The Russification of Kyrgyzstan
By Baktybek Abdrisaev Page 1 of 1
Posted April 2009
How Russia pushed the U.S. out of a Central Asian stronghold.
STRONGHOLD:要塞
T
he remote and mountainous Central Asian nation of Kyrgyzstan has long been viewed as something of an outlier. Unlike its expansive northern neighbor, Kazakhstan, it has no hydrocarbon wealth. But Kyrgyzstan has something that is fairly precious and rare in the developing world: a well-educated population that values democracy and freedom.
OUTLIER:离群
HYDROCARBON: any of a class of compounds of hydrogen and carbon that are found in petrol, coal and natural gas 烃; 碳氢化合物
Lately, however, a shadow has fallen over Kyrgyzstan. Last month a prominent political leader, Medet Sadyrkulov, was found dead following a car crash that burned his body beyond recognition. Sadyrkulov was previously the chief of staff to President Kurmanbek Bakiyev, who took power with great fanfare in the 2005 Tulip Revolution. But he, like a number of other reformers attached to Bakiyev's government, had left it and appeared to be sounding an alarm -- charging that Bakiyev was intent on turning the country into a dictatorship. In the post-Soviet space, suspicious dead-of-night car accidents are a popular method of assassination. And in Kyrgyzstan today, it's difficult to find a political figure who isn't convinced that Sadyrkulov was murdered.
FANFARE: short ceremonial piece of music, usu played on trumpets 仪式上用的短曲（通常用小号吹奏）: A fanfare was played as the queen entered. 女王驾到时, 小号奏起欢迎乐曲.
INTENT: intention; purpose 意图; 意向; 目的
A Siberian wind is now blowing through Kyrgyzstan's political landscape. It is viewed by many as a process of Russification. That is to say, Kyrgyzstan is becoming much more like Russia. It maintains a semblance of democratic institutions, but in fact it is looking more and more like a presidential dictatorship where the men of power are prepared to use the most ruthless methods to quiet opposition voices.
But there is a second aspect of this Russification -- namely, the Kremlin's influence is clearly on the rise. Russian investment in Kyrgyzstan has long been pervasive and very welcome. But Russian political influence has gradually become more overt. Most recently, Bakiyev received a commitment of $2.1 billion in economic assistance from the Kremlin -- money his cash-strapped country badly needs. The assistance package coincided with Bakiyev's decision to shut down the United States' Manas Air Base, a principal supply post for allied military operations in Afghanistan, and a longtime thorn in Russia's side. Because Bakiyev's main interest in maintaining the base has long been its economic value -- a point about which Kyrgyzstan has always been perfectly open -- it's easy to understand the Russian aid package as an incentive to close the base.
COMMITMENT：承诺，保证；信奉，献身；承担的义务
CASH-STRAPPED: adj. 没有足够资本的,缺钱的
THORN: sharp pointed growth on the stem of a plant （植物的）刺, 棘刺
Still, Russification does not mean that the country is falling entirely under Russia's influence. The strongmen of Central Asia have learned how to pursue a delicate balancing act. A region that once was viewed as a Soviet backwater now is an international borderland where great powers such as the United States, Russia, and China compete with regional players like Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, and India for influence. In a sense, this competition is very ancient, though the United States is decidedly a newcomer. America inserted itself aggressively into the region after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and Kyrgyzstan was its main beachhead.
BACKWATER:回水
The example of the U.S. air base in Kyrgyzstan shows just how easily the geopolitical game can be played in Central Asia. The Americans acquired the base as a supply point for a campaign against the Taliban and al Qaeda elements in Afghanistan. But nearly eight years later, they were still there, with no signs of departure on the horizon. The base fit well into former U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's notion of a system of "lily pads" -- almost skeletal military outposts scattered widely around the globe that would give the United States the ability to project its military power and resources into regions where U.S. military operations were previously unthinkable.
SKELETAL:骨骼
OUTPOST: (group of soldiers at an) observation point some distance away from the main army 前哨（站）.
While American diplomats sought to play down the long-term strategic element of the U.S. plan, the Kremlin obsessed about it. In Soviet times, Kyrgyzstan was so secure and safe that it furnished an excellent testing ground for sensitive weapons systems. Now it was the site of the aggressive extension of the growing U.S. military presence in the region. The Kremlin therefore sought to shut down the U.S. operation. Chinese interests aligned with the Russians'. NATO interests aligned with the Americans'. Bakiyev himself had no inherent interest in the base or its removal; he was happy to allow the outcome to go to the highest bidder. At the moment, the high bid is the Kremlin's, but it's possible that many bids and counterbids will follow.
ALIGN: join sb as an ally; come into agreement with sb 与某人结盟; 与某人一致
COUNTERBID:还价
Successful navigation of these waters for the Americans as well as the Russians will turn on a sober appreciation of Bakiyev's motivations and objectives. His conduct since the Tulip Revolution reveals two primary forces at work. One is the steady accumulation of wealth for himself and those in his immediate entourage. The other is the consolidation of his political position and his power base in Kyrgyzstan's strong-president parliamentary system. He has been quite successful in achieving both goals.
For four years, Bakiyev has offered Kyrgyzstan a reasonable measure of economic freedom, but at the same time, key investment opportunities have been taken by members of his inner circle. Both the Americans and the Russians have played off these kleptocratic tendencies in their dealings with the Kyrgyz government, as a study of U.S. contracting practices connected to the air base and Russian large-scale investments will show. But in the end, Russian investment far outstrips that of the West, and Russian investments are deeply entangled with Bakiyev and his key retainers.
RETAINER:聘
Bakiyev has also worked effectively to consolidate his control over the main pillars of political power in his country. He embraced a modest reform of the Constitution that shifted power to the parliament, but at the same time carefully planned a thorough takeover of the parliament by his supporters. As the vote (78 to 1) to close the Manas base proves, the parliament today is little more than Bakiyev's rubber stamp.
CONSOLIDATE: become more solid, secure, or strong 使某事物巩固; 加固; 加强
Now, however, opposition to Bakiyev is slowly consolidating, and he is very conscious of the springtime uprising that toppled his predecessor and brought him to power. The Kyrgyz alone among the peoples of Central Asia have the civil courage to take a stand against their government and take to the streets to voice their dissent -- a trait they have repeatedly demonstrated. Will Bakiyev face a tulip revolution of his own?
TOPPLE: be unsteady and fall 不稳而倒下
DISSENT: holding opinions which differ from common or officially held ones 持有异议
The odds are still against that. But with economic conditions rapidly worsening -- thanks to both the global financial crisis and Bakiyev's own mismanagement -- he has decided to rush ahead with presidential elections, which have now been set for July.
The circumstances will provide the toughest test yet for Kurmanbek Bakiyev. And they offer renewed hope for Kyrgyzstan's democrats, who are fearful of yet another form of Russification -- sham elections that extend the power of a wannabe autocrat. In the meantime, tulip season is just on the horizon in Kyrgyzstan, and with the spring thaw, citizens have begun again to focus on politics and their uncomfortable relations with those who govern them.
WANNABE:辣妹的一首歌
THAW:
v.(使)融化；(使)变得友善 n.融化；缓和
Baktybek Abdrisaev is a visiting professor of history and political science at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah. He served as Kyrgyzstan's ambassador to the United States and Canada from 1997 to 2005.
4/10
The last powerful intellectual push for pan-Asianism was promoted nearly a century ago by Rabindranath Tagore, a Bengali Nobel laureate. He was rapturously received on tours in China and Japan, where he urged people to counter Western imperial might and material with sacrifice and an Asian spiritualism.
Yet Tagore was more often rejected. The head of the nascent Chinese Communist Party mocked dreamers like him for seeking to “destroy our railroads, our steamships and our printing presses in order to return to woodblock printing, the canoe carved from a tree-trunk, the wheelbarrow.” Imitation of the West seemed wiser than atavism, not least among Japanese, who in the 1930s dressed pan-Asianism in wolf’s clothing. Any broader Asian dream must escape from the grotesque shadow of the Greater East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere, the name given to dignify Japan’s occupation of its neighbours in the 1930s and 1940s.
The powerful impulse for co-operation is materialism based on rapid economic development: the antithesis of Tagore’s invocation.
At the turn of this century, it looked as though China would have the field pretty much to itself, having brought 250m out of poverty since its autarky ended in 1978.
The chief Asian project will be to enmesh both countries into a broader set of economic and security norms, while ensuring a continued security presence for the United States, still the region’s top dog in military terms. Failure would put paid to notions of an Asian century.
Asian valuesSo why Banyan? A dearth of pan-Asian images speaks volumes, but the banyan tree serves better than most, for it or similar trees are found somewhere in most Asian countries. The banyan spans Asia’s spirituality and its entrepreneurialism. The Bodhi tree, under which Buddha attained enlightenment, was a banyan by another name. Gujarati merchants conducted business under it, and the Portuguese lent their name, banyan, to the tree. It stuck.
In early March, in Perak in Malaysia, the state assembly convened an emergency session under a tree. It was, said outraged national ministers, a return to the jungle, making Malaysia a laughing-stock. We beg to differ. An ancient connection exists between public business and the banyan tree, as between its huge overarching shade and its deep intertwining roots. In South-East Asia, and Java in particular, the shade was a place of learning and a site where rulers vowed justice. Those are Asian values to which Banyan will happily subscribe.
At stake in the debate over higher taxes is the sanctity of property rights and the principle of freedom to dispose of one's resources as one chooses."
经济学人杂志经典永恒
本帖最后由 gdreamer9 于 2009-4-14 15:52 编辑
On these taxing days, when we become a defiantly 挑战，对抗 bipartisan 两党的nation of whiners convinced that we are handing over to the Internal Revenue Service 美国国税政府 our blood and sweat and mother’s milk, our pound of flesh and firstborn young, maybe it’s time for a little perspective.
Legions before us have donated all these items and more to the public till, and not just metaphorically 比喻speaking, either. Benjamin Franklin was right to equate paying taxes with a deeply organic behavior like dying.非常喜欢这个比喻呵呵 It turns out that giving up a portion of one’s income for the sake of the tribe is such a ubiquitous 普遍存在的feature of the human race that some researchers see it as crucial to our species’ success. Without ritualized taxation, there would be precious little hominid 原始的representation.
Moreover, plenty of nonhuman animals practice the tither’s art, too, demanding that individuals remit a portion of their food, labor, comfort or personal fecundity 肥沃的for the privilege of group membership. And just as the I.R.S. depends on threat of audit as much as it does on anybody’s sense of civic responsibility, so do other toll-collecting species ensure compliance by meting out swift punishment against tax cheats. For example, Marc Hauser of Harvard University has found that when a rhesus monkey is out foraging and comes upon a source of especially high-quality food, like, say, a batch of ripe coconuts, the monkey is expected to give a characteristic food call to alert its comrades to the find. “The bad thing about doing a food call is that it means others will come and take some of the food,” said Laurie R. Santos, who studies the primates at Yale University. Yet a monkey who opts to keep mum about its discovery could face worse. Should other group members happen by while the private feast is under way, they will not only claim the food for themselves, but the most dominant among them will also beat the cheater indignantly. 愤怒的
Not everybody is subject to a big macaque attack. Adolescent males that have only recently transferred into the group are not required to issue food alerts. They are, as yet, on probation, and only upon gaining the rights of full citizenship will the young males be expected to shoulder its duties.
The more closely knit an animal society is, and the more interdependent its members, the higher the rate of taxation.这个说法好形象，美国就是这个例子把 Among bell miner birds of Australia, for example, pairs of breeding adults are assisted at the nest by several youthful helpers, usually male. The helpers provision the couple’s fledglings with a steady supply of lerp, sugary casings secreted by plant-sucking insects. And though some scientists had wondered whether lerp wasn’t basically a junk food, offered up to the young bell miners as much for show as for substance, researchers report in the March issue of Animal Behaviour that lerp is, in fact, as important to the fledglings’ growth as is the meatier arthropod prey supplied by their parents. By all evidence, the helper birds are honestly “paying to stay,” trading a valuable currency for the right to remain within the aggressively guarded precincts of a bell miner breeding colony, with the hope of better times and personal propagation opportunities ahead. 没看明白
Or at least of averting personal injury. Among another Australian species of cooperatively breeding birds, the superb fairy-wren, dominant males notice when their helpers are less than superb about paying their taxes. Should a helper fail to feed and groom the dominant’s nestlings, or to give an alarm call on seeing intruders enter the territory, the dominant male will angrily chase, harass and peck at the helper, for up to 26 hours at a time. In the case of the highly social cichlid fish, fear of punishment inspires delinquent helper fish to ostentatiously redouble their contributions to the communal nest, their digging in the sand, their cleaning and fanning of the eggs — rather like politicians who suddenly pony up three years of back taxes for themselves, the nanny and the gardener. “If they don’t pay their bill, there will be punishment,” said Michael Taborsky of the University of Bern, “so they try to pre-emptively appease the dominant individuals in the group.”
If hope and fear don’t guarantee compliance, there’s always embarrassment. Vampire bats are famous for their willingness to regurgitate a blood meal to feed fellow bats that are down on their luck. In fact, hiding one’s wealth is a problem. A fully fed vampire bat is as bloated as a fraternity water balloon, and the bats appear to rub bellies to see who is in a position to share. “It’s hard to cheat when your stomach is obviously distended,” Dr. Santos said.
It’s also hard to cheat when you live in a small band of big-brained, sharp-eyed individuals, as humans did for vast stretches of our past, which may help explain why we are so easily taxed. “There’s not a human society in the world that doesn’t redistribute food to nonrelatives,” said Samuel Bowles, director of the behavioral sciences program at the Santa Fe Institute. “Whether it’s through the state, or the chief, or a rural collective, or some other mechanism, food sharing of large nutritional packages is quite extensive and has been going on for at least 100,000 years of human history.” In hunting and foraging cultures, the proportional tax rate is so high, said Dr. Bowles, that “even the Swedes would be impressed.”
Take the case of the Ache tribe of Paraguay. Hunters bring their bounty back to a common pot. “The majority of calories are redistributed,” he said. “It ends up being something like a 60 percent income tax.”
Pastoral and herding societies tend to be less egalitarian than foraging cultures, and yet, here, too, taxing is often used to help rectify extreme inequities. When a rich cattle farmer dies among the Tandroy of southern Madagascar, Dr. Bowles said, “The rich person’s stock is killed and eaten by everyone,” often down to the last head of cattle. “That’s a 100 percent inheritance tax.”
Modern taxes are just a “newfangled version of commitment to the group,” said David Sloan Wilson of Binghamton University, the result of the invention of money. Yet even with our elaborate, abstracted tax code, fear of public opprobrium remains an impressive motivator. “It’s expected that powerful, high-status members of society should be contributing more,” Dr. Wilson said. “If they don’t, they won’t remain high status for long.” And for the fat bats among us who just won’t cough up the goods — there’s always jail.
经济学人算一个很好的提高英文的读物，不过有些遣词造句稍显做作
经济学人算一个很好的提高英文的读物，不过有些遣词造句稍显做作
chusuifeng 发表于 2009-4-14 15:28 https://bbs.gter.net/images/common/back.gif
严重同意。
Face value
Sauce of success
Apr 8th 2009
From The Economist print edition
How Yuzaburo Mogi of Kikkoman helped turn soy sauce into a global product
ReutersAT THE International Trade Fair in Chicago in 1959, visitors were delighted by the salty-savoury taste of roast beef marinated in a novel condiment called soy sauce; slices were being given away by young Japanese men. What the nibblers did not know was that the foreigners were not merely demonstration staff but workers at the saucemaker’s new American unit, who wanted to see at first hand how American consumers responded to their product. Among them was Yuzaburo Mogi, a 24-year-old student at Columbia Business School and the scion of one of the founding families behind Kikkoman, a soy-sauce manufacturer which traces its origins to the early 17th century.
MARINATE:腌
CONDIMENT: seasoning (eg salt or pepper) used to give flavour and relish to food 调味品, 佐料（如盐或胡椒）
NIBBLER: 步冲轮廓机(毛坯下料机)
By the time he reached the top of the firm in 1995, Mr Mogi was well on his way to transforming it into an international food business and turning an obscure Asian seasoning into a mainstream global product. “We tried to appeal to the non-Japanese, general-market consumer,” says Mr Mogi, who speaks fluent English—a rarity among Japanese bosses. Kikkoman is now the world’s largest maker of naturally brewed soy sauce. Foreign sales of its sauce have grown by nearly 10% a year for 25 years. Its distinctive curvy bottle has become commonplace in restaurants and kitchens the world over, alongside other condiments such as Italian olive oil or French mustard. Interbrand, a brand consultancy, ranks Kikkoman among the most recognisable Japanese names in a list otherwise dominated by carmakers and electronics firms.
CURVY：adj. 弯曲的, 曲线美的
MUSTARD：plant with yellow flowers and (black or white) sharp-tasting seeds in long thin pods 芥
Indeed, this family-owned Japanese firm is unusual in several ways. In 1973 it became the first Japanese food company to open a factory in America; Mr Mogi was running the American division by this time. Whereas many Japanese firms eschew mergers and acquisitions, Kikkoman has been active, buying American and Japanese companies in the course of its expansion. (In January Kikkoman adopted a holding-company structure which will make acquisitions easier, among other things.) Mr Mogi speaks with pride about corporate-governance reforms he has instituted, including succession planning. Since 2004 the firm’s presidents have come from outside the founding families. And rather than being centrally run from Tokyo, Kikkoman is known for devolving power to the bosses of its foreign subsidiaries.
ESCHEW：keep away from (sth); abstain from; avoid 避开（某事物）; 戒除; 回避: eschew political discussion 回避政治讨论
HOLDING-COMPANY：控股公司
Under Mr Mogi’s leadership Kikkoman’s sales have grown to more than $4 billion a year, of which soy sauce accounts for 20%. Most of the firm’s revenue now comes from selling other food products, in Japan and abroad. Kikkoman is the biggest wholesaler of Asian foodstuffs in America, with similar operations in Europe, China and Australia. It sells canned fruit and vegetables in Asia under the Del Monte brand, and one of its subsidiaries is Coca-Cola’s bottling affiliate in Japan. Foreign sales account for 30% of revenue but 55% of operating profit, three-quarters of which comes from North America. By some measures Kikkoman is the Japanese firm most dependent on the American market.
AFFILIATE：We are affiliated with the national group. 我们隶属於国营组织
OPERATING PROFIT：营业利润
The recession has hit Kikkoman’s profits, but it is relatively well protected. “In a recession, demand shifts from restaurants to household consumption,” Mr Mogi explains, so what his company loses in one market it makes up in the other. Another concern is the value of the yen: the exchange rate against the dollar has gyrated wildly over the past 18 months between ¥90 and ¥125, and is now around ¥100. But Kikkoman buys most of its soyabeans and wheat from America and Canada, so a stronger yen actually reduces its costs. On a cashflow basis the company is unscathed, says Mr Mogi. But the strong yen extracts a toll when the revenue is consolidated in the corporate accounts, he laments. A further frustration for the company is the recent trade quarrel between America and Mexico, a small but growing market for the firm. Last month, after Mexican truckers were banned from America’s roads, Mexico retaliated by slapping tariffs on many imports from America, including a 20% duty on soy sauce, which Kikkoman makes at its factory in Wisconsin.
GYRATE：move around in circles or spirals; revolve 旋转; 回旋.
UNSCATHED：not injured or hurt; unharmed 未受损伤; 未遭伤害:
TOLL：
CONSOLIDATE：unite or combine (into one) （使事物）联合或合并
SLAP：slap sb's face/sb on the face 打某人耳光
Kikkoman’s move into America in the 1950s set the template for the company’s foreign expansion. America was the perfect place to venture abroad, says Mr Mogi. It is open to new things and is willing to incorporate novel ingredients into its cuisine. During his time at business school Mr Mogi travelled across America, visiting Asian restaurants. There were very few: in New York he found only eight Japanese eateries. Kikkoman, he realised, had to adapt its sauce to the local cuisine if it was going to succeed. Kikkoman promoted soy sauce in America by hiring chefs to concoct recipes that incorporated the sauce into classic American dishes. The firm then sent the recipes to local newspapers, prompting housewives to cut them out and shop for the ingredients. In the process it started to position soy sauce not as a Japanese product, but as an “all-purpose seasoning”, as a housewife puts it in Kikkoman’s 1950s television advertisements. The same words can still be seen emblazoned on its bottles.
INGREDIENT：any of the foods that are combined to make a particular dish （烹调用的）材料, 原料, 成分
EATERIES：закусочная, столовка
CONCOCT：make (sth) by mixing ingredients (esp ones that do not usu go together) 将（尤指通常不相配合的）成分混合成某物; 调制
EMBLAZON：decorate (sth) with heraldic or other devices 以纹章或其他方式装饰（某物）
What’s the company’s special sauce?
In 1961 the company picked up many new customers by introducing teriyaki sauce—a mixture of soy sauce and other ingredients devised specifically for the American market as a barbecue glaze. Kikkoman is now devising products for South American and European tastes, such as a soy sauce that can be sprinkled on rice—something that is not done in Japan. In Europe and Australia, where consumers are suspicious of biotechnology, Kikkoman’s sauce is made without genetically modified ingredients. Mr Mogi is also taking Kikkoman into a foreign market rather closer to home: China. It is a more difficult market to enter than America or Europe, because soy sauce is already part of Chinese cuisine and cheap products abound, often chemically synthesised rather than naturally brewed. Mr Mogi hopes to establish Kikkoman’s sauce as a premium product aimed at wealthier buyers. His early recognition of the importance of adapting his firm’s product for foreign markets is Kikkoman’s real special sauce.
DEVISE：think out (a plan, system, tool, etc); invent 想出, 设计（计划﹑
制度﹑
工具等）; 发明
GLAZE：fit sheets or panes of glass into (sth) 装玻璃於（某物）; 给（某物）镶嵌玻璃
SPRINKLE：撒
ABOUND：be very plentiful; exist in great numbers 非常多; 大量存在
Denmark's prime ministers
Rasmussens abound
Apr 8th 2009 | COPENHAGEN
From The Economist print edition
Denmark’s prime minister gets NATO’s top job and a namesake succeeds him
NAMESAKE：同名或同姓
THAT one of Anders Fogh Rasmussen’s first acts after being chosen as NATO’s secretary-general was to fall down the stairs in Istanbul and dislocate his shoulder is not that surprising. He had been on an exhausting 12-month slog to swap his job as Danish prime minister for the plum post in Brussels, culminating in a gruelling finale at the NATO summit, where Turkey raised objections. The deadlock was broken only when Barack Obama marched Mr Fogh Rasmussen and Turkey’s president, Abdullah Gul, into a back room for a private chat.
SLOG：hit (sth/sb) hard 猛击
PLUM：soft round smooth-skinned fruit with sweet flesh and a flattish pointed stone 李子; 梅子
CULMINATE：have the specified final conclusion or result 终於获得某种结局或结果
GRUELLING：adj severe; exhausting 严厉的; 使人筋疲力竭的
Turkey’s obstinacy was rooted in Danish stubbornness. In 2005, as prime minister, Mr Fogh Rasmussen refused to meet Turkish and other Muslim diplomats to discuss cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in a Danish newspaper. Mr Fogh Rasmussen said free speech was non-negotiable. In Istanbul on April 6th he took a softer line, speaking of the balance between free speech and a deep respect for personal religious convictions. This conciliatory approach brought smiles to Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s prime minister, but riled politicians in Copenhagen, making more trouble for Mr Fogh Rasmussen’s successor.
OBSTINACY：being obstinate; stubbornness 固执; 倔强; 顽固
CONVICTION：the convicting of a person for a crime 定罪; 科刑
CONCILIATORY：调和的
RILE：annoy (sb); irritate 使（某人）恼火; 激怒
The new prime minister is yet another Rasmussen—the third in a row, none of them related. Lars Lokke Rasmussen, a 44-year-old who has previously had the health and finance portfolios, has domestic experience but almost no foreign exposure. A loyal sidekick thus far, he promises to stick with Mr Fogh Rasmussen’s broad policy agenda.
SIDEKICK：死党
The problems are stacking up. Denmark is in recession and unemployment is rising. Recognising that his first priority should be damage control, Mr Lokke Rasmussen has put another party stalwart, Claus Frederiksen, into the finance ministry. The climate-change summit in Copenhagen in December will be another huge task. The biggest international event ever held in the city will be a test of Mr Lokke Rasmussen’s diplomacy. (Mr Fogh Rasmussen’s advice: get an international network, fast.)
Succeeding a man who won three elections in a row will not be easy. The voters’ response to Mr Lokke Rasmussen has been lukewarm. Support for the opposition Social Democrats has surged. Public opinion is divided over whether the newcomer can fill his master’s large shoes or whether he may be an underestimated talent. Whichever it is, Mr Lokke Rasmussen may find that tackling the problems ahead proves just as punishing as Mr Fogh Rasmussen’s marathon run to the NATO job.
Energy and climate change
Meltdown
Apr 8th 2009
From The Economist print edition
What to do?
EVERYONE is green now, at least in theory. A warming planet has panicked the world into looking for alternatives to fossil fuels even as billions of people begin to achieve the sort of luxurious Western lifestyle that will, without reform, cook the Earth. If the science of climate change is fast-moving, the politics are even faster, with a huge array of treaties, promises, pledges and targets giving the appearance of lots of action—but with little actually being achieved. Three books take very different approaches to sizing up the problem.
PANICKED:
PLEDGE: solemn promise; vow 誓言; 誓约; 保证
Anthony Giddens, a professor at the London School of Economics, is a sociologist most famous for developing the “Third Way”, the centre-leftish political philosophy espoused by Tony Blair and Bill Clinton. His book argues that the scale of the climate-change problem and the difficulty of reconciling greenery with development demands a new political approach.
ESPOUSE: give one's support to (a cause, theory, etc) 支持, 拥护（某主张﹑
理论等）: espousing feminism 拥护女权主义
RECONCILE: cause (people) to become friends again, eg after quarrelling 使（人）重新和好（如争吵後）; 使和解; 使复交
The result is a wide-ranging book that covers everything from renewable energy to carbon trading and the practicalities of adapting to a world with deeper seas and fiercer weather. Lord Giddens (he was ennobled in 2004) gives much good advice. He chastises eco-warriors for their relentlessly downbeat message, arguing that people are more likely to change their habits if offered a happy future to look forward to rather than a bleak one to avoid. He rejects the hair-shirt ideals of many greens as unlikely ever to appeal to most voters. And he argues against the idea that climate change is too big a problem for a democratic system to deal with.
PRACTICALITY:
可行性
LORD:伯爵
CHASTISE: punish (sb) severely, esp by beating 严惩（某人）（尤指责打）.
RELENTLESS: 残酷的，不留情的，无怜悯心的
DOWNBEAT: gloomy; pessimistic 忧郁的; 悲观的.
But the price of breadth is a lack of depth that may leave curious readers frustrated. Part of the problem is a tendency to affectation. The rather pedestrian observation that distant, abstract crises tend not to change people’s behaviour even if the consequences are extremely unpleasant is christened “Giddens’ paradox”, and the opening chapter mentions every fashionable meme from the internet and social networks to Barack Obama’s “yes we can” campaign slogan. Overall, there is little in the book that is truly original. But it is conveniently packaged and Lord Giddens’s reputation among policy wonks (as well as an endorsement from Mr Clinton) will propel it onto shelves in high places.
BREADTH: wide extent (eg of knowledge); range 宽广的程度（如指知识）; 范围
AFFECTATION: unnatural behaviour, manner of speaking, etc, intended to impress others 为给人留有印象而作出不自然的样子; 做作
PEDESTRIAN: lacking imagination or inspiration; dull 缺乏想像力或灵感的; 平淡的; 沉闷的
CHRISTEN: receive (sb) into the Christian Church by sprinkling water on his head and giving him a name 为（某人）施洗礼（在头上洒水并为之命名以加入基督教）
MEME: 弥母，文化基因，文化传播的最小单位。
WONK:
书呆子, 死用功的学生
PROPEL: move, driveor push (sth) forward 推进, 驱动, 推（某物
Those who crave something less woolly will prefer Sir Nicholas Stern’s book. Sir Nicholas is a former chief economist at the World Bank and author of an influential study of climate-change economics for the British government. His book addresses the argument in cost-benefit terms, and concludes that spending 1-2% of global output to avoid a significant temperature rise is a bargain worth taking—a similar conclusion to that in his original 2006 study. But the book is written for a wider audience than the official report, and incorporates some more recent (and worrying) findings from climate science.
CRAVE: ~ (for) sth have a strong desire for sth 渴望; 渴求某事物
WOOLLY:
模糊的,不鲜明的
Least woolly of all is David MacKay’s book (which can be bought or downloaded free from www.withouthotair.com). Irritated by the waffle that often surrounds discussions of energy and climate change, Mr MacKay, a physicist at Cambridge University, has chosen to illustrate the challenge of breaking our fossil-fuel addiction armed only with the laws of physics, reams of publicly available information and the back of an envelope.
WAFFLE: vague, wordy and often meaningless talk or writing （含糊﹑
冗长而常无内容的）谈话或文字
REAMS: large quantity (of writing) 许多（文字）:
Mr MacKay favours no particular technology. He is concerned only that proposals to decarbonise the economy should add up. But his refreshingly hard-headed approach (confined to Britain, but easily adapted to other countries) comes to some sobering conclusions. Meeting Britain’s energy needs from onshore wind power would require covering literally the entire country in turbines, even assuming that the wind was guaranteed to blow. If only 10% of Britain were covered then wind could provide roughly a tenth of total demand. Switching every piece of agricultural land to biofuel production would provide just 12% of the requisite juice.
FAVOUR: liking; goodwill; approval (used esp with the vs shown) 喜爱; 宠爱; 好感; 欢心; 赞同
CONFINE: ~ sb/sth to sth restrict or keep sb/sth within certain limits 将某人[某事物]限制在一定范围以内
TURBINE: machine or motor driven by a wheel which is turned by a current of water, steam, air or gas 涡轮机; 透平机
It is a similar story for offshore wind, tidal and wave energy, all of which make the claims of green advocates that Britain has a “huge” renewable resource look somewhat hollow, especially since the book ignores questions of costs and focuses purely on physical limits. To make a dent in fossil-fuel consumption without using nuclear power, renewable-energy facilities will have to be “country-sized”, with offshore wind farms bigger than Wales and huge solar-power arrays in sunny deserts piping power to cloudier nations.
TIDAL: of or affected by a tide or tides 潮的; 有潮的; 受潮汐影响的
Although Mr MacKay’s conclusions are fascinating, much of his book’s appeal lies in its methods. Ballpark calculations are a powerful way of getting to grips with a problem. The book is a tour de force, showing, for example, how the potential contribution of biofuels can be approximated from just three numbers: the intensity of sunlight, the efficiency with which plants turn that sunlight into stored energy and the available land area in Britain. As a work of popular science it is exemplary: the focus may be the numbers, but most of the mathematical legwork is confined to the appendices and the accompanying commentary is amusing and witty, as well as informed.
TOUR DE FORCE: outstandingly skilful performance or achievement 绝技; 壮举; 杰作
GRIP: take and keep a firm hold of (sth/sb) 紧抓（某物[某人]）; 紧握:
APPENDIX: section that gives extra information at the end of a book or document 附录
With global climate-change and energy policy consisting mostly of feel-good rhetoric rather than action, Mr MacKay’s reminder that the natural world does not care for political expediency—summed up in Richard Feynman’s famous observation that “nature cannot be fooled”—should be engraved on environment-ministry doors the world over. For anyone seeking a deeper understanding of the real problems involved, “Sustainable Energy—Without the Hot Air” is the place to start.
ENGRAVE: ~ B on A/~ A (with B) cut or carve (words, designs, etc) on (a hard surface) 在（硬物）上雕刻（字﹑
画等
Islam（大家还记得GRE阅读中那篇伊斯兰教法吧，三大难文之一啊，这篇Eco上刚出来的文章就是讲伊斯兰教穆斯林的相关文化现象）
The choice facing Muslims
Apr 16th 2009
FOR those (and they are many) who are convinced by the thesis that the West and its values are under remorseless（remorse这个GRE单词记得吧，后悔悔恨） siege from a menacing and resurgent Islam, Ali Allawi’s antithesis may seem a little surprising, even absurd. But the author is a distinguished Iraqi who has twice served in post-Saddam governments in Baghdad and whose last, much-acclaimed book was a searing indictment of American (and Iraqi) failings. Though the two books tackle very different themes, what they have in common is their author’s intimate knowledge of both Islam and the West, and his unflinching honesty.
remorseless：
[*]Having no pity or compassion; merciless.[*]Unyielding; relentless.siege：The surrounding and blockading of a city, town, or fortress by an army attempting to capture it.
under siege from
indictment of
intimate：marked by very close association, contact, or familiarity *intimate knowledge of the law*
（这第一段多想GRE的阅读套路哈，嘎嘎，感觉比GRE还GRE，那么多GRE单词）
Mr Allawi calls his new book an “attempt to understand the factors behind the decay of the spirit of Islam”. He locates this decay not in the personal piety of the world’s Muslims—which remains vibrant—but in the collective failure of Muslims, over the past 200 years, to come up with an adequate and effective response to Western modernity. The problem is not that Islam is incapable of finding its own path to modernity. Mr Allawi wholly rejects the popular notion that Islam is inherently incompatible with tolerance, democracy, women’s rights—in short, all that the West holds dear.（我发现在GRE阅读中这样的插入语特别会在细节题中出现，还有就是泛指化题型，那种all any typical暗示的）
piety : the quality or state of being pious: as a : fidelity to natural obligations (as to parents) b : dutifulness in religion : DEVOUTNESS
红宝书中有pious，你知道piety么？呵呵
这一段继续很像GRE阅读，逻辑转折递进，还出现了wholly这样在GRE中的大明星
The difficulty, he says, is that the predominant Muslim response to the Western challenge has been narrowly political instead of being rooted in the inherited ethos of Islamic civilisation. Seen in this light, the Islamist movements which have received so much attention since the Islamic revival in the 1970s are shallow and passionate. （这一句可以预示GRE出题，就是提问Islamist movement所受到的attention在作者看来如何？细节题）For all their pretence of offering an “Islamic alternative”, they represent, or so he argues（这里也可以成为出题点，那就是Allawi怎么看待Islamic alternative，细节题，因为这里有more than的比较，也涉及到了文章中心词眼modernity）, nothing more than Western modernity in Islamic garb.
文章继续像GRE，并且是一个观点持续发展，即所谓的全文论证一个观点
Mr Allawi calmly and methodically deconstructs an Islamic revival which has failed to live up to its promise. Islamist movements and secular governments anxious to pay lip-service to Islam have, between them, failed spectacularly to anchor themselves in genuinely Islamic principles: principles which, for Mr Allawi, are as much about inner spirituality as outward religiosity. The results are everywhere to be seen. Autocratic governments abuse human rights, whether in Islamic Iran, Saudi Arabia and Sudan or in secular Egypt and Syria. Economies are corrupt and maladministered, and their supposed ethical principles, such as Islamic banking, are a sham. There has been a profound loss of cultural creativity, apparent, for example, in the decay of the Islamic city and its time-honoured traditions of craftsmanship, piety and community.
deconstruct：
[*]To break down into components; dismantle.[*]To write about or analyze (a literary text, for example), following the tenets of deconstruction.lip-service：Verbal expression of agreement or allegiance, unsupported by real conviction or action; hypocritical respect: “Lip service continues to be paid to resolving regional conflicts, but there is no sense of urgency” (Henry A. Kissinger).
religiosity：
[*]The quality of being religious.[*]Excessive or affected piety.（文章应该取之这个含义）继续！
Mr Allawi buttresses his case with some striking statistics: “The creative output of the twenty or thirty million Muslims of the Abbasid era dwarfs the output of the nearly one-and-a-half billion Muslims of the modern era.” Per head, the income of the wealthiest Muslim country (the United Arab Emirates) is 200 times that of the poorest (Somalia).
Is there a solution? Mr Allawi, himself a Shia Muslim, believes the mystical (or Sufi) tradition must be an integral part of the revival of Islamic civilisation. But here too—although Sufism retains a strong grassroots following in several parts of the Muslim world—he finds himself at odds with both the modernist and puritanical (Wahhabi) strands of Islam, which disdain the individualistic heterodoxy of “folk Islam”.
puritanical：
[*]Rigorous in religious observance; marked by stern morality.[*]Puritanical Of, relating to, or characteristic of the Puritans.（清教徒）
The West has not helped. Mr Allawi castigates the hysterical Islamophobia which came in the wake of the attacks of September 2001, as well as the hubristic（知道hubris就该知道这个） attempts to “reform” Islam in the name of defeating terrorism. He insists that the challenge of recapturing the “spirit of Islam” is a task for Muslims, not outsiders.（这两句话可以成为出题点，那就是这个打引号的reform Allawi认为是为了outsiders） The stark choice for the Muslim world is between the revival of its civilisation, difficult as that is to achieve, and its secularisation—“the dissolution of Islam into modernity”. Mr Allawi is not sanguine.
in the wake of：尾随
这一段的出题点很多，最后一句短短的就有一个态度词sanguine，这是题眼。还有就是倒数第二句这个stark的理解和句子的理解也可以出题
PS：通篇下来很像一片GRE的长文章，属于全文论证一个观点型，细节题的出题点有好几个我在文中已经标出，希望大家能够指点，共同学习！
以后多来些这样的分析。做一篇比我做十篇有用多了啊。
是这样的，其实看美剧时也会遇到，比如prison break第四季里T－B就说过Don't be so paranoid...
本帖最后由 gdreamer9 于 2009-4-20 22:14 编辑
Autism and extraordinary ability
Genius locus
Apr 16th 2009
From The Economist print edition
There is strong evidence for a link between genius and autism. In the first of three articles about the brain this week, we ask how that link works, and whether “neurotypicals” can benefit from the knowledge
Ronald Grant ArchiveTHAT genius is unusual goes without saying. But is it so unusual that it requires the brains of those that possess it to be unusual in others ways, too? A link between artistic genius on the one hand and schizophrenia and manic-depression on the other, is widely debated. However another link, between savant syndrome and autism, is well established. It is, for example, the subject of films such as “Rain Man”, illustrated above.
A study published this week by Patricia Howlin of King’s College, London, reinforces this point. It suggests that as many as 30% of autistic people have some sort of savant-like capability in areas such as calculation or music. Moreover, it is widely acknowledged that some of the symptoms associated with autism, including poor communication skills and an obsession with detail, are also exhibited by many creative types, particularly in the fields of science, engineering, music, drawing and painting. Indeed, there is now a cottage industry in re-interpreting the lives of geniuses in the context of suggestions that they might belong, or have belonged, on the “autistic spectrum”, as the range of syndromes that include autistic symptoms is now dubbed.
So what is the link? And can an understanding of it be used to release flashes of genius in those whose brains are, in the delightfully condescending term used by researchers in the area, “neurotypical”? Those were the questions addressed by papers (one of them Dr Howlin’s) published this week in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. The society, Britain’s premier scientific club and the oldest scientific body in the world, produces such transactions from time to time, to allow investigators in particular fields to chew over the state of the art. The latest edition is the outcome of a conference held jointly with the British Academy (a similar, though younger, organisation for the humanities and social sciences) last September.
A spectrum of belief
A standard diagnosis of autism requires three things to be present in an individual. Two of these three, impairments in social interaction and in communication with other people, are the results of autists lacking empathy or, in technical jargon, a “theory of mind”. In other words they cannot, as even fairly young neurotypicals can, put themselves in the position of another being and ask themselves what that other is thinking. The third criterion, however, is that a person has what are known as restrictive and repetitive behaviours and interests, or RRBI, in the jargon.
Until recently, the feeling among many researchers was that the first two features were crucial to someone becoming a savant. The idea was that mental resources which would have been used for interaction and communication could be redeployed to develop expertise in some arbitrary task. Now, though, that consensus is shifting. Several of the volume’s authors argue that it is the third feature, RRBI, that permits people to become savants.
Francesca Happé of King’s College, London, is one of them. As she observes, obsessional interests and repetitive behaviours would allow someone to practice, albeit inadvertently, whichever skill they were obsessed by. Malcolm Gladwell, in a book called “Outliers” which collated research done on outstanding people, suggested that anyone could become an expert in anything by practising for 10,000 hours. It would not be hard for an autistic individual to clock up that level of practice for the sort of skills, such as mathematical puzzles, that many neurotypicals would rapidly give up on.
Many, but not all. Dr Happé has drawn on a study of almost 13,000 individual twins to show that childhood talent in fields such as music and art is often associated with RRBIs, even in those who are not diagnosed as classically autistic. She speculates that the abilities of savants in areas that neurotypicals tend to find pointless or boring may result from an ability to see differences where a neurotypical would see only similarities. As she puts it, “the child with autism who would happily spend hours spinning coins, or watching drops of water fall from his fingers, might be considered a connoisseur, seeing minute differences between events that others regard as pure repetition.”
Simon Baron-Cohen, a doyen of the field who works at Cambridge University, draws similar conclusions. He suggests the secret of becoming a savant is “hyper-systematising and hyper-attention to detail”. But he adds sensory hypersensitivity to the list. His team have shown one example of this using what is known as the Freiburg visual acuity and contrast test, which asks people to identify the gap in a letter “c” presented in four different orientations. Those on the autistic spectrum do significantly better at this than do neurotypicals. That might help explain Dr Happé’s observations about coins and raindrops.
Insight, too, is given by autists themselves. Temple Grandin is a professor of animal science at Colorado State University. She also writes about her experience of being autistic. As she describes in the volume, one of the differences she perceives between her experience and that of most neurotypicals is that she thinks in images. She says her mind is like an internet search engine that searches for photographs. To form concepts, she sorts these pictures into categories. She does not, however, claim that all autistic people think like this. To the contrary, she describes two other sorts: pattern thinkers who excel at maths and music, and verbal specialists who are good at talking and writing, but lack visual skills. The latter might not qualify as autistic under a traditional diagnosis, but slip into the broader autistic spectrum.
The question of how the autistic brain differs physically from that of neurotypicals was addressed by Manuel Casanova of the University of Louisville, in Kentucky. Dr Casanova has spent many years dissecting both. His conclusion is that the main difference is in the structure of the small columns of nerve cells that are packed together to form the cerebral cortex. The cortical columns of those on the autistic spectrum are narrower than those of neurotypicals, and their cells are organised differently.
The upshot of these differences is that the columns in an autistic brain seem to be more connected than normal with their close neighbours, and less connected with their distant ones. Though it is an interpretative stretch, that pattern of connection might reduce a person’s ability to generalise (since disparate data are less easily integrated) and increase his ability to concentrate (by drawing together similar inputs).
Rain and sunshine
Given such anatomical differences, then, what hope is there for the neurotypical who would like to be a savant? Some, possibly. There are examples of people suddenly developing extraordinary skills in painting and music in adult life as a result of brain damage caused by accidents or strokes. That, perhaps, is too high a price to pay. But Allan Snyder of the University of Sydney has been able to induce what looks like a temporary version of this phenomenon using magnetism.
Dr Snyder argues that savant skills are latent in everyone, but that access to them is inhibited in non-savants by other neurological processes. He is able to remove this inhibition using a technique called repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation.
Applying a magnetic field to part of the brain disrupts the electrical activity of the nerve cells for a few seconds. Applying such a field repeatedly can have effects that last for an hour or so. The technique has been approved for the treatment of depression, and is being tested against several other conditions, including Parkinson’s disease and migraines. Dr Snyder, however, has found that stimulating an area called the left anterior temporal lobe improves people’s ability to draw things like animals and faces from memory. It helps them, too, with other tasks savants do famously well—proofreading, for example, and estimating the number of objects in a large group, such as a pile of match sticks. It also reduces “false” memories (savants tend to remember things literally, rather than constructing a mnemonic narrative and remembering that).
There are, however, examples of people who seem very neurotypical indeed achieving savant-like skills through sheer diligence. Probably the most famous is that of London taxi drivers, who must master the Knowledge—ie, the location of 25,000 streets, and the quickest ways between them—to qualify for a licence.
The expert here is Eleanor Maguire of University College, London, who famously showed a few years ago that the shape of the hippocampus, a part of the brain involved in long-term learning, changes in London cabbies. Dr Maguire and her team have now turned their attention to how cabbies learn the Knowledge.
The prodigious geographical knowledge of the average cabbie is, indeed, savant-like. But Dr Maguire recently found that it comes at a cost. Cabbies, on average, are worse than random control subjects and—horror—also worse than bus drivers, at memory tests such as word-pairing. Surprisingly, that is also true of their general spatial memory. Nothing comes for nothing, it seems, and genius has its price.
Savant syndrome, then, is a case where the politically correct euphemism “differently abled” has real meaning. The conclusion that should be drawn, perhaps, is not that neurotypicals should attempt to ape savants, but that savants—even those who are not geniuses—should be welcomed for what they are, and found a more honoured place in society.
65# gdreamer9
By all evidence, the helper birds are honestly “paying to stay,” trading a valuable currency for the right to remain within the aggressively guarded precincts of a bell miner breeding colony, with the hope of better times and personal propagation opportunities ahead.
所有的证据显示，这些帮忙的鸟类实际上是“付费停留”的，用一种珍贵的货币（lerp）来交换在被积极保卫的bell miner养殖地的停留权，并希望等待更好的时机和前面更好的繁殖机会。