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Well, no gain without pain, they say. But what about pain without gain Everywhere you go in America, you hear tales of corporate revival. What is harder to establish is whether the productivity revolution that businessmen assume they are presiding over is for real.The official statistics are mildly discouraging. They show that, if you put manufacturing and services together, productivity has grown on average by 1.2% since 1987. That is somewhat faster than the average during the previous decade. And since 1991, productivity has increased by 2% a year, which is more than twice the 1978—1987 average. The trouble is that part of the recent acceleration is due to the usual rebound that occurs at this point in a business cycle, and so is not conclusive evidence of a revival in the underlying trend. There is, as Robert Rubin, the treasury secretary, says, a "disjunction" between the mass of business anecdote that points to a leap in productivity and the picture reflected by the statistics.Some of this can be easily explained. New ways of organizing the workplace — all that re- engineering and downsizing — are only one contribution to the overall productivity of an economy, which is driven by many other factors such as joint investment in equipment and machinery, new technology, and investment in education and training. Moreover, most of the changes that companies make are intended to keep them profitable, and this need not always mean increasing productivity: switching to new markets or improving quality can matter just as much.Two other explanations are more speculative. First, some of the business restructuring of recent years may have been ineptly done. Second, even if it was well done, it may have spread much less widely than people suppose.Leonard Schlesinger, a Harvard academic and former chief executive of Au Bon Pain, a rapidly growing chain of bakery cafes, says that much "re-engineering" has been crude. In many cases, he believes, the loss of revenue has been greater than the reductions in cost. His colleague, Michael Beer, says that far too many companies have applied re-engineering in a mechanistic fashion, chopping out costs without giving sufficient thought to long-term profitability. BBDO’s A1 Rosenshine is blunter. He dismisses a lot of the work of re- engineering consultants as mere rubbish — "the worst sort of ambulance-chasing. \ According to the author, the American economic situation is（）
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It doesn’t take an Einstein to recognize that Albert Einstein’s brain was very different from yours and mine. The gray matter housed inside that shaggy head managed to revolutionize our concepts of time, space, motion — the very foundations of physical reality — not just once but several times during his astonishing career. Yet while there clearly had to be something remarkable about Einstein’s brain, the pathologist who removed it from the great physicist’s skull after his death reported that the organ was, to all appearances, well within the normal range — no bigger or heavier than anyone else’s.But a new analysis of Einstein’s brain by Canadian scientists reveals that it has some distinctive physical characteristics after all. A portion of the brain that governs mathematical ability and spatial reasoning — two key ingredients to the sort of thinking Einstein did best — was significantly larger than average. Its cells may have been more closely connected, which could have allowed them to work together more effectively. While the case is far from proven, it’s a fascinating discovery.What they found was that while the overall size of Einstein’s brain was about average, a region called the inferior parietal lobe (顶骨下叶) was about 15% wider than normal. "visuaspatial (视觉空间) cognition, mathematical thought and imagery of movement, " write Witelson and her co-authors, "are strongly dependent on this region. " And as it happens, Einstein’s impressive insights tended to come from visual images he conjured up intuitively, and were then translated into the language of mathematics ( the theory of special relativity, for example, was triggered by his musing on what it would be like to ride through space on a beam of light).Not only was Einstein’s inferior parietal region unusually bulky, the scientists found, but a feature called the Sylvian fissure (大脑外侧裂) was much smaller than average. Without the groove that normally slices through the tissue, the brain cells were parked close together, permitting more interconnections — which in principle can permit more cross-referencing of information and ideas, leading to great leaps of insight.That’s the idea, anyway. But while it’s quite plausible according to current neurological theory, that doesn’t necessarily make it true. We know Einstein was a genius, and we now know that his brain was physically different from the average. But none of this proves a cause- and-effect relationship. "What you really need, " says Dr. Francine Benes, director of the Structural Neuroscience Laboratory at Meclean Hospital, "is to look at the brains of a number of mathematical geniuses to see if the same abnormalities are present. "Even if they are, it’s possible that the bulked-up brains are result of strenuous mental exercise, not an inherent feature that makes genius possible. Bottom line: we still don’t know whether Einstein was born with an extraordinary mind or whether he earned it, one brilliant idea at a time. The word "housed" (Para.1) probably means "（）".
It doesn’t take an Einstein to recognize that Albert Einstein’s brain was very different from yours and mine. The gray matter housed inside that shaggy head managed to revolutionize our concepts of time, space, motion — the very foundations of physical reality — not just once but several times during his astonishing career. Yet while there clearly had to be something remarkable about Einstein’s brain, the pathologist who removed it from the great physicist’s skull after his death reported that the organ was, to all appearances, well within the normal range — no bigger or heavier than anyone else’s.But a new analysis of Einstein’s brain by Canadian scientists reveals that it has some distinctive physical characteristics after all. A portion of the brain that governs mathematical ability and spatial reasoning — two key ingredients to the sort of thinking Einstein did best — was significantly larger than average. Its cells may have been more closely connected, which could have allowed them to work together more effectively. While the case is far from proven, it’s a fascinating discovery.What they found was that while the overall size of Einstein’s brain was about average, a region called the inferior parietal lobe (顶骨下叶) was about 15% wider than normal. "visuaspatial (视觉空间) cognition, mathematical thought and imagery of movement, " write Witelson and her co-authors, "are strongly dependent on this region. " And as it happens, Einstein’s impressive insights tended to come from visual images he conjured up intuitively, and were then translated into the language of mathematics ( the theory of special relativity, for example, was triggered by his musing on what it would be like to ride through space on a beam of light).Not only was Einstein’s inferior parietal region unusually bulky, the scientists found, but a feature called the Sylvian fissure (大脑外侧裂) was much smaller than average. Without the groove that normally slices through the tissue, the brain cells were parked close together, permitting more interconnections — which in principle can permit more cross-referencing of information and ideas, leading to great leaps of insight.That’s the idea, anyway. But while it’s quite plausible according to current neurological theory, that doesn’t necessarily make it true. We know Einstein was a genius, and we now know that his brain was physically different from the average. But none of this proves a cause- and-effect relationship. "What you really need, " says Dr. Francine Benes, director of the Structural Neuroscience Laboratory at Meclean Hospital, "is to look at the brains of a number of mathematical geniuses to see if the same abnormalities are present. "Even if they are, it’s possible that the bulked-up brains are result of strenuous mental exercise, not an inherent feature that makes genius possible. Bottom line: we still don’t know whether Einstein was born with an extraordinary mind or whether he earned it, one brilliant idea at a time. Which is the physical characteristic of Einstein’s brain（）
In Japan, most people still feel that a woman’s place is in the home; and most women willingly accept their (31) role as wife, leaving the business of making a living (32) their husbands. For those who do want a (33) of their own, opportunities are limited, and working women usually have to (34) for low wages, fewer promotions, less responsible (35) .In America, on the other hand, most women, (36) wives and mothers, work most of their times. But (37) few have had real careers. As in Japan, most fields are (38) by men and opportunities for women have been (39) , salaries low, chances for advancement (40) American women work mainly because they (41) ; in these days of inflation and luxury living, (42) income per family is simply not enough to (43) . So American women actually have two jobs: one nine-to-five position outside the home, and (44) round-the-clock in the home job (45) wife, housemaid, cook and nurse.One of the main goals of the modern women’s liberation movement, which started (46) , was to eliminate sex discrimination in the work force, and to (47) careers for women that were previously (48) for men. And though there is still a long way to (49) , a lot of progress has been (50) . （48）（）
Scattered around the globe are more than 100 small regions of isolated volcanic activity known to geologists as hot spots. Unlike most of the world’s volcanoes, they are not always found at the boundaries of the great drifting plates that make up the earth’s surface. On the contrary, many of them lie deep in the interior of a plate. Most of the hot spots move only slowly, and in some cases the movement of the plates past them has left trails of dead volcanoes. The hot spots and their volcanic trails are milestones that mark the passage of the plates.That the plates are moving is now beyond dispute. Africa and South America, for example, are moving away from each other as new material is injected into the sea floor between them. The complementary coastlines and certain geological features that seem to span the ocean are reminders of where the two continents were once joined. The relative motion of the plates carrying these continents has been constructed in detail, but the motion of one plate with respect to another cannot readily be translated into motion with respect to the earth’s interior. It is not possible to determine whether both continents are moving in opposite directions or whether one ocean is stationary and the other is drifting away from it. Hot spots, anchored in the deeper layer of the earth, provide the measuring instruments needed to resolve the question. From an analysis of the hot-spot population it appears that it has not moved during the 30 million years.The significance of hot spots is not confined to their role as a frame of reference. It now appears that they also have an important influence on the geophysical processes that propel the plates across the globe. When a continental plate comes to rest over a hot spot, the material rising from deeper layers creates a broad dome. As the dome grows, it develops deep fissures (cracks); in at least a few cases the continent may break entirely along some of these fissures, so that the hot spot initiates the formation of new ocean. Thus just as earlier theories have explained the mobility of the continents, so hot spots may explain the mobility of the continents, and their mutability (inconstancy). The author believes that（）
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