有木有潜伏在G版的托福党啊，寻找托福口语小伙伴啊！！

无敌浩克OneUID: 3605802

since 2016.5.1

since 2016.5.29

无敌浩克OneUID: 3605802

“IF OUR party can’t even handle food-safety issues properly, and keeps on mishandling them, then people will ask whether we are fit to keep ruling China.” So Xi Jinping warned officials in 2013, a year after he became the country’s leader. It was a remarkable statement for the chief of a Communist Party that has always claimed to have the backing of “the people”. It suggested that Mr Xi understood how grievances about official incompetence and corruption risked boiling over. Mr Xi rounded up tens of thousands of erring officials, waging a war on corruption of an intensity not seen since the party came to power in 1949. Many thought he was right to do so.

Today, however, China is enduring its biggest public-health scandal in years. Tens of millions of dollars-worth of black-market, out-of-date and improperly stored vaccines have been sold to government health centres, which have in turn been making money by selling them to patients.

Mr Xi’s anti-graft war has often made little difference to ordinary people. Their life—and health—is still blighted by corruption. In recent days there have also been signs of discontent with Mr Xi among the elite: official media complaining openly about reporting restrictions, a prominent businessman attacking him on his microblog, a senior editor resigning in disgust.

Mr Xi has acquired more power than any Chinese leader since Mao Zedong. It was supposed to let him get things done. What is going wrong?

Credibility gap
In fairness, Mr Xi was bound to meet with hostility. Many officials are angry because he has ripped up the compact by which they have operated and which said that they could line their pockets, so long as corruption was not flagrant and they did their job well.

But Mr Xi has also found that the pursuit of power is all-consuming: it does not leave room for much else. In three and a half years in charge, he has accumulated titles at an astonishing pace. He is not only party leader, head of state and commander-in-chief, but is also running reform, the security services and the economy. In effect, the party’s hallowed notion of “collective” leadership (see article) has been jettisoned. Mr Xi is, one analyst says, “Chairman of Everything”.

At the same time, he has flouted the party’s ban on personality cults, introduced in 1982 to prevent another episode of Maoist madness. Official media are filled with fawning over “Uncle Xi” and his wife, Peng Liyuan, a folk-singer whom flatterers call “Mama Peng”. A video, released in March, of a dance called “Uncle Xi in love with Mama Peng” has already been viewed over 300,000 times. There have been rumours recently that Mr Xi feels some of this has been going a bit far. Some of the most toadying videos, such as “The east is red again” (comparing Mr Xi to Mao), have been scrubbed from the internet.

Many would take that as a sign that the personality cult is little more than harmless fun. Mr Xi is no Mao, whose tyrannical nature and love of adulation were so great that he blithely led the country into the frenzy and violence of the Cultural Revolution. Although some older Chinese squirm at a style of politics so reminiscent of days long past, there is no suggestion that China is on the brink of another such horror.

But Mr Xi does not need to be as extreme as Mao for his concentration of power to cause harm. He has been fighting dissent with even more ruthlessness than he has been waging war on graft. Not since the dark days after the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989 has there been such a sweeping crackdown on critics of the party. Internet censors have been busy deleting messages posted on social media by outraged citizens in response to the vaccine scandal. These have included posts reminding Mr Xi of his words in 2013 about the party’s fitness to rule. Police have also been investigating the appearance early in March of an anonymous letter on a government-affiliated website calling on Mr Xi to resign (raising, among several transgressions, the personality cult and his stifling of the media). Some 20 people have been arrested. Yet this work is never-ending. Even now citizens are pushing back. With the help of the internet, no matter how heavily it is blocked and censored, their voices keep crying out.

No liberal, Xi
By cracking down and puffing himself up, Mr Xi is neither buying himself security nor helping to keep China stable. He is using the party’s own thuggish investigators to take on graft. But they have a greater interest in settling political scores than in ensuring laws are applied fairly. That gets in the way of good administration, if only because officials are scared of spending money in case it attracts a probe. By cowing the media, Mr Xi created a press reluctant to challenge officials by exposing the dodgy-vaccine trade as soon as it was discovered at least a year ago. By the time such scandals eventually come to light, they pose even greater threats to the party’s, and Mr Xi’s, credibility.

Mr Xi has pledged to give market forces a “decisive role”, and put “power in a cage” by establishing the rule of law. But he is providing neither the country with prosperity and freedom, nor reassuring the rest of the world with stability. Abroad, anxieties about him keep growing: his muscular efforts to assert control in the South China Sea have been driving countries across Asia closer to the American camp.

Earlier in Mr Xi’s rule, observers had wondered whether, after establishing himself, he would turn to carrying out the reforms that he says he wants. But hopes are fading that a big reformist push will ever materialise. Mr Xi appears to have little time for the politically irksome business of making the party follow the law, closing down loss-making state-owned firms, or bringing about much-needed social changes, such as scrapping restrictions on access by rural migrants to urban public services. The task of preserving his power is a full-time job.

In the past 66 years of Communist rule in China, the most troubled times have usually come about when tensions break out within the elite. Mr Xi’s style of rule is only serving to stoke them. The more Mr Xi tries to fight off enemies using scare tactics and brute force, the more enemies he is likely to make.

无敌浩克OneUID: 3605802

2016.4.1
the economist is suddenly blocked out. and after jumped over the fire wall, I found out that the headline news was about Chinese politics. I immediately understood why it has been blocked out.

new words or expressions

wage war
grievance: a wrong considered as complaint
blight: destroy
rip: cut
flagrant: shockingly noticeable
hallow: sacred
jettison: discard
cult: great veneration of one person
flout: contempt
toady: flatter
scrub: remove/cancel
blithely: careless
squirm: feel discomfort
reminiscent: awakening similar memory
dissent: disagreement
sweeping: moving
affiliate: associate
thuggish: murdering
cow: fight with threat
irksome: annoying
stoke: to tend a fire of
brute: animal

无敌浩克OneUID: 3605802

GLOBALISATION has created a handful of metropolises that attract people, capital and ideas from all over the world, almost irrespective of how their national economy is doing. House prices in such places, unsurprisingly, outpace the national average. In our latest round-up of global housing, we find that prices have risen in 20 of the 26 countries we track over the past year, at an (unweighted) average pace of 5.1% after adjusting for inflation. Prices in pre-eminent cities in these countries, however, have risen by 8.3% on average.

In a survey conducted last year, fewer than one in nine residents of Amsterdam, Berlin, London, Paris, Stockholm and Zurich thought that it was easy to find reasonably-priced housing. In these cities, house prices have risen at an average pace of 6.5% a year over the past three years (again, unweighted), compared with a national average rise of just 3.2%. The value of homes in four cities on the Pacific—San Francisco, Vancouver, Sydney and Shanghai—has increased by 12% a year over the past three years, twice the average national pace.


The supply of housing is rather inelastic, so in the short term house-price inflation is driven more by demand factors, such as the number of households, disposable income, interest rates and the yield available on other assets. In recent years all of these have helped to push house prices steadily upwards, especially in big cities.


In the conurbations in question, the number of households is rising fast as hordes of ambitious millennials pour in. Two in five of Zurich’s residents were born outside Switzerland; 44% are between the ages of 20 and 44. The boom towns also have tight labour markets and therefore relatively high income growth: the unemployment rate in San Francisco and Stockholm is around a percentage-point lower than the national averages. Some are havens for second homes and money seeking safety: foreigners snap up half of London’s princeliest dwellings, according to Savills, an estate agent. Finally, they provide a decent return: net yields in Vancouver were 11% in 2015, according to MSCI, a data provider, three percentage points above the average for Canadian housing.

Whenever the supply of a good is limited, there is potential for exuberance. San Francisco’s property market is intertwined with the technology sector: since 2008 there has been a 93% correlation between the monthly movements in the NASDAQ and house-price inflation in its metropolitan area. Since bottoming out in early 2012, prices in Silicon Valley have risen by 73%, compared with 31% in America as a whole.



Compare global housing data over time with our interactive house-price tool
To determine whether homes are fairly valued The Economist looks at the relationship between prices and disposable income (an indicator of affordability) and between prices and rents (a substitute for buying a home). If rising prices move these ratios above their long-run averages, then either incomes or rents are likely to rise, or house prices to fall.

Across America house prices, after falling by 25% from their peak between 2007 and 2012, are now at fair value compared with rents and incomes. In San Francisco, too, they are at fair value when compared with rents, but 45% overvalued relative to incomes. Thanks largely to their big cities, housing appears to be more than 40% overvalued in Australia, Britain and Canada, according to the average of our two measures. Between 2002 and 2012 the typical London home sold for seven times the city’s average annual salary. That figure has since risen to 12 times.

As property developers from Las Vegas to Limerick will attest, when supply does eventually respond to soaring demand, property prices fall. Restrictive planning laws curb new construction in the area around San Francisco Bay; the narrow peninsula that San Francisco itself occupies compounds the problem. London suffers from an even more severe planning regime. Yet housing starts are at a nine-year high in San Francisco. In London, too, builders are finding a way: construction began on 24,000 new homes in the capital in 2015, the highest rate for ten years.

无敌浩克OneUID: 3605802

outpace the national average
unweighted average
adjust for inflation
inelastic: lacking flexibility
horde: large group
millennial: thousand years
princely: lavish
exuberance: luxuriant
fair value: unbiased estimation
soaring demand: high demand
attest: make sth clear

无敌浩克OneUID: 3605802

AT THE outset of his presidency, Barack Obama laid out a vision of a nuclear-free world in what became known as the Prague speech. Such was the mood of optimism that Mr Obama was prematurely awarded the Nobel peace prize. Mr Obama did manage to get a new strategic arms-control agreement with Russia soon after and last year saw what the president almost certainly regards as his greatest foreign-policy achievement: the nuclear deal with Iran. Those apart, there is not much to show for that early statement of intent other than a series of four Nuclear Security Summits, the last of which wrapped up in Washington on April 1st.

The main aim of the summits has been to create a better system of global safeguards to ensure that nuclear material, specifically highly enriched uranium and plutonium, which could be used by terrorists to construct a so-called “dirty bomb”—or even a fission bomb—does not get into the wrong hands.

The summits have been a qualified success. Achievements so far include the removal of highly enriched uranium from 15 countries and the closure or conversion to low-enriched-uranium use of many research reactors and isotope-production facilities. For its part, the White House instructed the American navy to look into how it might convert the highly-enriched-uranium reactors that power its aircraft carriers and submarines.

Security has also been tightened at dozens of fissile-material storage sites. This year’s meeting produced the expected list of announcements. A raft of countries, including Kazakhstan and Poland, undertook to reduce their stockpiles of highly enriched uranium. There was also an agreement with Japan to ship separated plutonium to America, only somewhat diminished by the country’s decision to build a new plutonium-reprocessing plant that will be capable of producing more than seven tonnes of the stuff every year.

This summit is likely to be the last of its kind unless Mr Obama’s successor decides to keep them going as a mechanism for nuclear diplomacy. Although five international agencies are expected to continue the work, money for nuclear security has been cut back by Congress and momentum could also be hard to maintain for other reasons. While 50 world leaders showed up for this summit, Vladimir Putin’s decision to boycott the event was a major disappointment. Russia’s president is no longer prepared to participate in what he sees as an American-led process. Speaking for the White House, Ben Rhodes said: “You want Russia at the table on issues of nuclear security. They only isolate themselves by not attending summits like this.”

Another concern expressed by Mr Obama is that Pakistan, whose nuclear-security arrangements have up to now been praised by America, is moving ahead with the production of small, battlefield nuclear weapons. They may be a lot harder to keep safe as they will at times be under the command of relatively junior officers, some of whom may have been “radicalised” and share sympathies with extremist Islamist groups, of which Pakistan has many. There are worries too about Islamic State having ambitions to acquire fissile material. Those have grown since reports last week that it may be trying to infiltrate nuclear plants in Belgium.

That said, evidence of terrorist outfits actively seeking nuclear capability is scant. Mark Fitzpatrick, director of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in the Americas and a nuclear non-proliferation expert, points out that nothing resembling a black market for nuclear material has yet emerged. In the overwhelming majority of known cases involving the attempted sale of nuclear or other radioactive material (or material alleged to be radioactive), there has been no buyer.

There was an element of bathos at Mr Obama’s end-of-summit press conference. Much of it was devoted to comments about the summit made by Donald Trump. Mr Obama said that other world leaders had expressed their dismay in private conversations over the past two days about the Republican front-runner’s cavalier and ignorant approach to nuclear weapons. Last week Mr Trump touted the idea of encouraging Japan and South Korea to acquire nuclear weapons, as a way to reduce America’s expensive security commitments in the western Pacific. Mr Obama said that Mr Trump’s comments reflected the views of someone who “doesn’t know much about foreign policy or nuclear policy or the world generally”.

无敌浩克OneUID: 3605802

outset: beginning
presidency: office of president
fission: splitting up to parts
conversion: change of character
fissile: can be divided
stockpile: supply
momentum: force of movement
infiltrate: permeate
proliferation: rapid growth
cavalier: haughty
tout the idea: solicit support for the idea

无敌浩克OneUID: 3605802

ON MARCH 30th in Napyidaw, Myanmar’s eerie purpose-built capital, Htin Kyaw was sworn in as the country’s first civilian president in more than 50 years. Parliament elected him president just over two weeks ago; in Myanmar’s hybrid electoral system, the people elect parliament, and then parliamentarians vote for president. His party, Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD), won commanding majorities in both houses of parliament last November, allowing them to elect their chosen candidate easily. Thein Sein, the outgoing president, handed over power peacefully. Min Aung Hlaing, head of the army, which ruled Myanmar either directly or through its fig-leaf party since 1962, said he supports the country’s democratic transition. This seems a triumph for Burmese democracy. The reality is more complex.

Mr Htin Kyaw was neither the NLD’s nor Myanmar’s first choice for president. They would have preferred Miss Suu Kyi, but the constitution bars anyone with a foreign spouse or children from the top job (her sons, like her late husband, are British; most believe the bar was specifically written to keep her out of office). Before last November’s elections Miss Suu Kyi said she would put herself “above the president”. She will run the country from the foreign ministry, while Mr Htin Kyaw, her longtime confidante and loyal placeholder, holds what looks like a nominal presidency. Installing a puppet president and subverting the constitution marks an inauspicious beginning for a party nominally devoted to democracy, transparency and rule of law.

But the larger threat to democracy comes from the expansive power Myanmar’s constitution reserves for the army. At a parade on March 27th Mr Min Aung Hlaing reminded Myanmar’s citizens that the army “ensure[s] the stability of the country” and “has to be present in a leading role in national politics.” The constitution was written to preserve that role. The army controls three powerful ministries: defence, border affairs and home affairs. The last gives it control of the state’s administrative backbone, right down to the village level. Through those ministries the army dominates the National Defence and Security Council, which can disband parliament, impose martial law and run the country. Changing the constitution requires a 75%+1 majority in parliament; since the army has 25% of seats reserved by law, it holds a perpetual veto.

So the civilian government and army will essentially control different parts of the government. The NLD’s top priorities are economic development and reaching a lasting peace with ethnic minorities along the country’s borders, some of whom have been fighting the central government for decades. These tasks are linked: unless Myanmar’s central government extends the state’s reach into the resource-rich borderlands, its economy will never reach full potential. But that may require the new government to make concessions that the army does not like, and the army’s control over the border-affairs and defence ministries—as well as its operational independence—give it an effective veto. How this conflict plays out will determine whether Myanmar keeps going forward on the road to democracy, or whether the army grabs the steering wheel for a quick U-turn.

无敌浩克OneUID: 3605802

houses of parliament
confidante: people confiding secrets
disband: break up
reach full potential

无敌浩克OneUID: 3605802

Today everything exists to end in a photograph,” Susan Sontag wrote in her seminal 1977 book “On Photography.” This was something I thought about when I recently read that Google was making its one-hundred-and-forty-nine-dollar photo-editing suite, the Google Nik Collection, free. This photo-editing software is as beloved among photographers as, say, Katz’s Deli is among those who dream of pastrami sandwiches.

Before Google bought it, in 2012, the collection cost five hundred dollars. It is made up of seven pieces of specialized software that, when used in combination with other photo-editing software, such as Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Lightroom, give photographers a level of control akin to that once found in the darkroom. They can mimic old film stock, add analog photo effects, or turn color shots into black-and-white photos. The suite can transform modestly good photos into magical ones. Collectively, Nik’s intellectual sophistication is that of a chess grand master. I don’t mind paying for the software, and neither do thousands of photographers and enthusiasts. So, like many, I wondered, why would Google make it free?


My guess is that it wants to kill the software, but it doesn’t want the P.R. nightmare that would follow. Remember the outcry（protest) over its decision to shut down its tool for R.S.S. feeds, Google Reader? Nik loyalists are even more rabid(extreme). By making the software free, the company can both ignore the product and avoid a backlash(reaction). But make no mistake: it is only a matter of time before Nik goes the way of the film camera—into the dustbin of technological history.

“The giveaway is bad news, as it means the software they paid for has almost [certainly] reached the end of the line in terms of updates,” wrote PC World. And, as Google explained in the blog post announcing the news, the company will “focus our long-term investments in building incredible photo editing tools for mobile.” That means Google Photos, the company’s tool for storing and sorting, and Nik’s own Snapseed app for mobile phones.

Google’s comments—disheartening as they might be—reflect the reality of our shifting technologies. Sure, we all like listening to music on vinyl, but that doesn’t mean streaming music on Spotify is bad. Streaming just fits today’s world better. I love my paper and ink, but I see the benefits of the iPad and Apple Pencil. Digital photography is going through a similar change, and Google is smart to refocus.

To understand Google’s decision, one needs to understand how our relationship with photographs has changed. From analog film cameras to digital cameras to iPhone cameras, it has become progressively easier to take and store photographs. Today we don’t even think twice about snapping a shot. About two years ago, Peter Neubauer, the co-founder of the Swedish database company Neo Technology, pointed out to me that photography has seen the value shift from “the stand-alone individual aesthetic of the artist to the collaborative and social aesthetic of services like Facebook and Instagram.” In the future, he said, the “real value creation will come from stitching together photos as a fabric, extracting information and then providing that cumulative information as a totally different package.”

His comments make sense: we have come to a point in society where we are all taking too many photos and spending very little time looking at them.

“The definition of photography is changing, too, and becoming more of a language,” the Brooklyn-based artist and professional photographer Joshua Allen Harris told me. “We’re attaching imagery to tweets or text messages, almost like a period at the end of a sentence. It’s enhancing our communication in a whole new way.”

In other words, “the term ‘photographer’ is changing,” he said. As a result, photos are less markers of memories than they are Web-browser bookmarks for our lives. And, just as with bookmarks, after a few months it becomes hard to find photos or even to navigate back to the points worth remembering. Google made hoarding(hidden) bookmarks futile. Today we think of something, and then we Google it. Photos are evolving along the same path as well.

Humans have two billion smartphones, and, based on the ultra-conservative assumption that we each upload about two photos a day to various Internet platforms, that means we take about four billion photographs a day. It’s hard to imagine how many photos total are sitting on our devices.

Thanks to our obsession with photography—and, in particular, the cultural rise of selfies—the problem of how to sort all these images has left the realm of human capabilities. Instead, we need to augment humans with machines, which are better at sifting through thousands of photos, analyzing them, finding commonalities, and drawing inferences around moments that matter. Machines can start to learn our style of photography.


Google Photos, a service the company has fully committed to, is built to do just that—organize and enhance maddeningly large photo libraries. Upload your photos to Google’s Cloud and the program will sort through them, remove duplicates, pick out the best ones, tag them, build albums of your vacations, and create animated GIFs for you to share with others. The Assistant feature even edits your photos. The human just has to dump a lot of stuff in a pile; the machine takes care of the rest.

The more photos Google has, the easier it is for its algorithms to learn and become even more precise and effective at the job of creatively editing. I worry about Google’s data ethics and about the idea of handing over the corpus of my life, but I can’t deny that it is exceptional at making sense of my ever-growing photo library. Facebook, too, is clever at arranging photos along the axis of relationships and time. This is a moment for incredible automation, because of the confluence of affordable and large-scale parallel computation(calculation), the increased availability of bigger data sets, and advanced deep-learning algorithms.

It’s not just improved technological capabilities bringing about this shift. Google, Facebook, and Instagram are also reacting to a larger shift away from desktop-oriented computing to always-on computing via our Chromebooks, phones, tablets, and other devices. These devices essentially need software that is built to work with the Cloud, not with one machine on your desk. The functionality of the desktop-centric Nik Collection and its plugins is going to be and should be shoved(move by force) into mobile apps such as Snapseed and VSCO. Just as apps like Instagram and devices like iPhone made us all able to take decent photos, the new intelligent software should make all our shots effortlessly better, as well as much easier to find and share.

The amateur in me is thrilled by the prospect of living in the Cloud, editing on the go. The purist in me wonders if, in the future, desktop photo editing will be like the film-photography revival(restoration） of today—a luxury to feed our nostalgia, a wistful effort to exercise human control over a task machines have taken over from us. I wonder what Sontag would make of that.

无敌浩克OneUID: 3605802

16.4.6 on book、
16.4.7 on book、
spread exponentially
having priced the offering at between $60 and $66 a share(the opening price)
the rate of dollars against the euro
16.4.8 on book、
pay installment
16.4.9 on book
mouth-watering aromas
16.4.10 on book
grave: momentary
engulf: submerge
marine: see
uprising: rise in revolt
repugnant: offensive
peel: to remove
gang up:uniting in opposition
assert oneself: declare one's view forcefully
16.4.11 on book
berserk: violently
aftermath: result
16.4.12 on book
buy-back scheme: used in stock market
share repurchase
skew: distort
propped-up share price
perverse: against desire
16.4.13 on book
grim business: fierce/cruel
rate tumbles/soars: shockingly decrease
emerging economies: newly developed countries excluding China
In 2013, their output per person, on average, grew just 1.1% faster than that in America. At that pace convergence would take: more than a century.
vibrant emerging markets: animated
prop up their own growth: buoy up
strip away the effects of the business cycle
China’s remarkably rapid and export-intensive industrialisation buoyed up other emerging economies
China cannot industrialise itself from scratch again:
rich countries excel at something: exceed
a law/theory still holds
prosper in something: be good at
A serves as a spur to B: stimulate sth
country’s growth model towards services: service-intensive
Regaining momentum will not be easy: the way back to zenith
minority:
exertion:
confluence:
lump into:
surveillance:
dossier:

无敌浩克OneUID: 3605802

IS THERE a global economic crisis on the horizon? Probably not. Is the world in danger of falling into recession? Not soon. Yet the IMF’s latest forecast update, part of its twice-yearly “World Economic Outlook”, is nevertheless resolutely downbeat. Speaking in Washington, DC, the fund’s chief economist, Maurice Obstfeld, outlined yet another set of downgrades to its global GDP growth projections. It is more likely that the next forecast revision will again be down, not up. One of the big risks to the world economy, he said, is from “non-economic” factors, fund-speak for grubby politics. A world economy heading for the growth doldrums, he cautioned, might be a politically perilous place.


The actual forecast numbers are far from horrible. The fund nudged down its global growth projection for 2016 from 3.4% to 3.2%. That is still a shade faster than growth in 2015. The revisions are broad-based: America, Europe and the emerging world as a bloc all saw similar downgrades (see chart). The forecast for sub-Saharan Africa was pared back the most, in large part because of a gloomier outlook for oil-rich Nigeria, the continent’s largest economy. The recent recovery in crude prices will take some pressure off oil producers, but “probably though we won't be seeing prices at the $100 a barrel level for some time, if ever,” said Mr Obstfeld. Of biggish economies, only China escaped a downgrade. The fund is more confident than it was in January that stimulus measures there will work. But short-term optimism could not mask enduring worries about China further out. There is a concern about the quality of China’s growth, said Mr Obstfeld, as fresh credit is directed towards sputtering industries.

The scenario the fund seems most concerned about is a steady slide in global GDP growth that feeds on itself (by discouraging investment), only to exacerbate political tensions, which in turn makes fixing the economy even harder. Brazil shows how a bad economy can be made worse by political paralysis. Low growth might add to the “rising tide of inward-looking nationalism” in the rich world, said Mr Obstfeld. Politics in America is moving against free trade. And for once, Greece is not the biggest risk factor in Europe. The refugee crisis in the European Union has already put pressure on its open-borders policy; there is a “real possibility” that Britain might leave the EU.

The IMF has some familiar remedies for what ails the global economy: keep monetary policy loose, augment it with fiscal stimulus where possible, and add some pro-growth reforms to the mix. Such action is needed to insure against the downside risks the fund identifies. But the world should also now be making contingency plans for a co-ordinated response if a financial shock hits. “There is no longer much room for error,” said Mr Obstfeld, with a certain weariness.

无敌浩克OneUID: 3605802

16.4.14
connotation: second meaning of a word
espionage: spy
treachery: betrayal
crackdown:forceful regulation
revile: to assail with opprobrious language
battered woman: be hitted heavily
dub: to be called
stem: arise from
liable to draconian penalties: legally to rigorous punishment
kerfuffle: tumultuous motion
16.4.16
special economic zone
financial crisis
melange: mixture
frenetic: extremely feeling
misstep
puncture: pierce
16.4.22
ballot paper
A campaigner
provide more grist to that mill: support
income tax

无敌浩克OneUID: 3605802

2015.9.1 run 3000m
2015.9.2 run 1500m
and then stop...


2 and a half month flied in a blink
...
hate my current condition

kept this absurd condition for 7 and a half month!!
time to change!!!!!!!

2016.3.3 run 2000m
2016.3.4 run 2800m
and then stop again...

2016.3.20 run 2800m
2016.3.23 run 3000m
2016.3.26 run 3000m
since 2016.3.30
2016.4.4 no run
2016.4.6 no run(hurt feet)
2016.4.7 no run(no time)
2016.4.9 no run(lazy)
2016.4.11 no run(ill)
2016.4.15 no run(lazy)
2016.4.16 no run(lazy)
2016.4.17 no run(ill)
2016.4.18 no run(lazy)
2016.4.19 no run(lazy)
2016.4.20 no run(lazy)
2016.4.21 no run(lazy)
2016.4.23 no run(lazy)
2016.4.24 no run(lazy)
2016.4.25 no run(lazy)
2016.4.26 no run(lazy)
2016.4.27 no run(lazy)
2016.4 17 days no run

the economist
since 2016.4.1
all read
2016.4.11 no read(ill)
2016.4.17 no read(lazy)
2016.4.18 no read(lazy)
2016.4.19 no read(lazy)
2016.4.20 no read(lazy)
2016.4.21 no read(lazy)
2016.4.22 no read(lazy)
2016.4.23 no read(lazy)
2016.4.24 no read(lazy)
2016.4.25 no read(lazy)
2016.4.26 no read(lazy)
2016.4.27 no read(lazy)
2016.4.28 no read(lazy)
2016.4.29 no read(lazy)

无敌浩克OneUID: 3605802

The contemporary trend whereby fashion designers flout mainstream tradition is unique only in its (i)_____; earlier fashion designers experienced the same (i)_____ impulse, albeit in a less extreme form.
Blank (i)              Blank (ii)
A. subversiveness D. indiscriminate
B. intensity          E. iconoclastic
C. palpability        F. temperate

unique refers to the character of the trend, since every generation has similar trend, only the former ones were less extreme. the current trend is more intensive than the former ones and this should be its unique.

5. Memory-exempt technology such as online birthday reminders does more than enhance our recall abilities; it induces us to (i)______ even more behaviors to automated process. Witness the (ii)______ a program that allows us to create computer greeting cards for the entire year in one setting.

Blank (i)     Blank (i)
A. delegate D. controversy over
B. ascribe   E. popularity of
C. liken       F. sophistication of

more behaviors mean we use this technology more which is kind of popularity.
since you can set all the procedures in one step, it cannot be sophisticated--excluded F

5.scientific papers often (i)________ what actually happened in the course of the investigations they describe. Misunderstandings, blind alleys, and mistakes of various sorts will fail to appear in the final written accounts, because (ii)_______ is a desirable attribute when transmitting results in a science report and would be poorly served by (iii)________

Blank (i)           Blank (ii)             Blank (iii)
A. amplify         D. transparency   G. a comprehensive historical account
B. misrepresent E. efficiency         H. a purely quantitative analysis
C. particularize  F. exhaustiveness I. an overly superficial discussion

not including everything means not comprehensive