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The rear section of the brain does not contract with age, and one can continue living without intellectual or emotional faculties.
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Text 2When enthusiasts talk of sustainable development, the eyes of most people glaze over. There is a whiff of sack-cloth and ashes about their arguments, which usually depend on people giving up the comforts of a modern economy to achieve some debatable greater good. Yet there is a serious point at issue. Modern industry pollutes, and it also seems to cause significant changes to the climate. What is needed is an industry that delivers the benefits without the costs. And the glimmerings of just such an industry can now be discerned.That industry is based on biotechnology. At the moment, biotech’s main uses are in medicine and agriculture. But its biggest long-term impact may be industrial. Here, it will diminish demand for oil by taking the cheapest raw materials imaginable, carbon dioxide and water, and using them to make fuel and plastics.Plastics and fuels made in this way would have several advantages. They could accurately be called "renewables", since nothing is depleted to make them. They would be part of the natural carbon cycle, borrowing that element from the atmosphere for a few months, and returning it when they were burned or dumped. That means they could not possibly contribute to global warming. And they would be environmentally friendly in other ways. Bioplastics are biodegradable, since bacteria understand their chemistry and can therefore digest them. Biofuels, while not quite "zero emission" from the exhaust pipe (though a lot cleaner than petrol and diesel), would be cleaner overall even than the fuel-cell technology now being touted as an alternative to the internal-combustion engine. That is because making the hydrogen that fuel cells use is not an environmentally friendly process, and never will be—un less it, too, uses biotechnology.All this will, in the end, depend on costs. But these do not look unfavourable. Already, the price of bioplastics overlaps the top end of the petroleum-based plastics market. Bulk production should bring prices ’down, particularly when the raw materials are free. Meanwhile, ethanol would be a lot easier to introduce than fuel cells. Existing engines will run on it with minor tweaking, so there is no need to change the way ears am made. And since, unlike hydrogen, it is a liquid, the fuel-distribution infrastructure would not need radical change.The future could be green in ways that traditional environmentalists had not expected. Whether they will embrace that possibility, or stick to sack-cloth, remains to be seen. According to the author, applying biotechnology to industry（）
Text 4A friend of mine had a grandfather who supervised the payroll at a large company long ago. People who knew him say this man was a paragon of virtue when it came to making sure the employees were treated fair and square on every payday. But he also believed that once wages were disbursed, workers should take full responsibility for their financial security. In his view, honest labor and thrifty habits were basic elements of the free-enterprise system. Nobody should expect any money unless they earned it. He opposed company pension plans, and was thoroughly dismayed by the fiscal structure and benefits of Social Security.I wonder how many people hold the same views now. The debate about changing Social Security is part of a larger question: What obligation, if any, do Americans feel toward fellow citizens who need help Note, I didn’t say "less fortunate," "disadvantaged," or some other term that might be construed as evidence I’m promoting my own brand of social engineering. I just want to know how much concern people have for what happens outside their own households.Critics of government assistance programs often say they do more harm than good by creating a cycle of dependency for recipients and a gigantic bureaucracy that demoralizes the rest of society by taking money away from us and creating a welfare state of slackers.The term I prefer to describe our current situation is safety-net culture." It has lots of problems, but I also know what life was like before safety nets, because my dad gave me abundant testimony from his 1920s boyhood near San Francisco—it was no Norman Rockwell painting His father worked for the Southern Pacific Railroad Company, so they did have a house. But one neighbor lived in a tent on a vacant lot and another was known for owning only one pair of overalls, which his wife laundered in a tub on the stove on Saturdays while he sat by, wrapped in a blanket. My dad’s family often ate boiled rice for breakfast. The beverage of choice was tea, but if that ran out they made "silver tea"—hot water with milk and sugar. Money for college wasn’t in the family budget. My dad got his degree thanks to the GI Bill.Decades of safety-net culture have removed a lot of anxiety from our lives but we’re still not close to Utopia. Amid all the Social Security debate about aging baby boomers and shrinking worker contributions, I’m most compelled by this statistic: Close to 20 percent of retirees get all of their income from Social Security. Should that number be a source of national pride or embarrassment Or perhaps a better question: How do you honestly feel about drinking silver tea during your golden years According to the first paragraph, the grandfather resented（）
Text 1Mark Twain once observed that giving up smoking is easy. He knew, because he’d done it hundreds of times himself, Giving up for ever is a trifle more difficult, apparently, and it is well known that it is much more difficult for some people than for others. Why is this soFew doctors believe any longer that it is simply a question of will power. And for those people that continue to view addicts as merely "weak", recent genetic research may force a rethink. A study conducted by Jacqueline Vink, of the Free University of Amsterdam, used a database called the Netherlands Twin Register to analyse the smoking habits of twins. Her results suggest that an individual’s degree of nicotine dependence, and even the number of cigarettes he smokes per day, are strongly genetically influenced.The Netherlands Twin Register is a voluntary database that is prized by geneticists because they allow the comparison of identical twins (who share all their genes) with fraternal twins (who share half). In this case, however, Dr. Vink did not make use of that fact. For her, the database was merely a convenient repository of information. Instead of comparing identical and fraternal twins, she concentrated on the adult fraternal twins, most of whom had completed questionnaires about their habits, including smoking, and 536 of whom had given DNA samples to the register.The human genome is huge. It consists of billions of DNA "letters", some of which can be strung together to make sense (the genes),but many of which have either no function, or an unknown function. To follow what is going on, geneticists rely on markers they have identified within the genome. These are places where the genetic letters may vary between individuals. If a particular variant is routinely associated with a particular physical feature or a behaviour pattern, it suggests that a particular version of a nearby gene is influencing that feature or behaviour.Dr. Vink hopes that finding genes responsible for nicotine dependence will make it possible to identify the causes of such dependence. That will help to classify smokers better (some are social smokers while others are physically addicted) and thus enable "quitting" programmes to be customised.Results such as Dr. Vink’s must be interpreted with care. Association studies, as such projects are known, have a disturbing habit of disappearing, as it were, in a puff of smoke when someone tries to replicate them. But if Dr. Vink really has exposed a genetic link with addiction, then Mark Twain’s problem may eventually become a thing of the past. Dr. Vink's results must be interpreted with care because（）
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