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The past few years have been busy ones for human-rights organisations. In prosecuting the so-called war on terror, many governments in Western countries where freedoms seemed secure have been tempted to nibble away at them. Just as well, you might suppose, that doughty campaigners such as Amnesty International exist to leap to the defense. Yet Amnesty no longer makes the splash it used to in the rich world. This is not for want of speaking out. The organization is as vocal as it ever was. But some years ago it decided to follow intellectual fashion and dilute a traditional focus on political rights by mixing in a new category of what people now call social and economic rights. Rights being good things, you might suppose that the more of them you campaign for the better. Why not add pressing social and economic concerns to stuffy old political rights such as free speech, free elections and due process of law What use is a vote if you are starving Are not access to jobs, housing, health care and food basic rights too No: few rights are truly universal, and letting them multiply weakens them. Food, jobs and housing are certainly necessities. But no useful purpose is served by calling them "rights". When a government locks someone up without a fair trial, the victim, perpetrator and remedy are pretty clear. This clarity seldom applies to social and economic "rights". It is hard enough to determine whether such a right has been infringed, let alone who should provide a remedy, or how. Who should be educated in which subjects for how long at what cost in taxpayers’ money is a political question Best settled at the ballot Box. So is how much to spend on what kind of health care. And no economic system known to man guarantees a proper job for everyone all the time: even the Soviet Union’s much-boasted full employment was based on the principle "they pretend to pay us and we pretend to work". It is hardly an accident that the countries keenest to use the language of social and economic rights tend to be those that show least respect for rights of the traditional sort. The rulers of some countries habitually depict campaigns concentrating on individual freedoms as a conspiracy by the rich northern hemisphere to do down poor countries. It is mightily convenient, if you deprive your citizens of political liberties, to portray these as a bourgeois luxury. And it could not be further from the truth. For people in the poor world, as for people everywhere, the most reliable method yet invented to ensure that governments provide people with social and economic necessities is called politics. That is why the rights that make open politics possible—free speech, due process, protection from arbitrary punishment—are so precious. Insisting on their enforcement is worth more than any number of grandiloquent but unenforceable declarations demanding jobs, education and housing for all. Many do-goading outfits suffer from baying too broad a focus and too narrow a base. Amnesty used to be the other way round, appealing to people of all political persuasions and none, and concentrating on a hard core of well-defined basic liberties. No longer. By trying in recent years to borrow moral authority from the campaigns and leaders of the past and lend it to the woollier cause of social reform, Amnesty has succeeded only in muffling what was once its central message, at the very moment when governments in the West need to hear it again. According to the passage, Amnesty International
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There are great many reasons for studying what philosophers have said 79. ______ in the past. One is that we cannot separate the history of philosophy from which 80. ______ of science. Philosophy is largely discussion about matters on which few people are 81. ______ quite certain, and those few hold opposite opinions. As knowledge increases, Philosophy buds off the sciences. For an example, in the ancient world and 82. ______ the Middle Ages philosophers discussed motion. Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas taught that a moving body would slow down until a force were 83. ______ constantly applied to it. They were wrong. It goes on moving unless some-thing slows it down. But they had good arguments on their side, and if westudy these, and the experiments which proved them right, this will help 84. ______ us to distinguish truth from false in the scientific controversies of today. We 85. ______ also see how different philosopher reflects the social life of his day. 86. ______ Plato and Aristotle, in the slave-owning society of ancient Greece, thought man’s highest state was contemplation rather than activity. In the Middle Ages St. Thomas believed a regular feudal system of nine ranks of 87. ______ Angels. Herbert Spencer, in the time of free competition between capitals, found the key to progress the survival of the fittest. Thus Marxism is seen to fit into its place as the philosophy for the workers, the only class with a future. 88. ______
Questions 61-67 are based on the following passage. Sports is one of the world’s largest industries, and most athletes are professionals who are paid for their efforts. Because an athlete succeeds by achievement only--not by economic background or family connections--sports can be a fast route to wealth, and many athletes play more for money than for love. This has not always been true. In the ancient Olympics the winner got only a wreath of leaves (花冠). Even though the winners became national heroes, the games remained amateur for centuries. Athletes won fame, but no money. As time passed, however, the contests become increasingly less amateur and cities began to hire athletes to represent them. By the fourth century A.D., the Olympics were ruined, and they were soon ended. In 1896, the Olympic Games were revived with same goal of pure amateur competition. The rules bar athletes who have ever received a $50 prize or an athlete scholars or who have spent for weeks in a training camp. At least one competitor in the 1896 games met these qualifications. He was Spiridon Loues, a water carrier who won the marathon race. After race, a rich Althenian offered him anything he wanted. A true amateur, Loues accepted only a cart and a horse. Then he gave up running forever. But Loues was an exception and now, as the Chairman of the German Olympic Committee said, "Nobody pays any attention to these rotes." Many countries pay their athletes to train year-round, and Olympic athletes are eager to sell their names to companies that make everything from ski equipment to fast food. Even the games themselves have become a huge business. Countries fight to hold the Olympics not only for honor, but for money. In 1972 games in Munich cost the German 545 million dollars, but by selling medal symbols, TV rights, food, drink, hotel rooms, and souvenirs, they managed to make a profit. Appropriately, the symbols of victory in the Olympic Games is no longer a simple olive wreath--it is a gold medal. According to the author, some athletes are even willing to advertise for business which sell things like ______.
Who is the speaker
Born in the trough of the Great Depression, Edmund Phelps, a professor at Columbia University who won the Nobel Prize for economics, has spent much of his intellectual life studying slumps of a different kind. The Depression, which cost both of his parents their jobs, was exacerbated by the monetary, authorities, who kept too tight a grip on the money supply. Mr. Phelps is interested in unemployment that even open-handed central bankers cannot cure. Most scholars stand on the shoulders of giants. But Mr. Phelps won his laurels in part tar kicking the feet from under his intellectual forerunners. In 1958 William Phillips, of the London School of Economics, showed that for much of the previous hundred years, unemployment was low in Britain when wage inflation was high, and high when inflation was low. Economists were too quick to conclude that policy makers therefore faced a grand, macroeconomic trade-off, embodied in the so-called "Phillips curve". They could settle for unemployment of, say, 6% and an inflation rate of 1%—as prevailed in America at the start of the 1960s—or they could quicken the economy, cutting unemployment by a couple of percentage points at the expense of inflation of 3% or so—which is roughly how things stood in America when Mr. Phelps published his first paper on the subject in 1967. In such a tight lab our market, companies appease workers by offering higher wages. They then pass on the cost in the form of dearer prices, cheating workers of a higher real wage. Thus policymakers can engineer lower unemployment only through deception. But "man is a thinking, expectant being,"as Mr. Phelps has put it. Eventually workers will cotton on, demanding still higher wages to offset the rising cost of living. They can be duped for as long as inflation stays one step ahead of their rising expectations of what it will be. The stable trade-off depicted by the Phillips curve is thus a dangerous mirage. The economy will recover its equilibrium only when workers’ expectations are fulfilled, prices turn out as anticipated, and they no longer sell their labour under false pretences. But equilibrium does not, sadly, imply full employment. Mr. Phelps argued that inflation will not settle until unemployment rises to its "natural rate", leaving some workers moldering on the shelf. Given economists’ almost theological commitment to the notion that markets clear, the presence of unemployment in the world requires a theodicy to explain it. Mr. Phelps is willing to entertain several. But in much of his work he contends that unemployment is necessary to cow workers, ensuring their loyalty to the company and their diligence on the job, at a wage the company can afford to pay. "Natural" does not mean optimal. Nor, Mr. Phelps has written, does it mean "a pristine element of nature not susceptible to intervention by man. " Natural simply means impervious to central bankers’ efforts to change it, how much money they print. Economists, including some of his own students, commonly take this natural rate to be slow moving, if not constant, and devote a great deal of effort to estimating it. Mr. Phelps, by contrast, has been more anxious to explain its fluctuations, and to recommend measures to lower it. His book Structural Slumps, published in 1994, is an ambitious attempt to provide a general theory of how the natural rate of unemployment evolves. Some of the factors that he considered important--unemployment benefits or payroll taxes, for example—are widely accepted parts of the story. Others are more idiosyncratic. He and his French collaborator, Jean-Paul Fitoussi, have, for example, blamed Europe’s mounting unemployment in the 1980s in part on Ronald Reagan’s budget deficits, which were expansionary at home, but squeezed employment in the rest of the world. A few years ago David Walsh, an economic journalist, lamented that the glare of the Nobel Prize left other equally deserving economists, such as Mr. Phelps, languishing "in the half-lit penumbra of the shortlist". After an unaccountably long lag, professional acclaim for this bold, purposeful theorist finally converged on its natural rate. It can be concluded that
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