It"s not that we thought things were free. It"s just that this year there were no fixes to the messes we made—no underwater oil-well caps, no AIG bailouts, no reuniting the island castaways in a church and sending them to heaven. We had to idly watch things completely fall apart, making us feel so pathetic that planking seemed like a cool thing to do. This was the year of the meltdown.If a meltdown could happen at a nuclear reactor in Japan—a country so obsessed with keeping up to date that its citizens annually get new cell phones and a new Prime Minister—we should have known we were all doomed. Meltdowns happened to the most unlikely victims. Everyone was so vulnerable to meltdowns that even Canadians rioted, though they did it only so the rest of the world wouldn"t feel bad about their riots.It didn"t take a tsunami; anything could trigger a meltdown. Greece, a country so economically insignificant that its biggest global financial contribution to this century was that Nia Vardalos movie, sent the entire European economy into a meltdown. A meltdown of both the U.S. credit rating and Congress"s approval rating was unleashed over raising the debt ceiling, something so routine and boring. Sometimes, it didn"t take an actual sexual affair to ruin your promising political career.Sometimes, crises sprang out of tiny mistakes that usually have no consequences whatsoever, like that day in college when you went to a protest, charged a couple more things on your nearly maxed-out credit card and drunkenly told the pizza guy with all the dumb ideas that he should totally run for President. Well, when the entire country does that at once, you get a meltdown.There was even a meltdown of the once powerful American middle class. A year ago ours was still a country that pretended there was no class system, where rich people all called themselves "upper-middle class". Now we are full-on feudal, with an angry 99% and a 1% who actually understand the things which the 99% are inarticulately complaining about. The meltdown itself melted down when Occupy Wall Street protesters and police couldn"t agree on lawn care.It"s too late to cool the rods. We are either going to abandon the old structures altogether—nuclear power, the euro, Arab secular rule, unregulated capitalism—or wait a really long time for things to get better. We are finally going to have to choose between our modem love of constant drama and our modem laziness. I know which I"m betting on. Laziness has a really high melting point. Regarding all the meltdowns happening in the world this year, the author feels ______.
A. indifferent
B. optimistic
C. pessimistic
D. puzzled
根据以下信息,回答第80题至第81题。 一家公司购买了一项使用寿命十年的资产。公司出于纳税考虑将对其使用加速折旧法。在报表上将使用直线折旧法,因为这种方法据信可以更好地反映这项资产的实际使用情况。 下列______属于消费者价格指数(CPI)的主要类别。
A. a.股票和债券
B. b.医疗保障
C. c.不动产
D. d.人寿保险
It"s been called the Gig Economy, Freelance Nation, the Rise of the Creative Class, and the e-economy, with the "e" standing for electronic, entrepreneurial. Everywhere we look, we can see the U.S. workforce undergoing a massive change. No longer do we work at the same company for 25 years, waiting for the gold watch, expecting the benefits and security that come with full-time employment. We"re no longer simply lawyers, or photographers, or writers. Instead, we"re part-time lawyers-cum-amateur photographers who write on the side.Today, careers consist of piecing together various types of work, juggling multiple clients, learning to be marketing and accounting experts, and creating offices in bedrooms/coffee shops. Independent workers abound. We call them freelancers, contractors, sole proprietors, consultants, temps, and the self-employed.This transition is nothing less than a revolution. We haven"t seen a shift in the workforce so significant in almost 100 years since we transitioned from an agricultural to an industrial economy. Now, employees are leaving the traditional workplace and opting to piece together a professional life on their own. As of 2005, one-third of our workforce participated in this "freelance economy". Statistics show that number has only increased over the past six years. While the economy has unwillingly pushed some people into independent work, many have chosen it because of greater flexibility that lets them skip the dreary office environment and focus on more personally fulfilling projects.These trends will have an enormous impact on our economy and our society:We don"t actually know the true composition of the new workforce. After 2005, the government stopped counting independent workers in a meaningful and accurate way. Studies have shown that the independent workforce has grown and changed significantly since then.Jobs no longer provide the protections and security that workers used to expect. The basics such as health insurance, protection from unpaid wages, a retirement plan, and unemployment insurance are out of reach for one-third of working Americans. Independent workers are forced to seek them elsewhere, and if they can"t find or afford them, then they go without. Therefore, it"s time to build a new support system that allows for the flexible and mobile way that people are working.This new, changing workforce needs to build economic security in profoundly new ways. For the new workforce, the New Deal is irrelevant. When it was passed in the 1930s, the New Deal provided workers with important protections and benefits but those securities were built for a traditional employer-employee relationship. The New Deal has not evolved to include independent workers. From Paragraph 5 and Paragraph 6, we can draw the conclusion that ______.
A. only one-third of working Americans can get protections and security from jobs
B. the U.S. independent workers get unemployment insurance and health insurance from the government
C. the U.S. government has got accurate statistics of the new workforce
D. a new support system is necessary for the independent workers