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Smiling and dapper, Fazle Hasan Abed hardly seems like a revolutionary. A Bangladeshi educated in Britain, an admirer of Shakespeare and Joyce, and a former accountant at Shell, he is the son of a distinguished family, his maternal grandfather was a minister in the colonial government of Bengal; a great-uncle was the first Bengali to serve in the governor of Bengal’s executive council. Now he received a very traditional distinction of his own. a knighthood. Yet the organization he founded, and for which his knighthood is a kind of respect, has probably done more than any single body to upend the traditions of misery and poverty in Bangladesh. Called BRAC, it is by most measures the largest, fastest-growing non-governmental organization (NGO) in the world—and one of the most businesslike.Although Mohammed Yunus won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for helping the poor, his Grameen Bank was neither the first nor the largest microfinance lender in his native Bangladesh; BRAC was. Its microfinance operation disburses about $ 1 billion a year. But this is only part of what it does: it is also an Internet-service provider; it has a university; its primary schools educate 11% of Bangladesh’s children. It runs feed mills, chicken farms, tea plantations and packaging factories. BRAC has shown that NGOs do not need to be small and that a little-known institution from a poor country can outgun famous Western charities.None of this seemed likely in 1970, when Sir Faze turned Shell’s offices in Chittagong into a refuge for victims of a deadly cyclone. BRAC—which started as an acronym, Bangladesh Rehabilitation Assistance Committee, and became a motto, "building resources across communities"—surmounted its early troubles by combining two things that rarely go together: running an NGO as a business and taking seriously the social context of poverty.BRAC earns from its operations about 80% of the money it disburses to the poor (the remainder is aid, mostly from Western donors). It calls a halt to activities that require endless subsidies. At one point, it even tried financing itself from the tiny savings of the poor (is, no aid at all), though this drastic form of self-help proved a step too far. hardly any lenders or borrowers put themselves forward. From the start, Sir Fazle insisted on brutal honesty about results. BRAC pays far more attention to research and "continuous learning" than do most NGOs. David Korten, author of "When Corporations Rule the World", called it "as near to a pure example of a learning organization as one is likely to find. "What makes BRAC unique is its combination of business methods with a particular view of poverty. Poverty is often regarded primarily as an economic problem which can be alleviated by sending money. Influenced by three "liberation thinkers" fashionable in the 1960s—Frantz Fanon, Paulo Freer and Ivan Iliac—Sir Fazle recognized that poverty in Bangladeshi villages is also a result of rigid social stratification. In these circumstances, "community development" will help the rich more than the poor; to change the poverty, you have to change the society.That view might have pointed Sir Fazle towards left-wing politics. Instead, the revolutionary impetus was channeled through BRAC into development. Women became the institution’s focus because they are bottom of the heap and most in need of help: 70% of the children in BRAC schools are girls. Microfinance encourages the poor to save but, unlike the Graeme Bank, BRAC also lends a lot to small companies. Tiny loans may improve the lot of an individual or family but are usually invested in traditional village enterprises, like owning a cow. Sir Fazle’s aim of social change requires not growth (in the sense of more of the same) but development (meaning new and different activities). Only businesses create jobs and new forms of productive enterprise.After 30 years in Bangladesh, BRAC has more or less perfected its way of doing things and is spreading its wings round the developing world. It is already the biggest NGO in Afghanistan, Tanzania and Uganda, overtaking British charities which have been in the latter countries for decades. Coming from a poor country—and a Muslim one, to boot—means it is less likely to be resented or called condescending. Its costs are lower, too. it does not buy large white SUVs or employ large white men.Its expansion overseas may, however, present BRAC with a new problem. Robert Kaplan, an American writer, says that NGOs fill the void between thousands of villages and a remote, often broken, government. BRAC does this triumphantly in Bangladesh—but it is a Bangladeshi organisation. Whether it can do the same elsewhere remains to be seen. We can infer from the first paragraph that().
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Imagine you found out that ideas invented by a computer were rated higher by independent experts than ideas created by a group of humans asked to perform the same task. Would you praise the designer of the "creative computer" for a great achievement or would you question why human talent -- usually so potent in coping with complex cognitive challenges -- created such poor ideas Or maybe you would question your view of the notion of creativity. In fact, such a scenario was played out when we used a simple computerized routine to generate ideas and compared them as superior to human ideas when they performed the same taskCreativity is considered the ultimate human activity, a highly complex process, difficult to formalize and to control. Although there is a general agreement regarding the distinctive nature of the creative product( idea, painting, poem, and so on). there is a controversy over the nature of the creative process. Some researchers hold that the creative thinking process is qualitatively different from "ordinary" day-to-day thinking, and involves a leap that cannot be formulated, analyzed, or reconstructed --the creative spark. Others adopt a reductionism view that creative products and the outcome of ordinary thinking, only quantitatively different from everyday thinking.Because creative ideas are different from those that normally arise, people often believe that such ideas require conditions dramatically different from the usual. The notion goes that, in order to overcome mental barriers and reach creative idem, total freedom is necessary -- no directional guidance, constraints, criticism, of thinking within bounded scope. Then ideas can be drawn and contemplated from an infinite space during the creativity process. This view prompted the emergence of various idea-generating methods: brainstorming, synectics, lateral thinking, random stimulation, and so on, all of which consist of withholding judgement and relying on analogies from other members in the group of on randomly selected analogies. This family of methods relies on the assumption that enhancing randomness, breaking roles and paradigms, and generating anarchy of thought increase the probability of creative idea emergence.Do these methods work A number of researchers indicate that they do not. Ideas suggested by individuals working a- lone are superior to ideas suggested in brainstorming sessions and the performance of problem solvers instructed to "break the rules, get out of the square, and change paradigms" was not better than that of individuals who were not given any instruction at all.The failure of these methods to improve creative outcomes has been explained by the unstructured nature of the task. Reitman observed that many problems that lack a structuring framework are ill-defined in that the representations of one or more of the basic components -- the initial state, the operators and constraints, and the goal -- are seriously incomplete, and the search space is exceedingly large. Indeed, many ill-defined problems seem difficult, not because we are swamped by the enormous number of alternative possibilities, but because we have trouble thinking even of one idea worth pursuing. The author thinks that creative thinking is ().
It is hard to conceive of a language without nouns or verbs. But that is just what Riau Indonesian is, a researcher says at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, in Leipzigstates. Dr. Gil has been studying Riau for the past 12 years. Initially, he says, he struggled with the language, despite being fluent in standard Indonesian. However, a breakthrough came when he realized that what he had been thinking of as different parts of speech were, in fact, grammatically the same. For example, the phrase "the chicken is eating" translating into colloquial Riau is "ayam makan". Literally, the phrase means "chicken eat". But the same pair of words also have meanings as diverse as "the chicken is making somebody eat", or "somebody is eating where the chicken is". There are, he says, no modifiers that distinguish the tenses of verbs. Nor are there modifiers for nouns that distinguish the definite from the indefinite. Indeed, there are no features in Riau Indonesian that distinguish nouns from verbs. These categories, he says, are imposed because the languages that Western linguists are familiar with having them.This sort of observation flies in the face of conventional wisdom about what languages is. Most linguists are influenced by the work of Noam Chomsky—in particular, his theory of "deep grammar". According to Dr. Chomsky, people are born with a sort of linguistic template in their brains. This is a set of rules that allows children to learn a language quickly, but also imposes constraints and structure on what is learnt. Evidence in support of this theory includes the tendency of children to make systematic mistakes which indicate a tendency to impose rules on what turn out to be grammatical exceptions (e. g. "I dided it" instead of "I did it"). There is also the ability of the children of migrant workers to invent new languages known as creoles out of the grammatically incoherent pidgin spoken by their parents. Exactly what the deep grammar consists of is still not clear, but a basic distinction between nouns and verbs would probably be one of its minimum requirements.Dr. Gil contends, however, that there is a risk of unconscious bias leading to the conclusion that a particular sort of grammar exists in an unfamiliar language. That is because it is easier for linguists to discover extra features in foreign languages, for example, tones that change the meaning of words, which are common in Indonesian but do not exist in European languages than to realize that elements which are taken for granted in a linguist’s native language may be absent from another. Despite the best intentions, he says, there is a tendency to fit languages into a mould. And since most linguists are Westerners, that mould is usually an Indo-European language from the West.It needs not, however, be a modern language. Dr. Gil’s point about bias is well illustrated by the history of the study of the world’s most widely spoken tongue. Many of the people who developed modern linguistics had had an education in Latin and Greek. As a consequence, English was often described until well into the 20 century as having six different noun cases, because Latin has six. Only relatively recently did grammarians begin a debate over noun cases in English. Some now contend that it does not have noun cases at all; others argue that it has two while still others maintain that there are three or four cases.The difficulty is compounded if a linguist is not fluent in the language he is studying. The process of linguistic fieldwork is a painstaking one, fraught with pitfalls. Its mainstay is the use of "informants" who tell linguists, in interviews and on paper, about their language. Unfortunately, these informants tend to be better-educated than their fellows and are often fluent in more than one language. Which of the following sentence cannot serve as evidence of Noam Chomsky’s theory of "deep grammar" ().
某高速公路工程项目，施工项目经理部为了更好地对施工现场材料进行管理，根据工程的性质、工期和施工条件，同时考虑材料供应市场情况的影响，对施工主要材料提出了如下要求。 (1)使用土质材料时必须了解其主要的物理机械特性； (2)用于施工的粗集料应具有足够的强度和耐磨性，并且清洁、干燥、无风化、无杂质； (3)施工用石粉应采用合成性岩石磨制的石粉，并且不应含泥土杂质和团粒； (4)施工用水泥中的氧化镁和三氧化硫含量应符合规定； (5)用于路面底层的粉煤灰应按等级使用； (6)施工用水泥混凝土中的水泥应采用专用水泥； (7)施工用沥青材料和钢材必须符合各项规定。 [问题] 沥青面层施工用粗集料应尽量选用哪些材料
In this section you will hear everything ONCE ONLY. Listen carefully and then answer the questions that follow. Mark the correct answer to each question on your ANSWER SHEET. Questions 1 to 5 are based on an interview. At the end of the interview you will be given 10 seconds to answer each of the following five questions. Now listen to the interview. What did the results of Frank’s survey show
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