经济学人2016年3月26日A jab in time

摘要：赫尔穆特·施密特，西德的社会民主党总理，逝于11月10日，终年96岁。

他的聪明和粗暴时常会让听众意识到自己上当受骗和受到羞辱的时候已经太晚了。

赫尔穆特·施密特不仅发现了傻瓜令人讨厌，他还消灭了他们。

既然事实清楚，逻辑不可辩驳，那么，再有不同的意见就是白痴的表现。

Obituary: Helmut Schmidt Smoke and fire赫尔穆特·施密特烟与火Helmut Schmidt, Social Democrat chancellor of West Germany, died on November 10th, aged 96赫尔穆特·施密特，西德的社会民主党总理，逝于11月10日，终年96岁HE WAS so clever, and so rude with it, that his listeners sometimes realised too late that they had been outwitted and insulted. Helmut Schmidt did not just find fools tiresome. He obliterated them. The facts were clear and the logic impeccable. So disagreement was a sign of idiocy.他的聪明和粗暴时常会让听众意识到自己上当受骗和受到羞辱的时候已经太晚了。

赫尔穆特·施密特不仅发现了傻瓜令人讨厌，他还消灭了他们。

既然事实清楚，逻辑不可辩驳，那么，再有不同的意见就是白痴的表现。

He was impatient, too, with his own party, which failed to realise the constraints and dilemmas of power. It wanted him to spend money West Germany did not have, and to compromise with terrorists who belonged in jail. He was impatient with the anti-nuclear left, who failed to realise that nuclear-power stations were safe, and that the Soviet empire thrived on allies' weakness. And he was impatient with post-Watergate America, which seemed to have lost its will to lead.他还对没能意识到权力的约束和困境的他的政党感到不耐烦。

《经济学人》2021年3月27日刊精彩文章导读原计划每天发推文一篇，说明自己在读词典。

BUT，实践证明：说得容易做着难。

要坚持下来，真不容易。

这周还真有些事情。

我们每年3月份调薪。

在职场的朋友应该知道，这个月是最不稳定的时候：1、聪明一点的员工开始抓住机会找领导各种诉苦，申请工资能多涨点。

2、有些员工根据表现知道自己涨幅不高，开始找工作跳槽。

3、还有一部分员工蠢蠢欲动，等发了工资，掂量是否达到预期，再决定是走还是留。

我们公司通常离职率在25%左右，在软件行业属于比较正常的水平。

我所负责的开发部门，大约有一百多人，要想一个都不走，也很难，但自己不希望有大的波动。

这段时间经常晚上接到电话。

如果是普通员工打过来，99%不是好事情。

讨论主题只有两个：“生活不易，申请涨薪”或者“干得不爽，坚决离职”。

心累。

也就没有了写文的心情。

还好，这一波离职潮基本结束。

团队总体尚好，核心人员和骨干基本挽留了下来。

这周微信里有些朋友问我，看《经济学人》有什么好处？你痴迷这本杂志为了什么？有中文翻译吗？你通常3-4点钟起床，干什么？这些问题比较典型。

做个集中答复吧。

看《经济学人》有什么好处？如果带着功利心来讲，短期看不到任何好处。

要考研的话，不如看教辅资料；想跳槽外企的话，不如参与专业的口语和听力培训。

我看《经济学人》纯属爱好。

以我目前实力，我看不出杂志中的遣词造句，欣赏不出英语句子的美感，更别指望能用英文写作。

已到而立之年，做一件事，更多是站在实用性考虑。

那么，我看《经济学人》，主要是为了吸收不同的想法和观点。

现在这个社会，最稀缺的能力是独立思考。

咱们看众多自媒体，为了吸引读者的眼球，不断制造新闻，挑起对立情绪。

在这个流量为王的时代，自己很容易被带节奏，成为其中的韭菜或帮凶。

比如，前段时间，有则新闻说手术医生累了喝了一瓶葡萄糖输液，然后有人发帖质疑，医生喝的输液费用算到了患者账单上。

而后不少自媒体难得抓取这个兴趣点，开局一张图，内容全靠编，煽动医患关系。

Clinical trialsFor my next trick...Too many medical trials move their goalposts halfway through. A new initiative aims to change thatMar 26th 2016 | From the print editionPAXIL was a blockbuster. It was introduced by its inventors, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), in 1992, as an antidepressant. By the early 2000s it was earning the firm nearly $2 billion a year. It was being prescribed to millions of children and teenagers on the basis of a trial, called Study 329, which suggested it was a good treatment for depressed youngsters. But when British regulators took a second look at Study 329, in 2003, they concluded that it had been misleadingly presented. Not only did Paxil do little to help youngsters with depression, it often made things worse—to the extent of making some who took it suicidal. In 2012 the American authorities imposed the biggest fine in the history of the pharmaceutical industry, $3 billion, on GSK for misreporting data on a variety of drugs, of which Paxil was one.Since then, Study 329 has become one of the best-known examples of a piece of academic sleight-of-hand called “outcome switching”. This is a procedure in which the questions that a scientific study was set up to answer are swapped part way through for a different lot. Study 329 set out to measure the impact of Paxil on eight different variables, all based around how participants scored on a variety of depression tests. None showed that it was any better than a placebo sugar pill, but the researchers who wrote the paper came up with 19 newmeasures. Most of those showed no benefit either, but four did. In the paper, those four were presented as if they had been the main measures all along. Outcome switching is a good example of the ways in which science can go wrong. This is a hot topic at the moment, with fields from psychology to cancer research going through a “replication crisis”, in which published results evaporate when people try to duplicate them. Now, a team of researchers at the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine, at Oxford University, have set up a project called COMPare, in the hope of doing something about it.Go COMPareOutcome switching can sometimes be done for good reasons: participants may refuse to fill in a long form, for instance, meaning that no data can be collected from it. But it can also let unscrupulous researchers go on “fishing expeditions” to prove whatever they want. Collect enough data, and correlations that look statistically significant will appear by chance. Pick them out after the event and you have, unless you re-test to demonstrate that they were not flukes, proved nothing.Study 329 finished in 1998. These days, such shenanigans are supposed to be impossible. American and European regulators require trials to be registered before they begin, complete with information about what they will be investigating and how they will go about it, so that researchers can check their colleagues have done what they promised to do. But enforcement is lax. Ameta-analysis—a study of studies—published in BMC Medicine in 2015 found that 31% of clinical trials did not stick to the measurements they had planned to use. Another paper, published in PLOS ONE, also in 2015, examined 137 medical trials over a six-month period and found that 18% had altered their primary outcomes halfway through the trial, while 64% had done the same with secondary, less-important measures of success.The COMPare team’s results are similar. They analysed all the clinical trials reported between October and January in the five most prestigious medical journals—specifically, the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of the American Medical Association, the Lancet, Annals of Internal Medicine and the BMJ—looking for evidence of outcome switching.INTERACTIVE: Clinical trial simulator - Run your own trials and play the system in favour of your own drugThat came to a total of 67 different trials. Of those, nine were perfect—they had done exactly what they had said they would do, or if they had changed their measurements, they had said so plainly and given their reasons. The other 58, though, had flaws. Between them they contained 300 outcomes that should have been reported but were not, while 357 new outcomes, not specified in the documents describing what the trial would be doing, were silently added. Where previous research has merely described the problem, says Ben Goldacre, a British doctor and epidemiologist who is leading the project, COMPare hopes to do something about it. For every imperfect trial, the team wrote a letter to the editors of the relevant journal, pointing out the inconsistencies with the aim of setting the record straight.So far, responses have been mixed. Of 58 letters COMPare has sent out since the project began, seven have been published. Another 16 were rejected by the journals, who argued either that the problem was insignificant or that attentive, industrious readers could work out for themselves what had happened. The rest have seemingly been ignored.Dr Goldacre—who has built a reputation as a crusader for open science—says some journals’ responses surprised him. He points out that all five have signed up to guidelines that require them to police outcome switching and to make sure papers they publish do not engage in it. The COMPare team plans to collate the responses into another scientific paper, to be published shortly. “I would regard this as a provocation study,” says Dr Goldacre, using the immunological meaning of the term. “When you provoke the system, the responses you get tell you a lotabout how the system works. But we’r e not doing this to be provocative and snide, we’re doing it to understand the pathology.”。

2016考研英语阅读题源经济学人文章：巴西经济Brazil's economy巴西经济Rough weather ahead极端天气在前The mistakes Dilma Rousseff made during her firstpresidential term mean her second will be stormy迪尔玛·罗塞夫在她第一个任期内所犯的错误将使她的第二个任期风雨交加WHILE Dilma Rousseff prepared to be sworn in for a second term as Brazil's president onJanuary 1st, the skies over the capital, Brasília, were forecast to be clear. But the outlook forthe next four years is gloomy. Her daunting to-do list includes repairing ties with America,damaged by the revelation in 2013 that its spies had tapped her phone calls. Deforestation inthe Amazon region is rising after a decade of decline, and the worst drought on recordthreatens to bring energy and water rationing to the industrial south-east. Preparations for the2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeirorisk a reprise of the deadline- and budget-busting run-up tothe 2014 football World Cup, which Brazilalso hosted. Ms Rousseff's left-wing Workers' Party(PT) and its allies are embroiled in a corruption scandal involving Petrobras, the state-controlled oil giant, though so far she is personally untainted.当迪尔玛·罗塞夫准备一月一日的巴西总统连任宣誓时，天气预报显示首都巴西利亚是晴天。

2016考研英语阅读题源经济学人文章：New banks感谢凯程考研李老师对本文做出的重要贡献大学毕业后，有的同学直接保研或者考上了研究生，还有一种同学是工作几年后重新考上研究生。

及时获取了考研报考信息的人，很清楚的知道自己在备考期间最需要做什么事，读什么书、还知道应该旁听什么课程，与什么人交朋友、建立人际关系。

现凯程教育为考研考生们带来重要信息。

New banks新兴银行Ripe for disruption扰乱时机正当时A rush of new entrants hope to shake up banking新兴银行这股狂流欲重组银行业“I PROMISE to open a bank account for a British citizen in just two minutes”, says Nazzim Ishaque brightly. With a background in IT, banking and asset management, he is submitting plans to the regulators to start a new bank called Lintel; the two-minute pledge is one of his selling points. Mr Ishaque reckons that he can do better than the existing banks, and is putting plenty of his own money where his mouth is, as part of the ￡5m ($7.5m) start-up cost. He hopes to start doing business early next year.Nazzim Ishaque明确表示：“我承诺可以两分钟内为英国人民开通银行账户。

Self-improvementNet benefitsWith millions stuck at home, the online wellness industry is booming“Up off your chairs and just start lifting those feet,” chirps高兴地大声说a woman sporting green leggings as she marches energetically. Diana Moran, a fitness expert known as the Green Goddess, was a staple主食of 1980s British breakfast television. Now in her 80s, she is making a comeback东山再起. In a new morning slot she is encouraging older people, many of whom are in isolation to avoid infection, to stay active. As lockdowns force the world to stay at home indefinitely, many are turning to their screens to stay sane明智的.Meditation冥想apps, digital fitness classes and online cookery courses are booming. Zoom, a videoconferencing service now worth around $40bn through which many such classes are broadcast, has become one of the most important “social wellness” companies, reckons Beth McGroarty of the Global Wellness Institute, a research group. Those stuck inside are desperate for company.On YouTube average daily views of videos including “with me” in the title—convivial baking, studying and decluttering清理are all available—have increased by 600% since March 15th compared with the rest of the year. Last week DJ D-Nice, an American disc jockey, drew over 100,000 virtual partygoers聚会的客人to his “Club Quarantine” on Instagram Live.The stuck-at-home are also keen to improve themselves. Downloads of the top five recipe apps doubled in Chin a during February’s lockdown. In Britain John Lewis, an upmarket高档的department store, has reported a five-fold increase in sales of its Marcato pasta machine compared with typical sales for this time of year. Kettlebells and yoga mats are selling like toilet paper. Joe Wicks, a trainer who posts workout videos online, saw subscriptions to his channel more than double after he launched live physical-education lessons for kids no longer able to burn off their energy at school. During the first week of classes 15m viewers joined in.The popularity of live group activities challenges the idea that you have to be physically present to be together. People who work out in groups are more committed and get more health benefits than those doing so alone. It is also showing just how much can be “experienced” from the comfort of the c ouch, raising the bar for experiences such as concerts and classes in the post-covid world.Even before the pandemic, fitness fans wondered whether paid-for online platforms such as Peloton, a home exercise-bike company, could replace gyms. That debate will pump up further if gyms go bust生意失败because of the shutdowns.It seems more likely that the strange but temporary state of lockdown will boost sectors that were already growing. Mental-health apps were flourishing before covid-19. Downloads of the five m ost popular “mindfulness” apps grew by 85% in 2018. In the last week of March Headspace, a meditation app, saw a 19-fold jump in users completing a calming exercise and a 14-fold surge in those doing a “reframing anxiety” session.参考译文“Up off your chairs and just start lifting those feet,” chirps a woman sporting green leggings as she marches energetically. Diana Moran, a fitness expert known as the Green Goddess, was a staple of 1980s British breakfast television. Now in her 80s, she is making a comeback. In a new morning slot she is encouraging older people, many of whom are in isolation to avoid infection, to stay active. As lockdowns force the world to stay at home indefinitely, many are turning to their screens to stay sane.“举起椅子，开始抬起那只脚，”一名穿着绿色紧身裤的妇女大声疾呼，一边喊着。

3月26日托福写作真题2016年3月26日托福写作真题以下是3月26日托福综合写作真题和详细解析，提供给大家参考。

关于Gustave Whitehead 先于莱特兄弟成功试飞飞机3月26日托福综合写作范文：Sample answer:The reading puts forward three reasons to illustrate the badeffects brought by those prairie dogs. However, the professor refutes thesethree strongly.Firstly, the listening argues that the reason why the reporthad no photo but only draft drawings lied in two aspects. First, thephotography technology at that time was not as advanced as it is now. As theimaging techniques was not good, the quality of the photos was low. Inaddition, when the experiment was conducted, it was cloudy; in such conditionto capture the image of a flying plane was too difficult.Secondly, the reading claims the design of Whitehead’s planethat only had one wing was not logical, for the plane usually had two or threewings at that time. However, the professor disagrees. In the recent, someresearchers have made a copy of Whitehead’s plane base d on his design diagram.They tested the copy planes four times, and each of them was successful.Finally, the reading suggests that Whitehead had producedmany engines and sold them to several aircraft builders, but in fact none of thoseengines used in planes had ever succeeded, illustrating that Whitehead had notsuccessfully tested his plane. But the professor argues the problem that thoseengines did not work could not be blamed to Whitehead. It was because thetechnology was not so developed at that timeand aircraft builders knew littleabout designing planes. The fact that there were people buying Whitehead’sengines actually proved that his design had no problem.3月26日托福独立写作题目：It is often not a good thing for people to move to a new town or a new country because they will lose their friends.题型类别:利弊类题材类别：二选一相关旧题：2014.09.21写作思路：“搬到新的城镇或国家不是一个好主意，因为人们会失去朋友。

The sociology of scienceIn death, there is lifeBig-name scientists may end up stifling progress in their fieldsMar 26th 2016 | From the print editionMAX PLANCK, the inventor of quantum theory, once said that science advances one funeral at a time. He meant—or, at least, is presumed to have meant—that the death of a dominant mind in a field liberates others with different points of view to make their cases more freely, without treading on the toes of established authority. It might also rearrange patterns of funding, for they, too, often reflect established hierarchies.But was Planck right? For almost a decade Pierre Azoulay of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has been trying to find out. His conclusion, reported in a working paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research, is a qualified “yes”. Dr Azoulay first published on the subject in 2010 in the Quarterly Journal of Economics. On that occasion he came to an apparently different conclusion. This was that the death of a star resulted in a marked slowing of the published output of the star’s collaborators, a phenomenon which sometimes lasted for decades. But subsequent conversations led him to suspect this was not the whole story. Some scientists he spoke to agreed that the Quarterly Journal paper captured their experience. Others, though, dissented. These latter claimed that a star’sdominance often sucked the intellectual oxygen from a field, and that his or her demise let it back in.With the assistance of two others, Christian Fons-Rosen of the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona and Joshua Graff Zivin of the University of California, San Diego, Dr Azoulay decided to dig deeper. The trio focused on biology, America and the period between 1975 and 2003. They mined online databases to extract the publication records of biologists working in different fields before and after the deaths of stars in those fields. Crucially, their data included both people who had collaborated with the star, and people who had not.The three researchers’ definition of scientific stardom rested on such criteria as patents held, funding received and publications widely cited. Among those stars they identified, 452 also had in common the fact that they had died early—meaning, in this context, before they could retire or leave active research to take up administrative roles. They were, in other words, at their intellectual peaks.Gratifyingly for Dr Azoulay, he and his colleagues confirmed his earlier finding. A star’s collaborators did indeed produce fewer articles after that star’s death—as many as 40% less a year, on average. But they also found a contrary effect. This was that publications by researchers who had not collaborated with the star (and who were indeed sometimes working in entirely different fields at the time of the “extinction event”) increased by 8% a year. Within five years of a star’s death, the increase in non-colla borators’ articles had fully compensated for the drop-off in those of the collaborators.That the loss of his mentor would harm an acolyte’s career makes perfect sense. Why outsiders should benefit, though, is less clear. Dr Azoulay found that few of the stars in his sample sat on committees that distributed funds or edited journals, so explicit favouritism does not seem to be the answer. Perhaps the explanation does indeed lie in that woolly but evocative phrase, “intellectual oxygen”. A star’s death gives outsiders room to breathe.Morbid though the thought is, Dr Azoulay’s hypothesis has the scientific virtue of generating testable predictions. Among the influential scientists who have died prematurely in the past two years are David Flockhart, who helped create the field of personalised medicine; Yoshiki Sasai, a prominent stem-cell biologist; and Allison Doupe, a neurobiologist who studied birdsong as a model for human language. It will be interesting to see how the careers of others in these fields now evolve.。

2016考研英语阅读题源：预算趣录考研频道分享《经济学人》文章预算趣录，希望大家平时多练习英语阅读，争取考试时拿高分!2016考研英语阅读题源：预算趣录Fun on a budget预算趣录Congress is incapable of restraining spending. Itshould let the president try国会无力控制开支，也许该放手让总统一试AT THE end of Barack Obama's budget, which waspublished on February 2nd, the administration thanks 614 people by name for putting thething together. It adds that “hundreds, perhaps thousands” of nameless others also helped.There is some thing depressing about the effort that went into producing the document. Thebudget is an admirable piece of work which contains many good ideas, from cuts in farmsubsidies to an increase in tax credits for childless workers. There is, however, a grammatica lmistake repeated throughout it. “The budget will”, the president writes, when what he means isthat his budget would, in the unlikely event that Congress were ever to pass it.奥巴马总统的财政年度预算于2月2日公布，在预算案的最后，政府向614人致谢，感谢他们为预算案形成所作出的贡献。

3月26日托福考试真题回忆2016年3月26日托福考试真题回忆下面是店铺整理的3月26日托福考试的阅读、听力和口语的真题，提供给大家参考。

托福阅读3月26日托福阅读第一篇：鸟类学习鸣叫：需要在出生后几周内学到，可以跟着recording 学，但是由于生理构造仍然是只能学习同一个或相似species的声音，最后一段提出两类例外：一个是天生deaf的，一个是会说话的鸟类3月26日托福阅读第二篇新石器时代的农耕。

多处同时发生，气温温和，地中海地区适合作物生长，作物太多就开始储存粮食，由打猎改为定居;之后干旱严重，也并没有迁徙，因为存了粮食不方便搬，粮食收货少了就开始直接种种子，科学家怀疑是农业文明开始形成的时期。

3月26日托福阅读第三篇就是TPO17的听力M hypothesis，但是前面部分没有听力那么长，很快就进入了1970年:ocean的证据验证了hypothesis;1980：D hole的证据反对hypothesie;接着总结：两个证据都对，ocean是全球而D hole是地区托福听力Conversation 1女生刚刚成为outdoor workshop的新晋会长，然后老师恭喜她，她就跟老师说没有收到邮件，然后希望你能当我们leader，老师说你自己当就挺好的。

然后就想让这个教授做她的导师，因为她没做过leader就很紧张(有题)。

然后又说举行活动的一个地方被占了，反正吹了就问B—可以吗?professor就说挺好啊，是outdoor的活动呀，教授还说可以搞一些introductory的活动，还可以培养collaboration 定下以后活动的基调，然后这个女生说自己活动的计划之类之类(这里有题)，教授听了说你这不是想的很好吗?而且我有一个学生说可以为你的社团提供fund。

托福听力Lecture 1[人类学]讲英国的巨石阵Stone Henge和距离它不远的Durrington Wall, 巨石阵是石头做的，两圈，而那个Wall是木炭/木材建的(石头永久，木头不永久，推测可能有象征意义，有题)，里面发现了一些动物尸骨和Pottery，两个地方都有path到河边。