经济学人双语阅读4

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英语学习_（6-10）《经济学人》中英对照_必备

英语学习_（6-10）《经济学⼈》中英对照_必备弃我去者，昨⽇之⽇不可留乱我⼼者，今⽇之⽇多烦忧TEXT 6Travelling with baggage背着⾏囊去旅⾏Feb 16th 2006From The Economist print edition（1）FEW modern travel writers excite more hostility and awe than Sir ★Wilfred Thesiger[1], who died in 2003. Despising the “drab uniformity of the modern world”, Sir Wilfred ★slogged across [2] Africa and Asia, especially Arabia, on animals and on foot, immersing himself in tribal societies. He delighted in killing—lions in Sudan in the years before the second world war, Germans and Italians during it. He disliked “soft”living and “★intrusive[3]”women and revered murderous savages, to whom he gave guns. He thought educating the working classes a waste of good servants. He kicked his dog. His journeys were more notable as feats of ★masochistic[4] endurance than as exploration. Yet his first two books, “Arabian Sands”, about his crossing of the Empty Quarter, and “The Marsh Arabs”, about southern Iraq, have a ★terse[5] brilliance about them. As records of ancient cultures on the ★cusp[6] of ★oblivion[7], they are unrivalled.现代游记作家鲜有⼈能⽐2003年去世的威福瑞?塞西格爵⼠更令⼈敬畏。

经济学人文章(四六级雅思精读素材)2020-08-27

The Economist August 29th 2020 Business 55Depending on whom you ask, Califor-nia is a leader in clean energy or a cau-tionary tale. Power outages in August prompted stern critiques from Republi-cans. “In California”, D onald Trump tweeted, “D emocrats have intentionally implemented rolling blackouts—forcing Americans in the dark.” In addition to pro-voking outrage and derision, however, the episode is also likely to inspire investment.The Golden State has long been Ameri-ca’s main testing ground for green compa-nies. Californians buy half of all electric cars sold in America. Theirs is the country’s largest solar market. As California deals with heat waves, ﬁres and a goal of carbon-free electricity by 2045, the need for a reli-able grid is becoming ever more obvious.For years ﬁrms competed to generate clean power in California. Now a growing num-ber are vying to store and manage it, too. August’s blackouts have many causes,including poor planning, an unexpected lack of capacity and sweltering heat in not just California but nearby states from which it sometimes imports power. Long before the outages, however, electricity op-erators were anxious about capacity. Cali-fornia’s solar panels become less useful in the evening, when demand peaks. In No-vember state regulators mandated that utilities procure an additional 3.3 gigawatts (gw ) of capacity, including giant batteries that charge when energy is abundant and can sell electricity back to the grid.Too few such projects have come online to cope with the surge in demand for air-conditioning in the scorching summer. But more are sprouting across the state. On Au-gust 19th ls Power, an electricity ﬁrm backed by private equity, unveiled a 250-megawatt (mw ) storage project in San Die-go, the largest of its kind in America. In July the county of Monterey said Vistra Energy,a Texan power company, could build as much as 1.2gw of storage.The rooftop solar industry stands to beneﬁt from a new Californian mandate that requires new homes to install panels on their roofs from this year. Sunrun, the market leader, is increasingly pairing such residential installations with batteries. In July, for instance, the company said it had won contracts with energy suppliers in the Bay Area to install 13mw of residential solar and batteries. These could supply power to residents in a blackout or feed power into the grid to help meet peak demand. Sunrunis so conﬁdent in its future that it has bid $3.2bn for Vivint Solar,its main rival.Another way to stave oﬀoutages is to curb demand.Enel,a European power company,has contracts with local utilities to work with large commercial and indus-trial clients.When demand rises,Enel pays customers to reduce energy consumption,easing demand on the grid.A company called OhmConnect oﬀers something sim-ilar for homeowners.Even as such oﬀerings scale up,the need for reliability means that fossil fuels will not disappear just yet.On September 1st California’s regulators will vote on whether to delay the retirement of four natural-gas plants in light of the outages.The state remains intent on decarbonising its power system over the next 25years.But progress may not move in a straight line.7NEW YO RKBusinesses compete to battle California’s blackoutsEnergy utilitiesLitMany big companies may be struggling with depressed sales, but these are busy times for bribery-busters. Mexico is abuzz over allegations by an ex-boss of Pe-mex, the state oil giant, that several senior politicians received bungs from compa-nies including Odebrecht, a Brazilian con-struction ﬁrm (see Americas section). The scandal is the latest in a string of graft cases to make headlines this year, starting with Airbus’s record $4bn settlement in January over accusations of corruption for making illegal payments in various countries.Corporate bribery is hardly new. In sur-veys, between a third and a half of compa-nies typically claim to have lost business to rivals who won contracts by paying kick-backs. But such perceptions-based re-search has obvious limitations. A new study takes a more rigorous approach, and draws some striking conclusions.Raghavendra Rau of Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge, Yan-Leung Cheung of the Education University of Hong Kong and Aris Stouraitis of Hong Kong Baptist University examined nearly 200 prominent bribery cases in 60 coun-tries between 1975 and 2015. For the ﬁrms doing the bribing, they found, the short-term gains were juicy: every dollar of bribe translated into a $6-9 increase in excess re-turns, relative to the overall stockmarket. That, however, does not take account of the chances of getting caught. These have risen as enforcement of America’s 43-year-old anti-bribery law, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (fcpa ), has been stepped up and other countries have passed similar laws. The number of fcpa cases is up sharply since the ﬁnancial crisis of 2007-09, according to Stanford Law School (see chart). It has dipped a bit under Presi-dent Donald Trump, who has criticised the fcpa for hobbling American ﬁrms over-seas, but remains well above historic lev-els. Total ﬁnes for fcpa violations were $14bn in 2016-19, 48 times as much as in the four years to 2007.The authors also tested 11hypotheses that emerged from past studies of bribery.They found support for some, for instance that ﬁrms pay larger bribes when they ex-pect to receive larger beneﬁts, and that the net beneﬁts of bribing are smaller in places with more public disclosure of politicians’sources of income.But they punctured other bits of re-ceived wisdom. Most striking, they found no link between democracy and graft. This challenges the “Tullock paradox”, which holds that ﬁrms can get away with smaller bribes in democracies because politicians and oﬃcials have less of a lock on the sys-tem than those in autocratic countries, and so cannot extract as much rent. Such ﬁnd-ings will doubtless be of interest to corrup-tion investigators and unscrupulous exec-utives alike. 7Bribery pays—if you don’t get caughtBriberyA closer look at greasy palmsBrown envelopes, big chequesUnited States,Foreign Corrupt Practices ActSources:Stanford Law School;Sullivan &Cromwell*Investigations and enforcement actions †To August6543210605040302010020†10152000059095851977Enforcement actionsSanctions, $bnUtilitiesTransport Communications Basic materials Financial services Consumer goods Aerospace & defence TechnologyIndustrials Health care Oil &gas 100806040200Number of cases* by selected industry1977-2020†。

《经济学人》英语热点文章精选8篇(中英文对照

（考研英语阅读原文很多来自《经济学人》，希望大家好好看看)印度的救赎IN MAY America’s Federal Reserve hinted that it would soon start to reduce its vast purchases of Treasury bonds. As global investors adjusted to a world without ultra—cheap money, there has been a great sucking of funds from emerging markets。

Currencies and shares have tumbled, from Brazil to Indonesia, but one country has been particularly badly hit。

今年五月，美国联邦储备委员会(Federal Reserve）暗示，它将很快开始缩减大量购买国债的规模。

随着全球投资者开始调整策略，以适应没有超廉价资金的世界，大量资金开始逃离新兴市场.从巴西到印度尼西亚，货币及股票纷纷暴跌，但有一个国家受创尤其严重.Not so long ago India was celebrated as an economic miracle. In 2008 Manmohan Singh，the prime minister，said growth of 8—9% was India’s new cruising speed. He even predicted the end of the “chronic poverty，ignorance and disease, which has been the fate of millions of our countrymen for centuries”. Today he admits the outlook is difficult. The rupee has tumbled by 13% in three months。

16英语阅读-经济学人《Economics》双语版-Like pearls falling into a jade plate

Like pearls falling into a jade plate大珠小珠落玉盘WHEN Wu Man arrived in New Haven1, Connecticut, from Beijing in 1990 she spoke no English and ★gambled on[1] surviving with the help of her pipa, a traditional lute-like Chinese instrument. She has succeeded (A) （triumph）,working her way from New York's Chinatown to Carnegie Hall2, where she gives her debut recital on April 6th.The pipa is a sonorous, four-stringed, pear-shaped instrument held upright on the lap. Its strings used to be silk but are now steel, which resonates better. The fake fingernails on Ms Wu's right hand ★pluck[2] the strings, while her left hand fingers the ★frets[3]. （1）She produces an (B) (astonish) range of colours and moods from a 2,000-year-old instrument which produces a sound, observed a poet from the Tang dynasty, like “pearls falling into a jade plate”.Ms Wu is a ★virtuoso[4] interpreter of traditional music, creating (C) （haunt）exotic waves of sound with ★pi zzicatos and tremolos[5] (the plucking of one string with all five fingers consecutively). But (D) （evoke） of dropping pearls soon fade to Jimi Hendrix3. During her time in America, （2）Ms Wu has daringly expanded the pipa's range, playing jazz, bluegrass4 and Bollywood5 with eclectic instrumentalists—and inspiring (E) (number) works from prominent composers.The pipa can sound gently lyrical or(F) （aggress） modern, which is why, says Ms Wu, it attracts such composers as Terry Riley, Philip Glass, Tan Dun and Bright Sheng, all of whom have written for her. She was the first to partner the pipa with an endongo (an eight-stringed Ugandan instrument), an Appalachian banjo and a string quartet6. She was also, she says, the first to play jazz on the pipa.All this happened after she arrived in America. Young Chinese musicians are now ubiquitous in American and European conservatories, competitions and concert halls, but during China's cultural revolution the performance of Western music was greatly restricted. Traditional instruments, however, were(G) （courage）,and Ms Wu, born in 1964 in Hangzhou, began studying the pipa when she was nine.She entered the Beijing Central Conservatory of Music (where she heard Western music for the first time) and became the first (H) （receive）of a masters degree in the pipa. She was awarded a ★tenured[6] faculty position. But her curiosity about the West proved (I) （resist）. Colleagues who had emigrated to the United States warned her that there was no interest in Chinese traditional music, （3）but, undaunted, she packed seven instruments (including pipas, a zither and a dulcimer) and set off.During the first two difficult years she learnt English and cried a lot. She joined other Chinese musicians and began performing in New York's Chinatown,(J) （rehearse） in the basement of a dry-cleaner. （4）American musicians would approach her after concerts,(K) （fascination）.David Harrington of the Kronos Quartet said that the first time he heard her play was like the first time he heard Jascha Heifetz, a master violinist.Mr Harrington chose her to perform in the quartet's recent Bollywood-(L) （inspiration） recording because he wanted one person to create many different sounds. （5）Ms Wu, with her “large sonic vocabulary”, was uniquely qualified. She also attracted the attention of Yo Yo Ma, a cellist with whom she now frequently performs as a member of his Silk Road★Ensemble[7].Pipa players and audiences in China are also becoming more open minded; she caused(M) （exciting） when she performed in Beijing with the Kronos Quartet ten years ago. “That's my hope,” she says, “that （6）the next generation know there is another way for traditional instruments to survive.”[QUIZ]1. 用文中空白后括号内单词的适当（相关）形式填空（可以是动词、形容词及副词，注意时态、语态、比较级乃至派生词等），每空只填一词：如：WHEN Wu Man ________(arrival) in New Haven, Connecticut, from Beijing in 1990 she spoke no English.此空白处应填arrived.（欢迎就出题方式提出您的宝贵意见）2. 将文中划线部分翻译成英语：[NOTES](LONGMAN)[1]gamble v.以……为赌注，孤注一掷to do something that involves a lot of risk, and that will not succeed unless things happen the way you would like them togamble onThey're gambling on Johnson being fit for Saturday's game.gamble something on somethingPotter gambled everything on his new play being a hit.[2]pluck v.弹拨to pull the strings of a musical instrumentpluck atSomeone was plucking at the strings of an old guitar.[3]fret n.音品；安在某些弦乐器如吉他弹拨处的一个或多个隆起物one of the raised lines on the fretboard of a guitar etc[4] virtuoso plural virtuososn. 技术超群的表演者（尤指音乐）someone who is a very skilful performer, especially in music:violin virtuoso Stephane Grappelli—virtuoso adjective [only before noun]a virtuoso performancea virtuoso pianist[5] pizzicatos and tremolos拨奏曲和颤音[6]tenure[UC]享有终身教授的权利 the right to stay permanently in a teaching job: It's becoming increasingly difficult to acquire academic tenure. —tenured adjective:a tenured professora tenured position[7]ensemble <法>全体, [音]合唱曲, 全体演出者[TIPS & BACKGROUND]1. 纽黑文（New Haven）：美国康涅狄格州（Connecticut）南部城市，临长岛海湾，对外贸易港口。

赏析版2013年4月经济学人文章_英汉双语对照_part4

The thawing of relations with the Soviet Union: with Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990 和苏联的关系解冻，1990年和米哈伊尔•戈尔巴乔夫在一起As Baroness Thatcher at the state opening of Parliament in 20102010年女男爵撒切尔出席国会开幕大典译者：veep[2013.04.13] Sex, drugs and hope 性、药物与希望Schumpeter熊彼特Sex, drugs and hope性、药物与希望How big business fought AIDS in South Africa大型企业如何对抗南非艾滋病Apr 13th 2013 |From the print editionMOST managers extol the power of positive thinking. At the New Vaal colliery in South Africa, however, workers are urged to “stay negative”. This is not because Anglo American, the mining giant that owns the colliery, wants to foster a gloomy attitude among its employees. Rather, it wants them to stay alive.很多经理都赞扬积极思考的力量，但南非新瓦尔河煤矿（the New Vaal）却要求工人“保持消极”。

英美资源集团作为煤矿负责人，不是想给员工营造悲观的气氛，而是让他们活下来。

When Schumpeter visited, the coal mine’s top brass were wearing the canary-yellow shirts of the national football team, part of a promotion to encourage employees to take a voluntary test for HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. Around 80% have done so. No one who was HIV-negative last year has turned positive this year. Early testers are often those with the least reason to be anxious about their status; nonetheless, this is promising.当笔者到达采访时看到，煤矿的高层主管都穿着浅黄色的国家足球队队服，可能是以此鼓励员工自愿接受能引发艾滋病的HIV病毒检查，约有80%的进行了检查。

经济学人双语阅读：世界银行亟待重整

【经济学人】双语阅读：世界银行亟待重整Finance and economics财经商业Reforming the World Bank世界银行，亟待重整Zen and the art of poverty reduction禅宗思想及扶贫艺术Calm and confusion at the world's biggest development institution世界最大发展机构—平静与骚乱并存THE World Bank may need a period of quiet reflection, but this was ridiculous.世界银行可能需要一段时间来安静的反思，但这在过去是荒谬可笑的。

经济学人下载:世界银行亟待重整On September 10th 300 bankers joined Thich Nhat Hanh, an 87-year-old Vietnamese monk and founder of the Order of Interbeing, for a day of mindful meditation with Jim Kim, the bank's president and an admirer of Mr Hanh.九月十日，300名银行家以及世界银行行长吉姆金同现年87岁的越南高僧一行禅师进行了为期一天的静心冥想的活动。

一行禅师创立了相即共修团，且吉姆金是他的崇拜者之一。

It was all very Zen, one member of staff told the Washington Post.一切都弥漫着佛教气息，其中一位银行家对华盛顿邮报如是说。

Afterwards, Mr Hanh and 20 brown-robed brethren led a walking meditation through Washington —though since the traffic police did not show up, the quiet contemplation was marred by the not-so-Zen honking of angry drivers.在这之后，一行禅师和其他20名身穿棕色长袍的同胞们在华盛顿进行了步行禅修的活动。

考研英语阅读理解外刊原文经济学人

Have baby, stay in school生孩子还是继续上学？Why teenage mothers in Zimbabwe struggle to get educated为什么津巴布韦的未成年妈妈很难继续接受教育Brilliant Ndlovu has never really known childhood. Since the age of seven she has headed her household in Tsholotsho, a town in rural western Zimbabwe, after her parents went to work abroad. The oldest of five, she scraped a living growing crops while trying to keep up with her schoolwork.聪明的恩德洛夫从未真正经历过童年。

自从7岁起，她的父母去国外工作后，她就一直在津巴布韦西部乡村小镇茨洛特肖主持家务。

她是五个孩子中的老大，一边靠种庄稼勉强糊口，一边还要努力完成学业。

But in 2020 the covid-19 pandemic struck, coming shortly after a devastating drought. Farmers could not afford to pay child labourers like Ms Ndlovu. “So I looked for a man to help support my family,” she recalls. She found one who demanded sex in exchange for money. Aged 17, she got pregnant.但在2020年，经历一场毁灭性的干旱后，新冠疫情又紧随其后。

《经济学人》杂志原版英文(The Economist整理版4-5)

Digest Of The. Economist. 2006(4-5)Hot to trotA new service hopes to do for texting what Skype did for voice callsTALK is cheap—particularly since the appearance of voice-over-internet services such as Skype. Such services, which make possible very cheap (or even free) calls by routing part or all of each call over the internet, have forced traditional telecoms firms to cut their prices. And now the same thing could be about to happen to mobilephone text messages, following the launch this week of Hotxt, a British start-up.Users download the Hotxt software to their handsets, just as they would a game or a ringtone. They choose a user name, and can then exchange as many messages as they like with other Hotxt users for £1 ($1.75) per week. The messages are sent as data packets across the internet, rather than being routed through operators' textmessaging infrastructure. As a result, users pay only a tiny data-transport charge, typically of a penny or so per message. Since text messages typically cost 10p, this is a big saving—particularly for the cost-conscious teenagers at whom the service is aimed.Most teenagers in Britain, and elsewhere in Europe, pay for their mobile phones on a “pre-paid” basis, rather than having a monthly contract with a regular bill. Pre-paid tariffs are far more expensive: bundles of free texts and other special deals, which can reduce the cost of text messaging, are generally not available. For a teenager who sends seven messages a day, Hotxt can cut the cost of texting by 75%, saving £210 per year, says Doug Richard, the firm's co-founder. For really intensive text-messagers, the savings could be even bigger: Josh Dhaliwal of mobileYouth, a market-research firm, says that some teenagers—chiefly boys aged 15-16 and girls aged 14-15—are “supertexters” who send as many as 50 messages per day.While this sounds like good news for users, it could prove painful for mobile operators. Text-messaging accounts for around 20% of a typical operator's revenues. With margins on text messages in excess of 90%, texting also accounts for nearly half of an operator's profits. Mr Richard is confident that there is no legal way that operators can block his service; they could raisedata-transport costs, but that would undermine their own efforts to push new services. Hotxt plans to launch in other countries soon.“The challenge is getting that initial momentum,” says Mr Dhaliwal. Hotxt needs to persuade people to sign up, so that they will persuade their friends to sign up, and so on. Unlike Skype, Hotxt is not free, so users may be less inclined to give it a try. But as Skype has also shown, once a disruptive, low-cost communications service starts to spread, it can quickly become very big indeed. And that in turn can lead to lower prices, not just for its users, but for everyone.A discerning viewA new way of processing X-rays gives much clearer imagesX-RAYS are the mysterious phenomenon for which Wilhelm Röntgen was awarded the first Nobel prize in physics, in 1901. Since then, they have shed their mystery and found widespread use in medicine and industry, where they are used to revealthe inner properties of solid bodies.Some properties, however, are more easily discerned than others. Conventional Xray imaging relies on the fact that different materials absorb the radiation to different degrees. In a medical context, for example, bones absorb X-rays readily, and so show up white on an X-radiograph, which is a photographic negative. But Xrays are less good at discriminating between different forms of soft tissue, such as muscles, tendons, fat and blood vessels. That, however, could soon change. For Franz Pfeiffer of the Paul Scherrer Institute in Villigen, Switzerland, and his colleagues report, in the April edition of Nature Physics, that they have manipulated standard X-ray imaging techniques to show many more details of the inner body.The trick needed to discern this fine detail, according to Dr Pfeiffer, is a simple one. The researchers took advantage not only of how tissues absorb X-rays but also of how much they slow their passage. This slowing can be seen as changes in the phase of the radiation that emerges—in other words of the relative positions of the peaks and troughs of the waves of which X-rays are composed.Subtle changes in phase are easily picked up, so doctors can detect even small variations in the composition of the tissue under investigation, such as might be caused by the early stages of breast cancer. Indeed, this trick—known as phase-contrast imaging—is already used routinely in optical microscopy and transmission electron microscopy. Until now, however, no one had thought to use it for medical X-radiography.To perform their trick, the researchers used a series of three devices called transmission gratings. They placed one between the source of the X-rays and the body under examination, and two between the body and the X-ray detector that forms the image. The first grating gathers information on the phases of the X-rays passing through it. The second and third work together to produce thedetailed phase-contrasted image. The approach generates two separate images—the classic X-ray image and the phase-contrasted image—which can then be combined to produce a high-resolution picture.The researchers tested their technique on a Cardinal tetra, a tiny iridescent fish commonly found in fish tanks and aquariums. The conventional X-ray image showed the bones and the gut of the fish, while the phase-contrasted image showed details of the fins, the ear and the eye.Dr Pfeiffer's technique would thus appear to offer a way to get much greater detail for the same amount of radiation exposure. Moreover, since it uses standard hospital equipment, it should be easy to introduce into medical practice. X-rays may no longer be the stuff of Nobel prizes, but their usefulness may just have increased significantly.Here be dragonsWith luck, you may soon be able to buy a mythological petPAOLO FRIL, chairman and chief scientific officer of GeneDupe, based in San Melito, California, is a man with a dream. That dream is a dragon in every home.GeneDupe's business is biotech pets. Not for Dr Fril, though, the mundane cloning of dead moggies and pooches. He plans a range of entirely new animals—or, rather, of really quite old animals, with the twist that even when they did exist, it was only in the imagination.Making a mythical creature real is not easy. But GeneDupe's team of biologists and computer scientists reckon they are equal to the task. Their secret is a new field, which they call “virtual cell biology”.Biology and computing have a lot in common, since both are about processing information—in one case electronic; in the other, biochemical. Virtual cell biology aspires to make a software model of a cell that is accurate in every biochemical detail. That is possible because all animal cells use the same parts list—mitochondria for energy processing, the endoplasmic reticulum for making proteins, Golgi body for protein assembly, and so on.Armed with their virtual cell, GeneDupe's scientists can customise the result so that it belongs to a particular species, by loading it with a virtual copy of that animal's genome. Then, if the cell is also loaded with the right virtual molecules, it will behave like a fertilised egg, and start dividing and developing—first into an embryo, and ultimately into an adult.Because this “growth” is going on in a computer, it happens fast. Passing from egg to adult in one of GeneDupe's enormous Mythmaker computers takes less than a minute. And it is here that Charles Darwin gets a look in. With such a short generation time, GeneDupe's scientists can add a little evolution to their products.Each computer starts with a search image (dragon, unicorn, gryphon, etc), and the genome of the real animal most closely resembling it (a lizard for the dragon, a horse for the unicorn and, most taxingly, the spliced genomes of a lion and an eagle for the gryphon). The virtual genomes of these real animals are then tweaked by random electronic mutations. When they have matured, the virtual adults most closely resembling the targets are picked and cross-bred, while the others are culled.Using this rapid evolutionary process, GeneDupe's scientists have arrived at genomes for a range of mythological creatures—in a computer, at least. The next stage, on which they are just embarking, is to do it for real.This involves synthesising, with actual DNA, the genetic material that the computer models predict will produce the mythical creatures. The synthetic DNA is then inserted into a cell that has had its natural nucleus removed. The result, Dr Fril and his commercial backers hope, will be a real live dragon, unicorn or what have you.Tales of the unexpectedWhy a drug trial went so badly wrongIN ANY sort of test, not least a drugs trial, one should expect the unexpected. Even so, on March 13th, six volunteers taking part in a small clinical trial of a treatment known as TGN1412 got far more than they bargained for. All ended up seriously ill, with multiple organ failure, soon after being injected with the drug at a special testing unit at Northwick Park Hospital in London, run by a company called Parexel. One man remains ill in hospital.Small, preliminary trials of this sort are intended to find out whether a drug is toxic. Nevertheless, the mishap was so serious that Britain's Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), a government body, swiftly launched a full inquiry. On April 5th it announced its preliminary findings. These were that the trial was run correctly, doses of the drug were given as they were supposed to have been, and there was no contamination during manufacturing. In other words, it seems that despite extensive tests on animals and human-cell cultures, and despite the fact that the doses in the human trial were only a five-hundredth of those given to the animals, TGN1412 is toxic in people in a way that simply had not shown up.This is a difficult result for the drug business because it raises questions about the right way of testing medicines of this kind. TGN1412 is unusual in that it is an antibody. Most drugs are what are known as “small molecules”. Antibodies are big, powerful proteins that are the workhorses of the immune system. A mere 20 of them have been approved for human therapy, or are in latestage clinical trails, in America and Europe, but hundreds are in pre-clinical development, and will soon need to be tried out on people.Most antibody drugs are designed to work in one of three ways: by recruiting parts of the immune system to kill cancer cells; by delivering a small-molecule drug or a radioactive atom specifically to a cancer; or by blocking unwanted immune responses. In that sense, TGN1412 was unusual because it worked in a fourth way. It is what is called a “superagonistic” antibody, designed to increase the numbers of a type of immune cell known as regulatory T-cells.Reduced numbers, or impaired function, of regulatory T-cells has been implicated in a number of illnesses, such as type 1 diabetes, multiple sclerosis and rheumatoid arthritis. Boosting the pool of these antibodies seemed like a good treatment strategy. Unfortunately, that strategy fell disastrously to pieces and it will take a little longer to find out why.The result highlights concerns raised in a paper just published by the Academy of Medical Sciences, a group of experts based in London. It says there are special risks associated with novel antibody therapies. For example, their chemical specificity means that they might not bind to their targets in humans as they do in other species.Accidence and substanceTwo possible explanations for the bulk of realityTHE unknown pervades the universe. That which people can see, with the aid of various sorts of telescope, accounts for just 4% of the total mass. The rest, however, must exist. Without it, galaxies would not survive and the universe would not be gently expanding, as witnessed by astronomers. What exactly constitutes this dark matter and dark energy remains mysterious, but physicists have recently uncovered some more clues, about the former, at least.One possible explanation for dark matter is a group of subatomic particles called neutrinos. These objects are so difficult to catch that a screen made of lead a light-year thick would stop only half the neutrinos beamed at it from getting through. Yet neutrinos are thought to be the most abundant particles in the universe. Some ten thousand trillion trillion—most of them produced by nuclear reactions in the sun—reach Earth every second. All but a handful pass straight through the planet as if it wasn't there.According to the Standard Model, the most successful description of particle physics to date, neutrinos come in three varieties, called “flavours”. These are known as electron neutrinos, tau neutrinos and muon neutrinos. Again, according to the Standard Model, they are point-like, electrically neutral and massless. But in recent years, this view has been challenged, as physicists realised that neutrinos might have mass.The first strong evidence came in 1998, when researchers at an experiment called SuperKamiokande, based at Kamioka, in Japan, showed that muon neutrinos produced by cosmic rays hitting the upper atmosphere had gone missing by the time they should have reached an underground detector. SuperKamiokande's operators suspect that the missing muon neutrinos had changed flavour, becoming electron neutrinos or—more likely—tau neutrinos. Theory suggests that this process, called oscillation, can happen only if neutrinos have mass.Since then, there have been other reports of oscillation. Results from the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory in Canada suggest that electron neutrinos produced by nuclear reactions in the sun change into either muon or tau neutrinos on their journey to Earth. Two other Japanese experiments, one conducted at Kamioka and one involving the KEK particle-accelerator laboratory in Tsukuba, near Tokyo, also hint at oscillation.Last week, researchers working on the MINOS experiment at Fermilab, near Chicago, confirmed these results. Over the coming months and years, they hope to produce the most accurate measurements yet. The researchers created a beam of muon neutrinos by firing an intense stream of protons into a block of carbon. On the other side of the target sat a particle detector that monitored the number of muon neutrinos leaving the Fermilab site. The neutrinos then traveled 750km (450 miles) through the Earth to a detector in a former iron mine in Soudan, Minnesota.Myths and migrationDo immigrants really hurt American workers' wages?EVERY now and again America, a nation largely made up of immigrants and their descendants, is gripped by a furious political row over whether and how it should stem the flood of people wanting to enter the country. It is in the midst of just such a quarrel now. Congress is contemplating the erection of a wall along stretches of the Mexican border and a crackdown on illegalworkers, as well as softer policies such as a guest-worker programme for illegal immigrants. Some of the arguments are plain silly. Immigration's defenders claim that foreigners come to do jobs that Americans won't—as if cities with few immigrants had no gardeners. Its opponents say that immigrants steal American jobs—succumbing to the fallacy that there are only a fixed number of jobs to go around.One common argument, though not silly, is often overstated: that immigration pushes down American workers' wages, especially among high-school dropouts. It isn't hard to see why this might be. Over the past 25 years American incomes have become less equally distributed, typical wages have grown surprisingly slowly for such a healthy economy and the real wages of the least skilled have actually fallen. It is plausible that immigration is at least partly to blame, especially because recent arrivals have disproportionately poor skills. In the 2000 census immigrants made up 13% of America's pool of workers, but 28% of those without a high-school education and over half of those with eight years' schooling or less.In fact, the relationship between immigration and wages is not clear-cut, even in theory. That is because wages depend on the supply of capital as well as labour. Alone, an influx of immigrants raises the supply of workers and hence reduces wages. But cheaper labour increases the potential return to employers of building new factories or opening new valet-parking companies. In so doing, they create extra demand for workers. Once capital has fully adjusted, the final impact on overall wages should be a wash, as long as the immigrants have not changed the productivity of the workforce as a whole.However, even if wages do not change on average, immigration can still shift the relative pay of workers of different types. A large inflow of low-skilled people could push down the relative wages of low-skilled natives, assuming that they compete for the same jobs. On the other hand, if the immigrants had complementary skills, natives would be relatively better off. To gauge the full effect of immigration on wages, therefore, you need to know how quickly capital adjusts and how far the newcomers are substitutes for local workers.Roaming holidayThe EU hopes to slash the price of cross-border mobile calls“TODAY it is only when using your mobile phone abroad that you realise there are still borders in Europe,” lamented Viviane Reding, the European commissioner responsible for telecoms and media regulation, as she announced plans to slash the cost of mobile roaming last month. It is a laudable aim: European consumers typically pay €1.25 ($1.50) per minute to call home from another European country, and €1 per minute to receive calls from home while abroad. With roaming margins above 90%, European mobile operators make profits of around €10 billion a year from the trade, the commission estimates.Ms Reding's plan, unveiled on March 28th and up for discussion until May 12th, is to impose a “home pricing” scheme. Even while roaming, callers would be charged whatever they would normally pay to use their phones in their home countries; charges for incoming calls while roaming would be abolished. That may sound good. But, as the industry is understandably at pains to point out, it could have some curious knock-on effects.In particular, consumers could sign up with operators in foreign countries to take advantage of lower prices. Everyone would take out subscriptions to the cheapest supplier and bring them back home, says John Tysoe of the Mobile World, a consultancy. “You'd end up with a complete muddle. An operator might have a network, bu t no customers, because they've all migrated.”Another problem with Ms Reding's plan, he says, is that operators would compensate for the loss of roaming fees— thought to account for around 3% of their revenues and 5% of profits—by raising prices elsewhere. This would have the perverse effect of lowering prices for international business travellers, a big chunk of roaming traffic, while raising prices for most consumers.The commission's proposals are “economically incoherent”, says Richard Feasey of Vodafo ne, which operates mobile networks in many European countries. Imposing price caps on roaming is legally questionable, he says, and Vodafone has, in any case, been steadily reducing its roaming charges. (European regulators prevented it from doing so for three years on antitrust grounds after its takeover of Mannesmann in 2000.) Orange, another multinational operator, says it is planning to make price cuts, too. “Of course, now everybody's got price cuts,” says Stefano Nicoletti of Ovum, a consultancy.But perhaps Ms Reding's unspoken plan is to use the threat of regulation as a way to prompt action. Operators are right that her proposals make no sense, but they are charging too much all the same. So expect them to lobby hard against the proposals over the next couple of years, while quietly cutting their prices—an outcome that would, of course, allow both sides to claim victory.Devices and their desiresEngineers and chemists get togetherTHERE used to be a world of difference between treating a patient with a device—such as a fake hip or a pacemaker—and using biology and biochemistry. Different ailments required wholly different treatments, often with little in common. But that is changing as medical advances—such as those being trumpeted at the biotechnology industry's annual gathering this week in Chicago—foster combinations of surgical implants and other hardware with support from medicines. Drug-releasing stents were one of the first fruits of this trend, which increasingly requires vastly different sorts of health-care firms to mesh their research efforts.That will be a challenge. While pharmaceutical and biotech firms are always in search of the next big thing, devicemakers prefer gradual progress. Instead of hanging out with breathless entrepreneurs near America's east and west coasts, where most drug and biotechnology firms are based, many of the device-makers huddle in midwestern cities such as Minneapolis, Indianapolis and Kalamazoo. And unlike Big Pharma, which uses marketing blitzes to tell ailing consumers about its new drugs, medical-device sales teams act more as instructors, showing doctors how to install their latest creations.Several companies, however, are now trying to bring these two business cultures together. Earlier this year, for example, Angiotech Pharmaceuticals, a Canadian firm, bought American Medical Instruments (AMI). Angiotech's managers reckon their company has devised a good way to apply drug coatings to all sorts of medical paraphernalia, from sutures and syringes to catheters, in order to reduce the shock to the body. AMI makes just the sorts of medical supplies to which Angiotech hopes to apply its techniques.One of America's biggest makers of medical devices, Medtronic, has been doing joint research with Genzyme, a biotechnology company that is also keen on broader approaches to health care. Genzyme says that it was looking for better ways to treat ailments, such as coronary and kidney disease, and realised that it needed to understand better how electro-mechanical devices and information technology work. But combining its efforts with those of Medtronic “on a cultural level is very hard”, the company says. Biotechnology firms are used to much more risky projects and far longer development cycles.Another difference is that device-makers know that if a problem emerges with their hardware, the engineers will tinker around and try to resolve the glitch. Biotech and pharmaceutical firms have no such option. If a difficulty emerges after years of developing and testing a new pill, as with Merck's Vioxx, there may be little they can do about it. “You can't futz with a molecule”, says Debbie Wang, a health-care industry analyst.Strangely, says Ms Wang, some of the most promising engineering outfits were once divisions of pharmaceutical andhealth-care companies, which got rid of them precisely because they did not appear to offer the rapid growth that managers saw in prescription drugs. Guidant, a maker of various cardiovascular devices, was spun off by Eli Lilly in 1994 and a decade later became the prize in a bidding war between Johnson & Johnson and Boston Scientific, which Boston won earlier this year.Pfizer sold Howmedica, which makes joint replacements and prosthetics, to Kalamazoo-based Stryker in 1998. Anotherjoint-replacement maker, Zimmer, was spun off from Bristol-Myers Squibb in 2001. Now both those companies are looking for ways to add “anti-interactive coatings”—ie, drugs—to their business. One of the most troublesome complications in joint replacement is infection.The big drug companies might be tempted to reacquire the firms that they let go. But, given the potential for cultural and strategic clashes, it may make more sense for a few big and broad medical-device makers, such as Medtronic, Boston Scientific and St Jude Medical, to continue consolidating their own industry while co-operating, along the lines of the Medtronic-Genzyme venture, with biotech and pharmaceutical firms as they see fit. There would still be irritation; but probably less risk of wholesale rejection.Eat less, live moreHow to live longer—maybeDIETING, according to an old joke, may not actually make you live longer, but it sure feels that way. Nevertheless, evidence has been accumulating since the 1930s that calorie restriction—reducing an animal's energy intake below its energy expenditure—extends lifespan and delays the onset of age-related diseases in rats, dogs, fish and monkeys. Such results have inspired thousands of people to put up with constant hunger in the hope of living longer, healthier lives. They have also led to a search for drugs that mimic the effects of calorie restriction without the pain of going on an actual diet.Amid the hype, it is easy to forget that no one has until now shown that calorie restriction works in humans. That omission, however, changed this month, with the publication of the initial results of the first systematic investigation into the matter. Thisstudy, known as CALERIE (Comprehensive Assessment of Long-term Effects of Reducing Intake of Energy), was sponsored by America's National Institutes of Health. It took 48 men and women aged between 25 and 50 and assigned them randomly to either a control group or a calorie-restriction regime. Those in the second group were required to cut their calorie intake for six months to 75% of that needed to maintain their weight.The CALERIE study is a landmark in the history of the field, because its subjects were either of normal weight or only slightly overweight. Previous projects have used individuals who were clinically obese, thus confusing the unquestionable benefits to health of reducing obesity with the possible advantages of calorie restriction to the otherwise healthy.At a molecular level, CALERIE suggests these advantages are real. For example, those on restricted diets had lower insulin resistance (high resistance is a risk factor for type 2 diabetes) and lower levels of low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (high levels are a risk factor for heart disease). They showed drops in body temperature and blood-insulin levels—both phenomena that have been seen in long-lived, calorie-restricted animals. They also suffered less oxidative damage to their DNA.Eric Ravussin, of Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, who is one of the study's authors, says that such results provide support for the theory that calorie restriction produces a metabolic adaptation over and above that which would be expected from weight loss alone. (He also points out that it will be a long time before such work reveals whether calorie restriction actually extends life.) Nevertheless, such metabolic adaptation could be the reason why calorie restriction is associated with longer lifespans in other animals—and that is certainly the hope of those who, for the past 15 years, have been searching for ways of triggering that metabolic adaptation by means other than semi-starvation.The search for a drug that will stave off old age is itself as old as the hills—as is the wishful thinking of the suckers who finance such efforts. Those who hope to find it by mimicking the effect of calorie restriction are not, however, complete snake-oil salesmen, for there is known to be a family of enzymes called sirtuins, which act both as sensors of nutrient availability and as regulators of metabolic rate. These might provide the necessary biochemical link between starving and living longer.Universal service?Proponents of “software as a service” say it will wipe out traditional softwareSOMETHING momentous is happening in the software business. Bill Gates of Mi crosoft calls it “the next sea change”. Analysts call it a “tectonic shift” in the industry. Trade publications hail it as “the next big thing”. It is software-as-a-service (SaaS)—the delivery of software as an internet-based service via a web browser, rather than as a product that must be purchased, installed and maintained. The appeal is obvious: SaaS is quicker, easier and cheaper to deploy than traditional software, which means technology budgets can be focused on providing competitive advantage, rather than maintenance.This has prompted an outbreak of iconoclasm. “Traditional software is dead,” says Jason Maynard, an analyst at Credit Suisse. Just as most firms do not own generators, but buy electricity from the grid, so in future they will buy software on the hoof, he says. “It's the end of software as we know it. All software is becoming a service,” declares Marc Benioff of , thebest-known proponent of the idea. But while SaaS is growing fast, it still represents only a tiny fraction of the overall software industry—a mere $3.35 billion last year, estimates Mr Maynard. Most observers expect it to be worth around $12 billion by 2010—but even that is equal only to Microsoft's quarterly sales today. There is no denying that SaaS is coming. But there is much debate, even among its advocates, about how quickly it will grow, and how widely it will be adopted.At the moment, small and medium-sized businesses are the most enthusiastic adopters of SaaS, since it is cheaper and simpler than maintaining rooms of server computers and employing staff to keep them running. Unlike the market for desktop software, which is dominated by Microsoft, or for high-end enterprise software, which is dominated by SAP and Oracle, the middle ground is still highly f ragmented, which presents an opportunity. “This is the last great software market left—the last unconsolidated market,” says Zach Nelson of NetSuite, which provides a suite of software services including accounting, sales-force automation and customer service. His firm is targeting small and medium-sized businesses by providing “verticalised” services—that is, versions of its software adapted to particular types of company, such as professional-service firms, wholesale distributors and software firms.Large companies, says Mr Nelson, have already made big investments in traditional software. “They've already been through the pain,” he says. So they will not be in a hurry to ditch their existing investments in traditional software from the likes of SAP and Or acle. “I have no fantasy of replacing those guys,” says Mr Nelson. But Mr Benioff of disagrees. His firm provides customer-relationship management (CRM) software as a service, which is already used by many big firms including Cisco, Sprint a nd Merrill Lynch. “The world's largest companies are now using for the world's largest CRM implementations,” he says. “It's the future of our industry that everything will be a service.”Even so, Mr Maynard reckons it will be some time before large companies fully embrace the service model. However,。

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经济学人杂志双语阅读：Dismal science沉闷的科学Paul Krugman's London lectures保罗克鲁格曼伦敦演讲Dismal science沉闷的科学(注1)Jun 11th 2009From The Economist print editionThe Nobel laureate speaks on the crisis in the economy and in economics诺贝尔奖得主就经济危机和经济学问题发表演讲THE London School of Economics was once so popular among young American scholars that British students used to joke that LSE stood for “Let's See Europe”. A distinguished sightseer, Paul Krugman, returned to the LSE on June 8th to give the annual Lionel Robbins memorial lectures. Mr Krugman, who gave the Robbins lectures 21 years ago, tried to answer two big questions in the course of his three talks. Why did economists not foresee calamity? And how will the world economy climb out of recession?伦敦经济学院曾经在美国青年学者中是如此的受欢迎，以至于英国学生曾笑称其为欧洲的象征。

六月八日，令人尊敬的客人-保罗克鲁格曼先生，回到伦敦经济学院为一年一度的莱昂内尔罗宾斯纪念典礼做演将。

克鲁格曼先生曾在二十一年前的罗宾斯纪念典礼上发表过演说，在当时的三场演讲中，他试图解说两大问题，即“为什么经济学家不对灾难进行预测？”和“世界经济如何走出衰退？”The immediate cause of the crisis, “the mother of all global housing bubbles”, wa s spotted by many economists. That house prices had risen too far was obvious, even if policymakers had seemed less sure. The surprise was that the bursting of the bubble would be so damaging. “I had no idea it would end so badly,” said Mr Krugman.许多经济学家认为，引发危机的的直接原因是“全球房地产泡沫之母”。

很明显，住房价格已经涨得太高了，虽然决策者们对此看上去并不是很肯定。

令人吃惊的是泡沫的破灭竟然会具有如此破坏性。

“我不曾想到它会产生如此糟糕的结果，”克鲁格曼先生说。

One big blind spot was the financial system. The mistake was to think “a bank had to look like something Jimmy Stewart could run”, with rows of tel lers taking deposits in a marble-fronted building. In fact a bank is anything that uses short-term borrowing to finance long-term assets that are hard to sell at a push. The shadow banking system was as important to the economy as the ordinary kind, but was far more vulnerable. Its collapse was the modern re-run of the bank failures of the 1930 s, said Mr Krugman.金融系统是一个大盲点。

人们所犯的错误是认为“银行看上去就像是吉米·史都华(注2)能够掌控一样”，出纳员在大理石建筑中排队领取保证金。

(注3)而事实上银行是任何通过短期借款来进行长期融资的机构，很难一下子卖出所有金融品。

影子银行体系对于经济来说与普通商业银行体系同样重要，但却脆弱的多。

这一体系的崩溃其实是上世纪三十年代中的银行倒闭在现代的重演罢了，克鲁格曼先生说。

The excess borrowing that did for shadow banks threatens consumers, too. They are scrambling to save more as house prices plunge. Their mortgage debts loom largerbecause of vanishing inflation. This urge to shore up wealth is self-defeating in aggregate, as it curbs spending and incomes. It also renders conventional monetary policy impotent, as the interest rate that prevents too much saving is below zero.影子银行(注4)过度借款也造成了消费恐慌。

由于房价的暴跌，消费者们争着将更多的钱放进银行。

通货膨胀的消失使他们的抵押债务所面临的形势变得相当严峻。

这种强烈的财富保值意识宏观加总后反而弄巧成拙，因为这抑制了支出和收入。

它也使得传统的货币政策变得无能为力，因为为了阻止过多的储蓄，利率已经为负了。

That creates a role for fiscal policy. If zero interest rates cannot get consumers to spend, then governments must spend instead. That remedy comes from economics so the discipline is not without merit. The trouble is, “the analysis we're using is decades old”. It dates back to Keynes, one of the few economists whose reputation has been burnished by the crisis. (Another is Hyman Minsky, whose main insight was that stability leads to too much debt, and then to collapse.) Most work in macroeconomics in the past 30 years has been useless at best and harmful at worst, said Mr Krugman. 这创造了一个财政政策的新作用。

如果零利率不能刺激消费，那么政府就必须代为支出。

这个补救措施源自经济学研究，因此不是毫无价值的。

但问题是“我们所使用的这种经济学分析已经有几十年的历史了”。

这可以追溯到凯恩斯，他是为数不多的因危机而成名的经济学家中的一位。

(另一位是海曼明斯基，他的主要观点是稳定导致过多债务从而引发崩溃。

)宏观经济学在近30年中的多数研究说得好听点是毫无用处的，说的难听点甚至是有害的，克鲁格曼先生如是说。

As for the economy, the road back to health will be long and painful. The big lesson from past bubbles is that recovery is export-led, which is not helpful “unless we can find another planet to export to”. Otherwise, recovery will have to wait for savings to be rebuilt, and that will not happen quickly. Higher inflation than before the crisis might help, he said.至于经济，恢复健康的道路将是漫长而又痛苦的。

从过去的泡沫危机中得到的启示是由出口带动经济复苏是无益的，“除非我们能找到另一个星球并对其进行出口”。

否则，想要经济复苏就不得不等待储蓄的重建，而那不是短时间内能够完成的。

比危机发生前更高的通胀也许有帮助，他说。

-注释：1.经济学常常被称为“沉闷的科学”，因为经济学家经常带来坏消息。

经济学不那么讨人喜欢，认真的经济学家常常带来泼冷水似的意见。

他们会指出一个表面上看来很吸引人的项目，很可能结局并不那么美妙。

2.吉米·史都华：即詹姆斯·史都华(James Stewart)，好莱坞影星，主演过《费城故事》、《后窗》、《迷魂记》、《桃色血案》等名片。

3.关于这句话，我网上查了很多资料，克鲁格曼所指的应该是史都华所演的《风云人物》中的场景，这部片子我现在在下，看过之后应该就可以理解了。

4.所谓影子银行系统，就是一群非银行机构，但是它们又确实在发挥着一整套银行的功能。

比如它们将房地产贷款加工成有价证券，交易到资本市场，房地产业传统上由银行系统承担的融资功能逐渐被投资所替代，属于银行的证券化活动。