leaves of growing plants into the atmosphere. These two processes, known in combination as evapotranspiration (ET), tend to be overlooked by water policymakers. Yet over 60% of all the rain and snow that hits the ground cannot be captured because it evaporates from the soil or transpires through plants. Like water that cannot be recovered for a specific use because it has run into the sea or perhaps a saline aquifer, water lost through ET is, at least until nature recycles it, well and truly used—or, in the language of the water world, “consumed”, ie, not returned to the system for possible reuse.

The problems caused by inexact terminology do not end here. Concepts like efficiency, productivity and saving attract woolly thinking. Chris Perry, an irrigation economist widely considered the high priest of water accounting, points out that “efficient” domestic systems involve virtually no escape of water through evaporation or irrecoverable seepage. “Efficient” irrigation, though, is often used to describe systems that result in 85% of the water disappearing in vapour. Similarly, water is not saved by merely using less of it for a purpose such as washing or irrigation; it is saved only if less is rendered irrecoverable.

Soaked, parched, poachedMany of these conceptual difficulties arise from other unusual aspects of water. It is a commodity whose value varies according to locality, purpose and circumstance. Take locality first. Water is not evenly distributed—just nine countries account for 60% of all available fresh supplies—and among them only Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Congo, Indonesia and Russia have an abundance. America is relatively well off, but China and India, with over a third of the world’s population between them, have less than 10% of its water.

Even within countries the variations may be huge. The average annual rainfall in India’s north-east is 110 times that in its western desert. And many places have plenty of water, or even far too much, at some times of year, but not nearly enough at others. Most of India’s crucial rain is brought by the summer monsoon, which falls, with luck, in just a few weeks between June and September. Flooding is routine, and may become more frequent and damaging with climate change.

Scarce or plentiful, water is above all local. It is heavy—one cubic metre weighs a tonne—so expensive to move. If you are trying to manage it, you must first divide your area of concern into drainage basins. Surface water—mostly rivers, lakes and reservoirs—will not flow from one basin into another without artificial diversion, and usually only with pumping. Within a basin, the water upstream may be useful for irrigation, industrial or domestic use. As it nears the sea, though, the opportunities diminish to the point where it has no uses except to sustain deltas, wetlands and the estuarial ecology, and to carry silt out to sea.

These should not be overlooked. If rivers do not flow, nothing can live in them. Over a fifth of the world’s freshwater fish species of a century ago are now endangered or extinct. Half the world’s wetlands have also disappeared over the past 100 years. The point is, though, that even within a basin water is more valuable in some places than in others.

Almost anywhere arid, the water underground, once largely ignored, has come to be seen as especially valuable as the demands of farmers have outgrown their supplies of rain and surface water. Groundwater has come to the rescue, and for a while it seemed a miraculous solution: drill a borehole, pump the stuff up from below and in due course it will be replaced. In some places it is indeed replenished quite quickly if rain or surface water is available and the geological and soil conditions are favourable. In many places, however, from the United States to India and China, the quantities being withdrawn exceed the annual recharge. This is serious for millions of people not just in the country but also in many of the world’s biggest cities, which often depend on aquifers for their drinking water.

The 20m inhabitants of Mexico City and its surrounding area, for example, draw over 70% of their water from an aquifer that will run dry, at current extraction rates, within 200 years, maybe much sooner. Already the city is sinking as a result. In Bangkok, Buenos Aires and Jakarta, the aquifers are similarly overdrawn, polluted or contaminated by salt. Just as serious is the depletion of the aquifers on which farmers depend. In the Hai river basin in China, for example, deep-groundwater tables have dropped by up to 90 metres.

Part of the beauty of the borehole is that it requires no elaborate apparatus; a single farmer may be able to sink his own tubewell and start pumping. That is why India and China are now perforated with millions of irrigation wells, each drawing on a common resource. Sometimes this resource will be huge: the High Plains aquifer, for example, covers 450,000 square kilometres below eight American states and the Guaraní aquifer extends across 1.2m square kilometres below parts of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay. But even big aquifers are not immune to the laws of physics. Parts of the High Plains are seriously overdrawn. In the United States, China and many other places, farmers probably have to pay something for the right to draw groundwater. But almost nowhere will the price reflect scarcity, and often there is no charge at all and no one measures how much water is being taken.

Liquid asset or human right?Priced or not, water is certainly valued, and that value depends on the use to which it is harnessed. Water is used not just to grow food but to make every kind of product, from microchips to steel girders. The largest industrial purpose to which it is put is cooling in thermal power generation, but it is also used in drilling for and extracting oil, the making of petroleum products and ethanol, and the production of hydro-electricity. Some of the processes involved, such as hydro power generation, consume little water (after driving the turbines, most is returned to the river), but some, such as the techniques used to extract oil from sands, are big consumers.

Industrial use takes about 60% of water in rich countries and 10% in the rest. The difference in domestic use is much smaller, 11% and 8% respectively. Some of the variation is explained by capacious baths, power showers and flush lavatories in the rich world. All humans, however, need a basic minimum of two litres of water in food or drink each day, and for this there is no substitute. No one survived in the ruins of Port-au-Prince for more than a few days after January’s earthquake unless they had access to some water-based food or drink. That is why many people in poor and arid countries—usually women or children—set off early each morning to trudge to the nearest well and return five or six hours later burdened with precious supplies. That is why many people believe water to be a human right, a necessity more basic than bread or a roof over the head.

From this much follows. One consequence is a widespread belief that no one should have to pay for water. The Byzantine emperor Justinian declared in the sixth century that “by natural law” air, running water, the sea and seashore were “common to all”. Many Indians agree, seeing groundwater in particular as a “democratic resource”. In Africa it is said that “even the jackal deserves to drink”.

A second consequence is that water often has a sacred or mystical quality that is invested in deities like Gong Gong and Osiris and rivers like the Jordan and the Ganges. Throughout history, man’s dependence on water has made him live near it or organise access to it. Water is in his body—it makes up about 60%—and in his soul. It has provided not just life and food but a means of transport, a way of keeping clean, a mechanism for removing sewage, a home for fish and other animals, a medium with which to cook, in which to swim, on which to skate and sail, a thing of beauty to provide inspiration, to gaze upon and to enjoy. No wonder a commodity with so many qualities, uses and associations has proved so difficult to organise.

Rose@MayUID：2797727

COMMENTS:

I am happy to read this special report about water scarcity on the Economist. Lask week or so one of my teachers talked about waster scarcity in class. You know, my hometown lies in the south of China with a beautiful name of a county of water. However, because of the development of industry, the water in my city becomes dirtier and dirtier. Most of the water in my city cannot reach the standard of clean water in China, low as the standard is. As a result, the county of water is in short of water very much. Sounds ridiculous, isn't it?

Water is essential to keep living things survive on earth, including human beings and other animals. We need to use water from agriculture to industry, from daily personal life to public affairs. With the increase of population, climate change and more serious water pollution problems, we are stepping into a world with less and less available water. Some people even think that in the near future, countries might fight for water, just as they do for oil today.

As only about 0.75% percent of the total amount of water can be used for all the living thins on earth to survive on, scientists are developing new technology to make more water from the rest of 99.25% percent of water, most of which is salty or icy. Unfortunately, desalination consumes so much energy that it is impossible for the farmers to use desalted water for irrigation because of its high expense. What I have to say is that water for agriculture accounts for the largest part of water use for human beings.

China and India own only 10% of the water with over one third of the world's population. Water is in great scaricty in China. Now the government is considering about higher price of water to make people be more aware of water conservation. I think that will be a good policy.

In short, short of water supply is becoming a serious problem all around the world. We need to conserve water and try not to pollute it. The government should play its role in guiding the public to concern more about the water problem and also try to take measures to solve the problem, including public policies and technological support.

Rose@MayUID：2797727

The moderator's opening remarks
This promises to be a debate that engages people's emotions as well as their intellect.

Richard Donkin argues that the motion is what Americans call a "no brainer". Women clearly enjoy opportunities to make their livings and shape their lives that their predecessors could only dream of. They may not be doing as well as they would like. But, as he remarks, to say that they have never had it so good is not to say they cannot have it better.

Terry O'Neill produces a wealth of statistics to show that women still get a bum rap. They earn less than men, on average, and bear more responsibility for looking after children and the elderly. Only 3% of Fortune 500 CEOs are female.

There is much to chew on here. As the debate continues, Mr Donkin needs to grapple with the fact that, particularly in America, ordinary people have seen their incomes stagnate since the 1970s. It now takes two incomes to afford what one could afford in the 1960s. Are women running faster just to stay in the same place?
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Ms O'Neill needs to deal with the worry that she has already conceded too much ground. Proving that women still lag behind men, and indeed that they suffer from innumerable social ills, does not deal with the assertion at the heart of this debate: that they enjoy immmeasurably better lives, in terms of incomes, opportunities and social mores, than their ancestors just a few decades ago, not to mention the millions of people in the developing world.

Rose@MayUID：2797727

The proposer's opening remarks

When asked to argue for this motion, it seemed like a straightforward task. The proposition is what Americans like to call a "no-brainer". Well it is, isn't it? How could anyone argue that the lot of women has not improved immeasurably in the past century?

They got the vote, they got the pill, they got relatively easy divorces when their marriages didn't work out plus a fair share of the spoils, they got multiple orgasms, trouser suits, retail therapy, pedicures and the Chippendales; and they got the keys to the executive lavatory.

And when they began to get into positions of power they generally earned respect. Other than Winston Churchill, Margaret Thatcher must have been the most admired and recognised British prime minister abroad since the end of the second world war. Benazir Bhutto, Indira Gandhi, Golda Meir and Gro Brundtland all proved they had the character to lead their countries in tough political arenas that in two of those cases would cost them their lives. Women have nothing left to prove.

So why do I feel like the patsy, the fall guy, the blindsided winger in rugby who knows he is about to be felled at the ankles after receiving what in the game they call a "hospital pass"? I am conscious of some weighty personal disadvantages in supporting this motion.

The first and most obvious of these is that I am a man and, while I can claim empathy with the opposite sex, my emotional relationship with children is not the same as that of a woman. Equally the physical experiences associated with childbirth and the monthly cycle must remain by default something I can only imagine (and which my wife says I cannot imagine).

The second disadvantage is that I was not around a few generations ago to know just how bad women had it before the suffragette movement won them the vote, or how bad it was in the early 1950s when society assumed that the woman's place was in the home.

I was raised in a family that approached home-keeping and child-rearing in a practical if somewhat traditional way at the time. The mother was the home manager, home labourer and home economist, while the man of the house went out to work for the good of the family. I know my mother never felt inferior to men. It was through doing what was called war work in the second world war that she met my father. When the fighting ended he came back to his old job to find it was being done by a woman.

My mother was happy to hand over the job. Attitudes were different then, but a point had been proven, nevertheless, even as mothers assumed their former roles as housewives, heralding a post-war baby boom. The idea that women felt chained to the kitchen sink is not a myth but neither is it representative of all women during that era. My mother never read "The Female Eunuch" by Germaine Greer and had she done so I doubt it would have changed her. But part of Greer's argument was that men were the last people who could make such judgments. Whether housewives knew it or not, said Greer, their sexuality was being repressed in the consumer-driven family home.

Some might argue that the varying degrees of liberation from this repression have created their own problems, since so many working women still bear the greatest domestic burdens of the family while trying to pursue careers.

And therein lies a third problem in this argument and one that worries me the most. If reliable contraception in the late 20th century gave women anything it gave them choices. It is how they have handled these choices and how they feel about their decisions that leaves the proposition open to debate.

Once upon a time it was only men who failed to understand women. We could sympathise with Sigmund Freud's exasperation when he declared: "The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is 'What does a woman want?'"

Is it reasonable today, I wonder, to question whether women themselves know what they want in exercising their career options? Katherine Hakim, a sociologist at London School of Economics, has observed that women are heterogeneous, or diverse, in the way they handle the conflicts between family life and employment. These conflicts, she argues, have become more acute in the last 50 years as women have expanded their role in the workplace.

The expansion, to the stage that in both the United States and the UK women now comprise nearly half of the labour market, has resulted from a number of factors: the contraceptive revolution, equal opportunities and sex discrimination legislation, a growth of white-collar jobs that prove more attractive to women, and changing attitudes towards women and work in modern, liberal societies. When, for example, Johanna Siguroardottir became Iceland's prime minister it was noted that she was the first openly lesbian head of government in Europe. But that was all: the point was simply noted, not debated.

To say that women have never had it so good is not to say that they cannot have it better. There is still much work to be done, breaking through those corporate glass ceilings, still work to be done on equal pay and equal opportunities, still work to be done in removing an almost inbred resistance in men to domestic chores and still work in coaxing some men to assume an equal role in parenting.

As women stand on the brink of inheriting the workplace they could be forgiven for asking themselves: "Is it worth it?" Possibly not, if women simply assume the roles and past perspectives of men, if they perceive themselves as slaves to work, or if a woman's career is to be nothing but a guilt trip. If this is how women today feel about their lives, then the motion is lost. It stands or falls on an attitude of mind.

Tomorrow's battles may involve feminising the workforce in different ways, other than numerical dominance. As Mary Parker Follett once said from a distinctly female perspective, there is merit to be gained in managers exercising power with their fellow employees, rather than power over them.

Some have questioned whether women can have it all in raising families and pursuing careers. But that must be a question for individual women. The most convincing of all the points that support the motion we are debating here must be that women today have choices they never enjoyed in the past. It is not up to me or anyone else to suggest what they do with those choices. As Annie Lennox pointed out, in a song that has almost earned the status of an anthem, "Sisters are doing it for themselves."

Rose@MayUID：2797727

The opposition's opening remarks

The first question the motion raises is: why focus solely on women in the developed world? Surely The Economist is not implying that we should care only about the status of women in industrialised countries. Perhaps the distinction is made because women in developing countries are in such dire straits. News of the discrimination, confinement and violence levelled at women in places like Afghanistan has opened many eyes to what sexism taken to the extreme looks like.

The "you've never had it so good" canard has long been used as a smokescreen by those who would avoid or deny society's most intractable problems. For women, it is tantamount to being told to sit down and shut up. We will not. The motion is insulting, and I reject it.

It is not good that the wage gap between women and men has narrowed by less than half a penny per year since 1963. It definitely is not good that because of gender pay discrimination women in the United States are at higher risk of poverty than men, especially in retirement. Denial of equal pay for comparable work is a form of oppression of half the population that underlies lower productivity, higher poverty rates, more old age poverty, more ill health and family instability.

Women in the United States do make up half the workforce, but that hardly makes us equal. Since the Equal Pay Act was passed in 1963, women have closed the wage gap by a mere 18 cents. Today, women's median annual paychecks reflect only 77 cents for each dollar paid to men, with African American women paid 68 cents and Latinas just 58 cents (in nearly every arena, women of colour are short-changed at startlingly high rates).

Recently The WAGE Project concluded that full-time working women lose a startling amount of wages over the course of their lifetimes: an average $700,000 for high-school graduates; $1.2m for college graduates and $2m for professional graduates. I ask all of your female readers to pause a moment to reflect on this statistic. What might you do with $700,000? Pay off your mortgage? Send your kids to college debt-free?
As a former law professor at Tulane University, I know that women get more high-school and university-level degrees. But that is no marker of equality, it is an obvious follow-on to a discriminatory wage system in which a woman with a college degree earns about what a man with a high-school diploma does.

Why are women a measly 3% of Fortune 500 CEOs? I will give you one hint: it is not the myth of the so-called opt-out revolution.
True, a longitudinal survey of three Harvard Business School graduating classes showed only 38% of graduating women ending up in full-time careers. A Harvard Business Review study shows that of those in full-time careers, nearly eight in ten women reported taking drastic steps to care for their families, with four out of ten deliberately seeking work with fewer responsibilities and lower compensation in order to continue unpaid care-giving work, and another four in ten reporting voluntarily leaving work at some point in their careers (most often to care for their families). Would this have been the case for many of these Harvard graduates had high-quality, affordable child care been widely available?
Beyond the truism that women are encouraged and expected to take on the lion's share of unpaid care-giving work within the family in the United States, there are additional economic reasons why a woman with a male partner is the one to leave the paid workforce: the wage gap grows as women age (his work is compensated even more over time); women who try to negotiate for higher pay are perceived negatively; and care-giving work is not compensated in wage dollars or through safety-net retirement programmes such as Social Security.

Outside the higher income brackets, a gender poverty gap persists. Women are 35% more likely to be poor than men. Only a minority of eligible poor families (the vast majority of which are headed by single mothers) receive benefits in the United States, and those who do are unable to adequately provide food and shelter.

One reason for persistent female poverty is job segregation. Only 38% of management positions are held by women, with most women clustered into low-wage occupations including administrative/secretarial work, teaching, nursing, customer service, book-keeping and child care (these are the same positions women filled back when employment ads were "men only" and "women only").

Closing the wage gap in the industrialised world will require not only educating more women in science, math, technology, engineering, business and other male-dominated professions, but we also must start to institute comparable-worth legislation that acknowledges that many of the underpaid positions held by women are highly skilled and deserving of fair compensation.

Recently the World Economic Forum assessed countries on how well they divide their resources and opportunities among women and men in their populations. The top five countries—Iceland, Finland, Norway, Sweden and New Zealand—were followed by South Africa, which is on the International Monetary Fund's list of emerging and developing economies. The United States is on the list at no. 31, behind eight other developing countries.

Could it be this is related to the astonishingly disproportionate lack of women in political power? Here in the United States, women make up a paltry 17% of Congress, less than 20% of state governorships and only two of nine Supreme Court justices. And, of course, like many other industrialised nations we have never had a female head of state. This photo from the most recent G20 Summit says it all about who runs the industrialised world and why women must continue to agitate for equality for all:

Try to imagine more women in this picture, and then just think what we might be able to accomplish for our sisters living in Afghanistan and here at home.

戰GUID：2817568