Economist里面的GRE单词

whinnyUID: 189834

中英文都没有看懂。

gdreamer9UID: 2542678

75# Genev
谢谢GENEV MM 的解答！

gdreamer9UID: 2542678

When the first Earth Day took place in 1970, American environmentalists had good reason to feel guilty. The nation’s affluence and advanced technology seemed so obviously bad for the planet that they were featured in a famous equation developed by the ecologist Paul Ehrlich and the physicist John P. Holdren, who is now President Obama’s science adviser.

Their equation was I=PAT, which means that environmental impact is equal to population multiplied by affluence multiplied by technology.这个理论真的有吗？很可笑和荒谬喔～呵呵～ Protecting the planet seemed to require fewer people, less wealth and simpler technology — the same sort of social transformation and energy revolution that will be advocated at many Earth Day rallies on Wednesday.

But among researchers who analyze environmental data, a lot has changed since the 1970s. With the benefit of their hindsight and improved equations, I’ll make a couple of predictions:

1. There will be no green revolution in energy or anything else. No leader or law or treaty will radically change the energy sources for people and industries in the United States or other countries. No recession or depression will make a lasting change in consumers’ passions to use energy, make money and buy new technology — and that, believe it or not, is good news, because...

2. The richer everyone gets, the greener the planet will be in the long run.

I realize this second prediction seems hard to believe when you consider the carbon being dumped into the atmosphere today by Americans, and the projections for increasing emissions from India and China as they get richer.

Those projections make it easy to assume that affluence and technology inflict more harm on the environment. But while pollution can increase when a country starts industrializing, as people get wealthier they can afford cleaner water and air. They start using sources of energy that are less carbon-intensive — and not just because they’re worried about global warming. The process of “decarbonization” started long before Al Gore was born.

The old wealth-is-bad IPAT theory may have made intuitive sense, but it didn’t jibe with the data that has been analyzed since that first Earth Day. By the 1990s, researchers realized that graphs of environmental impact didn’t produce a simple upward-sloping line as countries got richer. The line more often rose, flattened out and then reversed so that it sloped downward, forming the shape of a dome or an inverted U — what’s called a Kuznets curve. (See nytimes.com/tierneylab for an example.)

In dozens of studies, researchers identified Kuznets curves for a variety of environmental problems. There are exceptions to the trend, especially in countries with inept governments and poor systems of property rights, but in general, richer is eventually greener. As incomes go up, people often focus first on cleaning up their drinking water, and then later on air pollutants like sulfur dioxide.

As their wealth grows, people consume more energy, but they move to more efficient and cleaner sources — from wood to coal and oil, and then to natural gas and nuclear power, progressively emitting less carbon per unit of energy. This global decarbonization trend 怎么不用LOW CARBON initiative has been proceeding at a remarkably steady rate since 1850, according to Jesse Ausubel of Rockefeller University and Paul Waggoner of the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station.

“Once you have lots of high-rises filled with computers operating all the time, the energy delivered has to be very clean and compact,” said Mr. Ausubel, the director of the Program for the Human Environment at Rockefeller. “The long-term trend is toward natural gas and nuclear power, or conceivably solar power. If the energy system is left to its own devices, most of the carbon will be out of it by 2060 or 2070.”

But what about all the carbon dioxide being spewed out today by Americans commuting to McMansions? Well, it’s true that American suburbanites do emit more greenhouse gases than most other people in the world (although New Yorkers aren’t much different from other affluent urbanites).

But the United States and other Western countries seem to be near the top of a Kuznets curve for carbon emissions and ready to start the happy downward slope. The amount of carbon emitted by the average American has remained fairly flat for the past couple of decades, and per capita carbon emissions have started declining in some countries, like France. Some researchers estimate that the turning point might come when a country’s per capita income reaches $30,000, but it can vary widely, depending on what fuels are available. Meanwhile, more carbon is being taken out of the atmosphere by the expanding forests in America and other affluent countries. Deforestation follows a Kuznets curve, too. In poor countries, forests are cleared to provide fuel and farmland, but as people gain wealth and better agricultural technology, the farm fields start reverting to forestland.

Of course, even if rich countries’ greenhouse impact declines, there will still be an increase in carbon emissions from China, India and other countries ascending the Kuznets curve. While that prospect has environmentalists lobbying for global restrictions on greenhouse gases, some economists fear that a global treaty could ultimately hurt the atmosphere by slowing economic growth, thereby lengthening the time it takes for poor countries to reach the turning point on the curve.

But then, is there much reason to think that countries at different stages of the Kuznets curve could even agree to enforce tough restrictions? The Kyoto treaty didn’t transform Europe’s industries or consumers. While some American environmentalists hope that the combination of the economic crisis and a new president can start an era of energy austerity and green power, Mr. Ausubel says they’re hoping against history.

Over the past century, he says, nothing has drastically altered the long-term trends in the way Americans produce or use energy — not the Great Depression, not the world wars, not the energy crisis of the 1970s or the grand programs to produce alternative energy.

“Energy systems evolve with a particular logic, gradually, and they don’t suddenly morph into something different,” Mr. Ausubel says. That doesn’t make for a rousing speech on Earth Day. But in the long run, a Kuznets curve is more reliable than a revolution.

gdreamer9UID: 2542678

Our feathered friends
Mar 19th 2009
From The Economist print edition

Some say that birds are dinosaurs. The truth may be that dinosaurs are birds


THAT birds are the descendants of dinosaurs is now accepted by almost all evolutionary biologists. The clinching discovery was of animals that were clearly dinosaurs, and clearly could not fly, but which had feathers. That did raise the question, though, of why one twig of the great dinosaur tree had developed such strange outer vestments, even before it developed wings. 提出问题

If a discovery announced in this week’s Nature has been interpreted correctly, that question is about to get even stranger. For Zheng Xiaoting of the Shandong Tianyu Museum of Nature in Pingyi, China, and her colleagues, are suggesting that it was not just the part of the clan that led to birds that was feathered. What they have found makes it likely that many dinosaurs had something rather like feathers, and that those which did not had lost a primitive characteristic of the group in the way that elephants and hippos have lost most of the hair that is characteristic of mammals.

The crucial discovery comes from a famous fossil bed in Liaoning province. Dr Zheng and her colleagues propose to call it Tianyulong confuciusi. The new species belongs to a group of dinosaurs called the Ornithischia. This group, which includes such famous names as Stegosaurus and Triceratops, is one of the two clades into which the dinosaurs are divided. The other is the Saurischia, whose famous members include Diplodocus and Tyrannosaurus. The Saurischia also include all the immediate ancestors of birds. Which is why Dr Zheng was stunned to find on Tianyulong confuciusi what are conservatively described in her paper as “long, singular and unbranched filamentous integumentary structures”. In other words, things than look suspiciously like the central shafts of feathers.

Li Da XingBeautiful plumage
Such “protofeathers” have been found on other dinosaurs, but until now those species have, like those that sport true feathers, all belonged to a part of the Saurischia that includes the birds. Yet the split between Ornithischia and Saurischia goes back to the very beginning of the dinosaurs, 80m years before the first birds and about 100m years before T. confuciusi. So if the feather-like structures of T. confuciusi really have the same origin as feathers, then such structures must have been there from the outset, and be characteristic of dinosaurs as a whole.

Jurassic larkThat does not explain what they were for. A few researchers argue that they were actually internal to the skin, and thus not related to feathers at all. If they really were external, the most likely answer is that they served the same function—insulation—as hair does on a mammal. But they may, like hair and modern feathers, have had a secondary, signalling function.
This discovery raises another question, too. Taxonomically, the very definition of a bird was until recently an animal that has feathers. Now, taxonomists argue that since birds are descended from dinosaurs they should be classified merely as a subgroup of the Dinosauria. But if feathers truly are the diagnostic criterion, then perhaps things should be the other way round, and Stegosaurus, Triceratops, Diplodocus, Tyrannosaurus and their kin should no longer be thought of as terrible lizards, but as overweight, flightless birds.

thatllUID: 2538832

79# gdreamer9
The clinching discovery was of animals that were clearly dinosaurs, and clearly could not fly, but which had feathers.这句话怎么理解

gdreamer9UID: 2542678

79# gdreamer9  
The clinching discovery was of animals that were clearly dinosaurs, and clearly could not fly, but which had feathers.这句话怎么理解
thatll 发表于 2009-4-21 19:13

两个矛盾的发现就是这些动物确实是恐龙，确实不会飞翔，但是确实是有羽毛的。。。OVER

gdreamer9UID: 2542678

A DIAGNOSIS of cancer is often followed by a prescription of surgery. Before chemotherapy, before radiation, the knife is frequently the oncologist’s first line of attack. If done early and well, it has the potential to stop the disease in its tracks. Even if it does not, it is the best way for the doctor to get a feel for what he is dealing with, how extensive it is, and what to do next. But, whereas therapies and diagnostics for cancer have been evolving steadily in response to new biochemical knowledge, surgical techniques have remained surprisingly primitive.

What happens at the moment is that a surgeon roots around inside a patient, removes as much tumour as he can find, and hopes he got it all. He then sends what he has excised to a laboratory, where technicians sample all around the outside of the extracted mass to see if it is encapsulated 原来这个词还有动词的形式啊by healthy tissue. If it is, the whole tumour has probably been removed. If not, the surgeon must go back in, and the time-consuming process starts again.

Roger Tsien and his colleagues at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), are trying to halt this cycle by creating a luminous map for the surgeon to follow. Dr Tsien, who shared the 2008 Nobel prize in chemistry for his work on green fluorescent protein, has found a way to make cancer cells glow. That could help surgeons see precisely what to cut out and what to leave behind.

Getting fluorescent dyes to stick to cells in general is easy. Cells are covered in negative charges, so all you have to do is make the molecules you want to stick to them positively charged. Getting those molecules to stick only to tumour cells, though, is a different kettle of fish. To do so, Dr Tsien took advantage of enzymes called matrix metalloproteinases (MMPs), which cancer cells use to chew their way through connective tissue and other material. Few healthy cells make these enzymes, so they are a reliable marker of tumours.

To make use of the MMPs Dr Tsien attaches his fluorescent dye, along with some positive charges, to one side of a small hairpin-shaped protein molecule. The other side of the hairpin carries a collection of negative charges, so that the whole caboodle is electrically neutral. The secret is the composition of the hairpin’s turn. This is a sequence of amino acids (the building blocks of proteins) that is particularly vulnerable to the cutting action of MMPs. When a dose of the new compound is injected, most of it washes out quickly. The only dye molecules that remain are those whose hairpins have been severed by MMPs, thus separating them from their negatively charged partners and allowing them to stick to the tumour cells whose enzymes liberated them.

And it works—at least in mice. With the help of Quyen Nguyen, a surgeon based at UCSD, Dr Tsien has tested the hairpin dye on mice that had had breast cancer induced in their bodies. Those animals that had been infused with the dye before surgery had a five-fold better survival rate than those which had not. In other words, the glow allowed Dr Nguyen to see the tumours better and remove them more accurately, thereby preventing the disease from spreading.

Dr Tsien and his team believe their targeted dye has huge potential. They have already put it to use in magnetic-resonance imaging by combining it with gadolinium, a metal employed as a contrast agent in this sort of body scanning. Used this way, the dye does more than just provide guidance to the surgeon during the procedure—it highlights tumours both pre- and post-operatively. It can also show whether tumour cells have crept onto nerve fibres, something that is now left to a biopsy or a surgeon’s best guess. And Dr Tsien has even modified the dye to respond to other molecules, such as a blood-clotting factor called thrombin. The result lights up those arterial plaques most at risk of becoming dislodged and causing a heart attack or stroke. A spotlight on disease, as it were.

gdreamer9UID: 2542678

Conscious and unconscious thought

Incognito
Apr 16th 2009
From The Economist print edition

Evidence mounts that brains decide before their owners know about it


EVERYONE has had the experience. You are confronted by a complex problem, with a not-so-obvious solution. You pore over it, engrossed, but still the answer will not come. Fearing you will be stuck for ever, you take a walk. Then suddenly, from nowhere, there it is. Eureka! 提出一个现象

But did it really come from nowhere? A piece of research about to be published in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, by Joydeep Bhattacharya at Goldsmiths’ College in London and Bhavin Sheth at the University of Houston, in Texas, suggests that although people are not consciously aware of it, their brains have to be in a certain state for an insight to take place. Moreover, that state can be detected electrically several seconds in advance of the “aha!” moment itself.  TS

The question of where insights come from has become a hot topic in neuroscience, despite the fact that they are not easy to induce experimentally in a laboratory. Some researchers have used getting the punch line of a riddle as an example of an insightful outcome. Critics complain, however, that this is less an insight than an “outsight”. Other experiments have used word tasks. In these, a person might be given three seemingly unrelated words, such as “skirts”, “black” and “put”, and asked to come up with a fourth that can link to each of the other three. (In this case, “out”.) But those tasks may say more about lexical ability than true insight.

Dr Bhattacharya and Dr Sheth have taken a third approach. They have selected some brain-teasing but practical problems in the hope that these would get closer to mimicking real insight. To qualify, a puzzle had to be simple, not too widely known and without a methodical solution. The researchers then asked 18 young adults to try to solve these problems while their brainwaves were monitored using an electroencephalograph (EEG).

A typical brain-teaser went like this. There are three light switches on the ground-floor wall of a three-storey house. Two of the switches do nothing, but one of them controls a bulb on the second floor. When you begin, the bulb is off. You can only make one visit to the second floor. How do you work out which switch is the one that controls the light? 恩这个题目还真确实有点难度的说呵呵～

That light-bulb moment
This problem, or one equivalent to it, was presented on a computer screen to a volunteer when that volunteer pressed a button. The electrical activity of the volunteer’s brain (his brainwave pattern, in common parlance) was recorded by the EEG from the button’s press. Each volunteer was given 30 seconds to read the puzzle and another 60 to 90 seconds to solve it. If he had not done so in the time allotted, a hint appeared. In the case of the light-switch puzzle, the suggestion was that you turn one switch on for a while, then turn it off.

Some people worked it out; others did not. The significant point, though, was that the EEG predicted who would fall where. Those volunteers who went on to have an insight (in this case that on their one and only visit to the second floor they could use not just the light but the heat produced by a bulb as evidence of an active switch)这个答案很有道理 had had different brainwave activity from those who never got it. In the right frontal cortex, a part of the brain associated with shifting mental states, there was an increase in high-frequency gamma waves (those with 47-48 cycles a second). Moreover, the difference was noticeable up to eight seconds before the volunteer realised he had found the solution. Dr Sheth thinks this may be capturing the “transformational thought” (the light-bulb moment, as it were) in action, before the brain’s “owner” is consciously aware of it.

There is a precedent for such observations of unconscious thought in action. In the 1980s Benjamin Libet of the University of California, San Francisco, showed that simple decisions, such as when to move a finger, are made about three-tenths 这个是十分之三秒的意思吗of a second before the brain’s owner is aware of them, and subsequent work has found that the roots of such decisions can be seen up to ten seconds before they become conscious. But this is the first occasion that such a long lead time has been shown for more complex thought processes.

This finding, combined with Libet’s, poses fascinating questions about how the brain really works. Conscious thought, it seems, does not solve problems. Instead, unconscious processing happens in the background and only delivers the answer to consciousness once it has been arrived at. Food for further thought, indeed.

GenevUID: 2543794

ls MM头像似乎有深意...

gdreamer9UID: 2542678

嘿嘿～三维画好好看看，看中有奖励喔～ ^_^～开玩笑的。。。

whinnyUID: 189834

N久没有回复这个帖子了，想转战到别的阵地，但是战友又太少了。

把别人做的一篇我查出来再做一次。
Autism and extraordinary ability
9 x/ L, y3 e! u+ D! Z4 userious mental illness, esp of children, in which one becomes unable to communicate or form relationships with others 自向症, 孤独症（严重的精神病, 尤见於儿童, 患者无法与他人交往
Genius locus

exact place of sth 所在地; 场所.
" `6 G# ]/ i( r! ]9 r% t. R7 ]Apr 16th 20093 a9 `# [1 n. Z) C: l
From The Economist print edition/ T  C# g! U)

8 P' n: i! V- ~- d4 j5 f5 }There is strong evidence for a link between genius and autism. In the first of three articles about the brain this week, we ask how that link works, and whether “neurotypicals” can benefit from the knowledge
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! q! |( X# P$ a0 r7 j1 h7 A9 JRonald Grant Archive THAT genius is unusual goes without saying. But is it so unusual that it requires the brains of those that possess it to be unusual in others ways, too? A link between artistic genius on the one hand and schizophrenia and manic-depression on the other, is widely debated. However another link, between savant syndrome and autism, is well established. It is, for example, the subject of films such as “Rain Man”, illustrated above. 3 U$ ?6 J5 G, ]* I' b( U$ Z
SCHINZOPHRENIA: mental illness that causes the sufferer to act irrationally, have delusions, withdraw from social relationships, etc 精神分裂症
MANIC-DEPRESSION:
躁郁症
SAVANT: person of great learning 博学之士; 学者; 专家.

' A  M) O5 l# F. C# M! J0 DA study published this week by Patricia Howlin of King’s College, London, reinforces this point. It suggests that as many as 30% of autistic people have some sort of savant-like capability in areas such as calculation or music. Moreover, it is widely acknowledged that some of the symptoms associated with autism, including poor communication skills and an obsession with detail, are also exhibited by many creative types, particularly in the fields of science, engineering, music, drawing and painting. Indeed, there is now a cottage industry in re-interpreting the lives of geniuses in the context of suggestions that they might belong, or have belonged, on the “autistic spectrum”, as the range of syndromes that include autistic symptoms is now dubbed.3 Z. X- r" G; U
SAVANT-LIKE:$ 学者样
DUB: make (a man) a knight by touching him on the shoulder with a sword 以剑触（某人）肩以封之为爵士

So what is the link? And can an understanding of it be used to release flashes of genius in those whose brains are, in the delightfully condescending term used by researchers in the area, “neurotypical”? Those were the questions addressed by papers (one of them Dr Howlin’s) published this week in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. The society, Britain’s premier scientific club and the oldest scientific body in the world, produces such transactions from time to time, to allow investigators in particular fields to chew over the state of the art. The latest edition is the outcome of a conference held jointly with the British Academy (a similar, though younger, organisation for the humanities and social sciences) last September.
4 M/ d' q* R& D9 _4 m! Z. A- Y CONDESCEND: do sth that one regards as undignified or below one's level of importance 屈尊; 俯就
A spectrum of belief:
A standard diagnosis of autism requires three things to be present in an individual. Two of these three, impairments in social interaction and in communication with other people, are the results of autists lacking empathy or, in technical jargon, a “theory of mind”. In other words they cannot, as even fairly young neurotypicals can, put themselves in the position of another being and ask themselves what that other is thinking. The third criterion, however, is that a person has what are known as restrictive and repetitive behaviours and interests, or RRBI, in the jargon.
3 ]7 I+ v) r+ {2 N8 s* Y" o; `IMPAIRMENT: 损耗
EMPATHY: ability to imagine and share another person's feelings, experience, etc 感情移入, 同感（对他人的感情﹑
经历等的想像力和感受力）:
REPETITIVE:重复
Until recently, the feeling among many researchers was that the first two features were crucial to someone becoming a savant. The idea was that mental resources which would have been used for interaction and communication could be redeployed to develop expertise in some arbitrary task. Now, though, that consensus is shifting. Several of the volume’s authors argue that it is the third feature, RRBI, that permits people to become savants. P" [0 w& X4 U" i2 u
SAVANT: person of great learning 博学之士; 学者; 专家.
( t3 N1 n. \$ DFrancesca Happé of King’s College, London, is one of them. As she observes, obsessional interests and repetitive behaviours would allow someone to practice, albeit inadvertently, whichever skill they were obsessed by. Malcolm Gladwell, in a book called “Outliers” which collated
research done on outstanding people, suggested that anyone could become an expert in anything by practising for 10,000 hours. It would not be hard for an autistic individual to clock up that level of practice for the sort of skills, such as mathematical puzzles, that many neurotypicals would rapidly give up on.$
ADVERTENT: внимательный, чуткий; заботливый
COLLATE: examine and compare (two books, manuscripts, etc) in order to find the differences between them 核对, 校对（书﹑
底稿等
CLOCK UP:
# V  C# {) O9 w0 Z& B1 W; S) nMany, but not all. Dr Happé has drawn on a study of almost 13,000 individual twins to show that childhood talent in fields such as music and art is often associated with RRBIs, even in those who are not diagnosed as classically autistic. She speculates that the abilities of savants in areas that neurotypicals tend to find pointless or boring may result from an ability to see differences where a neurotypical would see only similarities. As she puts it, “the child with autism who would happily spend hours spinning coins, or watching drops of water fall from his fingers, might be considered a connoisseur, seeing minute differences between events that others regard as pure repetition.”

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Simon Baron-Cohen, a doyen of the field who works at Cambridge University, draws similar conclusions. He suggests the secret of becoming a savant is “hyper-systematising and hyper-attention to detail”. But he adds sensory hypersensitivity to the list. His team has shown one example of this using what is known as the Freiburg visual acuity and contrast test, which asks people to identify the gap in a letter “c” presented in four different orientations. Those on the autistic spectrum do significantly better at this than do neurotypicals. That might help explain Dr Happé’s observations about coins and raindrops." R( T' \' V# Y" o" X
DOYEN: senior member of a group, profession, etc （团体﹑
职业等的）资深者, 老前辈, 元老
ACUITY:
Insight, too, is given by autists themselves. Temple Grandin is a professor of animal science at Colorado State University. She also writes about her experience of being autistic. As she describes in the volume, one of the differences she perceives between her experience and that of most neurotypicals is that she thinks in images. She says her mind is like an internet search engine that searches for photographs. To form concepts, she sorts these pictures into categories. She does not, however, claim that all autistic people think like this. To the contrary, she describes two other sorts: pattern thinkers who excel at maths and music, and verbal specialists who are good at talking and writing, but lack visual skills. The latter might not qualify as autistic under a traditional diagnosis, but slip into the broader autistic spectrum.)

PERCEIVE: aware of (sb/sth); notice; observe 意识到, 注意到, 观察到


: H# _% \& h( ^$ eThe question of how the autistic brain differs physically from that of neurotypicals was addressed by Manuel Casanova of the University of Louisville, in Kentucky. Dr Casanova has spent many years dissecting both. His conclusion is that the main difference is in the structure of the small columns of nerve cells that are packed together to form the cerebral cortex. The cortical columns of those on the autistic spectrum are narrower than those of neurotypicals, and their cells are organised differently.
DISSECT: examine (a theory, an event, etc) in great detail 剖析（理论﹑
事件等9 P9 o: j1 p' R6 _- N1 d
CEREBRAL CORTEX:大脑皮层
CORTICAL:皮层

6 ~+ K/ f! k, r, I; |The upshot of these differences is that the columns in an autistic brain seem to be more connected than normal with their close neighbours, and less connected with their distant ones. Though it is an interpretative stretch, that pattern of connection might reduce a person’s ability to generalise (since disparate data are less easily integrated) and increase his ability to concentrate (by drawing together similar inputs).
UPSHOT: the ~ (of sth) the final result or outcome 最後结果; 结局
DISPARATE: so different in kind or degree that they cannot be compared 迥然不同的; 无法比较的
2 e- T2 o8 [: s
3 y% N8 X, y  j5 f8 d- qRain and sunshine
5 Y: I) G& F! MGiven such anatomical differences, then, what hope is there for the neurotypical who would like to be a savant? Some, possibly. There are examples of people suddenly developing extraordinary skills in painting and music in adult life as a result of brain damage caused by accidents or strokes. That, perhaps, is too high a price to pay. But Allan Snyder of the University of Sydney has been able to induce what looks like a temporary version of this phenomenon using magnetism.
ANATOMICAL:
解剖(学)的；结构上的
/ l& u3 ~; \: @5 ]$ K4 }ANAN

Dr Snyder argues that savant skills are latent in everyone, but that access to them is inhibited in non-savants by other neurological processes. He is able to remove this inhibition using a technique called repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation. y) h8
LATENT: existing but not yet active, developed or visible 潜在的; 不活跃的; 未发展的; 不明显的: latent abilities 潜在的才能 * a latent infection 潜伏性传染病.

/ J8 Q1 f& W  f4 G) l% y% b& o3 }Applying a magnetic field to part of the brain disrupts the electrical activity of the nerve cells for a few seconds. Applying such a field repeatedly can have effects that last for an hour or so. The technique has been approved for the treatment of depression, and is being tested against several other conditions, including Parkinson’s disease and migraines. Dr Snyder, however, has found that stimulating an area called the left anterior temporal lobe improves people’s ability to draw things like animals and faces from memory. It helps them, too, with other tasks savants do famously well—proofreading, for example, and estimating the number of objects in a large group, such as a pile of match sticks. It also reduces “false” memories (savants tend to remember things literally, rather than constructing a mnemonic
narrative and remembering that).
MIGRAINE: severe recurring type of headache, usu on one side of the head or face, often accompanied by nausea and disturbance of the eyesight 偏头痛.

ANTERIOR：coming before in position or time; nearer the front 前面的; 先前的; 较靠近前方的. Cf 参看 posterior.
LOBE：lower soft part of the outer ear 耳垂rounded flattish part or projection of a body organ, esp the lungs or brain （器官的）叶; （尤指）肺叶, 脑叶
PROOFREAD：校对
MNEMONIC：of or designed to help the memory 记忆的; 帮助记忆的: mnemonic verses, eg for remembering spelling or grammar rules, etc 帮助记忆的歌诀

: L" C9 {, J* D3 FThere are, however, examples of people who seem very neurotypical indeed achieving savant-like skills through sheer diligence. Probably the most famous is that of London taxi drivers, who must master the Knowledge—ie, the location of 25,000 streets, and the quickest ways between them—to qualify for a licence.
SHEER：complete; thorough; utter 完全的; 彻底的; 十足的: sheer nonsense 一派胡言9 |; [# N8 z# _9 T+ S



The expert here is Eleanor Maguire of University College, London, who famously showed a few years ago that the shape of the hippocampus, a part of the brain involved in long-term learning, changes in London cabbies. Dr Maguire and her team have now turned their attention to how cabbies learn the Knowledge.; x: ]$ B! H4 J
HIPPOCAMPUS：海马
CABBY：taxi-driver 计程车司机.


The prodigious geographical knowledge of the average cabbie is, indeed, savant-like. But Dr Maguire recently found that it comes at a cost. Cabbies, on average, are worse than random control subjects and—horror—also worse than bus drivers, at memory tests such as word-pairing. Surprisingly, that is also true of their general spatial memory. Nothing comes for nothing, it seems, and genius has its price.
PRODIGIOUS：very great in size, amount or degree, so as to cause amazement or admiration; enormous （在体积﹑
数量或程度上）大得令人惊叹; 巨大的:
SPATIAL：of, concerning or existing in space 空间的; 有关空间的; 存在於空间的

Savant syndrome, then, is a case where the politically correct euphemism “differently abled” has real meaning. The conclusion that should be drawn, perhaps, is not that neurotypicals should attempt to ape savants, but that savants—even those who are not geniuses—should be welcomed for what they are, and found a more honoured place in society.
ABLED：身体健全的,无残疾的
APE：imitate (sb/sth); mimic 学（某人[某事物]）的样; 模仿

GenevUID: 2543794

ls注意下格式，不然不方便阅读。

whinnyUID: 189834

今天看了篇FP（其实也不是今天看的啦，看了好几天才看完了。）

The Dictator’s Handbook


By Paul Collier




May/June 2009


Why is democracy failing even as elections proliferate? A thought experiment sheds new light on why aging autocrats remain so hard to dislodge.
SHED: ~ sth (on sb/sth) spread or send sth out 散发出（某物）: a fire shedding warmth 向外散热的火 * The lamp shed soft light on the desk. 台灯柔和的光线照射在桌面上.
DISLODGE: move or force sb/sth from a previously fixed position 将某人[某物]逐出或移开; 移去; 取出

The old rulers of the Soviet Union were terrified of facing contested elections. Those of us who studied political systems presumed they must be right: Elections would empower citizens against the arrogance of government. And with the fall of the Iron Curtain, elections indeed swept the world. Yet democracy doesn’t seem to have delivered on its promise. Surprisingly often, the same old rulers are still there, ruling in much the same old way. Something has gone wrong, but what?
PRESUME：suppose (sth) to be true; take (sth) for granted 假定（某事物）是事实; 认定（某事物）; 假设; 推测: I presume that an agreement will eventually be reached. 我想最终是会达成协议的
CONTEST：claim that (sth) is wrong or not proper; dispute 对（某事物）予以驳斥; 争论: contest a statement, point, etc 对某说法﹑
论点等加以驳斥
take part in and) try to win (sth) （参与并）争取赢得（某事物）
To answer this question, I put myself in the shoes of an old autocrat—say, Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak—now having to retain power in a “democracy.” What options do I face? Hard as it is to bear, I have to be honest with myself: My people do not love me. Far from being grateful for the wonders that I have achieved, they may increasingly be aware that under my long rule our country has stagnated while similar countries have transformed themselves. There are even a few cogent voices out there explaining why this situation is my fault. I shake my head in disbelief that it has come to this, seize my gold pen, and start listing my options. I decide to be systematic, in each case evaluating the pros and cons.


--Paul Collier
STAGNATE：be or become stagnant(1) 不流动; 成为死水
COGENT：(of arguments, reasons, etc) convincing; strong （指论据﹑
道理等）令人信服的; 强有力的: He produced cogent reasons
Option 1: Turn over a new leaf and embrace good government


Pros: This is probably what most people want. I might start feeling better about myself, and I might even leave a legacy my children could be proud of.

Cons: I haven’t much idea how to do it. The skills I have developed over the years are quite different—essentially, retaining power through shuffling a huge number of people around a patronage trough. My God, I might have to read those damned donor reports. And even if I worked out what needed to change, the civil service wouldn’t be up to implementing it. After all, I’ve spent years making sure that anyone who is exceptional or even honest is squeezed out; honest people cannot easily be controlled.
PATRONAGE：support and encouragement given by a patron 资助; 赞助; 支持: patronage of the arts 对艺术方面的赞助
DONOR：person who provides blood for transfusion, organs for transplantation, etc
Worse still, reform might be dangerous. My “friends,” the parasitic sycophants with whom I have surrounded myself, might not put up with it: They might decide to replace me in a palace coup. They would probably dress it up to the outside world as “reform”!
SYCOPHANT：) person who tries to gain people's favour by insincerely flattering them and always agreeing with them
PALACE COUP：
But suppose I did it. Suppose I actually delivered good government. Would I get reelected? I start to think about all those rich-country political leaders who over the years have met me, often lecturing me on the need for good governance. I do a rough tally: They seemed to win their own elections only about 45 percent of the time.
TALLY：score; reckoning 计分; 计算: Keep a tally of how much you spend. 把你的花费都记录下来.
label or ticket used for identification （用以核对的）标签, 票据
So, even if I pull it off, I’m still more than likely to lose power. Best to cheat. But how?


Option 2: Lie to the voters


Pros: I control most of the media, so it is relatively easy. What’s more, my citizens have neither much in the way of education nor good reference points by which to tell how bad things really are. So, I can tell them how fortunate they are to have me as president.

Cons: I have been doing this for years, so people heavily discount anything I say. On balance, though lying seems to be worth doing, I simply cannot rely on it to deliver victory.

Option 3: Scapegoat a minority


Pros: This one works! I can blame either unpopular minorities within my country or foreign governments for all my problems. The politics of hatred has a long and, electorally speaking, pretty successful pedigree. In the Ivory Coast it was the Burkinabe immigrants; in Zimbabwe, the whites; in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Tutsi. Failing all else, I can always blame Israel America. I can also promise favoritism for my own group.
PEDIGREE：line of ancestors 世系: proud of his long pedigree 为其源远流长的世系而骄傲. (b) [U] quality of having this 门第; 出身

FAVORITISM：Unfair partiality;favoritism.

偏爱不公正地喜欢；偏袒

Cons: Some of my best friends are ethnic minorities. In fact, they have been funding me for years in return for favors. I prefer doing business with ethnic minorities because, however rich they become, they cannot challenge me politically. It is the core ethnic groups I need to keep out of business. Scare the minorities too badly, and they will move their money out. So, though scapegoating works, beyond a certain point it gets rather costly.

Option 4: Buy the votes to win

Pros: Bribing voters plays to one of my key advantages over the opposition—I have more money.

Cons: Can I trust people to honor the deal? If I pay them, will they actually vote for me? After all, there are some pretty unscrupulous people out there.
UNSCRUPULOUS：without moral principles 无道德原则的; 不讲道德的
On balance, I am not sure. I search the Web and stumble on a study by someone named Pedro Vicente at Oxford University. Vicente conducted a randomized, controlled experiment on electoral bribery in São Tomé and Príncipe. In some districts, bribery was restrained by external scrutiny, whereas in others it was not. Systematically, where bribery was unrestrained, the candidate offering bribes got more votes. Bribery works!
STUMBLE：The child stumbled through a piece by Chopin. 那孩子演奏萧邦的曲子很不流畅

In fact, bribery comes in two modes: retail and wholesale. Retail bribery is expensive and difficult but might still be worthwhile. Its advantage is that I can target pockets of voters critical for success.

Why doesn’t bribery backfire? If the British Labour Party were caught offering money to individual voters in exchange for their support, the electoral damage would be massive. But in many societies elections are viewed differently. Politicians deliver nothing during their periods in office, so people expect that during the one brief moment when they exert some power politicians should dispense patronage. Hard cash in the pocket is better than promises. But even if politicians can offer bribes without provoking criticism, how can they enforce the deal? After all, the vote is secret. What is to stop voters from accepting money and then voting for the opposition?
BACKFIRE：产生事与愿违的后果
DISPENSE：give sth out; distribute sth 施予某物; 分配某物

In Kenya, the opposition recognized that telling people not to take bribes would be a vote-loser and so did not even attempt it. Instead, it proposed that people should take bribes from the government but vote for the opposition.

Why is this not a very effective counter? I have two points of discipline. One, paradoxically, is morality: Often, ordinary decent people feel bad if they take someone’s money but then renege. The other is fear of detection: How secret is the ballot? In Zimbabwe, President Robert Mugabe’s street boys spread the word that the government would know how votes were cast, and in the prevailing conditions of misgovernance, this warning could not be treated as an idle threat.
DETECTION：detecting; discovering 发现; 察觉; 侦查; 探测
RENEGE：fail to keep a promise, one's word, etc 违背诺言等; 食言; 背信
But how much does it cost to bribe the typical voter? How many votes do I need to buy, and how much can I afford? Is there a cheaper way of buying votes?

Indeed there is: wholesale bribery. Wholesale bribery works by paying for votes delivered in blocs rather than individually. Bloc voting is very common in impoverished, traditional, rural societies, where the local big shot’s advice is not seriously questioned. When votes are counted, it is common for many villages to have voted 100 percent for one candidate. If the big shot determines how individuals vote, it is obviously cheaper to buy his support directly.
SHOT：
Overall, bribery is my kind of strategy. The only problem is whether I have enough money to win with it.

Option 5: Intimidate the electorate
ELECTORATE：全体选民
INTIMIDATE：frighten sb (in order to make him do sth) 恐吓, 威胁
Pros: Most politicians try to ingratiate themselves with voters, but a radically different technique is to frighten them. Most people are not particularly brave. When confronted by thugs threatening personal violence, they back down rather than stand up for themselves.
INGRATIATE：(attempt to) gain the favour of sb by flattering him, doing things that will please him, etc （竭力）取悦某人
THUG：violent criminal or hooligan 暴徒; 流氓; 恶棍.
One big advantage of intimidation is that even if I cannot observe how people vote, I can observe whether they vote. Given that I am playing identity politics, I know perfectly well who intends to vote for my opponent. So, I can threaten them that if they vote they will suffer.

Cons: In politics, once violence starts, it’s hard to stop. The other side might turn nasty. After all, they have the advantage of numbers. If they didn’t, I would not have to worry about losing the election. I don’t want to risk losing a contest in violence. A few images float into view: the mass power of street protests sweeping out the shah of Iran, then Haiti’s “Baby Doc,” then Romania’s Nicolae Ceausescu, and finally Indonesia’s Suharto. It’s come to something when you can’t even rely on your own soldiers to shoot.
NASTY：unpleasant; disgusting
SHAH：伊朗国王

Option 6: Restrict the field to exclude the strongest candidates


Pros: This is particularly appealing because not only do I increase my chances of winning, but I hit directly at the people I most hate: my opponents. I have to find some reason for excluding them, but that is not particularly difficult. I can accuse them of corruption—after all, it is quite likely to be true. A delicious added benefit is that because donors are always urging me to be tougher on corruption, they can scarcely object. If corruption is too sensitive an issue to open, I can always try citizenship. It should be easy to trump up some ancestry that bars my enemies from running.
ANCESTRY：祖先

Cons: Unless I go whole hog, like Sani Abacha of Nigeria, and ensure I’m the only candidate on the ballot, voters will inevitably find some alternative to my own good self, however awful. They might even be sufficiently foolish to opt for it.

Worried, I wonder whether there is any strategy I have overlooked. And then I heave a long, deep sigh of relief.

Option 7: Last but not least, miscount the votes


Pros: Finally, I have found a strategy that sounds reliable. With this one, I literally cannot lose. The tally might be: incumbent, 1; opponent, 10,000,000. But the headline will read: “Incumbent Wins Narrowly.” It also has advantages in reinforcing some of the other strategies. Once people get the sense that I am going to win anyway and that their true votes will not be counted, they have even less incentive to forgo bribes and take the risk of joining the opposition. Better still, I can also keep this strategy in reserve until I see that I am losing.
FORGO：give up or do without (esp sth pleasant) 放弃或没有（尤指美好的事物）也行
INCUMBENT：necessary as part of sb's duty 有责任; 有义务; 必须履行
TALLY：score; reckoning 计分; 计算

Cons: The international community won’t like it. I’ll just have to remember not to go overboard: not 99 percent. It should not look like a Soviet election.
OVERBOARD：over the side of a ship or boat into the water 越过船舷进入水中

gdreamer9UID: 2542678

88# whinny
LS 的是在是太强了～如此仔细的分析！佩服！

gdreamer9UID: 2542678

假期2天读了一些经济师的文章，觉得蛮有意思的，现在把一篇我看到过的最大GRE单词，而且文中有几句和几段根本琢磨不透意思的文章发给大家共享一下呵呵～ 可能是我的词汇量下降，阅读能力也差了。。看这篇真费劲~哎。。虚度了一个月的结果！

First night at the Globe

THE eight-year-old English boy wrote home from his boarding school. He‟d heard a brilliant piece of music by a man called, well, he wasn‟t sure how to spell it, but something like m-o-z-a-r-t. Could he—or even a little Austrian, or Russian, or Indonesian—have written that he‟d seen a play by someone called s-h-a-k-e-s-p-e-a-r-e?

It‟s impossible now to unknow Shakespeare. The words are quotations, the plays no longer plays but interpretations of plays. The playwright himself has become a sort of one-man band, with a cacophony of instruments strapped on all over him: academia on his back, a drum thumping with conferences and careers; the theatre on his shoulders, bristling with logos and sponsorship and more careers; business bursting from his pockets, spilling heritage enterprises, mugs and T-shirts, the whole monstrous spectacle shimmering with 400 years of reputation.

Shakespeare was no sooner dead than his fellow playwright Ben Jonson hailed him as “not of an age, but for all time”. In the 18th century he became the National Poet; in the 19th, a secular saint; in the 20th, political radicals and liberal humanists alike have claimed him for themselves. Continental Europe and Russia joined in, from the late 18th century onwards. True, Voltaire had called Shakespeare a barbarian for neglecting the rules of neo-classical dramaturgy upheld by Corneille and Racine (whose plays, besides, were performed across Europe, as Shakespeare‟s, then, were not). But it was just his roughness, as it was deemed, that excited the Romantics‟ imagination, seeming to capture the very spirit of rebellion.

Yet the man (given that he wasn‟t really the Earl of Oxford, or Francis Bacon, or, as an English wit once conclusively proved, Queen Victoria) was a man of the theatre, and of his time and place. How did his plays and the theatre seem there and then? Perhaps because of the centuries‟ accretions round his name, people have long desired to go back to the beginning and look.

In the quest for that past, the Globe theatre, on the bank of London‟s Thames, casts a potent spell.这句没有看明白是什么意思 Perhaps within that magic circle, that wooden O, Shakespeare‟s ghost can be conjured up? One scholar reckons that over the past 200 years there have been at least 20 reconstructions of open-air Elizabethan theatres. Certainly the most recent, the new Globe, sited almost where the old one was, brings a catch at the heart不知道这个句子是什么意思. We know the structure is only a well-informed guess, but it has the feeling of authenticity.写SHAKRSPEAR的文章语言也很深奥啊～

And the audience? We can imagine them, paying their pennies to stand or sit in different parts of the house; hissing or clapping, heckling or laughing, eating and smoking.这几个词把观众的翻译都说全了实在是太有意思了 We can imagine the actors too, standing on that “long, rude tongue” 这个俚语有点意思of a stage, as someone once called it, thrust out into the middle of the audience, terrifyingly
but exhilaratingly exposed. At the new Globe, we can witness it. Yet we cannot be with Shakespeare‟s audience or actors. We bring our 20th-century minds, watching ourselves having an Elizabethan experience.

A surer way, paradoxically, may be to recognise the very distance between ourselves and him. In an intriguing new book, “Shakespeare‟s Mystery Play; the Opening of the Globe Theatre 1599”, Steve Sohmer follows a trail that takes him, he believes, to the very opening play and day of the newly built theatre: “Julius Caesar”, on June 12th 1599. He does it by an arcane route: the 16th-century controversy over the Julian and the Gregorian calendars, astronomy, astrology, Biblical scholarship and classical allusion.

That June 12th, it seems, was a loaded date: June 12th it was, according to the faulty Julian calendar then still used in England, but the summer solstice, according to the sun. Thereby hangs an elaborate tale, in a world where a date was not just a date, but a rendezvous with the planets; where the planets ordered the pattern of the Christian year; where that year, with its succession of holy days and scriptural texts, was a form of divine revelation; and where Christian revelation was made manifest anywhere in history—for example, in the pre-Christian history of “Julius Caesar”.这段什么意思啊～

There are times when Shakespeare emerges from all this more ingenious and recondite than one can quite believe. Yet Mr Sohmer persuasively evokes an intellectual atmosphere where history is criss-crossed with anachronism, antiquity and Christianity seeming almost to occupy the same time, like the togas and doublets side by side in a contemporary illustration of “Titus Andronicus”, or the mixture of thatch and trompe l’oeil marbling in the Globe itself. The many references in “Julius Caesar” to dates and hours and calendars begin to resonate, as it were, to the church bells of Southwark clanging through those afternoon performances 400 years ago. And even if the Globe did not open on June 12th, nor with “Julius Caesar”, the first solid information we have of a performance there brings us pretty close. Thomas Platter, a Swiss visitor to London in 1599, noted that on September 21st after lunch, about two o‟clock, I and my party crossed the water and there in the house with the thatched roof witnessed an excellent performance of the tragedy of the first Emperor Julius Caesar.