Washington, DC has traditionally been an unbalanced city when it comes to the life of the mind. It has great national monuments, from the Smithsonian museums to the Library of Congress. But day-to-day cultural life can be thin. It attracts some of the country’s best brains. But far too much of the city’s intellectual life is devoted to the minutiae of the political process. Dinner table conversation can all too easily turn to budget reconciliation or social security. This is changing. On October 1st the Shakespeare Theatre Company opened a 775-seat new theatre in the heart of downtown. Sidney Harman hall not only provides a new stage for a theatre company that has hitherto had to make do with the 450-seat Lansburgh Theatre around the corner. It will also provide a platform for many smaller arts companies. The fact that so many of these outfits are queuing up to perform is testimony to Washington’s cultural vitality. The recently-expanded Kennedy Centre is by some measures the busiest performing arts complex. But it still has a growing number of arts groups which are desperate for mid-sized space down- town. Michael Kahn, the theatre company’s artistic director, jokes that, despite Washington’s aversion (厌恶) to keeping secrets, it has made a pretty good job of keeping quiet about its artistic life. The Harman Centre should act as a whistle blower. Washington still bows the knee to New York and Chicago when it comes to culture. But it has a good claim to be America’s intellectual capital. It has the greatest collection of think-tanks on the planet, and it regularly sucks in a giant share of the country’s best brains. Washington is second only to San Francisco for the proportion of residents twenty-five years and older with a bachelor’s degree or higher. Washington’s intellectual life has been supercharged during the Bush years, despite the Decider’s aversion to ideas. September 11th, 2001, put questions of global strategy at the center of the national debate. Most of America’s intellectual centers are firmly in the grip of the left-liberal establishment. For all their talk of "diversity" American universities are allergic to a diversity of ideas. Washington is one of the few cities where conservatives regularly do battle with liberals. It is also the center of a fierce debate about the future direction of conservatism. The danger for Washington is that this intellectual and cultural renaissance will leave the majority of the citizens untouched. The capital remains a city deeply divided between over-educated white itinerants and under- educated black locals. Still, the new Shakespeare theatre is part of job-generating downtown revival. Twenty years ago downtown was a desert of dilapidated(破旧的) buildings and bag people. Today it is bustling with life. If Washington is struggling to fix the world, at least it is making a reasonable job of fixing itself. It can be inferred from the last paragraph that ______.
A. Washington’s intellectual and cultural life is unbalanced.
B. there is social division between intellectuals and black locals.
C. the cultural revival brings jobs and vitality to the downtown.
D. Washington solves its own problems before fixing the world.
从某种意义上来说,大脑就像肌肉一样,如果______锻炼某个部分,就会使该区域增强。科学家发现小提琴演奏家的大脑中用来控制左手的区域远大于常人,因为左手按压琴弦的工作比较_______,而右手拉弓弦则相对简单。同样,阅读盲文的盲人,其大脑中很大的区域______给触觉。 依次填入横线部分最恰当的一项是( )。
A. 长期 紧张 安排
B. 反复 繁琐 分配
C. 直接 劳累 划分
D. 刻意 复杂 预留
Text CLately, everybody from industrial designers to city planners claims to be looking after our aesthetic interests, and there is ample anecdotal evidence that, on the margin, people do put a higher premium on the look and feel of things than they once did. That is to be expected as society grows richer. But aesthetics is not the only value -- trade-offs must be made -- and aesthetic value is hard to measure. What is "it," after all Aesthetics doesn’t come in neat units like microprocessor speed, calories, or tons of steel. Style is qualitative. The value of qualitative improvements poses tricky problems for economists. It is a major challenge to tease out how much consumers value each individual attribute that comes bundled in a given good or service. If you pay $2.99 for a toothbrush, how much of that is for the cleaning ability How much for the feel of the handle How much for the durability How much for the packaging How much for the convenient distribution to your comer drugstore How much for the color Economists use statistical techniques called "hedonic pricing" to try to separate the implicit prices of various characteristics. Essentially, they look at how prices go up or down as features are added or subtracted and try to figure out how consumers value the individual features. How much will consumers pay for an extra megahertz of computing speed, for instance Not every characteristic is as easily measured as megahertz. The trickier the measurement, the more difficult the problem. For aesthetics, economists generally don’t even try. It’s just too hard. How do you account for the restaurant d écor or subtle enhancements in the taste of the food How do you measure the increased value of a typeset resume, memo or client newsletter -- the result of ubiquitous word processors -- over an old-fashioned typed document That sort of detail is simply lost in crude economic statistics. Many product characteristics -- from convenience to snob appeal to aesthetics -- are hard to quantify and so tend to be undercounted. The result is that the standard of living can change for the better without much notice. That is especially likely if products improve without becoming more expensive. Consumers are happier, but if they aren’t spending more money, no revenue increase shows up in the productivity statistics. This isn’t unusual in competitive markets. Shopping malls redecorate, and newspapers adopt color printing just to keep up with the competition. They aren’t able to charge more. They are just able to stay in business. When thinking about new products, producers face two challenges. First, they need to offer something whose value to the consumer is greater than its cost to produce and distribute. Increasing the surplus of value minus cost is where both higher living standards and higher profits come from. It is the measure of real economic improvement. The second challenge is, of course, to price the offering to maximize profit. As a general matter, aesthetics sells. But "as a general matter" obscures all the specifics that make or break a product: What exact design will you use How will you manufacture it What will you charge And, given those decisions, how will customers respond The answers can’t be found through a blackboard exercise. Price theory is a useful tool, but we can’t know in advance how much people will value the characteristics of a product they haven’t yet seen or compared with real alternatives. Even market research, while helpful, cannot duplicate real-life choices. Although we all have fun predicting and second-guessing business ideas, the only way to find out is through trial and error. Market competition is a discovery process that subjects business hypotheses to unsentimental testing. Some managers are better than others at identifying promising new sources of value, and some companies are better than others at operations and pricing -- the skills that determine whether a product that consumers do value will in fact be profitable. Market competition tests these theories and skills. And, like all competitions, this one has its failures, some of them beautiful. Not every attempt at improvement works out. Sometimes value does not exceed cost. Sometimes it does, but managers fall in love with their product, price it too high and drive away potential customers. Sometimes the coolest of the cool just can’t survive the heat. With 20/20 hindsight, it is easy to see that the pricey Cube was doomed. But nobody knew that a year ago. Which of the following is most probably true of Apple’s Cube
A. Customers didn’t like the look and feel of it.
B. There was no surplus of value minus cost.
C. It did not reflect real-life choices.
D. It contradicted price theory.