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Britain’s undeclared general election campaign has already seen the politicians trading numbers as boxers trade punches. There is nothing new in such statistical slanging matches(相互谩骂)What is new is an underestimation of worry about what has been happening to official statistics under the Labour government. One of the most important figures for Gordon Brown when presenting his pre-election budget on March 16th was the current-budget balance. This is the gap between current revenues and current spending. It matters to the chancellor of the exchequer(财政部长) because he is committed to meeting his own "golden rule" of borrowing only to invest, so he has to ensure that the current budget is in balance or surplus over the economic cycle. Mr. Brown told MPs that he would meet the golden rule for the current cycle with ￡ 6 billion ($11.4 billion) to spare—a respectable-sounding margin, though much less than in the past. However, the margin would have been halved but for an obscure technical change announced in February by the Office for National Statistics to the figures for road maintenance of major highways. The ONS said that the revision was necessary because it had been double-counting this spending within the current budget. If this were an isolated incident, then it might be disregarded. But it is not the first time that the ONS has made decisions that appear rather convenient for the government. Mr. Brown aims to meet another fiscal rule, namely to keep public net debt below 40% of GDP, again over the economic cycle. At present he is meeting it but his comfort room would be reduced if the S 21 billion borrowings of Network Rail were included as part of public debt. They are not thanks to a controversial decision by the ONS to classify the rail-infrastructure corporation within the private sector, even though the National Audit Office, Parliament’s watchdog, said its borrowings were in fact government liabilities. This makes it particularly worrying that the official figures can show one thing, whereas the public experiences another. One of the highest-profile targets for the NHS is that no patient should spend more than four hours in a hospital accident and emergency department. Government figures show that by mid-2004, the target was being met for 9696 of patients. But according to a survey of 55,000 patients by the Healthcare Commission, an independent body, only 77% of patients said they stayed no more than four hours in A&E. One way to help restore public confidence in official statistics would be to make the ONS independent, as the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats have suggested. Another would be for the National Audit Office to assess how the government has been performing against targets, as the Public Administration Committee has recommended. Mr. Brown’s budget surplus now looked respectable-sounding because
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Advances in computers and data networks inspire visions of a future "information economy" in which everyone will have (1) to gigabytes of all kinds of information anywhere and anytime. (2) information has always been a (3) difficult commodity to deal with, and, in some ways, computers and high-speed networks make the problems of buying, (4) , and distributing information goods worse (5) better. The evolution of the Internet itself (6) serious problems. (7) the Internet has been privatized, several companies are (8) to provide the backbones that will carry traffic (9) local networks, but (10) business models for interconnection—who pays how much for each packet (11) , for example—have (12) to be developed. (13) interconnection standards are developed that make (14) cheap and easy to transmit information across independent networks, competition will (15) . If technical or economic (16) make interconnection difficult, (17) transmitting data across multiple networks is expensive or too slow, the (18) suppliers can offer a significant performance (19) ; they may be able to use this edge to drive out competitors and (20) the market. 3（）
Dear Ms．Emily， The need for a biology teacher in the Heavilon Community Schools was indicated in the Purdue University Educational Listings of June 7，2008．If this vacancy still exists，please consider me as all applicant for the position and send me a teacher application． On May 13，2008，I graduated from Purdue University with a B．S．degree．I received an Indiana Secondary Standard Certificate with a major in biology and a minor in botany．In addition t0 this formal education．the past two summers were spent at the Gull Lake Biological Station where 1 worked as a laboratory assistant．The preceding two summers were spent in field work with the Indiana Department of Conservation．These experiences have been valuable additions to my educational background．During the fall semester，2007，I did my student teaching in biology at Central High School in Lafayette，Indiana． My resume is enclosed for your information，and my credentials are available at the Educational Placement Office，Purdue University，West Lafayette，Indiana．A personal interview can also be arranged at your request． Sincerely， Lydia Wong Enclosure：Resume What did she do in Gull Lake Biological Station She worked as ______.
WebSQL is a SQL-like (71) language for extracting information from the web. Its capabilities for performing navigation of web (72) make it a useful tool for automating several web-related tasks that require the systematic processing of either all the links in a (73) , all the pages that can be reached from a given URL through (74) that match a pattern, or a combination of both. WebSQL also provides transparent access to index servers that can be queried via the Common (75) Interface.
(46) A long-held view of the history of the English colonies that became the United States has been that England’ s policy toward these colonies before 1763 was dictated by commercial interests and that a change to a more imperial policy, dominated by expansionist militarist objectives, generated the tensions that ultimately led to the American Revolution. In a recent study, Stephen Saunders Webb has resented a formidable challenge to this view. According to Webb, England already had a military imperial policy for more than a century before the American Revolution. He sees Charles Ⅱ, the English monarch between 1660 and 1685, as the proper successor of the Tudor monarchs of the sixteenth century and of Oliver Cromwell, all of whom were bent on extending centralized executive power over England’ s possessions through the use of what Webb calls "garrison government." Garrison government allowed the colonists a legislative assembly, but real authority, in Webb’ s view, belonged to the colonial governor, who was appointed by the king and supported by the "garrison," that is. by the local contingent of English troops under the colonial governor’ s command.According to Webb, the purpose of garrison government was to provide military support for a royal policy designed to limit the power of the upper classes in the American colonies. (47) Webb argues that the colonial legislative assemblies represented the interests not of the common people but of the colonial upper classes, a coalition of merchants and nobility who favored self-rule and sought to elevate legislative authority at the expense of the executive. It was, according to Webb, the colonial governors who favored the small farmer, opposed the plantation system, and tried through taxation to break up large holdings of land. Backed by the military presence of the garrison, these governors tried to prevent the gentry and merchants, allied in the colonial assemblies, from transforming colonial America into a capitalistic oligarchy.(48) Webb’ s study illuminates the political alignments that existed in the colonies in the century prior to the American Revolution, but his view of the crown’ s use of the military as an instrument of colonial policy is not entirely convincing. England during the seventeenth century was not noted for its military achievements. Cromwell did mount England’s most ambitious overseas military expedition in more than a century, but it proved to be an utter failure. Under Charles Ⅱ, the English army was too small to be a major instrument of government. (49) Not until the war in France in 1697 did William Ⅲ persuade Parliament to create a professional standing army, and Parliament’ s price for doing so was to keep the army under tight legislative control. (50) While it may be true that the crown attempted to diminish the power of the colonial upper classes, it is hard to imagine how the English army during the seventeenth century could have provided significant military support for such a policy. 48
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