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American dramas and sitcoms (连续剧) would have been candidates for prime time several years ago. But today those programs--though some remain popular- increasingly occupy fringe times slots on foreign networks. Instead, a growing number of shows produced by local broadcasters are on the air at the best times. The shift counters longstanding assumptions that TV shows produced in the United States would continue to overshadow locally produced shows from Singapore to Sicily. The changes are coming at a time when the influence of the United States on_ international affairs has chafed (使恼火) friends and foes, and some people are expressing relief that at least on television American culture is no longer quite the force it once was. "There has always been a concern that the image of the world would be shaped too much by American culture," said Dr. Jo Groebek, director general of the European Institute for the Media, a non-profit group. Given the choice, he adds, foreign viewers often prefer homegrown shows that better reflect local tastes, cultures and historical events. Unlike in the United States, commercial broadcasting in most regions of the world--including Asia, Europe and a lesser extent Latin American, which has a long history of commercial TV--is a relatively recent development. A majority of broadcasters in many countries were either state-owned or state- subsidized for much of the last century. Governments began to relax their control in the 1980’s by privatizing national broadcasters and granting licenses to dozens of new commercial networks. The rise of cable and satellite pay-television increased the spectrum of channels. Relatively inexperienced and often financed on a shoestring, these new commercial stations needed hours of programming fast. The cheapest and easiest way to fill airtime was to buy shows from American studios, and the bidding wars for popular shows were fierce. The big American studios took advantage of that demand by raising prices and forcing foreign broadcasters to buy less popular programs if they wanted access to the best-selling shows and movies. "The studios priced themselves out of prime time," said Harry Evans Sloan, chairman of SBS Broadcasting, a Pan-European broadcaster. Mr. Sloan estimates that over the last decade, the price &American programs has increased fivefold even as the international ratings for these shows have declined. American broadcasters are still the biggest buyers of American-made television shows, accounting for 90% of the $25 billion in 2001 sales. But international sales which totaled $2.5 billion last year often make the difference between a profit and a loss on a show. As the pace of foreign sales slows--the market is now growing at 5% a year, down from the double-digit growth of the 1990’s--studio executives are rethinking production costs. American studio producers will give thought to production costs ______.
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For Tony Blair, the outside world is a place of moral certainty. There are good guys and bad guys, and what needs to be done is pretty clear. Home, by contrast, is a messy sort of place, where the prime minister’s job is not to uphold eternal values but to force through some unpopular changes that may make the country work a bit better. So, if, as Britain dispatches 1,700 marines to help finish off the bad guys in Afghanistan, Mr. Blair cuts a more impressive figure abroad than he does at home, it is not surprising. Mr. Blair’s government is at that dangerous stage. The gloss of last year’s landslide(政党或候选人的胜利) has worn off; the next election is too far away to foster unity among the Labor Party and its allies; fighting the battles that need to be fought seems like hard work. No wonder Mr. Blair is not looking so steady. The area where this is most obvious, and where it matters most is the public services. Mr. Blair faces a difficulty here which is partly of his own making. By focusing his last election campaign on the need to improve hospitals, schools, transport and policing, he built up expectations. And he has been admirably frank about how that improvement needs to be achieved. A lazier and more cynical prime minister might have blamed past failure on Tory under funding, thrown some more money at the relevant ministries and hoped for the best. Mr. Blair has said many times those reforms in the way the public services work need to go alongside increases in cash. The trouble is that public services are, for the most part, people--teachers, doctors, nurses, policemen--so reforming them means changing working practices. People don’t much like having new ways of working forced on them, and their unions see resisting change as their raison d’etre(存在的目的或理由). So the hardest part of the government’s task is getting the unions to agree to change. Mr. Blair has made his task harder by committing a classic negotiation error. Instead of extracting concessions from the other side before promising his own, he has pledged himself to higher spending on public services without getting a commitment to change from the unions. Nor are other ministries conveying quite the same message as the treasury. On March 19th, John Hutton, a health minister, announced that cleaners and catering staff in new privately funded hospitals working for the National Health Service will still be government employees, entitled to the same pay and conditions as other health service workers. Since one of the main ways in which the government hopes to reform the public sector is by using private providers, and since one of the main ways in which private providers are likely to be able to save money is by cutting labor costs. this move seems to undermine the government’s strategy. Strong opposition is leveled against Mr. Blair’s strategy because the government ______.
For Tony Blair, the outside world is a place of moral certainty. There are good guys and bad guys, and what needs to be done is pretty clear. Home, by contrast, is a messy sort of place, where the prime minister’s job is not to uphold eternal values but to force through some unpopular changes that may make the country work a bit better. So, if, as Britain dispatches 1,700 marines to help finish off the bad guys in Afghanistan, Mr. Blair cuts a more impressive figure abroad than he does at home, it is not surprising. Mr. Blair’s government is at that dangerous stage. The gloss of last year’s landslide(政党或候选人的胜利) has worn off; the next election is too far away to foster unity among the Labor Party and its allies; fighting the battles that need to be fought seems like hard work. No wonder Mr. Blair is not looking so steady. The area where this is most obvious, and where it matters most is the public services. Mr. Blair faces a difficulty here which is partly of his own making. By focusing his last election campaign on the need to improve hospitals, schools, transport and policing, he built up expectations. And he has been admirably frank about how that improvement needs to be achieved. A lazier and more cynical prime minister might have blamed past failure on Tory under funding, thrown some more money at the relevant ministries and hoped for the best. Mr. Blair has said many times those reforms in the way the public services work need to go alongside increases in cash. The trouble is that public services are, for the most part, people--teachers, doctors, nurses, policemen--so reforming them means changing working practices. People don’t much like having new ways of working forced on them, and their unions see resisting change as their raison d’etre(存在的目的或理由). So the hardest part of the government’s task is getting the unions to agree to change. Mr. Blair has made his task harder by committing a classic negotiation error. Instead of extracting concessions from the other side before promising his own, he has pledged himself to higher spending on public services without getting a commitment to change from the unions. Nor are other ministries conveying quite the same message as the treasury. On March 19th, John Hutton, a health minister, announced that cleaners and catering staff in new privately funded hospitals working for the National Health Service will still be government employees, entitled to the same pay and conditions as other health service workers. Since one of the main ways in which the government hopes to reform the public sector is by using private providers, and since one of the main ways in which private providers are likely to be able to save money is by cutting labor costs. this move seems to undermine the government’s strategy. As is described in the first paragraph, Tony Blair’s government is strikingly characterized by its ______.
In 2012, America will still be the place where the future happens first, for that is the nation’s oldest tradition. The early Puritans lived in almost Stone Age conditions, but they were inspired by visions of future glories, God’s kingdom on earth. The early pioneers would sometimes travel past perfectly good farmland, because they were convinced that even more amazing land could be found over the next ridge. The Founding Fathers took t 3 scraggly Colonies and believed they were creating a new nation on earth. The railroad speculators envisioned magnificent fortunes built on bands of iron. This future-mindedness explains many modem features of American life. It explains workaholism: the average American works 350 hours a year more than the average European. Americans move more, in search of that brighter tomorrow, than people in other lands. They also, sadly, divorce more, for the same reason. Americans adopt new technologies such as online shopping and credit cards much more quickly than people in other countries. Forty-five percent of world Internet use takes place in the United States. Even today, after the bursting of the stock-market bubble, American venture-capital firms--which are in the business of betting on the future--dwarf the firms from all other nations. Future-mindedness contributes to the disorder in American life, the obliviousness to history, the high rates of family breakdown, the frenzied waste of natural resources. It also leads to incredible innovation. According to the Yale historian Paul Kennedy, 75 percent of the Noble laureates in economics and the sciences over recent decades have lived or worked in the United States. One in 12 Americans has enjoyed the thrill and challenge of starting his own business. A study published in the Journal of International Business Studies in 2000 showed that innovative people are spread pretty evenly throughout the globe, but Americans are most comfortable with risk. If the 1990s were a great decade of future-mindedness, we are now in the midst of a season of experience. It seems cooler to be skeptical, to pooh-pooh all those IPO suckers who lost their money betting on the telecom future. By 2012, this period of chastisement(惩罚) will likely have run its course, and future-mindedness will be back in vogue, for better or worse. We don’t know exactly what the next future-minded frenzy will look like. We do know where it will take place: the American suburb. In 1979, three quarters of American office space were located in central cities. The new companies, research centers and entrepreneurs are flocking to these low buildings near airports, highways and the Wal-Mart mails, and they are creating a new kind of suburban life. We are now approaching a moment in which the majority of American office space, and the hub of American entrepreneurship, will be found in quiet office parks in places like Rockville, Maryland, and in the sprawling suburbosphere around Atlanta. We also know that future-mindedness itself will become the object of greater study. We are discovering that there are many things that human beings do easily that computers can do only with great difficulty, if at all. Cognitive scientists are now trying to decode the human imagination, to understand how the brain visualizes, dreams and creates. And we know, too, that where there is future-mindedness there is hope. According to the passage, which of the following is NOT brought about by future- mindedness
For one thing, tightness in the job market seems to have given men an additional incentive to take jobs where they can find them. Although female dominated office and service jobs for the most part, rank lower in pay and status, "they’re still there," says June O’Neill, director of program and policy research at the institute. Traditionally mate blue-collar jobs, meanwhile, "aren’t increasing at all". At the same time, she says, "The outlooks of young people are different." Younger men with less rigid views on what constitutes male or female work "may not feel there’s such a stigma to work in a female dominated field." Although views have softened, men who cross the sexual segregation line in the job market may still face discrimination and ridicule. David Anderson, a 36-year-old former high school teacher, says he found secretarial work "a way out of teaching and into the business world". He had applied for work at 23 employment agencies for "management training jobs that didn’t exist", and he discovered that "the best skill ! had was being able to type 70 words a minute". He took a job as a secretary to the marketing director of a New York publishing company. But he says he could feel a lot of people wondering what he was doing there and if something was wrong with him. Mr. Anderson’s boss was a woman. When she asked him to fetch coffee, he says, "The other secretaries’ eyebrows went up." Sales executives who came in to see his boss, he says, "couldn’t quite believe that I could and would type, take dictation, and answer the phones." Males sometimes find themselves mistaken for higher status professionals. Anthony Shee, a flight attendant with U.S. Air Inc., has been mistaken for a pilot. Mr. Anderson, the secretary, says he found himself being "treated in executive tones whenever I wore a suit". In fact, the men in traditional female jobs often move up the ladder fast. Mr. Anderson actually worked only seven months as a secretary. Then he got a higher level, better paying job as a placement counselor at an employment agency. "I got a lot of encouragement to advance," he says, "including job tips from male executives who couldn’t quite see me staying a secretary." Experts say, for example that while men make up only a small fraction of elementary school teachers, a disproportionate number of elementary principals are men. Barbara Bergmann, an economist at the University of Maryland who has studied sex segregation at work, believes that’s partly because of "sexism in the occupational structure" and partly because men have been raised to assert themselves and to assume responsibility. Men may also feel more compelled than women to advance, she suspects. What can be inferred from the last paragraph
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