1006G 备考日记by C。——认真是一种可怕的力量。

123runfordreamUID: 2697608

105# gongyuxiang1990

感谢！一起加油！！

123runfordreamUID: 2697608

12.15.
终于把杨鹏难句教程结果了。比较彻底的，前几天就看完了。今天只是把看得不够印象的加强了一下，后面的GMAT部分。anywhy，成就感。O(∩_∩)O哈哈~
看的感觉还可以，至少是找得到感觉的。至于效果，正式练习阅读再走着瞧瞧。
加油哈~其它的也赶上来！！

123runfordreamUID: 2697608

12.16.
1，阅读——看了草木对阅读的分析，自己做了一篇，竟然全对。乐死我了。草木分析的那篇之前做过，看是看懂了，就是在细节题上没转过弯。牺牲了两道。不过这两篇都是短的。我争取这种短阅读读个爽。
2，题库分类熟悉中，传媒的就把我卡了。在television的利弊上想了半天，还是没归纳清楚。
3，单词慢慢回来了，量还不够。

ps：明天做完diplomacy的presentation，又要开始想着怎么为gpa贡献的期末考怎么办。哎，god bless me。

123runfordreamUID: 2697608

12.17.
1，单词40 41
2，阅读一篇
3，报纸浏览了几篇——！！！不带这样的。

哇~目前只干了这么点？杯具！！大姐，拜托认真点。明天还交这样的白卷对得起自己吗？

123runfordreamUID: 2697608

12.18.

Getting warmer

Dec 3rd 2009 From The Economist print edition

So far the effort to tackle global warming has achieved little. Copenhagen offers the chance to do better, says Emma Duncan (interviewed here)
Illustration by M. Morgenstern

1.THE mountain bark beetle is a familiar pest in the forests of British Columbia. Its population rises and falls unpredictably, destroying clumps of pinewood as it peaks which then regenerate as the bug recedes. But Scott Green, who studies forest ecology at the University of Northern British Columbia, says the current outbreak is “unprecedented in recorded history: a natural background-noise disturbance has become a major outbreak. We’re looking at the loss of 80% of our pine forest cover.”* Other parts of North America have also been affected, but the damage in British Columbia is particularly severe, and particularly troubling in a province whose economy is dominated by timber.

2. Three main explanations for this disastrous outbreak suggest themselves. It could be chance. Populations do fluctuate dramatically and unexpectedly. It could be the result of management practices. British Columbia’s woodland is less varied than it used to be, which helps a beetle that prefers pine. Or it could be caused by the higher temperatures that now prevail in northern areas, allowing beetles to breed more often in summer and survive in greater numbers through the winter.

3. The Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which the United Nations adopted at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, is now 17 years old. Its aim was “to achieve stabilisation of greenhouse-gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system”. The Kyoto protocol, which set about realising those aims, was signed in 1997 and came into force in 2005. Its first commitment period runs out in 2012, and implementing a new one is expected to take at least three years, which is why the 15th conference of the parties to the UNFCCC that starts in Copenhagen on December 7th is such a big deal. Without a new global agreement, there is not much chance of averting serious climate change.

4. Since the UNFCCC was signed, much has changed, though more in the biosphere than the human sphere. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the body set up to establish a scientific consensus on what is happening, heat waves, droughts, floods and serious hurricanes have increased in frequency over the past few decades; it reckons those trends are all likely or very likely to have been caused by human activity and will probably continue. Temperatures by the end of the century might be up by anything from 1.1ºC to 6.4ºC.

5. In most of the world the climate changes to date are barely perceptible or hard to pin on warming. In British Columbia and farther north the effects of climate change are clearer. Air temperatures in the Arctic are rising about twice as fast as in the rest of the world. The summer sea ice is thinning and shrinking. The past three years have seen the biggest losses since proper record-keeping started in 1979. Ten years ago scientists reckoned that summer sea-ice would be gone by the end of this century. Now they expect it to disappear within a decade or so.

6. Since sea-ice is already in the water, its melting has little effect on sea levels. Those are determined by temperature (warmer water takes up more room) and the size of the Greenland and Antarctic ice caps. The glaciers in south-eastern Greenland have picked up speed. Jakobshavn Isbrae, the largest of them, which drains 6% of Greenland’s ice, is now moving at 12km a year—twice as fast as it was when the UNFCCC was signed—and its “calving front”, where it breaks down into icebergs, has retreated by 20km in six years. That is part of the reason why the sea level is now rising at 3-3.5mm a year, twice the average annual rate in the 20th century.

7. As with the mountain bark beetle, it is not entirely clear why this is happening. The glaciers could be retreating because of one of the countless natural oscillations in the climate that scientists do not properly understand. If so, the glacial retreat could well stop, as it did in the middle of the 20th century after a 100-year retreat. But the usual causes of natural variability do not seem to explain the current trend, so scientists incline to the view that it is man-made. It is therefore likely to persist unless mankind starts to behave differently—and there is not much sign of that happening.

8. Carbon-dioxide emissions are now 30% higher than they were when the UNFCCC was signed 17 years ago. Atmospheric concentrations of CO2 equivalent (carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases) reached 430 parts per million last year, compared with 280ppm before the industrial revolution. At the current rate of increase they could more than treble by the end of the century, which would mean a 50% risk of a global temperature increase of 5ºC. To put that in context, the current average global temperature is only 5ºC warmer than the last ice age. Such a rise would probably lead to fast-melting ice sheets, rising sea levels, drought, disease and collapsing agriculture in poor countries, and mass migration. But nobody really knows, and nobody wants to know.

9. Some scientists think that the planet is already on an irreversible journey to dangerous warming. A few climate-change sceptics think the problem will right itself. Either may be correct. Predictions about a mechanism as complex as the climate cannot be made with any certainty. But the broad scientific consensus is that serious climate change is a danger, and this newspaper believes that, as an insurance policy against a catastrophe that may never happen, the world needs to adjust its behaviour to try to avert that threat.

10. The problem is not a technological one. The human race has almost all the tools it needs to continue leading much the sort of life it has been enjoying without causing a net increase in greenhouse-gas concentrations in the atmosphere. Industrial and agricultural processes can be changed. Electricity can be produced by wind, sunlight, biomass or nuclear reactors, and cars can be powered by biofuels and electricity. Biofuel engines for aircraft still need some work before they are suitable for long-haul flights, but should be available soon.

11. Nor is it a question of economics. Economists argue over the sums (see article), but broadly agree that greenhouse-gas emissions can be curbed without flattening the world economy.


A hard sell

12. It is all about politics. Climate change is the hardest political problem the world has ever had to deal with. It is a prisoner’s dilemma, a free-rider problem and the tragedy of the commons all rolled into one. At issue is the difficulty of allocating the cost of collective action and trusting other parties to bear their share of the burden. At a city, state and national level, institutions that can resolve such problems have been built up over the centuries. But climate change has been a worldwide worry for only a couple of decades. Mankind has no framework for it. The UN is a useful talking shop, but it does not get much done.

13. The closest parallel is the world trading system. This has many achievements to its name, but it is not an encouraging model. Not only is the latest round of negotiations mired in difficulty, but the World Trade Organisation’s task is child’s play compared with climate change. The benefits of concluding trade deals are certain and accrue in the short term. The benefits of mitigating climate change are uncertain, since scientists are unsure of the scale and consequences of global warming, and will mostly accrue many years hence. The need for action, by contrast, is urgent.

14. The problem will be solved only if the world economy moves from carbon-intensive to low-carbon—and, in the long term, to zero-carbon—products and processes. That requires businesses to change their investment patterns. And they will do so only if governments give them clear, consistent signals. This special report will argue that so far this has not happened. The policies adopted to avoid dangerous climate change have been partly misconceived and largely inadequate. They have sent too many wrong signals and not enough of the right ones.

15. That is partly because of the way the Kyoto protocol was designed. By trying to include all the greenhouse gases in a single agreement, it has been less successful than the less ambitious Montreal protocol, which cut ozone-depleting gases fast and cheaply. By including too many countries in detailed negotiations, it has reduced the chances of agreement. And by dividing the world into developed and developing countries, it has deepened a rift that is proving hard to close. Ultimately, though, the international agreement has fallen victim to domestic politics. Voters do not want to bear the cost of their elected leaders’ aspirations, and those leaders have not been brave enough to push them.

16. Copenhagen represents a second chance to make a difference. The aspirations are high, but so are the hurdles. The gap between the parties on the two crucial questions—emissions levels and money—remains large. America’s failure so far to pass climate-change legislation means that a legally binding agreement will not be reached at the conference. The talk is of one in Bonn, in six months’ time, or in Mexico City in a year.

17. To suggest that much has gone wrong is not to denigrate the efforts of the many people who have dedicated two decades to this problem. For mankind to get even to the threshold of a global agreement is a marvel. But any global climate deal will work only if the domestic policies through which it is implemented are both efficient and effective. If they are ineffective, nothing will change. If they are inefficient, they will waste money. And if taxpayers decide that green policies are packed with pork, they will turn against them.



Words new for me: ——red
Fluctuate：to shift back and forth uncertainly
anthropogenic :of, relating to, or resulting from the influence of human beings on nature
pin on:to blame someone for something, often unfairly
Don't try to pin the blame on me!
They're trying to pin the murder on the boyfriend.
oscillations
：a flow of electricity changing periodically from a maximum to a minimum
Irreversible：irreversible damage, change etc is so serious or so great that you cannot change something back to how it was before

scep·tic：BrE skeptic AmE /ˈskeptɪk/ n [C] a person who disagrees with particular claims and statements, especially those that are generally thought to be true

at issue：formal the problem or subject at issue is the most important part of what you are discussing or considering

At issue here is the extent to which exam results reflect a student's ability.

——Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English

Words , phrases and sentences good for my writing：——pink

Complicated sentences: ——grey

Comments——
I have to say it’s quite a long article for me to finish it patiently without any clues on my mind. Sometimes being inpatient is just because of the length instead of the context. Actually it has few troubles understanding the separated sentences or whole article. It’s the structure and the main point that confused me. To make it clear, I tried to conclude each paragraph with key words or phrases as followed:
1, bark beetle outbreak
2, why——climate change
3,global agreement: old one & new one——we need a new one.
4, why we need a new agreement→5，air temperature change; 6, ice melting
7, caused by man-made
8, how——carbon emissions
9，scientists’ opinion——the world needs to adjust its behaviour to try to avert that threat.
10，11，12——finding the problems—— climate change is about politics.
13, compared to the world trading system
14,how to solve the problem——the old politic is not enough for situation now
15, why not
16, Copenhagen talks is a second chance to change
17, analysis the result ——hope it can work out.(that’s my understanding.)

And finally, I could simply conclude that this article is trying to explain the meaning of Copenhagen talks and show the expectation for making some difference.

ps：it looks like an analysis instead of a comment.  I will try another way...as possible as I could.

123runfordreamUID: 2697608

12.19.
READING——https://bbs.gter.net/thread-1043113-1-1.html
Suspended animation：
1 : temporary suspension of the vital functions (as in persons nearly drowned)
2 : a condition (as inactivity) likened to suspended animation
Hurrah：（hurray；hooray）used to express joy, approval, or encouragement
Emporiums: a place of trade especially : a commercial center
Consignment: a quantity of goods that are sent somewhere, especially in order to be sold
Sotheby's is the world's third oldest auction house in continuous operation.
Christie's is a leading art business and a fine arts auction house.




Comments：
This article got me again since I am not quite similar with economy or market.
I heard something about auction before but still cant tell what’s the relation between the art and the market, apparently this article did not help me out .while it talks about the globalization help the art market out. Describing the recession of art market as beginning, concentrating on the deal in Sotheby's and Christie's , and the moving to the change. The trend has changed the art market from the auction to the artist，also the buyers ,the collectors. In the economic way, the market really had some differences , but how long is it going to exist? Why the author uses suspended animation as the title? Suspended means temporary that shows it may just stay for a short time because no one knows what is going to happen, especially involved with economy——（well ,these words seem meaningless.）

I still have no idea. Forgive my stupid comments. Not me. Don’t forgive me.

123runfordreamUID: 2697608

argument translation：

118.
各种来源预测，下一个冬季，全国气温将会高出平均水平，包括Sun City，我们每年冬季会议举行的惯例的地方。较高的冬季温度将会吸引更多的人前来Sun City旅游，这个以迷人的海滩和宜人的气候著名的地方。酒店将会出现房间更紧张的情况，交通工具更难预定，系那个公园餐馆这样的公共场所会更加拥挤。这些情况可能会大大减少了会议的出席率。因此，我们应该把会议地点搬到一个比较不流行冬季旅游的城市。

119.
Waymarsh的交通问题显然达到了创纪录的水平。三个月以前，我去工作只需要15分钟，现在需要将近25分钟。Waymarsh应该以临市G为榜样，向它学习。去年，G实施了奖励政策，奖励那些一起坐车去上班的人汽油劵。自从实行了奖励政策之后，G的污染水平下降了，一些住在G城市的朋友告诉我他们去上班比以前更快了。因为Waymarsh拥挤的交通和严重的污染，我们必须实行像G城哪有的政策来改善。

120.
就骑自行车戴头盔的效果问题，一个为期十年的全国性研究表明，十年前根据报告骑自行车的人大约35%戴头盔。而现在的数据接近80%。然而，另一个研究表明，在同一个十年的时间段，自行车引起的交通事故增加了200%。这些数据表明，骑自行车者因为戴着头盔觉得比较安全，结果更加冒险。因此，为了减少自行车引起的严重的交通事故，政府应该集中更多的精力教导人们关于自行车的安全使用而减少放在鼓励或要求骑自行车者戴头盔的精力。

163.
一个近期的研究表明，生活在北美大陆的人们患慢性疲劳和慢性抑郁症疾病的人数比生活在亚洲大陆的人们分别多9倍和31倍。有趣的是，亚洲人平均每天吃20克大豆，而北美人几乎没有吃大豆。原来，大豆包含了一种叫做isoflavones（异黄酮）的植物化学物质，已经发现有疾病预防的性质。因此，北美人应该考虑定期吃大豆来预防疲劳和抑郁。

164.
为了节约大量资金，Rockingham的世纪政府大厅应该拆除，以修建一些市民提议的更大很节能的建筑。旧的市政大厅太小以至于不能舒适地接纳政府职员们。另外，旧建筑冬天的保暖和夏天的制冷是比很大的开支。新的，更大的建筑将更有能源效率，比起旧建筑，每平方的保暖和制冷费用更少。此外，新建筑的部分空间可能可以出租出去，从而为Rockingham增加收入。

165.
去年，由于众多消费者投诉有头晕和恶心的症状发生，Promo foods要求800万罐金枪鱼撤柜以待检测。Promo foods的结论是，那些罐头终究没有包含构成健康危险的化学物质。这个结论是基于来自Promo foods的化学家经过检测撤柜的罐头的结果，并且发现8种最常见的被认为是导致头晕和恶心症状的化学物质中，5种没有在任何一个罐头中被检测出来。但化学家们确实发现了另外3种可疑的化学物质自然存在于其它种类的罐头食品中。

172.
Mozart音乐学校显然应该是每一个意识到它的名气的音乐学生的第一选择。首先，Mozart音乐学校强调集中的练习和训练，以便它的学生能在很小的时候开始具有代表性地训练。第二，学校有大量的设备和最新的专业器材，并且，它的教员里包括了一些世界顶尖的老师。最后，很多Mozart的毕业生继续深造成为国内最著名的最富有的音乐家。


173.
在过去的三年中，我们销量最低的几期杂志是那些在封面上刊登了国际新闻故事的那几期。在同一时期，与我们竞争的新闻刊物大大减少了他们所致力于的国际新闻的封面故事的数量。此外，用于维持在国外报道国际新闻的办事处的费用在增加。所以我们应该减少我们在国际新闻的重点，并限制这样的消息刊登在杂志封面。


174.
我们建议Grove学院保留其已有百年历史的女校传统，而不是允许录取男性。确实有大部分员工投票赞成男女同校，理由是这样会鼓励更多的学生申请Grove。但是在学生会的一个调查中，80%的学生回应希望学校保留女校的传统，超过一半的校友在另一个调查中也反对男女同校。因此，维持女校的形式有助于提升学生的斗志并让校友继续在财政上支持学校。

sunflower_irisUID: 2720580

勤劳的小CC，我来看看你。

123runfordreamUID: 2697608

113# sunflower_iris


哈哈。欢迎欢迎。

123runfordreamUID: 2697608

12.20

Contemplate:
Inescapable
Commentators
Be fraught with: be full with
Tenaciously, tenacious: persistent in maintaining, adhering to, or seeking something valued or desired
Aftermath
1. America was the rising power
2. the balance of power is shifting more rapidly in China’s favour
3. China is exploring the rubble of the global economy in hopes of accelerating its own rise.
4. China’s power is still dwarfed by America’s
5. they are a long way from trusting each other
6. Its rise will be far more nettlesome than that of his own country a century ago.
7. On October 1st China offered a stunning display of the hard edge of its rising power as it paraded its fast-growing military arsenal through Beijing.
8. ruler of the waves
9. China is exploring the rubble of the global economy in hopes of accelerating its own rise.


1.These fears ignore the value-destroying (and, for China’s leaders, politically hugely embarrassing) effect that a sell-off of American debt would have on China’s dollar reserves.
2.But it also noted that in effect this was a “foreign-exchange version of the cold-war stalemate based on ‘mutually assured destruction’”.
3.This special report will argue that the United States may have to get used to a bigger Chinese presence on its own soil, including some of its most hallowed turf, such as the car industry.


Comments:
We don’t know what we need until we are at the corner. Same as the situation between China and America when we look back towards our history in this certain conditions, the financial crisis , considered about the economy dependent on each other laying china and America , the argument analysis the current progress in this relationship.
China has become the biggest lender to America during the financial crisis by purchasing American Treasury securities. “Why China will continue to lend to America, and why the yuan is unlikely to become a reserve currency” that is also what issue I can’t figure out. It has become a no denying fact that China is a rising power. However, China is still not mature enough to replace America. In fact, China’s industrializations based on the plenty human resources instead of high technologic facilities are a big part. We are taking the advantage of big population, which compared to the developed economy market of industrialized countries is not a bright side.
Speaking to the development of these two countries, the author suggest that it is a long way to pursue, since china has its social problems while America has his owns.

123runfordreamUID: 2697608

6 arguments' translation

there's no time for me to upload them .  I will do it tomorrow.

and  I will working on it——
https://bbs.gter.net/thread-1043548-1-1.html

123runfordreamUID: 2697608

12.21.
arguments' translation:

201.
Forsythe的市民采纳了更健康的生活方式。他们对最近的一个调查的反应表明了他们的饮食习惯比起十年前，更符合政府的营养标准。此外，含有kiran这种科学研究表明能较少胆固醇的物质的食品销量增加了四倍。这样的趋势也表现在sulia—
一种最健康的市民几乎不会吃的食品—销量的减少。

202.
大约7000年前，人们到达Kaliko Islands。在Kaliko Islands 森林里生活了3000年里数量最多的哺乳动物物种现在已经逐渐灭绝了。但是，人们不可能是物种灭绝的因素。因为没有证据证明人们和那些哺乳动物有重大的接触。另外，考古学家们发现了很多丢弃了的鱼骨头地方，但是这些地方没有发现大哺乳动物的骨头。所以，人们不可能猎取这些哺乳动物。因此，一些气候变化或者其它的环境因素必定造成这些物种的灭绝。

203.
Saluda市的小规模非盈利医院里，病人住院的平均时间长度是两天；在Megaville附近城市的大规模的营利性的医院里，病人平均住院时间是六天。另外，S医院的治愈率是M医院的两倍。S医院平均每个病人配有的雇员比M的多，在当地医院也少有投诉。这些数据表明，在小一点的非盈利的医院治疗比在大规模营利性的医院治疗更省钱也更有保障。

204.
随着对健康饮食必要性的持续宣传，以及与有关吃太多糖的有害影响的新研究，全国对糖需求量无疑是会下降的。因此，我们州的农民应该把目前种甘蔗的田地用来改种花生。花生富含蛋白质而含糖量低。隔壁Palin州的农民去年大大提高了花生的产量，他们从这种农作物获得的总收入非常高。


205.
去年十月，Belleville城在中心商业地带安装了高强度照明，那里肆意破坏公共设施的情况几乎是立即减少。Amburg最近已经开始实行警察骑自行车在商业中心巡逻，但破坏公共设施的行为的发生仍然连续发生。由于高强度照明显然是打击犯罪最有效的方法，我们应该在全Amburg城安装像这样的照明。通过这样的方法来减少犯罪率，我们可以在我们的城市振兴下降的街区。

206.
去年全国范围内，越来越多九岁以下的孩子参加少年垒球和足球俱乐部。其中超过80000的选手受过伤。在最近的一个研究中采访表明，一些来自大城市的垒球选手据说也受到了来自教练和父母对赢得竞赛的压力。另外，教育专家们认为，这些运动的长时间地训练占用了孩子们的学习时间。由于弊端显然大于好处，我们Parkville应该停止举办9岁以下孩子的体育竞赛。


READING
Epicureans: people who gaining pleasure from the senses, especially through good food and drink
Pristine: belonging to the earliest period or state; not spoiled, corrupted, or polluted (as by civilization) ; fresh and clean as or as if new
Epicurean: gaining pleasure from the senses, especially through good food and drink

Shenanigan 1 : a devious trick used especially for an underhand purpose
                 2   a : tricky or questionable practices or conduct ― usually used in plural

                      b : high-spirited or mischievous activity ― usually used in plural

                                                             ——M-W

                 bad behaviour that is not very serious, or slightly dishonest activities——L-M

Ruminate: to go over in the mind repeatedly and often casually or slowly

Laid-back: having a relaxed style or character

Fitful: having an erratic or intermittent character;not regular, and starting and stopping often

Marketable：1. Fit to be offered for sale in a market
                  2. Of or relating to buying or selling
Sanctum：1.a sacred place 2.a place where one is free from intrusion
exchequer:the national banking account of this realm
Unstuck: brought into a state of disarray, discomposure, or incoherence
Stagnate: to become or remain stagnant, not flowing in a current or stream, not advancing or developing


1. Economic turmoil
2. Saddled with the worst credit rating in the country, the “Golden State” is cutting spending on schools, prisons and health care for the elderly, as well as closing parks and laying off staff for three days a month.

3. It tries to peer five years into the economic future.

4. “The banking system will be a shadow of its former self,” and the securitisation markets, which buy and sell marketable bundles of debt, will presumably be a shadow of a shadow.
5. This is an alarming gap
6. Financial crises can pose such a threat to national incomes because of the way they erode national wealth.
7. The answer lies on the other side of the balance-sheet.
8. When you are falling, you do not look up. Only when you hit bottom can you stop and contemplate the cliff you must now climb.



comments：
Taking California as an example, this article tells us the tough situation in the financial crises, which include bankrupts, financial cutting, and losing jobs. The worse part is that we thought things were getting better; however, apparently, it is not possible to recovery as what it was. As what the article had said, the world economy is fitful getting back to normal, but a new normal. Though some experts thought it could be bound to the old one. How to support the idea of impossible being old normal? The author explains that if the shortfall in demand persists it can do lasting damage to supply, reducing the level of potential output or even its rate of growth (I don’t quite this conception actually.) .Also, the rate of employment is still not going to rise. Even though, the economy has palpably improved. And once the situation is better, the demand in rich countries will be still weak. So the future is going to be depressing with 25m people losing their jobs and can’t regain. It seems not a good picture. Looking around ourselves, what kind of attitude should we keep? I am confused. We are going to have a big challenge in our future.

123runfordreamUID: 2697608

IT NOW looks certain that Barack Obama will get what he wanted for Christmas—a health-care reform bill passed out of the Senate, probably just a few hours before Santa begins his rounds.

The bill passed the House on a margin of just five votes, and in the Senate it has no safety margin.

The health bill has been stripped of something very dear to many of then: a “public option” of a government-backed insurance scheme that would compete with private insurers in order, supposedly, to keep costs down and guarantee access.

The hope is that tens of million of Americans currently without coverage will now be able to get it, and many tens of millions more, who have insurance but fear losing it through redundancy or ill-health, will have those worries lifted from their shoulders.



tooth-and-nail：拼命。
nose-counting
:投票计数。
Filibuster：to try to delay action in Congress or another law-making group by making very long speeches——LM


redundancy：a situation in which someone has to leave their job, because they are no longer needed；when something is not used because something similar or the same already exists
Give around:让步。
comments：
“Health care reform” these words may probable the most hearing for me this year either in china or America. A few weeks ago, a friend of mine took some pictures which were some protestors show their protest in the campus.

This article looks like easier than those before. However, it is not easy to get its idea at first glance. The author mentions that the passage of the bill seems not a big victory with only a narrow vote. Following the passage of the bill, it comes to the hard future of payment of this insurance. Different parties hold the different views with different concerns. Republicans hate the bill, mostly on the ground of cost. Of course money issue is always on the table. What’s going to happen on hearth care in America, we’ll see.


PS：大家对文章的解读都很详细。今天的文章比较短，但是句子比较长。是我比较懒？我想试着用杨鹏的招数来应对这些长句子，练练感觉。

123runfordreamUID: 2697608

12.23.
READING：
第一遍——初步扫盲
Executive pay

This house believes that on the whole, senior executives are worth what they are paid


About this debate

Over the past few decades executive pay has risen dramatically. Bosses who were once paid ten times as much as shopfloor workers are now sometimes paid as much as 300 times as much. This trend was never popular, even during good times. But today it is becoming radioactive, as governments step in to rescue failing companies and ordinary people are forced to tighten their belts.

Is the anger justified? Some argue that executive pay is a long-standing disgrace. Pay is often not tethered to performance. Huge rewards for the few demotivate the rest of the workforce. Others are more sanguine. Successful executives, such as Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric, can add hugely to a firm's profitability, benefiting workers, managers and shareholders alike. The growing pay of executives has to be balanced against the growing difficulty of their jobs, particularly as turnover in the boardroom increases.

Opening statements

Defending the motion

Steven N. Kaplan Neubauer Family Prof. of Entrepreneurship & Finance, University of Chicago Booth School of Business

In the United States, the United Kingdom and elsewhere, CEOs are routinely criticised for being overpaid.

Against the motion

Nell  Minow Editor and Co-founder, The Corporate Library

Excessive executive compensation of the past decade is both a symptom and a cause of the current economic mess.

The moderator's opening remarks

Oct 20th 2009 |   Adrian  Wooldridge

Oneof the few things that anti-globalisation campaigners and stockmarketinvestors agree upon is that executive pay is out of control.
Itis not hard to understand this shared outrage: executive pay has exploded since the 1980s. For most of the postwar era executives earneda few multiples of the median pay. But thereafter, starting in America and slowly spreading to the rest of the world, the multiples increased exponentially. Today many American workers earn in a year what their boss takes home in an evening.
Isn't this a disgrace? Critics of executive pay worry that even mediocre bosses are given outsized rewards. Robert Nardelli received a $20m pay-off when he left HomeDepot even though the share price had fallen during his six-year tenure. Carly Fiorina was $180m better off when she left Hewlett-Packard despite a lacklustre tenure. Defenders of executive pay argue that great bosses such as Louis Gerstner, the former boss of IBM, and Jack Welch, the former boss of General Electric, are worth every penny because they create huge amounts of wealth for both shareholders and employees.
The debate about executive pay, though never cool, is particularly hot at the moment. Workers have been squeezed by the recession. Unemployment is approaching 10% in the United States and much higher numbers in many other countries. Numerous governments are planning to deal with their rising deficits by freezing public-sector pay. And yet many bosses and bankers continue to make out like bandits—or so lots of people think.
We are lucky to have two of the best people in the business to debate this subject. Steven Kaplan, who proposes the motion, teaches at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business. Nell Minow, who opposes it, is a long-time shareholder activist and chairwoman of the Corporate Library, a research company. (For people who want to know more about her she is also the subject of a profile in a recent issue of the New Yorker.)
Mr Kaplan starts off by making two fundamental points. CEO pay has not gone up in recent years; indeed, it has been dropping since 2000, particularly in relation to other well-paid groups, such as hedge fund managers, lawyers, consultants and professional athletes. Nor is CEO pay unrelated to performance. Boards are increasingly willing to fire CEOs for poor performance.
Ms Minow focuses heavily on the relationship between pay and the recent credit crunch. She points out that executive pay helped to create the mess in the first place: Countrywide's CEO, Angelo Mozillo, made more than $550m during his time in office. She also points out that the fact that many companies that were bailed out by the government continue to pay their CEOs huge salaries and bonuses is damaging the credibility of the system.
Such bold opening statements raise questions galore. Is Mr Kaplan justified in starting his account in 2000 rather than 1980, when executive pay exploded. And is Ms Minow right to concentrate so heavily on the financial sector? These are only a couple of the questions that we need to thrash out in the coming days.


The proposer's opening remarks
Oct 20th 2009 |   Steven N. Kaplan

In the United States, the United Kingdom and elsewhere, CEOs are routinely criticised for being overpaid. Critics argue that boards do not respond to market forces, but, instead, are dominated by or are over-generous to their CEOs. Boards are criticised for not tying CEOs' pay to performance. These criticisms have been exacerbated by the financial crisis and the desire to find scapegoats.
I argue below that the critics are wrong and that there are many misperceptions of CEO pay. While CEO pay practices are not perfect, they are driven by market forces and performance. Contrary to public perception, CEO pay has not gone up in recent years. In fact, the average CEO pay (adjusted for inflation) has dropped since 2000, while the pay of other groups has increased substantially. Similarly, the view that CEOs are not paid for performance is wrong. In fact, the opposite is true and boards increasingly fire them for poor performance. And, most recently, consistent with market forces driving pay, the US and UK governments each hired a new CEO (of AIG and the Royal Bank of Scotland) for pay exceeding that of the median large company CEO.
It is useful to understand how CEO pay is measured. It includes three components: salary, bonus and stock-based pay. It is usually measured in two ways. The first is the sum of salary, bonus, restricted stock and the expected value of stock options. I call this expected pay. Expected pay measures what boards believe they awarded the CEO. This is the best measure of what a CEO is paid each year. Note that the CEO does not actually walk away with this money. The second measure replaces expected stock option values with values actually realized and realized pay measures what CEOs walk away with.
The first graph shows average and median expected CEO pay for S&P 500 CEOs since 1994 (adjusted for inflation). It shows that median CEO pay has been stable since 2001; it has not increased. And average pay has declined substantially. In fact, average CEO pay in2008 is below the average in 1998.
（表略）
While average CEO pay has declined, the pay of other highly paid groups has increased. The second graph shows S&P 500 CEO pay relative to the income of the top 1% of US taxpayers. Relative to those other groups, CEOs are no better off in 2008 than in 1994. Strikingly, relative CEO pay is a half of what it was in 2001, a huge decline.
（表略）
Which are those groups that have earned increasingly high compensation? Hedge fund, private equity and venture capital investors have increased their assets and fees substantially, translating into high pay. By one estimate, the top three hedge fund managers earned more in 2007 than all 500 S&P 500 CEOs combined. Professional athletes, investment bankers, consultants and lawyers also have benefited greatly. For example, from 2004 to 2008, the inflation-adjusted pay of partners at the top 20 law firms increased by 12% while that of S&P 500 CEOs dropped 12%. Those law firms had over 3,000 partners making an average of $2.4m each.
One can look at the Obama administration for other examples. Larry Summers made $8m (more than the median S&P 500 CEO) giving speeches and working part-time for a hedge fund. Eric Holder made $3.5m as a law partner.
So, while CEOs earn a lot, they are not unique. The pay of people in the other groups has undoubtedly been driven by market forces; all are compensated in arm's-length markets, not by
cronies. Technology, globalisation and scale appear to have increased the market value of these groups. CEOs have not done better and, by some measures, have done worse. Those who argue CEOs are overpaid have to explain how CEOs can be overpaid and not subject to market forces, when the other groups are paid at least as well and are subject to market forces.
Why is the pay of these other groups relevant for CEOs? Top executives regularly leave to work for private equity firms and hedge funds. Law partners and consultants leave to work for public companies as general counsels and executives. Relative pay matters and all these groups are paid according to market demand. Markets are the driving force for senior executives in all these industries and talented people jump across industries, based on market perceptions of their worth.
Critics also argue that CEO pay is not tied to stock performance. Again, that is not true. Looking at what CEOs actually receive—realised pay—Josh Rauh and I found that firms with CEOs in the top decile of realised pay earned stock returns 90%above those of other firms in their industries over the previous five years. Firms with CEOs in the bottom decile of realised pay underperformed by almost 40%. The typical CEO is paid for performance.
This was reinforced in 2008, when average realised CEO pay declined by 25%(according to S&P's Execucomp). And Equilar, another provider of CEO pay data, estimated that the typical CEO experienced a net worth decline of over 40%.
The final myth to bust is that CEOs control their boards and earn high pay through this control and not performance. In fact, CEO tenure has declined, from ten years in the1970s to six years today, and boards have got tougher on their executives when they do not perform.
In sum, market forces govern CEO compensation. CEOs are paid what they are worth. Talented individuals, who are perceived to be valuable, can move between industries to be compensated well. The clearest example of this is that even governments have to pay highly for talented executives. Recently, the Royal Bank of Scotland (under UK government control) hired a CEO with a package worth up to $16m; AIG (under US government control)hired a CEO with a package worth up to $10.5m. For these critical jobs, both of these executives received compensation exceeding the pay of the median S&P 500 CEO.


The opposition's opening remarks
Oct 20th 2009 | Nell  Minow

Excessive executive compensation of the past decade is both a symptom and a cause of the current economic mess. And the post-meltdown awards are all but guaranteed to continue to create perverse incentives that will reward management and further damage the interests of shareholders and every other participant in the economy.
Incentive compensation rewarded executives for the quantity of transactions rather than the quality of transactions. It inevitably led to failures like the subprime disaster and the dominoes it toppled as it took the economy down with it. Worst of all, the avalanche of post-bailout bonuses and departure packages like the $53m Ken Lewis got from Bank of America have severely damaged the credibility of Wall Street and the American financial markets as a whole. The billions of dollars of losses do not come close to the reputational
hit to American capitalism, which will increase the cost of capital for all US companies.
Panglossian observers will always be able to find some metric to justify any level of pay. But the results speak for themselves. The decisions that led to the meltdown were made by executives who knew that they would be paid tens, even hundreds of millions of dollars no matter how successful the consequences of those decisions.
Let us look at ground zero of the subprime mess, Countrywide, where Angelo Mozilo made more than$550m during his time as CEO. When the compensation committee tried to object to his pay levels, he hired another compensation consultant, paid for by the shareholders, to push them into giving him more. He also pushed for, and was given, shareholder subsidies, not just for his wife's travel on the corporate jet but for the taxes on the imputed income from that travel. Instead of telling Mr Mozilo that he had no business asking the shareholders to subsidise his taxes, the board meekly signed off on it, making it clear to everyone in the executive suite that the pay-performance link was not a priority.
By the end of 2007, when Countrywide finally revealed the losses it had previously obscured, shareholders lost more than 78% of their investment value. Meanwhile, in early 2007 Mr Mozilo sold over $127m inexercised stock options before July 24th 2007, when he announced a$388m write-down on profits. Before the bailout, Countrywide narrowly avoided bankruptcy by taking out an emergency loan of $11 billion from a group of banks. Mr Mozilo continued to sell off shares, and by the end of 2007 he had sold an additional $30m in exercised stock options. There is the definition of outrageously excessive compensation.
Country wide responded to a shareholder proposal that year asking for a non-binding advisory vote on its pay plan by urging shareholders to oppose it because "Countrywide has been an outstanding performer" and because" The Board's Compensation Committee has access to the best information on compensation practices and has a thorough process in place to determine appropriate executive pay." They could hardly have done worse. And it is likely that some market feedback on the structure of the pay plan could have given compensation committee members Harley W.Snyder (chair), Robert J. Donato, Michael E. Dougherty and Oscar P.Robertson worthwhile guidance.
Michelle Leder of the indispensable Footnoted.org website discovered that Frank A. Keating, Charles T. Maxwell and Frederick B. Whittemore, the compensation committee at Chesapeake Energy, not only paid the CEO, AubreyMcClendon, $100m, a 500% increase as the stock dropped 60% and the profits went down 50%, they spent $4.6m of the shareholders' money to sponsor a basketball team of which Mr McClendon owns a 19% stake, they purchased catering services from a restaurant which he owns just under a half of, and they took his collection of antique maps off his hands for $12.1m of the shareholders' money, based on a valuation from the consultant who advised Mr McClendon on assembling the collection. The board justified this by referring to Mr McClendon's having to sell more than $1 billion worth of stock due to margin calls, his having concluded four important deals and the benefit to employee morale from having the maps on display in the office. A market-based response would be: (1) that was his risk and it is inappropriate to the point of misappropriation to force the other shareholders, already substantially out of pocket with their own losses due to his poor leadership of the organisation, make up for his losses (2) if the deals are good ones, he will be adequately rewarded when the benefit of those deals is reflected in the stock price; and (3) you have got to be kidding. If this is pay for performance, what exactly is the performance we are paying for?
These may be anecdotes, but they are illuminating ones. The numbers and details may be at the extreme, but the underlying approaches are representative. Even as outliers, they still demonstrate the failure of the system to ensure a vigorous, arm's-length system for determining pay and the inability of the system to require an effective incentive programme with a genuine downside as well as an upside.
In my comments, I will discuss the seven deadliest sins of executive compensation, the two key elements that are essential for any plan that merits support from investors and the only metric that matters in looking at pay.

123runfordreamUID: 2697608

12.24.
续：
Tether: to fasten or restrain by or as if by a tether
Turnover: the amount of business done during a particular period
Mediocre: of moderate or low quality, value, ability, or performance
Tenure: the act, right, manner, or term of holding something
public-sector: 公共部门；公共成分

bandit: an outlaw who lives by plunder especially : a member of a band of marauders
galore: in large amounts or numbers
thrash out: to discuss something thoroughly with someone until you find an answer, reach an agreement, or decide on something
dominoes:
骨牌游戏;
meekly:
→meek：very quiet and gentle and unwilling to argue with people
Strikingly: in a way that is very easy to notice；used to emphasize that someone or something is beautiful in a way that is easy to notice
Metric
：of, relating to, or using the metric system