美英报刊选读Dating and mating for over-35s中文翻译

Lesson 7 ：Cities and Suburbs Are Trading Places远程办公Young Singles, Other ‘Non-Families’ Taking Over Outer Areas, Study Shows研究显示，单身青年和其他“非家庭成员”占据了周边地区By D’Vera Cohn.A role reversal between cities and suburbs is rewriting a demographic script that has dominated American life for decades.城市和郊区之间的角色转换正在改写几十年来主导美国生活的人口统计学脚本。

Young singles, elderly widows and other such “non-family households”now outnumber married-with-children homes in the nation’s suburbs, creating changes in demand for housing, entertainment and services in the communities where most Americans live.在美国的郊区，年轻的单身人士、年老的寡妇和其他类似的“无家庭家庭”现在的数量超过了结婚带孩子的家庭，这就改变了大多数美国人居住的社区对住房、娱乐和服务的需求。

At the same time, the married-with-children families often thought of as typically suburban are increasing in many growing cities of the South and West, according to a study based on the 2000 Census to be released today by the Brookings Institution.与此同时，布鲁金斯学会(Brookings Institution)今天发布的一项基于2000年人口普查的研究显示，在美国南部和西部许多发展中城市，通常被认为是典型的郊区已婚带孩子家庭的人数正在增加。

Lesson4 Is an Ivy League Diploma Worth It？花钱读常春藤名校值不值？1.如果愿意的话，施瓦茨（Daniel Schwartz）本来是可以去一所常春藤联盟（Ivy League）院校读书的。

他只是认为不值。

2.18 岁的施瓦茨被康奈尔大学（Cornell University）录取了，但他最终却去了纽约市立大学麦考利荣誉学院（City University of New York’s Macaulay Honors College），后者是免费的。

3.施瓦茨说，加上奖学金和贷款的支持，家里原本是可以付得起康奈尔的学费的。

但他想当医生，他觉得医学院是更有价值的一项投资。

私立学校医学院一年的花费动辄就要4 万5 美元。

他说，不值得为了一个本科文凭一年花5 万多美元。

4.助学贷款违约率日益攀升，大量的大学毕业生找不到工作，因此越来越多的学生认定，从一所学费不太贵的学校拿到的学位和从一所精英学校拿到的文凭没什么区别，并且不必背负贷款负担。

5.Robert Pizzo 越来越多的学生选择收费较低的公立大学，或选择住在家里走读以节省住房开支。

美国学生贷款行销协会（Sallie Mae）的一份报告显示，2010 年至2011 学年，家庭年收入10 万美元以上的学生中有近25%选择就读两年制的公立学校，高于上一学年12%的比例。

6.这份报告称，这样的选择意味着，在2010 至2011 学年，各个收入阶层的家庭在大学教育上的花费比上一年少9%，平均支出为21,889 美元，包括现金、贷款、奖学金等。

高收入家庭的大学教育支出降低了18%，平均为25,760 美元。

这份一年一度的报告是在对约1,600 名学生和家长进行问卷调查后完成的。

7.这种做法是有风险的。

顶级大学往往能吸引到那些已经不再去其他学校招聘的公司前来招聘。

在许多招聘者以及研究生院看来，精英学校的文凭还是更有吸引力的。

Lesson 35 Spamming the Worldby BY BRAD STONE AND JENNIFER LIN | NEWSWEEKFrom the magazine issue dated Aug 19, 2002In A Popularity Contest, …Bulk E-Mailers‟ Would Rank Just Above Child Pornographers. But The Scourge Of The Internet Is Defending Its Vocation.1. Al Ralsky would like you to have thick, lustrous hair. He also wants to help you buy a cheap car, get a loan regardless of your credit history and earn a six-figure income from the comfort of your home. But according to his critics, Ralsky‟s no t a do-gooder, but a bane of the Internet–a spammer, responsible for deluging e-mail accounts and choking the Internet service providers (ISPs) that administer them. In real life, the 57-year-old father of three lives in a middle-class suburb of Detroit. He started bulk e-mailing seven years ago, when he was flat broke. To buy his first two computer servers, he had to sell his 1994 Toyota Camry. These days Ralsky sends out more than 30 million e-mails a day and raves about the possibilities of marketing on the Internet. “It‟s the most fair playing field in the world,” he says. “It makes you equal with any Fortune 500 company.”2. In a popularity contest among Net users, spammers would probably rank only slightly above child pornographers. Spam–unsolicited messages that make their way to your e-mail inbox with misleading subject lines and dubious propositions (from pyramid schemes to porno come-ons)–accounts for 30 to 50 percent of all e-mail traffic on the Net. Users are fed up, and big ISPs like AOL and Earthlink, increasingly overwhelmed by the excess traffic, are taking some spam operators to court. Meanwhile, vigilante anti-spam organizations like SpamCop are aggressively blacklisting spam operators and publishing their home and family information on the Web. Anti-spam sentiment has even evolved to the point where spammers themselves are feeling like victims, and are defending what they call an honest, legal living. Maryland e-mailer Alan Moore, also known as “Dr. Fat” for his herbal weight-loss pills, says spammers are “helping the economy and adding to the GNP. People need to realize his.”3. Spam operations are often, by necessity, fly-by-night businesses. Bulk e-mailers gather addresses using “spambots” like the $179 Atomic Harvester, a piece of software that scours the Internet 24/7, vacuuming up addresses it encounters on bulletin boards and directories. Spammers often don‟t charge clients anything up front, but will take 40 to 50 percent of the revenue an ad generates (or, with products like insurance, $7 a lead). Since most U.S. ISPs have policies that prohibit sending out spam, the majority of spammers operate by sending their messages to “blind” relays, computers in China, South Korea or Taiwan that redirect the e-mail and make it difficult to trace.4. Recently, life has become more onerous for bulk e-mailers. Companies and ISPs are using new software to identify and stop spam as it comes into the network, before it gets distributed to individual inboxes. (This is why spam subject lines are now misleadingly banal or end in numbers: to trick the software, not you.) And with so many more marketing messages clogging Net accounts, users are increasingly inclined to hit the delete button when they see a piece of spam. One bulk e-mailer says that when she started spamming in 1999, she could send out 100,000 e-mails and get 25 responses. Today, she has to send out a million messages to get the same response (a .0025 percent hit rate).5. While most spammers claim they‟ve made hundreds of thousands–some even say millions–of dollars in past years by taking big cuts of their clients‟ revenue, they‟re tight-lipped about their current income. founder Steve Linford, whose anti-spam agents snoop on the e-mailers‟ private online forums to stay on top of trends in the business, says there‟s good reason: “We know they hardly make anything because they‟re always complaining about it.” Several spam operations are also being threatened by litigation. For example, Al Ralsky has been sued in Virginia state court for allegedly sending millions of messages in mid-2000 that crashed the servers of Verizon Online. (His lawyer denies the charges.) The trial is set for this fall, but the judge in the Ralsky case has already ruled a spammer can be held liable in any state where his messages are received.6. In a world where every niche industry speaks loudly to defend its interests, perhaps it‟s not surprising that spammers are joining forces and trying to fight back. Thirty prolific e-mailers recently banded together in something called the Global E-mail Marketing Association (GEMA). The director, a southern California-based e-mailer who would like to be called “Tara,” says the purpose of GEMA is to regulate the industry and ensure its members abide by certain rules, such as allowing recipients to opt out of any list. She also wants to improve the public‟s perception of spamming. First step: changing the name. “We are …commercial bulk e-mailers‟, not spammers,” she says. “I would appreciate if NEWSWEEK would at least give us the dignity of that.”7. Ronnie Scelson is another spammer showing defiance in the face of distaste for his profession. The 28-year-old father of three from Slidell, La., dropped out of high school in the ninth grade but says he‟s made millions sending o ut 560 million e-mail messages a week, hawking everything from travel deals to lingerie. As a result, he drives a 2001 Corvette, and recently bought a five-bedroom home with a game room and pool. In May, the company Scelson founded, Opt-In Marketing, turned the tables and sued two ISPs and three anti-spam organizations in Civil District Court in New Orleans. The suit alleges that the ISPs, New Jersey-based CoVista and its Denver-based backbone provider Qwest, cut off his Internet access and denied his free-speech rights.8. Scelson draws a distinction between his old profession, spamming, and his new one, bulk e-mailing: he says he currently allows people to take themselves off his lists and uses American ISPs to send e-mail instead of foreign relays. But spam is in the eye of the beholder, and recently one of his high-speed Internet lines was temporarily blocked by his new ISP. Now Scelson wonders aloud if playing by the rules is even worth it and threatens to return to his old ways. “I‟m going back to spamm ing. I don‟t care if I have to relay, work through a proxy or spoof an IP address, I‟ll do it.”9. Anti-spammers practically leak venom when it comes to addressing the bid for dignity made by their rivals. Julian Haight, the founder of SpamCop, says spamme rs deserve “every ounce of the image that they have… The correlation between spamming and rip-off deals is unreal.” Verizon exec Tom Daly says spam is insidious because it shifts the costs and burden of handling massive volumes of mail to the network providers. And Internet users: well, no one is exactly clamoring for more e-mail about get-rich-quick schemes or magical ways to enhance their you-know-what. For spammers (er, commercial bulk e-mailers), the quickest route to respectability may be to find another line of work altogether.Find this article at/id/65418。

一，who we are now1.But the president was openly ambivalent, too.2.Because who we are now-a country in which traditional barriers of race, age and gender are crumbling-flows in many ways from what LBJ did then.3.Why exhume the long-dead Johnson on the occasion of one of the most engaging inaugural since George Washington took the oath at Federal Hall…4.His conflicting language underscores the nation’s occasionally wary view of the changes wrought by immigration.5.There is something quintessentially American about a lumbering white man from Texas…6.In the understandable thrill of the inaugural season, all eyes are turned to this single man, all ears attuned to his voice.7.Whatever your politics, the election of the 44th president represents a kind of redemption from the long and tragic history of blacks…8.If you count a generation as roughly 21 years, he was off the mark, since the rapidly inspired backlash shaped politics for more than 40 years9.In 1909,…proposed a literary test to restrict the influx of the “Italians, Russians,Poles,Hungarians”…10.Then,in1952,Congress passed the…Act,which essentially made naturalization colorblind.(平等的对待不同肤色的人)11.The tension between assimilation and separation is eternal, but there is no doubt that this flood of immigration and the breaking down of barriers between previously estranged (疏远的，隔离的)groups within the country has created a much more fluid culture than…12.The key cohort is the 75 million-strong generation known as the millennials(1980-2000)13.perennial:lasting for a long time or forever14.The disparity between older and younger voters was greater in 2008 than at any other time…15.The younger cohort is more diverse than the general population, more female, more secular, less socially conservative and more willing to describe themselves as liberals.16.In the wake of a possible terrorist attack, fear could easily lead to tension, resent and discord.17.witch hunts: an attempt to find and punish people with different opinions18.allude to: mention sth. in an indirect way19.momentous:very important20.mythic:very famousndslide竞选中压倒多数性的选票二，The lost generation1.The most enduring harm is being done to young people who cannot grab onto the first rung of the career ladder.2.Affected are a range of young people,from high school dropouts,to college grades,to newly minted lawyers and…3.Studies suggest that an extended period of young joblessness can significantly depress lifetime income as people get sunk (unable to move)in jobs that are beneath their capabilities, or come to be seen by employers as damaged goods.研究表明，青年人长期失业会大大压低其一生的薪金水平，因为这些人难以摆脱无法发挥自己能力的工作，被雇主视为有缺陷的员工。

LESSON 1The top talent in countries around the world have a new suitor: the Chinese government.China has a severe shortage of skilled talent and, in a policy reversal, has decided to open its doors to talent from around the world. This could mean that the brilliant NASA scientists the U.S. laid off, could find new employment — and a new home — in Shanghai or Beijing.Chinese research labs have long had difficulty recruiting qualified workers to perform necessary research and development, and its corporations struggle to find competent managers. The situation will likely get worse as China's high-tech industries grow and it increases its national R&D spending from the present 1.62 percent of GDP, according to the Chinese government, to the planned 2.5 percent by 2020. China's President Hu Jintao, in May 2010, declared talent development a national priority in order to fill the void. The goal is to dramatically increase the education level of China's workforce and to build an innovation economy.China has launched several high-priority programs to encourage skilled Chinese to return home — all in an effort to meet the country's pressing talent demands.One of these programs is the "Thousand Foreign Talents Program." The program's goal is to bring 2,000 experienced engineers, scientists, and other experts of Chinese origin back from the West. The government also announced that it aims to cultivate 100 "strategic entrepreneurs" who can lead Chinese firms getting into the ranks of the world's top 500 countries.Both efforts are running ahead of target according to Dr. Huiyao Wang, the Director General of the Center for China and Globalization and an advisor to the Chinese government. China had recruited more than 1,500 "high quality talents," according to Wang, and 300 returnees had been enrolled in management training courses by August 2011. The courses were conducted by senior ministers. These individuals, while re-learning how to operate successfully within the Chinese system, are expected to serve as a critical catalyst in transforming China's innovation environment in ways that will enhance the country's competitive edge across a range of key, strategic industries.China is getting more ambitious, based on the initial recruitment successes of the returnee program.The Chinese government invited me to attend the International Conference on the "Exchange of Talent" held in Shenzhen on Nov. 5. Vice Premier, Zhang Dejiang launched China's "Thousand Foreign Talents Program," which, for the first time, opens China's doors to skilled foreigners to secure long-term employment in China. The Chinese government announced that it will allow foreign nationals to take senior roles in science and technology sectors and state-owned enterprises. They will also pay foreigners salaries equal to what they can earn at top paying jobs in America. And the government announced that it intends to offer permanentresident-type visas to foreign entrepreneurs.This announcement was front-page news in China, and its importance should not be underestimated in the U.S. where these developments were not widely covered. These programs, which were announced with amazing fanfare, represent a significant break from the traditional "use Chinese" policies and a greater openness to the outside world. Chinese governors and senior officials from across the country participated in the ceremonies, and the Chinese government claimed the conference had 100,000 attendees. The festivities that accompanied this were nothing short of dazzling, with cultural entertainers and acrobats brought in from all over China.Denis Fred Simon, author and Vice-Provost for International Affairs at the University of Oregon was one of the nine foreign experts at the Shenzhen conference. China, said Simon, sees talent as the next big global race for driving competitiveness and innovation. The country is determined to win this race if only to ensure it can complete the goal of transforming its economy. Wang also explained that the Chinese see this new talent pool as the key to moving from a "made in China" orientation to a "created in China" capability. China's future growth, continued Wang, will rely more on the new talent strategy, even as its past successes were built mainly on its population dividend and investment.But sometimes things aren't as rosy as they seem.Some of the returnees have found themselves victims of discrimination and petty jealousy from those who stayed behind. Moreover, they have struggled to re-adapt to China's relationship-oriented culture, which stands in sharp contrast to the performance-oriented culture of the West. Compared to the generally transparent set of rules and decision-making processes that are commonplace in U.S. and European research and university settings, returnees are frequently confounded by the "personalized" ways research proposals are evaluated and research grants are distributed. The reality is that despite the good intentions of the program, the Chinese research environment remains plagued by plagiarism, fraud, and other scandals.There is an even greater challenge, however. Returnees are refusing to make full-time commitments to their new Chinese employers. Many have returned only sporadically, often not meeting the stated residency requirements of the Thousand Talents Program.The best of the Chinese talent pool abroad has not yet chosen to return to China, especially in the science and technology fields, said Simon. Some who were considering returning home, he said, are still watching and waiting as their peers cope with the challenges of returning. Family considerations also pose an important barrier, said Simon, as many Chinese expatriates based overseas would prefer their children to complete their education abroad and not have to suffer through China's "examination hell" prior to college.Discussions with Chinese government leaders in Shenzhen made it clear that Chinese leaders are not satisfied with the level of innovation in the country. I told them that I didn't believe that China could fix this problem merely through returnees. China would need to learn some of the techniques that Indian industry has employed to upgrade its workforce. China's most critical challenge will be to create a more conducive environment for entrepreneurship. Innovation requires risk-taking, breaking existing systems and challenging the norms. Within Hu Jintao's model of a "harmonious" society (what he calls "hexie shehui"), this presents some real challenges.Until China allows and encourages more "out of the box" thinking and behavior, it simply won't innovate, nor will it produce the types of breakthroughproducts top Chinese leaders wish to see coming out of China's research labs and key enterprises.BWCHINESE中文网讯，曾在美国国家航空航天局任职的精英科学家们将在上海或北京安新家。

The Decline of Neatness 行为标准的蜕化By Norman CousinsAnyone with a passion for hanging labels on people or things should have little difficulty in recognizing that an apt tag for our time is the “Unkempt Generation”. 任何一个喜欢给别人或事物贴标签的人应该不难发现我们这个时代合适的标签是“邋遢的一代”。

I am not referring solely to college kids. The sloppiness virus has spread to all sectors of society," People go to all sorts of trouble and expense to look uncombed, unshaved. unpressed.3 我说这话不仅仅是针对大学生。

邋遢这种病毒已经蔓延到社会各个部分。

人们刻意呈现一幅蓬头散发、边幅不修、衣着不整的形象。

The symbol of the times is blue jeans—not just blue jeans in good condition but jeans that are frayed, torn, discolored. They don't get that way naturally. No one wants blue jeans that are crisply clean or spanking new. 如今时代潮流的象征是穿蓝色牛仔裤--不是完好的牛仔裤，而是打磨过的，撕裂开的，和褪色了的牛仔裤。

正常穿着磨损很难达到上述效果。

没有人喜欢穿干净崭新的牛仔裤。

Manufacturers recognize a big market when they see it, and they compete with one another to offer jeans（that are made to look as though they've just been discarded by clumsy house painters after ten years of wear. ）生产商意识到这将是个潜力巨大的市场，于是展开了激烈地竞争，生产出的牛仔裤好像是笨拙的油漆工人穿了十年之后扔掉的一样。

英美报刊选读_课文word整合版Unit2 Gender IssuesMen turn to jobs women usually do 1.HOUSTON - Over the last decade, Americanmen of all backgrounds have begun flocking to fields such as teaching, nursing and waiting tables that have long been the province of women.2."The way I look at it is that anything, basically,that a woman can do, a guy can do," said Miguel Alquicira, who graduated from high school when construction and manufacturing jobs were scarce and became a dental assistant.3.The trend began well before the crash,andappears to be driven by a variety of factors, including financial concerns, quality-of-life issues and a gradual erosion ofg ender stereotypes.4.In interviews, about two dozen men played downthe economic considerations, saying that the stigma associated with choosing such jobs had faded, and that the jobs were appealing not just because they offered stable employment, but because they were more satisfying.5."I.T. is just killing viruses and clearing paperjams all day," said Scott Kearney, 43, who tried information technology and other fields before becoming a nurse in the pediatric intensive care unit at Children's Memorial Hermann Hospital in Houston.6.An analysis of United States census data by TheNew York Times shows that from 2000 to 2010, occupations that are more than 70 percent female accounted for almost a third of all job growth for men, double the share of the previousdecade. 7.That does not mean that men are displacing women - those same jobs accounted for almost two-thirds of women's job growth. But in Texas, for example, the number of men who are registered nurses nearly doubled in that time period.8.The shift includes low-wage jobs as well.Nationally, two-thirds more men were bank tellers, almost twice as many were receptionists and two-thirds more were waiting tables in 2010 than a decade earlier.9.Even more striking is the type of men who aremaking the shift. From 1970 to 1990, according to a study by Mary Gatta, senior scholar at Wider Opportunities for Women, an organization based in Washington, D.C., and Patricia A. Roos, a sociologist at Rutgers University in New Jersey, men who took so-called pink-collar jobs tended to be foreign-born, non-English speakers with low education levels.10.Now, though, the trend has spread among men ofnearly all races and ages, more than a third of whom have a college degree. In fact, the shift is most pronounced among young, white, college-educated men like Charles Reed, a sixth-grade math teacher at Patrick Henry Middle School in Houston.11.Mr. Reed, 25, intended to go to law school after atwo-year stint with Teach for America, a national teacher corps of recent college graduates who spend two years helping under-resourced urban and rural public schools. But Mr. Reed fell in love with teaching. He says the recession had little to do with it, though he believes that, by limiting prospects for new law school graduates, it made his father, a lawyer, more accepting.12.To the extent that the shift to "women's work"has been accelerated by recession, the change may reversewhen the economy recovers. "Are boys today saying, 'I want to grow up and be a nurse?'" asked Heather Boushey, senior economist at the Center for American Progress."Or are they saying, 'I want a job that's stable and recession-proof?'"13.Daniel Wilden, a 26-year-old Army veteran andnursing student, said he had gained respect for nursing when he saw a female medic use a Leatherman tool to save the life of his comrade."She was a beast," he said admiringly.14.More than a few men said their new jobs werefar harder than they imagined. But these men can expect success. Men earn more than women even in female-dominated jobs. And white men in particular who enter those fields easily move up to supervisory positions, a phenomenon known as the glass escalator, said Adia Harvey Wingfield, a sociologist at Georgia State University.15."I hated my job every single day of my life," saidJohn Cook, 55, who got a modest inheritance that let him drop a $150,000-a-year database consultant's job to enter nursing school. 16.His starting salary will be two thirds lower, but database consulting does not typically earn hugs like the one Mr. Cook received from a girl after he took care of her premature baby sister. "It's like, people get paid for doing this kind of stuff?"Mr. Cook said, tears coming to his eyes as he recounted the episode.17.Several men cited the same reasons for seekingout pink-collar work that have drawn women to such careers: less stress and more time at home.At John G. Osborne Elementary School, Adrian Ortiz, 42,joked that he was one of the few Mexicans who made more in his native country, where he was a hard-working lawyer, than he did in the United States as a kindergarten teacher in a bilingual classroom. "Now," he said, "my priorities are family, 100 percent."18.Betsey Stevenson, a labor economist at theUniversity of Pennsylvania, said she was not surprised that changing gender roles at home, where studies show men are shouldering more of the domestic burden, are showing up in career choices. "We tend to study these patterns of what's going on in the family and what's going on in the workplace as separate, but they're very much intertwined," she said. "So as attitudes in the family change, attitudes toward the workplace have changed."19.In a classroom at Houston Community College,Dexter Rodriguez, 35, said his job in tech support had not been threatened by the tough economy. Nonetheless, he said, his family downsized the house, traded the new cars for used ones and began to live off savings, all so Mr.Rodriguez could train for a career he regarded as more exciting.20."I put myself into the recession," he said,"because I wanted to go to nursing school."Unit3 E-CommerceThe Post-Cash Economy1.In London, travelers can buy train tickets withtheir phones - and hold up the phones for the conductor to see. And in Starbucks coffee shops in the United States, customers can wave their phones in front of the cash register and pay for their soy chai lattes.2.Money is not what it used to be, thanks to theInternet. And the pocketbook may soon be destined for the dustbin of history - at least if some technology companies get their way.3.The cellphone increasingly contains theessentials of what we need to make transactions."Identification, payment and personal items," as Hal Varian, the chief economist at Google, pointed out in a new survey conducted by the Pew Research Center in Washington, D.C. "All this will easily fit in your mobile device and will inevitably do so."4.The phone holds and records plenty more vitalinformation: It keeps track of where you are, what you like and who your peers are. That data can all be leveraged to sell you things you never knew you needed.5.The survey, released last month by the PewResearch Center's Internet and American Life Project along with Elon University's Imagining the Internet Center in North Carolina, asked justover 1,000 technologists and social scientists to opine on the future of the wallet in 2020. Nearly two-thirds agreed that "cash and credit cards will have mostly disappeared" and been replaced with "smart" devices able to carry out a transaction.But a third of the survey respondents countered that consumers would fear for the security of transactions over a mobile device and worry about surrendering so much data about their purchasing habits.6.Sometimes, those with fewer options are theones to embrace change the fastest. In Kenya, a service called M-Pesa (pesa is money in Swahili) acts like a banking system for those who may not have a bank account. With a rudimentary cellphone, M-Pesa users can send and receivemoney through a network of money agents, including cellphone shops. And in India, several phone carriers allow their customers to pay utility bills and transfer small amounts of money over their cellphones.7.Several technology companies, big and small,are busy trying to make it easier for us to buy and sell all kinds of things without our wallets. A start-up,WePay, describes itself as a service that allows the smallest merchant - say, a dog walker - to get paid; the company verifies the reputations of payers and sellers by analyzing, among other things, their Facebook accounts. 8. A British start-up, called Blockchain, offers afree iPhone application allowing customers to use a crypto-currency called bitcoins, which users can mint on their computers.9. A company called Square began by offering asmall accessory to enable food cart vendors and other small merchants to accept credit cards on phones and iPads. Square's latest invention allows customers to register an account with Square merchants and pay simply by saying their names. The customer's picture pops up on the merchant's iPad.10.Google Wallet has been designed to sit in yourphone, be linked to your credit card, and let you pay by tapping your phone on a reader, using what is known as near field technology.But Google Wallet works on only four kinds of phones, and not many merchants are equipped for near field technology.11.Meanwhile, PayPal, which allows people tomake payments over the Internet, has quietly begun to persuade its users to turn to their cellphones. PayPal posted about $118 billion in total transactions last year and became thefastest-growing segment of eBay, its parent company.12."The physical wallet, which had no innovationin the last 50 years, will become an artifact,"John J. Donahoe, the chief executive of eBay, told me recently. The wallet would move into the cloud, and ideally, from his perspective, into PayPal. No more would the consumer worry about losing a wallet. Everything, he declared, would be contained within PayPal. It would also enable the company to collect vast amounts of data about customer habits, purchases and budgets.13.Mr. Donahoe said he wanted his company to become "a mall in your pocket."14.I recently described PayPal's plans to AlessandroAcquisti, an economist who studies digital privacy at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Mr. Acquisti smiled. If today all you need to do is enter your phone number and PIN when you visit a store, perhaps tomorrow, he said, that store will be able to detect your phone by its unique identifier. Perhaps, you won't have to shop at all. Your shopping data would be instead collected, analyzed and used to tell you exactly what you need: a motorcycle from Ducati or purple rain boots in the next size for your growing child. Money will be seamlessly taken from your account. A delivery will arrive at your doorstep. "In the future, maybe you won't have to pay," Mr. Acquisti offered, only half in jest."The transaction will be made for you."Unit4Cultural ExchangeAsia’s Endangered Species: the Expat1.Forget expats. Western companies doingbusiness in Asia are now looking to locals to fill the most important jobs in the region.2.Behind the switch, experts say, are severalfactors, including a leveled playing field in which Western companies must approach newly empowered Asian companies and consumers as equals and clients—not just manufacturing partners./doc/2216449449.html,panies now want executives who can securedeals with local businesses and governments without the aid of a translator, and who understand that sitting through a three-hour dinner banquet is often a key part of the negotiating process in Asia, experts say.4.In fact, three out of four senior executives hiredin Asia by multinationals were Asian natives already living in the region, according to a Spencer Stuart analysis of 1,500 placements made from 2005 to 2010. Just 6% were noncitizens from outside of Asia.5."It's a strategic necessity to be integrated in theculture. Otherwise, the time to learn all of it takes forever," said Arie Y. Lewin, a professor of strategy and international business at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business. He adds that locals may better navigate a business culture where copycats and competitors often play bydifferent rules.6.What's more, a failed expatriate hire can be acostly mistake and slow a firm's progress in the region, said Phil Johnston, a managing director at recruiter Spencer Stuart.7.To help companies fill Asia-based executiveroles, at least two search firms—Spencer Stuart and Korn/Ferry International—say they have begun classifying executives in four broad categories: Asia natives steeped in localculture but educated in the U.S. or Europe; the foreigner who has lived or worked in Asia for a long time;a person of Asian descent who was born orraised in a Western country but has had little exposure to Asia; and the local Asian executive who has no Western experience.8.For companies seeking local expertise, bothfirms said the first category is by far the mostsought-after. But Mr. Johnston said those candidates are difficult to find and retain, and they can command salaries of $750,000 to $1 million—on par with, and sometimes more than, their expat counterparts.9.German conglomerate Siemens AG in 2010hired Mei-Wei Cheng, a China-born Cornell University graduate, to head its Chinese operations—a role previously held by European executives.10.While Siemens's European executives had madeinroads with Chinese consumers—building sales in the region to nearly one-tenth of global revenue—the firm realized it needed someone who could quickly tap local business partners.11.After an extensive search, Siemens hired Mr.Cheng, formerly CEO at the Chinese subsidiaries of Ford Motor Co. and General Electric Co. GE12.The decision to hire locally seems to have paidoff for Siemens: In his first 18 months on the job, Mr. Cheng forged two wind-power jointventures with Shanghai Electric Group Co.13.Mr. Cheng communicates easily with localofficials, a major advantage when it comes to selling energy technology to individual cities, says Brigitte Ederer, head ofhuman resources for Siemens and a member of the company's managing board. Many local officials don't speak English.14.Bob Damon, president of recruiter Korn/FerryInternational's North American operations, said the current talent pool for executive roles is so limited that most top Asian executives simply rotate from one Western company to another, as Mr. Cheng did.15.Other companies are adding to the demand bycreating new positions in Asia.Campbell Soup Co. CPB last week announced the appointmentof Daniel Saw as its first-ever president of Asia operations, while Canadian conglomerate Bombardier Inc. BBD.B.T hired Albert Li to filla new role overseeing its aerospace business inChina. Both executives were born in Asia and have worked as regional managers for Western multinationals.16.Meanwhile, younger Chinese professionals arepositioning themselves to meet the need for executive talent in the years to come. Nearly four in 10 American M.B.A. programs say China was their fastest-growing source of foreign applicants last year, according to the Graduate Management Admission Council, which administers the Graduate Management Admission Test.17.Foreigners with no Asia experience, on the otherhand, need not apply, recruiters said. Spencer Stuart's Mr. Johnston said he occasionally receives inquiries from Western middle managers, proclaiming that they are finally ready to make a career move to the region. He advises them that "there is nothing about their experience that is interesting or relevant to Asia."18.In hubs like Singapore and Hong Kong, expatsreceive as much as $200,000 a year in subsidies for housing, transportation and private schooling, Mr. Johnston said. Payments to offset taxes for these benefits add up to another $100,000.Altogether, a bad match can cost a company as much as $1 million, after figuring in relocation costs, he said.19.Monster Worldwide Inc. Chief Executive SalIannuzzi said the company has been hiring locally for several years, in part because he found deploying expatriates cost too much. "Ittakes them six months to figure out how to take a ferry, they're there for 12 months, and then they spend the next six months figuring out how to get home," he said.20.Like some other companies, Monster now tracksits own workers to ensure a pipeline of talent. 21.The online job-search company's current head ofChina operations, Edward Lo, a former fraternity brother of Mr. Iannuzzi, understands the local scene, is well connected in China and knows how to recruit, Mr. Iannuzzi said.Among Mr. Lo's duties: finding his own successor before he retires.22.Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide Inc.based in White Plains, N.Y., also develops its own leaders for Asia, plucking people who have come up through the company ranks. For example, the head of Asia Pacific started in the 1970s on the finance team in Hong Kong, and the head of the Middle East region was a hotel manager who worked his way up.23.Having grown up in their markets, managersunderstand customer needs, said Starwood CEO Frits van Paasschen. Regional heads in China, for instance, know that whendealing with land owners or developers, deals are less "transactional," and more "trust-based," he said.They also know that Chinese travelers—who now comprise the majority of hotel guests in the region—feel more at home when they're supplied with tea kettles, slippers and chopsticks, headded.24.For fast-food company Yum Brands Inc. CEODavid Novak calls his Asia-bred regional head and executive team "our single biggest competitive advantage." China has become the company's biggest earnings driver, comprising more than 40% of operating profit.25.Thanks to Yum's China leaders, Mr. Novak says,KFC in China began serving rice porridge and soy milk for breakfast, and Pizza Hut now offers an afternoon tea menu—both of which have been big hits among local customers.Unit5Auto-WorldThe Future of the Car :Clean, Safe and it Drives itselfCars have already changed the way we live. They are likely to do so again1.SOME inventions, like some species, seem tomake periodic leaps in progress. The car is one of them. Twenty-five years elapsed between Karl Benz beginning small-scale production of his original Motorwagen and the breakthrough, by Henry Ford and his engineers in 1913, that turned the car into the ubiquitous, mass-market item that has defined the modern urban landscape. By putting production of the Model T on moving assembly lines set into the floor of his factory in Detroit, Ford drastically cut the time needed to build it, and hence its cost. Thus begana revolution in personal mobility. Almost abillion cars now roll along the world’s highways.2.Today the car seems poised for another burst ofevolution. One way in which it is changing relates to its emissions. As emerging markets grow richer, legions of new consumers are clamouring for their first set of wheels. For the whole world to catch up with American levels of car ownership, the global fleet would have to quadruple. Even a fraction of that growth would present fearsome challenges, from congestion and the price of fuel to pollution and global warming.3.Yet, as our special report this week argues,stricter regulations and smarter technology are making cars cleaner, more fuel-efficient and safer than ever before. China, its cities choked in smog, is following Europe in imposing curbs on emissions of noxious nitrogen oxides and fine soot particles. Regulators in most big car marketsare demanding deep cuts in the carbon dioxide emitted from car exhausts. And carmakers are being remarkably inventive in finding ways to comply.4.Granted, battery-powered cars have disappointed.They remain expensive, lack range and are sometimes dirtier than they look—for example, if they run on electricity from coal-fired power stations. But car companies are investing heavily in other clean technologies. Future motorists will have a widening choice of super-efficient petrol and diesel cars, hybrids (which switch between batteries and an internal-combustion engine) and models that run on natural gas or hydrogen. As for the purely electric car, its time will doubtless come.Towards the driverless, near-crashless car 5.Meanwhile, a variety of ―driver assistance‖technologies are appearing on new cars, which will not only take a lot of the stress out of driving in traffic but also prevent many accidents. More and more new cars can reverse-park, read traffic signs, maintain a safe distance in steady traffic and brake automatically to avoid crashes. Some carmakers are promising technology that detects pedestrians and cyclists, again overruling the driver and stopping the vehicle before it hits them.A number of firms, including Google, are busy trying to take driver assistance to its logical conclusion by creating cars that drive themselves to a chosen destination without a human at the controls. This is where it gets exciting.6.Sergey Brin, a co-founder of Google, predictsthat driverless cars will be ready for sale tocustomers within five years. That may be optimistic, but the prototypes that Google already uses to ferry its staff (and a recent visitor from The Economist) along Californian freeways are impressive. Google is seeking to offer the world a driverless car built from scratch, but it is more likely to evolve, and be accepted by drivers, in stages.7.As sensors and assisted-driving softwaredemonstrate their ability to cut accidents, regulators will move to make them compulsory for all new cars. Insurers are already pressing motorists to accept black boxes that measure how carefully they drive: these will provide a mass of data which is likely to show that putting the car on autopilot is often safer than driving it.Computers never drive drunk or while texting. 8.If and when cars go completely driverless—forthose who want this—the benefits will be enormous. Google gave a taste by putting a blind man in a prototype and filminghim being driven off to buy takeaway tacos. Huge numbers of elderly and disabled people could regain their personal mobility. The young will not have to pay crippling motor insurance, because their reckless hands and feet will no longer touch the wheel or the accelerator. The colossal toll of deaths and injuries from road accidents—1.2m killed a year worldwide, and 2m hospital visits a year in America alone—should tumble down, along with the costs to health systems and insurers.9.Driverless cars should also ease congestion andsave fuel. Computers brake faster than humans.And they can sense when cars ahead of them are braking. So driverless cars will be able to drive much closer to each other than humans safely can. On motorways they could formfuel-efficient ―road trains‖, gliding along in the slipstream of the vehicle in front. People who commute by car will gain hours each day to work, rest or read a newspaper.Roadblocks ahead10.Some carmakers think this vision of the future is(as Henry Ford once said of history) bunk.People will be too terrified to hurtle down the motorway in a vehicle they do not control: computers crash, don’t t hey? Carmakers whose self-driving technology is implicated in accidents might face ruinously expensive lawsuits, and be put off continuing to develop it.11.Yet many people already travel, unwittingly, onplanes and trains that no longer need human drivers. As with those technologies, the shift towards driverless cars is taking place gradually.The cars’ software will learn the tricks that humans use to avoid hazards: for example, braking when a ball bounces into theroad, because a child may be chasing it. G oogle’s self-driving cars have already clocked up over 700,000km, more than many humans ever drive;and everything they learn will become available to every other car using the software. As for the liability issue, the law should be changed to make sure that when cases arise, the courts take into account the overall safety benefits of self-driving technology.12.If the notion that the driverless car is round thecorner sounds far-fetched, remember that TV and heavier-than-air flying machines once did, too.One day people may wonder why earlier generations ever entrusted machines as dangerous as cars to operators as fallible as humans.Unit6 RomanceThe Modern Matchmakers现代红娘Internet dating sites claim to have brought scienceto the age-old question of how to pair offsuccessfully. But have they?互联网相亲网站声称已经将科技运用如何成功配对的问题之上。