【甚解小组】【TASK 4】原文抄抄抄之TRANSITIONS FROM【小法】

法布雷加欣UID: 2901617

Here be dragons

Jan 26th 2006
From The Economist print edition

Google, the internet search engine that has grown into a corporate giant, began operations in China on January 25th. Though critics suggest it has betrayed its own motto - “don't be evil” - by agreeing to censor certain sites, Google maintains it will do more good than harm.
Though…remain…表现出了明显的转折关系：尽管评论家认为，Google违背了自己的箴言——“别干坏事”，因为它同意对一些特定的站点进行审查，但Google公司坚持认为这样一来将利大于弊。

IN 2001 human-rights activists in China crowed that a little-known search engine called Google was the most important tool ever created to skirt state censors. Users could retrieve content that Beijing banned by clicking to call up a “cached” copy of the web page, stored by Google. Soon, however, Google itself was being sporadically blocked. The firm was instructed to deactivate that particular feature, and for a short time its web address was even re-routed by Chinese network operators to the website of a local rival.
However…and for a short time…不过…并且一度… HOWEVER转折，对于前面的现象出现了两个不好的后果，and for a short time之后又是更严重的一个后果。

前两段是google遇到的瓶颈

The continual cat-and-mouse game ended this week when Google, now a corporate giant, entered the dragon’s den. On January 25th the search engine “Google.cn” began operations. It is a first step towards beefing up the company’s local presence, which will also mean placing computer-servers in the country. This will speed up service for mainland users, who otherwise must penetrate the great firewall of China, which dramatically slows down access to Google.com.
Otherwise否则

Having local infrastructure gives an advantage to Google’s search-engine rivals, such as China’s Baidu.com (which enjoys around 40% of the Chinese search market, compared with Google’s 30%), and Yahoo! and Microsoft’s MSN, which have local Chinese operations. China’s internet market, with more than 100m users, is one of the fastest-growing and most lucrative in the world. Can Google—with its motto “don’t be evil”—do business in China without betraying its soul?

现状和疑问，机遇与挑战并存

The company is making a concerted effort to do just that. It has reached an agreement with the Chinese authorities that allows it to disclose to users, at the bottom of a list of search results, whether information has been withheld. This is similar to what the company does in other countries where it faces content restrictions, such as France and Germany (where Nazi sites are banned), and America (where it removes material that is suspected of copyright infringement). Although the disclosure is more prominent on these western sites, putting such a message on its Chinese site is an important step towards transparency and, furthermore, is something its rivals do not do.
Although…,……,and furthermore…对prominent的正反对比：尽管西方更prominent，但是在中国是transparency的important step，更重要的是其在中国的竞争对手不会这么做

Furthermore, Google is tiptoeing into the country with only a handful of services. It is not offering e-mail, blogging or social-networking services, because it worries that it will not be able to ensure users’ privacy. It wishes to avoid the situation in which MSN and Yahoo! find themselves, whereby they are forced to obey the Chinese government’s orders in censoring content and revealing users’ identities. Rather than be placed in a position where it may have to compromise its values, Google instead is narrowing what it offers (although its news service will contain only government-approved media sources).
Furthermore开头引出了另一种优点。
担心无法确保可以保护用户隐私  该公司并不提供电子邮件、博客以及社交网络服务
明显因果关系 because连接

Google believes that entering China, even with restraints on content, lets it offer more information than if it remained outside. Yet the decision comes as American internet firms such as Yahoo! and MSN duck criticism that they are complicit with the Chinese authorities.
yet…as…当…仍然… yet表现了google进军中国的决心
这一段yet的前后可以看做有因果关系，但是这里还是用了yet而不是therefore，就是为了突出google的决心，并且也暗含了一定的causal correlation（感觉这里既有仍然的意思也有eventually的意思）

Google在中国的几个优点，和google进军中国的决心

Meanwhile in America
For Google, taking the higher road happens to also be a way to differentiate its service. This month America’s Department of Justice went to court to force Google to comply with a subpoena seeking more than 1m web addresses and a weeks’ worth of all users’ searches (down from an original demand of every web address it holds and two months of searches), albeit without any information that would identify individual users. The government wants the data in order to examine the effectiveness of software filters to block pornography, for a case involving a law prohibiting the content, which the Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional.
Albeit表转折
comply with……, albeit without……遵循…的传票，但不需要…的信息

The government requested, and received, information from Yahoo!, MSN and AOL—all of which initially stonewalled about whether they disclosed the data. Yet Google resisted, arguing that “acceding to the request would suggest it is willing to reveal information about those who use its services. This is not a perception that Google can accept.” The day the subpoena was made public, Google’s shares dropped almost 9%, its largest single-day decline since it began trading in 2004.
Google’s stance could put commercial pressure on its rivals to adopt more customer-friendly policies, and may serve as a warning to other internet firms to treat customers’ data with more care. Yet such high-mindedness will be tested as Google enters China. Keeping its options open, the company is not shutting down the Chinese-language version of Google.com. It will remain available, for those willing to wait a bit longer for their uncensored search results.

google的理念无论在美国和中国都将接受到一定的挑战


这篇文章yet使用的较多，我正好也掌握的不是太完全，所以借此做个全面的了解：

1yet
1

1 a : in addition : BESIDES <gives yet another reason> b : EVEN 2C <a yet higher speed> c : on top of everything else : no less <had wells going dry. Between two large lakes, yet ― J. H. Buzard>
2 a (1) : up to now : so far <hasn't done much yet> ― often used to imply the negative of a following infinitive <have yet to win a game> (2) : at this or that time : so soon as now <not time to go yet> b : continuously up to the present or a specified time : STILL <is yet a new country> c : at a future time : EVENTUALLY <may yet see the light>
3 : NEVERTHELESS, HOWEVER
–as yet : up to the present or a specified time <there are as yet few clues ― Sharon Kingman>
–yet again : one more time <arrived late yet again>

纵观全文，相关段落之间的连接不一定都会有连接词，但是每个段落第一句之中主语一定很明确，意思一定很清晰，代表了之一段话的主题思路。段落中，要遵循思考过程，注意context的关联，并且清楚你想要突出的特点。

其实我们写作时并不是要特别注重关联词的词语选择多样化，但是要保持缜密连贯的思维，思维中的跳跃和联系需要在文中明确的引导出来，注意逻辑的正确和完整，更好的为文中的说理起到连接的作用。
在连接时也可以用时间、地点、程度等许多方面来衔接段落以表示段落的并列，意思的转移或者重点的突出。所以说不是为了使用连接词而使用连接词，而是让文章更加顺畅自然，无懈可击！

法布雷加欣UID: 2901617

THE planet-wide industrial exhalation of previously fossilised carbon is not the only way that humans are changing the Earth’s climate. There are
other
greenhouse gases, other atmospheric pollutants, the effects of cutting down forests, and more: together these things may contribute almost as much as carbon emissions to global warming. In the face of an international inability to put the sort of price on carbon use that would drive its emission down, an increasing number of policy wonks, and the politicians they advise, are taking a more serious look at these other factors as possible ways of controlling climate change.
Three things make these alternative approaches attractive by comparison. The first is that the emission of carbon dioxide is a fundamental part of today’s industrial infrastructure. The same is not true for, say, HFC-134a, a gas with various industrial uses that delivers more than 1,000 times more warming than carbon dioxide, mass for mass. Something peripheral不重要的 for which alternatives can be readily found is easier and cheaper to do without than something at the heart of industrial life.
Second, the benefits of reducing carbon-dioxide emissions can seem abstract and far-off (remote in time or space). In contrast, reducing emissions of the sooty油烟的 particles known as black carbon, which are given off by inefficient combustion in cooking fires and brick kilns, and by dodgy (tricky, evasive, questionable, suspicious) diesel柴油 engines, offers rapid, huge and tangible (clear and definite) public-health benefits. Controlling black carbon by giving poor people cleaner ways to burn various fuels could not only forestall a decade or two of global warming, it would also save hundreds of thousands of lives currently blighted (to impair the quality or effect of) by smoke and disease.
Third, equitable and efficient ways of reducing carbon emissions require new international agreements and new instruments of national policy. Putting these together has often proved difficult to the point of (到…地步) impossible: witness the UN climate talks. Sometimes the efforts have simply failed, as in America’s cap-and-trade legislation. Acting on other warming agents will frequently be a more straightforward matter of adapting existing tools. For instance, HFC-134a and a whole family of related chemicals could be dealt with by extending the Montreal protocol created to protect the ozone layer from similar industrial gases. Similarly, black carbon can in many places be managed under existing clean-air regulations, as can some other climate changing pollutants. True, the Obama administration is trying to tackle carbon dioxide in a similar way, by having the Environmental Protection Agency regulate emissions. But this, too, may fail, and even its proponents do not see it as a very attractive way forward.

Let the good be the friend of the better
As well as having charms that efforts to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions lack, these alternatives could also improve the content and prospects of other climate action. They allow people to meet in smaller venues than the vast UN shindigs热闹的聚会. Imagine that success on some of these currently marginal climate issues came fairly quickly and easily. That could help build the trust, ambition and momentum needed to get further on deals to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions, and to find ways to finance the new energy infrastructures those reductions require, both through the UN process and by other means.
But these new types of climate action do not replace the need to reduce carbon emissions. Carbon-dioxide levels are still rising; the shadow of uncertainty and risk they cast into the future is getting deeper and longer. Carbon emitted today will continue to warm the planet for millennia, unless active measures to remove it from the atmosphere are undertaken at some later date.
Reducing other short-lived sources of climate change while continuing to emit carbon will delay rises in temperature, but it will not stop them. Broadening climate action can supplement existing efforts on carbon and provide new suppleness (readily adaptable or responsive to new situations) to climate politics—both good things. But this does not change the imperative (command, obligation, rule, order) of decarbonisation.

周九UID: 2769406

24号作业收到，mark~

法布雷加欣UID: 2901617

ON A rainy weekend this month 10,000 businessmen, hobby traders and “netheads” gathered in Hangzhou, a pretty Chinese city near Shanghai, to talk about e-commerce. Most went to meet and swap tips with other online traders. All came to the “Alifest” to sit at the feet of Jack Ma, a pixie小精灵，小仙子-sized, boyish 42-year-old who is the founder of Alibaba, an e-commerce firm, and is regarded as the godfather of the internet in China. In a country where businessmen are viewed with suspicion, his popularity is unusual. When he was invited recently to speak in Beijing's Great Hall of the People, Mr Ma needed six bodyguards to escape a mob群，帮 of online traders waiting outside to give him a hug.

Mr Ma's rock-star status reflects how he has enabled thousands of his countrymen to become their own bosses, build businesses and make money. Alibaba has become the world's largest online business-to-business (B2B) marketplace, Asia's most popular online auction site and, as a result of it’s acquisition of Yahoo! China, the 12th most popular website in the world. That combination makes Alibaba one of the few credible challengers to the global online elite of Google, eBay, Yahoo! and Amazon.
连续两个…,…,and….加强语气
前两段总的概括马云的成功
Alibaba is far from being just a Chinese knock-off仿制品，冒牌货 of these American giants. Indeed, they have borrowed ideas from him. “Jack is not just a Chinese visionary, but a global one. Western companies are taking pages from the Alibaba book,” says Bob Peck, an analyst at Bear Stearns. At Alibaba's heart sit two B2B websites (alibaba.com and china.alibaba.com), one a marketplace for firms from across the world to trade in English, the other a domestic Chinese service. Rival e-commerce outfits, such as America's Ariba and Commerce One, sought to cut multinationals' procurement获得，取得 costs. In contrast, Alibaba's intention was to build markets for China's vast number of small and medium-sized enterprises, which make everything from cufflinks to motorcycles, by allowing them to trade with each other and linking them to global supply chains. Today, traders in America buy from Alibaba and resell on eBay.
At …sit… 方位状语提前倒桩，在句型上可以有如此变换，以提高语句的多样性。
对比是 用in contrast
TS：阿里巴巴绝非复制品，反而还其他公司还要借鉴他的理念 这里的转折用far from…indeed…来表达 可以学习
Mr Ma has also led the charge into online communities and social networking, both now booming areas. In 2003 he added a consumer auction site, Taobao, that allowed instant-messaging—a feature later added to his business sites. In contrast with eBay's relative anonymity, Taobao lets buyers and sellers get chummy友好的，关系亲密的 through messaging and voicemail, and by posting photographs and personal details on the site. Turning e-commerce into a community of “friends” has been critical in a country beset by a lack of trust. And with 70% of China's web users aged under 30, Taobao's informal, blog-like format struck a chord触动心弦，引起共鸣—attracting more than 20m users. Many have now gone professional, buying goods wholesale on Alibaba and reselling them on Taobao. The story goes that, shortly after visiting Alibaba's offices and seeing Taobao, Meg Whitman, eBay's boss, bought Skype, an internet-telephony start-up, for its instant-messaging.
TS：Mr Ma has also led the charge into online communities and social networking, both now booming areas.简明扼要的提出了这段的中心：马云还是第一个把收费服务引入网络社区和社交网络的人，如今这两个领域发展速度都非常快。

Alibaba has also outflanked出奇制胜 the opposition in online payments. Aware that most Chinese do not have credit cards, Mr Ma introduced AliPay, a system that keeps cash in escrow until goods arrive. That trick for getting round settlement risk was later adopted in China by eBay. China's powerful banking regulator has a hawkish eye on AliPay, which is, in effect, an online bank with thousands of credit histories (something mainland banks crave). Taobao's success has been startling. Its market share jumped from 8% to 59% between 2003 and 2005, while eBay China's slid from 79% to 36%. Mr Ma trumpets that it is “game over” for eBay China. Many industry watchers expect eBay to retreat and sell out to a local outfit such as Tencent (a rising star in auctions) or Alibaba itself—as Yahoo! China did.
TS：Alibaba has also outflanked出奇制胜 the opposition in online payments在在线付款方面，阿里巴巴也有过人之处。    两段同是优点，连接时用了also

Mr Ma is also at the forefront of the trend to integrate paid search with e-commerce. Alibaba's takeover of Yahoo! China last October gave the firm a search engine just as Google was demonstrating the huge potential of paid search, and the deal anticipated eBay's link-ups with portals (Yahoo! in America, and Google elsewhere). Baidu, China's main search engine, is a strong rival. But online advertising is surging in China and small firms are the biggest users of paid search, giving Alibaba an edge优势.
At the forefront of the trend潮流的前线
TS：Mr Ma is also at the forefront of the trend to integrate paid search with e-commerce. 同样用also连接    马云同样也走在了搜索付费与电子商务整合潮流的前沿。
Mr Ma seldom mentions technology. Whereas most internet entrepreneurs are geeks (think of Yahoo!'s or Google's founders), Mr Ma first touched a computer in 1995 on a trip to Seattle. “Someone as dumb as me should be able to use technology,” he says. He insists on simplicity. A new feature is rejected unless he can understand and use it. Mr Ma's approach to running the company is similarly independent. He reads neither business books nor case studies, and ascribes Alibaba's survival and success to the fact that he “knew nothing about technology, we didn't have a plan and we didn't have any money.” In truth, Mr Ma had powerful backers early on, including Goldman Sachs and Softbank. Yahoo!'s Jerry Yang—who joined Mr Ma at the Alifest—is also a longtime friend. In any case, he has money aplenty today: as part of its takeover by Alibaba, Yahoo! paid $1 billion for a 40% stake in the company.
Ascribe…to…将…归功于… 可以用来联系两个具有因果关系的成分
再写In fact可以用In truth 再写anyway 可以用in any case
TS：马云很少谈及技术问题。之后又whereas对比，立刻显现了马云的一个特点，也是这段作者想表达给读者的
Only one thing is missing: profits. As the boss of a private company in no rush to join the stockmarket, Mr Ma is relaxed. Revenues should double to more than $200m this year. But Alibaba has so far pursued market share rather than revenue. The global business site charges its users, but Taobao does not; an attempt to do so this year failed. Mr Ma says it is too early: only 30m of China's 120m online users have bought anything online. He wants to help the market grow—creating 1m jobs in China in the next three years—not stifle it with charges. He will have to tackle profitability if he is really to call the tune颐指气使，发号施令.
TS：Only one thing is missing: profits.
惟一不简单的就是利润。说出目前可能遇到的困难。

整篇文章结构清晰，内容明了，TS句的使用非常明显，给我们带来一些启示，在每段开头需要一针见血，不要追求句式的复杂，而在之后的阐述中，使用一些连接性的介词，动词词组，或者其他收集的好词组将内容串联起来，不要太在意句式的繁复，而要在意意思的清晰表达！

周九UID: 2769406

25号作业收到，mark

法布雷加欣UID: 2901617

INTERNET advertising is booming. The industry has gone from $9.6 billion in revenue in 2001 to $27 billion this year, according to Piper Jaffray, an investment bank. And it is still early days. The internet accounts for only 5% of total spending on advertising, but that figure is expected to reach at least 20% in the next few years. The single largest category within this flourishing industry, accounting for nearly half of all spending, is “pay-per-click” advertising, which is used by firms both large and small to promote their wares.

It works like this. Advertisers bid on keywords that they believe potential customers will be interested in. This enables internet firms such as Google, the market leader, and Yahoo!, its smaller rival, to display advertisements alongside the results of internet searches. Somebody searching for a particular type of wine, for example, might see advertisements from wine merchants. Google, Yahoo! and other firms also place ads on affiliates' websites—so wine merchants' advertisements might also appear on a wine-appreciation site. The advertiser pays only when a consumer clicks on an ad; the owner of the website where the ad was displayed then receives a small commission.
Enable很好的链接动词
For example， then 在句子中的使用地方灵活多变

The benefits of the pay-per-click approach over traditional advertising (television, radio, print and billboards) are obvious. Since advertisers pay only to reach the small subset who actually respond to an advertisement, the quality of the leads generated is very high, and advertisers are prepared to pay accordingly. The price per click varies from $0.10 to as much as $30, depending on the keyword, though the average is around $0.50. “Mesothelioma”, for instance, the name of an asbestos-related illness, is an especially valuable keyword, because lawyers are prepared to pay a lot to make contact with sufferers in the hope of representing them in a lucrative compensation lawsuit. Google made most of its $6.1 billion in revenue last year from pay-per-click advertising.
Over用于比较，比较容易被大家在作文中的写作中忽略
In the hope of目的的链接可以多一种形式 而不一直使用to等

But as pay-per-click advertising has grown into a huge industry, concern has mounted over so-called “click fraud”—bogus clicks that do not come from genuinely interested customers. It takes two main forms. If you click repeatedly on the advertisements on your own website, or get other people or machines to do so on your behalf, you can generate a stream of bogus commissions. Click fraud can also be used by one company against another: clicking on a rival firm's advertisements can saddle it with a huge bill. Bogus clicks are thought to account for around 10% of all click traffic, though nobody knows for sure.

In the wake of these legal challenges, Google and Yahoo! recently joined a working group at the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), a trade association, which will establish standards for pay-per-click advertising, including the introduction of industry-funded auditing and certification, by the middle of 2007. “I believe Google and Yahoo! are now taking the issue very seriously,” says David Jones, chief executive of Euro RSCG, an advertising company. But Rishad Tobaccowala, head of innovation at Publicis, one of the world's biggest advertising groups, says it is too early to say whether the measures being taken against click fraud will be enough to satisfy advertisers.
In the wake of紧紧跟随；随着…而来，作为…的结果很好很强大的词组 牢记

Might this put an end to click fraud? Don't bet on it, says Mike Zeman at Starcom, an advertising agency. Pay-per-action will be a niche, he predicts, since converting a click into an action depends on a variety of factors such as the ease of use of the advertiser's website. Google and its peers will be reluctant to be so dependent on factors outside their control. But Mr Tobaccowala thinks pay-per-action could become a real alternative to pay-per-click. As bigger companies spend more on internet advertising, they will demand more accountability and a wider range of options, he says.
At the very least, that means clamping down on打压 click fraud; but it also presents an opportunity for entrepreneurs to invent new models that are less vulnerable to abuse.
Put an end to停止，解决
At the very least 退一万步说，可以用于让步
Less vulnerable to不易遭受…

周九UID: 2769406

26号作业已收到，mark

法布雷加欣UID: 2901617

Busy signal

Jun 8th 2006
From The Economist print edition

LONDON responded to terrorist attack on July 7th in
true Blitz
style: rescuers were heroic, and ordinary citizens showed compassion and fortitude. Or so the politically correct version goes. A report this week from the London Assembly takes a sterner line. In fact, radios failed to work, medical supplies were lacking, some ambulances arrived inexplicably
late and traumatized people were left to wander off.
像…一样，以…方式：in … style
大约，左右：or so

This is the third official report into the bombs on tube and bus that killed 56 people last year and injured hundreds more. In May the Home Office offered a “narrative” of events but cast blame only on the terrorists. A parliamentary investigation concluded that the intelligence services, stretched thin, had done their best. The London Assembly's take on the matter will not satisfy those who want an independent public inquiry. But it has, at least, got beneath the gloss.浮出水面
Gloss: an attractive appearance on the surface of something that may hide something less pleasant
表面地或虚假的吸引人的形象；假象

The response to the July 7th bombings was chaotic, and in ways that ought to have been preventable. The emergency services had no coherent plan in
place to care for those who survived, the report suggests. But most crippling were the communication failures.但是最重要的还是…

Police, ambulance workers and firefighters were unable to talk to each other underground; only the radios of the transport police worked in the tunnels. The emergency services had to rely on runners to pass information to and from
disaster areas. Yet a report on a big fire at King's Cross tube station had drawn attention to precisely this problem in 1988.

Communications above ground were not much better. Rescue workers competed with bewildered bystanders for access to overloaded mobile-phone networks. The City of London Police, for its part, asked one wireless operator to favour certain rescue workers by limiting service for ordinary users. Earlier, a body headed by the Metropolitan Police had decided this was unnecessary.

Richard Barnes, who chaired the assembly's July 7th review committee, says the report is not meant to disparage
the work of the rescuers but rather to fix the problems they encountered. Almost a year later, the situation has barely improved: a new digital radio network for London's underground, for example, is running behind
schedule. The assembly plans new hearings in November to hold various feet to the fire.
Hold one’s feet to the fire：to cause someone to feel pressure or stress可以翻译成让某人以其高度重视

周九UID: 2769406

27号作业收到，mark~

周九UID: 2769406

28号作业木有收到，mark

法布雷加欣UID: 2901617

Testament of youth

Sep 21st 2006

From The Economist print edition

Political parties start talking to an elusive constituency

MOST marketing operations pay close attention to what young people are buying and thinking. Not Britain's political parties, however, for the simple reason that the under-30s are unlikely to go anywhere near a polling booth. In 1964, 11% of those aged 18 to 24 claimed not to vote, according to the British Election Study. At the general election last year that figure rose to 55%. A report this week by Reform, a think-tank, suggests that this reticence is costing them dearly. Changes in government policy, it argues, have turned being young into a terrible bore.
大多数经营机构都密切关注年轻人的所购所想，然而英国各政党对年轻人却不感兴趣，原因很简单，那就是在投票站附近不可能见到30岁以下的年轻人。据《英国选举研究》称，1964年，有11％年龄介于18至24岁之间的年轻人声称不会去投票。去年大选时这一数字已升至55％。一家名为“改革”的研究机构本周发布的一项报告表明，年轻人正在为这种漠不关心的态度付出昂贵的代价。报告指出，政府的政策变革已经让他们开始感到做一个年轻人真是没劲透了。
There are already two powerful economic forces working against the so-called “IPOD generation” that are beyond the government's control. First, the ageing of the population is fast increasing the ratio of people in retirement to those of working age. So the young can look forward to handing over a rising proportion of their pay to support the oldies in their decline. Second, the cost of buying a house in places where people want to live has shot up beyond the reach of the young. In 1995 24% of all first-time homebuyers were under 25; today, less than 15% are, according to the Halifax, a bank.
不服政府管束的所谓的“IPOD一代”目前已然受制于两种巨大的经济压力。首先，人口的老化正迅速提高退休人口与在岗人口的比率，因此为了维持老年人的晚年生活，年轻人将要放弃他们的增长的比例。其次，在人们都希望居住的区域购买房屋的价格飞速蹿升，年轻人已经难以企及。Halifax银行称，1995年首次置业者中有24％在25岁以下，而如今却不到15％。
This much is uncontroversial. But the report also argues that the Labour government has made life worse for young people, in three ways. First, increased spending on health care has tended to benefit the old, who use the NHS more than the young. Second, tilting the tax and benefit system towards people with children has transferred money from the young to the middle-aged. Third, higher tuition fees are landing university graduates with hefty debts. And the future doesn't look much better: the government's proposed pension reforms, along with the decline of defined-benefit company-pension schemes, make grim reading for使…形势严峻
the under-30s too.
这些都是毋庸置疑的。不过该报告也指出，让年轻人生活变得更糟的是工党政府，理由有三：首先，增大的医疗投入倾向于惠及使用国民医疗服务较年轻人多的老年人。其次，将税收与福利制度向有子女的人倾斜使得年轻人的钱转向中年人群。第三，高昂的学费使大学毕业生背上了沉重的债务。而且，未来似乎也没有好转的迹象——由于政府拟进行养老金改革，加之固定给付式养老金计划即将取消，30岁以下的人将面临严峻的形势。
“These changes ought to have brought about a re-examination of the burden of taxation on this age group,” says Nick Bosanquet of Imperial College London, one of the authors of the report. He reckons that, after paying various taxmen and lenders, graduates take home only around half of their salaries. The average for all salaried workers is about three-fifths.
该报告作者之一、伦敦帝国学院的尼克·博桑基特说：“在进行这些变革的同时，应该重新审视一下年轻人所背负的纳税负担。”他估算，大学毕业生在缴纳了各种各样的税款和贷款后，能够带回家的工资就只剩下一半左右，而就所有拿工资的工人而言，这一平均数字大约是五分之三。
Are things really that bad? When examined in a freeze-frame, being young does not look much fun financially. But welfare states are meant to transfer resources from the vigorous to the fragile. Some benefits are merely deferred: today's 25-year-olds will have babies and hip replacements one day. And although people in their 20s and 30s tend to be heavily indebted, this passes when they sink into their 40s and 50s, says Richard Disney of Nottingham University.
情况真的如此糟糕么？静止地看，年轻人在经济状况上是高兴不起来的，但福利制度本身就意味着“锄强扶弱”，而且有些福利只不过是延期到来而已——今天25岁的人总有一天会生儿育女，并且将被新的弄潮儿所取代。此外，诺丁汉大学的理查德·迪斯尼说，虽然人们在二、三十岁的时候重债在身，但到了四、五十岁时，这些债务终将成为过去。
Even so, the feeling that young people are being squeezed presents a political opportunity for the opposition parties. David Willetts, the Conservative shadow education secretary, said in a speech last year that the young “could be forgiven for believing that the way in which economic and social policy is now conducted is little less than无异于
a conspiracy by the middle-aged” against them. The Liberal Democrat commission on tax policy worried in August about inter-generational unfairness too.
话虽如此，认为年轻人遭到了压榨的这种情结还是让反对党在政治上有隙可乘。保守党影子内阁教育大臣大卫·威莱茨在去年的一次演讲中说，年轻人“认为现行的经济与社会政策无异于是中年人对他们所策划的一场阴谋”，这“是可以谅解的”。今年8月，自由民主党税收政策委员会也对两代人之间的不公平表示了担忧。
There will be more of such talk. For the Tories, it offers a way to discuss reducing spending without sounding as if they are merely the mouthpiece of the wealthy. It gives Lib Dem leaders a way to argue activists out of promising to out-spend Labour. And it might even persuade some of those gloomy 25-year-olds to vote.
诸如此类的言论定会不绝于耳。对于保守党而言，它可以让人们就削减财政支出展开讨论，而不会让人觉得自己无非是有钱人的传声筒而已。至于自由民主党，它的领导人则因此找到了一个劝阻激进分子在支出上与劳工党攀比的由头。而且，这样也可能会说服那些抑郁的年轻人投上一票。

周九UID: 2769406

3.1收到，mark

法布雷加欣UID: 2901617

FOR most Londoners, parish councils exist only in the fictional villages of Dibley or Ambridge, the settings of television and radio shows depicting the sleepy lives of rural folk, where council business rarely extends beyond organising the annual village fete. That might be about to change.
Tourists are often encouraged to experience “village London”, a term that reflects the variety of mini-centres dotted throughout the capital. The city’s governance structure, however, bears little relation to these localities: the lowest tier of government in London is its 32 borough councils, serving an average population of around 250,000. But activists are hoping to set up new representative bodies at a much more local level.
Ordinarily covering populations of only several thousand, parish councils started to take over the municipal tasks that had traditionally been performed by churches—hence the religious terminology—in the 19th century. Despite the fete-organising stereotype, in villages and some towns and cities they are responsible for more serious matters, such as public toilets, playing fields, road humps and youth clubs. Their members are elected and they can charge a “precept” that is added to the borough council tax.
Until 2008, the law prevented Londoners from being represented in this way. But under new rules introduced by the previous Labour government, parish (or community) councils can be set up in the city with the support of 10% of local electors and the approval of the relevant borough (which has few legal grounds to deny the request). The race is on to be first to establish one. Queen’s Park, an up-and-coming part of north-west London, has gathered the most signatures; London Fields, in Hackney, is next.
On the face of it, David Cameron should be pleased. This local activism seems to accord with his embattled notion of the “Big Society”, a plan to devolve more power to local communities and make the state less overbearing, which he defended this week from its many doubters. In truth, the push to create urban parish councils suggests a trend he might be less keen on.
The Queen’s Park campaign was prompted by the woes of the Queen’s Park Forum, a community group that, like many others, is threatened by cuts to its state funding. The thinking is that creating a parish council, able to raise money through taxation, will help to save the project in a statutory guise. In London’s villages, willing society is seeking the protective shelter of little government.

周九UID: 2769406

task 4结束袅~