【clover】Eco 阅读帖 by Misir

misirUID: 2684938

每个组员自己开张自己的eco阅读大贴
组员自己对eco文章的分析要求：每天都做
1.好词好句摘抄
2.分析行文结构以及逻辑推理技巧
3.挖掘可以作为自己文章里example的事例，观点，人物
4.通篇再阅读，提高自己的阅读能力和速度

本贴任务：每周两次。。在这张综合贴上重新贴出你再eco阅读中学到的东西。。不用像每天的分析那样详细。。把精华贴出即可。。一是为了和组员一起分享。。二是重新巩固精华。。反复多次是掌握的基本要点。。
1.逻辑推理展开技巧
2.好词好句
3.example

misirUID: 2684938

占楼待用。。。

misirUID: 2684938

[size=0.9em]Professional-services firms
Laid-off lawyers, cast-off consultantsThe downturn is sorting the best professional-services firms from the rest[size=0.7em]Jan 21st 2010 | NEW YORK | From The Economist print edition

[size=0.74em]Illustration by David Simonds

[size=0.8em]WHAT do you say to a recent law-school graduate? “A skinny double-shot latte to go, please.” From New York to Los Angeles, Edinburgh to Sydney, the downturn of the past two years has hit the legal profession with unprecedented severity. As even some leading law firms struggle for survival, recruitment has dried up. The lucky few who get jobs are often being told to find something else to do for now, and report for duty on some far-off date. The same is true for MBA graduates seeking jobs in management consulting. Even the mighty McKinsey is said to be postponing start dates by several months.
[size=0.8em]Given that new graduates are the grunts of the professional-services industries, earning less than anyone else and working the longest hours, the lack of demand for their services is the clearest indicator of how bad things are. Although a deeper-than-usual cyclical downturn is largely to blame—and is hitting hardest those firms that specialised in financial-market activities such as mergers and acquisitions, and private equity—it is already clear that there will be long-term structural consequences, not least a growing gap between the best firms and the rest.
[size=0.8em]Cutting lawyers’ jobs used to be frowned upon in the profession and thus rarely happened, even in recessions. But last year was the “worst year ever for law-firm lay-offs”, reckonsLaw Shucks, a legal-industry blog. It counted 218 reports of lay-offs at 138 big firms, including no less than ten rounds of cuts at Clifford Chance, a British firm whose ambitious global expansion before the crisis now seems a big mistake. Thacher, Proffitt & Wood, a New York firm which by 2007 earned around half its revenues from structured finance, was devastated by the bursting of the subprime mortgage bubble and ended up being dissolved in December 2008. It was followed in March 2009 by the venerable but property-exposed Philadelphia firm of Wolf, Block, Schorr and Solis-Cohen.
[size=0.8em]As for management consulting, in the third quarter of last year Marsh & McLennan reported a 10% decline in its consulting revenues, in line with the overall shrinkage of the industry. Figures from other big firms are patchy, since they are private partnerships. Still, in 2009, to ensure they had enough cash to weather the financial storm, even leading firms such as McKinsey and BCG held back a chunk of their partners’ bonuses. Of the big three, McKinsey and Bain are said to have suffered slight falls in revenues last year, while BCG, after a strong second half, was slightly up. All three deny making lay-offs—although it is said that they made their “attrition rates” increase, by significantly raising the bar on their traditional “up or out” policy. McKinsey now has 10% fewer consultants.
[size=0.8em]The experience of some once-booming boutique consultancies has been even worse. Marakon Associates was bought for a song by CRA International after the bankruptcy last January of its parent, Trinsum; and Katzenbach Partners was saved by Booz & Company after shrinking alarmingly in the first six months of 2009.
[size=0.8em]Perhaps the hardest hit of the professional services has been human-resources consulting, where revenues fell by 20% in Britain last year. Pay-and-benefits consultants also suffered: sharply falling revenues were one reason why Towers Perrin and Watson Wyatt decided to merge last year. And although accounting firms are less exposed to the cycle than most professional-services firms—annual reports still have to be prepared and audited, whatever the state of the economy—in the year to last June the two biggest accountants, PricewaterhouseCoopers and Ernst & Young, each suffered 7% falls in revenues.
[size=0.8em]Of course, firms with countercyclical activities, such as bankruptcy work, have fared better. Consultants offering outsourced services, like IBM and Accenture, have also done well as cost pressures have driven other companies to use their services. In particular, legal-process outsourcing is booming, as law firms parcel out some of their more basic work to reduce costs. One of the leaders of this nascent market, Pangea3, whose offices in Delhi and Mumbai take on work from clients worldwide, expects to earn twice as much revenue this month as in January 2009.
[size=0.8em]Another booming business is helping the government sort out the economic mess. This is favouring the market leaders most, says Heidi Gardner of Harvard Business School, because the crisis has made governments risk-averse about whom they hire. Slaughter and May, a big London law firm, earned ￡33m ($54m) for its work on the financial crisis, including on the nationalised Northern Rock bank. Sullivan & Cromwell in New York has also done nicely from helping the American government with troubled banks. Big management consultancies have done well too, despite their poor record in the public sector (seeSchumpeter). BCG, for instance, has advised the quango created to oversee America’s state-rescued car firms.
Under the knife[size=0.8em]Though the best will gain at the expense of the rest throughout professional services, the legal profession seems likely to undergo the most profound structural changes. For the first time—long after IT and finance departments went through the same experience—the corporate legal departments that hire law firms are under great budgetary pressure, and are thus demanding much better value from them.
[size=0.8em]In a recent paper, “The Death of Big Law”, Larry Ribstein, a law professor at the University of Illinois, argued that after decades without changing, law firms are likely to have an outburst of experimentation with different business models: even the venerable and lucrative “billable hour” method of charging clients is in doubt. The experimentation may include more firms abandoning their traditional partnership model to go public, following in the footsteps of an Australian law firm, Slater & Gordon, which went public in 2007.
[size=0.8em]Not everyone is excited by this idea. “At firms like McKinsey it was the partnership ethos that helped them through the crisis, as partners believed they were in it for the long term. At some law firms too,” says Jay Lorsch of Harvard Business School. Contrast that with the investment banks that switched from being partnerships to public companies, such as Goldman Sachs. “If you talk to some older Goldman partners they are unhappy with the behaviour of those now running the firm, who have abandoned the partnership ethos in favour of aggressively pursuing profits and have ended up looking like greedy bastards.” As they adapt to survive a tougher climate, lawyers and consultants will need to ensure that any changes do not put their culture of professionalism at risk.

misirUID: 2684938

Tablet computing
The book of Jobs
It has revolutionised one industry after another. Now Apple hopes to transform three at once
Jan 28th 2010 | From The Economist print edition

APPLE is regularly voted the most innovative company in the world, but its inventiveness takes a particular form. Rather than developing entirely new product categories, it excels[to be distinguishable by superiority : surpass others <excel in sports> <excelled at lipreading>] at taking existing, half-baked [poorly developed or carried out]ideas and showing the rest of the world how to do them properly. Under its mercurial and visionary boss, Steve Jobs, it has already done this three times. In 1984 Apple launched the Macintosh. It was not the first graphical, mouse-driven computer, but it employed these concepts in a useful product. Then, in 2001, came the iPod. It was not the first digital-music player, but it was simple and elegant, and carried digital music into the mainstream. In 2007 Apple went on to launch the iPhone. It was not the first smart-phone, but Apple succeeded where other handset-makers had failed, making mobile internet access and software downloads a mass-market phenomenon.
As rivals rushed to copy Apple’s approach, the computer, music and telecoms industries were transformed. Now Mr Jobs hopes to pull off [to carry out despite difficulties : accomplish successfully against odds]the same trick for a fourth time. On January 27th he unveiled his company’s latest product, the iPad—a thin, tablet-shaped device with a ten-inch touch-screen which will go on sale in late March for $499-829 . Years in the making, it has been the subject of hysterical online speculation in recent months, verging at times on religious hysteria: sceptics in the blogosphere jokingly call it the Jesus Tablet.
The enthusiasm of the Apple faithful may be overdone, but Mr Jobs’s record suggests that when he blesses a market, it takes off. And tablet computing promises to transform not just one industry, but three—computing, telecoms and media.
Companies in the first two businesses view the iPad’s arrival with trepidation [恐惧, 忧虑, 惊惶], for Apple’s history makes it a fearsome competitor. The media industry, by contrast, welcomes it wholeheartedly. Piracy, free content and the dispersal of advertising around the web have made the internet a difficult environment for media companies. They are not much keener on the Kindle, an e-reader made by Amazon, which has driven down book prices and cannot carry advertising. They hope this new device will give them a new lease of life, by encouraging people to read digital versions of books, newspapers and magazines while on the move. True, there are worries that Apple could end up wielding[驾轻就熟地使用（武器、工具等）；有效地行使（权力或影响等）] a lot of power in these new markets, as it already does in digital music. But a new market opened up and dominated by Apple is better than a shrinking market, or no market at all.

Keep taking the tablets
Tablet computers aimed at business people have not worked. Microsoft has been pushing them for years, with little success. Apple itself launched a pen-based tablet computer, the Newton, in 1993, but it was a flop[a complete failure]. The Kindle has done reasonably well, and has spawned[BRING FORTH\GENERATE<the idea spawned controversy>] a host of similar devices with equally silly names, including the Nook, the Skiff and the Que. Meanwhile, Apple’s pocket-sized touch-screen devices, the iPhone and iPod Touch, have taken off as music and video players and hand-held games consoles.
The iPad is, in essence, a giant iPhone on steroids. Its large screen will make it an attractive e-reader and video player, but it will also inherit a vast array of games and other software from the iPhone. Apple hopes that many people will also use it instead of a laptop. If the company is right, it could open up a new market for devices that are larger than phones, smaller than laptops, and also double as e-readers, music and video players and games consoles. Different industries are already converging[to come together and unite in a common interest or focus] on this market: mobile-phone makers are launching small laptops, known as netbooks, and computer-makers are moving into smart-phones. Newcomers such as Google, which is moving into mobile phones and laptops, and Amazon, with the Kindle, are also entering the fray: Amazon has just announced plans for an iPhone-style “app store” for the Kindle, which will enable it to be more than just an e-reader.
If the past is any guide, Apple’s entry into the field will not just unleash fierce competition among device-makers, but also prompt consumers and publishers who had previously been wary of e-books to take the plunge[to do or undertake something decisively especially after a period of hesitation or uncertainty], accelerating the adoption of this nascent[coming or having recently come into existence] technology. Sales of e-readers are expected to reach 12m this year, up from 5m in 2009 and 1m in 2008, according to iSuppli, a market-research firm.

Hold the front pixels[论证部分的真正开始。。。重点要看的地方。。。]
Will the spread of tablets save struggling media companies? Sadly not. Some outfits—metropolitan[大都会的] newspapers, for instance—are probably doomed by their reliance on classified advertising, which is migrating to dedicated[given over to a particular purpose <a dedicated Web server>] websites. Others are too far gone already. Tablets are expensive, and it will be some years before they are widespread enough to fulfil their promise. In theory a newspaper could ask its readers to sign up for a two-year electronic subscription, say, and subsidise the cost of a tablet. But such a subsidy would be hugely pricey, and expensive printing presses will have to be kept running for readers who want to stick with paper.
Still, even though tablets will not save weak media companies, they are likely to give strong ones a boost. Charging for content, which has proved difficult on the web, may get easier. Already, people are prepared to pay to receive newspapers and magazines (including The Economist) on the Kindle. The iPad, with its colour screen and integration with Apple’s online stores, could make downloading books, newspapers and magazines as easy and popular as downloading music. Most important, it will allow for advertising, on which American magazines, in particular, depend. Tablets could eventually lead to a wholesale[批发、大规模的] switch to digital delivery, which would allow newspapers and book publishers to cut costs by closing down printing presses.
If Mr Jobs manages to pull off another amazing trick with another brilliant device, then the benefits of the digital revolution to media companies with genuinely popular products may soon start to outweigh the costs. But some media companies are dying, and a new gadget will not resurrect them. Even the Jesus Tablet cannot perform miracles.
Even the Jesus Tablet cannot perform miracles.

misirUID: 2684938

http://www.economist.com/world/international/displayStory.cfm?story_id=15404916&source=hptextfeature

Scarcity and globalisation

A needier era

The politics of global disruption, and how they may change

Jan 28th 2010 | From The Economist print edition

Ideas are in short supply, too

1.THE 1990s was “the age of abundance”[富足的时代], argued Brink Lindsey in a book of that title. Round the world, incomes were rising; capital markets[资本市场] were processing endless flows of money and investment; technological gains meant that ever more information was available ever more cheaply. And politics in the age of abundance, Mr Lindsey claimed, was all about values. In America this was the period of the “culture wars” over abortion and gun ownership; internationally, there was a huge expansion in concern over human rights.第一段是着重描写“富足时代”的表现和导致的后果

2.The 2010s, it is sometimes said, will be an age of scarcity[贫穷的年代]. The warning signs of change are said to be the food-price spike[an abrupt sharp increase (as in prices or rates)] of 2007-08, the bid by China and others to grab access to[抓住机会] oil, iron ore[铁矿石] and farmland and the global recession. The main problems of scarcity are water and food shortages, demographic change and state failure. How will that change politics?第二段描写“贫困时代”的表现和提出疑问

3.In the domestic debates of some rich democracies, things are shifting already. In Europe the talk is of how to distribute the pain of cutting public debts. In America the return of mad-as-hell populism？？？ looks like a turn away from the politics of abundance . Now, a report for the Brookings Institution, a think-tank in Washington, DC, and the Centre on International Co-operation at New York University* looks at international politics in an age of want.第三段引出BI和CIC的看法[过渡]

4.The sort of problems governments increasingly face, they say, will be much less predictable than those associated with old great-power rivalries. Pressure from demography, climate change and shifts in economic power builds up quietly for a long time—and then triggers abrupt shifts.

5.They claim that the current global system is ill-designed for such a world. It is not just that the foreign policies of big countries are in flux[在不断变化]. Rather, the way states deal with new threats is, in the jargon, “stove-piped”[to develop, or be developed, in an isolated environment; to solve narrow goals or meet specific needs in a way not readily compatible with other systems.]. As a UN panel said in 2004, “finance ministers tend to work only with the international financial institutions, development ministers only with development programmes.”

6.The authors say that what is needed is not merely institutional tinkering[制度修补] but a different frame of mind. Governments, they say, should think more in terms of reducing risk and increasing resilience to shocks than about boosting sovereign power[主权]. This is because they think power may not be the best way for states to defend themselves against a new kind of threat: the sort that comes not from other states but networks of states and non-state actors, or from the unintended consequences of global flows of finance, technology and so on.

7.What would all that mean in practice? They cite the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation as the sort of institutions they want more of: bodies that use technical expertise—leaving aside the IPCC’s mistake over the melting of Himalayan glaciers—to induce countries to recognise their mutual interests[共同利益]. Such agencies can promote foresight, and help governments think harder about the consequences of failure (unlike traditional diplomacy, which likes muddling along[得过且过]). They propose an Intergovernmental Panel on Biological Safety along the lines of the IPCC to improve biosecurity; they also suggest boosting the G20[二十国集团是一个国际经济合作论坛，属于布雷顿森林体系框架内非正式对话的一种机制。旨在促进工业化国家和新兴市场国家就国际经济、货币政策和金融体系的重要问题开展富有建设性和开放性的对话，并通过对话，为有关实质问题的讨论和协商奠定广泛基础，以寻求合作并推动国际金融体制的改革，加强国际金融体系架构，促进经济的稳定和持续增长。] by giving it a secretariat and getting national security chiefs together.第四五六七段是主要展开内容，描述问题与解决方法

8.Many of these ideas may go nowhere[半途而废]; national sovereignty is hugely resilient. But to those who call the whole exercise pointless, they cite Milton Friedman, who, when monetarism[货币主义] was being mocked in the 1970s, replied “our basic function [is] to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.”怎么翻译最后一句话？？？最后一段总是很模棱两可。。。

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South Africa's education system
No one gets prizes
Blacks suffer most, as schools remain ill-equipped and children are ill-taughtJan 14th 2010 | JOHANNESBURG | From The Economist print edition

SOUTH AFRICA spends a bigger share of its GDP on education than any other country on the continent. Yet its results are among the worst. Fifteen years after apartheid[种族隔离政策] was buried, black children continue to receive an education that is vastly inferior to[次于; 劣于] most of their white peers. Instead of ending inequality, as the ruling African National Congress (ANC) promised, the country’s schools are perpetuating[to make perpetual or cause to last indefinitely <perpetuate the species>] it. 此段讲述现在与目标。

For Graeme Bloch, an education expert at the Development Bank of Southern Africa, his country’s education system is a “national disaster”. He says around 80% of schools are “dysfunctional”. Half of all pupils drop out before taking their final “matric” [大学入学许可]exams. Only 15% get good enough marks to get into university. Of those who do get in, barely half end up with a degree. South Africa regularly comes bottom or near the bottom in international literacy, numeracy[the capacity for quantitative thought and expression] and science tests.此段是南非某人述说的例子，说明了教育水平之差。

University heads increasingly complain about students totally unprepared for higher education. Employers bemoan a dearth[an inadequate supply]
of skilled manpower, yet—by some measures—one in three South Africans has no job. A study of first-year students by Higher Education South Africa, the universities’ representative body, found only half the 2009 intake to be proficient[well advanced in an art, occupation, or branch of knowledge] in “academic literacy” and barely a quarter in “quantitative literacy”, while no more than 7% were deemed[认为] to have the necessary mathematics skills.此段是大学校长抱怨人才少，说明人们普遍不重视教育

The ANC government has poured money into schools in black townships and rural areas in an effort to[企图] raise standards, yet black children still fare[GET ALONG SUCCEED] badly. Of the one in four who took matric maths in 2008, only 39% passed (despite a lowly passmark of just 30%), compared with 98% of whites; 28% of whites achieved a score of at least 80%, compared with just 2% of blacks. 此段说明虽然ANC政府花了钱，但是黑人小孩的学业还是没有进步。

Not surprisingly, the same story is repeated at tertiary[第三] level. Just one in ten black pupils qualifies for university, compared with more than half of their white peers. Whites, who account for 9% of the population, gained 42% of the degrees awarded in 2007, almost exactly the same proportion as blacks, who are nearly ten times more numerous. 此段说明黑人小孩比不过白人

Much of this discrepancy[相差; 矛盾; 差异] is to do with history. Under apartheid, blacks were kept down[抑制,控制]. By the end of the 1960s, the government was spending 16 times more on educating a white child than a black one. Most black teachers were (and still are) far less qualified than white ones. Black schools had (and still have) fewer facilities and much bigger classes. And most black children came from poor, ill-educated families where English, the main language of instruction, was not their mother tongue. 此段解释造成前面述说的现象的原因是历史。

Today, all state schools are desegregated[废除种族隔离]. But it is the better-endowed former white schools, with their continuing traditions of discipline, excellence and hard work, that still produce by far and away[by a considerable margin <was far and away the better team>] the best results. The top 10% of former all-black schools are also achieving some excellent results. But, as the Congress of South African Trade Unions recently admitted, many are “unsafe, bleak, uninspiring places, where violence and abuse are rife[流行普遍的；越来越普及的]”. In many cases, said COSATU, they were “no more than dumping grounds for children.”此段讲述现在的状况有好转，但仍然存在问题

The latest matric results published this month showed a fall in the overall pass rate to 61%, compared with 73% in 2003. Though the pass rate has always fluctuated, the latest result has brought renewed heart-searching. Much of the blame has been attributed to the introduction in 1998 of a supposedly more child-centred “outcomes-based education”, designed to prepare children for a rapidly changing, technological world. But few schools had the resources to apply such ideas. The government now wants a return to greater emphasis on the three Rs. 此段述说了某考试结果下降的原因

But more than the curriculum or organisation of classes, it is the teachers who are largely responsible for South Africa’s abysmal[红宝单词] results. Only 18% are professionally qualified graduates. Most spend barely half the officially required 6.5 hours a day in class, sometimes running their own businesses on the side[作兼职]. Many are not up to teaching at all. Yet their performance is not systematically monitored. Now, to the horror of the powerful teaching unions, President Jacob Zuma’s government is talking of reintroducing a schools’ inspectorate[稽查员的职务] 此段述说另一个原因在于教师的水平有待提高.

Not all is gloom. Many more black children are getting at least some kind of formal instruction than under apartheid. Around three-quarters of those aged 4-6 and 98% of those aged 7-15 are in full-time schooling, while the number of black university students has nearly quadrupled[成四倍的] over the past 15 years. But with more than 5% of GDP being spent on education, South Africa is getting a rotten return on its investment. 此段在批评之余给了台阶下。。。

misirUID: 2684938

The family in figures
Men and marriage
Women’s higher earnings seem to benefit husbands as much as wives
Jan 28th 2010 | From The Economist print edition

IT IS a truth universally acknowledged that a married woman in possession of
a large fortune will probably spend most of it on her husband and children. [M1] That seems to be the conclusion of a study* by the Pew Research Centre in Washington, DC, of the lives of Americans aged 30-44, those most likely to have young families. Whereas in earlier generations marriage allowed women to achieve economic security, now, it appears, men are more likely to benefit.第一段总述男女收入的用处。

The root cause is the spread of women’s higher education. For the first time in American history there are more female than male college graduates among this age group. In contrast, in 1970, almost twice as many men as women[M2] in this group, 30-44, had college degrees. The result is that in the half of households where one partner has more education, it is now more likely to be the wife who has more. In 1970, it was usually the husband.第二段阐述了根源：女性的受教育水平升高。

Income tends to rise with education, and women’s earnings have risen relative to men’s at every level of schooling. Men’s income is still, on average, higher, but women have been narrowing the gap and adding more to household earnings. A few wives contributed more than their men: in 1970 only 4% earned more than their husbands; in 2007 22% did.第三段举了例子说明第二段

That represented a rise in social mobility. But with it went an apparent decline in another aspect of mobility[M3] : more people seem to be marrying within their education and income bracket[M4] , especially at the top. The best educated and highest-earning husbands in 2007 were more likely to have the highest-income wives than was the case in 1970. At the bottom of the education heap, too, men are less likely to have wives who earn a lot. Forty years ago, half of husbands who dropped out of high school had wives who earned more than the average for women; now just 30% do. 第四段写门当户对现象

That is an exception to the rule that, as the report says, “the economic gains from marriage have accrued more to men than to women.” But there is one other way in which the growing economic clout of women increases their power within marriage. According to Pew, in households where the husband earns more, women are still just as likely to make the final decisions regarding household finances; where the wife earns more, she is more than twice as likely to do so.第五段讲了特例，同时女性的地位随收入的增加而升高。


[M1]赞此句子呢~

[M2]学习比较的用法

[M3]倒装句式

[M4]a section of a continuously numbered or graded series (as age ranges or income levels)这个意思比较特殊，是阶层的意思。。。

misirUID: 2684938

Banyan

Japan's love-bubbles for China

Hatoyama's advances to China raise fundamental questions about regional security

Jan 28th 2010 | From The Economist print edition

WHAT our colleague, Charlemagne, calls “bubbles of optimism” over China have been popping in Western capitals, as China has taken a hard line against internal dissent, proven unhelpful in efforts to tackle both climate change and Iran’s growing nuclear threat, manipulated its currency and launched cyber- attacks on Western computer networks. [一开头就是一个长句子。。] China, muscling its way to global prominence, is not quite the partner the West had been cultivating. [第二句也很精彩] Striking, then, that in Japan the bubble of optimism, among the country’s new leaders, is only inflating.中国实力异军突起，日本的”bubbles of optimism”在膨胀。

Soon after the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) swept into office nearly five months ago, the prime minister, Yukio Hatoyama [鸠山由纪夫], unveiled a vision for an East Asian Community (EAC). For all that it was dreamy and disjointed, it had at its heart a rapprochement between Japan and China leading towards regional integration. Asia, Mr Hatoyama reaffirmed, was Japan’s “basic sphere of being”. As for integration, fraternity was to be the glue.日本与中国的区域性整合。

Then late last year the DPJ’s secretary-general, Ichiro Ozawa[小泽一郎], travelled to Beijing at the head of a 639-strong mission [这句话的理解要注意~], including 143 parliamentarians with whom a beaming President Hu Jintao took the trouble to be photographed, each in turn. Mr Hu doesn’t smile like that for Westerners. Back in Tokyo, Mr Hatoyama horrified sticklers for imperial protocol by insisting that Mr Hu’s heir-apparent, Xi Jinping, pay an impromptu call on Emperor Akihito[明仁天皇].[这句话也很费解] Now rumours suggest Mr Hatoyama may make a visit of remorse, the first by a Japanese prime minister, to Nanjing, site of a massacre by Japanese forces in 1937. In return (and at less political cost), Mr Hu may pay respects to[致敬] the nuclear victims of Hiroshima[广岛]. Japan under the DPJ seems to get on better with China than it does with its ally and security guarantor, the United States. Relations with the United States are strained over the relocation of a military base for American marines on Okinawa, leading to worries over the future of the two countries’ alliance, keystone to security in the western Pacific. 中国与日本的政治友好，显示了日本与美国的紧张关系

Economic logic argues for closer ties with China, which has already overtaken America as Japan’s biggest trading partner, and is about to overtake Japan’s economy to become the world’s second-biggest. After not one but arguably two “lost decades”, an ageing population cannot drive demand in Japan. It must hitch itself to the Chinese juggernaut. A strategic vision, too, lurks somewhere in the idea of an EAC. Mr Hatoyama has committed Japan to cutting greenhouse-gas emissions by a quarter by 2020. He thinks Japan can lead Asia towards a low-carbon future. 与中国结盟是日本经济所需。

But contradictions lurk too. The idea makes a nod to China’s rise. Yet it assumes Japan’s rightful lead in proposing a new regional architecture, while impressing Japan’s technological prowess[科技力量] on China. The impulse is deeper-seated[更深层次的] than Mr Hatoyama might admit. The story of modern Japan is of the use of Western arms and technology to overturn China’s centuries-old regional dominance. [西方列强武力打开中国封建闭关的大门。记~]China now intends to restore the natural order, and does not need directions from others, least of all Japan. It has made only the minimum polite noises about an EAC. As for the green technology that Japan can share, both sides say it is a good thing but are infuriatingly sparing with the details. Besides, since the December summit in Copenhagen, China has hinted it might go its own way on climate change.[有这等说法？] 日本的做法也存在弊端，中国现在正在走自己的道路。

Popular Japanese attitudes towards China suffer from the same doublethink. In one recent poll, most of those questioned wanted a “warmer” political relationship with their big neighbour. But most also wanted the prime minister to visit Yasukuni[靖国神社], Tokyo’s militarist shrine, on remembrance day. That is one issue guaranteed to send China-Japan relations into the cooler. A sense of Japanese superiority over coarse, authoritarian China is also widespread. More than one Japanese professor has told Banyan that Japan is the true guardian of Chinese culture.日本人还是死心不改，军国主义的思想根深蒂固，中国与日本的关系很可能更紧张。（参拜靖国神社是许多民众的意思，首相的参拜可以获得民众的支持。）对日本人的想法咬牙切齿ing…他们不肯承认那段历史的罪恶，我们这一代应该加倍努力，赶超日本！！！

History wars, still far from resolved, point to the limits of rapprochement. So too do maritime disputes over territory. But a huge constraint is the fiscal one. Greying Japan is burdened with deflation[通货紧缩], stagnant growth and a national debt close to 200% of GDP. Japan lacks the resources (and the will) for the kind of bold strategic moves, putting Japan at the heart of Asia, at which Mr Hatoyama and Mr Ozawa hint. Even a more autonomous security policy, out from under America’s wing, is almost a non-starter. Japan has cut its defence spending in recent years, to just 1% of GDP. It has grown more dependent on the United States, not less.日本经济停滞,更加依靠美国的帮助了。

Behind China’s smile

This is where strains over the alliance really matter for the security of the whole region, not least because of Taiwan. On January 24th the Okinawan township picked, after painful years of talks, by the United States and Japan’s previous government as the destination for the relocated marine base elected a mayor resolutely[坚决地] opposed to the move. Popular concerns about the “occupation mentality” of American forces are valid. But Mr Hatoyama, according to colleagues, was sleepwalking when he reopened the issue. Now he cannot go back. Local politics and national security are on a collision course. Mr Hatoyama has said he will decide over the base by May. But moving it anywhere else in Japan will face local resistance too.美国与日本之间的政治军事问题，美国要在日本某岛建立海军基地

As Yoichi Funabashi, editor of Asahi Shimbun puts it, if the new administration bungles relations with Washington, it will look diplomatically inept at a time when power relations in Asia are shifting fast.[不易理解。。]That might spell the end of the hapless Mr Hatoyama. So it is hardly cynical to assume that one aim behind China’s outbreak of smiling is to drive a wedge between a slightly clueless Japan and its longstanding protector. After all, Japan would be its base were America to come to Taiwan’s rescue in the event of a mainland attack.[末句貌似是一个倒装结构]日本处于两难的境地

misirUID: 2684938

Books & Arts
The state of America

An anthropologist on the run

Jan 28th 2010 | From The Economist print edition

The Cracked Bell: America and the Afflictions of Liberty. By Tristram Riley-Smith. Skyhorse; 326 pages; $26.95. Constable; &pound;8.99. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

THE final clear note of the Liberty Bell sounded in Philadelphia费城 for the last time on the occasion of George Washington’s birthday in February 1846. That same day, after almost a century of service, it cracked irreparably不能挽回地. For Tristram Riley-Smith, a British civil servant公务员posted for several years to Her Majesty’s陛下embassy in Washington, DC, and now back working in Whitehall, the silenced bell, which was cast in London’s Whitechapel, has provided not only the title of this engaging and ambitious book but also a metaphor for its central idea.

Early in its prehistory, the author argues, America imported from England an ideal of freedom that was tempered by the moral sensibility of the Scottish Enlightenment启蒙运动. In the pressured atmosphere of America itself, however, this ideal was to become distorted by a radical form激进的形式of individualism, which is now undermining social cohesion社会凝聚力. “There is something almost pathological,” he concludes, “about a national narrative that is intoxicated by the spirit of freedom while failing to pay sufficient attention to its meaning.”

What are the supposed “afflictions” of liberty in America? After little more than 50 pages the reader has already learned that Americans have made a religion out of commerce, are intellectually impatient and consume more than they conserve. Hurricane Katrina卡特里娜飓风 of 2005 was “engendered by the radiation of a consumer society”, and the subsequent looting of New Orleans exposed “the anger and appetite of an underclass that knew no other values than those preached in the Temple of Trade”. America’s “consumerist creed消费主义的信条” creates a “candyfloss culture棉花糖文化” dominated by instant gratification, the fallout from which includes “obesity, debt, poverty and pollution”. Thus Thomas Jefferson’s mandate命令to pursue happiness “falls like kerosene煤油on the torch of liberty”, warming many but “scorching and blinding” countless others.这段有很多很精彩的句子！！！

Irritated American readers tempted to give up at this point would do well to persevere. Thankfully, the author’s America becomes both less clichéd and less negative as he goes along. In the end a sharp eye, lively pen and a training in anthropology help Mr Riley-Smith to paint a vivid, impressionistic picture of a society constantly pushed and pulled between contradictory impulses: to forge a single identity while prizing diversity; to set some sort of social ballast社会镇流器alongside quicksilver individualism; to square a culture of innovation with politics that are throttled扼杀by special interests; to reconcile the American dream of achievement for all with the reality of personal failure for many. Among other things, such contradictions help to explain the American attachment to religion that puzzles many in Europe. “Submission to Jesus”, notes Mr Riley-Smith, “is an appealing alternative to the challenge of pulling yourself up by the bootstraps通过引导.”

In his darkest moments Mr Riley-Smith perceives America as “Hobbesville USA”, a lawless place where liberty has degenerated into licence, setting man against man in a Hobbesian dystopia. At other times he imagines America as Hobbiton in J.R. Tolkien’s托尔金fictional shire, whose denizens maintain a voluntary, ordered society where the sense of fellowship is strong and where government is small. “There is”, he admits, “a piece of Hobbiton meshed into all but the most dysfunctional communities of the USA, not least in the suburbs that harbour the bulk of the nation’s population.” But he believes that the first decade of the 21st century has seen the balance tip too far in the direction of hyper-individualism极端个人主义. Now the balance needs to be corrected. But how?

The answer, in so far as this book has one, is Barack Obama, whose mixed background and eloquent雄辩的writing appear to have persuaded Mr Riley-Smith that this particular president has the “opportunity, the capacity and the vision” to recast the Liberty Bell and make room for the civic values公民价值观such as equality, fairness and justice that America has neglected as a result of its disproportionate emphasis on personal freedom. How ironic that the book should be published just when a quirky election in Massachusetts has shown how little power even the most inspiring of presidents has to recast America. Some may say that this, too, is one of the “afflictions of liberty”. But maybe it is just liberty.

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建议看下载的版本。。。这帖严重掉色。。。

银落UID: 2632560

继续坚持。。做的很好。。~。。。》《。。:)

misirUID: 2684938

A special report on social networking

A world of connections

Online social networks are changing the way people communicate, work and play, and mostly for the better, says Martin Giles

Jan 28th 2010 | From The Economist print edition

THE annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, currently in progress, is famous for making connections among the global great and good. But when the delegates go home again, getting even a few of them together in a room becomes difficult. To allow the leaders to keep talking, the forum’s organisers last year launched a [url=]pilot[/url][s1] version of a secure online service where members can post mini-biographies and other information, and create links with other users to form collaborative working groups.

Dubbed命名的the World Electronic Community, or WELCOM, the forum’s exclusive online network has only about 5,000 members.

But if any service deserves such a grand title it is surely Facebook, which celebrates its sixth birthday next month and is now the second most popular site on the internet after Google. The globe’s largest online social network boasts over 350m users—which, were it a nation, would make Facebook the world’s third most populous after China and India.很形象地描述了facebook的使用人数多~记~而且使用了虚拟语气~ That is not the only striking statistic associated with the business. Its users now post over 55m updates a day on the site and share more than 3.5 billion pieces of content with one another every week. As it has grown like Topsy, the site has also expanded way beyond its American roots: today some 70% of its audience is outside the United States.

Although Facebook is the world’s biggest social network, there are a number of other [url=]globetrotting[/url][s2] sites, such as MySpace, which concentrates on music and entertainment; LinkedIn, which targets career-minded professionals; and Twitter, a networking service that lets members send out short, 140-character messages called “tweets”. All of these appear in a ranking of the world’s most popular networks by total monthly web visits (see chart 1), which also includes Orkut, a Google-owned service that is heavily used in India and Brazil, and QQ, which is big in China. On top of these there are other big national community sites such as Skyrock in France, VKontakte in Russia, and Cyworld in South Korea, as well as numerous smaller social networks that appeal to specific interests such as Muxlim, aimed at the world’s Muslims, and ResearchGATE, which connects scientists and researchers.一些网络通讯工具。。。

Going public

All this shows just how far online communities have come. Until the mid-1990s they were largely ghettos for geeks who hid behind online aliases. Thanks to easy-to-use interfaces and fine-grained privacy controls, social networks have been transformed into vast public spaces where millions of people now feel comfortable using their real identities online. ComScore, a market-research firm, reckons that last October big social-networking sites received over 800m visitors. “The social networks’ greatest achievement has been to bring humanity into a place that was once cold and technological,” says Charlene Li of the Altimeter Group, a consulting firm.

Their other great achievement has been to turn themselves into superb tools for mass communication. Simply by updating a personal page on Facebook or sending out a tweet, users can let their network of friends—and sometimes the world—know what is happening in their lives. Moreover, they can send out videos, pictures and lots of other content with just a few clicks of a mouse. “This represents a dramatic and permanent upgrade in people’s ability to communicate with one another,” says Marc Andreessen牛人, a Silicon Valley [url=]veteran[/url][s3] who has invested in Facebook, Twitter and Ning, an American firm that hosts almost 2m social networks for clients.

And people are making copious use of that ability. Nielsen, a market-research firm, reckons that since February 2009 they have been spending more time on social-networking sites than on e-mail, and the lead is getting bigger. Measured by hours spent on them per social-network user, the most avid online networkers are in Australia, followed by those in Britain and Italy (see chart 2). Last October Americans spent just under six hours surfing social networks, almost three times as much as in the same month in 2007. And it isn’t just youngsters who are friending and poking one another—Facebook-speak for making connections and saying hi to your pals. People of all ages are joining the networks in ever greater numbers.

Social-networking sites’ impressive growth has attracted much attention because the sites have made people’s personal relationships more visible and quantifiable than ever before. They have also become important vehicles for news and channels of influence.网络的影响越来越多。。。 Twitter regularly scores headlines with its real-time updates on events like the Mumbai terrorist attacks and on the activities of its high-profile users, who include rap stars, writers and royalty. And both Twitter and Facebook played a starring role in the online campaign strategy that helped sweep Barack Obama to victory in the presidential race.

Delivery time

But like Mr Obama, social networks have also generated great expectations along the way on which they must now deliver. They need to prove to the world that they are here to stay. They must demonstrate that they are capable of generating the returns that justify the lofty valuations investors have given them. And they need to do all this while also reassuring users that their privacy will not be violated in the pursuit of profit.

In the business world there has also been much hype around something called “Enterprise 2.0”, a term coined to describe efforts to bring technologies such as social networks and blogs into the workplace. Fans claim that new social-networking offerings now being developed for the corporate world will create huge benefits for businesses. Among those being touted are services such as Yammer, which produces a corporate version of Twitter, and Chatter, a social-networking service that has been developed by Salesforce.com.

To skeptics all this talk of twittering, yammering and chattering smacks of another internet bubble in the making. They argue that even a huge social network such as Facebook will struggle to make money because fickle networkers will not stay in one place for long, pointing to the example of MySpace, which was once all the rage but has now become a shadow of its former self. Last year the site, which is owned by News Corp, installed a new boss and fired 45% of its staff as part of a plan to revive its fortunes. Critics also say that the networks’ advertising-driven business model is flawed.

Within companies there is plenty of doubt about the benefits of online social networking in the office. A survey of 1,400 chief information officers conducted last year by Robert Half Technology, a recruitment firm, found that only one-tenth of them gave employees full access to such networks during the day, and that many were blocking Facebook and Twitter altogether. The executives’ biggest concern was that social networking would lead to social notworking囧~一字之差, with employees using the sites to chat with friends instead of doing their jobs. Some bosses also fretted that the sites would be used to leak sensitive corporate information.

This special report will examine these issues in detail. It will argue that social networks are more robust than their critics think, though not every site will prosper, and that social-networking technologies are creating considerable benefits for the businesses that embrace them, whatever their size. Lastly, it will contend that this is just the beginning of an exciting new era of global interconnectedness that will spread ideas and innovations around the world faster than ever before.描述通讯全球化的句子

[s1]serving as a guiding or tracing device, an activating or auxiliary unit, or a trial apparatus or operation <a pilot study>



[s2]travelling in many countries all over the world: a globetrotting journalist



[s3]a person of long experience usually in some occupation or skill (as politics or the arts)

misirUID: 2684938

0206日ECO总结~by MisirVocabulary:1、
Wield [驾轻就熟地使用（武器、工具等）；有效地行使（权力或影响等）]
2、
Flop [a complete failure]
3、
Spawn [BRING FORTH, GENERATE <the idea spawned controversy>]
4、
Converge [to come together and unite in a common interest or focus]
5、
Nascent [coming or having recently come into existence]
6、
metropolitan[大都会的]
7、
capital markets[资本市场]
8、
spike[an abrupt sharp increase (as in prices or rates)]
9、
monetarism[货币主义]
10、
apartheid [种族隔离政策]

desegregated[废除种族隔离]
11、
rife[流行普遍的；越来越普及的]
12、
an ageing population人口老龄化
13、
in a [url=]Hobbesian[/url][s1] [url=]dystopia[/url][s2] .

Phrases:1.
view the iPad’s arrival with trepidation [恐惧, 忧虑, 惊惶]
2.
in essence [in or by its very nature : ESSENTIALLY, BASICALLY]可作为插入语
3.
take the plunge[to do or undertake something decisively especially after a period of hesitation or uncertainty]
4.
grab access to[抓住机会]
5.
be in flux[在不断变化]
6.
recognise their mutual interests[共同利益]
7.
inferior to[次于; 劣于]
8.
final “matric”[大学入学许可]exams
9.
a dearth [an inadequate supply] of
10.
be proficient[well advanced in an art, occupation, or branch of knowledge] in
11.
be deemed to 被认为是
12.
at tertiary[第三] level
13.

Sentences:1．
Rather than developing entirely new product categories, it excels [to be distinguishable by superiority: surpass others <excel in sports> <excelled at lipreading>] at taking existing, half-baked [poorly developed or carried out] ideas and showing the rest of the world how to do them properly.
2．
Tablets could eventually lead to a wholesale[批发、大规模的] switch to digital delivery, which would allow newspapers and book publishers to cut costs by closing down printing presses
3．
But some media companies are dying, and a new [url=]gadget[/url][s3] will not resurrect使复活them. Even the Jesus Tablet cannot perform miracles.
4．
Technological gains meant that ever more information was available ever more cheaply. [technology]
5．
Many of these ideas may go nowhere[半途而废]
6．
Much of this discrepancy[相差; 矛盾; 差异] is to do with history.
7．
to forge a single identity while prizing diversity; to set some sort of social ballast社会镇流器alongside [url=]quicksilver[/url][s4] individualism; to [url=]square[/url][s5] a culture of innovation with politics that are throttled扼杀by special interests; to [url=]reconcile[/url][s6] the American dream of achievement for all with the reality of personal failure for many.
8．
which, were it a nation, would make Facebook the world’s third most populous after China and India.很形象地描述了facebook的使用人数多~记~而且使用了虚拟语气~
9．
social networking would lead to social notworking囧~一字之差
10．
Lastly, it will contend that this is just the beginning of an exciting new era of global interconnectedness that will spread ideas and innovations around the world faster than ever before.描述通讯全球化的句子

[s1]霍布斯认为，历史最重要的职责就是要为统治阶级在政治策略方面提供有益的教训



[s2]an imaginary place where people lead dehumanized and often fearful lives反面乌托邦，非理想化的地方，地狱般的处境



[s3]an often small mechanical or electronic device with a practical use but often thought of as a novelty



[s4]changing or moving very quickly: his quicksilver temperament



[s5]to agree precisely



[s6]to make consistent or congruous <reconcile an ideal with reality>

misirUID: 2684938

生词|词组|佳句|其他
NASA's new mission
Space to thrive
A plan to overhaul America’s space agency is long overdue
Feb 3rd 2010 | From The Economist print edition



IN 2004 George Bush announced a plan for America’s space agency, NASA, to return to the moon by 2020, land there, explore the surface and set up a base. The moon would then serve as a staging post for a journey to Mars. It was, unfortunately, unclear how this modest proposal would be paid for and, as work began and costs spiraled不断加剧地增加, the “vision” seemed more science fiction than science.
On February 1st, reality caught up. The back-to-the-moon programme, Constellation, with its Ares rocket (pictured), fell victim to成为...的牺牲品Barack Obama’s need to find cuts. The Office of Management and Budget described it as over budget, behind schedule and lacking in innovation due to a failure to invest. The office also said Constellation had sucked money from other, more scientific programmes, such as robotic space exploration and Earth observation.
Much has been made of the fact that NASA will, as a consequence of Constellation’s cancellation, have to rely on private firms to send its astronauts to the international space station once the space shuttle is withdrawn. In many ways, though, this is the least interesting aspect of what is happening, for what Mr Obama proposed is actually a radical overhaul of the agency.
Success is an option
The rethink looks at four areas: new ways of getting into space; extending the life and use of the space station; the agency’s relationship with the private sector; and its scientific mission. The first part of the plan, known as the transformative technology initiative, will cost $7.8 billion over five years. It will develop orbiting fuel depots, rendezvous-and-docking technologies交会和对接技术, advanced life-support systems that recycle all of their materials, and better motors for spacecraft. The agency will also develop new engines, propellants推进燃料 and materials as part of a $3.1 billion heavy-lift programme, to allow it to send craft well beyond Earth, while $4.9 billion is allowed for advances in areas such as sensors, communications and robotics.
The second part of the plan is to postpone推迟the death of the space station from 2016 to 2020. More science will be done there (cynics might take issue with与 ... 争论the word “more”) and there will, specifically, be research into biology, combustion and materials science.[跟咱的专业能扯上关系，空间生物学也是一个不错的选择。。。] There will also be more emphasis on space medicine, and the station is to get a centrifuge. This will allow people to experience artificial gravity in space, which may be important for long-term missions to places such as Mars. Inflatable “space habitats” were mentioned, and these might be used to build extensions to the space station on the cheap. All this will please the station’s other participants—Canada, Europe and Japan—which have invested a lot in it for, as yet, little return. It will also help build a coalition联盟of countries that want to travel farther into the solar system.
Now Constellation is cancelled, the plan’s third part is to encourage private firms to provide transport to and from the space station. Such journeys into low Earth orbit do not need the heavy-lifting oomph that more wide-ranging missions require, so the proposal is to contract out all of this local delivery work. In fact, such a scheme already exists, and 20 cargo missions by two firms, SpaceX and Orbital Sciences, are planned. The scheme will be extended to include at least two other companies, Boeing and Sierra Nevada Corporation.
Under the new regime, companies will get fixed-price contracts instead of being paid on a “cost plus” basis. The risks and burdens of developing transport to low Earth orbit will thus fall to the private sector. According to Mike Gold of Bigelow Aerospace, a firm that hopes to build inflatable space habitats, such fiscal财政的rectitude has been met with criticism from a surprising quarter: Republican politicians. Bill Posey, who represents Florida in Congress, described it as a “slow death of our nation’s human space-flight programme”. “If you could fuel a rocket on hypocrisy伪善,” Mr Gold suggests, “we’d be on Pluto冥王星by now.”
The last part of the plan is for more science. The Earth-observation programme will receive some $2 billion to improve the forecasting of climate change and monitor the planet’s carbon cycle and its ice sheets. As part of this, NASA will replace the Orbiting Carbon Observatory, a satellite that was lost a year ago, and which was supposed to identify the world’s sources, and sinks, of carbon dioxide.
There will also be a new emphasis on robotic missions, which are vastly cheaper than manned ones, and cause less angst if they blow up. The first robot destination will be the moon. There will also, according to Charlie Bolden, NASA’s administrator, be a mission to the sun, to study the solar wind, and one to improve the agency’s ability to detect and catalogue interesting (but potentially dangerous) asteroids that pass near Earth.
It all, then, adds up to a radical shift—but a sensible one after years of fantasy. As Lori Garver, Mr Bolden’s deputy, put it, “the old plans lost us the moon. This gives us back the solar system.”
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支持下PDF好了~

misirUID: 2684938

生词|词组|佳句|其他
The science of music
Sounds wonderful
Feb 4th 2010 | From The Economist print edition
The Music Instinct: How Music Works and Why We Can’t Do Without It. By Philip Ball. Bodley Head; 452 pages; &pound;20.

MUSIC is a mystery. It is unique to the human race: no other species produces elaborate sound for no particular reason. It has been, and remains, part of every known civilization on Earth.[可以用在艺术类的ISSUE上~
] Lengths of bone fashioned into flutes were in use 40,000 years ago. And it engages people’s attention more comprehensively than almost anything else: scans show that when people listen to music, virtually every area of their brain becomes more active. 提出观点给出证据~

Yet it serves no obvious adaptive purpose. Charles Darwin, in “The Descent of Man”, noted that “neither the enjoyment nor the capacity of producing musical notes is faculties of the least direct use to man in reference to his ordinary habits of life.” Unwilling to believe that music was altogether useless; Darwin concluded that it may have made man’s ancestors more successful at mating. Yet if that were so, you might expect one gender to be musically more gifted than the other, and there is no evidence of that. So what is the point of music? Darwin’s Theory

Steven Pinker, a cognitive psychologist best known for his book “The Language Instinct”, has called music “auditory cheesecake, an exquisite confection crafted to tickle the sensitive spots of at least six of our mental faculties.” If it vanished from our species, he said, “the rest of our lifestyle would be virtually unchanged.” Others have argued that, on the contrary, music, along with art and literature, is part of what makes people human; its absence would have a brutalising effect. Philip Ball, a British science writer and an avid music enthusiast, comes down somewhere in the middle. He says that music is ingrained in our auditory, cognitive and motor functions. We have a music instinct as much as a language instinct, and could not rid ourselves of it if we tried.

Music can mean different things in different cultures.[这种论述可以学习~分情况case by case] But although it is culturally从文化角度specific, some of its building blocks are universal: melody, harmony, rhythm, the timbre音色, 音质produced by a variety of instruments and the distinctive style added by particular composers.[音乐的基本元素是相同的。。。这句话挺好的] Almost all musical systems are based on scales spanning an octave—the note that sounds the same as the one you started off with, but at a higher or lower pitch. Pythagoras毕达哥拉斯, a Greek philosopher who lived around 500BC, is said to have discovered that notes that sound harmonious together have simple ratios between their frequencies: for example, one that is an octave higher than another has double the frequency. The Pythagorean “diatonic” scale, still the basis of most Western music, is made up from seven notes. But it is far from the only one. Javanese爪哇人gamelan加麦兰(一组印尼的民族管弦乐器) uses two scales with different numbers of notes; North Indian music has 32 different scales. Arnold Schoenberg舍恩伯格devised a 12-tone scheme of atonal music about a century ago.论点+论据，俱已~

Mr Ball goes through each component of music in turn to explain how and why it works, using plentiful examples drawn from a refreshingly wide range of different kinds of music, from Bach巴赫to the Beatles, and from nursery rhymes童谣
to jazz. If you can read music, you will find yourself humming aloud to see what he means. If you can’t, you might occasionally get lost among the technicalities. But before things get too rarefied, Mr Ball’s facility for conveying complex facts in simple language comes to the rescue.

His basic message is encouraging and uplifting: people know much more about music than they think. They start picking up the rules from the day they are born, perhaps even before, by hearing it all around them. Very young children can tell if a tune or harmony is not quite right. One of the joys of listening to music is a general familiarity with the way it is put together: to know roughly what to expect, then to see in what particular ways your expectations will be met or exceeded. [此 话表示的意思我也曾经想过。。。人似乎可以预计将要发生的东西。。。]Most adults can differentiate between kinds of music even if they have had no training.

Music is completely sui generis. It should not tell a non-musical story; the listener will decode it for himself. Many, perhaps most, people have experienced a sudden rush of emotion on hearing a particular piece of music; a thrill or chill, a sense of excitement or exhilaration, a feeling of being swept away by it. They may even be moved to tears, without being able to tell why[谈论音乐的感受，即使未知其中的原因。。。]. Musical analysts have tried hard to find out how this happens, but with little success. Perhaps some mysteries are best preserved.

misirUID: 2684938

Geopolitics
Facing up to China

Making room for a new superpower should not be confused with giving way to it
Feb 4th 2010 | From The Economist print edition

FOR six decades now, Taiwan has been where the simmering distrust between China and America most risks boiling over. In 1986 Deng Xiaoping called it the “one obstacle in Sino-US relations”. So there was something almost ritualistic惯例的about the Chinese government’s protestations this week that it was shocked, shocked and angered by America’s decision to sell Taiwan $6 billion-worth of weaponry. Under the Taiwan Relations Act, passed in 1979, all American administrations must help arm Taiwan so that it can defend itself. And China, which has never renounced what it says is its right to “reunify” Taiwan by force, feels just as bound to protest when arms deals go through. After a squall（短暂的）骚动briefly roils the waters, relations revert to their usual choppy but unthreatening passage.
With luck, this will happen again. But the squalls are increasing in number, and the world’s most important bilateral relationship双边关系is getting stormy. If it goes wrong, historians will no doubt heap much of the blame on China’s aggression; but they will also measure Barack Obama on this issue, perhaps more than any other.

The China ascendancy
As if to highlight the underlying dangers, China has this time gone further than the usual blood-and-thunder紧张激烈的、遍体鳞伤的warnings and suspension of military contacts. It has threatened sanctions官方批准；认可 against American firms and the withdrawal of co-operation on international issues. Those threats, if carried out, would damage China’s interests seriously, so its use of them suggests that it hopes it can persuade Mr Obama to buckle—if not on this sale then perhaps on Taiwan’s mooted有争议的future purchases of advanced jet-fighters. But the unusual ferocity残暴of the Chinese regime’s response also points to three dangerous undercurrents.
①The first is the failure of China’s Taiwan policy. Under the presidency of Ma Ying-jeou, Taiwan’s relations with the mainland have been better than ever before. Travel, trade and tourist links have strengthened. A free-trade agreement is under negotiation. Yet there is little sign of progress towards China’s main goal of “peaceful reunification”. Most Taiwanese want both economic co-operation and de facto事实上的independence. A similar failure haunts policy in Tibet, where our correspondent, on a rarely permitted trip to the region, found the attempt to buy Tibetans’ loyalty through the fruits of development apparently futile无用的. As talks between China and the emissaries密使, 使者, 间谍of the Dalai Lama ended in the usual stalemate this week, China warned Mr Obama against his planned meeting with Tibet’s exiled放逐的spiritual leader.
②Again, nothing new in that. There is, however, a new self-confidence these days in China’s familiar harangues about anything it deems sovereign. That is the second trend: China, after its successful passage through the financial crisis of late 2008, is more assertive and less tolerant of being thwarted阻挠（击败…的努力、计划或野心）—and not just over its “internal affairs”. From its perceived position of growing economic strength, China has been throwing its weight around. It played a central and largely unhelpful role at the climate-change talks in Copenhagen; it looks as if it will wreck a big-power consensus over Iran’s nuclear programme; it has picked fights in territorial disputes with India, Japan and Vietnam. At gatherings of all sorts, Chinese officials now want to have their say, and expect to be heeded.
③This suggests a dangerous third trend. As China has opened its economy since 1978, it has been frantically engaged in catching up with the rich West. That has led to the idea, even among many Chinese, that it would gradually become more “Western”. The slump活动、价格或生意方面）猛然落下，暴跌in the West, however, has undermined that assumption. Many Chinese now feel they have little to learn from the rich world. On the contrary, a “Beijing consensus” has been gaining ground, extolling the virtues of decisive authoritarianism over shilly-shallying democratic debate. In the margins of international conferences such as the recent Davos forum, even American officials mutter despairingly about their own “dysfunctional” political system.

A swing not a seesaw
①Two dangers arise from this loss of Western self-confidence. One is of trying to placate（通过达成协议）抚慰China. The delay in Mr Obama’s meeting with the Dalai Lama in order to smooth his visit to China in November gave too much ground, as well as turning an issue of principle into a bargaining chip. America needs to stand firmer. Beefing up the deterrent威慑的，制止的capacity of Taiwan, which China continues to threaten with hundreds of missiles, is in the interests of peace. Mr Obama should therefore proceed with the arms sales and European governments should back him. If American companies, such as Boeing, lose Chinese custom for political reasons, European firms should not be allowed to supplant them.
②On the other hand the West should not be panicked into unnecessary confrontation对抗. Rather than ganging up on China in an effort to “contain” it, the West would do better to get China to take up its share of the burden of global governance. Too often China wants the power due a global giant while shrugging off the responsibilities, saying that it is still a poor country. It must be encouraged to play its part—for instance, on climate change, on Iran and by allowing its currency to appreciate. As the world’s largest exporter, China’s own self-interest lies in a harmonious world order and robust trading system.
It is in the economic field that perhaps the biggest danger lies. Already the Obama administration has shown itself too ready to resort to诉诸于，求助于，凭借trade sanctions against China. If China now does the same using a political pretext借口, while the cheapness of its currency keeps its trade surplus large, it is easy to imagine a clamour in Congress for retaliation met by a further Chinese nationalist backlash. That is why the administration and China’s government need to work together to pre-empt trouble.
Some see confrontation as inevitable when a rising power elbows its way to the top table. But America and China are not just rivals for global influence, they are also mutually dependent economies with everything to gain from co-operation. Nobody will prosper if disagreements become conflicts.