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Passage Three After a run of several thousand years, it is entirely fitting that 2000 will be marked as the year the tide turned against taxation. Clay tablets recall the taxes of Hammurabi in the Babylon of 2000BC, but the practice is certainly older. People in power have always tried to divert some of the proceeds of economic activity in their own direction. Lords took feudal dues from their vassals; landowners took tolls from merchants; gangsters took protection money from small businesses; governments took taxes from their citizens. Despite the different names, the principle has remained constant: those who do not produce take resources from those who do, and spend it on altogether different things. The tide is turning because of the convergence of several factors, in the first place, taxes are becoming harder to collect. Capital is more mobile than ever, and inclined to fly from places that tax to places that do not. Governments do not move their boundaries and jurisdictions as rapidly as companies can change locations. Attempts to establish trans-national tax powers are almost certainly, ably doomed by international competition to attract economic activity. Many businesses will choose to stay out of reach. The global economy and the Internet mean that purchases can now cross frontiers. People buy books, clothes, and cars from abroad, and any finance minister who likes to tax these items find his tax base diminishing. It is not only capital and goods which are harder to pin down. Even wages are crossing frontiers. The rise of the service sector means that many income-generating activities can take place across frontiers, causing yet more headaches for overstretched public treasuries. Furthermore, the pace of electronic, hard-to-trace activity is accelerating. No less important has been the rise of political resistance. The past quarter-century has been marked by a movement led in Britain and America itself in California’s famous tax-cutting referendum Proposition 13, but saw its fullest expression in the Thatcher and Reagan tax cuts of the 1980’s. Britain’s Tories entered office in 1979 with the top rate of income tax at 98%, and left office 18 years later with a top rate of 40%. Indeed, their Labour opponents became electable only after a firm promise not to raise it again. The plain fact is that electorates these days will not stand for it. They recognize, correctly, that governments spend their money less carefully and less efficiently than they can spend it themselves. One of the greatest uses of tax money is to provide pensions. And here a revolution--as important and pervasive as privatization--is sweeping the world. Fully-funded personal pension plans, based on individual savings, are sweeping away the poorly funded public pensions promised by governments. The latter take taxes from the young to support the old. The former invest savings from the young to support themselves when old. From this article it is evident that ______.
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Passage Four Handwriting analysis (graphology) circumvents the law by frying to determine an employee’s traits (e. g. stability) according to some handwriting group stereotype to which he or she belongs. (Indeed, some graphologists have m little respect for the law and m much confidence in their stereotyping that they have proposed using the technique in lieu of court proceedings to identify and prosecute criminals!) The analysis works by comparing the speed, size, slant, form, pressure, layout, and continuity of an individual’s handwriting with various patterns and typologies, and assimilating this person’s script into these types. As a result the individual judged ceases to be an individual and becomes little more than a composite of traits. This end result differs little from judgments based on race, sex, religion, etc. Granted, no individual is totally unique. Any evaluation of character, or for that matter skills, turns, in some measure, on employing generic ideas about virtue, vice, and technical competence. Still, there is a human individuality which manifests itself in our imagination and in the innovative arguments we choose to advance. Standardized handwriting analysis is far less respectful of individuality in this latter sense than other modes of screening. Individuals who are asked to write a personal essay describing their qualifications in their own terms; and who are given an opportunity in an interview to describe their motivations in seeking a particular job retain far more of what makes them distinctive. This more personalized format gives the individual an opportunity to express unusual or provocative opinions the employer may not have previously considered. Upon reflection, the employer may think these comments so pertinent that s/he awards the job to this candidate. Handwriting analysis, though, is ostensibly purely formal. It does not provide the candidate with any opportunity to distinguish himself or herself in this substantive fashion. At best, graphology will yield some vague assessment such as "the candidate is highly creative". It is worth remembering what the driving force is behind graphological testing. Handwriting analysis, like automated telephone screening, is increasingly being used early in the hiring process because it purports to deliver salient, accurate information cheaply. Yet precisely because these techniques are standardized, the data has reduced value. Judgments about the precise relevance of some perceived character traits to a job are rarely straightforward. Good interviewers learn through training and through interaction itself to qualify previous judgments. Perhaps the candidate who fails to make eye contact has a guilty conscience (as it is standardly assumed). On the other hand, perhaps the candidate is a recent immigrant from a country where eye contact is considered rude. Alternate interpretations sometimes suggest themselves in a face-to-face encounter with individuals who are fully present in their living, acting, and speaking personhood. Handwriting analysis, done at a distance by an expert who has never even met the candidate, will not stimulate the evaluator’s imagination in the way the in-person interview 6r personal essay might. On the contrary, the cheapness of the technique stems from its elimination of the important human activity of hypothesizing about the case at hand. According to this article, handwriting analysis is used by some companies because ______.
Passage Five At some time around 2300BC, give or take a century or two, a large number of the major civilizations of the world collapsed, in Mesopotamia, Egypt, Israel, Anatolia, and Greece, as well as in Afghanistan and China. All of them the first urban civilizations fell into rain at more or less the same time. A thousand years later, around 1200BC, many of the civilizations of the same regions again collapsed at about the same time. The reasons for these widespread and apparently simultaneous disasters which coincided with changes to cultures and societies elsewhere, such as in Britain, have long been a fascinating mystery. Traditional explanations included warfare, famine, and more recently systems collapse, but the apparent absence of direct archaeological or written evidence for causes, as opposed to effects, has led many archaeologists and historians into a resigned assumption that no definite explanation can be found. Over the past 15 years, however, a new type of ’natural disaster’ has been proffered which is beginning to be regarded by many scholars as the most probable single explanation for widespread and simultaneous cultural collapse. The new theory has been advanced largely by astronomers and remains largely unknown by archaeologists (notable exceptions include Professor Baillie of Belfast and Dr. Euan Mackie in Glasgow). The theory postulates that the disasters were caused by the impact of comets or other types of cosmic debris on the Earth. French archaeologist Chude Schaeffer, in 1948, published his analysis and compared the destruction layers of more than 40 archaeological sites. He was the first scholar to detect that all of the sites had been totally destroyed several times in the Early, Middle and Late Bronze Age, apparently simultaneously. Since the damage did not show signs of military or other human involvement, and, in any case, was too excessive, he argued that repeated seismic activity might have been responsible. Schaeffer was not taken seriously in 1948, but since then natural scientists have found widespread and unambiguous evidence for abrupt climate change, sudden sea level changes, catastrophic inundations, and seismic activity at several periods since the last Ice Age, particularly around 2300BC. Areas such as the Sahara, which were once farmed, became deserts. Tree rings show disastrous conditions at 2350BC. In Mesopotamia the land appears to have been inundated, devastated, or totally burned. Scholars who, following Schaeffer, favor earthquakes as the principal cause of civilization collapse, argue that the world can expect earthquakes every 1000 ～2000 years, leading to abandonment of sites; while scholars who prefer climate change as the principal cause argue that severe droughts caused agriculture to fail and that .societies inexorably fell apart as a result. The question remained what caused the climate change or the earthquakes. By the late 1970’s British astronomers Clube and Napier of Oxford University had begun to investigate cometary impact as the ultimate cause. In 1980, the Nobel prize-winning chemist Luis Alvarez and his colleagues published their paper arguing that a cosmic impact had caused the extinction of the dinosaurs. He showed that large amounts of iridium found in geological layers from the time of the dinosaurs had a cosmic origin. Alvarez’s paper stimulated further research by Clube and Napier, Professor Mark Bailey, Duncan Steel and Sir Fred Hoyle. All now support the theory of cometary impact and what is now known as the British School of Coherent Catastrophism. The collapse of civilizations has remained a fascinating mystery because ______.
On your answer sheet, circle and black out the letter that best answers the questions below.Passage One Obviously, the per capita income of a country depends on many things, and any statistical test that does not take account of all important determinants is misspecified, and thus must be used only for descriptive and heuristic purposes. It is nonetheless interesting--and for many people surprising--to find that there is a positive and even a statistically significant relationship between these two variables: the greater the number of people per square kilometer the higher the per capita income. The law of diminishing returns is not invariably true. It would be absurd to suppose that a larger endowment of land ipso facto makes a country poorer. This consideration by itself would, of course, call for a negative sign on population density. Thus, it is interesting to ask what might account for the "wrong" sign and think of what statistical tests should ultimately be done. Clearly there is a simultaneous two-way relationship between population density and per capita income; the level of per capita income affects population growth just as population, by increasing the labor force, affects per capita income. The argument offered here suggests that perhaps countries with better economic policies and institutions come to have higher per capita incomes than countries with inferior policies and institutions, and that these higher incomes bring about a higher population growth through more immigration and lower death raters. In this way, the effects of better institutions and policies in raising per capita income swamps the tendency of diminishing returns to labor to reduce it. This hypothesis may also explain why many empirical studies have not been able to show a negative association between the rate of population growth and increases in per capita income. One reason why the ratio of natural resources to population does not account for variations in per capita income is that most economic activity can now readily be separated from deposits of raw material and arable land. Over time, transportation technologies have certainly improved, and products that have a high value in relation to their weight, such as most services and manufactured goods like computers and airplanes, may have become more important. The Silicon Valley is not important for the manufacturing of computers because of the deposits of silicon, and London and Zurich are not great banking centers because of fertile land. Even casual observation suggests that most modem manufacturing and service exports are not closely related to natural resources. Western Europe does not now have a high ratio of natural resources to population, but it is very important in the export of manufactures and services. In a parallel way, the striking success of Japan, Hong Kong, and Singapore, with relatively few natural resources per capita, cannot be explained by reliance thereon. With which bf the following statements would the author agree
因特网的服务器中所存放并提供给网络浏览器阅读的是一种功能更强、结构更加复杂的______超文本，这种超文本的不同结点可能存放在因特网中的另外一台Web服务器。
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