问答题 Practice 1 　　Some people call him “Guidone”—big Guido. Large in both physical stature and reputation, Guido Rossi, who took over as Telecom Italia's chairman on September 15th following the surprise resignation of Marco Tronchetti Provera, has stood out from the Italian business crowd for more than three decades. Mr. Rossi, who attended Harvard law school in the 1950s and wrote a book on American bankruptcy law, made his name as a corporate lawyer keen on market rules and their enforcement. He has since worked in both private and public sectors, including stints in the Italian Senate and as one of the European Commission's group of company-law experts. As well as running a busy legal practice, he also has a reputation as a corporate troubleshooter and all-round Mr Fix-It, and is often called upon to clean up organisations in crisis. 　　His role at Telecom Italia marks a return to the company he headed for ten months in 1997, during its politically tricky and legally complex privatisation. Before that, Mr Rossi had been sent in to sort out Ferruzzi-Montedison, an agri-business and chemicals group, which had collapsed after magistrates uncovered tangentopoli (“bribesville”).

问答题 Practice 8 　　Over the years, organizations have implemented incentive plans for a variety of reasons: high labor costs, competitive product markets, slow technological advances, and high potential for production bottlenecks. While these reasons are still cited, contemporary arguments for incentive plans focus on pay-for-performance and link compensation rewards to organizational goals. By meshing compensation and organizational objectives, managers believe that employees will assume “ownership” of their jobs, thereby improving their effort and overall job performance. Incentives are designed to encourage employees to put out more effort to complete their job tasks-effort they might not be motivated to expend under hourly and/or seniority-based compensation systems. Financial incentives are therefore offered to improve or maintain high levels of productivity and quality. 　　Do incentive plans work? Various studies have demonstrated a measurable relationship between incentive plans and improved organizational performance. In a survey of organizations with more than 500 employees, conducted by the New York Stock Exchange,70 percent of organizations with gain sharing programs stated that those programs improved productivity. In the area of manufacturing productivity will often improve by as much as 20 percent after the adoption of incentive plans.

问答题 Practice 7 　　Some people would say that the Englishman's home is no longer his castle; that it has become his workshop. This is partly because the average English is keen on working with his own hands and partly because he feels, for one reason or another, that he must do for himself many household jobs for which, some years ago, he would have hired professional help. The main reason for this is a financial one.. the high cost of labor has meant that the builders and decorators' costs have reached a level which makes them prohibitive for house-proud English people of modest means. So, if they wish to keep their houses looking bright and smart, they have to tackle some of the repairs and decorating themselves. As a result, there has grown up in the post-war years what is sometimes referred to as the “Do-it-yourself Movement”. 　　The “Do-it-yourself Movement” began with home decorating but has since spread into a much wider field. Nowadays there seem to be very few things that cannot be made by the “do-it- yourself” method.

问答题 Practice 3 　　Dolly was no ordinary lamb. She was cloned from a single mammary cell of an adult ewe, overturning long- held scientific dogma that had declared such a thing biologically impossible. Her birth set off a race in laboratories around the world to duplicate the breakthrough and raised the specter of human cloning. 　　A decade later, scientists are starting to come to grips with just how different Dolly was. Dozens of animals have been cloned since that first little lamb and it’s becoming increasingly clear that they are all, in one way or another, defective. 　　It’s tempting to think of clones as perfect carbon copies of the original—down to every hair and quirk of temperament. It turns out, though, that there are various degrees of genetic replication. Not only are clones separated from the original template by time—-in Dolly’s case, six years—but they are also the product of an unnatural molecular mechanism that turns out not to be very good at making identical copies. 　　But scientists see a role for cloning in treating human diseases—and perhaps someday conquering some of man’s most intractable conditions. It may be another 10 years or more before the approach yields anything safe and reliable enough to be used in real patients, and there is no guarantee that it will ever be successful. But nobody thought Dolly was possible until she made history that warm July night 10 years ago.

问答题 Practice 3 　　In-state tuition. For decades, it was the one advantage big state schools had that even the Ivy League couldn’t match, in terms of recruiting the best and the brightest to their campuses. But these days, that’s no longer necessarily the case. Starting this September, some students will find a Harvard degree cheaper than one from many public universities. Harvard officials sent shock waves through academia last December by detailing a new financial-aid policy that will charge families making up to $180,000 just 10 % of their household income per year, substantially subsidizing the annual cost of more than $ 45,600 for all but its wealthiest students. The move was just the latest in what has amounted to a financial-aid bidding war in recent years among the U. S.’s élite universities. 　　Though Harvard’s is the most generous to date, Princeton, Yale and Stanford have all launched similar plans to cap tuition contributions for students from low-and middle-income families. Indeed, students on financial aid at nearly every Ivy stand a good chance of graduating debt-free, thanks to loan-elimination programs introduced over the past five years. And other exclusive schools have followed their lead by replacing loans with grants and work-study aid. And several more schools are joining the no-loan club this fall. Even more schools have taken steps to reduce debt among their neediest students.

问答题 Practice 3 　　Einstein was one of the intellectual heroes of history, and such heroes, like Newton and like Darwin, are always twofold — rebels in their work and heretics in society. He prized the integrity of man's personality more highly than man's science. Back in the 1920's he said, in some desultory interview, that two discoveries might destroy mankind: atomic energy and universal thought-reading. The wry prophecy sums up Einstein's passions. He saw deeply into nature, her promise and her threat, but he was not too abstracted to remember .the fallibility of men. For him the key to the world lay in the minds of men. He fought for freedom of the mind from his rebellious school-days and the manifesto of 1914 to his dying day. In his last years he spoke out constantly against the inquisition which then darkened America. But even his love for science and for freedom was not abstract. These were for him the high places of the human mind, and he lived those; he loved people. 　　His richness of sympathy made him a symbol to an age. It carried his ideas beyond their scientific setting so that, more profoundly than the work of any philosopher, they changed the outlook of philosophy. All his ideas grew from one conception: that the world is not given to us absolutely, but is something which we actively observe and thereby shape. For Einstein was a practical thinker; to him, truth was that which is experienced in action. When he died, on April 18, 1955, Einstein had created a new empiricism, as revolutionary and as lasting as that with which Galileo laid the foundation of science.

问答题 Practice 6 　　If there's a threat of dangerous deflation—a general fall in prices—the causes lie as much in Europe and Japan as in the United States. The inevitable collapse of America's speculative boom need not have been especially damaging if the world's other advanced economies were healthy. Their expanding appetite for imports would have bolstered the United States and so-called emerging market countries, from Brazil to South Korea. The trouble is that other advanced economies aren't healthy. 　　Deflation could emerge from simultaneous slumps in the world's three major economies. Prices drop because there's too little global demand chasing too much global supply—everything from steel to shoes. Japan's ills are well known. Its banks are awash in bad loans. Less understood (at least in the United States) is the fact that Europe's troubles stem significantly from Germany. Germany is Europe's “sick man”, just as Japan is Asia's. Only 15 years ago, these countries seemed poised to assume leadership of the world economy. Now they are dragging it down.

问答题 Practice 3 　　Energy-saving vehicles were part of the Green Transportation Festival in the US in 2003. The vehicles shown were designed to reduce America’s dependence on oil and help the environment. 　　There are exhibits of cars and buses at the festivals. Most of them use little gas or use another kind of fuel such as natural gas. People are also urged to consider simpler ways of getting around, such as walking, biking and using public transportation systems. 　　The United States has less than five per cent of the world’s population, but uses about twenty-five per cent of the world’s oil. More than half of the nation’s oil is imported. Most of it goes to transportation. 　　Festival organizers said progress in technology was making it possible for Americans to reduce their dependence on oil. That is because the kinds of energy-saving vehicles are increasing. Efforts to reduce oil imports in the United States would also have important environmental benefits. The burning of oil as fuel is responsible for gases blamed for climate change. When gasoline is burned in cars, it also pollutes the air. This leads to many health problems.

问答题 Practice 2 　　The regular use of text messages and e-mails can lower the IQ more than twice as much as smoking marijuana. 　　That is the claim of psychologists who have found that tapping away on a mobile phone or computer keypad or checking them for electronic messages temporarily knocks up to 10 points off the user’s IQ. 　　This rate of decline in intelligence compares unfavourably with the four-point drop in IQ associated with smoking marijuana, according to British researchers, who have labelled the fleeting phenomenon of enhanced stupidity as “infomania”. 　　The noticeable drop in IQ is attributed to the constant distraction of “always on” technology when employees should be concentrating on what they are paid to do. 　　Furthermore, infomania is having a negative effect on work colleagues, increasing stress and dissenting feelings. Nine out of ten polled thought that colleagues who answered e-mails or messages during a face-to-face meeting were extremely rude. Yet one in three Britons believes that it is not only acceptable, but actually diligent and efficient to do so.

问答题 Practice 2 　　President Bill Clinton's My Wife shows US the progress of a remarkable American, who, through his own enormous energies and efforts, made the unlikely journey from Hope, Arkansas, to the White House—a journey fueled by an impassioned interest in the political process which manifested itself at every stage of his life：in college, working as an intern for Senator William Fulbright; at Oxford, becoming part of the Vietnam War protest movement；at Yale Law School, campaigning on the grassroots level for Democratic candidates；back in Arkansas, running for Congress, attorney general, and governor. 　　We see his career shaped by his resolute determination to improve the life of his fellow citizens, all unfaltering commitment to civil rights, and an exceptional Understanding of the practicalities of political life. 　　We come to understand the emotional pressures of his youth—born after his Father's death；caught in the dysfunctional relationship between his feisty, nurturing mother and his abusive stepfather, whom he never ceased to love and whose name he took；drawn to the brilliant, compelling Hillary Rodham, whom he was determined to marry；passionately devoted, from her infancy, to their daughter, Chelsea, and to the entire。Experience of fatherhood; slowly and painfully beginning to comprehend how his early denial of pain led him at times into damaging patterns of behavior.