经济学人阅读指南
经济学人精读笔记(45页)
经济学人The insecurity of freelance workTHE decline of the conventional job has been much heralded in recent years.近年来，许多征兆显示出（传统工作）的衰落herald 英['her(ə)ld]n. 预兆，征兆；先驱；传令官；报信者vt. 通报；预示…的来临It is now nearly axiomatic that …是不言而喻的axiomatic[,æksɪə'mætɪk]adj. 公理的；自明的：eg. It is axiomatic that as people grow older they generally become less agile.人年纪越大通常灵活性越差，这是不言而喻的。
Opinion is still divided over whether this change is a cause for concern or a chance for workers to be liberated from the rut of office life.这种工作形式的变化应该令人担忧，还是会把工作者从枯燥乏味的办公室生活中解脱出来？人们的观点仍然存在分歧。
be liberated from 从…中解脱出来the rut of office life枯燥乏味的办公室生活be in a rut 千篇一律；一成不变I don't like being in a rut – I like to keep moving on.我不喜欢一成不变–我喜欢不断前进。
自由职业群体alternative employment=self-employed sector=freelance work=self-employed traders= non-traditional workersconventionally employed people传统从业者=regular employmentsole traders个体户independent consultants独立顾问tax advantages税务优惠top up income“zero hours” contracts 零时合约gig economy零工经济”contract out” tasks签约外包，合同外包rolling contract 滚动合约[a contract that continues automatically unless someone decides to end it]As for 至于the gig economy, it actually seems to be quite a small part of the alternative-employment sector…makes them vulnerable to any change in their circumstances.使他们更容易受到环境变化影响the Great Recession 大萧条aggregate turnover 周转总额,营业总额real earnings实际收入Far more people work in construction or business services than drive cars for Uber.从事…的人远多于…It’s easier than ever to get work done without hiring someone as an employee. But the growing group of non-traditional workers (that results ) has no access to labour protections or safety nets provided by law to employees. 不新增雇员就把工作搞定比过去任何时候都更容易，但因此产生的不断壮大的非传统工作群体，却无法享受法律赋予雇员的劳动保护和保障机制。
读经济学人杂志有很多句子看不懂怎么办
读经济学人杂志有很多句子看不懂怎么办有人问：对经济学人杂志上的很多句子看不懂，即使查了字典也好不了多少，该怎么做才能象读中文版一样顺利？Liston点评：经济学人的内容很简单，真会英语的人很容易读懂了，就跟中国人读中文版一样。
你读不懂，是因为你不会英语。
很多人以为中国人多读中文书籍而提高了中文水平，因此多读英语书籍也能提高英语水平、能提高阅读能力。
但这些人搞错了一个大前提：中国人在6岁到达了儿童级中文母语水平，再学了汉字就能阅读了，多读可进一步提升为小学生/中学生/大学生母语水平。
不上学也是文盲母语水平，听书是能听懂的。
英美人能读懂英语书籍，因为他们会英语，对英语声音直接听懂、能用英语想问题、说正确的英语句子。
在此基础上，稍微熟悉文字就能流畅阅读。
经济学人有一些财政类金融专业知识，6岁儿童也许听不太懂，但小学生初中生就可以听懂了。
正因为能听懂，所以才能读懂。
但中国人普遍听不懂英语，因为只学了如何“脑内解密成中文了假懂”：把个个单词在脑子里替换成中文词汇、拼凑成自以为象样的中文句子，就以为懂了英语。
这跟百度机翻是同样的解密过程，虽然能猜个中文意思，但英语本身还是乱码一样啥也没懂。
精听精读是解密技巧，说写是反向转码操作。
捆绑了中文词汇而背的假单词，就是当密匙用的。
听力考试也是用解密的假招来对付的，即使考过雅思托福，也只表示你会拿自己的脑子搞机翻，而不等于能听懂英语。
英专生留学生也普遍是0岁婴儿的零水平。
结果经济学人这么简单的内容，很多人对声音解密开不了工，即使低难的文本解密，哪怕边查词典边猜中文意思，依然很多句子解不出结果。
英美人那样的真正会英语，中国人是可以学会的，前提条件是要把英语当成语言来学，也就是象英美小孩那样对语境中的声音直接听懂，体会英语本身的含义。
儿童学母语和成年人学外语的大思路是一样的。
我自己拿英美剧这种电子语境来学的真英语，短短几年就学到了母语水平，对绝大多数英美剧包括快速长难句能一遍听懂且精准理解，经济学人这么简单的更是一听就懂，阅读很流畅，从来不背单词。
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 thesource 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 the detailed 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 l onger 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 seri ous that Britain's Medic ines 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 partic le-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 illegal workers, 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. This study, 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,。
考研英语阅读英文原刊《经济学人》：印度税制改革_百度文库
考研英语阅读英文原刊《经济学人》:印度税制改革Tax reform in India印度税制改革The truck stops here如鲠在喉A fix for India's indirect-tax system is overdue butit may fall short of the ideal由于印度未能及时对其间接税系统进行调整使得其未能达到理想状态TRADE negotiators were dismayed when in July India scuppered a chance to make modestprogress on a global trade deal. Perhaps they hoped for too much. For years India has failed tosign a free-trade agreement even with itself. A recent report from the World Bank saidbureaucracy related to tax-collection at state borders is a big reason why India's long-distance truckers are parked 60% of the time. A proposal to address this by rationalising themyriad state and central-government levies into a harmonised goods-and-service tax, or GST,has been around since at least 2007. But grubby politics has put paid to the idea—until now.7月,印度本可让不温不火的全球贸易谈判有所进展的,可他却让贸易代表们的愿望化成了泡影,对此代表们十分沮丧。
经济学人精读(第二季)教材
经济学人精读（第二期）教材有道考神团队@陈曲Frank致各位亲爱的同学们：大家好，我是有道考神团队的陈曲老师。
继暑假7.18-7.23，我们成功了开启第一期经济学人课程后（https:///course/detail/1954?keyfrom=xue/list），秋季开学季我们迎来了第二期的课程。
感谢大家选择经济学人课程，我们的课程时间持续一周，具体为：9月19日19:00-20:00 精讲篇章1 – Seize the day（经济类）9月20日19:00-20:00 精讲篇章2 – Planet of the Phones（科技类）9月21日19:00-20:00 精讲篇章3 – The whole world is going to university（教育类）9月22日19:00-20:00 精讲篇章4 – Space and the city（经济类）9月23日19:00-20:00 精讲篇章5 – Artificial Intelligence（科技类）9月26日19:00-20:00 精讲篇章6 – The weaker sex（社会类）请大家注意以下注意事项：1.讲义以课文为主，请各位同学课前预习课文，查出不认识的单词。
2.请各位同学准备好笔记本，授课时做好笔记，微博坚持晒笔记和打卡将有陈曲老师专属的礼品赠送。
3.除了课文外，陈曲老师还精心挑选了课后的阅读篇章。
供大家研读学习。
4.关于这些文章，大家既可以阅读讲义，也可以在群里下载期刊的pdf格式。
5.我的新浪微博：@陈曲Frank，微博里会持续有一些更新内容，大家可以借鉴。
特别鸣谢eco中文网，讲义中大量的翻译均有其提供！译文仅作参考！大家一起学习一点真正的英语（Authentic English）！Passage 1: Seize the dayJan 17th 2015 | From the print editionThe fall in the price of oil and gas provides a once-in-a-generation opportunity to fix bad energy policies.MOST of the time, economic policymaking is about tinkering at the edges. Politicians argue furiously about modest changes to taxes or spending. Once in a while, however, momentous shifts are possible. From Deng Xiaoping s market opening in 1978 to Poland s adoption of “shock therapy” in 1990, bold politicians have seized propitious circumstances to push through reforms that transformed their countries. Such a once-in-a-generation opportunity exists today.The plunging price of oil, coupled with advances in clean energy and conservation, offers politicians around the world the chance to rationalise energy policy. They can get rid of billions of dollars of distorting subsidies, especially for dirty fuels, whilst shifting taxes towards carbon use.A cheaper, greener and more reliable energy future could be within reach.The most obvious reason for optimism is the plunge in energy costs. Not only has the price of oil halved in the past six months, but natural gas is the cheapest it has been in a decade, bar a few panicked months after Lehman Brothers collapsed, when the world economy appeared to be imploding. There are growing signs that low prices are here to stay: the rising chatter of megamergers in the oil industry is a sure sign that oilmen are bracing for a shake-out. Less noticed, the price of cleaner forms of energy is also falling, as our special report this week explains. And new technology is allowing better management of the consumption of energy, especially electricity. That should help cut waste and thus lower costs still further. For decades the big question about energy was whether the world could produce enough of it, in any form and at any cost. Now, suddenly, the challenge should be one of managing abundance.Clean up a dirty businessThat abundance provides the potential for reform. Far too many economies are littered with the detritus of daft energy policies, based on fears about supply. Even though fracking has boosted America s oil output by two-thirds in just four years, the country still bans the export of oil and restricts exports of natural gas, a legacy of the oil shocks of the 1970s—and a boondoggle for American refiners and petrochemical firms. Congress also keeps handing out money to Iowa s already coddled corn farmers to produce ethanol and has not reviewed generous subsidies for nuclear power despite the Fukushima disaster and ruinous cost over-runs at new Western plants. Instead, it has spent four long years bickering about whether to allow the proposed Keystone XL pipeline to Canada s tar sands. In Europe the giveaways are a little different—billions have gone to wind and solar projects—but the same madness often prevails: Germany s rushed exit from nuclear power ended up helping boost American coal and Russian gas.The most straightforward piece of reform, pretty much everywhere, is simply to remove all the subsidies for producing or consuming fossil fuels. Last year governments around the world threw $550 billion down that rathole—on everything from holding down the price of petrol in poor countries to encouraging companies to search for oil. By one count, such handouts led toextra consumption that was responsible for 36% of global carbon emissions in.Falling prices provide an opportunity to rethink this nonsense. Cash-strapped developing countries such as India and Indonesia have bravely begun to cut fuel subsidies, freeing up money to spend on hospitals and schools. But the big oil exporters in the poor world, which tend to be the most egregious subsidisers of domestic fuel prices, have not followed their lead. Venezuela is close to default, yet petrol still costs a few cents a litre in Caracas. And rich countries still underwrite the production of oil and gas. Why should American taxpayers pay for Exxon to find hydrocarbons? All these subsidies should be binned.What a better policy would look likeThat should be just the beginning. Politicians, for the most part, have refused to raise taxes on fossil fuels in recent years, on the grounds that making driving or heating homes more expensive would not only annoy voters but also hurt the economy. With petrol and natural gas getting cheaper by the day, that excuse has gone. Higher taxes would encourage conservation, dampen future price swings and provide a more sensible way for governments to raise money.An obvious starting point is to target petrol. America s federal government levies a tax of just 18 cents a gallon (five cents a litre)—a figure that it has not dared change since 1993. Even better would be a tax on carbon. Burning fossil fuels harms the health of both the planet and its inhabitants. Taxing carbon would nudge energy firms and consumers towards using cleaner fuels. As fuel prices fall, a carbon tax is becoming less politically daunting.That points to the biggest blessing cheaper energy brings: the chance to inject some coherence into the world’s energy policies. Governments have a legitimate role in making sure that energy is abundant, clean and secure. But they need to learn the difference between picking goals and deciding how to reach them. Broad incentives are fine; second-guessing scientists and investors is not. A carbon tax, in other words, is a much better way to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases than subsidies for windmills and nuclear plants.By the same token, in the name of security of supply, governments should be encouraging the growth of seamless global energy markets. Scrapping unfair obstacles to energy investments is just as important as dispensing with subsidies. The more cross-border pipelines and power cables the better. America should approve Keystone XL and lift its export restrictions, while European politicians should make it much easier to exploit the oil and gas in the shale beneath their feet.This ambitious to-do list will drive regiments of energy lobbyists potty. But for the first time in years it is within the realm of the politically possible. And it would plainly lead to a more efficient and greener energy future. So our message to politicians is a simple one. Seize the day.中文翻译第一篇：抓住现在石油和天然气价格的下跌为修正差劲的能源政策提供了一代人只有一次的机遇。
考研英语阅读理解外刊原文经济学人
Springtime lethargy – is something entirely natural春困——一种很自然的现象Spring fatigue, also known as spring lethargy, refers to a state of fatigue, lowered energy, or depression, associated with the onset of spring.春困是指一种与春天的到来有关的疲劳、精力下降或抑郁的状态。
Such a state may be caused by a normal reaction to warmer temperatures, or it may have a medical basis, such as allergies or "reverse" seasonal affective disorder. Although the causes of this springtime lethargy have not yet been fully resolved, hormone balance may play a role.这种状态可能是对对气温升高的正常反应，也可能是一种医学上的反应，如过敏或“逆向”季节性情感障碍等。
人们至今尚未完全弄清楚春困发生的原因，但荷尔蒙平衡可能是原因之一。
According to this hypothesis, the body's reserves of the "happiness hormone" serotonin, whose production depends on daylight, become exhausted over the winter, making it especially easy for the "sleep hormone" melatonin to have its effect.根据这一假说，人体储存的“快乐荷尔蒙”血清素（其产生依赖于日光）在冬季会被消耗殆尽，这使得“睡眠荷尔蒙”褪黑激素特别容易发挥作用。
The_Economist整理版(《经济学人》原版英文,有4000词汇即可,练习阅读绝好资料)
Digest Of The. Economist. 2006(2-3)Moving marketsShifts in trading patterns are making technology ever more importantAN INVESTOR presses a button, sending 1,000 small “buy” orders to a stock exchange. The exchange's computer system instantly kicks in, but a split second later, 99% of the orders are cancelled. Having found the best price, the investor makes his trade discreetly, leaving no visible trace on the market—all in less time than it takes to blink. His stealth strategy remains intact.Events like this happen many times a day, as floods of orders from active hedge funds and “algorithmic” traders—who use automated programs to buy and sell—rush through the information-technology systems of the world's exchanges. The average transaction size on leading stock exchanges has fallen from about 2,000 shares in the mid-1990s to fewer than 400 today, although total trading volume has soared. But exchanges' systems have to cope with more than just a growing onslaught of “buy” and “sell” messages. Customers want to trade in more complicated ways, combining different types of assets on different exchanges at once. Then, as always, there is regulation. All this is pushing technology further to the fore.Recent embarrassments at the Tokyo Stock Exchange have illustrated what can happen when systems fail to keep up with the times. In just the past few months, the importance of technology has been plain in mergers (those of the New York Stock Exchange and Archipelago, and NASDAQ and INET); collaborations (the decision by the New York Board of Trade to use the Chicago Board of Trade's trading platform); and the creation of off-exchange trading networks (including one unveiled recently by Citigroup).Technology is hardly a new element in financial markets: the advent of electronic trading in the 1980s (first in Europe, later in America) helped to globalise financial markets and drove up trading volumes. But having slowed after the dotcom bubble it is now demanding ever more of exchanges' and intermediaries' attention. Investors can now deal more easily with exchanges or each other, bypassing traditional routes. As customers' demands and bargaining power have increased, so the exchanges have had to ramp up their own systems. “Technology created the monster that has to be ad dressed by more technology,” says Leslie Sutphen of Calyon Financial, a big futures broker.Aite Group, a research firm, reckons that in America alone the securities and investment industry spent $26.4 billion last year on IT (see chart), and may spend $30 billion in 2008. Sell-side firms spend most: J.P. Morgan Chase and Morgan Stanley each splashed out more than $2 billion in 2004, while asset-management firms such as State Street Global Advisors, Barclays Global Investors and Fidelity Investments spent between $250m and $350m apiece. With brokerage fees for trades whittled down, many have concluded that better technology is one way to cut trading costs and keep customers.Testing all enginesGlobal growth is looking less lopsided than for many yearsLARR Y SUMMERS, a Treasury secretary under Bill Clinton, once said that “the world economy is flying on one engine” to describe its excessive reliance on American demand. Now growth seems to be becoming more even at last: Europe and Japan are revving up, as are most emerging economies. As a result, if (or when) the American engine stalls, the global aeroplane will not necessarily crash.For the time being, America's monetary policymakers think that their economy is still running pretty well. This week, as Alan Greenspan handed over the chairmanship of the Federal Reserve to Ben Bernanke, the Fed marked the end of Mr Greenspan's18-year reign by raising interest rates for the 14th consecutive meeting, to 4.5%. The central bankers also gave Mr Bernanke more flexibi lity by softening their policy statement: they said that further tightening “may be needed”rather than “is likely to be needed”, as before.Most analysts expect the Fed to raise rates once or twice more, although the economy slowed sharply in late 2005. Real GDP growth fell to an annual rate of only 1.1% in the fourth quarter, the lowest for three years. Economists were quick to ascribe this disappointing number to special factors, such as Hurricane Katrina and a steep fall in car sales—the consequence of generous incentives that had encouraged buyers to bring purchases forward to the third quarter. The consensus has it that growth will bounce back to an annual rate of over 4% in the first quarter and stay strong thereafter.This sounds too optimistic. A rebound is indeed likely in this quarter, but the rest of the year could prove disappointing, as a weakening housing market starts to weigh on consumer spending. In December sales of existing homes fell markedly and the stock of unsold homes surged. Economists at Goldman Sachs calculate that, after adjusting for seasonal patterns, the median home price has fallen by almost 4% since October. Experience from Britain and Australia shows that even a soft landing for house prices cancause an acute slowdown in consumer spending.American consumers have been the main engine not just of their own economy but of the whole world's. If that engine fails, will the global economy nose-dive? A few years ago, the answer would probably have been yes. But the global economy may now be less vulnerable. At the World Economic Forum in Davos last week, Jim O'Neill, the chief economist at Goldman Sachs, argued convincingly that a slowdown in America need not lead to a significant global loss of power.Start with Japan, where industrial output jumped by an annual rate of 11% in the fourth quarter. Goldman Sachs has raised its GDP growth forecast for that quarter (the official number is due on February 17th) to an annualized 4.2%. That would pushyear-on-year growth to 3.9%, well ahead of America's 3.1%. The bank predicts average GDP growth in Japan this year of 2.7%. It thinks strong demand within Asia will partly offset an American slowdown.Japan's labour market is also strengthening. In December the ratio of vacancies to job applicants rose to its highest since 1992 (see chart 1). It is easier to find a job now than at any time since the bubble burst in the early 1990s. Stronger hiring by firms is also pushing up wages after years of decline. Workers are enjoying the biggest rise in bonuses for over a d ecade.Pass the parcelOnline shoppers give parcels firms a new lease of lifeTHINGS must be going well in the parcels business. At $2.5m for a 30-second TV commercial during last weekend's Super Bowl, an ad from FedEx was the one many Americans found the most entertaining. It showed a caveman trying to use a pterodactyl for an express delivery, only to watch it be gobbled up on take-off by a tyrannosaur. What did the world do before FedEx, the ad inquired? It might have asked what on earth FedEx did before the arrival of online retailers, which would themselves be sunk without today's fast and efficient delivery firms.Consumers and companies continue to flock in droves to the internet to buy and sell things. FedEx reported its busiest period ever last December, when it handled almost 9m packages in a single day. Online retailers also set new records in America. Excluding travel, some $82 billion was spent last year buying things over the internet, 24% more than in 2004, according to comScore Networks, which tracks consumer behaviour. Online sales of clothing, computer software, toys, and home and garden products were all up by more than 30%. And most of this stuff was either posted or delivered by parcel companies.The boom is global, especially now that more companies are outsourcing production. It is becoming increasingly common for products to be delivered direct from factory to consumer. In one evening just before Christmas, a record 225,000 international express packages were handled by UPS at a giant new air-cargo hub, opened by the American logistics firm at Cologne airport in Germany. “The internet has had a profound effect on our business,” says David Abney, UPS's international president. UPS now handles more than 14m packages worldwide every day.It is striking that postal firms—once seen as obsolete because of the emergence of the internet—are now finding salvation from it. People are paying more bills online and sending more e-mails instead of letters, but most post offices are making up for that thanks to e-commerce. After four years of profits, the United States Postal Service has cleared its $11 billion of debt.Firms such as Amazon and eBay have even helped make Britain's Royal Mail profitable. It needs to be: on January 1st, the Royal Mail lost its 350-year-old monopoly on carrying letters. It will face growing competition from rivals, such as Germany's Deutsche Post, which has expanded vigorously after partial privatisation and now owns DHL, another big international delivery company.Both post offices and express-delivery firms have developed a range of services to help ecommerce and eBay's traders—who listed a colossal 1.9 billion items for sale last year. Among the most popular services are tracking numbers, which allow people to follow the progress of their deliveries on the internet.A question of standardsMore suggestions of bad behaviour by tobacco companies. MaybeANOTHER round has just been fought in the battle between tobacco companies and those who regard them as spawn of the devil. In a paper just published in the Lancet, with the provocative title “Secret science: tobacco industry research on smoking behaviour and cigarette toxicity”, David Hammond, of Waterloo University in Canada and Neil Collishaw and Cynthia Callard, two members of Physicians for a Smoke-Free Canada, a lobby group, criticise the behaviour of British American Tobacco (BAT). They say the firm considered manipulating some of its products in order to make them low-tar in the eyes of officialdom while they actually delivered high tar and nicotine levels to smokers.It was and is no secret, as BAT points out, that people smoke low-tar cigarettes differently from high-tar ones. The reason isthat they want a decent dose of the nicotine which tobacco smoke contains. They therefore pull a larger volume of air through the cigarette when they draw on a low-tar rather than a high-tar variety. The extra volume makes up for the lower concentration of the drug.But a burning cigarette is a complex thing, and that extra volume has some unexpected consequences. In particular, a bigger draw is generally a faster draw. That pulls a higher proportion of the air inhaled through the burning tobacco, rather than through the paper sides of the cigarette. This, in turn, means more smoke per unit volume, and thus more tar and nicotine. The nature of the nicotine may change, too, with more of it being in a form that is easy for the body to absorb.According to Dr Hammond and his colleagues, a series of studies conducted by BAT's researchers between 1972 and 1994 quantified much of this. The standardised way of analysing cigarette smoke, as laid down by the International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO), which regulates everything from computer code to greenhouse gases, uses a machine to make 35-millilitre puffs, drawn for two seconds once a minute. The firm's researchers, by contrast, found that real smokers draw 50-70ml per puff, and do so twice a minute. Dr Hammonds's conclusion is drawn from the huge body of documents disgorged by the tobacco industry as part of various legal settlements that have taken place in the past few years, mainly as a result of disputes with the authorities in the United States.Dr Hammond suggests, however, the firm went beyond merely investigating how people smoked. A series of internal documents from the late 1970s and early 1980s shows that BAT at least thought about applying this knowledge to cigarette design.A research report from 1979 puts it thus: “There are three major design featur es which can be used either individually or in combination to manipulate delivery levels; filtration, paper permeability, and filter-tip ventilation.” A conference paper from 1983 says, “The challenge would be to reduce the mainstream nicotine determined by standard smoking-machine measurement while increasing the amount that would actually be absorbed by the smoker”. Another conference paper, from 1984, says: “We should strive to achieve this effect without appearing to have a cigarette that cheats the league table. Ideally it should appear to be no different from a normal cigarette...It should also be capable of delivering up to 100% more than its machine delivery.”Thanks to the banksCollege students learn more about market ratesA GOOD education may be priceless, but in America it is far from cheap—and it is not getting any cheaper. On February 1st Congress narrowly passed the Deficit Reduction Act, which aims to slim America's bulging budget deficit by, among other things, lopping $12.7 billion off the federal student-loan programme. Interest rates on student loans will rise while subsidies fall.Family incomes, grant aid and federal loans have all failed to keep pace with the growth in the cost of tuition. “The funding gap between what students can afford and what higher education costs has got wider and wider,” says Claire Mezzanotte of Fitch, a ratings agency. Lenders are rushing to bridge the gap with “private” student loans—loans that are free of government subsidies and guarantees.Virtually non-existent ten years ago, private student loans in the 2004-05 school year amounted to $13.8 billion—a compound annual growth rate of almost 30%—and they are expected to double in the next three years. According to the College Board, an association of schools and colleges, private student loans now make up nearly 22% of the volume of federal student loans, up from a mere 5% in 1994-95.The growth shows little sign of slowing. Education costs continue to climb while pressure on Congress to pare down the budget deficit means federal aid will, at best, stay at current levels. Meanwhile, the number of students attending colleges and trade schools is expected to soar as the children of post-war baby-boomers continue matriculating.Private student loans are popular with lenders because they are profitable. Lenders charge market rates for the loans (the rates on federal student loans are capped) before adding up-front fees, which can themselves be around 6-7% of the loan. Sallie Mae, a student-loan company and by far the biggest dispenser of private student loans, disclosed in its most recent report that the average spread on its private student lending was 4.75%, more than three times the 1.31% it made on its federally backed loans.All of this is good news when lenders are hungry for new areas of growth in the face of a cooling mortgage market. Private student loans, says Matthew Snowling of Friedman, Billings, Ramsey, an investment bank, are probably “the fastest-growing segment of consumer finance—and by far the most profitable one—at a time when finding asset growth is challenging.” Last December J.P. Morgan, which already had a sizeable education-finance unit, snapped up Collegiate Funding Services, a Virginia-based provider of federal and private student loans. Companies from Bank of America to GMAC, the financing arm of General Motors, have jumped in. Other consumer-finance companies, such as Capital One, are whispered to be eyeing the market.In the beginning...How life on Earth got going is still mysterious, but not for want of ideasNEVER make forecasts, especially about the future. Samuel Goldwyn's wise advice is well illustrated by a pair of scientific papers published in 1953. Both were thought by their authors to be milestones on the path to the secret of life, but only one has so far amounted to much, and it was not the one that caught the public imagination at the time.James Watson and Francis Crick, who wrote “A structure for deoxyribose nucleic acid”, have become as famous as rock stars for asking how life works and thereby starting a line of inquiry that led to the Human Genome Project. Stanley Miller, by contrast, though lauded by his peers, languishes in obscurity as far as the wider world is concerned. Yet when it appeared, “Production of amino acids under possible primitive Earth conditions” was expected to begin a scientific process that would solve a problem in some ways more profound than how life works at the moment—namely how it got going in the first place on the surface of a sterile rock 150m km from a small, unregarded yellow star.Dr Miller was the first to address this question experimentally. Inspired by one of Charles Darwin's ideas, that the ingredients of life might have formed by chemical reactions in a “warm, little pond”, he mixed the gases then thought to have formed the atmosphere of the primitive Earth— methane, ammonia and hydrogen—in a flask half-full of boiling water, and passed electric sparks, mimicking lightning, through them for several days to see what would happen. What happened, as the name of the paper suggests, was amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. The origin of life then seemed within grasp. But it has eluded researchers ever since. They are still looking, though, and this week several of them met at the Royal Society, in London, to review progress.The origin question is really three sub-questions. One is, where did the raw materials for life come from? That is what Dr Miller was asking. The second is, how did those raw materials spontaneously assemble themselves into the first object to which the term “alive” might reasonably be applied? The third is, how, having once come into existence, did it survive conditions in the early solar system?The first question was addressed by Patrick Thaddeus, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics, and Max Bernstein, who works at the Ames laboratory, in California, part of America's space agency, NASA. As Dr Bernstein succinctly put it, the chemical raw materials for life, in the form of simple compounds that could then be assembled into more complex biomolecules, could come from above, below or beyond.Full to burstingRising levels of carbon dioxide will dump even more water into the oceansTHE lungs of the planet, namely green-leafed plants that breathe in carbon dioxide and breathe out oxygen, also put water vapour into the atmosphere. Just as people lose water through breathing (think of the misted mirror used to check for vital signs), so, too, do plants. The question is, what effect will rising concentrations of carbon dioxide have on this? The answer, published in this week's Nature by Nicola Gedney of Britain's Meteorological Office and her colleagues, would appear to be, less water in the atmosphere and more in the oceans.Measurements of the volume of water that rivers return to the oceans show that, around the world, rivers have become fuller over the past century. In theory, there are many reasons why this could be so, but some have already been discounted. Research has established, for example, that it is not, overall, raining—or snowing, hailing or sleeting—any more than it used to. But there are other possibilities. One concerns changes in land use, such as deforestation and urbanisation. The soil in rural areas soaks up the rain and trees breathe it back into the atmosphere, whereas the concrete in urban areas transfers rainwater into drains and hence into rivers. Another possibility is “solar dimming”, in which aerosol particles create a hazy atmosphere that holds less water. And then there is the direct effect of carbon dioxide on plant transpiration.Dr Gedney used a statistical technique called “optimal fingerprinting” or “detection and attribution” to identify which of these four factors matter. Her team carried out five simulations of river flow in the 20th century. In the first of these they allowed all four explanations to vary: rainfall, haze, atmospheric carbon dioxide and land use. They then held one of them constant in each of the next four simulations. By comparing the outcome of each of these with the first simulation, the team gained a sense of its part in the overall picture. So, for example, they inferred the role of land use by deducting the simulation in which it was fixed from the simulation in which it varied.As with any statistical analysis, the results are only as good as the model, the experimental design and the data. Dr Gedney and her colleagues acknowledge that their model does not fully take into account the use of water to irrigate crops—particularly important in Asia and Europe—nor the question of urban growth. They argue, however, that these aspects, taken together, wouldremove water from rivers, which makes their conclusion all the more striking. And it is this: fuller rivers cannot be explained by more rainfall or haze or changes in land use, but they can be explained by higher concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide.The mechanism is straightforward. A plant breathes through small holes, called stomata, found in its leaves. Plants take in carbon dioxide, and when the atmosphere is relatively rich in this gas, less effort is needed. The stomata stay closed for longer, and less water is lost to the atmosphere. This means that the plant doesn't need to draw as much moisture from the soil. The unused water flows into rivers.The great tech buy-out boomWill the enthusiasm of private-equity firms for investing in technology and telecoms end in tears, again?PRIME COMPUTERS, Rhythm NetConnections and XO Communications—all names to drain the blood from the face of a private-equity investor. Or so it was until recently, when investing in technology and telecoms suddenly became all the rage for private-equity companies. These investment firms—labelled “locusts” by unfriendly Europeans—generally make their money by buying big controlling stakes in companies, improving their efficiency, and then selling them on.In the late 1980s, Prime Computers became private equity's first great “tech wreck”, humiliating investors who thought they understood the technology business and could nurture the firm back to health away from the shorttermist pressures of the public stockmarket. After Prime failed, private-equity firms spent the best part of a decade focusing solely on the old economy. Only in the late 1990s, when the new economy was all the rage, did they pluck up the courage to return to tech and telecoms—a decision some of the grandest names in the industry were soon to regret. Hicks, Muse, Furst and Tate (Rhythm NetConnections) and Forstmann Little (XO) have both been shadows of their old selves since losing fortunes on telecoms.Now, investing in technology and telecoms is once again one of the hottest areas in the super-heated privateequity market. The multi-billion-dollar question is: will this round of investment end any less horribly than the previous two?Last month TDC, a Danish phone company, was finally acquired after a bid of $15.3 billion by a consortium including European giants Permira Advisors and Apax Partners, and American veterans Kohlberg Kravis Roberts (KKR), Blackstone Group and Providence Equity Partners. In the past five years, there has been private-equity involvement in about 40% of telecoms deals in Europe.On the other side of the Atlantic, the action has focused mainly on technology, rather than telecoms. Last summer, a consortium including Silver Lake Partners and KKR completed the biggest private-equity tech deal to date, buying SunGard Data Systems, a financial-technology firm, for $11.3 billion. Since then the deals have continued to flow. The $1.2 billion acquisition of Serena Software by Silver Lake is due to be completed by the end of March. Blackstone and others are said to be circling two IT outsourcing firms—Computer Sciences and ACS.There are reasons to hope that this time will be different. In telecoms, for instance, private-equity firms are mostly trying to buy established firms—often former national monopolists—that, while they might be threatened by internet telephony, have strong cash flow, physical assets and plenty of scope to improve the quality of management. These are the sorts of characteristicsprivate-equity investors thrive on. By contrast, the disastrous investments in the late 1990s were in new telecoms firms that were building their operations.In technology, private-equity interest has grown as the industry has matured, and cash-flow and profitability have become more predictable. Until recently, it has been the norm for tech firms to plough back all their profit and cashflow into investing in the business. They have carried no debt and paid no dividends. Now private-equity firms see the opportunity to pursue their classic strategy of buying firms by borrowing against cashflow, and then returning money to shareholders. Glenn Hutchins of Silver Lake thinks the tech sector is now in a similar condition to the old economy in America in the early 1980s, which is when private equity first started to have an impact, by restructuring and consolidating many industries.How to live for everThe latest from the wacky world of anti-senescence therapyDEATH is a fact of life—at least it has been so far. Humans grow old. From early adulthood, performance starts to wane. Muscles become progressively weaker, cognition fails. But the point at which age turns to ill health and, ultimately, death is shifting—that is, people are remaining healthier for longer. And that raises the question of how death might be postponed, and whether it might be postponed indefinitely.Humans are certainly living longer. An American child born in 1970 could expect to live 70.8 years. By 2000, that hadincreased to 77 years. Moreover, an adult still alive at the age of 75 in 2002 could expect a further 11.5 years of life.Much of this change has been the result of improved nutrition and better medicine. But to experience a healthy old age also involves maintaining physical and mental function. Age-related non-pathological changes in the brain, muscles, joints, immune system, lungs and heart must be minimised. These changes are called “senescence”.Research shows that exercise can help to maintain physical function late in life and that exercising one's brain can limit the progression of senescence. Other work—on the effects of caloric restriction, consuming red wine and altering genes in yeast, mice and nematodes—has shown promise in slowing senescence.The approach advocated by Aubrey de Grey of the University of Cambridge, in England, and presented at last week's meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, is rather more radical. As an engineer, he favours intervening directly to repair the changes in the body that are caused by ageing. This is an approach he dubs “strategies for engineered negligible senescence”. In other words, if ageing humans can be patched up for 30 years, he argues, science will have developed sufficiently to make further repairs more effective, postponing death indefinitely.Dr de Grey's ideas, which are informed by literature surveys rather than experimental work, have been greeted with scorn by those working at developing such repair kits. Steven Austad, a gerontologist based at the University of Texas, warns that such therapies are many years away and may never arrive at all. There are also the side effects to consider. While mice kept onlow-calorie diets live longer than their fatter friends, the skinny mice are less fertile and are sometimes sterile. Humans wishing both to prolong their lives and to procreate might thus wish to wait until their child-bearing years were behind them before embarking on such a diet, although, by then, relatively more age-related damage will have accumulated.No one knows exactly why a low-calorie diet extends the life of mice, but some researchers think it is linked to the rate at which cells divide. There is a maximum number of times that a human cell can divide (roughly 50) before it dies. This is because the ends of chromosomes, structures called telomeres, shorten each time the cell divides. Eventually, there is not enough left for any further division.Cell biologists led by Judith Campisi at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California doubt that every cell has this dividing limit, and believe that it could be only those cells that have stopped dividing that cause ageing. They are devising an experiment to create a mouse in which senescent cells—those that no longer divide—are prevented from accumulating. They plan to activate a gene in the mouse that will selectively eliminate senescent cells. Such a mouse could demonstrate whether it is possible to avoid growing old.But successful ageing is being promoted here and now. Older people who engage in a lot of social interactions stay young for their chronological age, argues John Rowe, a professor of medicine and geriatrics at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York. Research has shown that people who receive emotional support not only have higher physical performance than their isolated counterparts, but also that they show lower levels of hormones that are associated with stress.Other work, led by Teresa Seeman of the University of California, Los Angeles, shows that “allostatic load”—the cumulative physiological toll exacted on the body—predicts life expectancy well. It is measured using variables including blood pressure and levels of stress hormones.Dr Seeman found that elderly people with high degrees of social engagement had lower allostatic loads. They were also more likely to be well educated and to have a high socio-economic status. It would thus appear that death can be postponed by various means and healthy ageing extended by others. Whether death will remain the ultimate consequence of growing old remains to be seen.Waving at the neighboursThe search for extra-terrestrial lifeHUMAN beings are, on an astronomical timescale, recent arrivals—and when you first arrive in the neighbourhood, it is only polite to say hello to the neighbours. That, at least, is the attitude of the SETI Institute. SETI stands for the Search forExtra-Terrestrial Intelligence, and that search has been going on, in various institutional guises, since 1960.The SETI Institute's members reckon the best way to get in touch is by radio, so they have begged and borrowed time on the world's radio telescopes to listen either for signals deliberately being broadcast by other technological species who want to make themselves known, or for radio signals intended for domestic alien consumption that have simply leaked into space. So far, though, they have heard nothing.Part of the problem is probably that intelligent aliens are thin on the ground and there are an awful lot of stars. With this in mind, Margaret Turnbull of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, DC, has, as she explained to last week's meeting of the。
考研英语碎片阅读：《经济学人》选篇
考研英语碎片阅读：《经济学人》选篇Saudi Arabia's women drivers沙特女司机Ovarian issue卵巢问题？Will Saudi women ever be allowed behind the wheel of a car?沙特的女性能获得开车权吗？WHEN a group of Saudi women first took to the kingdom's roads to flout its ban on female drivers, they publicised their protest by fax and videocassette. The 47 participants suffered fines, travel bans, social ostracism and, in some cases, the loss of government jobs. The ban itself, 23 years and many protests later, remains. But much else has changed.当第一次一群沙特女同志占据王国之路来嘲笑禁止女性司机这一法令时，她们通过传真和录音机来将她们的抗议公之于众。
那47位参与者遭到罚款、旅行禁令、社会排斥异己在某些情况下，失去了政府部门工作。
这条法令，在历经23年并遭到无数次反抗之后，如今仍然保留着。
但是很多东西早已改变。
The campaigners behind a drive-along protest scheduled for October 26th have put it on Twitter, Facebook and a slick website. Their petition demanding that the government issue driving licences to women has gathered close to 17,000 signatures. A call for women to upload videos of themselves driving has already gathered dozens of clips. The footage of headscarved ladies navigating suburban traffic may scarcely be thrilling, but some have scored over 100,000 web viewings.策划10月26日单独驾驶抗议的活动者们已经将这一禁令发布到推特，脸谱以及一个热门网站上。
3英语阅读-经济学人《Economics》双语版-Foodfirmsandfat-fighters
（2）：食品公司与减肥斗士【翻译交流】Feb 9th 2006From The Economist Global AgendaFood firms and fat-fighters食品公司与减肥斗士Five leading food companies have introduced a labelling scheme for their products in the British market, in an attempt to assuage critics who say they encourage obesity. But consumer groups are unhappy all the same. Is the food industry, like tobacco before it, about to be *engulfed[1]by a wave of lawsuits brought on health grounds?五家业内领先的食品公司采取了一项方案，就是在其投入英国市场的食品上作出标注，力图堵住那些说他们鼓励肥胖的批评人士的嘴。
不过，消费者团体仍然不开心。
食品业会像之前的烟草一样，被卷入一场关乎健康的诉讼之中吗？KEEPING fit requires a combination of healthy eating and regular exercise. On the second of these at least, the world’s food companies can claim to be setting a good example :they have been working up quite a sweat in their attempts to fend off assaults by governments, consumer groups and lawyers who accuse them of peddling products that encourage obesity. This week saw the unveiling of another industry initiative :five leading food producers—Danone, Kellogg, Nestlé, Kraft and PepsiCo—introduced a labelling scheme for the British market which will show “guideline daily amounts” for calories, fats, sugar and salt on packaging. The new labels will start to appear on the firms’ crisps, chocolate bars, cheese slices *and the like[2] over the next few months. A number of other food giants, such as Cadbury Schweppes and Masterfoods, have already started putting guideline labels on their products.将健康的饮食习惯和经常性的锻炼二者结合才可以让身体保持健康。
流畅阅读《经济学人》的第一步！10分钟学习164词的浓缩英文
流畅阅读《经济学人》的第一步！10分钟学习164词的浓缩英文每天清晨15分钟，史蒂文老师带你喝一杯经济学人浓缩咖啡，了解天下事，掌握核心词。
这是 Economist Espresso 栏目的第 17 篇精选文章：史蒂文老师制作的音频，建议您先听 1 遍20180212 札幌冰雕展如火如荼.mp31:44来自史蒂文爱学习打开今日头条，体验完整音频内容背景音乐选自《冰雪奇缘》主题曲 Let It Go第一步请先用 2 分钟阅读原文，不要查生词全文约 164 个单词Frozen friezes: snow and ice artThe weather outside is frightful, but the residents of Sapporo on Hokkaido island in Japan are delighted, because the Sapporo snow festival is in full swing. It started in 1950, when local students built six rather impressive snowmen in Odori park.Over the years the sculptures grew, the crowds gathered and the street-food stalls proliferated. Today more than 2m flock to see works up to 15m high and 25m wide, of anything from temples to anime heroes. International teams from Hawaii to Poland compete for a grand prize, this year won by the Thai team for a statue of fighting cockerels.It has been a disappointing season for some ice artists with the cancellation of the Alaska World Ice Art Championships, but fans of frozen forms can get their fill this weekend, not just in Sapporo but also in Harbin in north-eastern China, in Quebec City, in Liège in Belgium, and of course in Pyeongchang.第二步请结合下方词汇表，再读文章第三步现在，请各位读者做两件事：1）在手机或者电脑里开启一个专门的notes，同步到云端，把你每天从中学到的单词、例句，复制粘贴上去，认真记忆；2）试着翻译本文，遇到读不懂的句子，做好标记，然后在评论中找到译文，进行比对。
阅读《经济学人》，学会这样查词典，从此英语学习不求人
阅读《经济学人》，学会这样查词典，从此英语学习不求人《经济学人》定位的读者群体是“the most sophisticated” ，即英语国家受过较高教育的人群，这就意味着文章的单词量很大，遣词造句非常考究，涉及的语法面非常广，这些对读者本身的英语基础提出了一定要求。
读懂《经济学人》，首要障碍是词汇，原版报刊的用词都有一个比较特别的范围，就算你把四六级、考研英语、GRE词汇都背了，都未必能流畅阅读。
比如，《经济学人》20210206期有一篇文章《Doing the do》看到这个标题，是不是很奇怪？DO前面加了THE！Do 不就是动词“干”的意思嘛。
那你随手翻下词典，就知道自己孤陋寡闻了。
DO还有名词含义：宴会/社交聚会/社交活动；注意事项/规矩等。
甚至你背过的很多单词在杂志里并未出现，杂志的常用单词你可能也没背过。
在不断地查单词的过程中，你的精气神逐渐被消耗，然后，也就没有然后了。
因此，我们现在提供一份经济学人高频核心词汇（2706个）。
大家先把高频词汇熟悉，再看《经济学人》，更容易打通任督二脉，让我们的阅读不再困难。
•PDF 版•Excel 版而且，可以让你的词汇量和阅读能力有大幅提升！搞定这两千个高频词汇之后。
接下来，就要学会使用强大的词典工具。
我们常见的权威词典有牛津、柯林斯、韦氏等等。
它们在移动大潮兴起后推出了相应的app版本。
但是，用户体验都不理想。
另外，在英语学习的中、高阶段，我们可能需要不止一部词典，这时候，集多种功能于一体的词典软件APP就派上了用场。
这类软件里，大家听得比较多的可能有灵格斯、有道词典、金山词霸等，但从综合功能上来讲，目前这一领域里，“欧路词典”是当之无愧的强者。
欧路词典支持苹果ios、安卓、Windows、Mac系统，而且软件免费！欧路词典不仅有常用英汉词条30万个，专业词条40万个，例句库178万条，而且还支持个性化加载mdx和mdd等多种格式的扩充词库。
为了阅读《经济学人》的需要，我们需要扩展词库。
经济学人中英双语阅读精选(每日一篇)
The truth hurts 真相伤人Mar 31st 2010 | WASHINGTON, DC | From The Economist print editionWill the Treasury call China a currency manipulator?财政部会定义中国为货币操纵国吗？TO MOST people, to say that China holds down the value of its currency to boost its exports is to state the obvious. Not, though, to America’s Treasury Department. By law it must report twice a year on which countries fiddle their exchange rates at the world’s expense. China was last fingered in 1994. Ever since then, the Treasury has concluded that the designation would do more harm than good. Speculation is growing that it may decide differently in its next report, due on April 15th.对大多数人来说，说中国通过抑制人民币的价值，刺激出口，等于在陈述一个明显的事实。
然而对美国财政部来说，却不是这么简单。
法律规定它每隔两年对其它国家干涉汇率，危害他国的行为进行汇报。
中国曾在1994年列入汇率操纵国。
自那时候起，财政部得出结论：罗列中国，更多的是带来坏处。
外界猜测财政部可能将在4月15日的报告中推翻原先的结论。
The mood in America resembles that in 2005, when the Senate voted to hit China with tariffs of 27.5% and the Treasury ratcheted up its rhetoric. China abruptly moved to a managed float for the yuan. It was allowed to appreciate by 20% over the next three years before a halt was called during the banking panic of 2008.现在美国的感受类似2005年。
(1-5)《经济学人》中英对照
TEXT 1Rebuilding the American dream machine重建美国梦机器Jan 19th 2006 | NEW YORKFrom The Economist print editionFOR America's colleges, January is a month ofreckoning. Most applications for the next academicyear beginning in the autumn have to be made by theend of December, so a university's popularity is put toan objective standard: how many people want toattend. One of the more unlikely offices to have beenflooded with mail is that of the City University ofNew Y ork (CUNY), a public college that lacks,among other things, a famous sports team, bucoliccampuses and raucous parties (it doesn't even havedorms), and, until recently, academic credibility.对美国的大学而言，一月是一个清算的月份。
大多数要进入将于秋季开学的下一学年学习的申请必须在12月底前完成，因此一所大学的声望就有了客观依据：申请人的多少。
纽约城市大学，一所公立学院，与其他学校相比，它没有一支声名显赫的运动队，没有田园诗一般的校园，也没有喧嚣嘈杂的派对——甚至连宿舍都没有，而且，直到最近也没取得学术上的可信度，可就是这所大学的办公室塞满了学生们寄来的申请函，这简直有些令人难以置信。
经济学人杂志双语阅读汇总
经济学人杂志双语阅读汇总
介绍
经济学人杂志（The Economist）是一份全球性的英语经济、政治、科技及文化类杂志，由英国经济学人报纸有限公司出版。
本文将对经济学人杂志的双语阅读栏目进行汇总，介绍其中的一些优秀文章和关键观点。
双语阅读栏目概述
经济学人杂志的双语阅读栏目是为了帮助英语学习者提高阅读能力而设立的。
该栏目为读者提供了一篇原文和相应的中文翻译，使得读者可以在阅读原文的同时，对照翻译理解文章内容。
这对于提高读者的英语阅读理解能力非常有帮助。
精选文章1.。
《经济学人》杂志原版英文(整理完整版)之欧阳理创编
Digest Of The. Economist.2006(6-7)Hard to digestA wealth of genetic information is to be found in the human gutBACTERIA, like people, can be divided into friend and foe. Inspired by evidence that the friendly sort may help with a range of ailments, many people consume bacteria in the form of yogurts and dietary supplements. Such a smattering of artificial additions, however, represents but a drop in the ocean. There are at least 800 types of bacteria living in the human gut. And research by Steven Gill of the Institute for Genomic Research in Rockville, Maryland, and his colleagues, published in this week's Science, suggests that the collective genome of these organisms is so large that it contains 100 times as many genes as the human genome itself.Dr Gill and his team were able to come to this conclusion by extracting bacterial DNA from the faeces of two volunteers. Because of the complexity of the samples,they were not able to reconstruct the entire genomes of each of the gut bacteria, just the individual genes. But that allowed them to make an estimate of numbers.What all these bacteria are doing is tricky to identify—the bacteria themselves are difficult to cultivate. So the researchers guessed at what they might be up to by comparing the genes they discovered with published databases of genes whose functions are already known.This comparison helped Dr Gill identify for the first time the probable enzymatic processes by which bacteria help humans to digest the complex carbohydrates in plants. The bacteria also contain a plentiful supply of genes involved in the synthesis of chemicals essential to human life—including two B vitamins and certain essential amino acids—although the team merely showed that these metabolic pathways exist rather than proving that they are used. Nevertheless, the pathways they found leave humans looking more like ruminants: animals such as goats and sheep that use bacteria to break down otherwise indigestible matter in the plants they eat.The broader conclusion Dr Gill draws is that people aresuperorganisms whose metabolism represents an amalgamation of human and microbial attributes. The notion of a superorganism has emerged before, as researchers in other fields have come to view humans as having a diverse internal ecosystem. This, suggest some, will be crucial to the success of personalised medicine, as different people will have different responses to drugs, depending on their microbial flora. Accordingly, the next step, says Dr Gill, is to see how microbial populations vary between people of different ages, backgrounds and diets.Another area of research is the process by which these helpful bacteria first colonise the digestive tract. Babies acquire their gut flora as they pass down the birth canal and take a gene-filled gulp of their mother's vaginal and faecal flora. It might not be the most delicious of first meals, but it could well be an important one.Zapping the bluesThe rebirth of electric-shock treatmentELECTRICITY has long been used to treat medical disorders. As early as the second century AD, Galen, a Greek physician, recommended the use of electric eels for treatingheadaches and facial pain. In the 1930s Ugo Cerletti and Lucio Bini, two Italian psychiatrists, used electroconvulsive therapy to treat schizophrenia. These days, such rigorous techniques are practised less widely. But researchers are still investigating how a gentler electric therapy appears to treat depression.Vagus-nerve stimulation, to give it its proper name, was originally developed to treat severe epilepsy. It requires a pacemaker-like device to be implanted in a patient's chest and wires from it threaded up to the vagus nerve on the left side of his neck. In the normal course of events, this provides an electrical pulse to the vagus nerve for 30 seconds every five minutes.This treatment does not always work, but in some cases where it failed (the number of epileptic seizures experienced by a patient remaining the same), that patient nevertheless reported feeling much better after receiving the implant. This secondary effect led to trials for treating depression and, in 2005, America's Food and Drug Administration approved the therapy for depression that fails to respond to all conventional treatments, including drugs and psychotherapy.Not only does the treatment work, but its effects appear to be long lasting. A study led by Charles Conway of Saint Louis University in Missouri, and presented to a recent meeting of the American Psychiatric Association, has found that 70% of patients who are better after one year stay better after two years as well.The technique builds on a procedure called deep-brain stimulation, in which electrodes are implanted deep into the white matter of patients' brains and used to “reboot” faulty neural circuitry. Such an operation is a big undertaking, requiring a full day of surgery and carrying a risk of the patient suffering a stroke. Only a small number of people have been treated this way. In contrast, the device that stimulates the vagus nerve can be implanted in 45 minutes without a stay in hospital.The trouble is that vagus-nerve stimulation can take a long time to produce its full beneficial effect. According to Dr Conway, scans taken using a technique called positron-emission tomography show significant changes in brain activity starting three months after treatment begins. The changes are similar to the improvements seen in patientswho undergo other forms of antidepression treatment. The brain continues to change over the following 21 months. Dr Conway says that patients should be told that the antidepressant effects could be slow in coming.However, Richard Selway of King's College Hospital, London, found that his patients' moods improved just weeks after the implant. Although brain scans are useful in determining the longevity of the treatment, Mr Selway notes that visible changes in the brain do not necessarily correlate perfectly with changes in mood.Nobody knows why stimulating the vagus nerve improves the mood of depressed patients, but Mr Selway has a theory. He believes that the electrical stimulation causes a region in the brain stem called the locus caeruleus (Latin, ironically, for “blue place”) to flood the brain with norepinephrine, a neurotransmitter implicated in alertness, concentration and motivation—that is, the mood states missing in depressed patients. Whatever the mechanism, for the depressed a therapy that is relatively safe and long lasting is rare cause for cheer.The shape of things to comeHow tomorrow's nuclear power stations will differ from today'sTHE agency in charge of promoting nuclear power in America describes a new generation of reactors that will be “highly economical” with “enhanced safety”, that “minimise wastes” and will prove “proliferation resistant”. No doubt they will bake a mean apple pie, too.Unfortunately, in the world of nuclear energy, fine words are not enough. America got away lightly with its nuclear accident. When the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania overheated in 1979 very little radiation leaked, and there were no injuries. Europe was not so lucky. The accident at Chernobyl in Ukraine in 1986 killed dozens immediately and has affected (sometimes fatally) the health of tens of thousands at the least. Even discounting the association of nuclear power with nuclear weaponry, people have good reason to be suspicious of claims that reactors are safe.Yet political interest in nuclear power is reviving across the world, thanks in part to concerns about global warming and energy security. Already, some 441 commercial reactorsoperate in 31 countries and provide 17% of the planet's electricity, according to America's Department of Energy. Until recently, the talk was of how to retire these reactors gracefully. Now it is of how to extend their lives. In addition, another 32 reactors are being built, mostly in India, China and their neighbours. These new power stations belong to what has been called the third generation of reactors, designs that have been informed by experience and that are considered by their creators to be advanced. But will these new stations really be safer than their predecessors?Clearly, modern designs need to be less accident prone. The most important feature of a safe design is that it “fails safe”. Fo r a reactor, this means that if its control systems stop working it shuts down automatically, safely dissipates the heat produced by the reactions in its core, and stops both the fuel and the radioactive waste produced by nuclear reactions from escaping by keeping them within some sort of containment vessel. Reactors that follow such rules are called “passive”. Most modern designs are passive to some extent and some newer ones are truly so. However, some of the genuinely passive reactors are also likely to be moreexpensive to run.Nuclear energy is produced by atomic fission. A large atom (usually uranium or plutonium) breaks into two smaller ones, releasing energy and neutrons. The neutrons then trigger further break-ups. And so on. If this “chain reaction” can be controlled, the energy released can be used to boil water, produce steam and drive a turbine that generates electricity. If it runs away, the result is a meltdown and an accident (or, in extreme circumstances, a nuclear explosion—though circumstances are never that extreme in a reactor because the fuel is less fissile than the material in a bomb). In many new designs the neutrons, and thus the chain reaction, are kept under control by passing them through water to slow them down. (Slow neutrons trigger more break ups than fast ones.) This water is exposed to a pressure of about 150 atmospheres—a pressure that means it remains liquid even at high temperatures. When nuclear reactions warm the water, its density drops, and the neutrons passing through it are no longer slowed enough to trigger further reactions. That negative feedback stabilises the reaction rate. Can business be cool?Why a growing number of firms are taking global warming seriouslyRUPERT MURDOCH is no green activist. But in Pebble Beach later this summer, the annual gathering of executivesof Mr Murdoch's News Corporation—which last year led to a dramatic shift in the media conglomerate's attitude tothe internet—will be addressed by several leading environmentalists, including a vice-president turned climatechangemovie star. Last month BSkyB, a British satellite-television company chaired by Mr Murdoch and run by hisson, James, declared itself “carbon-neutral”, having taken various steps to cut or offset its discharges of carboninto the atmosphere.The army of corporate greens is growing fast. Late last year HSBC became the first big bank to announce that itwas carbon-neutral, joining other financial institutions, including Swiss Re, a reinsurer, and Goldman Sachs, aninvestment bank, in waging war on climate-warming gases (of which carbon dioxide is the main culprit). Last yearGeneral Electric (GE), an industrial powerhouse, launched its “Ecomagination” strategy, aiming to cut its outputofgreenhouse gases and to invest heavily in clean (ie, carbon-free) technologies. In October Wal-Mart announced aseries of environmental schemes, including doubling the fuel-efficiency of its fleet of vehicles within a decade.Tesco and Sainsbury, two of Britain's biggest retailers, are competing fiercely to be the greenest. And on June 7thsome leading British bosses lobbied Tony Blair for a more ambitious policy on climate change, even if that involvesharsher regulation.The greening of business is by no means universal, however. Money from Exxon Mobil, Ford and General Motorshelped pay for television advertisements aired recently in America by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, with thedaft slogan “Carbon dioxide: they call it pollution; we call it life”. Besides, environmentalist critics say, some firmsa re engaged in superficial “greenwash” to boost the image of essentially climate-hurting businesses. Take BP, themost prominent corporate advocate of action on climate change, with its “Beyond Petroleum” ad campaign, highprofileinvestments in green energy, and even a “carbon calculator” on its website that helps consumers measuretheirpersonal “carbon footprint”, or overall emissions of carbon. Yet, critics complain, BP's recent record profits arelargely thanks to sales of huge amounts of carbon-packed oil and gas.On the other hand, some free-market thinkers see the support of firms for regulation of carbon as the latestattempt at “regulatory capture”, by those who stand to profit from new rules. Max Schulz of the ManhattanInstitute, a conservative think tan k, notes darkly that “Enron was into pushing the idea of climate change, becauseit was good for its business”.Others argue that climate change has no more place in corporate boardrooms than do discussions of other partisanpolitical issues, such as Darfur or gay marriage. That criticism, at least, is surely wrong. Most of the corporateconverts say they are acting not out of some vague sense of social responsibility, or even personal angst, butbecause climate change creates real business risks and opportunities—from regulatory compliance to insuringclients on flood plains. And although these concerns vary hugely from one company to the next, few firms can besure of remaining unaffected.Testing timesResearchers are working on ways to reduce the need for animal experiments, but new laws mayincrease the number of experiments neededIN AN ideal world, people would not perform experiments on animals. For the people, they are expensive. For theanimals, they are stressful and often painful.That ideal world, sadly, is still some way away. People need new drugs and vaccines. They want protection fromthe toxicity of chemicals. The search for basic scientific answers goes on. Indeed, the European Commission isforging ahead with proposals that will increase the number of animal experiments carried out in the EuropeanUnion, by requiring toxicity tests on every chemical approved for use within the union's borders in the past 25years.Already, the commission has identified 140,000 chemicals that have not yet been tested. It wants 30,000 of theseto be examined right away, and plans to spend between €4 billion-8 billion ($5 billion-10 billion) doing so. Thenumber of animals used for toxicity testing in Europe will thus, experts reckon, quintuple from just over 1m ayearto about 5m, unless they are saved by some dramatic advances in non-animal testing technology. At the moment,roughly 10% of European animal tests are for general toxicity, 35% for basic research, 45% for drugs andvaccines, and the remaining 10% a variety of uses such as diagnosing diseases.Animal experimentation will therefore be around for some time yet. But the hunt for substitutes continues, and lastweekend the Middle European Society for Alternative Methods to Animal Testing met in Linz, Austria, to reviewprogress.A good place to start finding alternatives for toxicity tests is the liver—the organ responsible for breaking toxicchemicals down into safer molecules that can then be excreted. Two firms, one large and one small, told themeeting how they were using human liver cells removed incidentally during surgery to test various substances forlong-term toxic effects.PrimeCyte, the small firm, grows its cells in cultures over a few weeks and doses them regularly with the substanceunder investigation. The characteristics of the cellsare carefully monitored, to look for changes in theirmicroanatomy.Pfizer, the big firm, also doses its cultures regularly, but rather than studying individual cells in detail, it counts cellnumbers. If the number of cells in a culture changes after a sample is added, that suggests the chemical inquestion is bad for the liver.In principle, these techniques could be applied to any chemical. In practice, drugs (and, in the case of PrimeCyte,food supplements) are top of the list. But that might change if the commission has its way: those140,000screenings look like a lucrative market, although nobody knows whether the new tests will be ready for use by2009, when the commission proposes that testing should start.Other tissues, too, can be tested independently of animals. Epithelix, a small firm in Geneva, has developed anartificial version of the lining of the lungs. According to Huang Song, one of Epithelix's researchers, thefirm'scultured cells have similar microanatomy to those found in natural lung linings, and respond in the same way tovarious chemical messengers. Dr Huang says that theycould be used in long-term toxicity tests of airbornechemicals and could also help identify treatments for lung diseases.The immune system can be mimicked and tested, too. ProBioGen, a company based in Berlin, is developing anartificial human lymph node which, it reckons, could have prevented the near-disastrous consequences of a drugtrial held in Britain three months ago, in which (despite the drug having passed animal tests) six men sufferedmultiple organ failure and nearly died. The drug the men were given made their immune systems hyperactive.Such a response would, the firm's scientists reckon, have been identified by their lymph node, which is made fromcells that provoke the immune system into a response. ProBioGen's lymph node could thus work better than animaltesting.Another way of cutting the number of animal experiments would be tochange the way that vaccines are tested, according to CoenraadHendriksen of the Netherlands Vaccine Institute. At the moment, allbatches of vaccine are subject to the same battery of tests. DrHendriksen argues that this is over-rigorous. When new vaccine culturesare made,belt-and-braces tests obviously need to be applied. But if abatch of vaccine is derived from an existing culture, he suggests that itneed be tested only to make sure it is identical to the batch from which itis derived. That would require fewer test animals.All this suggests that though there is still some way to go before drugs,vaccines and other substances can be tested routinely on cells ratherthan live animals, useful progress is being made. What is harder to see ishow the use of animals might be banished from fundamental research.Anger managementTo one emotion, men are more sensitive than women MEN are notoriously insensitive to the emotional world around them. At least, that is the stereotype peddled by athousand women's magazines. And a study by two researchers at the University of Melbourne, inAustralia,confirms that men are, indeed, less sensitive to emotion than women, with one important and suggestiveexception. Men are acutely sensitive to the anger of other men.Mark Williams and Jason Mattingley, whose study hasjust been published in Current Biology, looked at the way aperson's sex affects his or her response to emotionally charged facial expressions. People from all cultures agreeon what six basic expressions of emotion look like. Whether the face before you is expressing anger, disgust, fear,joy, sadness or surprise seems to be recognised universally—which suggests that the expressions involved areinnate, rather than learned.Dr Williams and Dr Mattingley showed the participants in their study photographs of these emotional expressions inmixed sets of either four or eight. They asked the participants to look for a particular sort of expression, andmeasured the amount of time it took them to find it. The researchers found, in agreement with previous studies,that both men and women identified angry expressions most quickly. But they also found that anger was morequickly identified on a male face than a female one.Moreover, most participants could find an angry face just as quickly when it was mixed in a group of eightphotographs as when it was part of a group of four. That was in stark contrast to the other five sorts ofexpression,which took more time to find when they had to be sorted from a larger group. This suggests that something in thebrain is attuned to picking out angry expressions, and that it is especially concerned about angry men. Also, thishighly tuned ability seems more important to males than females, since the two researchers found that men pickedout the angry expressions faster than women did, even though women were usually quicker than men to recognizeevery other sort of facial expression.Dr Williams and Dr Mattingley suspect the reason for this is that being able to spot an angry individual quickly hasa survival advantage—and, since anger is more likely to turn into lethal violence in men than in women, the abilityto spot angry males quickly is particularly valuable.As to why men are more sensitive to anger than women, it is presumably because they are far more likely to getkilled by it. Most murders involve men killing other men—even today the context of homicide is usually aspontaneous dispute over status or sex.The ability to spot quickly that an alpha male is in a foul mood would thus have great survival value. It wouldallowthe sharp-witted time to choose appeasement, defence or possibly even pre-emptive attack. And, if it is right, thisstudy also confirms a lesson learned by generations of bar-room tough guys and schoolyard bullies: if you wantattention, get angry.The shareholders' revoltA turning point in relations between company owners and bosses?SOMETHING strange has been happening this year at company annual meetings in America:shareholders have been voting decisively against the recommendations of managers. Until now, mostshareholders have, like so many sheep, routinely voted in accordance with the advice of the people theyemploy to run the company. This year managers have already been defeated at some 32 companies,including household names such as Boeing, ExxonMobil and General Motors.This shareholders' revolt has focused entirely on one issue: the method by which members of the boardof directors are elected. Shareholder resolutions on other subjects have mostly been defeated, as usual.The successful resolutionscalled for directors to be elected by majority voting, instead of by thetraditional method of “plurality”—which in practice meant that only votes cast in favour were counted,and that a single vote for a candidate would be enough to get him elected.Several companies, led by Pfizer, a drug giant, saw defeat looming and pre-emptively adopted a formalmajority-voting policy that was weaker than in the shareholder resolution. This required any director whofailed to secure a majority of votes to tender his resignation to the board, which would then be free todecide whether or not to accept it. Under the shareholder resolution, any candidate failing to secure amajority of the votes cast simply would not be elected. Intriguingly, the shareholder resolution wasdefeated at four-fifths of the firms that adopted a Pfizer-style majority voting rule, whereas it succeedednearly nine times out of ten at firms retaining the plurality rule.Unfortunately for shareholders, their victories may prove illusory, as the successful resolutions wereall“precatory”—meaning that they merely advised management on the course of action preferredbyshareholders, but did not force managers to do anything. Several resolutions that tried to imposemajority voting on firms by changing their bylaws failed this year.Even so, wise managers should voluntarily adopt majority voting, according to Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen &Katz, a Wall Street law firm that has generally helped managers resist increases in shareholder power butnow expects majority voting eventually to “become universal”. It advises that, at the very least,managers should adopt the Pfizer model, if only to avoid becoming the subject of even greater scrutinyfrom corporate-governance activists. Some firms might choose to go further, as Dell and Intel have donethis year, and adopt bylaws requiring majority voting.Shareholders may have been radicalised by the success last year of a lobbying effort by managersagainst a proposal from regulators to make it easier for shareholders to put up candidates in boardelections. It remains to be seen if theywill be back for more in 2007. Certainly, some of the activistshareholders behind this year's resolutions have big plans. Where new voting rules are in place, they plancampaigns to vote out the chairman of the compensationcommittee at any firm that they think overpaysthe boss. If the 2006 annual meeting was unpleasant for managers, next year's could be far worse.Intangible opportunitiesCompanies are borrowing against their copyrights, trademarks and patentsNOT long ago, the value of companies resided mostly in things you could see and touch. Today it liesincreasingly in intangible assets such as the McDonald's name, the patent for Viagra and the rights toSpiderman. Baruch Lev, a finance professor at New York University's Stern School of Business, puts theimplied value of intangibles on American companies' balance sheets at about $6 trillion, or two-thirds ofthe total. Much of this consists of intellectual property, the collective name for copyrights, trademarksand patents. Increasingly, companies and their clever bankers are using these assets to raise cash.The method of choice is securitisation, the issuing of bonds based on the various revenues thrown off byintellectual property. Late last month Dunkin' Brands, owner of Dunkin' Donuts, a snack-bar chain, raised$1.7billion by selling bonds backed by, among other things, the royalties it will receive from itsfranchisees. The three private-equity firms that acquired Dunkin' Brands a few months ago have used thecash to repay the money they borrowed to buy the chain. This is the biggest intellectual-propertysecuritisation by far, says Jordan Yarett of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, a law firm that hasworked on many such deals.Securitisations of intellectual property can be based on revenues from copyrights, trademarks (such aslogos) or patents. The best-known copyright deal was the issue in 1997 of $55m-worth of “Bowie Bonds”supported by the future sales of music by David Bowie, a British rock star. Bonds based on the films ofDreamWorks, Marvel comic books and the stories of John Steinbeck have also been sold. As well asDunkin' Brands, several restaurant chains and fashion firms have issued bonds backed by logos andbrands.Intellectual-property deals belong to a class known as operating-asset securitisations. These differ fromstandard securitisations of future revenues, such as bonds backed by the payments on a 30-yearmortgage or a car loan, in that theborrower has to make his asset work. If investors are to recoup theirmoney, the assets being securitised must be “actively exploited”, says Mr Yarett: DreamWorks mustcontinue to churn out box-office hits.The market for such securitisations is still small. Jay Eisbruck, of Moody's, a rating agency, reckons thataround $10 billion-worth of bonds ar e outstanding. But there is “big potential,” he says, pointing out thatlicensing patented technology generates $100 billion a year and involves thousands of companies.Raising money this way can make sense not only for clever private-equity firms, but also for companieswith low (or no) credit ratings that cannot easily tap the capital markets or with few tangible assets ascollateral for bank loans. Some universities have joined in, too. Yale built a new medical complex withsome of the roughly $100m it raised securitising patent royalties from Zerit, an anti-HIV drug.It may be harder for investors to decide whether such deals are worth their while. They are, after all,highly complex and riskier than standard securitisations. The most obvious risk is that the investorscannot be sure that the assets。
经济学人封面文章中英对照
货币战争|《经济学人》：美元走势节节高，美国是否又要开始剪羊毛2016-12-06从余启欢迎打开“我与我们的世界”，从此，让我们一起“纵览世界之风云变幻、洞察社会之脉搏律动、感受个体之生活命运、挖掘自然之点滴奥妙”。
我与我们的世界，既是一个“奋斗”的世界，也是一个“思考”的世界。
奋而不思则罔，思而不奋则殆。
这个世界，你大，它就大；你小，它就小。
欢迎通过上方公众号名称打开公众号“查看历史信息”来挖掘往期文章，因为，每期都能让你“走近”不一样的世界、带给你不一样的精彩。
本期导读：当今世界，各国经济之间联系的紧密程度，前所未有。
全球化进程，也如历史车轮一样，始终在滚滚向前。
尽管历史上出现过一次又一次反对全球化的浪潮，但全球化总体上呈现出来的那种逐渐深化趋势，依然是一往无前的。
在逐步迈向一体化的全球经济体系中，各国的分量很显然不在同一个档次上，各国在世界经济中所具有的相应话语权，也必然相差悬殊。
整个全球经济体系，就是一个生态链，各个国家都得依照自己所处的那个位置来获得生存、实现发展。
当前，位于全球经济生态链顶端的国家，非美国莫属。
过去的几十年间，随着其他国家特别是新兴市场国家的崛起，美国在全球经济体系中的相对影响力呈现出一种持续下降的趋势。
不过，到目前为止，依然没有哪个国家能与美国相抗衡，特别是在金融领域。
美国之所以能称霸全球，硬实力和软实力缺一不可。
在美国的实力组合中，美元所起到的具体作用，尽管不那么显而易见，但总能在美国需要的时候，起到四两拨千斤的功效。
美国每次发生内部危机，就会通过美元这个百试不爽的工具来解救自己。
20世纪80年代初期，美国财政赤字急剧膨胀，贸易逆差大幅增长，美国就通过《广场协议》实现美元贬值，减轻了国内债务，并剪了全世界，特别是日本，一次羊毛。
近期，美元表现异常，特朗普上台后，是否又要开始剪全世界的羊毛？The mighty dollar强势美元Why a strengthening dollar is bad for the world economy美元走强，世界遭殃The rise of the greenback looks like something to welcome. That is to ignore the central role the dollar plays in global finance有些人觉得，美元走强是个好消息，那是因为没看到美元在全球金融体系中所扮演的关键角色。
财经记者必读书目
1.《经济学原理》英阿佛里德-马歇尔华夏出版社点评：所有财经记者都应好好一读的基本书目。
2。
《国富论》英亚当-斯密华夏出版社点评：西方经济学经典巨著，财经记者必读书目。
3.《世界是平的：21世纪简史》托马斯-弗里德曼湖南科技出版社点评：美国所有MBA、全美国州长、国会议员都在读此书。
2005年英国金融时报、高盛财经书大奖获奖书。
中国财经记者开阔视野的应读之书。
4.《一个人在华尔街的成长》美彼得-林奇机械工业出版社点评：美国第一基金经理彼得-林奇的投资之道，让你受益一生的好书。
5.《战胜华尔街》美彼得-林奇机械工业出版社点评：美国第一基金经理彼得-林奇的25条投资黄金法则，领略全球最成功基金经理眼中的华尔街，一本了解华尔街的必读书。
6.《大投机家》——匈牙利安德烈-科斯托拉尼海南出版社点评：欧洲证券教父安德烈-科斯托拉尼关于金钱与股市的思考。
7.《贼巢》——美詹姆斯-B斯图尔特国际文化出版公司点评：关于美国80年代垃圾债券金融风暴事件的最权威纪实，普利策新闻获奖作品。
8.《股票作手回忆录》美埃德文-拉斐尔上海财经大学出版社点评：经历90年长盛不衰的投资经典作品，教育了一代代美国证券投资人。
9.《巴菲特致股东的信：股份公司教程》美沃伦-巴菲特、劳伦斯-A坎安宁机械工业出版社点评：摩根大通银行推荐给美国百万富翁的10本必读书之一，关于价值投资的经典著作、巴菲特理论权威来源。
10.《伟大的博弈：华尔街金融帝国的崛起》美约翰-S-戈登中信出版社点评：400页走完华尔街350年金融冒险与复杂成长的历史，一本关于华尔街历史的不错快餐。
11.《对冲基金风云录》美巴顿-比格斯中信出版社点评：美国第一投资策略师、摩根斯坦利首席战略官关于对冲基金的佳作。
12.《蜡烛图方法：从入门到精通》美斯蒂芬-W-比加洛机械工业出版社点评：一本关于股市技术分析的基础必读书。
13.《1929年大崩盘》美国约翰-肯尼斯-加尔布雷恩上海财经大学出版社点评：学术界和证券投资界经常大量引用的典范性著作。
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经济学人阅读指南关于经济学人，很多童鞋听到大神说它是阅读必读、考研圣经什么的，就心急的下载了，打开就看见满屏幕的英文，生涩的难词是拦路虎，复杂的概念拗口又难读，实在是让人不得要领，读完了也觉得没有什么提高。
福利君意外在豆瓣上发现了一篇不错的心得，是一个英语专业小牛牛写的，这里拿过来大家一起学习一下，大家可以借鉴里面优秀的方法，在此也对原作者卡西表示感谢。
为了防止帖子沉没，对文中部分内容设置了回复可见，大家请见谅~文章稍微有些长，不过对于需要的童鞋一定是值得阅读的~-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------楼主是英语专业，学英语用英语很多年，听说读，都是自然的学习和渐进提高，没有特别用什么方法。
但写作方面确实有一点心得，慢慢在这里写一些和大家分享。
谢谢大家的反馈，今天先上一个啰嗦，但却十分必要的Introduction学习写英文，和学习任何其他学问一样，一要用心，二要有行动，三要有毅力。
没心没行动没毅力，只是拿人家的资料人家的清单，杂七杂八搜罗一大堆，不经过自己思考的过程，很难学好。
所以，开讲之前，大家要有心里准备：你需要动脑，动眼，动手。
我这里要说的英文写作，不是讲怎么开篇，怎么论证，怎么总结。
写英语文章和中文文章同理，大家多少都学过了。
还不明白的，先上网找内容自学着吧。
怎么写段落，怎么写整篇文章，以后有机会再谈。
这里要说的，是怎么遣词造句，写好一个个的英文句子。
可能有些人觉得自己的句子挺好，只是文章结构不好，只是脑袋里没有观点，那么以后我会给出例句进行点评修改，看看好的英文句子应该是怎样的。
首先，我们为什么要写好英文？原因可以粗略地分为两类：一，要通过一个到多个英语考试：四六级，专四专八，翻译考试，考研英语，雅思托福，毕业后其他职称考试，等等，这些都有写作的内容。
二，某些职业，对英语写作能力有较高的要求。
如果你的写作能力出类拔萃，那么求职升职，转换行业，肯定很加分。
当然，另外还有一个大大的bonus，英语句子写得越来越好好，越来越流畅，在口语上也会有相应的反应。
以上所列考试的英文写作有个共性：一般都要求写论证型或观点型文章。
那么，我们应该走直路：直接从出色的论证文章和观点文章着手学习。
通过精读文学类作品或文章学习英文写作，是大大的弯路。
不可行，不建议。
因为，文学语言不符合考试写作的特点，而且，工作中的写作也和文学类语言甚少共性。
接下来，我们要确定学习材料。
楼主必须老实地说，我对国内市场上的学习材料了解很少。
这个经，那个法，我一概不知。
我的经验是：学习资料不在于多，而在于恰当，在于精。
上学时，我没看过任何英文课外辅导书，没背过任何单词书。
而工作以后，为了提高英语写作水平，通过翻译考试，我也只用了一种材料：《经济学人》杂志，。
Economics杂志是我迄今为止用来提高英语的唯一材料。
为什么选择Economist？因为它的英文是真正的高手之作，国内任何经过改写编辑的教材和它没有可比性。
它众所周知地规范，优美，风格简练，紧凑，而且大部分文章都是信息和观点类型，十分符合我们英文写作考试的特点。
简单总结下，Economist文章有如下和我们的考试需求相关的特点：- 集中了大量论证和观点型文章的典型句型- 集中了大量经济，时政，科技，文化等写作常考领域的词汇- 有许多关于中国的文章，既可以吸收信息，也可以学习观点，考试时巧妙运用，不愁没想法- 多种数字的表达方法，- 多种句式和结构的灵活表达- ……看到这里，你可能猜到了一点点：我们也要列清单了。
没错，自己找，自己列。
用Economist的文章来学英语写作，适合什么人群呢？大家的首要目标是通过写作考试，而考试的难度越大，适合度就越高。
反之同理。
当然，如果你四级都过不了，却非要考高翻啥的，那是违背自然规律的，不列为适合人群。
如果你觉得这本杂志对你太难，也没问题。
你可以使用程度较低的学习材料。
但是，你的材料必须具有我上面列出来的Economist的文章的大部分特点，否则收效会小很多。
材料可以不同，但方法是一样的：以好的英文句子为范文，学习，发现，总结，copy。
所谓偷师学艺。
楼主不建议使用你们自己的英语课本。
为啥呢？原因之一是，课文都被老师榨干了，味同嚼蜡，不适合再拿来琢磨。
另一个原因你可以在上文找到。
特别提一下广泛阅读英文书的意义。
楼主虽然没看过辅导书，没背过单词书，但是从大学开始就有读原文小说的习惯。
大量英文阅读的意义在于，它让各种语言现象和单元慢慢地渗透到你的大脑里，并且牢牢呆住不走了。
同学们，必须读英文书啊。
今天开始谈提高写作心得的第一部分：写作加分速成法楼主是个痛恨考试的人，除非万不得已，绝不自讨苦吃。
几年前，因为职业发展规划需要，需要通过一个翻译考试，那是唯一一个可以证明英文写作能力的考试，70分通过，通过率极低，据说是3%。
楼主对自己当时水平的估计是，应该在通过的危险边缘。
该考试可以自己指定考试日期，随报随考。
楼主提前两个月报名，交了昂贵的考试费，准备背水一战，集中在周末复习，平时下班后该干嘛干嘛。
这样准备的时间一共是十几天，每天4小时左右。
当时手上有不少考试真题等资料。
但我想，汉译英考试，真正考的就是英语写作能力，因为中文完全能读懂看透。
但是英文，脑子里必须有足够多的搭配，足够多的句型，且对英文有足够的操控能力（the ability to manipulate the language），才能够把任何复杂的中文内容写成体面又合理的英文。
于是，我把真题都抛到一边，一篇都没翻，定下心来，用Economist的文章急攻英文写作。
第一步，选择文章文章话题的地域性：因为准备时间只有十几天，所以文章的选择很有技巧，必须跟考试内容有最大的相关性。
中译英考试的文章有很大可能是关于中国的话题，复习的时候选择中国题材的文章会在词汇内容上占优势。
于是上Economist的网站进行站内搜索，关键词China, 得到了它数据库里所有现有中国题材的文章。
然后进行筛选，主要选择经济类和科技类。
纯政治类一概pass, 不可能考。
文章的难易程度：我的目的是短平快提高写作，不是英文理解能力。
所以文章必须是对我来说相对简单的，无需查字典，无需仔细琢磨，一看就能读懂，各种句型简单易学。
很多中国题材的文章正好有这个特点。
我猜可能是有中国作者贡献的原因。
给童鞋们的建议：如果你们的目的是过级考试写作，考研写作，或翻译考试，那么选择中国题材的英文文章学习，基本上是不会出错的，你能得到很多与中国当前时政社会话题相关的词汇内容。
第二步，基本准备工作我当时打印了30来篇文章（相当于大学里1年的精读教材量吧），每一篇单独用订书针订好。
除平时写字的笔以外，另外准备彩色highlight笔，还有一沓空白A4打印纸。
这些细节都是个人的习惯了。
因为时间上很紧促，所以这些细节到位的话，会感觉复习起来比较顺手，效率高。
第三步：读文章，寻找实用可学的语言点我们平时都肯定写过英文，或者翻译过一些句子，无论我们是否有过总结，肯定有一些词汇和结构是我们需要的，是我们想写的，但却不知道英文是什么，或者怎么去用。
现在，我们就是带着这样一个找词汇找结构的目的去读文章。
带着疑问去读，去寻找自己能用到的词汇和语言结构。
你要找的语言结构，必须是你曾经见过，并且理解其意思和语法意义的；只不过，你从来没有注意过它的用法，更谈不上自己在口语和写作中正确使用。
切记，我这个方法的目的，不是学习新语言现象，而是把自己现有库存的某些语言现象，从熟识，变成会用；写作会用，最好口语也能用。
因为每个人的语言库存不一样，水平起点不同，因此每个人找到的语言点是不一样的。
但是，每个人整理出来的语言清单，对自己的“当前意义”是最大的。
当你经过了这个阶段的语言冲刺，之后又积累了新的语言库存后，这个清单对你的意义就会越来越小。
我现在看我几年前整理的清单，觉得已经没什么用处了，太简单了。
第四步：将找到的词汇和结构分类做清单拿出空白打印纸和笔，开始读文章，看到有用的词语结构就在文章里做标记，同时分类抄在不同的空白打印纸上，每个类别写上标题，如《动词/名词结构》，一条条往下抄。
下面是我按类别整理的一些词语和结构，比较随意，只是举例给大家看，这清单到底是怎样的，不建议大家使用我的清单。
大家可以根据自己的习惯和理解分类，自己用的，怎么清楚怎么来。
最重要的是，一定要分类记录。
1. 动词/名词结构经济减速Economic slowdown突出的问题noticeable problems显著的效果marked effects were achieved越来越严重… is worsening看见它的不多not many have seen it.人类the human race人类（定语）the human environment取得经济效益gain significant economic benefits引起公正注意catch public attention面临…的问题are confronted with problems采取有效措施take effective actions/measures从…的角度from the perspective of xxx严厉打击腐败clamp down on corruption收取回扣receive kickbacks有益于xxx is conducive to xxx优先考虑give priority to sth /sth takes precedence over想办法devise ways to抑制价格增长restrain price growth缓和mitigate, moderate保持上升的趋势remain on an upward trend激烈竞争intense competition取得进步/在。
方面取得进步achieve improvements in居民消费价格consumer prices没有给与应有重视is not given due weight勉强糊口live a hand-to-mouth existence面临压力come under pressure to do亲密，团结紧密，组织严密, a close-knit family / organization 造成/施加压力place stress on权力受到极大限制authority was tightly circumscribed进一步破坏further undermine the situation经不起检验/考证can’t stand scrutiny风险加剧risk is mounting规矩繁琐the rules surrounding this are cumbersome/the rules are cumbersome 培养/输送人才turn out talented people精细分工elaborate division of labor/market取得重大科技成果accomplish/pull off impressive scientific feats在。