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At the top of Green Mountain, the central peak of Ascension Island, there is a small pond, dotted with lilies,shadowed to one side by the fronds of a pandan tree. It is the only open body of fresh water on the island—and for a thousand kilometres in any direction. Around Dew Pond grows a grove of towering bamboo,beyond which the trade winds blow incessantly from the southeast. Within the grove the air is still and damp. Along the trailing ridge of the summit are fig trees, Cape yews and a garland of remarkably vigorous ginger. Below,on the mountain’s lee side, trees and shrubs from all parts of the world spread down the hillside to a landscape of casuarina trees—ironwood, or she-oak—and thorny chaparral around its base. Even on the bleaker windward slope, grasses and sedges are dotted with Bermuda cedar and guava bushes. Above, the bamboo scratching at their bellies, are the clouds the trade winds bring; some days they cover the mountain top. Once seen as too dry to be worth inhabiting, Ascension Island is becoming greener at an increasing rate. People are responsible. In part, their contribution was unwitting: the thorny mesquite that anchors a lot of the island’s scrub was introduced for a landscaping project just 50 years ago. But the forest on the peak of Green Mountain represents a deliberate attempt to change the island’s climate to make it more habitable. It is the centrepiece of a small but startling ecological transformation which is part experiment and part accident, part metaphor and part inspiration. Ascension was discovered by the Portuguese in 1501. Just to the west of the mid-ocean ridge that separates South America’s tectonic plate from Africa’s, it is the top of a volcano which rises steeply from abyssal plains more than four kilometres below the surface of the ocean. The volcano made it above that surface only a million or so years ago, since when the island has grown to about 100 square kilometres. Before people arrived it was home to just a flightless bird, a land crab and no more than 30 species of plant, none as big as a bush. It was so barren and isolated that during the following three centuries of assiduous empire-building neither the Portuguese nor any other nation bothered to claim it. When Captain Cook passed by in 1775, Georg Forster—later to become renowned for his accounts of exploration—wrote it off as a "ruinous heap of rocks", drearier even than Tierra del Fuego and Easter Island. Islands had a particular hold on the imaginations of explorers like Forster. It had long been widely held that the varieties of humankind reflected the action of different climates. In the late 18th century the opposite notion began to take hold among sailors, scientists and administrators: that humankind might itself act to change the climate, either for the worse or for the better, mainly through what it did or didn’t do to trees. A decade after Cook and the Forsters, a French explorer, La Pérouse, visited Easter Island. Noting the island’s "dreadful aridity" in the midst of an immense ocean, he blamed the ancestors of the island’s inhabitants, who had cut down the trees. Those imprudent ancestors have become symbols for mankind’s short-sighted carelessness with his environment. As environmentalists began to preach the gospel of finite resources, and satellites sent home images of the Earth looking like a small island in a vast dark sea, the fate of Easter Island seemed like a fearful parable. In his jeremiad, "Collapse", Jared Diamond described Easter Island’s story as "the closest approximation that we have to an ecological disaster unfolding in complete isolation". Yet it would be a mistake to place too much weight on this tale. The familiar story—deforestation leading to environmental degradation; subsequent population collapse, possibly including cannibalism; eventual endemic misery—has been revised in recent years. Some suggest that the Easter Islanders’ fate was not purely self-inflicted: seed-eating rats, European slavers and climate change were in part responsible. And although apocalyptic stories have a power that brighter tales lack, mankind’s record is more nuanced than the Easter Island story suggests. People have created fertile ecosystems as well as destroyed them. Ascension Island is a supreme example. Which of the following is NOT true of Ascension Island
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It’s good that wireless companies have agreed to warn customers when they are about to exceed monthly limits on voice, text or data usage or incur international roaming fees, which can result in thousands of dollars of extra charges. But consumers need more protection. The voluntary agreement announced between the main wireless industry group and the Federal Communications Commission only scratches the surface of troublesome pricing practices that have flourished in an industry that faces insufficient competition. The deal imposes no penalties on the wireless companies for violations. It might work, but the F. C. C. must convince carriers that violations will lead to real regulations with bite. Carriers often fail to respond to complaints without intervention from government regulators. For years,Verizon Wireless incorrectly billed millions of customers for data access that they did not use. Last year, the company publicly acknowledged the problem and agreed to pay $53 million in refunds and a $25 million settlement with the F. C. C. —after the agency opened an investigation. The wireless industry argues that it should remain as unregulated as possible because it is very competitive. But this is not true. Most customers, locked into their contracts by high early-termination penalties, have no easy way to switch providers. There are some unlocked plans, but they can be more expensive and offer more limited service. And two companies—Verizon and AT&T—now control 60 percent of the market nationwide. Wireless pricing policies reflect this uncompetitive landscape Take cellphone text messaging. Companies typically charge from $5 for 250 texts a month (2 cents per message) to $20 for an unlimited package. Pay-as-you-go rates can be as high as 20 cents a message. But the cost of sending a text message is about a third of a penny, according to Congressional testimony from Srinivasan Keshav, a professor at the University of Waterloo. The markup is enormous. Even the most expensive monthly wireless data plans, costing about $15 for 250 megabytes or 6 cents per megabyte, are orders of magnitude cheaper than cellphone text pricing. It is hugely profitable for companies to segregate voice, data and text into different plans and to force customers to buy a different plan for each device, like a phone or a tablet. But, on today’s networks, segregating services makes little sense technologically. This expensive segregation would be more difficult to maintain if the market were truly competitive and consumers could easily switch from one company to another that offers a better deal. The regulatory outlook is not promising. The F. C. C. has shied away from asserting that voice and data moving on wireless networks are the same thing,which would allow it to apply its greater authority over phones to broadband access services. But it could curtail high early-termination fees on phone contracts,which are subject to more intense regulation. This would increase competition by making it easier for customers to change carriers. If Congress allows the F. C. C. to reallocate television broadcasters’ unused spectrum and auction it for wireless broadband, the F. C. C. could set rules to ensure that the spectrum is available to more competitors. Perhaps the most effective path would be for the F. C. C. to declare broadband access to be a telecommunication service over which it has more control. Without action, consumers are stuck with a deregulated, less-than-competitive market. The author suggests that the wireless industry should have all the following EXCEPT
Elites are strange creatures. Every society has one—at least one—that members and nonmembers alike are intensely aware of. But only rarely is an elite a formal entity, with stated membership criteria and a list of who belongs. Studying elites is thus an inexact science. Still,the direction in which the American elite is changing right now seems quite clear. We are somewhere in the course of the greatest capitalist boom in our history. One result is that capitalists will make up our country’s next elite. The credential you will have to present to enter that virtual room in which candidates for office are chosen, educational institutions run, foreign alliances forged and social arrangements set will not be family background or educational achievement. It will be having started a successful business and made a lot of money at it. You can already feel this happening, with the force of a riptide. The self-made American rich are as celebrated, as respected, even as loved as they have ever been in our history and maybe the history of any other country. They smile at us from magazine covers and give us their opinions on television. Their charitable foundations, growing enormously, are taking government’s place as the national laboratory for public projects and social innovation. Never mind the Microsoft antitrust suit. The literally murderous personal rage against rich people that was so much a feature of American life at the outset of the 20th century is today almost nowhere to be found. The American elite 25 years from now won’t charge an admission price exactly; still, business success will be its way of assuring itself that an applicant has what it takes to become a member. Those who haven’t hit it big as business titans will somehow seem to have talents that are merely peripheral. The qualities that the elite respects will be a kind of aggressive and even ruthless energy and imagination. Superpromising young people will set themselves on a course to become David Geffen, not Dean Acheson. When this happens, it will bring us full circle. A century ago, this country had a capitalist elite personified by such businessmen as J. P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie. Then we spent the whole 20th century trying to replace it with other kinds of elites—two of them, to be specific. Now we’re headed right back where we started. During the first half of the century, the American elite was a distinct, quasi-hereditary group whose members were all men, all white and almost all Protestant. They lived mainly along the Eastern Seaboard. They had gone to Ivy League colleges, and often, before that, to boarding schools in New England. Today the President is a lower-middle-class Southern Baptist from Arkansas, the Secretary of State is a Czech immigrant, and the CEO of TIME’s parent company is Jewish, but all three went to highly selective private colleges in the East. The change goes beyond mere anecdote. The overall tenor of elite institutions such as law firms, investment banks and university faculties has changed, becoming distinctly brainier, less social, more diverse in background. What will cause this elite to fade in the next two or three decades is that the rest of the country doesn’t seem to accept these people as our "natural aristocracy," to use a phrase of Thomas Jefferson’s much loved by Conant. Their generally liberal politics don’t set the tone for the country. They are the object of populist resentment more than of admiration; they’re the "cultural elite" that politicians like to use as a foil. Oddly enough, the members of the old Wasp elite, though their high positions weren’t as hard-earned, didn’t get the country nearly as steamed up as the current elite has. It will be wildly ironic if the end result of the attempt to replace the Wasp elite with a new one of philosopher-kings is, instead, a return of the plutocracy that was upended by the Wasps a century ago. Many of the best-known Wasp grandees (like Averell Harriman) spent their life trying to undo what their plutocrat fathers had done. The creators of the succeeding admissions-test elite wanted to take decision-making power about who got to the top away from the marketplace and give it to the schools. If the country has decided it would be neat to be led by its billionaires, that would represent the failure of two elaborate, well-intentioned and long-running efforts, together taking up almost 100 years, to oust them and create an alternative elite. The lesson is that we’ve gone about the project of creating an American elite in the wrong order. The first step should be to generate a real national agreement about what form we want the country to take. After we’ve settled that, we should pick an elite that has the inclination and the ability to do what we want done. Generate an elite first—without a definite project for it to accomplish—and you will wind up with a class of leaders without followers. Which of the following statements is TRUE of American elites
In Professor Norman’s last tip,he suggests all the following EXCEPT that
请编制程序PROG1.ASM，其功能是：计算10×3矩阵中每一行元素(八位二进制数)之和，并将其存放在指定的内存区中。 例如： 内存中有0，0，0，(第1行)，1，1，1，(第2行)，……，9，9，9(第10行) 结果为0000H，0003H，…，001BH 部分程序已经给出，其中原始数据由过程LOAD从文件INPUT1.DAT中读入SOURCE开始的内存元中，转换结果要求从RESULT开始存放，由过程SAVE保存到文件OUTPUT1.DAT中。填空BEGIN和END之间已经给出的一段源程序使其完整，填空处已经用横线标出，每个空白一般只需要填一条指令或指令的一部分(指令助记符或操作数)，考生也可以填入功能相当的多条指令，或删去BEGIN和END之间原有的代码并自行编程来完成要求的功能。 对程序必须进行汇编，并与IO.OBJ链接产生PROG1.EXE执行文件，最终运行程序产生结果 (无结果或结果不正确者均不得分)。 PROG1.ASM文件内容如下： EXTRN LOAD: FAR, SAVE: FAR N EQU 30 DSEG SEGMENT SOURCE DB N DUP( ) RESULT DW N/3 DUP(0) I EQU 10 J EQU 3 NAME0 DB ’INPUT1. DAT’ ,0 NAME1 DB ’OUTPUT1. DAT’ ,0 DSEG ENDS SSEG SEGMENT STACK DB 256 DUP() SSEG ENDS CSEG SEGMENT ASSUME CS: CSEG, SS: SSEG, DS: DSEG START PROC FAR PUSH DS XOR AX, AX PUSH AX MOV AX, DSEG MOV DS, AX MOV ES, AX LEA DX, SOURCE LEA SI, NAMEO MOV CX, N CALL LOAD ; * * * BEGIN * * * LEA SI, SOURCE LEA DI, RESULT MOV BX, 1 LPI: MOV DX,O MOV CX, 1 LPJ: MOV AL, [SI] _____ ADD DX, AX INC _____ INC CX CMP CX,_____ JBE LPJ MOV [DI],_____ ADD DI,_____ INC BX CMP BX, I JBE LPI ; * * * END * * * LEA DX, RESULT LEA SI, NAME1 MOV CX, N/3 CALL SAVE RET START ENDP CSEG ENDS END START
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