Fair and(1) competition in government procurement around the world is good business and good public policy. Competitive pricing, product(2)and performanceimprovements result from competitive practices and help ensure that government authoritiesget the best (3)for the public they serve. 空白(2)处填()
Fair and(1) competition in government procurement around the world is good business and good public policy. Competitive pricing, product(2)and performanceimprovements result from competitive practices and help ensure that government authoritiesget the best (3)for the public they serve. 空白(1)处填()
Passage 2
[A] Certainly commercialism generates a fair amount of regularity. For example, when a non-commercial or anti-commercial movement or organization emerges, it is immediately scanned as a business opportunity—for the sale of legal services, counseling, gear, memberships, and material exploitable by the news and entertainment industry. Money-free zones are hard to find in the social landscape, only features more saturated or less saturated with commercialism. To take another example, booms and busts occur repeatedly. Booms involve overconfidence in technology, loose credit, excess capacity, manipulation and swindling, gold rush fever. Busts involve loss, bankruptcy, unemployment, and panic. Safeguards are installed too late to prevent busts and removed too soon to prevent booms. It's the way we do things.
[B] The short answer is no. Americans are predictable, very predictable, in their social behavior but erratic in justifying it. This could be interpreted in several ways. All theories, including Foucault's, tend to come up short against reality. America is too crude to suit a European model. And so on. It is more interesting, though, to explore the native pattern in its own right.
[C] As you may have heard too often already, the French historian and social theorist Michel Foucault posited an iron law of cultural hegemony. Local contests and assertions of power, according to him, feed into networks. Cliques, coalitions, institutions, regimes, and social classes channel the friction and flatten orbits into overall strategies of domination. Social structure is power consolidated, including control of wealth. To sustain power, elites are said to create a thick cultural overlay, "hegemonic discourse," that shapes what will be thought and expressed. Its purpose is to make what goes on seem correct. When it is working well, this nefarious process fills people's consciousness with myths, images, spectacles, codes, bodies of knowledge, and assignments more beguiling than the raw power formation they mask.
[D] On balance, however, Americans are poor at mystification. Cover stories on a par with those developed where the cultural overlay was thicker-say afterlife, courtly love, wheel of dharma, proletariat—are hard to come by. Economics, thoroughly mathematized, is indeed mystifying, comparable to priest craft. Yet when economists lapse into ordinary language, they could be mistaken for comedians. Given the recurrence of booms and busts, their term “market efficiency” borders on facetiousness. In any case, the lay audience for studies of booms and busts only seeks clues to timing. Given a chance, they intend to run through the cycle again, this time jumping in sooner and pulling out earlier.
[E] The United States is a business society and always has been. Does it fit Foucault's model—regularity of social relations interlocked with a sophisticated mystique?
[F] Certainly too there are, in some areas of American life, mystifications such as Foucault had in mind, regarded as sacrosanct without awareness of their background. The American lawn, for instance, began with the rich trying to imitate English estates in the wrong climate, whereupon the merely well-to-do took it up in a wave of second hand snobbery The U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Garden Club of America, real estate dealers, landscaping firms, and zoning boards then pushed the lawn farther down and across the class system. Today about $25 billion per year changes hands for seed and fertilizer, pesticides and water, mowing equipment and gasoline. By weight, grass clippings make up the nation's biggest crop. Multitudes, oblivious to origins, profits, and waste, now identify lawn care with civilization.
[G] Thus in the United States a home grown model has to be substituted for Foucault's linkage of power and well-wrought symbolic culture. Behavior is closely attuned to the mobility of capital but haphazardly combined with an uneven cultural overlay.
No jettison of cargo shall be made fair as()unless such cargo is carried in accordance with the recognized custom of the trade.
The World’s Fair won’t be a financial success _____ there are enough visitors.
Practice 2
The Dalton County Fair had 156 exhibitors last year. The Clinton County Fair had 281 exhibitors last year.
The number of exhibitors entering in the fair increases annually, each at its own constant rate. The fair boards agree that if each of these county fairs continues to welcome new exhibitors at the current rate, five years from now they will have the same number of exhibitors for the first time. In subsequent years, the Dalton County Fair will have more exhibitors each year than the Clinton County Fair.
In the table below, identify the rates of increase in annual exhibitors for each fair that together meet the exhibitor forecasts described above. Make only two selections, one in each column.
Three fair coins are tossed at the same time. What is the probability that all three coins will come up heads or all will come up tails?
What is the main reason for having the fair?
The fair breeze blew,the white foam flew/The furrow followed free.这两汉小诗使用了押头韵的修辞(alliteration)。
Fair and(1)competition in government procurement around the world is good business and good public policy. Competitive pricing, product (2)and performance improvements result from competitive practices and help ensure that government authorities get the best (3)for the public they serve.