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中文导读外资风投：黯然离场？上世纪90年代开始,“copy to China”风潮涌起,外资在中国这块赚钱的风水宝地如鱼得水。

如今,中国市场的魅力依然吸引着众多外资入局,但他们日子并不好过。

中国本土孵化器遍地开花、本土企业不断崛起,对外资风投形成了强有力的挤压。

当下中国科技大爆发、政策逐渐健全,“copy from China”的时代已经开启。

未来,外资还会青睐中国市场吗？less where that came from 与文章最后一句呼应,改用习语MoreWhere that Came from:A greater number of similar things can be pro-vided in the future 陆续有来skittish adj.not very serious and with ideas and feelings that keepchanging 轻浮的;易变的;反复无常的venture capitalist n.someone who makes money by investing inhigh risk projects 风险投资者demo (=demostration)n.an act of showing or explaining how sthworks or is done 示范;示范表演;演示Y Combinator 美国著名创业孵化器,Y Combinator 扶持初创企业并为其提供创业指南startup n.a small business that has recently been started by someone新创办的小公司vie (with sb)(for sth)与某人争夺某物SYN contend with sb for sthhigh-profile adj.receiving or involving a lot of attention and discus-sion on television,in newspapers,etc.经常出镜/见报的;高姿态的accelerator a company that helps new companies get started by giving them such things as office space,legal help and marketing services inexchange for payment 企业加速器/孵化器SYN incubatorthe like of sb/sth (also sb’s/sth’s like )something similar to someoneor a particular person or thing,or of equal importance or value 像某人(物)一样的人/物SYN equivalent ,matchDropbox 一款网络文件同步工具,提供在线存储服务,类似于百度云pull out of to move away from sth or stop being involved in it 脱离,退出nurture v.to help sb/sth to develop and be successful 扶持;帮助;支持SYN foster It’s important to nurture a good working relationship.维持良好的工作关系非常重要。

2021年《经济学人》杂志原版英文(整理完整版)

Digest Of The. Economist. 2006(6-7)欧阳光明（2021.03.07）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 withpublished 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 are superorganisms 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 asthey 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 treating headaches 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 DrugAdministration 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” f aulty 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 patients who 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's THE 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 immediatelyand 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 reactors operate 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”. For a re actor, 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 onesare truly so. However, some of the genuinely passive reactors are also likely to be more expensive 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 seriously RUPERT 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 mediaconglomerate'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 output ofgreenhouse 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 CompetitiveEnterprise Institute, with thedaft slogan “Carbon dioxide: they call it pollution; we call it life”. Besides, environmentalist critics say, some firmsare eng aged 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, andev en a “carbon calculator” on its website that helps consumers measuretheir personal “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 tank, not es 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 theseconcerns 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 a yearto 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 forgeneral 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 cells are 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: those 140,000screenings look like a lucrative market, although nobody knowswhether 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 liningof the lungs. According to Huang Song, one of Epithelix's researchers, the firm'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 they could 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 themoment, 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 womenMEN 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, in Australia,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 has just 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 of expression,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 inwomen, 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 would allowthe 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, asusual.The successful resolutions called 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 were all“precatory”—meaning that they merely advised management on the course of action preferred byshareholders, 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 powerbutnow 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 they will 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 compensation committee 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 Americancompanies' 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$1.7 billion 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 the borrower 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 are outs tanding. 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 will yield what borrowers promise: technology moves on, fashions changeand the demand for sugary snacks may collapse. Valuing intellectual property—an exercise based。

经济学人文章(四六级雅思精读素材)2020-08-27

The Economist August 29th 2020 Business 55Depending on whom you ask, Califor-nia is a leader in clean energy or a cau-tionary tale. Power outages in August prompted stern critiques from Republi-cans. “In California”, D onald Trump tweeted, “D emocrats have intentionally implemented rolling blackouts—forcing Americans in the dark.” In addition to pro-voking outrage and derision, however, the episode is also likely to inspire investment.The Golden State has long been Ameri-ca’s main testing ground for green compa-nies. Californians buy half of all electric cars sold in America. Theirs is the country’s largest solar market. As California deals with heat waves, ﬁres and a goal of carbon-free electricity by 2045, the need for a reli-able grid is becoming ever more obvious.For years ﬁrms competed to generate clean power in California. Now a growing num-ber are vying to store and manage it, too. August’s blackouts have many causes,including poor planning, an unexpected lack of capacity and sweltering heat in not just California but nearby states from which it sometimes imports power. Long before the outages, however, electricity op-erators were anxious about capacity. Cali-fornia’s solar panels become less useful in the evening, when demand peaks. In No-vember state regulators mandated that utilities procure an additional 3.3 gigawatts (gw ) of capacity, including giant batteries that charge when energy is abundant and can sell electricity back to the grid.Too few such projects have come online to cope with the surge in demand for air-conditioning in the scorching summer. But more are sprouting across the state. On Au-gust 19th ls Power, an electricity ﬁrm backed by private equity, unveiled a 250-megawatt (mw ) storage project in San Die-go, the largest of its kind in America. In July the county of Monterey said Vistra Energy,a Texan power company, could build as much as 1.2gw of storage.The rooftop solar industry stands to beneﬁt from a new Californian mandate that requires new homes to install panels on their roofs from this year. Sunrun, the market leader, is increasingly pairing such residential installations with batteries. In July, for instance, the company said it had won contracts with energy suppliers in the Bay Area to install 13mw of residential solar and batteries. These could supply power to residents in a blackout or feed power into the grid to help meet peak demand. Sunrunis so conﬁdent in its future that it has bid $3.2bn for Vivint Solar,its main rival.Another way to stave oﬀoutages is to curb demand.Enel,a European power company,has contracts with local utilities to work with large commercial and indus-trial clients.When demand rises,Enel pays customers to reduce energy consumption,easing demand on the grid.A company called OhmConnect oﬀers something sim-ilar for homeowners.Even as such oﬀerings scale up,the need for reliability means that fossil fuels will not disappear just yet.On September 1st California’s regulators will vote on whether to delay the retirement of four natural-gas plants in light of the outages.The state remains intent on decarbonising its power system over the next 25years.But progress may not move in a straight line.7NEW YO RKBusinesses compete to battle California’s blackoutsEnergy utilitiesLitMany big companies may be struggling with depressed sales, but these are busy times for bribery-busters. Mexico is abuzz over allegations by an ex-boss of Pe-mex, the state oil giant, that several senior politicians received bungs from compa-nies including Odebrecht, a Brazilian con-struction ﬁrm (see Americas section). The scandal is the latest in a string of graft cases to make headlines this year, starting with Airbus’s record $4bn settlement in January over accusations of corruption for making illegal payments in various countries.Corporate bribery is hardly new. In sur-veys, between a third and a half of compa-nies typically claim to have lost business to rivals who won contracts by paying kick-backs. But such perceptions-based re-search has obvious limitations. A new study takes a more rigorous approach, and draws some striking conclusions.Raghavendra Rau of Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge, Yan-Leung Cheung of the Education University of Hong Kong and Aris Stouraitis of Hong Kong Baptist University examined nearly 200 prominent bribery cases in 60 coun-tries between 1975 and 2015. For the ﬁrms doing the bribing, they found, the short-term gains were juicy: every dollar of bribe translated into a $6-9 increase in excess re-turns, relative to the overall stockmarket. That, however, does not take account of the chances of getting caught. These have risen as enforcement of America’s 43-year-old anti-bribery law, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (fcpa ), has been stepped up and other countries have passed similar laws. The number of fcpa cases is up sharply since the ﬁnancial crisis of 2007-09, according to Stanford Law School (see chart). It has dipped a bit under Presi-dent Donald Trump, who has criticised the fcpa for hobbling American ﬁrms over-seas, but remains well above historic lev-els. Total ﬁnes for fcpa violations were $14bn in 2016-19, 48 times as much as in the four years to 2007.The authors also tested 11hypotheses that emerged from past studies of bribery.They found support for some, for instance that ﬁrms pay larger bribes when they ex-pect to receive larger beneﬁts, and that the net beneﬁts of bribing are smaller in places with more public disclosure of politicians’sources of income.But they punctured other bits of re-ceived wisdom. Most striking, they found no link between democracy and graft. This challenges the “Tullock paradox”, which holds that ﬁrms can get away with smaller bribes in democracies because politicians and oﬃcials have less of a lock on the sys-tem than those in autocratic countries, and so cannot extract as much rent. Such ﬁnd-ings will doubtless be of interest to corrup-tion investigators and unscrupulous exec-utives alike. 7Bribery pays—if you don’t get caughtBriberyA closer look at greasy palmsBrown envelopes, big chequesUnited States,Foreign Corrupt Practices ActSources:Stanford Law School;Sullivan &Cromwell*Investigations and enforcement actions †To August6543210605040302010020†10152000059095851977Enforcement actionsSanctions, $bnUtilitiesTransport Communications Basic materials Financial services Consumer goods Aerospace & defence TechnologyIndustrials Health care Oil &gas 100806040200Number of cases* by selected industry1977-2020†。

重点总结的经济学人-中英文版)

Finance and EconomicsOffshore private banking离岸私人银行业Bourne to survive伯恩的幸存Aug 6th 2009From The Economist print editionDespite the woes of UBS, Swiss private banking remains in reasonable shape尽管瑞银处境不佳，瑞士的私人银行业仍保有相当规模Illustration by S. KambayashiA FTER visiting his bank in Zurich, Jason Bourne, an amnesic assassin, wonders: “Who has a safety-deposit box full of money and six passports and a gun?” In the popular imagination as well as Hollywood films the answer is clear: customers of Swiss banks do.当失忆的杀手詹森•伯恩(Jason Bourne)从其位于苏黎世的银行走出后，自问到：”什么样的人会有一个装满了钱、6本护照还有一把枪的银行保险箱？”在大众的想像与好莱坞的电影中，这个答案是明确的：瑞士银行的客户就是这样的人。

If this reputation for skulduggery is right, Switzerland, home to about one-quarter of the world’s offshore money, is in big trouble. After nearly going bust, UBS, its biggest bank, is now being pistol-whipped by America’s Internal Revenue Service (IRS), which wants it to hand over the names of tens of thousands of alleged tax dodgers. A preliminary settlement between the two was agreed on July 31st, although its details have yet to be made public. In March Switzerland agreed to comply with an OECD tax code that will oblige it to reveal information on clients that other governments say they need to enforce their laws. Where will crooks, despots and war criminals go now? And what will Swiss private banks do when they leave?如果这种隐秘而无原则的名声不是空穴来风的话，瑞士，这个坐拥世界四分之一离岸资金的国家将会有大麻烦。

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。

精读经济学人学阅读策略-22届高三英语二轮复习

co-CEO structure since 1989.
In short, collaboration may be a useful tool but it
doesn’t work in every situation.
描述现象 Para.1-2 提出论点 Para.3
The writer describes a common belief : Collaboration is a good thing.
描述现象 Para.1-2 提出论点 Para.3
The writer describes a common belief : Collaboration is a good thing.
Managers always have to balance merits with llaboration? A.Your English teacher B. Jack Ma（马云） C.Cathy Meng (孟晚舟) D. A leader of climbers to Himalayan
Para 9 As the authors note, co-leadership “ creates
The authors uncertainty over who is really in charge”. The battle between … and …when …… were
Para 8+9 infamous. LesEs xthaamn p5l%esco+mcpoanniceslu…shiaovne used a
with a wide variety of people and to build, sustain(keep) and
expand a network of people were three of the top five skills

经济学人 20230629 Sichuan peppers 精读

20230629 The curious, anaesthetising charm of Sichuan pepperscurious adj.奇特的，离奇古怪的anaesthetize vt.使麻醉／ə＇ni：sθətaiz／anaesthetic adj.麻醉的／ænəs＇θetik／anaesthesia n.麻醉／ænəs＇θi：ziə／adventurous adj.新奇的The menu contained traditional favourites as well as more adventurous dishes.这份菜单有受欢迎的传统菜，也有较为新奇的菜肴。

Like some other adventurous foods, they expand your sense of what eating can do to you“Polysemous” describes a word with several meanings, such as “run”, “set”, or, in the kitchen, “pepper”. That term encompasses the entire Capsicum annuum family, from vegetal green bell peppers to searing little Thai chillies. It includes dried, powdered Piperaceae berries, known as black and white pepper, as well as one of the strangest and most addictive spices in the world: Zanthoxylum simulans, more commonly known as Sichuan pepper.polysemous adj.一词多义的polysemy n.一词多义poly-多，众polygon n.多边形pentagon n.五边形polyglot adj.多语言的encompass vt.包含compass n.指南针；范围encase vt.把······装入到盒子里family n.（动植物的）科genus n.属species n.种Capsicum annuym n.一年生辣椒binomial nomenclature n.双名法Tyrannosaurus rex n.霸王龙Homo sapiens n.智人vegetal adj.植物的bell pepper n.甜椒searing adj.灼热的，火辣辣的Thai chilli n.泰国辣椒，鸟眼椒peppercorn n.胡椒粒Whereas ordinary peppercorns grow on vines, Sichuan peppers are berries of the prickly-ash tree and part of the citrus family. They come in red and green varieties; the red has an earthily floral taste, where the green is more astringent. Their most pronounced feature, however, is not their flavour but their effect on the mouth: they contain a chemical called hydroxy-alpha-sanshool, which induces a tingling numbness in the lips and tongue, a bit like being subjected to a long but mild electric shock.prickly-ash tree n.花椒树citrus n.柑橘属Rutaceae n.芸香科variety n.品种grape variety n.葡萄品种earthy adj.泥土的floral adj.花的flora n.植物群fauna n.动物群where conj.然而Sometimes a teacher will be listened to, where a parent might not. 有时教师的话会听，而父母的话可能就不听。

《The Economist》《经济学人》中文版2009年12月

全国气候：政治搭台，科学唱戏Climate change 气候变化heated debate 激辩Nov 26th 2009From The Economist print editionWhy political orthodoxy must not silence scientific argument为何有了政治说法，还应有科学的辩论？Illustration by Claudio Munoz“WHAT is truth?” That was Pontius Pilate’s answer to Jesus’s assertion that “Everyone that is of the truth heareth my voice.” It sounds suspiciously like the modern argument over climate change.“真理是什么？”耶稣说完“相信真理的人都能听到我”之后，彼拉多随即如此问道。

听起来耳熟？在当代，气候变化引起的争辩就与此有相似之处。

A majority of the world’s climate sc ientists have convinced themselves, and also a lot of laymen, some of whom have political power, that the Earth’s climate is changing; that the change, from humanity’s point of view, is for the worse; and that the cause is human activity, in the form of excessive emissions of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide.国际上，大多数气候科学家不但说服了自己，也说服了很多门外汉（其中包括一些有政治影响力的人）--地球的气候正在改变；这种改变，从人道主义角度来看，是消极的；这种改变的始作俑者是人类，是他们通过排放超量的诸如二氧化碳的温室气体而造成的。

英文外刊对英语专业学生的重要性及其精读方法——以《经济学人》为例

172020年20期总第512期ENGLISH ON CAMPUS英文外刊对英语专业学生的重要性及其精读方法——以《经济学人》为例文/吴彦泽【摘要】当今英语专业学生不仅要掌握相应的英语语言知识，还要以语言为媒介更好地了解英语国家的社会与文化，发挥英语在全球化大背景下起到的桥梁作用。

英文外刊涵盖面广、时效性强，因此阅读英文外刊不仅可以提升学生的英语语言运用能力，还可以帮助其更好地了解英语国家社会文化。

本文将从多方面探讨英文外刊对英语专业学生的重要性以及以《经济学人》为例介绍英文外刊的精读方法。

【关键词】英文外刊；英语专业；重要性；精读方法【作者简介】吴彦泽，山东师范大学外国语学院。

大量的语言输入是学习好一种语言的前提，而阅读又在语言输入的方式中占据了举足轻重的地位。

对于英语专业的学生来说，大量的地道英语也就是我们常说的“authentic English”的输入显得尤为重要。

那么应该通过阅读什么材料来获得地道的英语输入呢？读英文外刊。

英文外刊内容包罗万象，题材丰富多彩并且时效性强，紧密结合当下英语国家社会时事热点。

通过阅读英文外刊，英语专业学生可以更好地了解当下英语国家的社会与文化。

一、英文外刊对英语专业学生的重要性1.英文外刊的重要性在《高等学校英语专业教学大纲》中的体现。

在英语专业四级考试中，阅读理解的分值为20分，占到了总分数的20%。

而在2015修改过后的《高校英语专业八级考试大纲中》，更是将英语专业八级考试中阅读理解的分数从20分提高到了30分，占到了考试总分值的30%。

英语专业四级、专业八级考试对于英语专业学生的重要性不言而喻，一定程度上是学生未来工作的一块敲门砖。

阅读能力也反映了英语专业学生的英语综合能力。

而英语专业四级考试、英语专业八级考试阅读理解题目的选材有很大一部分是来自于像《经济学人》这样的英文外刊。

由此我们不难看出，加强对英文外刊的阅读训练可以提高英语专业学生的英语能力。

2.关注文章中词汇的运用。

《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 the source 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 thedetailed 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 longer 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 serious that Britain's Medicines 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 particle-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 illegalworkers, 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. Thisstudy, 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, which is dominated by Microsoft, or for high-end enterprise software, which is dominated by SAP and Oracle, the middle ground is still highly f ragmented, which presents an opportunity. “This is the last great software market left—the last unconsolidated market,” says Zach Nelson of NetSuite, which provides a suite of software services including accounting, sales-force automation and customer service. His firm is targeting small and medium-sized businesses by providing “verticalised” services—that is, versions of its software adapted to particular types of company, such as professional-service firms, wholesale distributors and software firms.Large companies, says Mr Nelson, have already made big investments in traditional software. “They've already been through the pain,” he says. So they will not be in a hurry to ditch their existing investments in traditional software from the likes of SAP and Or acle. “I have no fantasy of replacing those guys,” says Mr Nelson. But Mr Benioff of disagrees. His firm provides customer-relationship management (CRM) software as a service, which is already used by many big firms including Cisco, Sprint a nd Merrill Lynch. “The world's largest companies are now using for the world's largest CRM implementations,” he says. “It's the future of our industry that everything will be a service.”Even so, Mr Maynard reckons it will be some time before large companies fully embrace the service model. However,。

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经济学人精读教材有道考神团队@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。

欢迎大家选择经济学人课程，我们的课程时间持续一周，具体为：7月18日19:00-20:00 精讲篇章1 – kill seven diseases, save 1.2m lives a year（医疗类）7月19日19:00-20:00 精讲篇章2 – hyperactive, yet passive（经济类）7月20日19:00-20:00 精讲篇章3 – clear thinking on climate change（环境类）7月21日19:00-20:00 精讲篇章4 – the future of computing（科技类）7月22日19:00-20:00 精讲篇章5 – who’s afraid of the cheap oil（经济类）7月23日19:00-20:00 精讲篇章6 – migrant crisis（移民危机）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。

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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: Eradicating DiseaseOct 10th 2015 | From the print editionViral and parasitic diseases are not only worth killing off, they are also increasingly vulnerable.TO EXTERMINA TE a living species by accident is normally frowned on. To do so deliberately might thus seem an extraordinary sin. But if that species is Plasmodium falciparum, the sin may be excused. This parasitic organism causes the most deadly form of malaria. Together with four cousins, it is responsible for about 450,000 deaths a year, and the ruination of the lives of millions more people who survive the initial crisis of disease. Besides the direct suffering this causes, the lost human potential is enormous. The Gates Foundation, an American charity, reckons that eradicating malaria would bring the world $2 trillion of benefits by 2040.Malaria is one of the worst examples of the damage that transmissible diseases can wreak. But it is not alone. AIDS carries off fit, young adults by the millions and tuberculosis by the hundreds of thousands. Measles, whooping cough and diarrhoea together kill over 1m children a year. Parasitic worms and mosquito-borne viruses like dengue, though they take relatively few lives, debilitate many.Campaigns have brought the toll down heroically. As recently as 2000, malaria killed around 850,000 people a year; likewise, since 2000 deaths from measles have fallen by 75%, to around 150,000. These successes are to be celebrated, but an even greater prize exists: to go beyond controlling infections and infestations and instead to eradicate some of them completely, by exterminating the pathogens and parasites that cause them. That has been accomplished a couple of times in the past, for smallpox (a human disease) and rinderpest (a cattle disease similar to measles). The end is reckoned to be close for polio (a virus that once killed and crippled millions) and dracunculiasis (a parasitic worm). But more must follow.Swat teamsSome diseases are not suitable for eradication because the organisms that cause them hang around in the environment, or have other animal hosts. Others, such as tuberculosis, can infect people “silently”, without causing symptoms, so are invisible to doctors. But sometimes the culprit is a poverty of ambition. A list of five plausible targets—measles, mumps, rubella, filariasis and pork tapeworm—has hardly changed since the early 1990s, yet measles, mumps and rubella are all the subjects of intensive vaccination campaigns that could easily be converted into ones of eradication. And even though Swaziland is poised to become the first malaria-free country in sub-Saharan Africa, only a few dare to make explicit the goal of ridding the planet of the disease. Hepatitis C should be made a target, too. It kills half a million a year, and affects rich and poor countries alike, yet new drugs against it are almost 100% effective and there are no silent carriers. Eradicating these seven diseases—the five, plus malaria and hepatitis C—would save a yearly total of 1.2m lives. It would transform countless more.People argue that the cost of chasing down the last few cases of a disease is not worth it. Ifthe mass-vaccination campaigns under way can lower the incidence of measles, mumps, rubella and so on in poor countries to something close to rich-world levels, the argument goes, that is surely good enough.Well, it isn't. A disease can bounce back. That is what malaria did in the 1960s, when political attention waned, and the parasites that cause it evolved resistance to drugs and the mosquitoes that spread it evolved resistance to insecticides.Three big improvements underpin the argument for throwing eradication's net more widely. The first is better communications. The technology for locating and monitoring cases of disease in poor countries, even when few and far between, has improved immeasurably in the past two decades with the spread of mobile phones and the internet, and the expansion of road networks.The se cond is better medical technology. The reason filariasis is on the “possibles” list, for example, is the invention of ivermectin, a drug that kills the worm which causes it. The inventors of this drug won half of this year's Nobel prize for medicine. The other half was won by the woman who came up with an answer to drug resistance in malaria—a medicine called artemisinin, which has been crucial to the success of the recent push against the disease. (This time, alert to the risk of resistance, doctors have formulated it with other drugs to create combination therapies that natural selection finds hard to get around.)Even better technology is in the pipeline. In the case of mosquito-borne illnesses such as malaria and dengue, genetic engineering promises ways of making the insects resistant to the pathogens that they pass on to people, of crashing the mosquito population, and even of attacking insects and pathogens with genetically modified fungi and bacteria. Genetic engineering also promises a wide range of new vaccines.The third reason for seeking eradication is a change in political attitudes. The emergence of AIDS, in particular, made governments everywhere sit up and take notice. Last year's west African outbreak of Ebola only reinforced the message. Political attention leads to better medical infrastructure. To deal with AIDS, new networks of clinics were created and staffed with trained personnel. These can serve as the backbone of the campaigns that would be the starting-point for many extermination programmes.The Dalek doctrineThe list of candidates for such programmes should be extended as and when circumstances change. The biggest prize might be AIDS itself. Smallpox, the first target for eradication, was picked in part because the virus that caused it had only humans as hosts and could not survive independently for more than a few hours. It had, in other words, no hiding place. Both of these are true of HIV, the AIDS-causing virus. What is missing is the third ingredient for smallpox: a reliable vaccine.Throughout history, humans and disease have waged a deadly and never-ending war. Today the casualties are chiefly the world's poorest people. But victory against some of the worst killers is at last within grasp. Seize it.中文翻译（来自于网络）：第一篇：根除疾病病毒性疾病和寄生虫疾病不仅仅值得杀死，而且还在变得愈发不堪一击。