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. To its member nations, the EU"s plan means ______
A. a fierce competition
B. an ideal goal
C. a good opportunity
D. a difficult task
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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. The statistics in Paragraph 2 illustrate that______
A. women"s IQ and their marital probability are in direct proportion
B. men"s IQ and their marital probability are in inverse proportion
C. man prefer to marry women who are less intelligent
D. women prefer to marry men who are very intelligent
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. Today, the energy the EU gets from renewables must be ______
A. more than 20%
B. 10 percent
C. 20 percent
D. less than 10%
In Second Nature, Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist Gerald Edelman argues that the brain and mind are unified, but he has little patience with the claim that the brain is a computer. Fortunately for the general reader, his explanations of brain function are accessible, reinforced by concrete examples and metaphors.Edelman suggests that thanks to the recent development of instruments capable of measuring brain structure within millimeters and brain activity within milliseconds, perceptions, thoughts, memories, willed acts, and other mind matters traditionally considered private and impenetrable to scientific scrutiny now can be correlated with brain activity.The author describes three unifying insights that correlate mind matters with brain activity. First, even distant neurons will establish meaningful connections (circuits) if their patterns are synchronized. Second, experience can either strengthen or weaken synapses (neuronal connections). Finally, there is reentry, the continued signaling from one brain region to another and back again along massively parallel nerve fibers.Edelman concedes that neurological explanations for consciousness and other aspects of mind are not currently available, but he is confident that they will be soon. Meanwhile, he is comfortably hazarding a guess: "All of our mental life.., is based on the structure and dynamics of our brain," Despite this optimism about the explanatory powers of neuroscience, Edelman acknowledges the pitfalls in attempting to explain all aspects of the mind in neurological terms. Indeed, culture--not biology--is the primary determinant of the brain"s evolution, and has been since the emergence of language, he notes.However, I was surprised to learn that he considers Sigmund Freud "the key expositor of the effects of unconscious processes on behavior". Such a comment ignores how slightly Freud"s conception of the unconscious, with its emphasis on sexuality and aggression, resembles the cognitive unconscious studied by neuroscientists.Still, Second Nature is well worth reading. It serves as a bridge between the traditionally separate camps of "hard" science and the humanities. Readers without at least some familiarity with brain science will likely find the going difficult at certain points. Nonetheless, Edelman has achieved his goal of producing a provocative exploration of"how we come to know the world and ourselves". It was previously considered that perceptions and other mind matters could hardly be______
A. treated as a significant issue
B. studied with scientific methods
C. separated from brain activity
D. handled with surgical instruments
In Second Nature, Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist Gerald Edelman argues that the brain and mind are unified, but he has little patience with the claim that the brain is a computer. Fortunately for the general reader, his explanations of brain function are accessible, reinforced by concrete examples and metaphors.Edelman suggests that thanks to the recent development of instruments capable of measuring brain structure within millimeters and brain activity within milliseconds, perceptions, thoughts, memories, willed acts, and other mind matters traditionally considered private and impenetrable to scientific scrutiny now can be correlated with brain activity.The author describes three unifying insights that correlate mind matters with brain activity. First, even distant neurons will establish meaningful connections (circuits) if their patterns are synchronized. Second, experience can either strengthen or weaken synapses (neuronal connections). Finally, there is reentry, the continued signaling from one brain region to another and back again along massively parallel nerve fibers.Edelman concedes that neurological explanations for consciousness and other aspects of mind are not currently available, but he is confident that they will be soon. Meanwhile, he is comfortably hazarding a guess: "All of our mental life.., is based on the structure and dynamics of our brain," Despite this optimism about the explanatory powers of neuroscience, Edelman acknowledges the pitfalls in attempting to explain all aspects of the mind in neurological terms. Indeed, culture--not biology--is the primary determinant of the brain"s evolution, and has been since the emergence of language, he notes.However, I was surprised to learn that he considers Sigmund Freud "the key expositor of the effects of unconscious processes on behavior". Such a comment ignores how slightly Freud"s conception of the unconscious, with its emphasis on sexuality and aggression, resembles the cognitive unconscious studied by neuroscientists.Still, Second Nature is well worth reading. It serves as a bridge between the traditionally separate camps of "hard" science and the humanities. Readers without at least some familiarity with brain science will likely find the going difficult at certain points. Nonetheless, Edelman has achieved his goal of producing a provocative exploration of"how we come to know the world and ourselves". Gerald Edelman would probably support the idea that______
A. the brain co-functions with the mind
B. the brain works like a computer
C. the brain has an accessible function
D. the brain sends signals to the mind