The European Union revealed on January 23rd how it plans to save the world. A mammoth climate-change plan spells out in detail how much pain each of its 27 members will have to beat if the EU is to meet ambitious targets set by national leaders last March.The aim is to cut greenhouse-gas emissions by 2020 by at least a fifth, and more than double to 20% the amount of energy produced from renewable sources such as wind or wave power. If fuel from plants proves green enough, 10% of the fuel used in transport must come from biofuels by the same date. The new plan turns these goals into national targets. This will surely start much grumbling and months of horse-trading, as the European Commission"s recommendations are turned into binding law by national governments and the European Parliament.Countries with greenery in their veins are being asked to take more of the burden than newer members. Sweden, for example, is being invited to meet 49% of its energy from renewables. At the other end, Malta gets a renewables target of just 10%. It is a similar story when it comes to cutting greenhouse gases; by 2020, Denmark must cut emissions by 20% from 2005 levels; Bulgaria and Romania, the newest members, may let their emissions rise by 20%.EU leadership on climate change will not come cheap. The direct costs alone may be C 60 billion ($87 billion), or about 0.5% of total EU GDP, by 2020, said the commission"s president, Jose Manuel Barroso. But this is still presented as a bargain compared with the cost of inaction, which Mr. Barroso put at ten times as high. "Oh, leading the world in the fight against climate change need not cost jobs. Even in the most heavily polluting branches of heavy industry. We want to keep out industry in Europe," insisted Mr. Barroso.The trick to achieve the seemingly impossible targets is the EU"s emissions-trading scheme (ETS). This obliges big polluters such as power companies or manufacturing giants to trade permits that allow them to emit CO2 and other climate-change nasties, within a steadily tightening overall cap. If countries such as the US do not sign binding international agreements by 2001, then the heaviest greenhouse-gas emitters inside the EU may be given these allowances free, the commission suggests. Or, it threatens, firms to buy ETS permits. According to the EU"s ETS, big polluters ______
A. shall be given no permits until 2011
B. have to pay for their existence
C. will be allowed a fixed amount of emissions
D. can benefit if they chose to be inside the EU
Culture is transmitted largely by language and by the necessity for people in close contact to co-operate. The more extensive the communications network, the greater the exchange of ideas and beliefs and the more alike people become--in toleration of diversity if nothing else. Members of a culture or a nation are generally in closer contact with one another than with members of other cultures or nations. They become more like each other and more unlike others. In this way, there develops "national character", which is the statistical tendency for a group of people to share values and follow similar behavior patterns.Frequently, the members of one culture will interpret the "national characteristics" of another group in terms of their own values. For example, the inhabitants of a South Pacific island may be considered "lazy" by citizens of some industrialized nations. On the other hand, it may be that the islanders place a great value on social relationships but little value on "productivity", and crops grow with little attention. The negative connotation of the label "lazy" is thus unjustified from the point of view of the island culture.Stereotypes, such as "lazy", "inscrutable", and "dishonest" give people the security of labels with which to react to others in a superficial way, but they are damaging to real understanding among members of different cultures. People react more to labels than to reality. A black American Peace Corps volunteer, for instance, is considered and called a white man by black Africans. The "we--they" distinction applies to whatever characteristic the "wes" have and the "theys" do not have-- and the characteristics attributed to the "theys" are usually ones with a negative value.The distinction becomes most obvious in times of conflict. For this reason, it is often suggested the only thing that might join all men together on this planet would be an invasion from outer space. "We", the earthlings, would then fight "them", the outsiders.Given the great diversities- real and imagined- among people of the world, is there any foundation for hope that someday all men might join together to form a single and legitimate world government The outcome will probably depend on the political evolution of mankind. It is possible to form a single and legitimate world government only when______
A. people of different nations hold similar political views
B. human beings as a whole have one common enemy
C. people are willing to abandon their "national character"
D. human beings are able to contact beings in outer space
Our trouble lies in a simple confusion, one to which economists have been prone since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Growth and ecology operate by different rules. Economists tend to assume that every problem of scarcity can be solved by substitution, by replacing tuna with tilapia, without factoring in the long-term environmental implications of either. But whereas economies might expand, ecosystems do not. They change--pine gives way to oak, coyotes arrive in New England--and they reproduce themselves, but they do not increase in extent or abundance year after year. Most economists think of scarcity as a labor problem. Imagining that only energy and technology place limits on production. To harvest more wood, build a better chain saw; to pump more oil, drill more wells; to get more food, invent pest-resistant plants.That logic thrived on new frontiers and more intensive production, and it held off the prophets of scarcity- from Thomas Robert Malthus to Paul Ehrlich- whose predictions of famine and shortage have not come to pass. The Agricultural Revolution that began in seventeenth-centur) England radically increased the amount of food that could be grown on an acre of land, and the same happened in the 1960s and 1970s when fertilizer and hybridized seeds arrived in India and Mexico. But the picture looks entirely different when we change the scale. Industrial society is roughly 250 years old: make the last ten thousand years equal to twenty-four hours, and we have been producing consumer goods and CO2for only the last thirty-six minutes. Do the same for the past 1 million years of human evolution, and every thing from the steam engine to the search engine fits into the past twenty-one seconds. If we are not careful, hunting and gathering will look like a far more successful strategy of survival than economic growth. The latter has changed sc much about the earth and human societies in so little time that it makes more sense to be cautious than triumphant.Although food scarcity, when it occurs, is a localized problem, other kinds of scarcity are already here. Groundwater is alarmingly low in regions all over the world, but the most immediate threat to growth is surely petroleum. The purpose of mentioning the search engine is to show______
A. the economic impact of information technology
B. the high speed of modem machines
C. popular interest in the Internet
D. technological progress
If gender conflicts continue at their current rate, my partner gloomily observed, men may fade into extinction and women will manage fine without them. What with test-tube babies, cloning, a falling birth-rate, and have-it-all career women prevailing like never before, it seems as if old-fashioned, instinct-driven sexual selection was totally out of fashion. But a study from four British universities suggests it is alive and well, and busy shaping the next generation.In spite of emancipation, the feminist movement, gender equality, and consistent efforts to avoid gender-stereotyping, men still prefer to marry women who are not too brainy. In the study a high IQ hampered a woman"s chance of getting married, with a 40 percent drop in marital prospects for every 16-point rise. The opposite was true for their male class-mates. Top-earning men were 8 per cent more likely to be married than their low-earning peers.How interesting that we automatically assume that men are put off by cleverness in women. Perhaps the brainy women did not wan to get married. Possibly they could not find men clever enough to satisfy them. But these interpretations hardly merit more than a passing thought because this study simply reinforces what we know to be broadly true: that most women do want a committed partner and that most stable marriages occur in a power relation, with the man being the center.We usually think of competitiveness as a male activity, and so it is mainly, which is all the more reason for it causing stress in a marriage. Our ancestry certainly included a long phase when the males competed for the alpha role, in which the top male took all the advantages and most of the group matings. Most men nurse secret dreams of being "benign" dictators. No man likes his wife to earn more than he does. We see how fragile are the marriages of those in which the female has thewhip handin the shape of fame, success, and wealth. In contrast, marriages where the female status is obviously inferior, including arranged marriages, there is a greater stability.Women have to accept that coming into our own and achieving the full potential of our (seemingly superior) capacity to use education will undoubtedly make us more inaccessible as partners. More choosy, and therefore less successful. What might be the title of this passage
A. Why Brainy Women Stay Single
B. Single Women"s Self-reliance.
C. Road to a Successful Marriage.
D. Stereotypes About Marriage.