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Education is essential not only for environmental protection and climate change mitigation but also for climate change adaptation. It may be even more important than income and wealth for reducing vulnerability to natural hazards. The higher the average level of education in a country, the fewer deaths due to disasters, even after income, life expectancy at birth, exposure to climate related risks, population density, the political system, the region and whether a country is landlocked are taken into account.The importance of education for disaster resilience is valid for both slow and rapid onset cases. There are several potential causal mechanisms behind this. Learning basic reading, writing and abstraction skills raises the efficiency of cognitive processes and logical reasoning, thus enhancing cognitive capacity. Probably as a result, more educated people usually have better personal planning skills and are willing to change potentially risky behaviour. They are also more prepared for hazards because they tend to establish, for example, a family evacuation plan or stock pile emergency supplies. And they can access early warning systems and seasonal predictions more easily, which directly helps prevent fatalities. Female education at a certain age, typically the childrearing years, is especially important in preventing disaster-related deaths as well as in building long-term resilience because of women’s active role in improving the overall quality of institutions and social networks for mutual assistance. In this sense there is a spillover effect that works through social interaction when members of a community benefit from their peers’ higher education levels, which can facilitate access to information and knowledge as well as to institutions that help reduce disaster risk. This is important because diverse forms of knowledge obtained from, for instance, social networks and boundary organizations can greatly reduce vulnerability through two-way communication, improving mitigation as well as adaptation. Education also increases sociopsychological resilience. Better educated individuals affected by the 2004 Indian ocean tsunami were more able to cope with psychological stress in the long term. Better educated individuals were also less likely to live in camps or other temporary housing a few years after the tsunami, and they were economically more resilient. Other aspects of education that contribute to economic resilience include a wider set of skills among better educated individuals, which allows them to take up jobs in sectors other than agriculture, as well as easier access to certain resources due to social networks, including government financial assistance or informal loans from social networks.

There’s an urban legend about a Texas man who takes a rifle to the side of his barn and sprays bullets across the wall, more or less at random. Then he finds the densest clusters of holes and paints a bull’s eye around each one. Later, a passerby impressed by this display, trots off in search of the marksman. In a reversal of cause and effect, the Texas Sharpshooter is born.The Sharpshooter Fallacy is often used by scientists to illustrate our tendency to narrativize data after the fact. We may observe an unusual grouping of cancer cases and back into an explanation for it, cherry-picking statistics and ignoring the vagaries of chance. As we muddle through COVID-19’s winter surge, the story holds a deeper lesson about the perils of interpreting data without a full appreciation of the context Omicron, because of its extraordinary contagiousness and its relative mildness, has transformed the risks and the consequences of infection, but not our reading of the statistics that have been guiding us through the pandemic. Do the numbers still mean what we think they mean?A coronavirus infection isn’t what it once was. Studies suggest that, compared with Delta, Omicron is a third to half as likely to send someone to the hospital; by some estimates, the chance that an older, vaccinated person will die of COVID is now lower than the risk posed by the seasonal flu. And yet the variant is exacting a punishing toll—medical, social, economic. (Omicron still presents a major threat to people who are unvaccinated.) The United States is recording, on average, more than eight hundred thousand coronavirus cases a day, three times last winter’s peak. Given the growing use of at-home tests, this official count greatly underestimates the true number of infections. We don’t know how many rapid tests are used each day, or what proportion return positive, rendering unreliable traditional metrics, such as a community’s test-positivity rate, which is used to guide policy on everything from school closures to sporting events.There are many other numbers we’d like to know. How likely is Omicron to deliver not an imitating cold but the worst flu of your life? How does that risk increase with the number and severity of medical conditions a person has? What are the chances of lingering symptoms following a mild illness? How long does immunity last after a booster shot or an infection? Americans aren’t waiting to find out. Last week, rates of social distancing and self-quarantining rose to their higher levels in nearly a year, and dining, shopping, and social gatherings fell to new lows. Half of Americans believe that it will be at least a year before they return to their pre-pandemic lives, if they ever do; three-quarters feel that they’re as likely, or more so, to contract the virus today—a year after vaccines became available—as they were when the pandemic began.Should we be focused on case counts at all? Some experts, including Anthony Fauci, argue that hospitalizations are now the more relevant marker of viral damage. More than a hundred and fifty thousand Americans are currently hospitalized with the coronavirus—a higher number than at any other point in the pandemic. But that figure, too, is not quite what it seems. Many hospitalized COVID patients have no respiratory symptoms; they were admitted for other reasons—a heart attack, a broken hip, cancer surgery—and happened to test positive for the virus. There are no nationwide estimates of the proportion of hospitalized patients with “incidental COVID”, but in New York State some forty per cent of hospitalized patients with COVID are thought to have been admitted for other reasons. The Los Angeles County Department of Health Services reported that incidental infections accounted for roughly two-thirds of COVID admissions at its hospitals. (Pediatric COVID hospitalizations have also reached record levels, probably because Omicron’s transmissibility means that many more kids are contracting the virus; there’s little evidence that the variant is causing severe illness in them, though)Clarifying the distinction between a virus that drives illness and one that’s simply along for the ride is more than an academic exercise. If we tally a symptomatic or minimally symptomatic infections as COVID hospitalizations. we risk exaggerating the toll of the virus, with all the attendant social and economic ramifications. If we overstate the degree of incidental COVID, we risk promoting a misguided sense of security. Currently, the U.S. has no data-collection practices or unified framework for separating one type of hospitalization from another. Complicating all this is the fact that it’s sometimes hard to distinguish a person hospitalized “with COVID” from one hospitalized for “COVID”. For some patients, a coronavirus infection can aggravate a seemingly unrelated condition—a COVID fever tips an elderly woman with a urinary-tract infection into delirium; a bout of diarrhea dehydrates a man admitted with sickle-cell disease. In such cases, COVID isn’t an innocent bystander, nor does it start the fire—it adds just enough tinder to push a manageable problem into a crisis.It is a positive development that we’re able to engage in this discussion at all. With Alpha and Delta, almost all COVID hospitalizations were related to the infection. The situation is different with Omicron—a function both of its diminished ability to replicate in the lungs and of its superior capacity to infect people who’ve been vaccinated or previously contracted the virus. Still, parsing the numbers in a moment of crisis can seem a subordinate aim. Omicron is imposing an undeniable strain on the health-care system. Last week, a quarter of U.S. hospitals reported critical staffing shortages. Many have postponed non-urgent surgeries, and some have asked their employees to continue working even after they’ve been infected. Some states have called in the National Guard; others have enacted “crisis standards of care”, whereby overwhelmed hospitals can restrict or deny treatment to some patients—I. C. U. beds, ventilators, and other lifesaving resources-in order to prioritize those who are more likely to benefit.But this wave, too, shall pass—possibly soon. At the end of it, the vast majority of Americans could have some degree of immunity, resulting from vaccination, infection, or both. In all probability, we’d then approach the end endemic phase of the virus, and be left with a complex set of questions about how to live with it. What level of disease are we willing to accept? What is the purpose of further restrictions? What do we owe one another? A clear-eyed view of the numbers will inform the answers. But it’s up to us to paint the targets.

Today’s changed conditions for doing social theory have disturbed the original balance of trade between lay and expert social theorists. Were we to compare, say, the end of the nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth, we would soon find two major differences in the circumstances affecting who think about social life and how they think. First, the number of people with ready access to a culture supportive of critical thinking has increased dramatically, especially after the hold of the European powers on their colonies came to a formal end, primarily during the 1950s and 1960s. Second, the people normally engaged in critical social thinking are no longer necessarily members of or identified with a dominant class of bourgeois intellectuals. Many of the new social theorists do not consider themselves bourgeois, and many are visibly not anything like the white, male advocates of European culture who wrote the first, best-known social theories. These two differences—one of number, one of kind—make social theory today an enterprise largely, but not entirely, different from that of the nineteenth century.

It is also clear from his account who is responsible for misrepresenting this threat: the media and politicians. Throughout this work, he scolds both. Politicians, we are told, “amplify the threat for their own political gains and mislead the public into misunderstanding terrorism and prefer appearing tough on terrorism to effectively combating it at home”. He argues that media reporting is significantly flawed and hysterical and suggests that the media and politicians seldom pass up any opportunity to manipulate and sensationalize news events. The combination of these two factors is a great inflation of the terrorist threat in the United States, resulting in popular hysteria. The focus on the threat to the West is understandable in some ways—it is the threat to one’s own state that the media and politicians are concerned with and attempt to mitigate.

This work belongs within the movement of the so-called “Third Force” psychology, but unlike many other works in this stream of thought, it approaches the problems of man as a person from a point of view that comes from within science and from an academic psychological perspective. I stress this not because there have been no other such attempts, but because these attempts are in the minority—and because very often, to those who are not knowledgeable about the movement, Third Force psychology seems to be a domain reserved exclusively for clinicians. This impression is obtained because most of the Third Force psychologists are clinicians or psychologists interested in personality theory. Also, the mistaken notion that if one is interested in the whole person then it is not possible to be scientific is still too prevalent. In truth, the impact of this psychology is by no means limited to clinical psychology—its insights are relevant for the whole field. Moreover, it is precisely the prejudice that this psychology must be either anti scientific or nonscientific that we would like to challenge.

Totalitarianism is the polar case of such bureaucratic concentration of power that destroys democratic processes, but not the only one. The same tendency can be observed in political machine that transfer the power that legally belongs to voters to political bosses, in business corporations that vest the power that rightfully belongs to stockholders in corporation officials, in those unions that bestow the power that rightfully belongs to rank-and-file members upon union leaders. These cases lead some writers to contend that the present trend toward bureaucratization spells the doom of democratic institution. This may well be too fatalistic a viewpoint, but there can be no doubt that this trend constitutes a challenge. To protect ourselves against this threat, while continuing to utilize these efficient administrative mechanisms, we must first learn fully to understand how bureaucracies function.

Put the following passage into Chinese in your answer sheet.It is worth trying for a moment to put oneself in the position of a foreign observer, new to England, but unprejudiced and able, because of his work, to keep in touch with ordinary, useful, unspectacular people. Some of his generalizations would be wrong, because he would not make enough allowance for the temporary dislocations resulting from war. Never having seen England in normal times, he might underrate the power of class distinctions, or think English agriculture healthier than it is, or be too much impressed by the dinginess of the London streets or the prevalence of drunkenness. But with his fresh eyes he would see a great deal that a native observer misses, and his probable impressions are worth tabulating. Almost certainly he would find the salient characteristics of the English common people to be artistic insensibility, gentleness, respect for legality, suspicion of foreigners, sentimentality about animals, hypocrisy exaggerated class distinctions, and an obsession with sport. As for our artistic insensibility, ever-growing stretches of beautiful countryside are ruined by planless building, the heavy industries are allowed to convert whole countries into blackened deserts, ancient monuments are wantonly pulled down or swamped by seas of yellow brick, attractive vistas are blocked by hideous statues to nonentity—and all this without any popular protest whatever. When England’s housing problem is discussed. Its aesthetic aspect simply does not enter the mind of the average man. Nor is there any widespread interest in any of the arts, except perhaps music. Poetry, the art in which above all others England has excelled, has for more than century had no appeal whatever for the common people. It is only acceptable when—as in some popular songs and mnemonic rhymes—it is masquerading something else. Indeed the very word “poetry” arouses either derision or embarrassment in ninety-eight people out of a hundred.Our imaginary foreign observer would certainly be struck by our gentleness: by the orderly behavior of English crowds, the lack of pushing and quarrelling, the willingness to form queues, the good temper of harassed, overworked people like bus conductors. The manners of the English working class are not always very graceful, but they are extremely considerate.

So much is written about happiness at work—yet judging from Gallup statistics that show 85% of employees aren’t engaged, few know how to attain it. Given that the average person spends 90,000 hours at work in a lifetime, it’s important to figure out how to feel better about the time you spend earning a living. Here’s the catch, though: If you set happiness as your primary goal, you can end up feeling the opposite. This is because happiness (like all emotions) is a fleeting state, not a permanent one. An alternative solution is to make meaning your vocational goal.As author Emily Esfahani Smith has outlined, people who focus on meaning in their personal and professional lives are more likely to feel an enduring sense of well-being. Research shows that making work more meaningful is one of the most powerful and underutilized ways to increase productivity, engagement, and performance. In one survey of 12000 employees, 50 percent said they didn’t get a feeling of meaning and significance from their work, but those who did reported 1.7 times greater job satisfaction, were 1.4 times more engaged, and were more than three times as likely to remain with their current employer.As a coach to executives considering their next career move, I often hear clients express their desire to find greater meaning at work Take Jon (not his real name), for example. He started a biotech company, which he successfully grew to over $2 billion in revenue. Investors were champing at the bit for him to take the helm of another organization as CEO. However, when presented with these outwardly impressive opportunities, Jou confessed that he wanted to solve what felt to him like more significant health care problems—ones that no one had been able to solve. Although he was flattered to be courted for this top role, he was searching for more from his work, including long-term career satisfaction and engagement.The Difference between Meaning and HappinessIn a recent study Shawn Achor and his research team found that nine in 10 people would be willing to swap a percentage of their lifetime earnings for more meaningful work. That’s a lot of employees who would take a pay cut to have their work matter. But what are we really searching for when we say we want more “meaning,” and how does it differ from happiness?Philosophers, scholars, artists, and social psychologists have struggled to come up with an answer to that question for years. According to research on happiness and meaning conducted by psychologist Roy Baumeister and colleagues, five factors differentiate meaning and happiness:(1) . While happiness was found to correlate with having your desires satisfied, meaning was not. In fact, as Baumeister wrote: “The frequency of good and bad feelings tums out to be irrelevant to meaning, which can flourish even in very forbidding conditions.” For example, Jon might have enjoyed the prestige of a CEO title, but his quest to do something that mattered—even if it meant not getting that benefit—overrode this want.(2) . Baumeister found that while happiness relates directly to the here and now, meaning “seems to come from assembling past, present, and future into some kind of coherent story.” In Jon’s case, although becoming a chief executive may have brought immediate happiness, he was willing to forgo that quick hit of endorphins in order to seek something that reflected his bigger-picture and long-term values.(3) . Connections to others is important for both happiness and meaning, but the character of those connections informs the type of fulfillment they give you. Baumeister found that helping to other people leads to meaning, while having others help you leads to happiness. Jon’s desire to use his skills to help others predisposed him seek that type of role.(4) . Stress, strife, and struggles reduce happiness, “but they seem to be part and parcel of a highly meaningful life,” according to Baumeister. Jon was willing to take the more difficult route of figuring out an alternative to the CEO job in order to increase his chances of finding meaning at work.(5) __. An important source of meaning is actions or activities that “express the self.” But they are “mostly irrelevant” where happiness is concerned. Jon’s pull toward a different type of job was an expression of what had become most important to him.How to Prioritize MeaningThe distinctions above provide guideposts on steering your professional life toward meaning, which, as research by psychologist Pninit Russo-Netzer found, can ultimately lead to happiness as well. Here are four practical steps you can take to bring more meaning into your work:Keep a journal of activities. Identify the projects and tasks you find deeply satisfying (as opposed to ones that gratify you in the short term). Do you feel fulfilled when making presentations to your clients, for example? Are you energized when mentoring and coaching junior employees, thinking about how your present efforts contribute positively to their future?Align your values and actions when choosing what to prioritize. If mentoring is linked with your personal identity and self-expression, make coaching part of your weekly activities. If self-development is a core value, incorporate daily rituals such as listening to podcasts, taking a course, or joining a mastermind group.Focus on relationships, not just deliverables. But as you do so, be intentional about how you go about it, remembering Baumeister’s finding that contributing to others’ well-being is strongly tied to experiencing meaning.Share “best-self” narratives with coworkers. In the spirit of helping others, assist people in identifying what types of activities lead them to authentic self-expression and meaning. In the book Alive at Work, author Daniel Cable suggests having colleagues share stories of seeing one another at their best. You can do this for peers and ask them to return the favor.Living with meaning and purpose may not make you happy—at least in the short term. It requires self-reflection, effort, and wrestling with issues that initially can be frustrating. But when you approach work situations mindfully, with an eye toward contributing to others while honoring your personal identity, you’ll find opportunities to practice the skills that help you find the intrinsic value in your work.

Today’s changed conditions for doing social theory have disturbed the original balance of trade between lay and expert social theorists. Were we to compare, say, the end of the nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth, we would soon find two major differences in the circumstances affecting who think about social life and how they think. First, the number of people with ready access to a culture supportive of critical thinking has increased dramatically, especially after the hold of the European powers on their colonies came to a formal end, primarily during the 1950s and 1960s. Second, the people normally engaged in critical social thinking are no longer necessarily members of or identified with a dominant class of bourgeois intellectuals. Many of the new social theorists do not consider themselves bourgeois, and many are visibly not anything like the white, male advocates of European culture who wrote the first, best-known social theories. These two differences—one of number, one of kind—make social theory today an enterprise largely, but not entirely, different from that of the nineteenth century.

It is also clear from his account who is responsible for misrepresenting this threat: the media and politicians. Throughout this work, he scolds both. Politicians, we are told, “amplify the threat for their own political gains and mislead the public into misunderstanding terrorism and prefer appearing tough on terrorism to effectively combating it at home”. He argues that media reporting is significantly flawed and hysterical and suggests that the media and politicians seldom pass up any opportunity to manipulate and sensationalize news events. The combination of these two factors is a great inflation of the terrorist threat in the United States, resulting in popular hysteria. The focus on the threat to the West is understandable in some ways—it is the threat to one’s own state that the media and politicians are concerned with and attempt to mitigate.

This work belongs within the movement of the so-called “Third Force” psychology, but unlike many other works in this stream of thought, it approaches the problems of man as a person from a point of view that comes from within science and from an academic psychological perspective. I stress this not because there have been no other such attempts, but because these attempts are in the minority—and because very often, to those who are not knowledgeable about the movement, Third Force psychology seems to be a domain reserved exclusively for clinicians. This impression is obtained because most of the Third Force psychologists are clinicians or psychologists interested in personality theory. Also, the mistaken notion that if one is interested in the whole person then it is not possible to be scientific is still too prevalent. In truth, the impact of this psychology is by no means limited to clinical psychology—its insights are relevant for the whole field. Moreover, it is precisely the prejudice that this psychology must be either anti scientific or nonscientific that we would like to challenge.

Totalitarianism is the polar case of such bureaucratic concentration of power that destroys democratic processes, but not the only one. The same tendency can be observed in political machine that transfer the power that legally belongs to voters to political bosses, in business corporations that vest the power that rightfully belongs to stockholders in corporation officials, in those unions that bestow the power that rightfully belongs to rank-and-file members upon union leaders. These cases lead some writers to contend that the present trend toward bureaucratization spells the doom of democratic institution. This may well be too fatalistic a viewpoint, but there can be no doubt that this trend constitutes a challenge. To protect ourselves against this threat, while continuing to utilize these efficient administrative mechanisms, we must first learn fully to understand how bureaucracies function.

Which is more important, raising the standard of living or protecting the environment? Why?

I am grateful for the invitation to participate in this important conference, and I interpret it as evidence that students of creativity themselves possess the sensitivity to divergent approaches that they seek to identify in others. But I am not altogether sanguine about the outcome of your experiment with me. As most of you already know, I am no psychologist, but rather an ex-physicist now working in the history of science. Probably my concern is no less with creativity than your own, but my goals, my techniques, and my sources of evidence are so very different from yours that I am far from sure how much we do, or even should, have to say to each other. These reservations imply no apology; rather they hint at my central thesis. In the sciences, as I shall suggest below, it is often better to do one’s best with the tools at hand than to pause for contemplation of divergent approaches.If a person of my background and interests has anything relevant to suggest to this conference, it will not be about your central concerns, the creative personality and its early identification. But implicit in the numerous working papers distributed to participants in this conference is an image of the scientific process and of the scientist; that image almost certainly conditions many of the experiments you try as well as the conclusions you draw; and about it the historian may well have something to say. I shall restrict my attention to one aspect of this image--an aspect epitomized as follows in one of the working papers: The basic scientist “must lack prejudice to a degree where he can look at the most ‘self-evident’ facts or concepts without necessarily accepting them, and, conversely, allow his imagination to play with the most unlikely possibilities”. In the more technical language supplied by other working papers, this aspect of the image recurs as an emphasis upon “divergent thinking, the freedom to go off in different directions,... rejecting the old solution and striking out in some new direction.”I do not at all doubt that this description of “divergent thinking” and the concomitant search for those able to do it are entirely proper. Some divergence characterizes all scientific work, and gigantic divergences lie at the core of the most significant episodes in scientific development. But both my own experience in scientific research and my reading of the history of sciences lead me to wonder whether flexibility and open-mindedness have not been too exclusively emphasized as the characteristics requisite for basic research.

No thinker in the nineteenth century has had so direct, deliberate and powerful an influence upon mankind as Karl Marx. Both during his lifetime and after it he has exercised an intellectual and moral ascendancy over his followers, the strength of which was unique even in that golden age of democratic nationalism, an age which saw the rise of great popular heroes and martyrs，romantic, almost legendary figures, whose lives and words dominated the imagination of the masses and created a new revolutionary tradition in Europe. Yet Marx could not, at any time, be called a popular figure in the ordinary sense: certainly he was in no sense a popular writer or orator. He wrote extensively, but his works were not, during his lifetime, read widely; and when, in the late eighteen seventies, they began to reach the immense public which several among them afterwards obtained, the desire to read them was due not so much to a recognition of their intrinsic qualities as to the growth of the fame and notoriety of the movement with which he was identified.Marx totally lacked the qualities of a great popular leader or agitator, was not a publicist of genius like the Russian democrat Alexander Helen, nor did he possess Bakunin's marvelous eloquence; the greater part of his working life was spent in comparative obscurity in London, at his writing-desk and in the reading-room of the British Museum. He was little known to the general public, and while towards the end of his life he became the recognized and admired leader of a powerful international movement, nothing in his life or character stirred the imagination or evoked the boundless devotion, the intense, almost religion, worship, with which such men as Kossuth, Mazzini, and even Lassalle in his last years, were regarded by their followers.His public appearances were neither frequent nor notably successful. On the few occasions on which he addressed banquets or public meetings, his speeches were overloaded with matter, and delivered with a combination of monotonousness and brusqueness, which commanded the respect but not the enthusiasm of his audience. He was by temperament a theorist and an intellectual, and instinctively avoided direct contact with the masses, to the study of whose interests his entire life was devoted. To many of his followers he appeared in the role of a dogmatic and sententious German schoolmaster, prepared to repeat his theses indefinitely, with rising sharpness, until their essence became irremovably lodged in his disciples' minds. The greater part of his economic teaching was given its first expression in lectures to working men: his exposition under these circumstances was by all accounts a model of lucidity and conciseness. But he wrote slowly and painfully, as sometimes happens with rapid and fertile thinkers, scarcely able to cope with the speed of their own ideas, impatient at once to communicate a new doctrine, and to forestall every possible objection; the published versions were generally turgid, clumsy, and obscure in detail, although the central doctrine is never in serious doubt. He was acutely copious of this and once compared himself with the hero of Balzac's Unknown Masterpiece, who tries to paint the picture which has formed itself in his mind, touches and retouches the canvas endlessly, to produce at last a shapeless mass of colors, which to his eye seems to express the vision in his imagination. He belonged to a generation which cultivated the emotions more intently and deliberately than its predecessors, and was brought up among men to whom ideas were often more real than facts, and personal relations meant far more than the events of the external world; by whom indeed public life was commonly understood and interpreted in terms of the rich and elaborate world of their own private experience.

The method of science does not seek to impose the desires and hopes of men upon the flux of things in a capricious manner. It may indeed be employed to satisfy the desires of men. But its successful use depends upon seeking, in a deliberate manner, and irrespective of what men’s desires are, to recognize, as well as to take advantage of, the structure which the flux possesses.Consequently, scientific method aims to discover what the facts truly are, and the use of the method must be guided by the discovered facts. But, as we have repeatedly pointed out, what the facts are cannot be discovered without reflection. Knowledge of the facts cannot be equated to the brute immediacy of our sensations. When our skin comes into contact with objects having high temperatures or with liquid air, the immediate experiences may be similar. We cannot, however, conclude without error that the temperatures of the substances touched are the same. Sensory experience sets the problem of knowledge, just because such experience is immediate and finally it must become informed by reflective analysis before knowledge can be said to take place.Every inquiry arises from some felt problem, so that no inquiry can even get under way unless some selection or sifting of the subject matter has taken place. Such selection requires, we have been urging all along, some hypothesis, preconception, prejudice, which guides the research as well as delimits the subject matter of inquiry. Every inquiry is specific in the sense that it has a definite problem to solve, and such solution terminates the inquiry. It is idle to collect “facts’’ unless there is a problem upon which they are supposed to bear.The ability to formulate problems whose solution may also help solve other problems is a rare gift, requiring extraordinary genius. The problems which meet us in daily life can be solved, if they can be solved at all, by the application of scientific method. But such problems do not, as a rule, raise far-reaching issues. The most striking applications of scientific method are to be found in the various natural and social sciences.The “facts” for which every inquiry reaches out are propositions for whose truth there is considerable evidence. Consequently what the “facts” are must be determined by inquiry, and cannot be determined antecedently to inquiry. Moreover, what we believe to be the facts clearly depends upon the stage of our inquiry. There is therefore no sharp line dividing facts from guesses or hypotheses. During any inquiry the status of a proposition may change from that of hypothesis to that of fact, or from that of fact to that of hypothesis. Every so-called fact, therefore, may be challenged for the evidence upon which it is asserted to be a fact, even though no such challenge is actually made.1.The best title for this passage might be （）. 2.The phrase “irrespective of” in the passage is closest in meaning to （）.3.The author mentioned “When our skin…be similar” in order to show that （）.4.Which of the following statements can best paraphrase the last sentence “It is idle…, to bear” in Paragraph 3?5.All of the following statements are TRUE EXCEPT that （）.

A year ago, three journalists working for Qatar’s Al-Jazeera English network suddenly found themselves caught up in Egypt's harsh security crackdown following the military's overthrow of Islamist President Mohammed Morsi, the country's first democratically elected leader. Two of them, Australian Peter Greste, an award-winning former BBC correspondent, and Mohammed Fahym, an Egyptian-born Canadian, were arrested when the police burst into their office suite in Cairo’s Marriott Hotel. The third, Egyptian freelance producer Baher Mohammed, was led away in handcuffs from his Cairo home after his police shot his dog.Egypt’s crackdown on political dissent has presented President Obama with a difficult choice. On one hand, he’s keenly aware of Egypt’s strategic importance to the U.S. — from cooperation with anti-terrorist intelligence to maintaining the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty, which is why Obama has refused to characterize Morsi’s overthrow as a coup, a step that would legally require the administration to halt all military aid to Egypt until the country restores democracy. But Obama also wants to be seen as a staunch defender of human rights and democracy, key demands of the Arab Spring protests that challenged autocratic rule in much of the Middle East. To that end, the conflicted president last year held up hundreds of millions of dollars of military aid to Egypt to signal his concern over human rights violations.Now, however, Washington's strategic considerations appear to have trumped its human rights concerns. The reason: the new Republican-controlled House and Senate are concerned with the rise of ISIS militants. There's also been a huge influx of aid to Egypt from oil-rich Gulf states that has weakened U.S. leverage. Last month, Obama signed legislation that allows him to invoke national security concerns to waive human rights conditions attached to $1.5 billion in mostly military aid to Egypt, such as requirements to hold free and fair elections and protect minority fights. And while Obama periodically speaks out against Egypt's dismal human rights record, there's little doubt among both administration officials and Middle East hands that he will use that waiver to keep the aid to Cairo flowing. “We can harangue the Egyptians all we want about democracy,” says an expert on Egypt at the Council on Foreign Relations. “But it doesn't get us anywhere.”Such attempts at gaining leverage over the Egyptians don't seem to be working. If anything, they have further stoked Egyptian doubts about Washington and driven Cairo closer to those wealthy Gulf nations who have provided el-Sissi with some $32 billion in aid with no conditions attached. By contrast, Washington's annual $1.5 billion aid package now seems paltry. Even with the likelihood that U.S. military aid to Egypt will now flow, the relationship still faces some rough spots. Egyptian officials are resisting American advice to spend its aid money on counterterrorism equipment and border security.Yet these disagreements are unlikely to change Washington's decision to mute its human rights concerns, which means the jailed Al-Jazeera journalists will have to count on a successful rapprochement between Egypt and Qatar for their release, rather than any further pressure from Washington. As an American working with the Egyptian military said, “I don’t think the administration has much stomach to really push hard against Cairo.”1.This passage is most probably taken from an article entitled “（）”2.The word “harangue” in paragraph 3 is closest in meaning to “（）”3.We can infer from the last sentence in the last paragraph that （）.4.According to the passage, which of the following statements is TRUE?5.What is the author’s attitude towards the dissent’s situation in Egypt?

Around the world, rumbles of complaint about globalization are growing louder. In East Asia, the financial crisis of 1997 left a jaundiced sense of what globalization entails, though robust economic recovery has tempered that. Globalization’s standing has also been badly damaged in Latin America by the meltdown of the Argentine economy in 2000 and financial crises in Brazil in 1999 and 2001. New fears about globalization are surfacing in Europe too. In France and Germany, working people link globalization with pressures to dismantle the social democratic state.These developments have raised concerns about the durability of globalization even among its supporters. In the final section of his new book Global Capitalism: Its Fail and Rise in the 20th Century，the Harvard professor Jeffry Frieden—who is in favor of globalization—ruminates on the possibility that today’s globalization, like that of the 19th century, might falter.It can be highly instructive to look back at what some historians call “the first globalization”. When people do so, however, they often tend to identify its end as the beginning of World War I in 1914. This is wrong, and leads to misunderstandings about today’s globalization.The first globalization ended with the Wall Street crash of 1929 and the ensuing Great Depression. The world's response to the crash, however, was profoundly affected by the political conditions that World War I had created. In the United States, Britain and France, the war created political and social conditions that fostered a turn to social democracy. In Germany, the onerous economic burdens of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles fostered a turn to Nazism.This history has enormous significance for understanding today's predicament. The first lesson is that the economic crisis of 1929—not politics—brought down the first globalization, suggesting that an economic crisis, and not politics, will bring down today’s globalization.The second lesson is that while political developments before 1929 did not cause the crash, they mattered enormously for the international response. After World War I, governments substantially recreated the prewar economic system, but the reconstructed system distributed prosperity extremely unevenly. In the United States, wealth and income inequality grew during the "Roaring Twenties". In Britain, the industrial midlands and the north suffered from persistent stagnation because of an overvalued exchange rate. And prosperity simply bypassed Germany.Additionally, there was a popular turn to isolationism in response to the carnage wrought by the war. The global economic system was therefore unpopular, and consequently it had few defenders when the crash came. That lesson holds for the current globalization, which is also unpopular and feared.After the first globalization crashed because of inherent financial fragility, the ensuing New Deal era created a system that remedied that fragility. The New Deal era also created a social democratic, mass-consumption economy in which income was more broadly shared because of unionization, minimum wages and social security provisions. But such an economy is expensive for individual capitalists, giving them incentive to evade its costs. That has been a driving force behind globalization since 1980, and that is the contradiction in today’s system.1.The financial cries in Brazil are mentioned in the first paragraph to （）.2.Which of the following is NOT true about Jeffry Frieden?3.Why does the author advocate looking back at the first globalization?4.Which of the following is the lesson learnt from the history of the first globalization?5.It can be inferred from the last paragraph that （）.

Major exams are the bane of many a student's life. They represent a one-off chance to scribble months or years of learning onto paper, and can make or break future career prospects. The trouble is that taking an exam at a time rigidly set by the academic calendar has never been an ideal way to determine competence—they may come at the right time for some lucky students, but not for many others.Perhaps it doesn't have to be that way. As teaching begins to move online, we no longer need to wait until the end of a course to perform assessments. Instead, computer software can assess understanding during the learning process itself by analyzing a student's every mouse click and keystroke. So could we finally be able to get rid of the dreaded final exam? A better option is a system that allows students to advance at their own pace when they have mastered the material, says Julia Freeland, an education researcher. This is called competency-based learning, and it requires tailoring the educational program in a different way for each student. This is clearly something that teachers in a busy classroom may struggle to do. If course material is offered online, though, with the student's input analyzed automatically by computer software, students can be assessed individually—even to the point that the software can identify when a given student is likely to perform to their full potential on an exam.Competency-based learning software is now being used both in high schools and in colleges across the US, says Freeland. The Virtual Learning Academy Charter School in the state of New Hampshire is one prominent high school example.The idea behind the software is relatively straightforward. It takes information about the student's activity on course website—the pages they have visited and whether the student has verified that they have read a passage of text or watched a video, for instance—and combines it with data on the student’s performance on informal tests and quizzes to establish in real time how well the student understands a concept. When that understanding reaches a predetermined level, the student is challenged with new concepts, or offered the opportunity to take a formal exam. Since this form of competency-based learning approach was introduced in some classes at Arizona State University, pass rates have reportedly increased. And Philip Regier, the dean of the university’s online arm, says there are now plans for doing “an entire degree adaptively”.Some firms push the technology further. Their artificial intelligence software analyses the data collected to constantly tweak the way it presents new information to the individual. Within a few weeks, claim their makers, these algorithms can even identify what time of the day a student is most receptive to lessons in a given subject.1.It can be learned from Paragraph 1 that （）.2.Which of the following is TRUE about “competency-based learning”?3.The Virtual Learning Academy Charter School is mentioned in the passage to （）.4.What is “the idea behind the software” in Paragraph 5?5.To which of the following statements would the author most likely agree?

The period of history which is commonly called “modern” has a mental outlook which differs from that of the medieval period in many ways. Of these, two are（1）: the diminishing authority of the Church, and the increasing authority of science.（2）, others are connected. The culture of （3）is more lay than clerical. States increasingly replace the Church as the governmental authority that controls culture. The government of nations is, at first, mainly （4） kings; then, as in ancient Greece, the kings are gradually replaced by democracies or tyrants. The power of the national State, and the functions that it performs, （5） throughout the whole period (apart from some minor fluctuations); but at most times the State has less influence on the opinions of philosophers than the Church （6） in the Middle Ages. The feudal aristocracy, （7）, north of the Alps, has been able, till the fifteenth century, to hold its own against central governments, loses first its political and then its economic importance. It is replaced by the king （8） rich merchants; these two share power in different proportions in different countries. There is a tendency for （9） to become absorbed into the aristocracy. From the time of the American and French Revolutions onwards, democracy, in the modern sense, becomes an important political force. Socialism, （10） democracy based on private property, first acquires governmental power in 1917. This form of government, however, if it spreads, must obviously bring with it a new form of （11）: the culture with which we shall be concerned is in the main “liberal”, （12）, of the kind most naturally associated with commerce. （13） there are important exceptions, especially in Germany; Fichte and Hegel, to take two examples, have an outlook which is totally unconnected with commerce. But（14）are not typical of their age.The rejection of ecclesiastical authority, which is the negative characteristic of the modern age, begins earlier than （15）characteristic, which is the acceptance of （16） . In the Italian Renaissance, science played a very small part; the opposition to the Church, in men’s thoughts, was connected with antiquity, and looked still to the past, but to a more distant past than （17）the early Church and the Middle Ages. The first serious irruption of （18）was the publication of the Copemican theory in 1543; but （19） did not become influential until it was taken up and improved by Kepler and Galileo in the seventeenth century. Then began the long （20） between science and dogma, in which traditionalists fought a losing battle against new knowledge.

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