★☆★Economist系列精读★☆★

GenevUID: 2543794

27# dafeilei

这里的文章都是挑选过并且标画重点难点的。
去直接看也可以：www.economist.com

gdreamer9UID: 2542678

Planes, trains and automobilesJun 19th 2009
From Economist.com
Slowly overcoming the technical barriers to computerised cars will help win psychological acceptance
AN OLD joke among pilots asks: what do you need to fly a modern aeroplane? The answer is a computer, a pilot and a dog. The computer’s job is to fly the plane. The pilot’s job is to feed the dog. The dog’s job is to bite the pilot if he tries to touch anything. ^_^

It may be an exaggeration, but not by much: most long-haul flights are handled by autopilots from just after take-off until right before landing. And if the airport has the necessary technology, even the landing can be handed to the computer.
Shutterstock
Computerised control of transport is not new: the first autopilot, which allows a plane to maintain a steady course without pilot intervention, was developed in 1912.

Trains are going the same way: driverless metro systems exist in several cities. (The Docklands Light Railway in London is a particularly striking example, since passengers can see the entire inside of the carriages, which makes the absence of a driver obvious.)

But considering the number of people who fly or drive them, planes and trains are transport backwaters. Engineers have long dreamed of fully automating the motor car. General Motors’ famous Futurama exhibit at the 1939 World’s Fair promised fully automatic cars capable of 100mph (160kph), and they have been a staple of futurist predictions ever since.

Two problems have been behind their stubborn no-show: one technical, the other psychological. Computer-driven cars have proved technically more difficult than aeroplanes or trains because of the terrain on which they travel. Aeroplanes spend much of the time in relatively empty skies, and the “stacks” they join while waiting to land at airports are tightly controlled by human decision-makers on the ground.
Flying a plane is simple enough that many modern autopilots use Intel’s veteran 80386 processor—at 24 years old, an antediluvian relic in computing terms, with less horsepower than the chip found in a modern mobile phone.

Trains, meanwhile, are conceptually simple: they can only move forwards or backwards, and most of the time drivers need only watch for red signals and keep the train moving at the right speed.

Cars are more complicated because they must navigate a road system that is much more extensive and much less standardised than a rail network. Roads are anarchic places compared with railways, which tend to be fenced off. That helps to stop people or animals getting on to the tracks.

An automatic car would have to deal with all sorts of unexpected hazards, from accidents in other cars, to steering clear of emergency-service vehicles, to stopping when a football rolls out into the road—with a child, still hidden from view, in hot pursuit.

Yet engineers are still working on the problem because the advantages are so enticing. Once cars can reliably sense hazards, they will react far faster than people. Communication between cars would allow traffic speeds to be optimised, and avoid the wasteful overtaking and slowing down that people are so fond of (and which helps, paradoxically, to cause traffic jams).

It could also revolutionise car design. With little need for human input, a car’s traditional layout could be abandoned in favour of sofas, televisions, tables and even beds. That vision is slowly moving towards reality. An

gdreamer9UID: 2542678

Why Music Moves Us

New research explains music's power over human emotions and its benefits to our mental and physical well-beingBy Karen Schrock   


Getty Images

   



Key Concepts

• Some scientists conclude that music’s influence over us may be a chance event, arising from its ability to hijack brain systems built for other purposes such as language, emotion and movement.
• Music seems to offer a novel method of communication rooted in emotions rather than in meaning. Research shows that what we feel when we hear a piece of music is remarkably similar to what everybody else in the room is experiencing.
• Songs facilitate emotional bonding and even physical interactions such as marching or dancing together and thus may help cement ties that underlie the formation of human societies. In addition, tunes may work to our benefit on an individual level, manipulating mood and even human physiology more effectively than words can.

As a recreational vocalist, I have spent some of the most moving moments of my life engaged in song. As a college student, my eyes would often well up with tears (满含泪水？)during my twice-a-week choir rehearsals. I would feel relaxed and at peace yet excited and joyful, and I occasionally experienced a thrill so powerful that it sent shivers down my spine. I also felt connected with fellow musicians in a way I did not with friends who did not sing with me.

I have often wondered what it is about music that elicits such emotions. Philosophers and biologists have asked the question for centuries, noting that humans are universally drawn to music. It consoles us when we are sad, pumps us up in happier times and bonds us to others, even though listening to an iPod or singing “Happy Birthday” does not seem necessary for survival or reproduction.

Some scientists conclude that music’s influence may be a chance event, arising from its ability to hijack brain systems built for other purposes such as language, emotion and movement. As Harvard University psychologist Steven Pinker famously put it in his 1997 book How the Mind Works (W. W. Norton), music is “auditory cheesecake,” a confection crafted to tickle the areas of the mind that evolved for more important functions. But as a result of that serendipity, music seems to offer a novel system of communication rooted in emotions rather than in meaning. Recent data show, for example, that music reliably conveys certain sentiments: what we feel when we hear a piece of music is remarkably similar to what everybody else in the room is experiencing.

Emerging evidence also indicates that music brings out predictable responses across cultures and among people of widely varying musical or cognitive abilities. Even newborn infants and people who cannot discern pitch enjoy music’s emotional effect. “Certainly music seems to be the most direct form of emotional communication,” opines renowned neurologist Oliver Sacks of Columbia University, author of the recent book Musicophilia (Knopf, 2007). “It really seems to be as important a part of human life and communication as language and gesture.”

Such dialogue provides a way for people to connect emotionally and thus may reinforce the ties that underlie the formation of human societies, which have clear survival advantages. Musical rhythms may have even facilitated certain physical interactions such as marching or dancing together, further cementing our social ties. In addition, tunes may work to our benefit on an individual level, manipulating mood and even human physiology more effectively than words can—to excite, energize, calm or promote physical fitness. All these benefits are causing people to reconsider whether music is truly as frivolous as it seems.

Mosaic in the Mind
Throughout recorded history, people have attempted to explain music’s sway over the human spirit. Music has been labeled everything from a gift of the heavens to a tool of the Devil, from an extension of mathematics to a side effect of language processing. Charles Darwin was famously stumped by music’s ubiquitous presence around the world: man’s predilection for music, he wrote in 1871 in The Descent of Man, “must be ranked among the most mysterious with which he is endowed.”

Since the 1950s many psychologists have attempted to explain music’s power by comparing music appreciation with speech. After all, an understanding of both music and speech requires, at its most primitive level, the ability to detect sounds. The brain’s auditory cortex, an area dedicated to hearing, is now known to process basic musical elements such as pitch (a note’s frequency) and volume; the neighboring secondary auditory areas digest more complex musical patterns such as harmony and rhythm. [For more on how the brain processes music, see “Music in Your Head,” by Eckart O. Altenmüller; Scientific American Mind,

In addition, language and music both contain a grammar that organizes smaller components such as words and musical chords, phrases made up of melody or prosody (the melodic line of speech), and tension and resolution. ？？什么意思Indeed, music has been found to excite brain regions involved in understanding and producing language, including Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area, both located in the left hemisphere on the surface of the brain. (The majority of people process language mainly in the brain’s left hemisphere but encode most aspects of music in the analogous regions on the right.) Thus, musical syntax—for instance, the order of chords in a phrase—could have arisen from the mechanisms that evolved to organize and understand grammar.

But tunes also recruit other brain systems, principally perhaps those governing emotions such as fear, joy and sorrow. For example, damage to the amygdala, the brain’s fear hub, impairs a person’s ability to feel scared and, in some studies, sad in response to song. Many modern researchers thus conjecture that music evolved by piggybacking on a unique constellation of brain regions dedicated to language, feelings and other functions. “I think there’s a very good chance that music is simply a side effect of things that evolved for other reasons,” says auditory scientist Josh McDermott, now at New York University.
TO BE CONTINUE

IthakaUID: 2511650

Introduction: Money and Politics

By far themost secret and least accountable operation of the federal governmentis not, as one might expect, the CIA, DIA, or some other super-secretintelligence agency. 欲擒故纵的开头。The CIA and other intelligence operations areunder control of the Congress. They are accountable: a Congressionalcommittee supervises these operations, controls their budgets, and isinformed of their covert activities. 排比－气势 It is true that the committeehearings and activities are closed to the public; but at least thepeople's representatives in Congress insure some accountability forthese secret agencies. 前面语气的继续。It islittle known, however, that there is a federal agency that tops theothers in secrecy by a country mile. 转折；对比修饰 The Federal Reserve System isaccountable to no one; it has no budget; it is subject to no audit; andno Congressional committee knows of, or can truly supervise, itsoperations.千呼万唤始出来 The Federal Reserve, virtually in total control of thenation's vital monetary system, is accountable to nobody—and thisstrange situation, if acknowledged at all, is invariably trumpeted as avirtue.

Thus, whenthe first Democratic president in over a decade was inaugurated in1993, the maverick and venerable Democratic Chairman of the HouseBanking Committee, Texan Henry B. Gonzalez, optimistically introducedsome of his favorite projects for opening up the Fed to publicscrutiny. His proposals seemed mild; he did not call for fullfledgedCongressional control of the Fed's budget. The Gonzalez bill requiredfull independent audits of the Fed's operations; videotaping themeetings of the Fed's policymaking committee; and releasing detailedminutes of the policy meetings within a week, rather than the Fed beingallowed, as it is now, to issue vague summaries of its decisions sixweeks later. In addition, the presidents of the twelve regional FederalReserve Banks would be chosen by the president of the United Statesrather than, as they are now, by the commercial banks of the respectiveregions.

觉得好的英语文章，都在行文中不断给出新的出乎意料的信息，吸引你读下去；而这一点，除了逻辑、谋篇之外，还来自语气。这个似乎值得学习。

IthakaUID: 2511650

忘了说，文章出处是这里
http://www.yeeyan.com/articles/view/82893/44127/dz

gdreamer9UID: 2542678

Why Music Moves Us  section 2

Universal Language
Music’s simultaneous activation of diverse brain circuits seems to produce some remarkable effects. Instead of facilitating a largely semantic dialogue, as language does, melody seems to mediate an emotional one. When a composer writes a lamentation or a toddler exuberantly bangs out a rhythm on a pot, that person is not only revealing his or her own emotional state but also causing listeners to share those feelings. Several pieces of research indicate that music reliably conveys the intended emotion in all people who hear it. In the late 1990s neuroscientist Isabelle Peretz and her colleagues at the University of Montreal found that Western listeners universally agree on whether a song using Western tonal elements is happy, sad, scary or peaceful.

Music’s emotional content may even be culturally transparent. This past April neuroscientist Tom Fritz of the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany, and his colleagues exposed members of the Mafa ethnic group in Cameroon who had never heard Western music to excerpts of classical piano music. The researchers found that the adults who listened to the excerpts consistently identified them as happy, sad or scary just as Western listeners would. Thus, the ability of a song to elicit a particular emotion does not necessarily depend on cultural background.

The musical tongue may also transcend more fundamental communication barriers. In studies conducted over the past decade, cognitive psychologist Pam Heaton of Goldsmiths, University of London, and her research team played music for both autistic and nonautistic children, comparing those with similar language skills, and asked the kids to match the music to emotions. In the initial studies, the kids simply chose between happy and sad. In later studies, Heaton and her colleagues introduced a range of complex emotions, such as triumph, contentment and anger, and found that the kids’ ability to recognize these feelings in music did not depend on their diagnosis. Autistic and typical children with similar verbal skills performed equally well, indicating that music can reliably convey feelings even in people whose ability to pick up emotion-laden不知道是什么意思 social cues, such as facial expressions or tone of voice, is severely compromised.

Recently, in a clever experiment, acoustics scientist Roberto Bresin and his co-workers at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm garnered quantitative support for the idea that music is a universal language. Instead of asking volunteers to make subjective judgments about a piece of music, scientists asked them to manipulate the song—in particular, its tempo, volume and phrasing—to maximize a given emotion. For a happy song, for instance, a participant was supposed to manipulate these variables by adjusting sliders so that the song sounded as cheerful as possible; then as sad as possible; then scary, peaceful and neutral.

The researchers found that the participants—expert musicians and, in another study, seven-year-old children—all landed on the same tempo for each song to bring out its intended emotion, be it happiness, sadness, fear or tranquility. These findings, which Bresin reported at the 2008 Neuromusic III conference in Montreal, bolster the idea that music contains information that elicits a specific emotional response in the brain regardless of personality, taste or training. As such, music may constitute a unique form of communication.

Choral Bonding
Music’s ability to convey feelings may underlie one of its most important benefits. In most cultures, music is almost always a communal event: everyone gets together to sing, dance, and play instruments. Even in Western societies, which uniquely differentiate musical performers from listeners, people enjoy music together in a wide variety of settings: dancing at a wedding or a nightclub, singing hymns in church, crooning with their kids, Christmas caroling and singing “Happy Birthday” at a party. The popularity of such rituals suggests that music confers social cohesiveness, perhaps by creating empathetic connections among members of a group.

But empathy may not be the only means by which music facilitates unity. Studies show that when people listen to music, the motor regions of the brain are also active—probably for the purpose of processing rhythm. These include premotor areas, which prepare a person for action, and the cerebellum, which coordinates physical movement. Some researchers have a hunch that part of music’s power stems from its tendency to echo and synchronize our activities. “I can see how rhythm and physical action would have mutual resonance in the nervous system,” speculates neuropsychologist Robert Zatorre of McGill University. “All sound is produced by movement. When you hear a sound, it’s because something has moved.”

Then it is a small step from walking, breathing, and hearing a heartbeat—natural rhythmic sounds that are not intrinsically musical—to purposely keeping time or matching another’s gait. “Part of the reason music works is that when you hear a pattern, you can join in. You know how to organize your muscles to produce the sound you are hearing,” Zatorre explains. In this way, the rhythm of a song could also serve as social glue by promoting a kind of physical bonding.

The idea that music may promote a type of nonverbal togetherness gains additional support from a 2008 study by neuroscientists Nikolaus Steinbeis of the Max Plank Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences and Stefan Koelsch of the University of Sussex in England. Steinbeis and Koelsch used functional magnetic resonance imaging to pinpoint a brain area that responded to chords but not to words, in a task in which volunteers listened to both. The responsive region turned out to be the superior temporal sulcus, a part of the brain’s surface near the ears that responds to nonverbal social cues such as nonspeech vocal utterances, eye movements and body movements. The activation of this region hints that music may indeed be helping to forge social ties.

Whatever its origin, such cohesiveness is extremely valuable to a communal animal such as ourselves; traits that enhance such unity tend to persist. “Music is usually a social activity,” Koelsch explains. “While people make music, they communicate and cooperate with one another. In a way, they practice social activity and social functions. This social behavior is highly important for the human species.”

Musical Medicine
Music also bestows advantages on us as individuals. Underlying our conscious impressions of a tune are physiological effects that can improve our mental and physical well-being. Studies show that upbeat, tense or exciting music can physically excite the listener, triggering the body’s fight-or-flight response: heart and breathing rates increase, a person may break out in a sweat, and adrenaline enters the bloodstream. This “pumping up” effect explains why so many people enjoy listening to rock or hip-hop while they work out—the music primes the physiological systems needed for high-energy movement. The psychological effect is important, too; music is a welcome distraction, making exercising more fun. Energizing melodies tend to boost mood in general, waking us up if we are feeling tired and creating a sense of excitement in any situation.
ＴＯ　ＢＥ　ＣＯＮＴＩＮＵＥ

gdreamer9UID: 2542678

Popularity is In Your Genes

The size and structure of a person's social network have roots in DNA

We take it for granted that certain aspects of our social behavior—whether we chat easily with strangers at a party, for instance, or prefer to be a wallflower—are influenced by genetics. But now researchers at the University of California, San Diego, and Harvard University have shown that genes have a much broader sway, affecting the kinds of social networks people form and the positions they occupy in them.

James Fowler, a political scientist at U.C.S.D., and his colleagues studied the social networks of 1,110 adolescent fraternal and identical twins. They found that three aspects of the twins’ social networks appeared to be shaped by genetics. 长句！How many times each teen was named by others as a friend and how likely each youth’s friends were to know one another were both approximately 50 percent related to genetic factors. Whether a teen was located at the center of a network or toward the edge was about 30 percent genetic.

“We have innate characteristics that give us a tendency to gravitate toward one part of a network,” Fowler explains. “We vary in the tendency with which we’ll attract people as friends, and we vary in our tendency to introduce our friends to one another.” The genetic foundation uncovered in the study, he posits, is probably a broad combination of genes that are mostly linked to personality traits such as humor, generosity or extroversion.

Fowler and his co-authors have previously shown that health-related traits and behaviors, including obesity and smoking, seem to spread through social networks—people whose close friends gain weight, for example, are likely to bulk up themselves. Now that the researchers have shown that social networks have a genetic component, they are moving on to the next question: Is it possible that certain genes associated with obesity are not acting directly on the body but are influencing the structure of someone’s social network in a way that makes that person more likely to “catch” obesity? 文章不长怎么句子这么长啊！“Social networks might be a conduit through which genes act,” Fowler says. “It’s a pretty big and speculative hypothesis, but this is the first step.”

gdreamer9UID: 2542678

举手提问一个：
emotion-laden是什么意思？怎么都查不到啊～

GenevUID: 2543794

33# gdreamer9
well up with tears
well up
v.
涌出, 涌现

tension and resolution
这里都是指构成语言或音乐的grammar

tension:
Uneasy suspense:
使人不安的悬念：
a comic scene that relieved the tension of the drama.
喜剧情节缓解了戏剧的不安性

resolution
Music
【音乐】
The progression of a dissonant tone or chord to a consonant tone or chord.
解决：不谐和的音调或和弦向和谐的音调或和弦的过渡
The tone or chord to which such a progression is made.
解决的和谐音：进行这样转化的音调或和弦
The substitution of one metrical unit for another, especially the substitution of two short syllables for one long syllable in quantitative verse.
长音节的拆分或替换：一个韵律元素替代另一个，尤指在数量韵文中用两个短音节替代一个长音节

emotion-laden不知道是什么意思
充满感情的
laden
[5leidn]
adj.
装满的, 负载的, 苦恼的
vbl.
lade的过去分词

sliders
就是用来manipulate the song那种旋钮

the music primes the physiological systems
primed， prim.ing， primes
v.tr.（及物动词）
To make ready; prepare:
使准备好；准备：
guard dogs primed for attack.
看门狗准备攻击
To prepare (a gun or mine) for firing by inserting a charge of gunpowder or a primer.
装填火药：为（枪或地雷）装火药或导火索使其准备射击
To prepare for operation, as by pouring water into a pump or gasoline into a carburetor.
准备启动：给泵加水或给汽化器内加汽油，从而使发动或进入工作状态
To prepare (a surface) for painting by covering with size, primer, or an undercoat.
在…上涂底漆：在（某一表面）涂上底漆、底色或胶料以便油漆
To inform or instruct beforehand; coach.
事前指导：提前通知或指导；训练
v.intr.（不及物动词）
To become prepared for future action or operation.
准备：为将来的行为或运行而准备好

tonypudiUID: 2460849

额 不得不发现 读不下去。。

gjwUID: 2512308

''Popularity is In Your Genes"
学习笔记～
wallflower: a person who from shyness or unpopularity remains on the sidelines of a social activity

fraternal or identical twins: 同卵，异卵双胞胎

gravitate: to be drawn or attracted especially by natural inclination

bulk up:  [Vt]to caust to bulk up
              [Vi]to gain weight especially by becoming more muscular

GenevUID: 2543794

41# gjw

http://www.economist.com/businessfinance/displayStory.cfm?story_id=14025254&source=features_box2

Rio Tinto and China

Behind Chinese walls

Jul 13th 2009 | SHANGHAI
From Economist.com

The detention of Rio Tinto employees in China has worrying implications

THE detention of four executives of Rio Tinto, an Anglo-Australian mining giant, has transformed an industrial spat to a big test of how China intends to pursue its economic objectives. It has also sent a shudder through Chinese employees of Western companies in any area that is deemed important to the country’s welfare.

News only began to emerge on Tuesday July 7th though the government picked up Rio’s employees two days beforehand. After nearly a week details still remain sketchy. Despite the government’s being barraged by inquiries, there has yet to be any official comment. The scant information that has emerged has appeared in local publications believed to have access to government sources, and to announcements by Rio Tinto and the Australian government. The latter pair say they are mystified by what has unfolded. A worker at a large steel company, Shougang Group, has also been detained. Many others may have been questioned.

The detentions come during acrimonious negotiations between the Chinese steel companies and Rio over benchmark iron ore prices, which are set annually. Last year’s contract expired on April 1st, and a supposed final deadline for settling prices passed on June 30th . Last year’s negotiations took place when ore prices were soaring and the final, hard-fought agreement led an 85% price increase. This year, the China Iron and Steel Association was outspoken in its desire to see prices fall sharply, which throughout the spring seemed likely as demand wavered and spot prices sank. But the hard-line approach now seems to have backfired.

In late May, Japanese and South Korean steelmakers agreed price cuts with the three mining companies that dominate the trade in iron ore—Rio, BHP Billiton and Vale. Chinese negotiators continued to push for more but Rio remained firm, as have the other producers. Typically, mining companies like to work under annual contracts, since it enables them to assemble the massive supply chain needed to move vast amounts of ore from remote locations around the world.

This year, the failure to reach agreement has not been without benefits for the miners. Spot prices, which guide the annual benchmark, have risen steadily. And Chinese steel mills have been forced to make purchases on the spot market. Here prices are currently not only significantly above what they had hoped to pay, but approximately 7% more than what the Japanese and South Korean mills have agreed to under their annual contracts. This has put the Chinese producers at a disadvantage at a time when they felt their heft should give them a preferred rate in the annual negotiations.

That, say many in the industry, has resulted in the disastrous Chinese negotiating strategy—playing tough while prices were rising. There is widespread speculation that this has been enough to prompt embarrassed officials to attack Rio by alleging that Rio’s employees engaged in the theft of “state secrets”, presumably meaning the production targets of state-run Chinese steel mills. In a further twist, as part of the investigation into Rio, Chinese authorities are said to have seized information which may provide insight into the mining firm’s production costs and capacity.

Whether any of this is useful to China is questionable, but without a doubt the recent events could carry a high cost. The mysterious nature of the arrests has raised widespread concerns within foreign companies attempting to operate in China. If state espionage charges are used in a case stemming from a commercial contract negotiation, the worst fears of foreign companies and countries about the Chinese companies will be justified. In June, the Australian government rejected an offer by Chinalco a state-controlled aluminium company, to raise its stake in Rio to 18% on the grounds that its state ownership raised concerns about its ability to operate under normal business principles, rather than an as agent of the Chinese government. The Chinese government was irate, but the detention of the Rio employees would seem to justify some of Australia’s concerns.

gdreamer9UID: 2542678

http://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?story_id=14025366
Green.view
Lines in the sandJul 13th 2009
From Economist.com
Climate change could ignite wars in volatile regions

THE Matterhorn, an iconic emblem of the Alps, has two peaks: one on its Swiss side and one on its Italian side. Between them, the boundary separating the two countries traces the mountain ridge until it reaches the glacier at its base. According to a convention agreed long ago between Switzerland and Italy, the ridge of the glacier marks the border between the two countries. But the glacier is now receding, so a draft agreement has been proposed to create a new border that coincides with the ridge of the underlying rock.
用一个例子做为开头，很science based and convincing
The proposed change to this particular international border is unlikely to result in war. 这句话开始DEVELOP下文的观点了。As the world warms up, however, more and more countries will need to renegotiate their boundaries. 观点！Your correspondent 这个词还是没有明白是什么意思is concerned that a peaceful outcome is by no means assured. 这段即表明了观点，有很自然的成为了承上启下的过渡段。
AFP/Times of IndiaAn Indian soldier on the Indo-China border


分论点1 Indeed, two recent reports from the Centre for Naval Analysis, an American military-research institute, suggest that border-related conflicts are a growing threat. In its report on “National Security and the Threat of Climate Change”, published in 2007, it warns that “Climate change can act as a threat multiplier for instability in some of the most volatile regions of the world.”

例子1 Nowhere is this truer than along the disputed sections of India’s border with Pakistan and China. India and Pakistan have been locked in occasionally violent competition for control of Kashmir since their bloody partition in 1947. James Lee of the American University in Washington, DC, reckons “it is a very good bet that the Kashmir glaciers will get caught up in the India/Pakistan dispute.”

例子2India’s border with China is also unresolved. The two countries fought a brief war over it in 1962. In early June, India signalled that it would boost its military presence close to the border. China responded on June 9th, when the Chinese Global Times published an editorial entitled “India’s Unwise Military Moves” denouncing India’s troop deployment.

分论点2At the same time, the melting of sea ice around the north pole is causing old rivalries to heat up over conflicting claims to what could be valuable stretches of seabed that are becoming accessible as a result. The same report from the Centre for Naval Analysis warns that “an Arctic with less sea ice could bring more competition for resources, as well as more commercial and military activity.” And at the other end of the world Chile and Argentina, which last had an armed standoff in 1978, have yet to agree formally on a borderline through the southern Patagonian ice fields, which will affect their overlapping seabed claims. 海案线划分的边界条款。



分论点3Rising sea levels will also eat away at all coastal communities, especially large, densely populated portions of many South and South-East Asian countries as well as tiny island nations in the South Pacific. In Bangladesh, where about 10% of the country is less than a metre above sea level, tens of millions could be displaced by global warming. India has already constructed a 4,100 kilometre (2,560 mile) fence along the border in an attempt to curb illegal immigration.

As the Centre for Naval Analysis states in its most recent report, “Powering America’s Defence”, which was published in May, “climate change could increasingly drive military missions in this century.” Many of these missions could involve environmental refugees fleeing marginal cropland, the productivity of which is likely to be reduced by global warming. It is worth noting that the report also found the American border to be at risk.结尾没有简单的重复总结上文（我一般的做法）而是点出另外的新的挑战，引人思考，结尾自然。总感觉看这些好文章的结尾跟“病去如抽丝一样”，结尾自然舒畅。看自己的文章结尾总是硬生生加上去的，怕别人不知道你这个是结尾要写完了的感觉。唉。。

gdreamer9UID: 2542678

July 9, 2009 | 3 comments
Drugmakers Abandon Nature's PharmacyFrom penicillin to Taxol, most new drugs have had their roots in natural products, but scientists worry that the approach is in decline
In the 1992 film Medicine Man, actor Sean Connery stars as a grizzled scientist who discovers a cure for cancer in the Amazon and then struggles to replicate his findings as bulldozers destroy the very forests that harbor it. "What don't you understand?" he wails. "I found the cure for the...plague of the 20th century, and now I've lost it!"

又是一个很好的过渡把上文串起来同时引出自己的观点！If Connery reprised that role today, his enemy might instead be Big Pharma, whose working methods have staunched the pipeline for medicines derived from nature. The advent of high-throughput screening technologies has allowed companies to test 100,000 compounds per day for specific biological functions, but that speed comes at a price: Drug approval rates are far lower for synthetic compounds than those derived from natural products, which, due to their complexity, are harder to screen.

"I believe this is bad in the long term for both the pharmaceutical companies and the public," says John Vederas of the University of Alberta. "The current balance between high-throughput screening of synthetic libraries and pursuit of natural-product leads is skewed in an unfavorable way."

In this week's Science, Vederas and his student Jesse Li explain that this shift from natural products, along with tighter safety requirements and a focus on blockbuster drugs, is a key reason why the pharmaceutical pipeline is drying up. Today, just over 100 nature-derived drugs are currently in clinical trials, a 30 percent decline from just a few years ago. 用引用的两个人的话最为例子说明坏处。

The problem with current screening technologies is that compounds found in plants, animals and microbes have more complicated structures than those in synthetic chemical libraries, leading to challenges in their isolation, identification and manufacture. Moreover, natural compounds are often present at such low levels that they cannot be readily tested using current automated technologies. Finally, drugmakers exploring the natural world face the risk of isolating and identifying a known compound that cannot be patented.

看到坛子上有人介绍AW经验说在在文章三分之二处转折讲反方面，果然是这样啊。Even so, there's a bright side to the story. Vederas believes that this trend could be turned around by automating the hunt for natural compounds. 反面观点后举例。For instance, it may soon be possible to automatically separate all of the chemicals in an organism, identify them, and catalogue them in a library for future screening. He also advocates "smart screening" methods, such as using engineered E. coli in assays that help weed out common antibiotics produced by soil microbes to speed the search for new ones.

Whether or not all this novel technology means that Sean Connery, er, "Dr. Robert Campbell," will make a more credible scientist in the future, it's still worth taking a look at some of the greatest hits from nature's medicine cabinet.开放式结尾

此文更象是GRE小阅读呵呵

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http://www.economist.com/books/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13983232

Physics and philosophy
Much ado about nothingJul 9th 2009
From The Economist print edition
Illustration by Daniel Pudles
Nothing: A Very Short Introduction. By Frank Close. Oxford University Press; 157 pages; £7.99. To be published by OUP in America next month. Buy from Amazon.co.uk

DOES anything remain when everything is taken away? 提出问题This question has perplexed philosophers for thousands of years. In a new treatment, Frank Close, a physicist, examines the latest scientific thinking on the subject.

Most scientists believe that the universe was born in the Big Bang some 14 billion years ago. 观点1The vastness of space, its smattering of galaxies and stars, its planets and the conscious life that inhabits at least one such orb all came from this giant fireball. Not only was matter created at that point, so too were the forces that govern it and the fields that they generate. Further, time itself burst forth. Where did all this stuff come from? Science says that it came from quantum fluctuations in the void.

That, in turn, raises questions about what the void might be.推翻前一论点 Stripped of all matter, forces and fields, would space and time exist? The universe is expanding, being thrust apart by some mysterious “dark energy”, minute traces of which pervade all space. Is dark energy the “cost” of having free space?
Mr Close argues that emptiness is a collective effect similar to that of magnetism, which occurs in isolation but only when many atoms are present. 新观点Physicists call such phenomena “emergent” because they depend on a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions. Mr Close reckons that consciousness may be a collective effect, too.

He outlines how the Higgs field, which is thought to be responsible for endowing matter with mass and thus enabling gravity to act on it, may also be a collective property. Physicists are engaged in the biggest scientific experiment in the history of the world at CERN, the European particle physics laboratory, in an attempt to find the particles associated with this field and thereby confirm its existence. The Higgs field is thought to have pervaded the void ever since a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang.

Move away from the collective scale, however, and peer closer at empty space, that is, a volume from which all matter and forces have been removed, and it buzzes with energy. 观点2The smaller the space, the greater the fluctuations in the energy that pervades it. This makes the void fizz with activity, as particles and their antimatter counterparts zip in and out of existence. 晦涩It is this activity, at quantum mechanical scales, that banishes nothingness and which is thought to have given birth to the universe.

Mr Close surveys 3,000 years of thinking to arrive at the modern solution to the question of where everything came from. The answer is nothing. Why the universe is as it is remains an enigma to science.还是没有解决问题啊!
内容有点晦涩,可能学物理和哲学的同学能更明白些