考研英语阅读 经济学家.docx

1、考研英语阅读 经济学家1、Education Snooty or what?Oct 14th 2004 From The Economist print editionInverted snobbery prevents good teachers going where theyre neededA clever man wants to do a good thing, but the wicked government stops him. That is the scandalous-sounding story of the difficulties encountered by T

2、ristram Jones-Parry, head of fee-paying Westminster School, one of the best in the country. He retires next year and wants to help teach maths in a state school.Was he welcomed with open arms? No. He was told, he complains, that he would need retraining for the state system. It was a similar story f

3、or David Wolfe, a retired American physics professor who teaches in a British state school. He said this week that the authorities told him to sit the GCSEmaths exam normally taken by 16-year-olds if he wanted to continue. The system is not quite as insane as this might suggest. The rules that requi

4、re state-school teachers to be formally qualified do have exceptions. The Teacher Training Agency insists that Mr Jones-Parry could gain his ticket in just a day, by having an assessor from the state system observe his work at Westminster (a requirement scarcely less ludicrous than the supposed dema

5、nd for retraining). Mr Wolfes American PhD would count as an equivalent to the GCSE maths pass normally required. So he would scrape by as well. The General Teaching Council, another quango, has now apologised to Mr Jones-Parry for giving him the wrong information at first, and then leaving his foll

6、ow-up letter unanswered for six weeks. The real story is the gulf between the two kinds of school. Heads like Mr Jones-Parry hire teachers with good academic credentials but not necessarily with state qualifications. State-school hiring is closely regulated; their teachers need to be expert form-fil

7、lers and jargon-wielders, and are much less likely to have good degrees: indeed only 38% of state-school maths teachers have a degree in the subject; in independent schools, 63% do. So its not surprising that private-school teachers think even the most nominal barriers to their teaching in state sch

8、ools are offensive and silly. The other side responds in kind: teaching unions this week said snidely that Mr Jones-Parry might be good at teaching advanced maths to well-behaved bright kids, but would not necessarily know how to teach simple sums to rowdy, dim ones. Perhaps. But many state-school p

9、arents desperately seeking better maths teaching for their children might consider that risk rather small.2、Parents and children Family valuesSep 30th 2004 From The Economist print editionRich kids have little time for their elderly parents. The ingratitude!WHY was King Lear treated so cruelly by hi

10、s daughters? Until recently, most of the answers have come from scholars with scant knowledge of economic theory. Fortunately, John Ermisch, an Essex economist, is working to remedy this deficiency. His research proves what many parents have long suspectedthat increased wealth goes along with filial

11、 ingratitude. Topic sentenceUsing data from the British Household Panel Survey, Mr Ermisch shows that affluent parents are slightly more likely to supply offspring with money and help with child-rearing than poor parents. But success seems to have precisely the opposite effect on children. The mere

12、possession of a university degree makes children 20% less likely to phone their mothers regularly, and more than 50% less likely to pay them a visit. This is puzzling because self-interested children might be expected to behave in precisely the opposite way. Most wealthy people are descended from we

13、althy parents, which means they have a lot of patrimony to lose by cutting back on the fawning. “Nothing will come of nothing,” as a pre-retirement and still sane King Lear put it when his youngest daughter dared to withhold her affections. So why are rich kids such brats? There are two likely expla

14、nations. The first is that, as their income rises, the marginal cost of providing services goes up. It simply isnt worth their while to help with the shopping, particularly since affluence tends to increase distances between parents and children. And, since personal contact correlates with telephone

15、 contact, they are less likely to phone, too. Out of sight, out of mind.Another answer comes from an obscure branch of economics known as strategic bequest theory. This predicts that children will provide only enough services to ensure they get a reasonable share of the inheritance. But that point i

16、s reached sooner by those who have only one sibling rival, or none at all. Wealthier families, which tend to be smaller, simply fail to ensure the optimum amount of competition. Given these iron laws, what are parents supposed to do? Good results might be achieved by having more children, or express

17、ing a sudden interest in the local cats home. But Mr Ermisch is not optimistic. “The only thing they can do is follow their children around,” he says. And dont make King Lears mistake by handing over the cash first. 3、The internet Alive and kicking Sep 23rd 2004 From The Economist print editionCompe

18、tition still exists on the web JUST when you thought you knew the web, along come new competitors to keep things interesting. On September 15th, a new search engine called A was unveiled by Amazon, the giant internet retailer. It repackages Googles search results, but with useful tweaks. Searches no

19、t only call up websites and images on the same page, but other references, such as Amazons book search, the Internet Movie Database, and encyclopaedia and dictionary references. Moreover, it keeps track of users search historiesan important innovation as search becomes more personalised. Many had as

20、sumed the market was stitched up by Google and Yahoo! (who account for over 90% of searches), barring the expected entrance of Microsoft. Likewise, the market for online music seemed settled: Apples iTunes is the leader, its main rivals being RealNetworks and Microsofts MSN Music. Yet this, too, und

21、erstates the potential for battle. Last week, Yahoo! bought Musicmatch, an online music retailer and software firm, for $160m. Music downloads are now worth roughly $310m annually but are forecast to grow to $4.6 billion by 2008, according to Forrester Research, so there is room for new firms to spr

22、out. Meanwhile, the most surprising new competition is in web browsers. Microsoft was the undisputed champ（ Informal：=A champion）, after bundling Internet Explorer with its Windows operating system in the 1990s and destroying Netscape. However, Microsofts browser is so vulnerable to attacks by onlin

23、e crooks and various troublemakers that the American and German governments have recommended that users consider alternatives. This has been a boon to two small browser-makers, Opera, a Norwegian software company, and Mozilla, which developed the Firefox browser based on an open-source version of Ne

24、tscape. Firefox boasted 1m downloads within 100 hours of its release on September 14th.Security has become the main competitive difference. The software of both Opera and Mozilla is considered safer (partly because they have fewer users and so are a less attractive target for hackers). Microsofts sh

25、are of the browser market has actually shrunk over the past three months from around 96% to 94%. It is a highly symbolic phenomenon, albeit a modest decrease. Even Google is thought to be toying with the idea of launching its own browser.Underlying this ripple of competition is the ability of large

26、companies that already benefit from economies of scale to extend into new areas, says Hal Varian, an economist at the University of California at Berkeley. That explains Amazons A9 search service and Yahoo!s move into music. As for browsers, “Microsoft had a lock on the market and just dropped the b

27、all. Microsoft hasnt provided any innovation in the browser area and they had poor security,” he says. The message: watch your back.（1俗语：擦亮你的眼睛；2Microsoft的一款软件，用来阻挡可疑信息或过大邮件。这里一语双关，反讽十足。） 4、Brain scanning No hiding placeOct 28th 2004 | SAN DIEGO From The Economist print editionStudies using function

28、al brain-imaging take on sophisticated topicsFEW recent innovations have transformed a field of research as much as functional magnetic-resonance imaging (fMRI). The technique has revolutionised the study of the human brain. By making visible the invisible (the activity of different bits of the livi

29、ng brain on a second-by-second basis), it has revolutionised the study of that organ. But what started out as a medical instrument is now used routinely to probe complex questions about behaviour and motivation. That was the lesson of two studies presented to a meeting of the Society for Neuroscienc

30、e, held in San Diego earlier this week. In one of the studies, Jonathan Cohen, of Princeton University, and his colleagues tried to explain an anomaly that has been nagging economists for decades. If humans were fully rational (at least, rational in the way that economists define the word), they wou

31、ld attach the same monetary value to a weeks delay in receiving a payment, regardless of when that week began. So, if someone is offered $10 at the beginning of any given week, or $11 at the end of it, he should make the same choice, whether that week starts now or a year from now. But that turns ou

32、t not to be how most people judge it. In most cases, they will take the $10 today but the $11 in a year and a week.Dr Cohen reasoned that this inconsistency might reflect the influence of different neural systems in the brain. To test this, he recruited 14 students, the traditional workhorses in such studies. While lying in his brain scanner, the students were offered the choice of receiving an A gift certificate worth somewhere between $5 and $40 immediately, or getting one worth 1% to 50% more in a couple of weeks time.When a participant chose the earlier reward, there was an i