【clover】ECO analysis by tofee

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今天起在这个帖子里发 恩恩
100201

Apple unveils the iPad

Steve Jobs and the tablet平板电脑 of hope

The innovation machine churns out another game-changing device

Jan 28th 2010 | SAN FRANCISCO | From The Economist print edition

Getty Images

“HEROES and heroics” is one of the central themes of the current season at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, which prides itself on自我标榜，引以为荣 showcasing展出 contemporary artists who challenge conventional ways of doing things. On January 27th the centre played host to one of the heroes of the computing industry: Steve Jobs, the boss of Apple, who launched the company’s latest creation最新产品（设计）, the iPad. Mr Jobs also has a reputation for showcasing the unconventional. He did not disappoint.

The iPad, which looks like an oversized Apple iPhone and boasts（烧包） a colour screen measuring almost ten inches (25cm), promises to change the landscape of the computing world让焕然一新. It is just half an inch thick and weighs 1.5lb (680 grams). “It’s so much more intimate than a laptop笔记本, and so much more capable功能多 than a smartphone,” Mr Jobs said of the device（手机啊什么的设备用这个）, which will be available in late March.

The new iPad has important limitations, which critics were quick to point out. It does not have a camera or a phone and users cannot run multiple applications on it at the same time. But Apple should be able to correct such flaws in due course及时？. Together with a host of other touch-screen “tablet” computers that are expected to reach shops over the next year or so, the iPad looks set to revolutionise the way in which digital media are consumed in homes, schools and offices.

The flood of devices is likely to have a profound impact on parts of the media business that are already being turned upside-down by the internet. The move from print to digital has not been easy for newspaper or magazine publishers. Readers have proved（解释为被证明是，算作一个系动词吧） reluctant to pay for content on the web. Companies are unwilling to pay as much for online advertisements as for paper ones—hardly surprising, given the amount of space on offer【观点，不愿为网上的信息付费】. The iPad will probably accelerate the shift away from printed matter towards digital content, which could worsen the industry’s pain雪上加霜
in the short term. Yet publishers hope that tablets will turn out to be the 21st-century equivalent（等价物？？？） of the printed page, offering them compelling new ways to present their content and to charge for it为他收费. “This is really a chance for publishers to seize on a second life重获新生,” says Phil Asmundson of Deloitte, a consultancy.

It does not come as a surprise, then, that Apple has already attracted some blue-chip（蓝色-芯片===优质品牌） media brands to the iPad’s platform. During his presentation Mr Jobs revealed that the company had struck deals签协议 with leading publishers such as Penguin and Simon & Schuster. They will provide books for the iPad, to be found and paid for in Apple’s new iBooks online store. More agreements ought to be signed签协议
before the first iPads are shipped 产品面世 in March. Users will also be able to download applications that give them access to electronic versions of newspapers such as the New York Times, which presented an iPad app at the launch.

Apple’s media partners no doubt（
我可能就用了it is no doubt that了） have mixed feelings about dealing with Mr Jobs. Apple is now widely demonised in the music industry for dominating the digital downloading business with its iTunes store. The firm has been able to control the price of music, boosting sales（sales就是销售额，boost抬升） of iPods but not bringing the record companies a great deal of money. That said（和 that is to say有差别？）, Apple did provide a way for the music business to make a profit online, which had hitherto eluded it. Apple’s sleek iPhone has also given plenty of content producers a platform on which they can charge for their wares（产品）.

产品有：device wares

The firm’s record suggests that it will be able to make one of the computing industry’s most fervent wishes 强烈的愿望come true. Technology companies科技公司
（不是 technical，technics，techniques） have repeatedly tried to make a success of tablets or similar devices. But the zone between laptops and mobile phones has been something of a Bermuda Triangle百慕大三角 for device-makers, points out Roger Kay of Endpoint Technologies, a consultancy. “Products launched in there have usually disappeared from the radar screen雷达,” he says.

Among them are previous generations of tablet-style computers. In the 1990s various companies experimented with the machines, including Apple. When its Newton personal digital assistant failed to take off, Mr Jobs killed the project. Tablets were once again briefly in the limelight（舞台聚光灯的中心） when Microsoft’s Bill Gates predicted they would soon become people’s primary computing device—powered, of course, by his company’s software. That did not come to pass because consumers were put off（脱掉？阻碍！） by tablets’ high prices, clunky user interfaces（用户界面） and limited capabilities（有限的功能）. Instead the devices, which cost almost as much as proper PCs, have remained a niche product（小众产品） used primarily in industries such as health care（医疗，不用加industry什么的） and construction建筑（业）.

Why are tablets causing so much excitement these days? One reason is that innovations（革新，进步，不用new之类的词） in display显示器, battery电池 and microprocessing technologies微处理技术 have greatly reduced their cost. Apple’s iPad is priced at between $499 for the basic version and $829 for one with lots of memory and a 3G wireless connection, bringing it within the reach of ordinary consumers普通消费者，不是average. Another reason for optimism is that interfaces界面 have improved greatly. The iPad boasts（烧包） a big virtual keyboard, which pops up跳出的意思，那么那个支持的意思怎么用呢？ when needed. It also features（以....为特色，恩，当做一个动词） multi-touch, meaning that two fingers can be used to change the size of a photo. Furthermore, tablets will benefit from the fact that people have become accustomed to buying and consuming content in digital form (see chart)人们已经习惯于购买和消费数字化形式的产品了【观点】.

All this explains why other firms are eyeing（eye the market紧盯市场） the tablet market too. Dozens of prototypes were on show at a consumer-electronics trade fair in Las Vegas earlier this month, including ones from Motorola, Lenovo and Dell. Jen-Hsun Huang, the chief executive of NVIDIA, a maker of graphics chips, reckons this is the first time he has seen telecoms firms, computer-makers and consumer-electronics companies all equally keen to produce the same product. “The tablet is the first truly convergent（收敛，集大成者？） electronic device,” he says.

Netbooks and e-books

The iPad and other tablets could shake up（撼动） the computing scene（场景，本身也解释为“界”“圈子”嗯）. There has been some speculation that they could dent（牙印？凹痕，就是咬上一口。分得一杯羹。Dent the sales......） sales of low-end 低端PCs, including Apple’s MacBook. But a more likely scenario故事梗概 is that they eat into sales of（嗯，和dent一样吧）
netbooks上网本, the cheap mini-laptops that are used mainly for web surfing and watching videos. Netbooks have been on a roll连连获胜 recently, with global sales rising by 72% to $11.4 billion last year, according to DisplaySearch, a market research company. That makes them a tempting target.

Apple’s new device also poses a threat to（造成威胁，造成问题（threat and question）） dedicated e-readers such as Amazon’s Kindle, though these will probably remain popular with the most voracious bookworms贪婪的书虫. Apple’s long-expected entry into the tablet market has already forced e-reader firms to consider making their devices more versatile（interface） and exciting. “You will see more readers using colour and video over the next five years,” predicts Richard Archuleta of Plastic Logic, which produces the Que proReader. And more makers of e-readers may mimic Amazon’s recent decision to let third-party第三方 developers create software for its line of Kindles.

Book publishers are quietly hoping that Apple’s entry into （进军...市场）e-books will help to reduce the clout降低影响力
of Amazon: the Kindle has 60% of the e-reader market, according to Forrester, a research firm. They are also excited by the opportunities that tablets offer to combine various media. Bradley Inman, the boss of Vook, a firm that mixes texts with video and links to people’s social networks, believes the iPad will trigger an outpouring of creativity刺激了一个向外喷出的创造力..... “Its impact will be the equivalent of adding sound to movies or colour to TV,” he says.

Newspaper and magazine publishers are also thrilled（使激动，兴奋） by tablets’ potential. Their big hope is that the devices will allow them to generate revenues（利润）
both from readers and advertisers. People have proven (被证明是)willing to pay for long-form journalism on e-readers. But these devices do not allow publishers to present their content in creative ways and most cannot carry advertisements. Skiff, a start-up spun out of Hearst, is a rare exception to this rule. Its 11.5-inch reader is large enough to show off all elements of a magazine’s design and accommodates advertising too.

EPAVery nice, but where’s the off switch?

Apple’s arrival in the tablet market means that publishers will have to develop digital content for these devices, as well as for e-readers and smart-phones. Many will prove unable or unwilling to do so themselves. That may boost firms such as Zinio, which has developed a digital-publishing model called Unity. This takes publications’ content, repurposes it for different gadgets and stores it in “the cloud”, the term used to describe giant pools of shared data-processing capacity. Users pay once for the content and can access it on various Zinio-enabled devices, increasing the chances that it will be consumed.

Apple has other ambitions for the iPad. It hopes it will become a popular gaming machine and has designed the device so that many of the games among the 140,000 apps available for other Apple products will run on it straight away. The company has also revamped its iWork suite of word-processing, spreadsheet and presentation software for the iPad in an effort to ensure that the new device will catch on with business folk迎合商业人士。不是cater the favor of...catch on with the ......

Apple’s shareholders are no doubt hoping that the iPad will live up to its billing as a seminal device in the history of computing. They have already seen the company’s share price soar. Defying the recession, on January 25th Apple announced the best quarterly results in its 34-year history, with revenues rising to $15.7 billion and profits to $3.4 billion—an increase of 32% and 50% respectively over the previous year. They will be keeping their fingers crossed that the iPad turns into another billion-dollar hit. Whether or not that turns out to be the case, Mr Jobs has already proven heroic(英雄壮举 heroic) enough to merit（值得，配得上） a portrait on the Yerba Buena Center’s walls.
发现这篇文章有很多词汇可以和昨天的aw借鉴，恩恩，好的，不是可以修改自己的么？

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A premium to buy peace of mind
购买心安的保险费
Most economic analyses of climate change concentrate on the likeliest outcome—the highest point in the probability curve. That, on the basis of the IPCC’s data, would be 2.8oC over the next 100 years. Mr Weitzman reckons they should look instead at events that are less likely to materialise but cannot be ruled out (the right-hand tail of the curve), such as a massive temperature increase within a century. “Societies and ecosystems whose average temperature has changed in the course of a century by more than 6oC are located in the terra incognita of what any honest economic modeller would have to admit is a planet Earth reconfigured as science fiction, since such high temperatures have not existed for some tens of millions of years.” It is worth buying insurance against such an eventuality, he says. Mr Weitzman, thus, succeeds where many others have failed: he manages to reconcile economics with normal human instincts.



Ken Caldeira, an atmospheric scientist at the Carnegie Institution, puts the same point a different way=举另一个例子， another example is....”. “If we already had energy and transportation systems that met our needs without using the atmosphere as a waste dump for our carbon- dioxide pollution, and I told you that you could be 2% richer, but all you had to do was【自然破坏的句子】 acidify the oceans and risk killing off（灭绝) coral reefs珊瑚礁 and other marine ecosystems, risk melting the ice caps冰盖 with rapid sea-level rise, shifting weather patterns so that food-growing regions粮食生产区 might not be able to produce adequate amounts of food, and so on, would you take all of that environmental risk, just to be 2% richer?”【观点，可以用在企业唯利是图的题目】 He has, he says, often asked audiences this question; nobody has ever answered “yes”.



The second point on which economists take issue with Lord Stern is his estimate of the cost of mitigating减弱 climate change. 【take issue with sb on sth 值得商榷，恩恩这个词可以用在argu中】The review reckons（评估，AW） that it would take somewhere between -2% and 5% of gdp per year to limit them to 500-550ppm. At the bottom end of the range, in other words, shifting to clean energy情节能源 would increase economic growth, whereas at the top it would shrink it（increase/shrink the growth）. The review plumps for an average cost of around 1% of GDP per year.

The IPCC, the International Energy Agency and McKinsey, a consultancy, tend to agree with Lord Stern. And a piece of recent research, which shows that the cost of cutting pollution often turns out to be less than forecast, supports a modest较低的 estimate. Resources For the Future, an American think-tank, looked at regulations on things such as asbestos, power-station emissions and CFCs (refrigerant gases) and found that 12 of the 25 sets of rules it looked at were less expensive to implement than expected and only six were dearer.

But some economists think Lord Stern’s cost estimates are too low. Dieter Helm, professor of energy policy at Oxford University, says the underlying assumptions基本假设 about the costs of various technologies are likely to prove overoptimistic because they are produced by people who have an interest in exaggerating their viability恩恩，这个句子可以用来对AW中的survey进行驳斥.



Whether or not Lord Stern has won the argument economically, he has certainly won it politically,【观点】 for his 1% of GDP figure for the cost of mitigating climate change is now widely used. But a large caveat告诫 should accompany any use of that figure引用这些数据的时候有许多要注意的地方【aw用】, because it assumes that the policies employed for mitigation will be both efficient and effective—and so far that has not been true. As Mr Helm points out, “there is a voluminous literature of government failure, regulatory capture and the impact of rent-seeking behaviour within the policy process. Climate-change policy is likely to be one of the largest sources of economic rents from policy interventions. There is a large and growing climate-change ‘pork barrel’.” The larger the barrel, the higher the costs of mitigation will be.

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教育
Reaching the poorest
Enrolling the world’s poorest children in school needs new thinking, not just more money from taxpayers
Jan 21st 2010
From The Economist print edition
DAWN has just broken but classes have already started at the village school in Aqualaar, in the Garissa district of Kenya’s arid north-east. Around 30 children, mostly from families of Somali herders, sit listening as an enthusiastic 18-year-old teacher, Ibrahim Hussein, gives an arithmetic lesson. The school is really little more than a sandy patch of ground under an acacia tree. Mr Hussein’s blackboard hangs from its branches. There are no desks or chairs. Pupils follow the lesson by using sticks to scratch numbers in the sand.
The lack of basic kit（usility） is only too typical of schools in poor countries. What is unusual, sadly, is that Mr Hussein was actually present and teaching when his school was visited by Kevin Watkins, the lead author of “Reaching the Marginalised”, a new report on education in the developing world by UNESCO.
In India, for example, research by the World Bank reveals that 25% of teachers in government-run schools are away on any given day随便一天; of those present, only half were actually teaching when the bank’s researchers made spot checks检查么？. That is dreadful but not unusual: teacher absenteeism rates are around 20% in rural Kenya, 27% in Uganda and 14% in Ecuador.
Despite the inspiring rhetoric that accompanied the adoption of the UN’s “Education For All” goals in 1999, progress has been patchy进展是拼凑的？. The numbers of unenrolled school-age children dropped by 33m in 2007 compared with 1999. About 15m of that fall came in India alone (though UNESCO says statistics may understate the problem统计可能低估了问题（的严重性）【aw】 by up to 30%). In countries like Liberia and Nigeria the numbers have hardly budged（纹丝不动，数量难以碰动） since 1999. Of the 72m still outside school, 45% are in sub-Saharan Africa.
Dig, and it grows still gloomier. Two-thirds of the fall in out-of-school numbers was in 2002-04. Since then, improvement has been scanty, though getting the final chunk of children into school is necessarily the trickiest task as the easy cases are already solved. The hardest job is enrolling children from remote areas, who speak minority languages; or come from cultures that place little value on schooling or (in India) from castes that have been long excluded from it. In more than a third of the 63 countries for which such data were available, more than 30% of young adults have fewer than four years of schooling. Nineteen of these countries are in Africa; the remaining three are Guatemala, Pakistan and Nicaragua.
The UNESCO report shows stark differences明显的区别，significant=strak within the 80-plus countries it covers（report 涵盖的统计对象用cover）. In Nigeria about 10% of young Yoruba-speaking adults have under four years of schooling; for Hausa-speakers the figure is over 60%. Focusing on ethnicity or regional disparities can be controversial. The governments of Turkey and India are unhappy about the report’s mentions of, respectively, Kurdish girls and low-caste children.
Attending school is only the first step towards education. Even spending time in school does not guarantee good outcomes. In Ghana, for example, sixth-graders sitting a simple multiple-choice reading test scored on average the same mark that would be gained by random guessing.
So what to do? More government spending—as suggested by the report—is unlikely to be a complete answer（可能并不能解决问题。多好的表达，我会写not sufficient and efficient，）. Others, such as James Tooley, a British academic who advises a chain of low-cost for-profit schools（私立学校，和前边的 government run schlool 对照） in India, say private-sector education in poor countries routinely outperforms比...表现的好 the free, taxpayer-subsidised version（版本counterparts）. Teachers turn up; parents complain if standards slip水准下降 or pupils flounder.
公立：state-run=taxpayer-subsidised
Another answer may be（另一个可能性是。） performance-related pay for teachers难道说是绩效公司？我会用oriented）. Two researchers, Karthik Muralidharan of the University of California at San Diego and Venkatesh Sundararaman of the World Bank, tested that idea in 300 state-run schools公立学校 in Andhra Pradesh in India. The extra pay was three times more effective in boosting student test scores，不只是price frofits sales 能boost，分数也能boost than spending the same money on teaching materials. When schools are poorly run, studying what is wrong is the most vital subject of all.
表示程度的词：scanty improvement；strak difference；sticky task，vital subject

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Bricks-and-mortar shops struggle to win customers back from virtual ones


SHOPPERS on Black Friday, the traditional start of the holiday shopping season in America, which falls on November 27th this year, are notoriously aggressive. Some even start queuing outside stores before dawn to be the first to lay their hands on heavily discounted merchandise. Last year berserk bargain（特价商品）-hunters in the suburbs of New York City trampled a Wal-Mart employee to death. Despite the frenzy at many stores, however, the recession appears to=(seems to看来） have accelerated the pace at which shoppers are abandoning bricks and mortar in favour of
online retailers—e-tailers, in the jargon. So this year Black Friday (so named because it is supposed to put shops into profit for the year) also marks the start of many conventional retailers’ attempts to regain the initiative主动权.


E-commerce holds particular appeal吸引力 in straitened（使窘困） times as it enables people to compare prices across retailers quickly and easily. Buyers can sometimes avoid local sales taxes online, and shipping is often free. No wonder, then, that 不用说online shopping continues to grow even as the offline sort=counterparts shrinks. In 2008 retail sales grew by a feeble 1% in America and are expected to decline by more than 3% this year, according to the National Retail Federation, a trade body. In contrast, online sales grew by 13% in 2008 to over $141 billion and are predicted to grow by 11% in 2009, according to Forrester, a consultancy.



Online sales now account for占 6% of all retail sales in America (up from 5% in 2008) and that figure is expected to reach 8% by 2013. E-commerce电子商务 is also growing in Europe and Asia, where online sales in 2008 totalled $60 billion and $40 billion, respectively. In Britain, internet shopping now accounts for nearly 4% of total retail sales, according to Planet Retail, a research firm.


Online-only shopping sites such as Amazon and eBay, two e-commerce giants, have thrived in the downturn描述经济形势. Amazon’s sales rose to around $5.5 billion in the third quarter of the year, up by almost 30% from a year before. Listings订单, chiefly from commercial vendors零售小贩，tb上的店主, have surged so rapidly on eBay that its website briefly crashed on November 21st.

The range of items（品种用range) available online is also growing. Amazon has started selling groceries杂货食品. Consumer-goods companies such as Procter & Gamble (P&G) are encouraging the sale of things like nappies (diapers) and laundry detergent online. At the opposite extreme, the internet is also being used to sell luxury goods. Fabergé, a defunct jewellery-maker known for its gem-encrusted eggs, relaunched in September. It will not open any shops but will instead operate only online.


The shift in spending to the internet is good news for companies like P&G that lack retail outlets专卖店 of their own. But it is a big concern（大问题，我会写big problems or sticky problems） for brick-and-mortar retailers, whose prices are often higher than those of e-tailers, since they must bear the extra expense of running stores. Happily, however, conventional retailers are in a better positionto fight back than last year, when overstocking过多的存货 forced them to resort to诉诸于 ruinous discounting打折活动
（discount是折扣）. Inventories are about 15% lower this year. Some big retailers, such as Saks and Target, have recently reported rising revenues and margins.

The most obvious response to the growth of e-tailing is for conventional retailers to redouble their own efforts再加倍努力。。这种说法 online. The online arms部门或者部分 of big retailers are performing well, on the whole. Saks, for example, saw online sales rise 9% in the nine months to the end of October while sales in its stores fell by 19%. The company expects online growth to outpace sales in stores for the “foreseeable future可以预见的未来”, says Stephen Sadove, its boss.

The concept of “multichannel” shopping, where people can buy the same items from the same retailer in several different ways—online, via their mobile phones and in shops—is gaining ground, and retailers are trying to encourage users of one channel to try another. Growing online traffic may actually increase sales in stores too. According to a spokesman for Macy’s, a department-store chain, every dollar a consumer spends online with Macy’s leads to $5.70 in spending at a Macy’s store within ten days, because consumers learn about other products online and come into stores to look them over before buying them. Many online retailers offer tools that let people locate the nearest outlet专营店 that has a given item in stock.

Retailers are also trying to make shopping seem fun and exciting to counteract the economic gloom. One common tactic is to set up “pop-up” stores弹出式店铺, which appear for a short time before vanishing again, to foster a sense of novelty and urgency. Following the lead of many bricks-and-mortar outfits, eBay recently launched a pop-up in New York where customers could inspect items before ordering them from kiosks（tb店铺）.


Shoppers are increasingly looking for an “experience” when they go to stores, says Jack Anderson of Hornall Anderson, a branding and marketing firm, and are no longer interested in purely纯粹的就是用这个词哦 “transaction-based bricks and mortar stores”. Apple, which encourages customers to try out试用 its devices in its stores, is considered a pioneer of this strategy, and has attracted many imitators【AW】. The Walt Disney Company, for example, is rumoured to be redesigning its stores to attract shoppers looking for entertainment, with new features such as “magic mirrors”, which will allow children to play with Disney characters.
【商家的花招，商业就是在法律范围内挣更多的钱】

Stores are also trying to lure customers by offering services that are not available online. Best Buy, a consumer-electronics retailer, has started selling music lessons along with its musical instruments. Lululemon athletica, which sells sports clothes, offers free yoga classes. The idea is to bring people back to its shops regularly, increasing the likelihood that they will develop the habit of shopping there. 【商家的花招，商业就是在法律范围内挣更多的钱】

Another great hope is that mobile phones will come to the rescue of conventional retailers. Some consumers already use internet-enabled handsets to shop online. But many analysts think a technology called near-field communication (NFC) might boost sales at stores, by allowing shoppers to scan products with their phones to learn more about them, and then to pay by swiping their phones at the till. Unfortunately, NFC will not be widely available for some time—too late to help harried retailers through Black Friday.

tofeeUID: 2485486

A biography of Friedrich Engels
A biography of Friedrich Engels
A very special business angel
The self-effacing不求闻达 friend who enabled “Das Kapital” to be written 【观点】
Aug 13th 2009
From The Economist print edition
Marx’s General: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels. By Tristram Hunt. Metropolitan Books; 448 pages; $32. Published in Britain as “The Frock-Coated（defrock是剥夺袍子，原来是指的是礼服） Communist: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels”. Allen Lane; £25. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk
WHEN the financial crisis took off last autumn, Karl Marx’s “Das Kapital”, originally published in 1867, whooshed up bestseller lists（畅销书榜）. The first book to describe the relentless, all-consuming and global nature of capitalism had suddenly gained new meaning. But Marx had never really gone away, whereas然而 Friedrich Engels—the man who worked hand in glove with him for most of his life and made a huge contribution to “Das Kapital”—is almost forgotten. A new biography by a British historian, Tristram Hunt, makes a good case for giving him greater credit.
The two men became friends in Paris in 1844 when both were in their mid-20s（两千多年前怎么说？odds？）, and remained extremely close until Marx died in 1883. Both were Rhinelanders (our picture shows Engels standing behind Marx in the press room of Rheinische Zeitung which they edited jointly) but came from very different backgrounds: Marx’s father was a Jewish lawyer turned Christian; Engels’s a prosperous Protestant cotton-mill owner. Marx studied law, then philosophy; Engels, the black sheep不被人看好？ of his family, was sent to work in the family business at 17. While doing his military service in 1841 in Berlin, he was exposed to the ferment of ideas swirling around the Prussian capital.
Next, he went to work for the Manchester branch of the family business, Ermen & Engels. Manchester’s “cottonopolis” in the mid-19th century was a manufacturer’s heaven and a working man’s hell, and it provided an invaluable lesson（hold lesson） for Engels: that economic factors were the basic cause of the clash between different classes of society. By 1845, when he was just 24, he had not only learnt how to be a successful capitalist; he had also written a coruscatingly anti-capitalist work, “The Condition of the Working Class in England”, which charted the inhumanity of modern methods of production in minute（minute这里指细微的） detail.
Engels left Manchester to work with Marx on the “Communist Manifesto” and the two of them spent the late 1840s criss-crossing Europe to chase the continental revolutions of the time, ending up in England. Marx had started work on “Das Kapital”, but there was a problem. He had by then acquired an aristocratic German wife, a clutch of small children and aspirations for a comfortable bourgeois lifestyle, but no means of support.
Engels (whose name resembles the word for “angel” in German) offered an astoundingly big-hearted solution: he would go back to Manchester to resume life in the detested family cotton business and provide Marx with the money he needed to write his world-changing treatise. For the next 20 years Engels worked grumpily away, handing over half his generous income to an ever more demanding Marx. He also collaborated intensively on the great work, contributing many ideas, practical examples（实例ISSUE） from business and much-needed editorial attention. When at last volume I of “Das Kapital” was finished, he extricated himself from the business and moved to London to be near the Marx family, enjoying life as an Economist-reading rentier and intellectual.
Engels was an enigma. Gifted, energetic and fascinated by political ideas, he was nevertheless ready to play second fiddle to Marx. “Marx was a genius; we others were at best talented（genius and talented是有大区别的）,” he declared after his friend’s death. Mr Hunt does a brilliant job of setting the two men’s endeavours in the context of the political, social and philosophical currents at the time将他们在。。。。的context中来. It makes for a complex story that can be hard to follow but is well worth persevering with.
Tall and handsome, Engels had a taste not just for ideas but for the good life—wine, women, riding with the Cheshire hunt—and seems to have felt little sense of irony that all these things were paid for by the proletariat’s back-breaking labour. His domestic life家庭生活都包括了下边这些方面 was much more unconventional than Marx’s. He lived, on and off, with a semi-literate Irish working-class girl, Mary Burns; then, when she died, with her sister, Lizzy, whom he married only on her deathbed. He had no children, though he chivalrously呵呵 took responsibility for a boy whom Marx had fathered with a housekeeper.
Engels’s sacrifices continued after Marx’s death. He not only carried on funding the Marx family and their various hangers-on食客, but also spent years pulling together the chaotic notes Marx left behind for volumes II and III of “Das Kapital”. Inevitably there were lots of loose ends which Engels tied up as he saw fit, and sometimes the results were more revolutionary than the author may have intended. In volume III, where Marx discussed the tendency of companies’ profitability to fall and noted that this might lead to the “shaking” of capitalist production, Engels substituted the word “collapse”, opening up the text to much more radical interpretations by 20th-century Marxists.
When Engels died in 1895, he eschewed London’s Highgate cemetery where his friend was laid to rest. Self-effacing to the last, he had his ashes scattered off England’s coast at Eastbourne—the scene of happy holidays with the Marxes.

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Geopolitics Facing up to China
Making room for a new superpower should not be confused with giving way to it
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 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（理所当然）
when arms deals go through. After a squall 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 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（评价） Barack Obama on this issue, perhaps more than any other. Fresco on Sistine Chapel Barcelona

The China ascendancy
As if to仿佛是
highlight the underlying dangers, China has this time gone further than the usual blood-and-thunder warnings and suspension of military contacts (see article). It has threatened sanctions against American firms and the withdrawal取消 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让步—if not on this sale then perhaps on Taiwan’s mooted future purchases of advanced jet-fighters. But the unusual ferocity of the Chinese regime’s response also points to three dangerous undercurrents.

The 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 independence. A similar failure haunts萦绕【AW】 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 (see article). As talks between China and the emissaries of the Dalai Lama ended in the usual stalemate this week, China warned Mr Obama against his planned meeting with Tibet’s exiled spiritual leader.

Again, 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独断 and less tolerant of being thwarted阻挠—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.

This suggests a dangerous third trend. As China has opened its economy since 1978, it has been frantically engaged in（投入到，投身于） 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 in the West, however, has undermined that assumption【aw】. 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【issue 领导力，决断等】. In the margins会议间隙 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一荣俱荣，一损俱损

Two dangers arise from this loss of Western self-confidence. One is of trying to placate 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讨价还价的筹码. America needs to stand firmer. Beefing up the deterrent 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（支持用back的动词）. If American companies, such as Boeing, lose Chinese custom for political reasons, European firms should not be allowed to supplant them.

On the other hand the West should not be panicked into unnecessary confrontation. 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 trade sanctions against China. If China now does the same using a political pretext, 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.【观点】 Nobody will prosper if disagreements become conflicts.

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College enrolment

Boom times
Nov 12th 2009 | WASHINGTON, DC
From The Economist print edition

The recession drives young Americans back to learning
A BUSINESS that jacks up its prices during a recession is usually asking to lose customers. Not so America’s colleges, which are simultaneously raising tuition fees and experiencing record levels of enrolment. The Technical College System of Georgia, for instance, whose 28 campuses teach everything from power-line maintenance to dental hygiene, has sharply raised its fees, yet the number of students is up 24% from a year earlier. Campus parking lots停车场 are so full that “we got them parking in cow pastures奶牛牧场,” says a spokesman.


Across the country, college enrolment rates are at an all-time high. In October 41% of 18-to-24-year-olds were enrolled in either two-year colleges (which specialise in vocational training) or four-year colleges (which grant undergraduate degrees) or higher, up from 39% a year earlier. Yet tuition fees have risen by an average of 4-7%.

The economy is the most immediate（直接的，不是direct relation） culprit. The unemployment rate hit 10.2% in October, up sharply from 9.8% in September, the first time it has reached double digits since 1983. Among 16-to-24-year-olds, it was a dismal 19.1%. Faced with the worst job prospects in a generation, many young people are deciding to go to college instead.

That, however, is only part of the story. The Pew Research Centre notes in a recent report that enrolment rates have been rising and participation rates declining for decades now. One reason is that as the number of well-paid unskilled jobs began to shrink in the 1980s, the “college premium”—the difference in salaries between college and high-school graduates—rose.【观点】 The college premium stopped growing earlier this decade, but it remains high enough to affect the calculus for any 18-year-old weighing考虑 whether to look for work or stay in education.

Another reason is that the pool of potential college-goers has grown. The Pew report notes that the proportion of 18-to-24-year-olds who have dropped out of high school辍学 fell steadily to 9.3% in 2008 from 15.7% in 1973. With more students finishing high school, more are eligible具有资格 to go to college.

The problem for colleges is that enrolment is surging just as funding is shrinking. Private colleges have seen their endowments and investment income shrivel because of the financial crisis, while public colleges have had funding cut by cash-strapped state governments. The Technical College System of Georgia gets 60% of its budget from the state, and that has been frozen as the state attempts to sort out理清，把..从中区分出来 its finances. It has eliminated Friday classes to save money; some classes on other days go on past 10pm. Tuition charges have risen by $600 a quarter, to between $2,100 and $2,400. But that has failed to serve as a big deterrent, thanks in part to more generous state and federal “Pell grants”佩尔助学金, which Barack Obama increased this year.