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The Impossibility of Rapid Energy Transtions
A．Politicians are fond of promising rapid energy transitions. Whether it is a transition from imported to domestic oil or from coal-powered electricity production to natural-gas power plants, politicians love to talk big．Unfortunately for them(and often the taxpayers), our energy systems are a bit like an aircraft carrier: they are unbelievably expensive, they are built to last for a very long time, they have a huge amount of inertia(meaning it takes a lot of energy to set them moving), and they have a lot of momentum once they are set in motion. No matter how hard you try, you can"t turn something that large on a dime(10美分硬币), or even a few thousand dimes.
B．In physics, moving objects have two characteristics relevant to understanding the dynamics of energy systems: inertia and momentum. Inertia is the resistance of objects you back. Once you have started the boulder rolling, it develops momentum, which is defined by its mass and velocity. Momentum is said to be "conserved," that is, once you build it up, it has to go somewhere. So a heavy object, like a football player moving at a high speed, has a lot of momentum—that is, once he is moving, it is hard to change his state of motion. If you want to change his course, you have only a few choices: you can stop him, transferring (possibly painfully) some of his kinetic energy (动能)to your own body, or you can approach alongside and slowly apply pressure to gradually alter his course.
C．But there are other kinds of momentum as well. After all, we don"t speak only of objects or people as having momentum; we speak of entire systems having momentum. Whether it"s a sports team or a presidential campaign, everybody relishes having the big momentum, because it makes them harder to stop or change direction.
D．One kind of momentum is technological momentum. When a technology is deployed, its impacts reach far beyond itself. Consider the incandescent (白炽灯) bulb, an object currently hated by many environmentalists and energy-efficiency advocates. The incandescent light bulb, invented by Thomas Edison, which came to be the symbol of inspiration, has been developed into hundreds, if not thousands, of forms. Today, a visit to a lighting store reveals a stunning array of choices. There are standard-shaped bulbs, flame-shaped bulbs, colored globe-shaped bulbs, and more. It is quite easy, with all that choice, to change a light bulb.
E．But the momentum of incandescent lighting does not stop there. All of those specialized bulbs led to the building of specialized light fixtures, from the desk lamp you study by, to the ugly but beloved hand-painted Chinese lamp you inherited from your grandmother, to the ceiling fixture in your closet, to the light in your oven or refrigerator, and to the light that the dentist points at you. It is easy to change a light bulb, sure, but it is harder to change the bulb and its fixture.
F. And there is more to the story, because not only are the devices that house incandescent bulbs shaped to their underlying characteristics, but rooms and entire buildings have been designed in accordance with how incandescent lighting reflects off walls and windows.
G. As lighting expert Howard Brandston points out, "Generally, there are no bad sources, only bad applications. " There are some very commendable characteristics of the CFL (compact fluorescent (荧光的)light bulb), yet the selection of any light source remains inseparable from the luminaire (照明装置) that houses it, along with the space in which both are installed, and lighting requirements that need to be satisfied. The lamp, the fixture, and the room: all three must work in concert for the true benefits of end-users. If the CFL should be used for lighting a particular space, or an object within that space, the fixture must be designed to work with that simply installed in an incandescent fixture and then expected to produce a visual appearance that is more than washed out, foggy, and dim. The whole fixture must be replaced—light source and luminaire—and this is never an inexpensive proposition.
H. And Brandston knows a thing or two about lighting, being the man who illuminated the Statue of Liberty.
I. Another type of momentum we have to think about when planning for changes in our energy systems is labor-pool momentum. It is one thing to say that we are going to shift 30 percent of our electricity supply from, say, coal to nuclear power in 20 years. But it is another thing to have a sup-ply of trained talent that could let you carry out this promise. That is because the engineers, designers, regulators, operators, and all of the other skilled people needed for the new energy industry are specialists who have to be trained first (or retrained, if they are the ones being laid off in some related industry), and education, like any other complicated endeavor, takes time. And not only do our prospective new energy workers have to be trained, they have to be trained in the right sequence. One needs the designers, and perhaps the regulators, before the builders and operators, and each group of workers in training has to know there is work waiting beyond graduation. In some cases, colleges and universities might have to change their training programs, adding another layer of difficulty.
J. By far the biggest type of momentum that comes into play when it comes to changing our energy system is economic momentum. The major components of our energy systems, such as fuel production, refining, electrical generation and distribution, are costly installations that have lengthy lifespan. They have to operate for long periods of time before the costs of development have been recovered. When investors put up theirmoney to build, say, a nuclear power plant, they expect to earn that money back over the planned life of the plant, which is typically between 40 and 60 years. Some coal power plants in the United States have operated for more than 70 years ! The oldest continuously operated commercial hydro-electric plant in the United States is on New York"s Hudson River, and it went into commercial service in 1898.
K. As Vaclav Smil points out, "All the forecast, plans, and anticipations cited above have failed so miserably because their authors and promoters thought the transitions they hoped to implement would proceed unlike all previous energy transitions，and that their progress could be accelerated in an unprecedented manner."
L．When you hear people speaking of making a rapid transition toward any type of energy, whether it is a switch from coal to nuclear power, or a switch from gasonline-powered cars to electric cars, or even a switch from an incandescent to a fluorescent light, understanding energy system inertia and momentum can help you decide whether their plans are feasible.To change the light source is costly because you have to change the whole fixture.

答案： G[解析] 原文中的yet the selection of any light source remains inse...
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Climate Change May Be Real, but It"s Still Not Easy Being Green
How do we convince our inner caveman to be greener We ask some outstanding social scientists.
A．The road to climate hell is paved with our good intentions. Politicians may tackle polluters while scientists do battle with carbon emissions. But the most pervasive problem is less obvious: our own behaviour. We get distracted before we can turn down the heating. We break our promise not to fly after hearing about a neighbor"s rip to India. Ultimately, we can"t be bothered to change our attitude. Fortunately for the planet, social science and behavioral economics may be able to do that for us.
B. Despite mournful polar bears and carts showing carbon emissions soaring, most people find it hard to believe that global warming will affect them personally. Recent polls by the Pew Research Centre in Washington, DC, found that 75-80 per cent of participants regarded climate change as an important issue. But respondents ranked it last on a list of priorities.
C. This inconsistency largely steins from a feeling of powerlessness. "When we can"t actually remove the source of our fear, we tend to adapt psychologically by adopting a range of defense mechanisms," says Tom Crompton, change strategist for the environmental organization World Wide Fund for Nature.
D. Part of the fault lies with our inner caveman. Evolution has programmed humans to pay most attention to issues that will have an immediate impact. "We worry most about now because if we don"t survive for the next minute, we"re not going to be around in ten years" time," says Professor Elke Weber of the Centre for Research on Environmental Decisions at Columbia University in New York. If the Thames were lapping around Big Ben, Londoners would face up to the problem of emissions pretty quickly. But in practice, our brain discounts the risks—and benefits—associated with issues that lie some way ahead.
E. Matthew Rush worth, of the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford, sees this in his lab every day. "One of the ways in which all agents seem to make decisions is that they assign a lower weighting to outcomes that are going to be further away in the future," he says. "This is a very sensible way for an animal to make decisions in the wild and would have been very helpful for humans for thousands of years."
F. Not any longer. By the time we wake up to the threat posed by climate change, it could well be too late. And if we"re not going to make national decisions about the future, others may have to help us to do so.
G. Few political libraries are without a copy of Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness, by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein. They argue that governments should persuade us into making better decisions—such as saving more in our pension plans—by changing the default options. Professor Weber believes that environmental policy can make use of similar tactics. If, for example, building codes included green construction guidelines, most developers would be too lazy to challenge them.
H. Defaults are certainly part of the solution. But social scientists are most concerned about crafting messages that exploit our group mentality(心态). "We need to understand what motivates people, what it is that allows them to make change," says Professor Neil Adger, of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research in Norwich. "It is actually about what their peers think of them, what their social norms are, what is seen as desirable in society." In other words, our inner cave-man is continually looking over his shoulder to see what the rest of the tribe are up to.
I. The passive attitude we have to climate change as individuals can be altered by counting us in—and measuring us against—our peer group. "Social norms are primitive and elemental," says Dr. Robert Cialdini, author of Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. "Birds flock together, fish school together, cattle herd together...just perceiving norms is enough to cause people to adjust their behavior in the direction of the crowd."
J. These norms can take us beyond good intentions. Cialdini conducted a study in San Diego in which coat hangers bearing messages about saving energy were hung on people"s doors. Some of the messages mentioned the environment, some financial savings, others social responsibility. But it was the one that mentioned the actions of neighbours that drove down power use.
K. Other studies show that simply providing the facility for people to compare their energy use with the local average is enough to cause them to modify their behaviour. The Conservatives plan to adopt this strategy by making utility companies print the average local electricity and gas usage on people"s bills.
L. Social science can also teach politicians how to avoid our collective capacity for self-destructive behaviour. Environmental campaigns that tell us how many people drive SUVs unwittingly (不经意地) imply that this behaviour is widespread and thus permissible. Cialdini recommends some careful framing of the message. "Instead of normalising the undesirable behaviour, the message needs to marginalise it, for example, by stating that if even one person buys yet another SUV, it reduces our ability to be energy-independent."
M. Tapping into how we already see ourselves is crucial. The most successful environmental strategy will marry the green message to our own sense of identity. Take your average trade union member, chances are they will be politically motivated and be used to collective action—much like Erica Gregory. A retired member of the Public and Commercial Services Union, she is setting up one of 1,100 action groups with the support of Climate Solidarity, a two-year environmental campaign aimed at trade unionists.
N. Erica is proof that a great-grandmother can help to lead the revolution if you get the psychology right—in this case, by matching her enthusiasm for the environment with a fondness for organising groups. "I think there must be something in it." She is expecting up to 20 people at the first meeting she has called, at her local pub in the Cornish village of Polperro.
O. Nick Perks, project director for Climate Solidarity, believes this sort of activity is where the future of environmental action lies. "Using existing civil society structures or networks is a more effective way of creating change...and obviously trade unions are one of the biggest civil society net-works in the UK," he says. The "Love Food, Haste Waste" campaign entered into a collaboration last year with another such network—the Women"s Institute. Londoner Rachel Talor joined the campaign with the aim of making new friends. A year on, the meetings have made lasting changes to what she throws away in her kitchen. "It"s always more of an incentive if you"re doing it with other people," she says. "It motivates you more if you know that you"ve got to provide feedback to a group."
P. The power of such simple psychology in fighting climate change is attracting attention across the political establishment. In the US, the House of Representatives Science Committee has approved a bill allocating $10 million a year to studying energy-related behaviour. In the UK, new studies are in development and social scientists are regularly spotted in British government offices. With the help of psychologists, there is fresh hope that we might go green after all.When people find they are powerless to change a situation，they tend to live with it.
答案： C[解析] powerless替代C段中的a feeling of powerlessness；live with对应a...
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The Impossibility of Rapid Energy Transtions
A．Politicians are fond of promising rapid energy transitions. Whether it is a transition from imported to domestic oil or from coal-powered electricity production to natural-gas power plants, politicians love to talk big．Unfortunately for them(and often the taxpayers), our energy systems are a bit like an aircraft carrier: they are unbelievably expensive, they are built to last for a very long time, they have a huge amount of inertia(meaning it takes a lot of energy to set them moving), and they have a lot of momentum once they are set in motion. No matter how hard you try, you can"t turn something that large on a dime(10美分硬币), or even a few thousand dimes.
B．In physics, moving objects have two characteristics relevant to understanding the dynamics of energy systems: inertia and momentum. Inertia is the resistance of objects you back. Once you have started the boulder rolling, it develops momentum, which is defined by its mass and velocity. Momentum is said to be "conserved," that is, once you build it up, it has to go somewhere. So a heavy object, like a football player moving at a high speed, has a lot of momentum—that is, once he is moving, it is hard to change his state of motion. If you want to change his course, you have only a few choices: you can stop him, transferring (possibly painfully) some of his kinetic energy (动能)to your own body, or you can approach alongside and slowly apply pressure to gradually alter his course.
C．But there are other kinds of momentum as well. After all, we don"t speak only of objects or people as having momentum; we speak of entire systems having momentum. Whether it"s a sports team or a presidential campaign, everybody relishes having the big momentum, because it makes them harder to stop or change direction.
D．One kind of momentum is technological momentum. When a technology is deployed, its impacts reach far beyond itself. Consider the incandescent (白炽灯) bulb, an object currently hated by many environmentalists and energy-efficiency advocates. The incandescent light bulb, invented by Thomas Edison, which came to be the symbol of inspiration, has been developed into hundreds, if not thousands, of forms. Today, a visit to a lighting store reveals a stunning array of choices. There are standard-shaped bulbs, flame-shaped bulbs, colored globe-shaped bulbs, and more. It is quite easy, with all that choice, to change a light bulb.
E．But the momentum of incandescent lighting does not stop there. All of those specialized bulbs led to the building of specialized light fixtures, from the desk lamp you study by, to the ugly but beloved hand-painted Chinese lamp you inherited from your grandmother, to the ceiling fixture in your closet, to the light in your oven or refrigerator, and to the light that the dentist points at you. It is easy to change a light bulb, sure, but it is harder to change the bulb and its fixture.
F. And there is more to the story, because not only are the devices that house incandescent bulbs shaped to their underlying characteristics, but rooms and entire buildings have been designed in accordance with how incandescent lighting reflects off walls and windows.
G. As lighting expert Howard Brandston points out, "Generally, there are no bad sources, only bad applications. " There are some very commendable characteristics of the CFL (compact fluorescent (荧光的)light bulb), yet the selection of any light source remains inseparable from the luminaire (照明装置) that houses it, along with the space in which both are installed, and lighting requirements that need to be satisfied. The lamp, the fixture, and the room: all three must work in concert for the true benefits of end-users. If the CFL should be used for lighting a particular space, or an object within that space, the fixture must be designed to work with that simply installed in an incandescent fixture and then expected to produce a visual appearance that is more than washed out, foggy, and dim. The whole fixture must be replaced—light source and luminaire—and this is never an inexpensive proposition.
H. And Brandston knows a thing or two about lighting, being the man who illuminated the Statue of Liberty.
I. Another type of momentum we have to think about when planning for changes in our energy systems is labor-pool momentum. It is one thing to say that we are going to shift 30 percent of our electricity supply from, say, coal to nuclear power in 20 years. But it is another thing to have a sup-ply of trained talent that could let you carry out this promise. That is because the engineers, designers, regulators, operators, and all of the other skilled people needed for the new energy industry are specialists who have to be trained first (or retrained, if they are the ones being laid off in some related industry), and education, like any other complicated endeavor, takes time. And not only do our prospective new energy workers have to be trained, they have to be trained in the right sequence. One needs the designers, and perhaps the regulators, before the builders and operators, and each group of workers in training has to know there is work waiting beyond graduation. In some cases, colleges and universities might have to change their training programs, adding another layer of difficulty.
J. By far the biggest type of momentum that comes into play when it comes to changing our energy system is economic momentum. The major components of our energy systems, such as fuel production, refining, electrical generation and distribution, are costly installations that have lengthy lifespan. They have to operate for long periods of time before the costs of development have been recovered. When investors put up theirmoney to build, say, a nuclear power plant, they expect to earn that money back over the planned life of the plant, which is typically between 40 and 60 years. Some coal power plants in the United States have operated for more than 70 years ! The oldest continuously operated commercial hydro-electric plant in the United States is on New York"s Hudson River, and it went into commercial service in 1898.
K. As Vaclav Smil points out, "All the forecast, plans, and anticipations cited above have failed so miserably because their authors and promoters thought the transitions they hoped to implement would proceed unlike all previous energy transitions，and that their progress could be accelerated in an unprecedented manner."
L．When you hear people speaking of making a rapid transition toward any type of energy, whether it is a switch from coal to nuclear power, or a switch from gasonline-powered cars to electric cars, or even a switch from an incandescent to a fluorescent light, understanding energy system inertia and momentum can help you decide whether their plans are feasible.Not only moving objects and people but all system have momentum.
答案： C[解析] 同义复述，...don"t speak only of objects or people as havin...
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First-Generation College-Goers: Unprepared and Behind
Kids who are the first in their families to brave the world of higher education come on campus with little academic know-how and are much more likely than their peers to drop out before graduation.
A. When Nijay Williams entered college last fall as a first-generation student and Jamaican immigrants, he was academically unprepared for the rigors of higher education. Like many first-generation student, he enrolled in a medium-sized state university many of his high school peers were also attending, received a Pell Grant, and board and the closeness of the school to his family, he chose to live at home and worked between 30 and 40 hours a week while taking a full class schedule.
B. What Nijay didn"t realize about his school—Tennessee State University—was its frighteningly low graduation rate: a mere 29 percent for its first-generation students. At the end of his first year, Nijay lost his Pell Grant of over $5,000 after narrowly missing the 2.0 GPA cut-off, making it impossible for him to continue paying for school.
C. Nijay represents a large and growing group of Americans: first-generation college students who enter school unprepared or behind. To make matters worse, these schools are ill-equipped to graduate these students—young adults who face specific challenges and obstacles. They typically carry financial burdens that outweigh those of their peers, are more likely to work while attending school, and often require significant academic remediation(补习).
D. Matt Rubinoff directs I"m First, a nonprofit organization launched last October to reach out to this specific population of students. He hopes to distribute this information and help prospective college-goers find the best post-secondary fit. And while Rubinoff believes there are a good number of four-year schools that truly care about these students and set aside significant resources and pro-grams for them, he says that number isn"t high enough.
E. "It"s not only the selective and elite institutions that provide those opportunities for a small subset of this population," Rubinoff said, adding that a majority of first-generation undergraduates tend toward options such as online programs, two-year colleges, and commuter state schools. "Un-fortunately, there tends to be a lack of information and support to help students think bigger and broader."
F. Despite this problem, many students are still drawn to these institutions—and two-year schools in particular. As a former high school teacher, I saw students choose familiar, cheaper options year after year. Instead of skipping out on higher education altogether, they chose community colleges or state schools with low bars for admittance.
G. "They underestimate themselves when selecting a university," said Dave Jarrat, a marketing executive for Inside Track, a for-profit organization that specializes in coaching low-income students and supporting colleges in order to help students thrive. "The reality of it is that a lot of low-income kids could be going to elite universities on a full ride scholarship and don"t even realize it."
H. "Many students are coming from a situation where no one around them has the experience of successfully completing higher education, so they are coming in questioning themselves and their college worthiness," Jarrat continued. That helps explain why, as I"m First"s Rubinoff indicated, the schools to which these students end up resorting can end up being some of the poorest matches for them. The University of Tennessee and Tennessee State are worth comparing. Tennessee State"s overall graduation rate is a tiny 39 percent, but at least it has a smaller gap between the outcomes for first-generation students and those of their peers.
I. Still, the University of Tennessee deserves credit for being transparent. Many large institutions keep this kind of data secret—or at least make it incredibly difficult to find. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, for instance, admits only that the graduation rate for its first-generation pupils is "much lower" than the percentage of all students who graduate within four years (81 percent).
J. It is actually quite difficult to find reliable statistics on the issue for many schools. Higher education institutions are, under federal law, required to report graduation rates, but these reports typically only include Pell recipient numbers—not necessarily rates specific to first-generation students. Other initiatives fail to break down the data, too. Imagine how intimidating it can be for prospective students unfamiliar with the complexities of higher education to navigate this kind of information and then identify which schools are the best fit.
K. It was this lack of information that prompted the launch of I"m First in 2013, originally as an arm of its umbrella organization, the Center For Student Opportunity. "If we can help to direct students to more of these types of campuses and help students to understand them to be realistic and accessible places, have them apply to these schools at greater frequency and ultimately get in and enroll, we are going to raise the success rate," Rubinoff said, citing a variety of colleges ranging from large state institutions to smaller private schools.
L. Chelsea Jones, who now directs student programming at I"m First, was a first-generation college student at Howard. Like other students new to the intimidating higher-education world, she often struggled on her path to college. "There wasn"t really a college-bound culture at my high school," she said. "I want to go to college but I didn"t really know the process." Jones became involved with a college-access program through Princeton University in high school. Now she attributes much of her understanding of college to that: "But once I got to campus, it was a completely different ball game that no one really prepared me for."
M. She was fortunate, though. Howard, a well-regarded historically black college, had an array of resources for its first-generation students, including matching kids with counselors, connecting first-generation students to one another, and TRIO, a national program that supported 200 students on Howard"s campus. Still, Jones represents a small percentage of first-generation students who are able to gain entry into more elite universities, which are often known for robust financial aid packages and remarkably high graduation rates for first-generation students. (Harvard, for example, boasts a six-year graduation rate for underrepresented minority groups of 98 percent.)
N. Christian Vazquez, a first-generation Yale graduate, is another exception, his success story setting him far apart from students such as Nijay. "There is a lot of support at Yale, to an extent, after a while, there is too much support." he said, half-joking about the countless resources available at the school. Students are placed in small groups with counselors (trained seniors on campus); they have access to cultural and ethnic affinity(联系)groups, tutoring centers and also have a summer orientation specifically for first-generation students (the latter being one of the most common programs for students).
O. "Our support structure was more like: "You are going to get through Yale; you are going to do well."" he said, hinting at mentors(导师), staff, and professors who all provided significant support for students who lacked confidence about "belonging" at such a top institution.Many first-generation college-goers have doubts about their abilities to get a college degree.
答案： H[解析] 根据关键词first-generation college-goers, doubts about thei...
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Plastic Surgery
A better credit card is the solution to ever larger hack attacks
A. A thin magnetic stripe(magstripe)is all that stands between your credit-card information and the bad guys. And they"ve been working hard to break in. That"s why 2014 is shaping up as a major showdown: banks, law enforcement and technology companies are all trying to stop a network of hackers who are succeeding in stealing account numbers, names, email addresses and other crucial data used in identity theft. More than 100 million accounts at Target, Neiman Marcus and Michaels stores were affected in some way during the most recent attacks, starting last November.
B. Swipe(刷卡)is the operative word: cards are increasingly vulnerable to attacks when you make purchases in a store. In several recent incidents, hackers have been able to obtain massive information of credit-, debit-(借记)or prepaid-card numbers using malware, i.e. malicious soft-ware, inserted secretly into the retailers" point-of-sale system—the checkout registers. Hackers then sold the data to a second group of criminals operating in shadowy corners of the web. Not long after, the stolen data was showing up on fake cards and being used for online purchases.
C. The solution could cost as little as $2 extra for every piece of plastic issued. The fix is a security technology used heavily outside the U. S. While American credit cards use the 40-year-old magstripe technology to process transactions, much of the rest of the world uses smarter cards with a technology called EMV(short for Europay, MasterCard, Visa)that employs a chip embedded in the card plus a customer PIN( personal identification number)to authenticate(验证)every transaction on the spot. If a purchaser fails to punch in the correct PIN at the checkout, the transaction gets rejected. (Online purchases can be made by setting up a separate transaction code.)
D. Why haven"t big banks adopted the more secure technology When it comes to mailing out new credit cards, it"s all about relative costs, says David Robertson, who runs the Nilson Report, an industry newsletter. "The cost of the card, putting the sticker on it, coding the account number and expiration date, embossing(凸印)it, the small envelope—all put together, you"re in the dollar range." A chip-and-PIN card currently costs closer to $3, says Robertson, because of the price of chips. (Once large issuers convert together, the chip costs should drop.)
E. Multiply $3 by the more than 5 billion magstripe credit and prepaid cards in circulation in the U. S. Then consider that there"s an estimated $12.4 billion in card fraud on a global basis, says Robertson. With 44% of that in the U. S. American credit-card fraud amounts to about $5.5 billion annually. Card issuers have so far calculated that absorbing the liability for even big hacks like the Target one is still cheaper than replacing all that plastic.
F. That leaves American retailers pretty much alone the world over in relying on magstripe technology to charge purchases—and leaves consumers vulnerable. Each magstripe has three tracks of information, explains payments security expert Jeremy Gumbley, the chief technology officer of CreditCall, an electronic-payments company. The first and third are used by the bank or card issuer. Your vital account information lives on the second track, which hackers try to capture. "Malware is scanning through the memory in real time and looking for data," he says. "It creates a text file that gets stolen."
G. Chip-and-PIN cards, by contrast, make fake cards or skimming impossible because the information that gets scanned is encrypted (加密). The historical reason the U. S. has stuck with magstripe, ironically enough, is once superior technology. Our cheap, ultra-reliable wired net-works made credit-card authentication over the phone frictionless. In France, card companies created EMV in part because the telephone monopoly was so maddeningly inefficient and expensive. The EMV solution allowed transactions to be verified locally and securely.
H. Some big banks, like Wells Fargo, are now offering to convert your magstripe card to a chip-and-PIN model. (It"s actually a hybrid(混合体)that will still have a magstripe, since most U. S. merchants don"t have EMV terminals.) Should you take them up on it If you travel internationally, the answer is yes.
I. Keep in mind, too, that credit cards typically have better liability protection than debit cards. If someone uses your credit card fraudulently(欺炸性地), it"s the issuer or merchant, not you, that takes the hit. Debit cards have different liability limits depending on the bank and the events surrounding any fraud. "If it"s available, the logical thing is to get a chip-and-PIN card from your bank," says Eric Adamowsky, a co-founder of CreditCardInsider. com. "I would use credit cards over debit cards because of liability issues. "Cash still works pretty well too.
J. Retailers and banks stand to benefit from the lower fraud levels of chip-and-PIN cards but have been reluctant for years to invest in the new infrastructure(基础设施)needed for the technology, especially if consumers don"t have access to it. It"s a chicken-and-egg problem: no one wants to spend the money on upgraded point-of-sale systems that can read the chip cards if shoppers aren"t car-tying them—yet there"s little point in consumers" carrying the fancy plastic if stores aren"t equipped to use them. (An earlier effort by Target to move to chip and PIN never gained progress.) According to Gumbley, there"s a "you-first mentality. The logjam(僵局)has to be broken."
K. JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon recently expressed his willingness to do so, noting that banks and merchants have spent the past decade suing each other over interchange fees—the percentage of the transaction price they keep—rather than deal with the growing hacking problem. Chase offers a chip-enabled card under its own brand and several others for travel-related companies such as British Airways and Ritz-Carlton.
L. The Target and Neiman hacks have also changed the cost calculation: although retailers have been reluctant to spend the $6.75 billion that Capgemini consultants estimate it will take to convert all their registers to be chip-and-PIN compatible, the potential liability they now face is dramatically greater. Target has been hit with class actions from hacked consumers. "It"s the ultimate nightmare," a retail executive from a well-known chain admitted to TIME.
M. The card-payment companies MasterCard and Visa are pushing hard for change. The two firms have warned all parties in the transaction chain—merchant, network, bank—that if they don"t become EMV-compliant by October 2015, the party that is least compliant will bear the fraud risk.
N. In the meantime, app-equipped smartphones and digital wallets—all of which can use EMV technology—are beginning to make inroads(侵袭)on cards and cash. PayPal, for instance, is testing an app that lets you use your mobile phone to pay on the fly at local merchants—without surrendering any card information to them. And further down the road is biometric authentication, which could be encrypted with, say, a fingerprint.
O. Credit and debit cards, though, are going to be with us for the foreseeable future, and so are hackers, if we stick with magstripe technology. "It seems crazy to me," says Gumbley, who is English, "that a cutting-edge-technology country is depending on a 40-year-old technology." That"s why it may be up to consumers to move the needle on chip and PIN. Robertson says "When you get the consumer into a position of worry and inconvenience, that"s where the rubber hits the road."It is best to use an EMV card for international travel.
答案： H[解析] 根据题目中的international travel查找到H段。该段指出，一些大银行为客户提供更换“芯片+P...
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The Impossibility of Rapid Energy Transtions
A．Politicians are fond of promising rapid energy transitions. Whether it is a transition from imported to domestic oil or from coal-powered electricity production to natural-gas power plants, politicians love to talk big．Unfortunately for them(and often the taxpayers), our energy systems are a bit like an aircraft carrier: they are unbelievably expensive, they are built to last for a very long time, they have a huge amount of inertia(meaning it takes a lot of energy to set them moving), and they have a lot of momentum once they are set in motion. No matter how hard you try, you can"t turn something that large on a dime(10美分硬币), or even a few thousand dimes.
B．In physics, moving objects have two characteristics relevant to understanding the dynamics of energy systems: inertia and momentum. Inertia is the resistance of objects you back. Once you have started the boulder rolling, it develops momentum, which is defined by its mass and velocity. Momentum is said to be "conserved," that is, once you build it up, it has to go somewhere. So a heavy object, like a football player moving at a high speed, has a lot of momentum—that is, once he is moving, it is hard to change his state of motion. If you want to change his course, you have only a few choices: you can stop him, transferring (possibly painfully) some of his kinetic energy (动能)to your own body, or you can approach alongside and slowly apply pressure to gradually alter his course.
C．But there are other kinds of momentum as well. After all, we don"t speak only of objects or people as having momentum; we speak of entire systems having momentum. Whether it"s a sports team or a presidential campaign, everybody relishes having the big momentum, because it makes them harder to stop or change direction.
D．One kind of momentum is technological momentum. When a technology is deployed, its impacts reach far beyond itself. Consider the incandescent (白炽灯) bulb, an object currently hated by many environmentalists and energy-efficiency advocates. The incandescent light bulb, invented by Thomas Edison, which came to be the symbol of inspiration, has been developed into hundreds, if not thousands, of forms. Today, a visit to a lighting store reveals a stunning array of choices. There are standard-shaped bulbs, flame-shaped bulbs, colored globe-shaped bulbs, and more. It is quite easy, with all that choice, to change a light bulb.
E．But the momentum of incandescent lighting does not stop there. All of those specialized bulbs led to the building of specialized light fixtures, from the desk lamp you study by, to the ugly but beloved hand-painted Chinese lamp you inherited from your grandmother, to the ceiling fixture in your closet, to the light in your oven or refrigerator, and to the light that the dentist points at you. It is easy to change a light bulb, sure, but it is harder to change the bulb and its fixture.
F. And there is more to the story, because not only are the devices that house incandescent bulbs shaped to their underlying characteristics, but rooms and entire buildings have been designed in accordance with how incandescent lighting reflects off walls and windows.
G. As lighting expert Howard Brandston points out, "Generally, there are no bad sources, only bad applications. " There are some very commendable characteristics of the CFL (compact fluorescent (荧光的)light bulb), yet the selection of any light source remains inseparable from the luminaire (照明装置) that houses it, along with the space in which both are installed, and lighting requirements that need to be satisfied. The lamp, the fixture, and the room: all three must work in concert for the true benefits of end-users. If the CFL should be used for lighting a particular space, or an object within that space, the fixture must be designed to work with that simply installed in an incandescent fixture and then expected to produce a visual appearance that is more than washed out, foggy, and dim. The whole fixture must be replaced—light source and luminaire—and this is never an inexpensive proposition.
H. And Brandston knows a thing or two about lighting, being the man who illuminated the Statue of Liberty.
I. Another type of momentum we have to think about when planning for changes in our energy systems is labor-pool momentum. It is one thing to say that we are going to shift 30 percent of our electricity supply from, say, coal to nuclear power in 20 years. But it is another thing to have a sup-ply of trained talent that could let you carry out this promise. That is because the engineers, designers, regulators, operators, and all of the other skilled people needed for the new energy industry are specialists who have to be trained first (or retrained, if they are the ones being laid off in some related industry), and education, like any other complicated endeavor, takes time. And not only do our prospective new energy workers have to be trained, they have to be trained in the right sequence. One needs the designers, and perhaps the regulators, before the builders and operators, and each group of workers in training has to know there is work waiting beyond graduation. In some cases, colleges and universities might have to change their training programs, adding another layer of difficulty.
J. By far the biggest type of momentum that comes into play when it comes to changing our energy system is economic momentum. The major components of our energy systems, such as fuel production, refining, electrical generation and distribution, are costly installations that have lengthy lifespan. They have to operate for long periods of time before the costs of development have been recovered. When investors put up theirmoney to build, say, a nuclear power plant, they expect to earn that money back over the planned life of the plant, which is typically between 40 and 60 years. Some coal power plants in the United States have operated for more than 70 years ! The oldest continuously operated commercial hydro-electric plant in the United States is on New York"s Hudson River, and it went into commercial service in 1898.
K. As Vaclav Smil points out, "All the forecast, plans, and anticipations cited above have failed so miserably because their authors and promoters thought the transitions they hoped to implement would proceed unlike all previous energy transitions，and that their progress could be accelerated in an unprecedented manner."
L．When you hear people speaking of making a rapid transition toward any type of energy, whether it is a switch from coal to nuclear power, or a switch from gasonline-powered cars to electric cars, or even a switch from an incandescent to a fluorescent light, understanding energy system inertia and momentum can help you decide whether their plans are feasible.Changing the current energy system requires the systematic training of professionals and skilled labor.
答案： I[解析] 题目中的training of professionals and skilled labor”对应I段的“...
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Climate Change May Be Real, but It"s Still Not Easy Being Green
How do we convince our inner caveman to be greener We ask some outstanding social scientists.
A．The road to climate hell is paved with our good intentions. Politicians may tackle polluters while scientists do battle with carbon emissions. But the most pervasive problem is less obvious: our own behaviour. We get distracted before we can turn down the heating. We break our promise not to fly after hearing about a neighbor"s rip to India. Ultimately, we can"t be bothered to change our attitude. Fortunately for the planet, social science and behavioral economics may be able to do that for us.
B. Despite mournful polar bears and carts showing carbon emissions soaring, most people find it hard to believe that global warming will affect them personally. Recent polls by the Pew Research Centre in Washington, DC, found that 75-80 per cent of participants regarded climate change as an important issue. But respondents ranked it last on a list of priorities.
C. This inconsistency largely steins from a feeling of powerlessness. "When we can"t actually remove the source of our fear, we tend to adapt psychologically by adopting a range of defense mechanisms," says Tom Crompton, change strategist for the environmental organization World Wide Fund for Nature.
D. Part of the fault lies with our inner caveman. Evolution has programmed humans to pay most attention to issues that will have an immediate impact. "We worry most about now because if we don"t survive for the next minute, we"re not going to be around in ten years" time," says Professor Elke Weber of the Centre for Research on Environmental Decisions at Columbia University in New York. If the Thames were lapping around Big Ben, Londoners would face up to the problem of emissions pretty quickly. But in practice, our brain discounts the risks—and benefits—associated with issues that lie some way ahead.
E. Matthew Rush worth, of the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford, sees this in his lab every day. "One of the ways in which all agents seem to make decisions is that they assign a lower weighting to outcomes that are going to be further away in the future," he says. "This is a very sensible way for an animal to make decisions in the wild and would have been very helpful for humans for thousands of years."
F. Not any longer. By the time we wake up to the threat posed by climate change, it could well be too late. And if we"re not going to make national decisions about the future, others may have to help us to do so.
G. Few political libraries are without a copy of Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness, by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein. They argue that governments should persuade us into making better decisions—such as saving more in our pension plans—by changing the default options. Professor Weber believes that environmental policy can make use of similar tactics. If, for example, building codes included green construction guidelines, most developers would be too lazy to challenge them.
H. Defaults are certainly part of the solution. But social scientists are most concerned about crafting messages that exploit our group mentality(心态). "We need to understand what motivates people, what it is that allows them to make change," says Professor Neil Adger, of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research in Norwich. "It is actually about what their peers think of them, what their social norms are, what is seen as desirable in society." In other words, our inner cave-man is continually looking over his shoulder to see what the rest of the tribe are up to.
I. The passive attitude we have to climate change as individuals can be altered by counting us in—and measuring us against—our peer group. "Social norms are primitive and elemental," says Dr. Robert Cialdini, author of Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. "Birds flock together, fish school together, cattle herd together...just perceiving norms is enough to cause people to adjust their behavior in the direction of the crowd."
J. These norms can take us beyond good intentions. Cialdini conducted a study in San Diego in which coat hangers bearing messages about saving energy were hung on people"s doors. Some of the messages mentioned the environment, some financial savings, others social responsibility. But it was the one that mentioned the actions of neighbours that drove down power use.
K. Other studies show that simply providing the facility for people to compare their energy use with the local average is enough to cause them to modify their behaviour. The Conservatives plan to adopt this strategy by making utility companies print the average local electricity and gas usage on people"s bills.
L. Social science can also teach politicians how to avoid our collective capacity for self-destructive behaviour. Environmental campaigns that tell us how many people drive SUVs unwittingly (不经意地) imply that this behaviour is widespread and thus permissible. Cialdini recommends some careful framing of the message. "Instead of normalising the undesirable behaviour, the message needs to marginalise it, for example, by stating that if even one person buys yet another SUV, it reduces our ability to be energy-independent."
M. Tapping into how we already see ourselves is crucial. The most successful environmental strategy will marry the green message to our own sense of identity. Take your average trade union member, chances are they will be politically motivated and be used to collective action—much like Erica Gregory. A retired member of the Public and Commercial Services Union, she is setting up one of 1,100 action groups with the support of Climate Solidarity, a two-year environmental campaign aimed at trade unionists.
N. Erica is proof that a great-grandmother can help to lead the revolution if you get the psychology right—in this case, by matching her enthusiasm for the environment with a fondness for organising groups. "I think there must be something in it." She is expecting up to 20 people at the first meeting she has called, at her local pub in the Cornish village of Polperro.
O. Nick Perks, project director for Climate Solidarity, believes this sort of activity is where the future of environmental action lies. "Using existing civil society structures or networks is a more effective way of creating change...and obviously trade unions are one of the biggest civil society net-works in the UK," he says. The "Love Food, Haste Waste" campaign entered into a collaboration last year with another such network—the Women"s Institute. Londoner Rachel Talor joined the campaign with the aim of making new friends. A year on, the meetings have made lasting changes to what she throws away in her kitchen. "It"s always more of an incentive if you"re doing it with other people," she says. "It motivates you more if you know that you"ve got to provide feedback to a group."
P. The power of such simple psychology in fighting climate change is attracting attention across the political establishment. In the US, the House of Representatives Science Committee has approved a bill allocating $10 million a year to studying energy-related behaviour. In the UK, new studies are in development and social scientists are regularly spotted in British government offices. With the help of psychologists, there is fresh hope that we might go green after all.To be effective, environmental messages should be carefully framed.
答案： L[解析] 由L段Cialdini recommends some careful framing of the mes...
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First-Generation College-Goers: Unprepared and Behind
Kids who are the first in their families to brave the world of higher education come on campus with little academic know-how and are much more likely than their peers to drop out before graduation.
A. When Nijay Williams entered college last fall as a first-generation student and Jamaican immigrants, he was academically unprepared for the rigors of higher education. Like many first-generation student, he enrolled in a medium-sized state university many of his high school peers were also attending, received a Pell Grant, and board and the closeness of the school to his family, he chose to live at home and worked between 30 and 40 hours a week while taking a full class schedule.
B. What Nijay didn"t realize about his school—Tennessee State University—was its frighteningly low graduation rate: a mere 29 percent for its first-generation students. At the end of his first year, Nijay lost his Pell Grant of over $5,000 after narrowly missing the 2.0 GPA cut-off, making it impossible for him to continue paying for school.
C. Nijay represents a large and growing group of Americans: first-generation college students who enter school unprepared or behind. To make matters worse, these schools are ill-equipped to graduate these students—young adults who face specific challenges and obstacles. They typically carry financial burdens that outweigh those of their peers, are more likely to work while attending school, and often require significant academic remediation(补习).
D. Matt Rubinoff directs I"m First, a nonprofit organization launched last October to reach out to this specific population of students. He hopes to distribute this information and help prospective college-goers find the best post-secondary fit. And while Rubinoff believes there are a good number of four-year schools that truly care about these students and set aside significant resources and pro-grams for them, he says that number isn"t high enough.
E. "It"s not only the selective and elite institutions that provide those opportunities for a small subset of this population," Rubinoff said, adding that a majority of first-generation undergraduates tend toward options such as online programs, two-year colleges, and commuter state schools. "Un-fortunately, there tends to be a lack of information and support to help students think bigger and broader."
F. Despite this problem, many students are still drawn to these institutions—and two-year schools in particular. As a former high school teacher, I saw students choose familiar, cheaper options year after year. Instead of skipping out on higher education altogether, they chose community colleges or state schools with low bars for admittance.
G. "They underestimate themselves when selecting a university," said Dave Jarrat, a marketing executive for Inside Track, a for-profit organization that specializes in coaching low-income students and supporting colleges in order to help students thrive. "The reality of it is that a lot of low-income kids could be going to elite universities on a full ride scholarship and don"t even realize it."
H. "Many students are coming from a situation where no one around them has the experience of successfully completing higher education, so they are coming in questioning themselves and their college worthiness," Jarrat continued. That helps explain why, as I"m First"s Rubinoff indicated, the schools to which these students end up resorting can end up being some of the poorest matches for them. The University of Tennessee and Tennessee State are worth comparing. Tennessee State"s overall graduation rate is a tiny 39 percent, but at least it has a smaller gap between the outcomes for first-generation students and those of their peers.
I. Still, the University of Tennessee deserves credit for being transparent. Many large institutions keep this kind of data secret—or at least make it incredibly difficult to find. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, for instance, admits only that the graduation rate for its first-generation pupils is "much lower" than the percentage of all students who graduate within four years (81 percent).
J. It is actually quite difficult to find reliable statistics on the issue for many schools. Higher education institutions are, under federal law, required to report graduation rates, but these reports typically only include Pell recipient numbers—not necessarily rates specific to first-generation students. Other initiatives fail to break down the data, too. Imagine how intimidating it can be for prospective students unfamiliar with the complexities of higher education to navigate this kind of information and then identify which schools are the best fit.
K. It was this lack of information that prompted the launch of I"m First in 2013, originally as an arm of its umbrella organization, the Center For Student Opportunity. "If we can help to direct students to more of these types of campuses and help students to understand them to be realistic and accessible places, have them apply to these schools at greater frequency and ultimately get in and enroll, we are going to raise the success rate," Rubinoff said, citing a variety of colleges ranging from large state institutions to smaller private schools.
L. Chelsea Jones, who now directs student programming at I"m First, was a first-generation college student at Howard. Like other students new to the intimidating higher-education world, she often struggled on her path to college. "There wasn"t really a college-bound culture at my high school," she said. "I want to go to college but I didn"t really know the process." Jones became involved with a college-access program through Princeton University in high school. Now she attributes much of her understanding of college to that: "But once I got to campus, it was a completely different ball game that no one really prepared me for."
M. She was fortunate, though. Howard, a well-regarded historically black college, had an array of resources for its first-generation students, including matching kids with counselors, connecting first-generation students to one another, and TRIO, a national program that supported 200 students on Howard"s campus. Still, Jones represents a small percentage of first-generation students who are able to gain entry into more elite universities, which are often known for robust financial aid packages and remarkably high graduation rates for first-generation students. (Harvard, for example, boasts a six-year graduation rate for underrepresented minority groups of 98 percent.)
N. Christian Vazquez, a first-generation Yale graduate, is another exception, his success story setting him far apart from students such as Nijay. "There is a lot of support at Yale, to an extent, after a while, there is too much support." he said, half-joking about the countless resources available at the school. Students are placed in small groups with counselors (trained seniors on campus); they have access to cultural and ethnic affinity(联系)groups, tutoring centers and also have a summer orientation specifically for first-generation students (the latter being one of the most common programs for students).
O. "Our support structure was more like: "You are going to get through Yale; you are going to do well."" he said, hinting at mentors(导师), staff, and professors who all provided significant support for students who lacked confidence about "belonging" at such a top institution.First-generation college students tend to have much heavier financial burdens than their peers.
答案： C[解析] 根据关键词first-generation college-goers, financial burdens...
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The Impossibility of Rapid Energy Transtions
A．Politicians are fond of promising rapid energy transitions. Whether it is a transition from imported to domestic oil or from coal-powered electricity production to natural-gas power plants, politicians love to talk big．Unfortunately for them(and often the taxpayers), our energy systems are a bit like an aircraft carrier: they are unbelievably expensive, they are built to last for a very long time, they have a huge amount of inertia(meaning it takes a lot of energy to set them moving), and they have a lot of momentum once they are set in motion. No matter how hard you try, you can"t turn something that large on a dime(10美分硬币), or even a few thousand dimes.
B．In physics, moving objects have two characteristics relevant to understanding the dynamics of energy systems: inertia and momentum. Inertia is the resistance of objects you back. Once you have started the boulder rolling, it develops momentum, which is defined by its mass and velocity. Momentum is said to be "conserved," that is, once you build it up, it has to go somewhere. So a heavy object, like a football player moving at a high speed, has a lot of momentum—that is, once he is moving, it is hard to change his state of motion. If you want to change his course, you have only a few choices: you can stop him, transferring (possibly painfully) some of his kinetic energy (动能)to your own body, or you can approach alongside and slowly apply pressure to gradually alter his course.
C．But there are other kinds of momentum as well. After all, we don"t speak only of objects or people as having momentum; we speak of entire systems having momentum. Whether it"s a sports team or a presidential campaign, everybody relishes having the big momentum, because it makes them harder to stop or change direction.
D．One kind of momentum is technological momentum. When a technology is deployed, its impacts reach far beyond itself. Consider the incandescent (白炽灯) bulb, an object currently hated by many environmentalists and energy-efficiency advocates. The incandescent light bulb, invented by Thomas Edison, which came to be the symbol of inspiration, has been developed into hundreds, if not thousands, of forms. Today, a visit to a lighting store reveals a stunning array of choices. There are standard-shaped bulbs, flame-shaped bulbs, colored globe-shaped bulbs, and more. It is quite easy, with all that choice, to change a light bulb.
E．But the momentum of incandescent lighting does not stop there. All of those specialized bulbs led to the building of specialized light fixtures, from the desk lamp you study by, to the ugly but beloved hand-painted Chinese lamp you inherited from your grandmother, to the ceiling fixture in your closet, to the light in your oven or refrigerator, and to the light that the dentist points at you. It is easy to change a light bulb, sure, but it is harder to change the bulb and its fixture.
F. And there is more to the story, because not only are the devices that house incandescent bulbs shaped to their underlying characteristics, but rooms and entire buildings have been designed in accordance with how incandescent lighting reflects off walls and windows.
G. As lighting expert Howard Brandston points out, "Generally, there are no bad sources, only bad applications. " There are some very commendable characteristics of the CFL (compact fluorescent (荧光的)light bulb), yet the selection of any light source remains inseparable from the luminaire (照明装置) that houses it, along with the space in which both are installed, and lighting requirements that need to be satisfied. The lamp, the fixture, and the room: all three must work in concert for the true benefits of end-users. If the CFL should be used for lighting a particular space, or an object within that space, the fixture must be designed to work with that simply installed in an incandescent fixture and then expected to produce a visual appearance that is more than washed out, foggy, and dim. The whole fixture must be replaced—light source and luminaire—and this is never an inexpensive proposition.
H. And Brandston knows a thing or two about lighting, being the man who illuminated the Statue of Liberty.
I. Another type of momentum we have to think about when planning for changes in our energy systems is labor-pool momentum. It is one thing to say that we are going to shift 30 percent of our electricity supply from, say, coal to nuclear power in 20 years. But it is another thing to have a sup-ply of trained talent that could let you carry out this promise. That is because the engineers, designers, regulators, operators, and all of the other skilled people needed for the new energy industry are specialists who have to be trained first (or retrained, if they are the ones being laid off in some related industry), and education, like any other complicated endeavor, takes time. And not only do our prospective new energy workers have to be trained, they have to be trained in the right sequence. One needs the designers, and perhaps the regulators, before the builders and operators, and each group of workers in training has to know there is work waiting beyond graduation. In some cases, colleges and universities might have to change their training programs, adding another layer of difficulty.
J. By far the biggest type of momentum that comes into play when it comes to changing our energy system is economic momentum. The major components of our energy systems, such as fuel production, refining, electrical generation and distribution, are costly installations that have lengthy lifespan. They have to operate for long periods of time before the costs of development have been recovered. When investors put up theirmoney to build, say, a nuclear power plant, they expect to earn that money back over the planned life of the plant, which is typically between 40 and 60 years. Some coal power plants in the United States have operated for more than 70 years ! The oldest continuously operated commercial hydro-electric plant in the United States is on New York"s Hudson River, and it went into commercial service in 1898.
K. As Vaclav Smil points out, "All the forecast, plans, and anticipations cited above have failed so miserably because their authors and promoters thought the transitions they hoped to implement would proceed unlike all previous energy transitions，and that their progress could be accelerated in an unprecedented manner."
L．When you hear people speaking of making a rapid transition toward any type of energy, whether it is a switch from coal to nuclear power, or a switch from gasonline-powered cars to electric cars, or even a switch from an incandescent to a fluorescent light, understanding energy system inertia and momentum can help you decide whether their plans are feasible.Changing a light bulb is easier than changing the fixture housing it.
答案： E[解析] 同义复述，E段末句就是48句的同意替换句。
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Plastic Surgery
A better credit card is the solution to ever larger hack attacks
A. A thin magnetic stripe(magstripe)is all that stands between your credit-card information and the bad guys. And they"ve been working hard to break in. That"s why 2014 is shaping up as a major showdown: banks, law enforcement and technology companies are all trying to stop a network of hackers who are succeeding in stealing account numbers, names, email addresses and other crucial data used in identity theft. More than 100 million accounts at Target, Neiman Marcus and Michaels stores were affected in some way during the most recent attacks, starting last November.
B. Swipe(刷卡)is the operative word: cards are increasingly vulnerable to attacks when you make purchases in a store. In several recent incidents, hackers have been able to obtain massive information of credit-, debit-(借记)or prepaid-card numbers using malware, i.e. malicious soft-ware, inserted secretly into the retailers" point-of-sale system—the checkout registers. Hackers then sold the data to a second group of criminals operating in shadowy corners of the web. Not long after, the stolen data was showing up on fake cards and being used for online purchases.
C. The solution could cost as little as $2 extra for every piece of plastic issued. The fix is a security technology used heavily outside the U. S. While American credit cards use the 40-year-old magstripe technology to process transactions, much of the rest of the world uses smarter cards with a technology called EMV(short for Europay, MasterCard, Visa)that employs a chip embedded in the card plus a customer PIN( personal identification number)to authenticate(验证)every transaction on the spot. If a purchaser fails to punch in the correct PIN at the checkout, the transaction gets rejected. (Online purchases can be made by setting up a separate transaction code.)
D. Why haven"t big banks adopted the more secure technology When it comes to mailing out new credit cards, it"s all about relative costs, says David Robertson, who runs the Nilson Report, an industry newsletter. "The cost of the card, putting the sticker on it, coding the account number and expiration date, embossing(凸印)it, the small envelope—all put together, you"re in the dollar range." A chip-and-PIN card currently costs closer to $3, says Robertson, because of the price of chips. (Once large issuers convert together, the chip costs should drop.)
E. Multiply $3 by the more than 5 billion magstripe credit and prepaid cards in circulation in the U. S. Then consider that there"s an estimated $12.4 billion in card fraud on a global basis, says Robertson. With 44% of that in the U. S. American credit-card fraud amounts to about $5.5 billion annually. Card issuers have so far calculated that absorbing the liability for even big hacks like the Target one is still cheaper than replacing all that plastic.
F. That leaves American retailers pretty much alone the world over in relying on magstripe technology to charge purchases—and leaves consumers vulnerable. Each magstripe has three tracks of information, explains payments security expert Jeremy Gumbley, the chief technology officer of CreditCall, an electronic-payments company. The first and third are used by the bank or card issuer. Your vital account information lives on the second track, which hackers try to capture. "Malware is scanning through the memory in real time and looking for data," he says. "It creates a text file that gets stolen."
G. Chip-and-PIN cards, by contrast, make fake cards or skimming impossible because the information that gets scanned is encrypted (加密). The historical reason the U. S. has stuck with magstripe, ironically enough, is once superior technology. Our cheap, ultra-reliable wired net-works made credit-card authentication over the phone frictionless. In France, card companies created EMV in part because the telephone monopoly was so maddeningly inefficient and expensive. The EMV solution allowed transactions to be verified locally and securely.
H. Some big banks, like Wells Fargo, are now offering to convert your magstripe card to a chip-and-PIN model. (It"s actually a hybrid(混合体)that will still have a magstripe, since most U. S. merchants don"t have EMV terminals.) Should you take them up on it If you travel internationally, the answer is yes.
I. Keep in mind, too, that credit cards typically have better liability protection than debit cards. If someone uses your credit card fraudulently(欺炸性地), it"s the issuer or merchant, not you, that takes the hit. Debit cards have different liability limits depending on the bank and the events surrounding any fraud. "If it"s available, the logical thing is to get a chip-and-PIN card from your bank," says Eric Adamowsky, a co-founder of CreditCardInsider. com. "I would use credit cards over debit cards because of liability issues. "Cash still works pretty well too.
J. Retailers and banks stand to benefit from the lower fraud levels of chip-and-PIN cards but have been reluctant for years to invest in the new infrastructure(基础设施)needed for the technology, especially if consumers don"t have access to it. It"s a chicken-and-egg problem: no one wants to spend the money on upgraded point-of-sale systems that can read the chip cards if shoppers aren"t car-tying them—yet there"s little point in consumers" carrying the fancy plastic if stores aren"t equipped to use them. (An earlier effort by Target to move to chip and PIN never gained progress.) According to Gumbley, there"s a "you-first mentality. The logjam(僵局)has to be broken."
K. JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon recently expressed his willingness to do so, noting that banks and merchants have spent the past decade suing each other over interchange fees—the percentage of the transaction price they keep—rather than deal with the growing hacking problem. Chase offers a chip-enabled card under its own brand and several others for travel-related companies such as British Airways and Ritz-Carlton.
L. The Target and Neiman hacks have also changed the cost calculation: although retailers have been reluctant to spend the $6.75 billion that Capgemini consultants estimate it will take to convert all their registers to be chip-and-PIN compatible, the potential liability they now face is dramatically greater. Target has been hit with class actions from hacked consumers. "It"s the ultimate nightmare," a retail executive from a well-known chain admitted to TIME.
M. The card-payment companies MasterCard and Visa are pushing hard for change. The two firms have warned all parties in the transaction chain—merchant, network, bank—that if they don"t become EMV-compliant by October 2015, the party that is least compliant will bear the fraud risk.
N. In the meantime, app-equipped smartphones and digital wallets—all of which can use EMV technology—are beginning to make inroads(侵袭)on cards and cash. PayPal, for instance, is testing an app that lets you use your mobile phone to pay on the fly at local merchants—without surrendering any card information to them. And further down the road is biometric authentication, which could be encrypted with, say, a fingerprint.
O. Credit and debit cards, though, are going to be with us for the foreseeable future, and so are hackers, if we stick with magstripe technology. "It seems crazy to me," says Gumbley, who is English, "that a cutting-edge-technology country is depending on a 40-year-old technology." That"s why it may be up to consumers to move the needle on chip and PIN. Robertson says "When you get the consumer into a position of worry and inconvenience, that"s where the rubber hits the road."Personal information on credit and debit cards is increasingly vulnerable to hacking.
答案： B[解析] 文中多次提到信用卡和借记卡，但根据personal information和increasingly vul...
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First-Generation College-Goers: Unprepared and Behind
Kids who are the first in their families to brave the world of higher education come on campus with little academic know-how and are much more likely than their peers to drop out before graduation.
A. When Nijay Williams entered college last fall as a first-generation student and Jamaican immigrants, he was academically unprepared for the rigors of higher education. Like many first-generation student, he enrolled in a medium-sized state university many of his high school peers were also attending, received a Pell Grant, and board and the closeness of the school to his family, he chose to live at home and worked between 30 and 40 hours a week while taking a full class schedule.
B. What Nijay didn"t realize about his school—Tennessee State University—was its frighteningly low graduation rate: a mere 29 percent for its first-generation students. At the end of his first year, Nijay lost his Pell Grant of over $5,000 after narrowly missing the 2.0 GPA cut-off, making it impossible for him to continue paying for school.
C. Nijay represents a large and growing group of Americans: first-generation college students who enter school unprepared or behind. To make matters worse, these schools are ill-equipped to graduate these students—young adults who face specific challenges and obstacles. They typically carry financial burdens that outweigh those of their peers, are more likely to work while attending school, and often require significant academic remediation(补习).
D. Matt Rubinoff directs I"m First, a nonprofit organization launched last October to reach out to this specific population of students. He hopes to distribute this information and help prospective college-goers find the best post-secondary fit. And while Rubinoff believes there are a good number of four-year schools that truly care about these students and set aside significant resources and pro-grams for them, he says that number isn"t high enough.
E. "It"s not only the selective and elite institutions that provide those opportunities for a small subset of this population," Rubinoff said, adding that a majority of first-generation undergraduates tend toward options such as online programs, two-year colleges, and commuter state schools. "Un-fortunately, there tends to be a lack of information and support to help students think bigger and broader."
F. Despite this problem, many students are still drawn to these institutions—and two-year schools in particular. As a former high school teacher, I saw students choose familiar, cheaper options year after year. Instead of skipping out on higher education altogether, they chose community colleges or state schools with low bars for admittance.
G. "They underestimate themselves when selecting a university," said Dave Jarrat, a marketing executive for Inside Track, a for-profit organization that specializes in coaching low-income students and supporting colleges in order to help students thrive. "The reality of it is that a lot of low-income kids could be going to elite universities on a full ride scholarship and don"t even realize it."
H. "Many students are coming from a situation where no one around them has the experience of successfully completing higher education, so they are coming in questioning themselves and their college worthiness," Jarrat continued. That helps explain why, as I"m First"s Rubinoff indicated, the schools to which these students end up resorting can end up being some of the poorest matches for them. The University of Tennessee and Tennessee State are worth comparing. Tennessee State"s overall graduation rate is a tiny 39 percent, but at least it has a smaller gap between the outcomes for first-generation students and those of their peers.
I. Still, the University of Tennessee deserves credit for being transparent. Many large institutions keep this kind of data secret—or at least make it incredibly difficult to find. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, for instance, admits only that the graduation rate for its first-generation pupils is "much lower" than the percentage of all students who graduate within four years (81 percent).
J. It is actually quite difficult to find reliable statistics on the issue for many schools. Higher education institutions are, under federal law, required to report graduation rates, but these reports typically only include Pell recipient numbers—not necessarily rates specific to first-generation students. Other initiatives fail to break down the data, too. Imagine how intimidating it can be for prospective students unfamiliar with the complexities of higher education to navigate this kind of information and then identify which schools are the best fit.
K. It was this lack of information that prompted the launch of I"m First in 2013, originally as an arm of its umbrella organization, the Center For Student Opportunity. "If we can help to direct students to more of these types of campuses and help students to understand them to be realistic and accessible places, have them apply to these schools at greater frequency and ultimately get in and enroll, we are going to raise the success rate," Rubinoff said, citing a variety of colleges ranging from large state institutions to smaller private schools.
L. Chelsea Jones, who now directs student programming at I"m First, was a first-generation college student at Howard. Like other students new to the intimidating higher-education world, she often struggled on her path to college. "There wasn"t really a college-bound culture at my high school," she said. "I want to go to college but I didn"t really know the process." Jones became involved with a college-access program through Princeton University in high school. Now she attributes much of her understanding of college to that: "But once I got to campus, it was a completely different ball game that no one really prepared me for."
M. She was fortunate, though. Howard, a well-regarded historically black college, had an array of resources for its first-generation students, including matching kids with counselors, connecting first-generation students to one another, and TRIO, a national program that supported 200 students on Howard"s campus. Still, Jones represents a small percentage of first-generation students who are able to gain entry into more elite universities, which are often known for robust financial aid packages and remarkably high graduation rates for first-generation students. (Harvard, for example, boasts a six-year graduation rate for underrepresented minority groups of 98 percent.)
N. Christian Vazquez, a first-generation Yale graduate, is another exception, his success story setting him far apart from students such as Nijay. "There is a lot of support at Yale, to an extent, after a while, there is too much support." he said, half-joking about the countless resources available at the school. Students are placed in small groups with counselors (trained seniors on campus); they have access to cultural and ethnic affinity(联系)groups, tutoring centers and also have a summer orientation specifically for first-generation students (the latter being one of the most common programs for students).
O. "Our support structure was more like: "You are going to get through Yale; you are going to do well."" he said, hinting at mentors(导师), staff, and professors who all provided significant support for students who lacked confidence about "belonging" at such a top institution.The graduation rate of first-generation students at Nijay"s university was incredibly low.
答案： B[解析] 根据关键词graduation rate和Nijay"s university，可以定位B段第一句：What...
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Climate Change May Be Real, but It"s Still Not Easy Being Green
How do we convince our inner caveman to be greener We ask some outstanding social scientists.
A．The road to climate hell is paved with our good intentions. Politicians may tackle polluters while scientists do battle with carbon emissions. But the most pervasive problem is less obvious: our own behaviour. We get distracted before we can turn down the heating. We break our promise not to fly after hearing about a neighbor"s rip to India. Ultimately, we can"t be bothered to change our attitude. Fortunately for the planet, social science and behavioral economics may be able to do that for us.
B. Despite mournful polar bears and carts showing carbon emissions soaring, most people find it hard to believe that global warming will affect them personally. Recent polls by the Pew Research Centre in Washington, DC, found that 75-80 per cent of participants regarded climate change as an important issue. But respondents ranked it last on a list of priorities.
C. This inconsistency largely steins from a feeling of powerlessness. "When we can"t actually remove the source of our fear, we tend to adapt psychologically by adopting a range of defense mechanisms," says Tom Crompton, change strategist for the environmental organization World Wide Fund for Nature.
D. Part of the fault lies with our inner caveman. Evolution has programmed humans to pay most attention to issues that will have an immediate impact. "We worry most about now because if we don"t survive for the next minute, we"re not going to be around in ten years" time," says Professor Elke Weber of the Centre for Research on Environmental Decisions at Columbia University in New York. If the Thames were lapping around Big Ben, Londoners would face up to the problem of emissions pretty quickly. But in practice, our brain discounts the risks—and benefits—associated with issues that lie some way ahead.
E. Matthew Rush worth, of the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford, sees this in his lab every day. "One of the ways in which all agents seem to make decisions is that they assign a lower weighting to outcomes that are going to be further away in the future," he says. "This is a very sensible way for an animal to make decisions in the wild and would have been very helpful for humans for thousands of years."
F. Not any longer. By the time we wake up to the threat posed by climate change, it could well be too late. And if we"re not going to make national decisions about the future, others may have to help us to do so.
G. Few political libraries are without a copy of Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness, by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein. They argue that governments should persuade us into making better decisions—such as saving more in our pension plans—by changing the default options. Professor Weber believes that environmental policy can make use of similar tactics. If, for example, building codes included green construction guidelines, most developers would be too lazy to challenge them.
H. Defaults are certainly part of the solution. But social scientists are most concerned about crafting messages that exploit our group mentality(心态). "We need to understand what motivates people, what it is that allows them to make change," says Professor Neil Adger, of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research in Norwich. "It is actually about what their peers think of them, what their social norms are, what is seen as desirable in society." In other words, our inner cave-man is continually looking over his shoulder to see what the rest of the tribe are up to.
I. The passive attitude we have to climate change as individuals can be altered by counting us in—and measuring us against—our peer group. "Social norms are primitive and elemental," says Dr. Robert Cialdini, author of Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. "Birds flock together, fish school together, cattle herd together...just perceiving norms is enough to cause people to adjust their behavior in the direction of the crowd."
J. These norms can take us beyond good intentions. Cialdini conducted a study in San Diego in which coat hangers bearing messages about saving energy were hung on people"s doors. Some of the messages mentioned the environment, some financial savings, others social responsibility. But it was the one that mentioned the actions of neighbours that drove down power use.
K. Other studies show that simply providing the facility for people to compare their energy use with the local average is enough to cause them to modify their behaviour. The Conservatives plan to adopt this strategy by making utility companies print the average local electricity and gas usage on people"s bills.
L. Social science can also teach politicians how to avoid our collective capacity for self-destructive behaviour. Environmental campaigns that tell us how many people drive SUVs unwittingly (不经意地) imply that this behaviour is widespread and thus permissible. Cialdini recommends some careful framing of the message. "Instead of normalising the undesirable behaviour, the message needs to marginalise it, for example, by stating that if even one person buys yet another SUV, it reduces our ability to be energy-independent."
M. Tapping into how we already see ourselves is crucial. The most successful environmental strategy will marry the green message to our own sense of identity. Take your average trade union member, chances are they will be politically motivated and be used to collective action—much like Erica Gregory. A retired member of the Public and Commercial Services Union, she is setting up one of 1,100 action groups with the support of Climate Solidarity, a two-year environmental campaign aimed at trade unionists.
N. Erica is proof that a great-grandmother can help to lead the revolution if you get the psychology right—in this case, by matching her enthusiasm for the environment with a fondness for organising groups. "I think there must be something in it." She is expecting up to 20 people at the first meeting she has called, at her local pub in the Cornish village of Polperro.
O. Nick Perks, project director for Climate Solidarity, believes this sort of activity is where the future of environmental action lies. "Using existing civil society structures or networks is a more effective way of creating change...and obviously trade unions are one of the biggest civil society net-works in the UK," he says. The "Love Food, Haste Waste" campaign entered into a collaboration last year with another such network—the Women"s Institute. Londoner Rachel Talor joined the campaign with the aim of making new friends. A year on, the meetings have made lasting changes to what she throws away in her kitchen. "It"s always more of an incentive if you"re doing it with other people," she says. "It motivates you more if you know that you"ve got to provide feedback to a group."
P. The power of such simple psychology in fighting climate change is attracting attention across the political establishment. In the US, the House of Representatives Science Committee has approved a bill allocating $10 million a year to studying energy-related behaviour. In the UK, new studies are in development and social scientists are regularly spotted in British government offices. With the help of psychologists, there is fresh hope that we might go green after all.It is the government"s responsibility to persuade people into making environment-friendly decisions.
答案： G[解析] tactics“策略，战略”。原文中的environmental policy can make use o...
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The Impossibility of Rapid Energy Transtions
A．Politicians are fond of promising rapid energy transitions. Whether it is a transition from imported to domestic oil or from coal-powered electricity production to natural-gas power plants, politicians love to talk big．Unfortunately for them(and often the taxpayers), our energy systems are a bit like an aircraft carrier: they are unbelievably expensive, they are built to last for a very long time, they have a huge amount of inertia(meaning it takes a lot of energy to set them moving), and they have a lot of momentum once they are set in motion. No matter how hard you try, you can"t turn something that large on a dime(10美分硬币), or even a few thousand dimes.
B．In physics, moving objects have two characteristics relevant to understanding the dynamics of energy systems: inertia and momentum. Inertia is the resistance of objects you back. Once you have started the boulder rolling, it develops momentum, which is defined by its mass and velocity. Momentum is said to be "conserved," that is, once you build it up, it has to go somewhere. So a heavy object, like a football player moving at a high speed, has a lot of momentum—that is, once he is moving, it is hard to change his state of motion. If you want to change his course, you have only a few choices: you can stop him, transferring (possibly painfully) some of his kinetic energy (动能)to your own body, or you can approach alongside and slowly apply pressure to gradually alter his course.
C．But there are other kinds of momentum as well. After all, we don"t speak only of objects or people as having momentum; we speak of entire systems having momentum. Whether it"s a sports team or a presidential campaign, everybody relishes having the big momentum, because it makes them harder to stop or change direction.
D．One kind of momentum is technological momentum. When a technology is deployed, its impacts reach far beyond itself. Consider the incandescent (白炽灯) bulb, an object currently hated by many environmentalists and energy-efficiency advocates. The incandescent light bulb, invented by Thomas Edison, which came to be the symbol of inspiration, has been developed into hundreds, if not thousands, of forms. Today, a visit to a lighting store reveals a stunning array of choices. There are standard-shaped bulbs, flame-shaped bulbs, colored globe-shaped bulbs, and more. It is quite easy, with all that choice, to change a light bulb.
E．But the momentum of incandescent lighting does not stop there. All of those specialized bulbs led to the building of specialized light fixtures, from the desk lamp you study by, to the ugly but beloved hand-painted Chinese lamp you inherited from your grandmother, to the ceiling fixture in your closet, to the light in your oven or refrigerator, and to the light that the dentist points at you. It is easy to change a light bulb, sure, but it is harder to change the bulb and its fixture.
F. And there is more to the story, because not only are the devices that house incandescent bulbs shaped to their underlying characteristics, but rooms and entire buildings have been designed in accordance with how incandescent lighting reflects off walls and windows.
G. As lighting expert Howard Brandston points out, "Generally, there are no bad sources, only bad applications. " There are some very commendable characteristics of the CFL (compact fluorescent (荧光的)light bulb), yet the selection of any light source remains inseparable from the luminaire (照明装置) that houses it, along with the space in which both are installed, and lighting requirements that need to be satisfied. The lamp, the fixture, and the room: all three must work in concert for the true benefits of end-users. If the CFL should be used for lighting a particular space, or an object within that space, the fixture must be designed to work with that simply installed in an incandescent fixture and then expected to produce a visual appearance that is more than washed out, foggy, and dim. The whole fixture must be replaced—light source and luminaire—and this is never an inexpensive proposition.
H. And Brandston knows a thing or two about lighting, being the man who illuminated the Statue of Liberty.
I. Another type of momentum we have to think about when planning for changes in our energy systems is labor-pool momentum. It is one thing to say that we are going to shift 30 percent of our electricity supply from, say, coal to nuclear power in 20 years. But it is another thing to have a sup-ply of trained talent that could let you carry out this promise. That is because the engineers, designers, regulators, operators, and all of the other skilled people needed for the new energy industry are specialists who have to be trained first (or retrained, if they are the ones being laid off in some related industry), and education, like any other complicated endeavor, takes time. And not only do our prospective new energy workers have to be trained, they have to be trained in the right sequence. One needs the designers, and perhaps the regulators, before the builders and operators, and each group of workers in training has to know there is work waiting beyond graduation. In some cases, colleges and universities might have to change their training programs, adding another layer of difficulty.
J. By far the biggest type of momentum that comes into play when it comes to changing our energy system is economic momentum. The major components of our energy systems, such as fuel production, refining, electrical generation and distribution, are costly installations that have lengthy lifespan. They have to operate for long periods of time before the costs of development have been recovered. When investors put up theirmoney to build, say, a nuclear power plant, they expect to earn that money back over the planned life of the plant, which is typically between 40 and 60 years. Some coal power plants in the United States have operated for more than 70 years ! The oldest continuously operated commercial hydro-electric plant in the United States is on New York"s Hudson River, and it went into commercial service in 1898.
K. As Vaclav Smil points out, "All the forecast, plans, and anticipations cited above have failed so miserably because their authors and promoters thought the transitions they hoped to implement would proceed unlike all previous energy transitions，and that their progress could be accelerated in an unprecedented manner."
L．When you hear people speaking of making a rapid transition toward any type of energy, whether it is a switch from coal to nuclear power, or a switch from gasonline-powered cars to electric cars, or even a switch from an incandescent to a fluorescent light, understanding energy system inertia and momentum can help you decide whether their plans are feasible.Efforts to accelerate the current energy transitions didn"t succeed as expected.
答案： K[解析] 同义复述，原文中have failed对应49的didn"t succeed。
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Plastic Surgery
A better credit card is the solution to ever larger hack attacks
A. A thin magnetic stripe(magstripe)is all that stands between your credit-card information and the bad guys. And they"ve been working hard to break in. That"s why 2014 is shaping up as a major showdown: banks, law enforcement and technology companies are all trying to stop a network of hackers who are succeeding in stealing account numbers, names, email addresses and other crucial data used in identity theft. More than 100 million accounts at Target, Neiman Marcus and Michaels stores were affected in some way during the most recent attacks, starting last November.
B. Swipe(刷卡)is the operative word: cards are increasingly vulnerable to attacks when you make purchases in a store. In several recent incidents, hackers have been able to obtain massive information of credit-, debit-(借记)or prepaid-card numbers using malware, i.e. malicious soft-ware, inserted secretly into the retailers" point-of-sale system—the checkout registers. Hackers then sold the data to a second group of criminals operating in shadowy corners of the web. Not long after, the stolen data was showing up on fake cards and being used for online purchases.
C. The solution could cost as little as $2 extra for every piece of plastic issued. The fix is a security technology used heavily outside the U. S. While American credit cards use the 40-year-old magstripe technology to process transactions, much of the rest of the world uses smarter cards with a technology called EMV(short for Europay, MasterCard, Visa)that employs a chip embedded in the card plus a customer PIN( personal identification number)to authenticate(验证)every transaction on the spot. If a purchaser fails to punch in the correct PIN at the checkout, the transaction gets rejected. (Online purchases can be made by setting up a separate transaction code.)
D. Why haven"t big banks adopted the more secure technology When it comes to mailing out new credit cards, it"s all about relative costs, says David Robertson, who runs the Nilson Report, an industry newsletter. "The cost of the card, putting the sticker on it, coding the account number and expiration date, embossing(凸印)it, the small envelope—all put together, you"re in the dollar range." A chip-and-PIN card currently costs closer to $3, says Robertson, because of the price of chips. (Once large issuers convert together, the chip costs should drop.)
E. Multiply $3 by the more than 5 billion magstripe credit and prepaid cards in circulation in the U. S. Then consider that there"s an estimated $12.4 billion in card fraud on a global basis, says Robertson. With 44% of that in the U. S. American credit-card fraud amounts to about $5.5 billion annually. Card issuers have so far calculated that absorbing the liability for even big hacks like the Target one is still cheaper than replacing all that plastic.
F. That leaves American retailers pretty much alone the world over in relying on magstripe technology to charge purchases—and leaves consumers vulnerable. Each magstripe has three tracks of information, explains payments security expert Jeremy Gumbley, the chief technology officer of CreditCall, an electronic-payments company. The first and third are used by the bank or card issuer. Your vital account information lives on the second track, which hackers try to capture. "Malware is scanning through the memory in real time and looking for data," he says. "It creates a text file that gets stolen."
G. Chip-and-PIN cards, by contrast, make fake cards or skimming impossible because the information that gets scanned is encrypted (加密). The historical reason the U. S. has stuck with magstripe, ironically enough, is once superior technology. Our cheap, ultra-reliable wired net-works made credit-card authentication over the phone frictionless. In France, card companies created EMV in part because the telephone monopoly was so maddeningly inefficient and expensive. The EMV solution allowed transactions to be verified locally and securely.
H. Some big banks, like Wells Fargo, are now offering to convert your magstripe card to a chip-and-PIN model. (It"s actually a hybrid(混合体)that will still have a magstripe, since most U. S. merchants don"t have EMV terminals.) Should you take them up on it If you travel internationally, the answer is yes.
I. Keep in mind, too, that credit cards typically have better liability protection than debit cards. If someone uses your credit card fraudulently(欺炸性地), it"s the issuer or merchant, not you, that takes the hit. Debit cards have different liability limits depending on the bank and the events surrounding any fraud. "If it"s available, the logical thing is to get a chip-and-PIN card from your bank," says Eric Adamowsky, a co-founder of CreditCardInsider. com. "I would use credit cards over debit cards because of liability issues. "Cash still works pretty well too.
J. Retailers and banks stand to benefit from the lower fraud levels of chip-and-PIN cards but have been reluctant for years to invest in the new infrastructure(基础设施)needed for the technology, especially if consumers don"t have access to it. It"s a chicken-and-egg problem: no one wants to spend the money on upgraded point-of-sale systems that can read the chip cards if shoppers aren"t car-tying them—yet there"s little point in consumers" carrying the fancy plastic if stores aren"t equipped to use them. (An earlier effort by Target to move to chip and PIN never gained progress.) According to Gumbley, there"s a "you-first mentality. The logjam(僵局)has to be broken."
K. JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon recently expressed his willingness to do so, noting that banks and merchants have spent the past decade suing each other over interchange fees—the percentage of the transaction price they keep—rather than deal with the growing hacking problem. Chase offers a chip-enabled card under its own brand and several others for travel-related companies such as British Airways and Ritz-Carlton.
L. The Target and Neiman hacks have also changed the cost calculation: although retailers have been reluctant to spend the $6.75 billion that Capgemini consultants estimate it will take to convert all their registers to be chip-and-PIN compatible, the potential liability they now face is dramatically greater. Target has been hit with class actions from hacked consumers. "It"s the ultimate nightmare," a retail executive from a well-known chain admitted to TIME.
M. The card-payment companies MasterCard and Visa are pushing hard for change. The two firms have warned all parties in the transaction chain—merchant, network, bank—that if they don"t become EMV-compliant by October 2015, the party that is least compliant will bear the fraud risk.
N. In the meantime, app-equipped smartphones and digital wallets—all of which can use EMV technology—are beginning to make inroads(侵袭)on cards and cash. PayPal, for instance, is testing an app that lets you use your mobile phone to pay on the fly at local merchants—without surrendering any card information to them. And further down the road is biometric authentication, which could be encrypted with, say, a fingerprint.
O. Credit and debit cards, though, are going to be with us for the foreseeable future, and so are hackers, if we stick with magstripe technology. "It seems crazy to me," says Gumbley, who is English, "that a cutting-edge-technology country is depending on a 40-year-old technology." That"s why it may be up to consumers to move the needle on chip and PIN. Robertson says "When you get the consumer into a position of worry and inconvenience, that"s where the rubber hits the road."The French card companies adopted EMV technology partly because of inefficient telephone service.
答案： G[解析] 根据French card companies和inefficient telephone service查...
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First-Generation College-Goers: Unprepared and Behind
Kids who are the first in their families to brave the world of higher education come on campus with little academic know-how and are much more likely than their peers to drop out before graduation.
A. When Nijay Williams entered college last fall as a first-generation student and Jamaican immigrants, he was academically unprepared for the rigors of higher education. Like many first-generation student, he enrolled in a medium-sized state university many of his high school peers were also attending, received a Pell Grant, and board and the closeness of the school to his family, he chose to live at home and worked between 30 and 40 hours a week while taking a full class schedule.
B. What Nijay didn"t realize about his school—Tennessee State University—was its frighteningly low graduation rate: a mere 29 percent for its first-generation students. At the end of his first year, Nijay lost his Pell Grant of over $5,000 after narrowly missing the 2.0 GPA cut-off, making it impossible for him to continue paying for school.
C. Nijay represents a large and growing group of Americans: first-generation college students who enter school unprepared or behind. To make matters worse, these schools are ill-equipped to graduate these students—young adults who face specific challenges and obstacles. They typically carry financial burdens that outweigh those of their peers, are more likely to work while attending school, and often require significant academic remediation(补习).
D. Matt Rubinoff directs I"m First, a nonprofit organization launched last October to reach out to this specific population of students. He hopes to distribute this information and help prospective college-goers find the best post-secondary fit. And while Rubinoff believes there are a good number of four-year schools that truly care about these students and set aside significant resources and pro-grams for them, he says that number isn"t high enough.
E. "It"s not only the selective and elite institutions that provide those opportunities for a small subset of this population," Rubinoff said, adding that a majority of first-generation undergraduates tend toward options such as online programs, two-year colleges, and commuter state schools. "Un-fortunately, there tends to be a lack of information and support to help students think bigger and broader."
F. Despite this problem, many students are still drawn to these institutions—and two-year schools in particular. As a former high school teacher, I saw students choose familiar, cheaper options year after year. Instead of skipping out on higher education altogether, they chose community colleges or state schools with low bars for admittance.
G. "They underestimate themselves when selecting a university," said Dave Jarrat, a marketing executive for Inside Track, a for-profit organization that specializes in coaching low-income students and supporting colleges in order to help students thrive. "The reality of it is that a lot of low-income kids could be going to elite universities on a full ride scholarship and don"t even realize it."
H. "Many students are coming from a situation where no one around them has the experience of successfully completing higher education, so they are coming in questioning themselves and their college worthiness," Jarrat continued. That helps explain why, as I"m First"s Rubinoff indicated, the schools to which these students end up resorting can end up being some of the poorest matches for them. The University of Tennessee and Tennessee State are worth comparing. Tennessee State"s overall graduation rate is a tiny 39 percent, but at least it has a smaller gap between the outcomes for first-generation students and those of their peers.
I. Still, the University of Tennessee deserves credit for being transparent. Many large institutions keep this kind of data secret—or at least make it incredibly difficult to find. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, for instance, admits only that the graduation rate for its first-generation pupils is "much lower" than the percentage of all students who graduate within four years (81 percent).
J. It is actually quite difficult to find reliable statistics on the issue for many schools. Higher education institutions are, under federal law, required to report graduation rates, but these reports typically only include Pell recipient numbers—not necessarily rates specific to first-generation students. Other initiatives fail to break down the data, too. Imagine how intimidating it can be for prospective students unfamiliar with the complexities of higher education to navigate this kind of information and then identify which schools are the best fit.
K. It was this lack of information that prompted the launch of I"m First in 2013, originally as an arm of its umbrella organization, the Center For Student Opportunity. "If we can help to direct students to more of these types of campuses and help students to understand them to be realistic and accessible places, have them apply to these schools at greater frequency and ultimately get in and enroll, we are going to raise the success rate," Rubinoff said, citing a variety of colleges ranging from large state institutions to smaller private schools.
L. Chelsea Jones, who now directs student programming at I"m First, was a first-generation college student at Howard. Like other students new to the intimidating higher-education world, she often struggled on her path to college. "There wasn"t really a college-bound culture at my high school," she said. "I want to go to college but I didn"t really know the process." Jones became involved with a college-access program through Princeton University in high school. Now she attributes much of her understanding of college to that: "But once I got to campus, it was a completely different ball game that no one really prepared me for."
M. She was fortunate, though. Howard, a well-regarded historically black college, had an array of resources for its first-generation students, including matching kids with counselors, connecting first-generation students to one another, and TRIO, a national program that supported 200 students on Howard"s campus. Still, Jones represents a small percentage of first-generation students who are able to gain entry into more elite universities, which are often known for robust financial aid packages and remarkably high graduation rates for first-generation students. (Harvard, for example, boasts a six-year graduation rate for underrepresented minority groups of 98 percent.)
N. Christian Vazquez, a first-generation Yale graduate, is another exception, his success story setting him far apart from students such as Nijay. "There is a lot of support at Yale, to an extent, after a while, there is too much support." he said, half-joking about the countless resources available at the school. Students are placed in small groups with counselors (trained seniors on campus); they have access to cultural and ethnic affinity(联系)groups, tutoring centers and also have a summer orientation specifically for first-generation students (the latter being one of the most common programs for students).
O. "Our support structure was more like: "You are going to get through Yale; you are going to do well."" he said, hinting at mentors(导师), staff, and professors who all provided significant support for students who lacked confidence about "belonging" at such a top institution.Some top institutions like Yale seem to provide first-generation students with more support than they actually need.
答案： N[解析] 根据关键词top institutions like Yale和more support，可以定位至N段：C...
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Climate Change May Be Real, but It"s Still Not Easy Being Green
How do we convince our inner caveman to be greener We ask some outstanding social scientists.
A．The road to climate hell is paved with our good intentions. Politicians may tackle polluters while scientists do battle with carbon emissions. But the most pervasive problem is less obvious: our own behaviour. We get distracted before we can turn down the heating. We break our promise not to fly after hearing about a neighbor"s rip to India. Ultimately, we can"t be bothered to change our attitude. Fortunately for the planet, social science and behavioral economics may be able to do that for us.
B. Despite mournful polar bears and carts showing carbon emissions soaring, most people find it hard to believe that global warming will affect them personally. Recent polls by the Pew Research Centre in Washington, DC, found that 75-80 per cent of participants regarded climate change as an important issue. But respondents ranked it last on a list of priorities.
C. This inconsistency largely steins from a feeling of powerlessness. "When we can"t actually remove the source of our fear, we tend to adapt psychologically by adopting a range of defense mechanisms," says Tom Crompton, change strategist for the environmental organization World Wide Fund for Nature.
D. Part of the fault lies with our inner caveman. Evolution has programmed humans to pay most attention to issues that will have an immediate impact. "We worry most about now because if we don"t survive for the next minute, we"re not going to be around in ten years" time," says Professor Elke Weber of the Centre for Research on Environmental Decisions at Columbia University in New York. If the Thames were lapping around Big Ben, Londoners would face up to the problem of emissions pretty quickly. But in practice, our brain discounts the risks—and benefits—associated with issues that lie some way ahead.
E. Matthew Rush worth, of the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford, sees this in his lab every day. "One of the ways in which all agents seem to make decisions is that they assign a lower weighting to outcomes that are going to be further away in the future," he says. "This is a very sensible way for an animal to make decisions in the wild and would have been very helpful for humans for thousands of years."
F. Not any longer. By the time we wake up to the threat posed by climate change, it could well be too late. And if we"re not going to make national decisions about the future, others may have to help us to do so.
G. Few political libraries are without a copy of Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness, by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein. They argue that governments should persuade us into making better decisions—such as saving more in our pension plans—by changing the default options. Professor Weber believes that environmental policy can make use of similar tactics. If, for example, building codes included green construction guidelines, most developers would be too lazy to challenge them.
H. Defaults are certainly part of the solution. But social scientists are most concerned about crafting messages that exploit our group mentality(心态). "We need to understand what motivates people, what it is that allows them to make change," says Professor Neil Adger, of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research in Norwich. "It is actually about what their peers think of them, what their social norms are, what is seen as desirable in society." In other words, our inner cave-man is continually looking over his shoulder to see what the rest of the tribe are up to.
I. The passive attitude we have to climate change as individuals can be altered by counting us in—and measuring us against—our peer group. "Social norms are primitive and elemental," says Dr. Robert Cialdini, author of Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. "Birds flock together, fish school together, cattle herd together...just perceiving norms is enough to cause people to adjust their behavior in the direction of the crowd."
J. These norms can take us beyond good intentions. Cialdini conducted a study in San Diego in which coat hangers bearing messages about saving energy were hung on people"s doors. Some of the messages mentioned the environment, some financial savings, others social responsibility. But it was the one that mentioned the actions of neighbours that drove down power use.
K. Other studies show that simply providing the facility for people to compare their energy use with the local average is enough to cause them to modify their behaviour. The Conservatives plan to adopt this strategy by making utility companies print the average local electricity and gas usage on people"s bills.
L. Social science can also teach politicians how to avoid our collective capacity for self-destructive behaviour. Environmental campaigns that tell us how many people drive SUVs unwittingly (不经意地) imply that this behaviour is widespread and thus permissible. Cialdini recommends some careful framing of the message. "Instead of normalising the undesirable behaviour, the message needs to marginalise it, for example, by stating that if even one person buys yet another SUV, it reduces our ability to be energy-independent."
M. Tapping into how we already see ourselves is crucial. The most successful environmental strategy will marry the green message to our own sense of identity. Take your average trade union member, chances are they will be politically motivated and be used to collective action—much like Erica Gregory. A retired member of the Public and Commercial Services Union, she is setting up one of 1,100 action groups with the support of Climate Solidarity, a two-year environmental campaign aimed at trade unionists.
N. Erica is proof that a great-grandmother can help to lead the revolution if you get the psychology right—in this case, by matching her enthusiasm for the environment with a fondness for organising groups. "I think there must be something in it." She is expecting up to 20 people at the first meeting she has called, at her local pub in the Cornish village of Polperro.
O. Nick Perks, project director for Climate Solidarity, believes this sort of activity is where the future of environmental action lies. "Using existing civil society structures or networks is a more effective way of creating change...and obviously trade unions are one of the biggest civil society net-works in the UK," he says. The "Love Food, Haste Waste" campaign entered into a collaboration last year with another such network—the Women"s Institute. Londoner Rachel Talor joined the campaign with the aim of making new friends. A year on, the meetings have made lasting changes to what she throws away in her kitchen. "It"s always more of an incentive if you"re doing it with other people," she says. "It motivates you more if you know that you"ve got to provide feedback to a group."
P. The power of such simple psychology in fighting climate change is attracting attention across the political establishment. In the US, the House of Representatives Science Committee has approved a bill allocating $10 million a year to studying energy-related behaviour. In the UK, new studies are in development and social scientists are regularly spotted in British government offices. With the help of psychologists, there is fresh hope that we might go green after all.Politicians are beginning to realize the importance of enlisting psychologists" help in fighting climate change.
答案： P[解析] 根据in fighting climate change定位到P段，最后一句，在心理学家的帮助下，我们有了新...
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The Impossibility of Rapid Energy Transtions
A．Politicians are fond of promising rapid energy transitions. Whether it is a transition from imported to domestic oil or from coal-powered electricity production to natural-gas power plants, politicians love to talk big．Unfortunately for them(and often the taxpayers), our energy systems are a bit like an aircraft carrier: they are unbelievably expensive, they are built to last for a very long time, they have a huge amount of inertia(meaning it takes a lot of energy to set them moving), and they have a lot of momentum once they are set in motion. No matter how hard you try, you can"t turn something that large on a dime(10美分硬币), or even a few thousand dimes.
B．In physics, moving objects have two characteristics relevant to understanding the dynamics of energy systems: inertia and momentum. Inertia is the resistance of objects you back. Once you have started the boulder rolling, it develops momentum, which is defined by its mass and velocity. Momentum is said to be "conserved," that is, once you build it up, it has to go somewhere. So a heavy object, like a football player moving at a high speed, has a lot of momentum—that is, once he is moving, it is hard to change his state of motion. If you want to change his course, you have only a few choices: you can stop him, transferring (possibly painfully) some of his kinetic energy (动能)to your own body, or you can approach alongside and slowly apply pressure to gradually alter his course.
C．But there are other kinds of momentum as well. After all, we don"t speak only of objects or people as having momentum; we speak of entire systems having momentum. Whether it"s a sports team or a presidential campaign, everybody relishes having the big momentum, because it makes them harder to stop or change direction.
D．One kind of momentum is technological momentum. When a technology is deployed, its impacts reach far beyond itself. Consider the incandescent (白炽灯) bulb, an object currently hated by many environmentalists and energy-efficiency advocates. The incandescent light bulb, invented by Thomas Edison, which came to be the symbol of inspiration, has been developed into hundreds, if not thousands, of forms. Today, a visit to a lighting store reveals a stunning array of choices. There are standard-shaped bulbs, flame-shaped bulbs, colored globe-shaped bulbs, and more. It is quite easy, with all that choice, to change a light bulb.
E．But the momentum of incandescent lighting does not stop there. All of those specialized bulbs led to the building of specialized light fixtures, from the desk lamp you study by, to the ugly but beloved hand-painted Chinese lamp you inherited from your grandmother, to the ceiling fixture in your closet, to the light in your oven or refrigerator, and to the light that the dentist points at you. It is easy to change a light bulb, sure, but it is harder to change the bulb and its fixture.
F. And there is more to the story, because not only are the devices that house incandescent bulbs shaped to their underlying characteristics, but rooms and entire buildings have been designed in accordance with how incandescent lighting reflects off walls and windows.
G. As lighting expert Howard Brandston points out, "Generally, there are no bad sources, only bad applications. " There are some very commendable characteristics of the CFL (compact fluorescent (荧光的)light bulb), yet the selection of any light source remains inseparable from the luminaire (照明装置) that houses it, along with the space in which both are installed, and lighting requirements that need to be satisfied. The lamp, the fixture, and the room: all three must work in concert for the true benefits of end-users. If the CFL should be used for lighting a particular space, or an object within that space, the fixture must be designed to work with that simply installed in an incandescent fixture and then expected to produce a visual appearance that is more than washed out, foggy, and dim. The whole fixture must be replaced—light source and luminaire—and this is never an inexpensive proposition.
H. And Brandston knows a thing or two about lighting, being the man who illuminated the Statue of Liberty.
I. Another type of momentum we have to think about when planning for changes in our energy systems is labor-pool momentum. It is one thing to say that we are going to shift 30 percent of our electricity supply from, say, coal to nuclear power in 20 years. But it is another thing to have a sup-ply of trained talent that could let you carry out this promise. That is because the engineers, designers, regulators, operators, and all of the other skilled people needed for the new energy industry are specialists who have to be trained first (or retrained, if they are the ones being laid off in some related industry), and education, like any other complicated endeavor, takes time. And not only do our prospective new energy workers have to be trained, they have to be trained in the right sequence. One needs the designers, and perhaps the regulators, before the builders and operators, and each group of workers in training has to know there is work waiting beyond graduation. In some cases, colleges and universities might have to change their training programs, adding another layer of difficulty.
J. By far the biggest type of momentum that comes into play when it comes to changing our energy system is economic momentum. The major components of our energy systems, such as fuel production, refining, electrical generation and distribution, are costly installations that have lengthy lifespan. They have to operate for long periods of time before the costs of development have been recovered. When investors put up theirmoney to build, say, a nuclear power plant, they expect to earn that money back over the planned life of the plant, which is typically between 40 and 60 years. Some coal power plants in the United States have operated for more than 70 years ! The oldest continuously operated commercial hydro-electric plant in the United States is on New York"s Hudson River, and it went into commercial service in 1898.
K. As Vaclav Smil points out, "All the forecast, plans, and anticipations cited above have failed so miserably because their authors and promoters thought the transitions they hoped to implement would proceed unlike all previous energy transitions，and that their progress could be accelerated in an unprecedented manner."
L．When you hear people speaking of making a rapid transition toward any type of energy, whether it is a switch from coal to nuclear power, or a switch from gasonline-powered cars to electric cars, or even a switch from an incandescent to a fluorescent light, understanding energy system inertia and momentum can help you decide whether their plans are feasible.To change the light source is costly because you have to change the whole fixture.
答案： G[解析] 原文中的yet the selection of any light source remains inse...
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First-Generation College-Goers: Unprepared and Behind
Kids who are the first in their families to brave the world of higher education come on campus with little academic know-how and are much more likely than their peers to drop out before graduation.
A. When Nijay Williams entered college last fall as a first-generation student and Jamaican immigrants, he was academically unprepared for the rigors of higher education. Like many first-generation student, he enrolled in a medium-sized state university many of his high school peers were also attending, received a Pell Grant, and board and the closeness of the school to his family, he chose to live at home and worked between 30 and 40 hours a week while taking a full class schedule.
B. What Nijay didn"t realize about his school—Tennessee State University—was its frighteningly low graduation rate: a mere 29 percent for its first-generation students. At the end of his first year, Nijay lost his Pell Grant of over $5,000 after narrowly missing the 2.0 GPA cut-off, making it impossible for him to continue paying for school.
C. Nijay represents a large and growing group of Americans: first-generation college students who enter school unprepared or behind. To make matters worse, these schools are ill-equipped to graduate these students—young adults who face specific challenges and obstacles. They typically carry financial burdens that outweigh those of their peers, are more likely to work while attending school, and often require significant academic remediation(补习).
D. Matt Rubinoff directs I"m First, a nonprofit organization launched last October to reach out to this specific population of students. He hopes to distribute this information and help prospective college-goers find the best post-secondary fit. And while Rubinoff believes there are a good number of four-year schools that truly care about these students and set aside significant resources and pro-grams for them, he says that number isn"t high enough.
E. "It"s not only the selective and elite institutions that provide those opportunities for a small subset of this population," Rubinoff said, adding that a majority of first-generation undergraduates tend toward options such as online programs, two-year colleges, and commuter state schools. "Un-fortunately, there tends to be a lack of information and support to help students think bigger and broader."
F. Despite this problem, many students are still drawn to these institutions—and two-year schools in particular. As a former high school teacher, I saw students choose familiar, cheaper options year after year. Instead of skipping out on higher education altogether, they chose community colleges or state schools with low bars for admittance.
G. "They underestimate themselves when selecting a university," said Dave Jarrat, a marketing executive for Inside Track, a for-profit organization that specializes in coaching low-income students and supporting colleges in order to help students thrive. "The reality of it is that a lot of low-income kids could be going to elite universities on a full ride scholarship and don"t even realize it."
H. "Many students are coming from a situation where no one around them has the experience of successfully completing higher education, so they are coming in questioning themselves and their college worthiness," Jarrat continued. That helps explain why, as I"m First"s Rubinoff indicated, the schools to which these students end up resorting can end up being some of the poorest matches for them. The University of Tennessee and Tennessee State are worth comparing. Tennessee State"s overall graduation rate is a tiny 39 percent, but at least it has a smaller gap between the outcomes for first-generation students and those of their peers.
I. Still, the University of Tennessee deserves credit for being transparent. Many large institutions keep this kind of data secret—or at least make it incredibly difficult to find. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, for instance, admits only that the graduation rate for its first-generation pupils is "much lower" than the percentage of all students who graduate within four years (81 percent).
J. It is actually quite difficult to find reliable statistics on the issue for many schools. Higher education institutions are, under federal law, required to report graduation rates, but these reports typically only include Pell recipient numbers—not necessarily rates specific to first-generation students. Other initiatives fail to break down the data, too. Imagine how intimidating it can be for prospective students unfamiliar with the complexities of higher education to navigate this kind of information and then identify which schools are the best fit.
K. It was this lack of information that prompted the launch of I"m First in 2013, originally as an arm of its umbrella organization, the Center For Student Opportunity. "If we can help to direct students to more of these types of campuses and help students to understand them to be realistic and accessible places, have them apply to these schools at greater frequency and ultimately get in and enroll, we are going to raise the success rate," Rubinoff said, citing a variety of colleges ranging from large state institutions to smaller private schools.
L. Chelsea Jones, who now directs student programming at I"m First, was a first-generation college student at Howard. Like other students new to the intimidating higher-education world, she often struggled on her path to college. "There wasn"t really a college-bound culture at my high school," she said. "I want to go to college but I didn"t really know the process." Jones became involved with a college-access program through Princeton University in high school. Now she attributes much of her understanding of college to that: "But once I got to campus, it was a completely different ball game that no one really prepared me for."
M. She was fortunate, though. Howard, a well-regarded historically black college, had an array of resources for its first-generation students, including matching kids with counselors, connecting first-generation students to one another, and TRIO, a national program that supported 200 students on Howard"s campus. Still, Jones represents a small percentage of first-generation students who are able to gain entry into more elite universities, which are often known for robust financial aid packages and remarkably high graduation rates for first-generation students. (Harvard, for example, boasts a six-year graduation rate for underrepresented minority groups of 98 percent.)
N. Christian Vazquez, a first-generation Yale graduate, is another exception, his success story setting him far apart from students such as Nijay. "There is a lot of support at Yale, to an extent, after a while, there is too much support." he said, half-joking about the countless resources available at the school. Students are placed in small groups with counselors (trained seniors on campus); they have access to cultural and ethnic affinity(联系)groups, tutoring centers and also have a summer orientation specifically for first-generation students (the latter being one of the most common programs for students).
O. "Our support structure was more like: "You are going to get through Yale; you are going to do well."" he said, hinting at mentors(导师), staff, and professors who all provided significant support for students who lacked confidence about "belonging" at such a top institution.On entering college, Nijay Williams had no idea how challenging college education was.
答案： A[解析] 根据关键词entering college, Nijay Williams和no idea，可以定位至A段第...
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Plastic Surgery
A better credit card is the solution to ever larger hack attacks
A. A thin magnetic stripe(magstripe)is all that stands between your credit-card information and the bad guys. And they"ve been working hard to break in. That"s why 2014 is shaping up as a major showdown: banks, law enforcement and technology companies are all trying to stop a network of hackers who are succeeding in stealing account numbers, names, email addresses and other crucial data used in identity theft. More than 100 million accounts at Target, Neiman Marcus and Michaels stores were affected in some way during the most recent attacks, starting last November.
B. Swipe(刷卡)is the operative word: cards are increasingly vulnerable to attacks when you make purchases in a store. In several recent incidents, hackers have been able to obtain massive information of credit-, debit-(借记)or prepaid-card numbers using malware, i.e. malicious soft-ware, inserted secretly into the retailers" point-of-sale system—the checkout registers. Hackers then sold the data to a second group of criminals operating in shadowy corners of the web. Not long after, the stolen data was showing up on fake cards and being used for online purchases.
C. The solution could cost as little as $2 extra for every piece of plastic issued. The fix is a security technology used heavily outside the U. S. While American credit cards use the 40-year-old magstripe technology to process transactions, much of the rest of the world uses smarter cards with a technology called EMV(short for Europay, MasterCard, Visa)that employs a chip embedded in the card plus a customer PIN( personal identification number)to authenticate(验证)every transaction on the spot. If a purchaser fails to punch in the correct PIN at the checkout, the transaction gets rejected. (Online purchases can be made by setting up a separate transaction code.)
D. Why haven"t big banks adopted the more secure technology When it comes to mailing out new credit cards, it"s all about relative costs, says David Robertson, who runs the Nilson Report, an industry newsletter. "The cost of the card, putting the sticker on it, coding the account number and expiration date, embossing(凸印)it, the small envelope—all put together, you"re in the dollar range." A chip-and-PIN card currently costs closer to $3, says Robertson, because of the price of chips. (Once large issuers convert together, the chip costs should drop.)
E. Multiply $3 by the more than 5 billion magstripe credit and prepaid cards in circulation in the U. S. Then consider that there"s an estimated $12.4 billion in card fraud on a global basis, says Robertson. With 44% of that in the U. S. American credit-card fraud amounts to about $5.5 billion annually. Card issuers have so far calculated that absorbing the liability for even big hacks like the Target one is still cheaper than replacing all that plastic.
F. That leaves American retailers pretty much alone the world over in relying on magstripe technology to charge purchases—and leaves consumers vulnerable. Each magstripe has three tracks of information, explains payments security expert Jeremy Gumbley, the chief technology officer of CreditCall, an electronic-payments company. The first and third are used by the bank or card issuer. Your vital account information lives on the second track, which hackers try to capture. "Malware is scanning through the memory in real time and looking for data," he says. "It creates a text file that gets stolen."
G. Chip-and-PIN cards, by contrast, make fake cards or skimming impossible because the information that gets scanned is encrypted (加密). The historical reason the U. S. has stuck with magstripe, ironically enough, is once superior technology. Our cheap, ultra-reliable wired net-works made credit-card authentication over the phone frictionless. In France, card companies created EMV in part because the telephone monopoly was so maddeningly inefficient and expensive. The EMV solution allowed transactions to be verified locally and securely.
H. Some big banks, like Wells Fargo, are now offering to convert your magstripe card to a chip-and-PIN model. (It"s actually a hybrid(混合体)that will still have a magstripe, since most U. S. merchants don"t have EMV terminals.) Should you take them up on it If you travel internationally, the answer is yes.
I. Keep in mind, too, that credit cards typically have better liability protection than debit cards. If someone uses your credit card fraudulently(欺炸性地), it"s the issuer or merchant, not you, that takes the hit. Debit cards have different liability limits depending on the bank and the events surrounding any fraud. "If it"s available, the logical thing is to get a chip-and-PIN card from your bank," says Eric Adamowsky, a co-founder of CreditCardInsider. com. "I would use credit cards over debit cards because of liability issues. "Cash still works pretty well too.
J. Retailers and banks stand to benefit from the lower fraud levels of chip-and-PIN cards but have been reluctant for years to invest in the new infrastructure(基础设施)needed for the technology, especially if consumers don"t have access to it. It"s a chicken-and-egg problem: no one wants to spend the money on upgraded point-of-sale systems that can read the chip cards if shoppers aren"t car-tying them—yet there"s little point in consumers" carrying the fancy plastic if stores aren"t equipped to use them. (An earlier effort by Target to move to chip and PIN never gained progress.) According to Gumbley, there"s a "you-first mentality. The logjam(僵局)has to be broken."
K. JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon recently expressed his willingness to do so, noting that banks and merchants have spent the past decade suing each other over interchange fees—the percentage of the transaction price they keep—rather than deal with the growing hacking problem. Chase offers a chip-enabled card under its own brand and several others for travel-related companies such as British Airways and Ritz-Carlton.
L. The Target and Neiman hacks have also changed the cost calculation: although retailers have been reluctant to spend the $6.75 billion that Capgemini consultants estimate it will take to convert all their registers to be chip-and-PIN compatible, the potential liability they now face is dramatically greater. Target has been hit with class actions from hacked consumers. "It"s the ultimate nightmare," a retail executive from a well-known chain admitted to TIME.
M. The card-payment companies MasterCard and Visa are pushing hard for change. The two firms have warned all parties in the transaction chain—merchant, network, bank—that if they don"t become EMV-compliant by October 2015, the party that is least compliant will bear the fraud risk.
N. In the meantime, app-equipped smartphones and digital wallets—all of which can use EMV technology—are beginning to make inroads(侵袭)on cards and cash. PayPal, for instance, is testing an app that lets you use your mobile phone to pay on the fly at local merchants—without surrendering any card information to them. And further down the road is biometric authentication, which could be encrypted with, say, a fingerprint.
O. Credit and debit cards, though, are going to be with us for the foreseeable future, and so are hackers, if we stick with magstripe technology. "It seems crazy to me," says Gumbley, who is English, "that a cutting-edge-technology country is depending on a 40-year-old technology." That"s why it may be up to consumers to move the needle on chip and PIN. Robertson says "When you get the consumer into a position of worry and inconvenience, that"s where the rubber hits the road."While many countries use the smarter EMV cards. the U. S. still clings to its old mag-stripe technology.
答案： C[解析] 题目对比的是美国和很多其他国家的信用卡技术，根据many countries和the U. S.可查找到C段...
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The Impossibility of Rapid Energy Transtions
A．Politicians are fond of promising rapid energy transitions. Whether it is a transition from imported to domestic oil or from coal-powered electricity production to natural-gas power plants, politicians love to talk big．Unfortunately for them(and often the taxpayers), our energy systems are a bit like an aircraft carrier: they are unbelievably expensive, they are built to last for a very long time, they have a huge amount of inertia(meaning it takes a lot of energy to set them moving), and they have a lot of momentum once they are set in motion. No matter how hard you try, you can"t turn something that large on a dime(10美分硬币), or even a few thousand dimes.
B．In physics, moving objects have two characteristics relevant to understanding the dynamics of energy systems: inertia and momentum. Inertia is the resistance of objects you back. Once you have started the boulder rolling, it develops momentum, which is defined by its mass and velocity. Momentum is said to be "conserved," that is, once you build it up, it has to go somewhere. So a heavy object, like a football player moving at a high speed, has a lot of momentum—that is, once he is moving, it is hard to change his state of motion. If you want to change his course, you have only a few choices: you can stop him, transferring (possibly painfully) some of his kinetic energy (动能)to your own body, or you can approach alongside and slowly apply pressure to gradually alter his course.
C．But there are other kinds of momentum as well. After all, we don"t speak only of objects or people as having momentum; we speak of entire systems having momentum. Whether it"s a sports team or a presidential campaign, everybody relishes having the big momentum, because it makes them harder to stop or change direction.
D．One kind of momentum is technological momentum. When a technology is deployed, its impacts reach far beyond itself. Consider the incandescent (白炽灯) bulb, an object currently hated by many environmentalists and energy-efficiency advocates. The incandescent light bulb, invented by Thomas Edison, which came to be the symbol of inspiration, has been developed into hundreds, if not thousands, of forms. Today, a visit to a lighting store reveals a stunning array of choices. There are standard-shaped bulbs, flame-shaped bulbs, colored globe-shaped bulbs, and more. It is quite easy, with all that choice, to change a light bulb.
E．But the momentum of incandescent lighting does not stop there. All of those specialized bulbs led to the building of specialized light fixtures, from the desk lamp you study by, to the ugly but beloved hand-painted Chinese lamp you inherited from your grandmother, to the ceiling fixture in your closet, to the light in your oven or refrigerator, and to the light that the dentist points at you. It is easy to change a light bulb, sure, but it is harder to change the bulb and its fixture.
F. And there is more to the story, because not only are the devices that house incandescent bulbs shaped to their underlying characteristics, but rooms and entire buildings have been designed in accordance with how incandescent lighting reflects off walls and windows.
G. As lighting expert Howard Brandston points out, "Generally, there are no bad sources, only bad applications. " There are some very commendable characteristics of the CFL (compact fluorescent (荧光的)light bulb), yet the selection of any light source remains inseparable from the luminaire (照明装置) that houses it, along with the space in which both are installed, and lighting requirements that need to be satisfied. The lamp, the fixture, and the room: all three must work in concert for the true benefits of end-users. If the CFL should be used for lighting a particular space, or an object within that space, the fixture must be designed to work with that simply installed in an incandescent fixture and then expected to produce a visual appearance that is more than washed out, foggy, and dim. The whole fixture must be replaced—light source and luminaire—and this is never an inexpensive proposition.
H. And Brandston knows a thing or two about lighting, being the man who illuminated the Statue of Liberty.
I. Another type of momentum we have to think about when planning for changes in our energy systems is labor-pool momentum. It is one thing to say that we are going to shift 30 percent of our electricity supply from, say, coal to nuclear power in 20 years. But it is another thing to have a sup-ply of trained talent that could let you carry out this promise. That is because the engineers, designers, regulators, operators, and all of the other skilled people needed for the new energy industry are specialists who have to be trained first (or retrained, if they are the ones being laid off in some related industry), and education, like any other complicated endeavor, takes time. And not only do our prospective new energy workers have to be trained, they have to be trained in the right sequence. One needs the designers, and perhaps the regulators, before the builders and operators, and each group of workers in training has to know there is work waiting beyond graduation. In some cases, colleges and universities might have to change their training programs, adding another layer of difficulty.
J. By far the biggest type of momentum that comes into play when it comes to changing our energy system is economic momentum. The major components of our energy systems, such as fuel production, refining, electrical generation and distribution, are costly installations that have lengthy lifespan. They have to operate for long periods of time before the costs of development have been recovered. When investors put up theirmoney to build, say, a nuclear power plant, they expect to earn that money back over the planned life of the plant, which is typically between 40 and 60 years. Some coal power plants in the United States have operated for more than 70 years ! The oldest continuously operated commercial hydro-electric plant in the United States is on New York"s Hudson River, and it went into commercial service in 1898.
K. As Vaclav Smil points out, "All the forecast, plans, and anticipations cited above have failed so miserably because their authors and promoters thought the transitions they hoped to implement would proceed unlike all previous energy transitions，and that their progress could be accelerated in an unprecedented manner."
L．When you hear people speaking of making a rapid transition toward any type of energy, whether it is a switch from coal to nuclear power, or a switch from gasonline-powered cars to electric cars, or even a switch from an incandescent to a fluorescent light, understanding energy system inertia and momentum can help you decide whether their plans are feasible.Energy systems, like an aircraft carrier set in motion, have huge momentum.
答案： A[解析] 关键词定位，原文的our energy systems are a bit like an aircraft...
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Climate Change May Be Real, but It"s Still Not Easy Being Green
How do we convince our inner caveman to be greener We ask some outstanding social scientists.
A．The road to climate hell is paved with our good intentions. Politicians may tackle polluters while scientists do battle with carbon emissions. But the most pervasive problem is less obvious: our own behaviour. We get distracted before we can turn down the heating. We break our promise not to fly after hearing about a neighbor"s rip to India. Ultimately, we can"t be bothered to change our attitude. Fortunately for the planet, social science and behavioral economics may be able to do that for us.
B. Despite mournful polar bears and carts showing carbon emissions soaring, most people find it hard to believe that global warming will affect them personally. Recent polls by the Pew Research Centre in Washington, DC, found that 75-80 per cent of participants regarded climate change as an important issue. But respondents ranked it last on a list of priorities.
C. This inconsistency largely steins from a feeling of powerlessness. "When we can"t actually remove the source of our fear, we tend to adapt psychologically by adopting a range of defense mechanisms," says Tom Crompton, change strategist for the environmental organization World Wide Fund for Nature.
D. Part of the fault lies with our inner caveman. Evolution has programmed humans to pay most attention to issues that will have an immediate impact. "We worry most about now because if we don"t survive for the next minute, we"re not going to be around in ten years" time," says Professor Elke Weber of the Centre for Research on Environmental Decisions at Columbia University in New York. If the Thames were lapping around Big Ben, Londoners would face up to the problem of emissions pretty quickly. But in practice, our brain discounts the risks—and benefits—associated with issues that lie some way ahead.
E. Matthew Rush worth, of the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford, sees this in his lab every day. "One of the ways in which all agents seem to make decisions is that they assign a lower weighting to outcomes that are going to be further away in the future," he says. "This is a very sensible way for an animal to make decisions in the wild and would have been very helpful for humans for thousands of years."
F. Not any longer. By the time we wake up to the threat posed by climate change, it could well be too late. And if we"re not going to make national decisions about the future, others may have to help us to do so.
G. Few political libraries are without a copy of Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness, by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein. They argue that governments should persuade us into making better decisions—such as saving more in our pension plans—by changing the default options. Professor Weber believes that environmental policy can make use of similar tactics. If, for example, building codes included green construction guidelines, most developers would be too lazy to challenge them.
H. Defaults are certainly part of the solution. But social scientists are most concerned about crafting messages that exploit our group mentality(心态). "We need to understand what motivates people, what it is that allows them to make change," says Professor Neil Adger, of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research in Norwich. "It is actually about what their peers think of them, what their social norms are, what is seen as desirable in society." In other words, our inner cave-man is continually looking over his shoulder to see what the rest of the tribe are up to.
I. The passive attitude we have to climate change as individuals can be altered by counting us in—and measuring us against—our peer group. "Social norms are primitive and elemental," says Dr. Robert Cialdini, author of Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. "Birds flock together, fish school together, cattle herd together...just perceiving norms is enough to cause people to adjust their behavior in the direction of the crowd."
J. These norms can take us beyond good intentions. Cialdini conducted a study in San Diego in which coat hangers bearing messages about saving energy were hung on people"s doors. Some of the messages mentioned the environment, some financial savings, others social responsibility. But it was the one that mentioned the actions of neighbours that drove down power use.
K. Other studies show that simply providing the facility for people to compare their energy use with the local average is enough to cause them to modify their behaviour. The Conservatives plan to adopt this strategy by making utility companies print the average local electricity and gas usage on people"s bills.
L. Social science can also teach politicians how to avoid our collective capacity for self-destructive behaviour. Environmental campaigns that tell us how many people drive SUVs unwittingly (不经意地) imply that this behaviour is widespread and thus permissible. Cialdini recommends some careful framing of the message. "Instead of normalising the undesirable behaviour, the message needs to marginalise it, for example, by stating that if even one person buys yet another SUV, it reduces our ability to be energy-independent."
M. Tapping into how we already see ourselves is crucial. The most successful environmental strategy will marry the green message to our own sense of identity. Take your average trade union member, chances are they will be politically motivated and be used to collective action—much like Erica Gregory. A retired member of the Public and Commercial Services Union, she is setting up one of 1,100 action groups with the support of Climate Solidarity, a two-year environmental campaign aimed at trade unionists.
N. Erica is proof that a great-grandmother can help to lead the revolution if you get the psychology right—in this case, by matching her enthusiasm for the environment with a fondness for organising groups. "I think there must be something in it." She is expecting up to 20 people at the first meeting she has called, at her local pub in the Cornish village of Polperro.
O. Nick Perks, project director for Climate Solidarity, believes this sort of activity is where the future of environmental action lies. "Using existing civil society structures or networks is a more effective way of creating change...and obviously trade unions are one of the biggest civil society net-works in the UK," he says. The "Love Food, Haste Waste" campaign entered into a collaboration last year with another such network—the Women"s Institute. Londoner Rachel Talor joined the campaign with the aim of making new friends. A year on, the meetings have made lasting changes to what she throws away in her kitchen. "It"s always more of an incentive if you"re doing it with other people," she says. "It motivates you more if you know that you"ve got to provide feedback to a group."
P. The power of such simple psychology in fighting climate change is attracting attention across the political establishment. In the US, the House of Representatives Science Committee has approved a bill allocating $10 million a year to studying energy-related behaviour. In the UK, new studies are in development and social scientists are regularly spotted in British government offices. With the help of psychologists, there is fresh hope that we might go green after all.To find effective solutions to climate change, it is necessary to understand what motivates people to make change.
答案： H[解析] 由We need to understand what motivates people, what it ...
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Plastic Surgery
A better credit card is the solution to ever larger hack attacks
A. A thin magnetic stripe(magstripe)is all that stands between your credit-card information and the bad guys. And they"ve been working hard to break in. That"s why 2014 is shaping up as a major showdown: banks, law enforcement and technology companies are all trying to stop a network of hackers who are succeeding in stealing account numbers, names, email addresses and other crucial data used in identity theft. More than 100 million accounts at Target, Neiman Marcus and Michaels stores were affected in some way during the most recent attacks, starting last November.
B. Swipe(刷卡)is the operative word: cards are increasingly vulnerable to attacks when you make purchases in a store. In several recent incidents, hackers have been able to obtain massive information of credit-, debit-(借记)or prepaid-card numbers using malware, i.e. malicious soft-ware, inserted secretly into the retailers" point-of-sale system—the checkout registers. Hackers then sold the data to a second group of criminals operating in shadowy corners of the web. Not long after, the stolen data was showing up on fake cards and being used for online purchases.
C. The solution could cost as little as $2 extra for every piece of plastic issued. The fix is a security technology used heavily outside the U. S. While American credit cards use the 40-year-old magstripe technology to process transactions, much of the rest of the world uses smarter cards with a technology called EMV(short for Europay, MasterCard, Visa)that employs a chip embedded in the card plus a customer PIN( personal identification number)to authenticate(验证)every transaction on the spot. If a purchaser fails to punch in the correct PIN at the checkout, the transaction gets rejected. (Online purchases can be made by setting up a separate transaction code.)
D. Why haven"t big banks adopted the more secure technology When it comes to mailing out new credit cards, it"s all about relative costs, says David Robertson, who runs the Nilson Report, an industry newsletter. "The cost of the card, putting the sticker on it, coding the account number and expiration date, embossing(凸印)it, the small envelope—all put together, you"re in the dollar range." A chip-and-PIN card currently costs closer to $3, says Robertson, because of the price of chips. (Once large issuers convert together, the chip costs should drop.)
E. Multiply $3 by the more than 5 billion magstripe credit and prepaid cards in circulation in the U. S. Then consider that there"s an estimated $12.4 billion in card fraud on a global basis, says Robertson. With 44% of that in the U. S. American credit-card fraud amounts to about $5.5 billion annually. Card issuers have so far calculated that absorbing the liability for even big hacks like the Target one is still cheaper than replacing all that plastic.
F. That leaves American retailers pretty much alone the world over in relying on magstripe technology to charge purchases—and leaves consumers vulnerable. Each magstripe has three tracks of information, explains payments security expert Jeremy Gumbley, the chief technology officer of CreditCall, an electronic-payments company. The first and third are used by the bank or card issuer. Your vital account information lives on the second track, which hackers try to capture. "Malware is scanning through the memory in real time and looking for data," he says. "It creates a text file that gets stolen."
G. Chip-and-PIN cards, by contrast, make fake cards or skimming impossible because the information that gets scanned is encrypted (加密). The historical reason the U. S. has stuck with magstripe, ironically enough, is once superior technology. Our cheap, ultra-reliable wired net-works made credit-card authentication over the phone frictionless. In France, card companies created EMV in part because the telephone monopoly was so maddeningly inefficient and expensive. The EMV solution allowed transactions to be verified locally and securely.
H. Some big banks, like Wells Fargo, are now offering to convert your magstripe card to a chip-and-PIN model. (It"s actually a hybrid(混合体)that will still have a magstripe, since most U. S. merchants don"t have EMV terminals.) Should you take them up on it If you travel internationally, the answer is yes.
I. Keep in mind, too, that credit cards typically have better liability protection than debit cards. If someone uses your credit card fraudulently(欺炸性地), it"s the issuer or merchant, not you, that takes the hit. Debit cards have different liability limits depending on the bank and the events surrounding any fraud. "If it"s available, the logical thing is to get a chip-and-PIN card from your bank," says Eric Adamowsky, a co-founder of CreditCardInsider. com. "I would use credit cards over debit cards because of liability issues. "Cash still works pretty well too.
J. Retailers and banks stand to benefit from the lower fraud levels of chip-and-PIN cards but have been reluctant for years to invest in the new infrastructure(基础设施)needed for the technology, especially if consumers don"t have access to it. It"s a chicken-and-egg problem: no one wants to spend the money on upgraded point-of-sale systems that can read the chip cards if shoppers aren"t car-tying them—yet there"s little point in consumers" carrying the fancy plastic if stores aren"t equipped to use them. (An earlier effort by Target to move to chip and PIN never gained progress.) According to Gumbley, there"s a "you-first mentality. The logjam(僵局)has to be broken."
K. JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon recently expressed his willingness to do so, noting that banks and merchants have spent the past decade suing each other over interchange fees—the percentage of the transaction price they keep—rather than deal with the growing hacking problem. Chase offers a chip-enabled card under its own brand and several others for travel-related companies such as British Airways and Ritz-Carlton.
L. The Target and Neiman hacks have also changed the cost calculation: although retailers have been reluctant to spend the $6.75 billion that Capgemini consultants estimate it will take to convert all their registers to be chip-and-PIN compatible, the potential liability they now face is dramatically greater. Target has been hit with class actions from hacked consumers. "It"s the ultimate nightmare," a retail executive from a well-known chain admitted to TIME.
M. The card-payment companies MasterCard and Visa are pushing hard for change. The two firms have warned all parties in the transaction chain—merchant, network, bank—that if they don"t become EMV-compliant by October 2015, the party that is least compliant will bear the fraud risk.
N. In the meantime, app-equipped smartphones and digital wallets—all of which can use EMV technology—are beginning to make inroads(侵袭)on cards and cash. PayPal, for instance, is testing an app that lets you use your mobile phone to pay on the fly at local merchants—without surrendering any card information to them. And further down the road is biometric authentication, which could be encrypted with, say, a fingerprint.
O. Credit and debit cards, though, are going to be with us for the foreseeable future, and so are hackers, if we stick with magstripe technology. "It seems crazy to me," says Gumbley, who is English, "that a cutting-edge-technology country is depending on a 40-year-old technology." That"s why it may be up to consumers to move the needle on chip and PIN. Robertson says "When you get the consumer into a position of worry and inconvenience, that"s where the rubber hits the road."Attempts are being made to prevent hackers from carrying out identity theft.
答案： A[解析] 根据hackers和identity theft查找到A段。该段第3句指出，各相关机构正在努力拦截黑客网络，...
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First-Generation College-Goers: Unprepared and Behind
Kids who are the first in their families to brave the world of higher education come on campus with little academic know-how and are much more likely than their peers to drop out before graduation.
A. When Nijay Williams entered college last fall as a first-generation student and Jamaican immigrants, he was academically unprepared for the rigors of higher education. Like many first-generation student, he enrolled in a medium-sized state university many of his high school peers were also attending, received a Pell Grant, and board and the closeness of the school to his family, he chose to live at home and worked between 30 and 40 hours a week while taking a full class schedule.
B. What Nijay didn"t realize about his school—Tennessee State University—was its frighteningly low graduation rate: a mere 29 percent for its first-generation students. At the end of his first year, Nijay lost his Pell Grant of over $5,000 after narrowly missing the 2.0 GPA cut-off, making it impossible for him to continue paying for school.
C. Nijay represents a large and growing group of Americans: first-generation college students who enter school unprepared or behind. To make matters worse, these schools are ill-equipped to graduate these students—young adults who face specific challenges and obstacles. They typically carry financial burdens that outweigh those of their peers, are more likely to work while attending school, and often require significant academic remediation(补习).
D. Matt Rubinoff directs I"m First, a nonprofit organization launched last October to reach out to this specific population of students. He hopes to distribute this information and help prospective college-goers find the best post-secondary fit. And while Rubinoff believes there are a good number of four-year schools that truly care about these students and set aside significant resources and pro-grams for them, he says that number isn"t high enough.
E. "It"s not only the selective and elite institutions that provide those opportunities for a small subset of this population," Rubinoff said, adding that a majority of first-generation undergraduates tend toward options such as online programs, two-year colleges, and commuter state schools. "Un-fortunately, there tends to be a lack of information and support to help students think bigger and broader."
F. Despite this problem, many students are still drawn to these institutions—and two-year schools in particular. As a former high school teacher, I saw students choose familiar, cheaper options year after year. Instead of skipping out on higher education altogether, they chose community colleges or state schools with low bars for admittance.
G. "They underestimate themselves when selecting a university," said Dave Jarrat, a marketing executive for Inside Track, a for-profit organization that specializes in coaching low-income students and supporting colleges in order to help students thrive. "The reality of it is that a lot of low-income kids could be going to elite universities on a full ride scholarship and don"t even realize it."
H. "Many students are coming from a situation where no one around them has the experience of successfully completing higher education, so they are coming in questioning themselves and their college worthiness," Jarrat continued. That helps explain why, as I"m First"s Rubinoff indicated, the schools to which these students end up resorting can end up being some of the poorest matches for them. The University of Tennessee and Tennessee State are worth comparing. Tennessee State"s overall graduation rate is a tiny 39 percent, but at least it has a smaller gap between the outcomes for first-generation students and those of their peers.
I. Still, the University of Tennessee deserves credit for being transparent. Many large institutions keep this kind of data secret—or at least make it incredibly difficult to find. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, for instance, admits only that the graduation rate for its first-generation pupils is "much lower" than the percentage of all students who graduate within four years (81 percent).
J. It is actually quite difficult to find reliable statistics on the issue for many schools. Higher education institutions are, under federal law, required to report graduation rates, but these reports typically only include Pell recipient numbers—not necessarily rates specific to first-generation students. Other initiatives fail to break down the data, too. Imagine how intimidating it can be for prospective students unfamiliar with the complexities of higher education to navigate this kind of information and then identify which schools are the best fit.
K. It was this lack of information that prompted the launch of I"m First in 2013, originally as an arm of its umbrella organization, the Center For Student Opportunity. "If we can help to direct students to more of these types of campuses and help students to understand them to be realistic and accessible places, have them apply to these schools at greater frequency and ultimately get in and enroll, we are going to raise the success rate," Rubinoff said, citing a variety of colleges ranging from large state institutions to smaller private schools.
L. Chelsea Jones, who now directs student programming at I"m First, was a first-generation college student at Howard. Like other students new to the intimidating higher-education world, she often struggled on her path to college. "There wasn"t really a college-bound culture at my high school," she said. "I want to go to college but I didn"t really know the process." Jones became involved with a college-access program through Princeton University in high school. Now she attributes much of her understanding of college to that: "But once I got to campus, it was a completely different ball game that no one really prepared me for."
M. She was fortunate, though. Howard, a well-regarded historically black college, had an array of resources for its first-generation students, including matching kids with counselors, connecting first-generation students to one another, and TRIO, a national program that supported 200 students on Howard"s campus. Still, Jones represents a small percentage of first-generation students who are able to gain entry into more elite universities, which are often known for robust financial aid packages and remarkably high graduation rates for first-generation students. (Harvard, for example, boasts a six-year graduation rate for underrepresented minority groups of 98 percent.)
N. Christian Vazquez, a first-generation Yale graduate, is another exception, his success story setting him far apart from students such as Nijay. "There is a lot of support at Yale, to an extent, after a while, there is too much support." he said, half-joking about the countless resources available at the school. Students are placed in small groups with counselors (trained seniors on campus); they have access to cultural and ethnic affinity(联系)groups, tutoring centers and also have a summer orientation specifically for first-generation students (the latter being one of the most common programs for students).
O. "Our support structure was more like: "You are going to get through Yale; you are going to do well."" he said, hinting at mentors(导师), staff, and professors who all provided significant support for students who lacked confidence about "belonging" at such a top institution.Many universities simply refuse to release their exact graduation rates for first-generation students.
答案： J[解析] 根据关键词refuse to release their exact graduation rates，可以...
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The Impossibility of Rapid Energy Transtions
A．Politicians are fond of promising rapid energy transitions. Whether it is a transition from imported to domestic oil or from coal-powered electricity production to natural-gas power plants, politicians love to talk big．Unfortunately for them(and often the taxpayers), our energy systems are a bit like an aircraft carrier: they are unbelievably expensive, they are built to last for a very long time, they have a huge amount of inertia(meaning it takes a lot of energy to set them moving), and they have a lot of momentum once they are set in motion. No matter how hard you try, you can"t turn something that large on a dime(10美分硬币), or even a few thousand dimes.
B．In physics, moving objects have two characteristics relevant to understanding the dynamics of energy systems: inertia and momentum. Inertia is the resistance of objects you back. Once you have started the boulder rolling, it develops momentum, which is defined by its mass and velocity. Momentum is said to be "conserved," that is, once you build it up, it has to go somewhere. So a heavy object, like a football player moving at a high speed, has a lot of momentum—that is, once he is moving, it is hard to change his state of motion. If you want to change his course, you have only a few choices: you can stop him, transferring (possibly painfully) some of his kinetic energy (动能)to your own body, or you can approach alongside and slowly apply pressure to gradually alter his course.
C．But there are other kinds of momentum as well. After all, we don"t speak only of objects or people as having momentum; we speak of entire systems having momentum. Whether it"s a sports team or a presidential campaign, everybody relishes having the big momentum, because it makes them harder to stop or change direction.
D．One kind of momentum is technological momentum. When a technology is deployed, its impacts reach far beyond itself. Consider the incandescent (白炽灯) bulb, an object currently hated by many environmentalists and energy-efficiency advocates. The incandescent light bulb, invented by Thomas Edison, which came to be the symbol of inspiration, has been developed into hundreds, if not thousands, of forms. Today, a visit to a lighting store reveals a stunning array of choices. There are standard-shaped bulbs, flame-shaped bulbs, colored globe-shaped bulbs, and more. It is quite easy, with all that choice, to change a light bulb.
E．But the momentum of incandescent lighting does not stop there. All of those specialized bulbs led to the building of specialized light fixtures, from the desk lamp you study by, to the ugly but beloved hand-painted Chinese lamp you inherited from your grandmother, to the ceiling fixture in your closet, to the light in your oven or refrigerator, and to the light that the dentist points at you. It is easy to change a light bulb, sure, but it is harder to change the bulb and its fixture.
F. And there is more to the story, because not only are the devices that house incandescent bulbs shaped to their underlying characteristics, but rooms and entire buildings have been designed in accordance with how incandescent lighting reflects off walls and windows.
G. As lighting expert Howard Brandston points out, "Generally, there are no bad sources, only bad applications. " There are some very commendable characteristics of the CFL (compact fluorescent (荧光的)light bulb), yet the selection of any light source remains inseparable from the luminaire (照明装置) that houses it, along with the space in which both are installed, and lighting requirements that need to be satisfied. The lamp, the fixture, and the room: all three must work in concert for the true benefits of end-users. If the CFL should be used for lighting a particular space, or an object within that space, the fixture must be designed to work with that simply installed in an incandescent fixture and then expected to produce a visual appearance that is more than washed out, foggy, and dim. The whole fixture must be replaced—light source and luminaire—and this is never an inexpensive proposition.
H. And Brandston knows a thing or two about lighting, being the man who illuminated the Statue of Liberty.
I. Another type of momentum we have to think about when planning for changes in our energy systems is labor-pool momentum. It is one thing to say that we are going to shift 30 percent of our electricity supply from, say, coal to nuclear power in 20 years. But it is another thing to have a sup-ply of trained talent that could let you carry out this promise. That is because the engineers, designers, regulators, operators, and all of the other skilled people needed for the new energy industry are specialists who have to be trained first (or retrained, if they are the ones being laid off in some related industry), and education, like any other complicated endeavor, takes time. And not only do our prospective new energy workers have to be trained, they have to be trained in the right sequence. One needs the designers, and perhaps the regulators, before the builders and operators, and each group of workers in training has to know there is work waiting beyond graduation. In some cases, colleges and universities might have to change their training programs, adding another layer of difficulty.
J. By far the biggest type of momentum that comes into play when it comes to changing our energy system is economic momentum. The major components of our energy systems, such as fuel production, refining, electrical generation and distribution, are costly installations that have lengthy lifespan. They have to operate for long periods of time before the costs of development have been recovered. When investors put up theirmoney to build, say, a nuclear power plant, they expect to earn that money back over the planned life of the plant, which is typically between 40 and 60 years. Some coal power plants in the United States have operated for more than 70 years ! The oldest continuously operated commercial hydro-electric plant in the United States is on New York"s Hudson River, and it went into commercial service in 1898.
K. As Vaclav Smil points out, "All the forecast, plans, and anticipations cited above have failed so miserably because their authors and promoters thought the transitions they hoped to implement would proceed unlike all previous energy transitions，and that their progress could be accelerated in an unprecedented manner."
L．When you hear people speaking of making a rapid transition toward any type of energy, whether it is a switch from coal to nuclear power, or a switch from gasonline-powered cars to electric cars, or even a switch from an incandescent to a fluorescent light, understanding energy system inertia and momentum can help you decide whether their plans are feasible.The problem with lighting, if it arises, often doesn"t lie in light sources but in their applicants.
答案： G[解析] 同义复述，照明问题往往依赖于灯具设备的选择，跟灯光关系不大。
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Climate Change May Be Real, but It"s Still Not Easy Being Green
How do we convince our inner caveman to be greener We ask some outstanding social scientists.
A．The road to climate hell is paved with our good intentions. Politicians may tackle polluters while scientists do battle with carbon emissions. But the most pervasive problem is less obvious: our own behaviour. We get distracted before we can turn down the heating. We break our promise not to fly after hearing about a neighbor"s rip to India. Ultimately, we can"t be bothered to change our attitude. Fortunately for the planet, social science and behavioral economics may be able to do that for us.
B. Despite mournful polar bears and carts showing carbon emissions soaring, most people find it hard to believe that global warming will affect them personally. Recent polls by the Pew Research Centre in Washington, DC, found that 75-80 per cent of participants regarded climate change as an important issue. But respondents ranked it last on a list of priorities.
C. This inconsistency largely steins from a feeling of powerlessness. "When we can"t actually remove the source of our fear, we tend to adapt psychologically by adopting a range of defense mechanisms," says Tom Crompton, change strategist for the environmental organization World Wide Fund for Nature.
D. Part of the fault lies with our inner caveman. Evolution has programmed humans to pay most attention to issues that will have an immediate impact. "We worry most about now because if we don"t survive for the next minute, we"re not going to be around in ten years" time," says Professor Elke Weber of the Centre for Research on Environmental Decisions at Columbia University in New York. If the Thames were lapping around Big Ben, Londoners would face up to the problem of emissions pretty quickly. But in practice, our brain discounts the risks—and benefits—associated with issues that lie some way ahead.
E. Matthew Rush worth, of the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford, sees this in his lab every day. "One of the ways in which all agents seem to make decisions is that they assign a lower weighting to outcomes that are going to be further away in the future," he says. "This is a very sensible way for an animal to make decisions in the wild and would have been very helpful for humans for thousands of years."
F. Not any longer. By the time we wake up to the threat posed by climate change, it could well be too late. And if we"re not going to make national decisions about the future, others may have to help us to do so.
G. Few political libraries are without a copy of Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness, by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein. They argue that governments should persuade us into making better decisions—such as saving more in our pension plans—by changing the default options. Professor Weber believes that environmental policy can make use of similar tactics. If, for example, building codes included green construction guidelines, most developers would be too lazy to challenge them.
H. Defaults are certainly part of the solution. But social scientists are most concerned about crafting messages that exploit our group mentality(心态). "We need to understand what motivates people, what it is that allows them to make change," says Professor Neil Adger, of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research in Norwich. "It is actually about what their peers think of them, what their social norms are, what is seen as desirable in society." In other words, our inner cave-man is continually looking over his shoulder to see what the rest of the tribe are up to.
I. The passive attitude we have to climate change as individuals can be altered by counting us in—and measuring us against—our peer group. "Social norms are primitive and elemental," says Dr. Robert Cialdini, author of Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. "Birds flock together, fish school together, cattle herd together...just perceiving norms is enough to cause people to adjust their behavior in the direction of the crowd."
J. These norms can take us beyond good intentions. Cialdini conducted a study in San Diego in which coat hangers bearing messages about saving energy were hung on people"s doors. Some of the messages mentioned the environment, some financial savings, others social responsibility. But it was the one that mentioned the actions of neighbours that drove down power use.
K. Other studies show that simply providing the facility for people to compare their energy use with the local average is enough to cause them to modify their behaviour. The Conservatives plan to adopt this strategy by making utility companies print the average local electricity and gas usage on people"s bills.
L. Social science can also teach politicians how to avoid our collective capacity for self-destructive behaviour. Environmental campaigns that tell us how many people drive SUVs unwittingly (不经意地) imply that this behaviour is widespread and thus permissible. Cialdini recommends some careful framing of the message. "Instead of normalising the undesirable behaviour, the message needs to marginalise it, for example, by stating that if even one person buys yet another SUV, it reduces our ability to be energy-independent."
M. Tapping into how we already see ourselves is crucial. The most successful environmental strategy will marry the green message to our own sense of identity. Take your average trade union member, chances are they will be politically motivated and be used to collective action—much like Erica Gregory. A retired member of the Public and Commercial Services Union, she is setting up one of 1,100 action groups with the support of Climate Solidarity, a two-year environmental campaign aimed at trade unionists.
N. Erica is proof that a great-grandmother can help to lead the revolution if you get the psychology right—in this case, by matching her enthusiasm for the environment with a fondness for organising groups. "I think there must be something in it." She is expecting up to 20 people at the first meeting she has called, at her local pub in the Cornish village of Polperro.
O. Nick Perks, project director for Climate Solidarity, believes this sort of activity is where the future of environmental action lies. "Using existing civil society structures or networks is a more effective way of creating change...and obviously trade unions are one of the biggest civil society net-works in the UK," he says. The "Love Food, Haste Waste" campaign entered into a collaboration last year with another such network—the Women"s Institute. Londoner Rachel Talor joined the campaign with the aim of making new friends. A year on, the meetings have made lasting changes to what she throws away in her kitchen. "It"s always more of an incentive if you"re doing it with other people," she says. "It motivates you more if you know that you"ve got to provide feedback to a group."
P. The power of such simple psychology in fighting climate change is attracting attention across the political establishment. In the US, the House of Representatives Science Committee has approved a bill allocating $10 million a year to studying energy-related behaviour. In the UK, new studies are in development and social scientists are regularly spotted in British government offices. With the help of psychologists, there is fresh hope that we might go green after all.In their evolution. humans have learned to pay attention to the most urgent issues instead of long-term concerns.
答案： D[解析] 由D段Evolution has programmed humans to pay most attenti...
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First-Generation College-Goers: Unprepared and Behind
Kids who are the first in their families to brave the world of higher education come on campus with little academic know-how and are much more likely than their peers to drop out before graduation.
A. When Nijay Williams entered college last fall as a first-generation student and Jamaican immigrants, he was academically unprepared for the rigors of higher education. Like many first-generation student, he enrolled in a medium-sized state university many of his high school peers were also attending, received a Pell Grant, and board and the closeness of the school to his family, he chose to live at home and worked between 30 and 40 hours a week while taking a full class schedule.
B. What Nijay didn"t realize about his school—Tennessee State University—was its frighteningly low graduation rate: a mere 29 percent for its first-generation students. At the end of his first year, Nijay lost his Pell Grant of over $5,000 after narrowly missing the 2.0 GPA cut-off, making it impossible for him to continue paying for school.
C. Nijay represents a large and growing group of Americans: first-generation college students who enter school unprepared or behind. To make matters worse, these schools are ill-equipped to graduate these students—young adults who face specific challenges and obstacles. They typically carry financial burdens that outweigh those of their peers, are more likely to work while attending school, and often require significant academic remediation(补习).
D. Matt Rubinoff directs I"m First, a nonprofit organization launched last October to reach out to this specific population of students. He hopes to distribute this information and help prospective college-goers find the best post-secondary fit. And while Rubinoff believes there are a good number of four-year schools that truly care about these students and set aside significant resources and pro-grams for them, he says that number isn"t high enough.
E. "It"s not only the selective and elite institutions that provide those opportunities for a small subset of this population," Rubinoff said, adding that a majority of first-generation undergraduates tend toward options such as online programs, two-year colleges, and commuter state schools. "Un-fortunately, there tends to be a lack of information and support to help students think bigger and broader."
F. Despite this problem, many students are still drawn to these institutions—and two-year schools in particular. As a former high school teacher, I saw students choose familiar, cheaper options year after year. Instead of skipping out on higher education altogether, they chose community colleges or state schools with low bars for admittance.
G. "They underestimate themselves when selecting a university," said Dave Jarrat, a marketing executive for Inside Track, a for-profit organization that specializes in coaching low-income students and supporting colleges in order to help students thrive. "The reality of it is that a lot of low-income kids could be going to elite universities on a full ride scholarship and don"t even realize it."
H. "Many students are coming from a situation where no one around them has the experience of successfully completing higher education, so they are coming in questioning themselves and their college worthiness," Jarrat continued. That helps explain why, as I"m First"s Rubinoff indicated, the schools to which these students end up resorting can end up being some of the poorest matches for them. The University of Tennessee and Tennessee State are worth comparing. Tennessee State"s overall graduation rate is a tiny 39 percent, but at least it has a smaller gap between the outcomes for first-generation students and those of their peers.
I. Still, the University of Tennessee deserves credit for being transparent. Many large institutions keep this kind of data secret—or at least make it incredibly difficult to find. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, for instance, admits only that the graduation rate for its first-generation pupils is "much lower" than the percentage of all students who graduate within four years (81 percent).
J. It is actually quite difficult to find reliable statistics on the issue for many schools. Higher education institutions are, under federal law, required to report graduation rates, but these reports typically only include Pell recipient numbers—not necessarily rates specific to first-generation students. Other initiatives fail to break down the data, too. Imagine how intimidating it can be for prospective students unfamiliar with the complexities of higher education to navigate this kind of information and then identify which schools are the best fit.
K. It was this lack of information that prompted the launch of I"m First in 2013, originally as an arm of its umbrella organization, the Center For Student Opportunity. "If we can help to direct students to more of these types of campuses and help students to understand them to be realistic and accessible places, have them apply to these schools at greater frequency and ultimately get in and enroll, we are going to raise the success rate," Rubinoff said, citing a variety of colleges ranging from large state institutions to smaller private schools.
L. Chelsea Jones, who now directs student programming at I"m First, was a first-generation college student at Howard. Like other students new to the intimidating higher-education world, she often struggled on her path to college. "There wasn"t really a college-bound culture at my high school," she said. "I want to go to college but I didn"t really know the process." Jones became involved with a college-access program through Princeton University in high school. Now she attributes much of her understanding of college to that: "But once I got to campus, it was a completely different ball game that no one really prepared me for."
M. She was fortunate, though. Howard, a well-regarded historically black college, had an array of resources for its first-generation students, including matching kids with counselors, connecting first-generation students to one another, and TRIO, a national program that supported 200 students on Howard"s campus. Still, Jones represents a small percentage of first-generation students who are able to gain entry into more elite universities, which are often known for robust financial aid packages and remarkably high graduation rates for first-generation students. (Harvard, for example, boasts a six-year graduation rate for underrepresented minority groups of 98 percent.)
N. Christian Vazquez, a first-generation Yale graduate, is another exception, his success story setting him far apart from students such as Nijay. "There is a lot of support at Yale, to an extent, after a while, there is too much support." he said, half-joking about the countless resources available at the school. Students are placed in small groups with counselors (trained seniors on campus); they have access to cultural and ethnic affinity(联系)groups, tutoring centers and also have a summer orientation specifically for first-generation students (the latter being one of the most common programs for students).
O. "Our support structure was more like: "You are going to get through Yale; you are going to do well."" he said, hinting at mentors(导师), staff, and professors who all provided significant support for students who lacked confidence about "belonging" at such a top institution.According to a marketing executive, many, students from low-income families don"t know they could have a chance of going to an elite university.
答案： G[解析] 根据关键词marketing executive, low-income families和elite un...
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Plastic Surgery
A better credit card is the solution to ever larger hack attacks
A. A thin magnetic stripe(magstripe)is all that stands between your credit-card information and the bad guys. And they"ve been working hard to break in. That"s why 2014 is shaping up as a major showdown: banks, law enforcement and technology companies are all trying to stop a network of hackers who are succeeding in stealing account numbers, names, email addresses and other crucial data used in identity theft. More than 100 million accounts at Target, Neiman Marcus and Michaels stores were affected in some way during the most recent attacks, starting last November.
B. Swipe(刷卡)is the operative word: cards are increasingly vulnerable to attacks when you make purchases in a store. In several recent incidents, hackers have been able to obtain massive information of credit-, debit-(借记)or prepaid-card numbers using malware, i.e. malicious soft-ware, inserted secretly into the retailers" point-of-sale system—the checkout registers. Hackers then sold the data to a second group of criminals operating in shadowy corners of the web. Not long after, the stolen data was showing up on fake cards and being used for online purchases.
C. The solution could cost as little as $2 extra for every piece of plastic issued. The fix is a security technology used heavily outside the U. S. While American credit cards use the 40-year-old magstripe technology to process transactions, much of the rest of the world uses smarter cards with a technology called EMV(short for Europay, MasterCard, Visa)that employs a chip embedded in the card plus a customer PIN( personal identification number)to authenticate(验证)every transaction on the spot. If a purchaser fails to punch in the correct PIN at the checkout, the transaction gets rejected. (Online purchases can be made by setting up a separate transaction code.)
D. Why haven"t big banks adopted the more secure technology When it comes to mailing out new credit cards, it"s all about relative costs, says David Robertson, who runs the Nilson Report, an industry newsletter. "The cost of the card, putting the sticker on it, coding the account number and expiration date, embossing(凸印)it, the small envelope—all put together, you"re in the dollar range." A chip-and-PIN card currently costs closer to $3, says Robertson, because of the price of chips. (Once large issuers convert together, the chip costs should drop.)
E. Multiply $3 by the more than 5 billion magstripe credit and prepaid cards in circulation in the U. S. Then consider that there"s an estimated $12.4 billion in card fraud on a global basis, says Robertson. With 44% of that in the U. S. American credit-card fraud amounts to about $5.5 billion annually. Card issuers have so far calculated that absorbing the liability for even big hacks like the Target one is still cheaper than replacing all that plastic.
F. That leaves American retailers pretty much alone the world over in relying on magstripe technology to charge purchases—and leaves consumers vulnerable. Each magstripe has three tracks of information, explains payments security expert Jeremy Gumbley, the chief technology officer of CreditCall, an electronic-payments company. The first and third are used by the bank or card issuer. Your vital account information lives on the second track, which hackers try to capture. "Malware is scanning through the memory in real time and looking for data," he says. "It creates a text file that gets stolen."
G. Chip-and-PIN cards, by contrast, make fake cards or skimming impossible because the information that gets scanned is encrypted (加密). The historical reason the U. S. has stuck with magstripe, ironically enough, is once superior technology. Our cheap, ultra-reliable wired net-works made credit-card authentication over the phone frictionless. In France, card companies created EMV in part because the telephone monopoly was so maddeningly inefficient and expensive. The EMV solution allowed transactions to be verified locally and securely.
H. Some big banks, like Wells Fargo, are now offering to convert your magstripe card to a chip-and-PIN model. (It"s actually a hybrid(混合体)that will still have a magstripe, since most U. S. merchants don"t have EMV terminals.) Should you take them up on it If you travel internationally, the answer is yes.
I. Keep in mind, too, that credit cards typically have better liability protection than debit cards. If someone uses your credit card fraudulently(欺炸性地), it"s the issuer or merchant, not you, that takes the hit. Debit cards have different liability limits depending on the bank and the events surrounding any fraud. "If it"s available, the logical thing is to get a chip-and-PIN card from your bank," says Eric Adamowsky, a co-founder of CreditCardInsider. com. "I would use credit cards over debit cards because of liability issues. "Cash still works pretty well too.
J. Retailers and banks stand to benefit from the lower fraud levels of chip-and-PIN cards but have been reluctant for years to invest in the new infrastructure(基础设施)needed for the technology, especially if consumers don"t have access to it. It"s a chicken-and-egg problem: no one wants to spend the money on upgraded point-of-sale systems that can read the chip cards if shoppers aren"t car-tying them—yet there"s little point in consumers" carrying the fancy plastic if stores aren"t equipped to use them. (An earlier effort by Target to move to chip and PIN never gained progress.) According to Gumbley, there"s a "you-first mentality. The logjam(僵局)has to be broken."
K. JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon recently expressed his willingness to do so, noting that banks and merchants have spent the past decade suing each other over interchange fees—the percentage of the transaction price they keep—rather than deal with the growing hacking problem. Chase offers a chip-enabled card under its own brand and several others for travel-related companies such as British Airways and Ritz-Carlton.
L. The Target and Neiman hacks have also changed the cost calculation: although retailers have been reluctant to spend the $6.75 billion that Capgemini consultants estimate it will take to convert all their registers to be chip-and-PIN compatible, the potential liability they now face is dramatically greater. Target has been hit with class actions from hacked consumers. "It"s the ultimate nightmare," a retail executive from a well-known chain admitted to TIME.
M. The card-payment companies MasterCard and Visa are pushing hard for change. The two firms have warned all parties in the transaction chain—merchant, network, bank—that if they don"t become EMV-compliant by October 2015, the party that is least compliant will bear the fraud risk.
N. In the meantime, app-equipped smartphones and digital wallets—all of which can use EMV technology—are beginning to make inroads(侵袭)on cards and cash. PayPal, for instance, is testing an app that lets you use your mobile phone to pay on the fly at local merchants—without surrendering any card information to them. And further down the road is biometric authentication, which could be encrypted with, say, a fingerprint.
O. Credit and debit cards, though, are going to be with us for the foreseeable future, and so are hackers, if we stick with magstripe technology. "It seems crazy to me," says Gumbley, who is English, "that a cutting-edge-technology country is depending on a 40-year-old technology." That"s why it may be up to consumers to move the needle on chip and PIN. Robertson says "When you get the consumer into a position of worry and inconvenience, that"s where the rubber hits the road."Credit cards are much safer to use than debit cards.
答案： I[解析] 题目对信用卡和借记卡的安全性能做了对比，可定位到I段。该段首句就提醒：与借记卡相比，信用卡有更好保护消费者的...
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The Impossibility of Rapid Energy Transtions
A．Politicians are fond of promising rapid energy transitions. Whether it is a transition from imported to domestic oil or from coal-powered electricity production to natural-gas power plants, politicians love to talk big．Unfortunately for them(and often the taxpayers), our energy systems are a bit like an aircraft carrier: they are unbelievably expensive, they are built to last for a very long time, they have a huge amount of inertia(meaning it takes a lot of energy to set them moving), and they have a lot of momentum once they are set in motion. No matter how hard you try, you can"t turn something that large on a dime(10美分硬币), or even a few thousand dimes.
B．In physics, moving objects have two characteristics relevant to understanding the dynamics of energy systems: inertia and momentum. Inertia is the resistance of objects you back. Once you have started the boulder rolling, it develops momentum, which is defined by its mass and velocity. Momentum is said to be "conserved," that is, once you build it up, it has to go somewhere. So a heavy object, like a football player moving at a high speed, has a lot of momentum—that is, once he is moving, it is hard to change his state of motion. If you want to change his course, you have only a few choices: you can stop him, transferring (possibly painfully) some of his kinetic energy (动能)to your own body, or you can approach alongside and slowly apply pressure to gradually alter his course.
C．But there are other kinds of momentum as well. After all, we don"t speak only of objects or people as having momentum; we speak of entire systems having momentum. Whether it"s a sports team or a presidential campaign, everybody relishes having the big momentum, because it makes them harder to stop or change direction.
D．One kind of momentum is technological momentum. When a technology is deployed, its impacts reach far beyond itself. Consider the incandescent (白炽灯) bulb, an object currently hated by many environmentalists and energy-efficiency advocates. The incandescent light bulb, invented by Thomas Edison, which came to be the symbol of inspiration, has been developed into hundreds, if not thousands, of forms. Today, a visit to a lighting store reveals a stunning array of choices. There are standard-shaped bulbs, flame-shaped bulbs, colored globe-shaped bulbs, and more. It is quite easy, with all that choice, to change a light bulb.
E．But the momentum of incandescent lighting does not stop there. All of those specialized bulbs led to the building of specialized light fixtures, from the desk lamp you study by, to the ugly but beloved hand-painted Chinese lamp you inherited from your grandmother, to the ceiling fixture in your closet, to the light in your oven or refrigerator, and to the light that the dentist points at you. It is easy to change a light bulb, sure, but it is harder to change the bulb and its fixture.
F. And there is more to the story, because not only are the devices that house incandescent bulbs shaped to their underlying characteristics, but rooms and entire buildings have been designed in accordance with how incandescent lighting reflects off walls and windows.
G. As lighting expert Howard Brandston points out, "Generally, there are no bad sources, only bad applications. " There are some very commendable characteristics of the CFL (compact fluorescent (荧光的)light bulb), yet the selection of any light source remains inseparable from the luminaire (照明装置) that houses it, along with the space in which both are installed, and lighting requirements that need to be satisfied. The lamp, the fixture, and the room: all three must work in concert for the true benefits of end-users. If the CFL should be used for lighting a particular space, or an object within that space, the fixture must be designed to work with that simply installed in an incandescent fixture and then expected to produce a visual appearance that is more than washed out, foggy, and dim. The whole fixture must be replaced—light source and luminaire—and this is never an inexpensive proposition.
H. And Brandston knows a thing or two about lighting, being the man who illuminated the Statue of Liberty.
I. Another type of momentum we have to think about when planning for changes in our energy systems is labor-pool momentum. It is one thing to say that we are going to shift 30 percent of our electricity supply from, say, coal to nuclear power in 20 years. But it is another thing to have a sup-ply of trained talent that could let you carry out this promise. That is because the engineers, designers, regulators, operators, and all of the other skilled people needed for the new energy industry are specialists who have to be trained first (or retrained, if they are the ones being laid off in some related industry), and education, like any other complicated endeavor, takes time. And not only do our prospective new energy workers have to be trained, they have to be trained in the right sequence. One needs the designers, and perhaps the regulators, before the builders and operators, and each group of workers in training has to know there is work waiting beyond graduation. In some cases, colleges and universities might have to change their training programs, adding another layer of difficulty.
J. By far the biggest type of momentum that comes into play when it comes to changing our energy system is economic momentum. The major components of our energy systems, such as fuel production, refining, electrical generation and distribution, are costly installations that have lengthy lifespan. They have to operate for long periods of time before the costs of development have been recovered. When investors put up theirmoney to build, say, a nuclear power plant, they expect to earn that money back over the planned life of the plant, which is typically between 40 and 60 years. Some coal power plants in the United States have operated for more than 70 years ! The oldest continuously operated commercial hydro-electric plant in the United States is on New York"s Hudson River, and it went into commercial service in 1898.
K. As Vaclav Smil points out, "All the forecast, plans, and anticipations cited above have failed so miserably because their authors and promoters thought the transitions they hoped to implement would proceed unlike all previous energy transitions，and that their progress could be accelerated in an unprecedented manner."
L．When you hear people speaking of making a rapid transition toward any type of energy, whether it is a switch from coal to nuclear power, or a switch from gasonline-powered cars to electric cars, or even a switch from an incandescent to a fluorescent light, understanding energy system inertia and momentum can help you decide whether their plans are feasible.The biggest obstacle to energy transition is that the present energy system is too expensive to replace.
答案： J[解析] 关键词定位，costly对应too expensive。
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Climate Change May Be Real, but It"s Still Not Easy Being Green
How do we convince our inner caveman to be greener We ask some outstanding social scientists.
A．The road to climate hell is paved with our good intentions. Politicians may tackle polluters while scientists do battle with carbon emissions. But the most pervasive problem is less obvious: our own behaviour. We get distracted before we can turn down the heating. We break our promise not to fly after hearing about a neighbor"s rip to India. Ultimately, we can"t be bothered to change our attitude. Fortunately for the planet, social science and behavioral economics may be able to do that for us.
B. Despite mournful polar bears and carts showing carbon emissions soaring, most people find it hard to believe that global warming will affect them personally. Recent polls by the Pew Research Centre in Washington, DC, found that 75-80 per cent of participants regarded climate change as an important issue. But respondents ranked it last on a list of priorities.
C. This inconsistency largely steins from a feeling of powerlessness. "When we can"t actually remove the source of our fear, we tend to adapt psychologically by adopting a range of defense mechanisms," says Tom Crompton, change strategist for the environmental organization World Wide Fund for Nature.
D. Part of the fault lies with our inner caveman. Evolution has programmed humans to pay most attention to issues that will have an immediate impact. "We worry most about now because if we don"t survive for the next minute, we"re not going to be around in ten years" time," says Professor Elke Weber of the Centre for Research on Environmental Decisions at Columbia University in New York. If the Thames were lapping around Big Ben, Londoners would face up to the problem of emissions pretty quickly. But in practice, our brain discounts the risks—and benefits—associated with issues that lie some way ahead.
E. Matthew Rush worth, of the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford, sees this in his lab every day. "One of the ways in which all agents seem to make decisions is that they assign a lower weighting to outcomes that are going to be further away in the future," he says. "This is a very sensible way for an animal to make decisions in the wild and would have been very helpful for humans for thousands of years."
F. Not any longer. By the time we wake up to the threat posed by climate change, it could well be too late. And if we"re not going to make national decisions about the future, others may have to help us to do so.
G. Few political libraries are without a copy of Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness, by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein. They argue that governments should persuade us into making better decisions—such as saving more in our pension plans—by changing the default options. Professor Weber believes that environmental policy can make use of similar tactics. If, for example, building codes included green construction guidelines, most developers would be too lazy to challenge them.
H. Defaults are certainly part of the solution. But social scientists are most concerned about crafting messages that exploit our group mentality(心态). "We need to understand what motivates people, what it is that allows them to make change," says Professor Neil Adger, of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research in Norwich. "It is actually about what their peers think of them, what their social norms are, what is seen as desirable in society." In other words, our inner cave-man is continually looking over his shoulder to see what the rest of the tribe are up to.
I. The passive attitude we have to climate change as individuals can be altered by counting us in—and measuring us against—our peer group. "Social norms are primitive and elemental," says Dr. Robert Cialdini, author of Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. "Birds flock together, fish school together, cattle herd together...just perceiving norms is enough to cause people to adjust their behavior in the direction of the crowd."
J. These norms can take us beyond good intentions. Cialdini conducted a study in San Diego in which coat hangers bearing messages about saving energy were hung on people"s doors. Some of the messages mentioned the environment, some financial savings, others social responsibility. But it was the one that mentioned the actions of neighbours that drove down power use.
K. Other studies show that simply providing the facility for people to compare their energy use with the local average is enough to cause them to modify their behaviour. The Conservatives plan to adopt this strategy by making utility companies print the average local electricity and gas usage on people"s bills.
L. Social science can also teach politicians how to avoid our collective capacity for self-destructive behaviour. Environmental campaigns that tell us how many people drive SUVs unwittingly (不经意地) imply that this behaviour is widespread and thus permissible. Cialdini recommends some careful framing of the message. "Instead of normalising the undesirable behaviour, the message needs to marginalise it, for example, by stating that if even one person buys yet another SUV, it reduces our ability to be energy-independent."
M. Tapping into how we already see ourselves is crucial. The most successful environmental strategy will marry the green message to our own sense of identity. Take your average trade union member, chances are they will be politically motivated and be used to collective action—much like Erica Gregory. A retired member of the Public and Commercial Services Union, she is setting up one of 1,100 action groups with the support of Climate Solidarity, a two-year environmental campaign aimed at trade unionists.
N. Erica is proof that a great-grandmother can help to lead the revolution if you get the psychology right—in this case, by matching her enthusiasm for the environment with a fondness for organising groups. "I think there must be something in it." She is expecting up to 20 people at the first meeting she has called, at her local pub in the Cornish village of Polperro.
O. Nick Perks, project director for Climate Solidarity, believes this sort of activity is where the future of environmental action lies. "Using existing civil society structures or networks is a more effective way of creating change...and obviously trade unions are one of the biggest civil society net-works in the UK," he says. The "Love Food, Haste Waste" campaign entered into a collaboration last year with another such network—the Women"s Institute. Londoner Rachel Talor joined the campaign with the aim of making new friends. A year on, the meetings have made lasting changes to what she throws away in her kitchen. "It"s always more of an incentive if you"re doing it with other people," she says. "It motivates you more if you know that you"ve got to provide feedback to a group."
P. The power of such simple psychology in fighting climate change is attracting attention across the political establishment. In the US, the House of Representatives Science Committee has approved a bill allocating $10 million a year to studying energy-related behaviour. In the UK, new studies are in development and social scientists are regularly spotted in British government offices. With the help of psychologists, there is fresh hope that we might go green after all.One study shows that our neighbors, actions are influential unchanging our behavior.
答案： J[解析] 由J段最后一句But it was the one that mentioned the actions o...
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First-Generation College-Goers: Unprepared and Behind
Kids who are the first in their families to brave the world of higher education come on campus with little academic know-how and are much more likely than their peers to drop out before graduation.
A. When Nijay Williams entered college last fall as a first-generation student and Jamaican immigrants, he was academically unprepared for the rigors of higher education. Like many first-generation student, he enrolled in a medium-sized state university many of his high school peers were also attending, received a Pell Grant, and board and the closeness of the school to his family, he chose to live at home and worked between 30 and 40 hours a week while taking a full class schedule.
B. What Nijay didn"t realize about his school—Tennessee State University—was its frighteningly low graduation rate: a mere 29 percent for its first-generation students. At the end of his first year, Nijay lost his Pell Grant of over $5,000 after narrowly missing the 2.0 GPA cut-off, making it impossible for him to continue paying for school.
C. Nijay represents a large and growing group of Americans: first-generation college students who enter school unprepared or behind. To make matters worse, these schools are ill-equipped to graduate these students—young adults who face specific challenges and obstacles. They typically carry financial burdens that outweigh those of their peers, are more likely to work while attending school, and often require significant academic remediation(补习).
D. Matt Rubinoff directs I"m First, a nonprofit organization launched last October to reach out to this specific population of students. He hopes to distribute this information and help prospective college-goers find the best post-secondary fit. And while Rubinoff believes there are a good number of four-year schools that truly care about these students and set aside significant resources and pro-grams for them, he says that number isn"t high enough.
E. "It"s not only the selective and elite institutions that provide those opportunities for a small subset of this population," Rubinoff said, adding that a majority of first-generation undergraduates tend toward options such as online programs, two-year colleges, and commuter state schools. "Un-fortunately, there tends to be a lack of information and support to help students think bigger and broader."
F. Despite this problem, many students are still drawn to these institutions—and two-year schools in particular. As a former high school teacher, I saw students choose familiar, cheaper options year after year. Instead of skipping out on higher education altogether, they chose community colleges or state schools with low bars for admittance.
G. "They underestimate themselves when selecting a university," said Dave Jarrat, a marketing executive for Inside Track, a for-profit organization that specializes in coaching low-income students and supporting colleges in order to help students thrive. "The reality of it is that a lot of low-income kids could be going to elite universities on a full ride scholarship and don"t even realize it."
H. "Many students are coming from a situation where no one around them has the experience of successfully completing higher education, so they are coming in questioning themselves and their college worthiness," Jarrat continued. That helps explain why, as I"m First"s Rubinoff indicated, the schools to which these students end up resorting can end up being some of the poorest matches for them. The University of Tennessee and Tennessee State are worth comparing. Tennessee State"s overall graduation rate is a tiny 39 percent, but at least it has a smaller gap between the outcomes for first-generation students and those of their peers.
I. Still, the University of Tennessee deserves credit for being transparent. Many large institutions keep this kind of data secret—or at least make it incredibly difficult to find. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, for instance, admits only that the graduation rate for its first-generation pupils is "much lower" than the percentage of all students who graduate within four years (81 percent).
J. It is actually quite difficult to find reliable statistics on the issue for many schools. Higher education institutions are, under federal law, required to report graduation rates, but these reports typically only include Pell recipient numbers—not necessarily rates specific to first-generation students. Other initiatives fail to break down the data, too. Imagine how intimidating it can be for prospective students unfamiliar with the complexities of higher education to navigate this kind of information and then identify which schools are the best fit.
K. It was this lack of information that prompted the launch of I"m First in 2013, originally as an arm of its umbrella organization, the Center For Student Opportunity. "If we can help to direct students to more of these types of campuses and help students to understand them to be realistic and accessible places, have them apply to these schools at greater frequency and ultimately get in and enroll, we are going to raise the success rate," Rubinoff said, citing a variety of colleges ranging from large state institutions to smaller private schools.
L. Chelsea Jones, who now directs student programming at I"m First, was a first-generation college student at Howard. Like other students new to the intimidating higher-education world, she often struggled on her path to college. "There wasn"t really a college-bound culture at my high school," she said. "I want to go to college but I didn"t really know the process." Jones became involved with a college-access program through Princeton University in high school. Now she attributes much of her understanding of college to that: "But once I got to campus, it was a completely different ball game that no one really prepared me for."
M. She was fortunate, though. Howard, a well-regarded historically black college, had an array of resources for its first-generation students, including matching kids with counselors, connecting first-generation students to one another, and TRIO, a national program that supported 200 students on Howard"s campus. Still, Jones represents a small percentage of first-generation students who are able to gain entry into more elite universities, which are often known for robust financial aid packages and remarkably high graduation rates for first-generation students. (Harvard, for example, boasts a six-year graduation rate for underrepresented minority groups of 98 percent.)
N. Christian Vazquez, a first-generation Yale graduate, is another exception, his success story setting him far apart from students such as Nijay. "There is a lot of support at Yale, to an extent, after a while, there is too much support." he said, half-joking about the countless resources available at the school. Students are placed in small groups with counselors (trained seniors on campus); they have access to cultural and ethnic affinity(联系)groups, tutoring centers and also have a summer orientation specifically for first-generation students (the latter being one of the most common programs for students).
O. "Our support structure was more like: "You are going to get through Yale; you are going to do well."" he said, hinting at mentors(导师), staff, and professors who all provided significant support for students who lacked confidence about "belonging" at such a top institution.Some elite universities attach great importance to building up the first-generation students" serf-confidence.
答案： O[解析] 根据关键词great importance和self-confidence，可以定位至O段最后一句：hint...
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Plastic Surgery
A better credit card is the solution to ever larger hack attacks
A. A thin magnetic stripe(magstripe)is all that stands between your credit-card information and the bad guys. And they"ve been working hard to break in. That"s why 2014 is shaping up as a major showdown: banks, law enforcement and technology companies are all trying to stop a network of hackers who are succeeding in stealing account numbers, names, email addresses and other crucial data used in identity theft. More than 100 million accounts at Target, Neiman Marcus and Michaels stores were affected in some way during the most recent attacks, starting last November.
B. Swipe(刷卡)is the operative word: cards are increasingly vulnerable to attacks when you make purchases in a store. In several recent incidents, hackers have been able to obtain massive information of credit-, debit-(借记)or prepaid-card numbers using malware, i.e. malicious soft-ware, inserted secretly into the retailers" point-of-sale system—the checkout registers. Hackers then sold the data to a second group of criminals operating in shadowy corners of the web. Not long after, the stolen data was showing up on fake cards and being used for online purchases.
C. The solution could cost as little as $2 extra for every piece of plastic issued. The fix is a security technology used heavily outside the U. S. While American credit cards use the 40-year-old magstripe technology to process transactions, much of the rest of the world uses smarter cards with a technology called EMV(short for Europay, MasterCard, Visa)that employs a chip embedded in the card plus a customer PIN( personal identification number)to authenticate(验证)every transaction on the spot. If a purchaser fails to punch in the correct PIN at the checkout, the transaction gets rejected. (Online purchases can be made by setting up a separate transaction code.)
D. Why haven"t big banks adopted the more secure technology When it comes to mailing out new credit cards, it"s all about relative costs, says David Robertson, who runs the Nilson Report, an industry newsletter. "The cost of the card, putting the sticker on it, coding the account number and expiration date, embossing(凸印)it, the small envelope—all put together, you"re in the dollar range." A chip-and-PIN card currently costs closer to $3, says Robertson, because of the price of chips. (Once large issuers convert together, the chip costs should drop.)
E. Multiply $3 by the more than 5 billion magstripe credit and prepaid cards in circulation in the U. S. Then consider that there"s an estimated $12.4 billion in card fraud on a global basis, says Robertson. With 44% of that in the U. S. American credit-card fraud amounts to about $5.5 billion annually. Card issuers have so far calculated that absorbing the liability for even big hacks like the Target one is still cheaper than replacing all that plastic.
F. That leaves American retailers pretty much alone the world over in relying on magstripe technology to charge purchases—and leaves consumers vulnerable. Each magstripe has three tracks of information, explains payments security expert Jeremy Gumbley, the chief technology officer of CreditCall, an electronic-payments company. The first and third are used by the bank or card issuer. Your vital account information lives on the second track, which hackers try to capture. "Malware is scanning through the memory in real time and looking for data," he says. "It creates a text file that gets stolen."
G. Chip-and-PIN cards, by contrast, make fake cards or skimming impossible because the information that gets scanned is encrypted (加密). The historical reason the U. S. has stuck with magstripe, ironically enough, is once superior technology. Our cheap, ultra-reliable wired net-works made credit-card authentication over the phone frictionless. In France, card companies created EMV in part because the telephone monopoly was so maddeningly inefficient and expensive. The EMV solution allowed transactions to be verified locally and securely.
H. Some big banks, like Wells Fargo, are now offering to convert your magstripe card to a chip-and-PIN model. (It"s actually a hybrid(混合体)that will still have a magstripe, since most U. S. merchants don"t have EMV terminals.) Should you take them up on it If you travel internationally, the answer is yes.
I. Keep in mind, too, that credit cards typically have better liability protection than debit cards. If someone uses your credit card fraudulently(欺炸性地), it"s the issuer or merchant, not you, that takes the hit. Debit cards have different liability limits depending on the bank and the events surrounding any fraud. "If it"s available, the logical thing is to get a chip-and-PIN card from your bank," says Eric Adamowsky, a co-founder of CreditCardInsider. com. "I would use credit cards over debit cards because of liability issues. "Cash still works pretty well too.
J. Retailers and banks stand to benefit from the lower fraud levels of chip-and-PIN cards but have been reluctant for years to invest in the new infrastructure(基础设施)needed for the technology, especially if consumers don"t have access to it. It"s a chicken-and-egg problem: no one wants to spend the money on upgraded point-of-sale systems that can read the chip cards if shoppers aren"t car-tying them—yet there"s little point in consumers" carrying the fancy plastic if stores aren"t equipped to use them. (An earlier effort by Target to move to chip and PIN never gained progress.) According to Gumbley, there"s a "you-first mentality. The logjam(僵局)has to be broken."
K. JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon recently expressed his willingness to do so, noting that banks and merchants have spent the past decade suing each other over interchange fees—the percentage of the transaction price they keep—rather than deal with the growing hacking problem. Chase offers a chip-enabled card under its own brand and several others for travel-related companies such as British Airways and Ritz-Carlton.
L. The Target and Neiman hacks have also changed the cost calculation: although retailers have been reluctant to spend the $6.75 billion that Capgemini consultants estimate it will take to convert all their registers to be chip-and-PIN compatible, the potential liability they now face is dramatically greater. Target has been hit with class actions from hacked consumers. "It"s the ultimate nightmare," a retail executive from a well-known chain admitted to TIME.
M. The card-payment companies MasterCard and Visa are pushing hard for change. The two firms have warned all parties in the transaction chain—merchant, network, bank—that if they don"t become EMV-compliant by October 2015, the party that is least compliant will bear the fraud risk.
N. In the meantime, app-equipped smartphones and digital wallets—all of which can use EMV technology—are beginning to make inroads(侵袭)on cards and cash. PayPal, for instance, is testing an app that lets you use your mobile phone to pay on the fly at local merchants—without surrendering any card information to them. And further down the road is biometric authentication, which could be encrypted with, say, a fingerprint.
O. Credit and debit cards, though, are going to be with us for the foreseeable future, and so are hackers, if we stick with magstripe technology. "It seems crazy to me," says Gumbley, who is English, "that a cutting-edge-technology country is depending on a 40-year-old technology." That"s why it may be up to consumers to move the needle on chip and PIN. Robertson says "When you get the consumer into a position of worry and inconvenience, that"s where the rubber hits the road."Big banks have been reluctant to switch to more secure technology because of the higher costs involved.
答案： D[解析] 根据Big banks, more secure technology和costs可查找到D段。该段的主要内...
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Climate Change May Be Real, but It"s Still Not Easy Being Green
How do we convince our inner caveman to be greener We ask some outstanding social scientists.
A．The road to climate hell is paved with our good intentions. Politicians may tackle polluters while scientists do battle with carbon emissions. But the most pervasive problem is less obvious: our own behaviour. We get distracted before we can turn down the heating. We break our promise not to fly after hearing about a neighbor"s rip to India. Ultimately, we can"t be bothered to change our attitude. Fortunately for the planet, social science and behavioral economics may be able to do that for us.
B. Despite mournful polar bears and carts showing carbon emissions soaring, most people find it hard to believe that global warming will affect them personally. Recent polls by the Pew Research Centre in Washington, DC, found that 75-80 per cent of participants regarded climate change as an important issue. But respondents ranked it last on a list of priorities.
C. This inconsistency largely steins from a feeling of powerlessness. "When we can"t actually remove the source of our fear, we tend to adapt psychologically by adopting a range of defense mechanisms," says Tom Crompton, change strategist for the environmental organization World Wide Fund for Nature.
D. Part of the fault lies with our inner caveman. Evolution has programmed humans to pay most attention to issues that will have an immediate impact. "We worry most about now because if we don"t survive for the next minute, we"re not going to be around in ten years" time," says Professor Elke Weber of the Centre for Research on Environmental Decisions at Columbia University in New York. If the Thames were lapping around Big Ben, Londoners would face up to the problem of emissions pretty quickly. But in practice, our brain discounts the risks—and benefits—associated with issues that lie some way ahead.
E. Matthew Rush worth, of the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford, sees this in his lab every day. "One of the ways in which all agents seem to make decisions is that they assign a lower weighting to outcomes that are going to be further away in the future," he says. "This is a very sensible way for an animal to make decisions in the wild and would have been very helpful for humans for thousands of years."
F. Not any longer. By the time we wake up to the threat posed by climate change, it could well be too late. And if we"re not going to make national decisions about the future, others may have to help us to do so.
G. Few political libraries are without a copy of Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness, by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein. They argue that governments should persuade us into making better decisions—such as saving more in our pension plans—by changing the default options. Professor Weber believes that environmental policy can make use of similar tactics. If, for example, building codes included green construction guidelines, most developers would be too lazy to challenge them.
H. Defaults are certainly part of the solution. But social scientists are most concerned about crafting messages that exploit our group mentality(心态). "We need to understand what motivates people, what it is that allows them to make change," says Professor Neil Adger, of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research in Norwich. "It is actually about what their peers think of them, what their social norms are, what is seen as desirable in society." In other words, our inner cave-man is continually looking over his shoulder to see what the rest of the tribe are up to.
I. The passive attitude we have to climate change as individuals can be altered by counting us in—and measuring us against—our peer group. "Social norms are primitive and elemental," says Dr. Robert Cialdini, author of Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. "Birds flock together, fish school together, cattle herd together...just perceiving norms is enough to cause people to adjust their behavior in the direction of the crowd."
J. These norms can take us beyond good intentions. Cialdini conducted a study in San Diego in which coat hangers bearing messages about saving energy were hung on people"s doors. Some of the messages mentioned the environment, some financial savings, others social responsibility. But it was the one that mentioned the actions of neighbours that drove down power use.
K. Other studies show that simply providing the facility for people to compare their energy use with the local average is enough to cause them to modify their behaviour. The Conservatives plan to adopt this strategy by making utility companies print the average local electricity and gas usage on people"s bills.
L. Social science can also teach politicians how to avoid our collective capacity for self-destructive behaviour. Environmental campaigns that tell us how many people drive SUVs unwittingly (不经意地) imply that this behaviour is widespread and thus permissible. Cialdini recommends some careful framing of the message. "Instead of normalising the undesirable behaviour, the message needs to marginalise it, for example, by stating that if even one person buys yet another SUV, it reduces our ability to be energy-independent."
M. Tapping into how we already see ourselves is crucial. The most successful environmental strategy will marry the green message to our own sense of identity. Take your average trade union member, chances are they will be politically motivated and be used to collective action—much like Erica Gregory. A retired member of the Public and Commercial Services Union, she is setting up one of 1,100 action groups with the support of Climate Solidarity, a two-year environmental campaign aimed at trade unionists.
N. Erica is proof that a great-grandmother can help to lead the revolution if you get the psychology right—in this case, by matching her enthusiasm for the environment with a fondness for organising groups. "I think there must be something in it." She is expecting up to 20 people at the first meeting she has called, at her local pub in the Cornish village of Polperro.
O. Nick Perks, project director for Climate Solidarity, believes this sort of activity is where the future of environmental action lies. "Using existing civil society structures or networks is a more effective way of creating change...and obviously trade unions are one of the biggest civil society net-works in the UK," he says. The "Love Food, Haste Waste" campaign entered into a collaboration last year with another such network—the Women"s Institute. Londoner Rachel Talor joined the campaign with the aim of making new friends. A year on, the meetings have made lasting changes to what she throws away in her kitchen. "It"s always more of an incentive if you"re doing it with other people," she says. "It motivates you more if you know that you"ve got to provide feedback to a group."
P. The power of such simple psychology in fighting climate change is attracting attention across the political establishment. In the US, the House of Representatives Science Committee has approved a bill allocating $10 million a year to studying energy-related behaviour. In the UK, new studies are in development and social scientists are regularly spotted in British government offices. With the help of psychologists, there is fresh hope that we might go green after all.Despite clear signs of global warming, it is not easy for most people to believe climate change will affect their own lives.
答案： B[解析] 由B段第一句话...most people find it hard to believe that glo...
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The Impossibility of Rapid Energy Transtions
A．Politicians are fond of promising rapid energy transitions. Whether it is a transition from imported to domestic oil or from coal-powered electricity production to natural-gas power plants, politicians love to talk big．Unfortunately for them(and often the taxpayers), our energy systems are a bit like an aircraft carrier: they are unbelievably expensive, they are built to last for a very long time, they have a huge amount of inertia(meaning it takes a lot of energy to set them moving), and they have a lot of momentum once they are set in motion. No matter how hard you try, you can"t turn something that large on a dime(10美分硬币), or even a few thousand dimes.
B．In physics, moving objects have two characteristics relevant to understanding the dynamics of energy systems: inertia and momentum. Inertia is the resistance of objects you back. Once you have started the boulder rolling, it develops momentum, which is defined by its mass and velocity. Momentum is said to be "conserved," that is, once you build it up, it has to go somewhere. So a heavy object, like a football player moving at a high speed, has a lot of momentum—that is, once he is moving, it is hard to change his state of motion. If you want to change his course, you have only a few choices: you can stop him, transferring (possibly painfully) some of his kinetic energy (动能)to your own body, or you can approach alongside and slowly apply pressure to gradually alter his course.
C．But there are other kinds of momentum as well. After all, we don"t speak only of objects or people as having momentum; we speak of entire systems having momentum. Whether it"s a sports team or a presidential campaign, everybody relishes having the big momentum, because it makes them harder to stop or change direction.
D．One kind of momentum is technological momentum. When a technology is deployed, its impacts reach far beyond itself. Consider the incandescent (白炽灯) bulb, an object currently hated by many environmentalists and energy-efficiency advocates. The incandescent light bulb, invented by Thomas Edison, which came to be the symbol of inspiration, has been developed into hundreds, if not thousands, of forms. Today, a visit to a lighting store reveals a stunning array of choices. There are standard-shaped bulbs, flame-shaped bulbs, colored globe-shaped bulbs, and more. It is quite easy, with all that choice, to change a light bulb.
E．But the momentum of incandescent lighting does not stop there. All of those specialized bulbs led to the building of specialized light fixtures, from the desk lamp you study by, to the ugly but beloved hand-painted Chinese lamp you inherited from your grandmother, to the ceiling fixture in your closet, to the light in your oven or refrigerator, and to the light that the dentist points at you. It is easy to change a light bulb, sure, but it is harder to change the bulb and its fixture.
F. And there is more to the story, because not only are the devices that house incandescent bulbs shaped to their underlying characteristics, but rooms and entire buildings have been designed in accordance with how incandescent lighting reflects off walls and windows.
G. As lighting expert Howard Brandston points out, "Generally, there are no bad sources, only bad applications. " There are some very commendable characteristics of the CFL (compact fluorescent (荧光的)light bulb), yet the selection of any light source remains inseparable from the luminaire (照明装置) that houses it, along with the space in which both are installed, and lighting requirements that need to be satisfied. The lamp, the fixture, and the room: all three must work in concert for the true benefits of end-users. If the CFL should be used for lighting a particular space, or an object within that space, the fixture must be designed to work with that simply installed in an incandescent fixture and then expected to produce a visual appearance that is more than washed out, foggy, and dim. The whole fixture must be replaced—light source and luminaire—and this is never an inexpensive proposition.
H. And Brandston knows a thing or two about lighting, being the man who illuminated the Statue of Liberty.
I. Another type of momentum we have to think about when planning for changes in our energy systems is labor-pool momentum. It is one thing to say that we are going to shift 30 percent of our electricity supply from, say, coal to nuclear power in 20 years. But it is another thing to have a sup-ply of trained talent that could let you carry out this promise. That is because the engineers, designers, regulators, operators, and all of the other skilled people needed for the new energy industry are specialists who have to be trained first (or retrained, if they are the ones being laid off in some related industry), and education, like any other complicated endeavor, takes time. And not only do our prospective new energy workers have to be trained, they have to be trained in the right sequence. One needs the designers, and perhaps the regulators, before the builders and operators, and each group of workers in training has to know there is work waiting beyond graduation. In some cases, colleges and universities might have to change their training programs, adding another layer of difficulty.
J. By far the biggest type of momentum that comes into play when it comes to changing our energy system is economic momentum. The major components of our energy systems, such as fuel production, refining, electrical generation and distribution, are costly installations that have lengthy lifespan. They have to operate for long periods of time before the costs of development have been recovered. When investors put up theirmoney to build, say, a nuclear power plant, they expect to earn that money back over the planned life of the plant, which is typically between 40 and 60 years. Some coal power plants in the United States have operated for more than 70 years ! The oldest continuously operated commercial hydro-electric plant in the United States is on New York"s Hudson River, and it went into commercial service in 1898.
K. As Vaclav Smil points out, "All the forecast, plans, and anticipations cited above have failed so miserably because their authors and promoters thought the transitions they hoped to implement would proceed unlike all previous energy transitions，and that their progress could be accelerated in an unprecedented manner."
L．When you hear people speaking of making a rapid transition toward any type of energy, whether it is a switch from coal to nuclear power, or a switch from gasonline-powered cars to electric cars, or even a switch from an incandescent to a fluorescent light, understanding energy system inertia and momentum can help you decide whether their plans are feasible.The application of a technology can impact areas beyond itself.
答案： D[解析] 同义复述，对应原文When a technology is deployed, its impacts re...
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First-Generation College-Goers: Unprepared and Behind
Kids who are the first in their families to brave the world of higher education come on campus with little academic know-how and are much more likely than their peers to drop out before graduation.
A. When Nijay Williams entered college last fall as a first-generation student and Jamaican immigrants, he was academically unprepared for the rigors of higher education. Like many first-generation student, he enrolled in a medium-sized state university many of his high school peers were also attending, received a Pell Grant, and board and the closeness of the school to his family, he chose to live at home and worked between 30 and 40 hours a week while taking a full class schedule.
B. What Nijay didn"t realize about his school—Tennessee State University—was its frighteningly low graduation rate: a mere 29 percent for its first-generation students. At the end of his first year, Nijay lost his Pell Grant of over $5,000 after narrowly missing the 2.0 GPA cut-off, making it impossible for him to continue paying for school.
C. Nijay represents a large and growing group of Americans: first-generation college students who enter school unprepared or behind. To make matters worse, these schools are ill-equipped to graduate these students—young adults who face specific challenges and obstacles. They typically carry financial burdens that outweigh those of their peers, are more likely to work while attending school, and often require significant academic remediation(补习).
D. Matt Rubinoff directs I"m First, a nonprofit organization launched last October to reach out to this specific population of students. He hopes to distribute this information and help prospective college-goers find the best post-secondary fit. And while Rubinoff believes there are a good number of four-year schools that truly care about these students and set aside significant resources and pro-grams for them, he says that number isn"t high enough.
E. "It"s not only the selective and elite institutions that provide those opportunities for a small subset of this population," Rubinoff said, adding that a majority of first-generation undergraduates tend toward options such as online programs, two-year colleges, and commuter state schools. "Un-fortunately, there tends to be a lack of information and support to help students think bigger and broader."
F. Despite this problem, many students are still drawn to these institutions—and two-year schools in particular. As a former high school teacher, I saw students choose familiar, cheaper options year after year. Instead of skipping out on higher education altogether, they chose community colleges or state schools with low bars for admittance.
G. "They underestimate themselves when selecting a university," said Dave Jarrat, a marketing executive for Inside Track, a for-profit organization that specializes in coaching low-income students and supporting colleges in order to help students thrive. "The reality of it is that a lot of low-income kids could be going to elite universities on a full ride scholarship and don"t even realize it."
H. "Many students are coming from a situation where no one around them has the experience of successfully completing higher education, so they are coming in questioning themselves and their college worthiness," Jarrat continued. That helps explain why, as I"m First"s Rubinoff indicated, the schools to which these students end up resorting can end up being some of the poorest matches for them. The University of Tennessee and Tennessee State are worth comparing. Tennessee State"s overall graduation rate is a tiny 39 percent, but at least it has a smaller gap between the outcomes for first-generation students and those of their peers.
I. Still, the University of Tennessee deserves credit for being transparent. Many large institutions keep this kind of data secret—or at least make it incredibly difficult to find. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, for instance, admits only that the graduation rate for its first-generation pupils is "much lower" than the percentage of all students who graduate within four years (81 percent).
J. It is actually quite difficult to find reliable statistics on the issue for many schools. Higher education institutions are, under federal law, required to report graduation rates, but these reports typically only include Pell recipient numbers—not necessarily rates specific to first-generation students. Other initiatives fail to break down the data, too. Imagine how intimidating it can be for prospective students unfamiliar with the complexities of higher education to navigate this kind of information and then identify which schools are the best fit.
K. It was this lack of information that prompted the launch of I"m First in 2013, originally as an arm of its umbrella organization, the Center For Student Opportunity. "If we can help to direct students to more of these types of campuses and help students to understand them to be realistic and accessible places, have them apply to these schools at greater frequency and ultimately get in and enroll, we are going to raise the success rate," Rubinoff said, citing a variety of colleges ranging from large state institutions to smaller private schools.
L. Chelsea Jones, who now directs student programming at I"m First, was a first-generation college student at Howard. Like other students new to the intimidating higher-education world, she often struggled on her path to college. "There wasn"t really a college-bound culture at my high school," she said. "I want to go to college but I didn"t really know the process." Jones became involved with a college-access program through Princeton University in high school. Now she attributes much of her understanding of college to that: "But once I got to campus, it was a completely different ball game that no one really prepared me for."
M. She was fortunate, though. Howard, a well-regarded historically black college, had an array of resources for its first-generation students, including matching kids with counselors, connecting first-generation students to one another, and TRIO, a national program that supported 200 students on Howard"s campus. Still, Jones represents a small percentage of first-generation students who are able to gain entry into more elite universities, which are often known for robust financial aid packages and remarkably high graduation rates for first-generation students. (Harvard, for example, boasts a six-year graduation rate for underrepresented minority groups of 98 percent.)
N. Christian Vazquez, a first-generation Yale graduate, is another exception, his success story setting him far apart from students such as Nijay. "There is a lot of support at Yale, to an extent, after a while, there is too much support." he said, half-joking about the countless resources available at the school. Students are placed in small groups with counselors (trained seniors on campus); they have access to cultural and ethnic affinity(联系)groups, tutoring centers and also have a summer orientation specifically for first-generation students (the latter being one of the most common programs for students).
O. "Our support structure was more like: "You are going to get through Yale; you are going to do well."" he said, hinting at mentors(导师), staff, and professors who all provided significant support for students who lacked confidence about "belonging" at such a top institution.I"m First distributes information to help first-generation college-goers find schools that are most suitable for them.
答案： D[解析] 根据关键词I"m First和most suitable，可以定位至D段第一句或补定位句，随后He hope...
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Plastic Surgery
A better credit card is the solution to ever larger hack attacks
A. A thin magnetic stripe(magstripe)is all that stands between your credit-card information and the bad guys. And they"ve been working hard to break in. That"s why 2014 is shaping up as a major showdown: banks, law enforcement and technology companies are all trying to stop a network of hackers who are succeeding in stealing account numbers, names, email addresses and other crucial data used in identity theft. More than 100 million accounts at Target, Neiman Marcus and Michaels stores were affected in some way during the most recent attacks, starting last November.
B. Swipe(刷卡)is the operative word: cards are increasingly vulnerable to attacks when you make purchases in a store. In several recent incidents, hackers have been able to obtain massive information of credit-, debit-(借记)or prepaid-card numbers using malware, i.e. malicious soft-ware, inserted secretly into the retailers" point-of-sale system—the checkout registers. Hackers then sold the data to a second group of criminals operating in shadowy corners of the web. Not long after, the stolen data was showing up on fake cards and being used for online purchases.
C. The solution could cost as little as $2 extra for every piece of plastic issued. The fix is a security technology used heavily outside the U. S. While American credit cards use the 40-year-old magstripe technology to process transactions, much of the rest of the world uses smarter cards with a technology called EMV(short for Europay, MasterCard, Visa)that employs a chip embedded in the card plus a customer PIN( personal identification number)to authenticate(验证)every transaction on the spot. If a purchaser fails to punch in the correct PIN at the checkout, the transaction gets rejected. (Online purchases can be made by setting up a separate transaction code.)
D. Why haven"t big banks adopted the more secure technology When it comes to mailing out new credit cards, it"s all about relative costs, says David Robertson, who runs the Nilson Report, an industry newsletter. "The cost of the card, putting the sticker on it, coding the account number and expiration date, embossing(凸印)it, the small envelope—all put together, you"re in the dollar range." A chip-and-PIN card currently costs closer to $3, says Robertson, because of the price of chips. (Once large issuers convert together, the chip costs should drop.)
E. Multiply $3 by the more than 5 billion magstripe credit and prepaid cards in circulation in the U. S. Then consider that there"s an estimated $12.4 billion in card fraud on a global basis, says Robertson. With 44% of that in the U. S. American credit-card fraud amounts to about $5.5 billion annually. Card issuers have so far calculated that absorbing the liability for even big hacks like the Target one is still cheaper than replacing all that plastic.
F. That leaves American retailers pretty much alone the world over in relying on magstripe technology to charge purchases—and leaves consumers vulnerable. Each magstripe has three tracks of information, explains payments security expert Jeremy Gumbley, the chief technology officer of CreditCall, an electronic-payments company. The first and third are used by the bank or card issuer. Your vital account information lives on the second track, which hackers try to capture. "Malware is scanning through the memory in real time and looking for data," he says. "It creates a text file that gets stolen."
G. Chip-and-PIN cards, by contrast, make fake cards or skimming impossible because the information that gets scanned is encrypted (加密). The historical reason the U. S. has stuck with magstripe, ironically enough, is once superior technology. Our cheap, ultra-reliable wired net-works made credit-card authentication over the phone frictionless. In France, card companies created EMV in part because the telephone monopoly was so maddeningly inefficient and expensive. The EMV solution allowed transactions to be verified locally and securely.
H. Some big banks, like Wells Fargo, are now offering to convert your magstripe card to a chip-and-PIN model. (It"s actually a hybrid(混合体)that will still have a magstripe, since most U. S. merchants don"t have EMV terminals.) Should you take them up on it If you travel internationally, the answer is yes.
I. Keep in mind, too, that credit cards typically have better liability protection than debit cards. If someone uses your credit card fraudulently(欺炸性地), it"s the issuer or merchant, not you, that takes the hit. Debit cards have different liability limits depending on the bank and the events surrounding any fraud. "If it"s available, the logical thing is to get a chip-and-PIN card from your bank," says Eric Adamowsky, a co-founder of CreditCardInsider. com. "I would use credit cards over debit cards because of liability issues. "Cash still works pretty well too.
J. Retailers and banks stand to benefit from the lower fraud levels of chip-and-PIN cards but have been reluctant for years to invest in the new infrastructure(基础设施)needed for the technology, especially if consumers don"t have access to it. It"s a chicken-and-egg problem: no one wants to spend the money on upgraded point-of-sale systems that can read the chip cards if shoppers aren"t car-tying them—yet there"s little point in consumers" carrying the fancy plastic if stores aren"t equipped to use them. (An earlier effort by Target to move to chip and PIN never gained progress.) According to Gumbley, there"s a "you-first mentality. The logjam(僵局)has to be broken."
K. JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon recently expressed his willingness to do so, noting that banks and merchants have spent the past decade suing each other over interchange fees—the percentage of the transaction price they keep—rather than deal with the growing hacking problem. Chase offers a chip-enabled card under its own brand and several others for travel-related companies such as British Airways and Ritz-Carlton.
L. The Target and Neiman hacks have also changed the cost calculation: although retailers have been reluctant to spend the $6.75 billion that Capgemini consultants estimate it will take to convert all their registers to be chip-and-PIN compatible, the potential liability they now face is dramatically greater. Target has been hit with class actions from hacked consumers. "It"s the ultimate nightmare," a retail executive from a well-known chain admitted to TIME.
M. The card-payment companies MasterCard and Visa are pushing hard for change. The two firms have warned all parties in the transaction chain—merchant, network, bank—that if they don"t become EMV-compliant by October 2015, the party that is least compliant will bear the fraud risk.
N. In the meantime, app-equipped smartphones and digital wallets—all of which can use EMV technology—are beginning to make inroads(侵袭)on cards and cash. PayPal, for instance, is testing an app that lets you use your mobile phone to pay on the fly at local merchants—without surrendering any card information to them. And further down the road is biometric authentication, which could be encrypted with, say, a fingerprint.
O. Credit and debit cards, though, are going to be with us for the foreseeable future, and so are hackers, if we stick with magstripe technology. "It seems crazy to me," says Gumbley, who is English, "that a cutting-edge-technology country is depending on a 40-year-old technology." That"s why it may be up to consumers to move the needle on chip and PIN. Robertson says "When you get the consumer into a position of worry and inconvenience, that"s where the rubber hits the road."The potential liability for retailers using magstripe is far more costly than upgrading their registers.
答案： L[解析] 根据potential liability和retailers查找到L段。该段第1句分析了如果他们不更新寄存...
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Climate Change May Be Real, but It"s Still Not Easy Being Green
How do we convince our inner caveman to be greener We ask some outstanding social scientists.
A．The road to climate hell is paved with our good intentions. Politicians may tackle polluters while scientists do battle with carbon emissions. But the most pervasive problem is less obvious: our own behaviour. We get distracted before we can turn down the heating. We break our promise not to fly after hearing about a neighbor"s rip to India. Ultimately, we can"t be bothered to change our attitude. Fortunately for the planet, social science and behavioral economics may be able to do that for us.
B. Despite mournful polar bears and carts showing carbon emissions soaring, most people find it hard to believe that global warming will affect them personally. Recent polls by the Pew Research Centre in Washington, DC, found that 75-80 per cent of participants regarded climate change as an important issue. But respondents ranked it last on a list of priorities.
C. This inconsistency largely steins from a feeling of powerlessness. "When we can"t actually remove the source of our fear, we tend to adapt psychologically by adopting a range of defense mechanisms," says Tom Crompton, change strategist for the environmental organization World Wide Fund for Nature.
D. Part of the fault lies with our inner caveman. Evolution has programmed humans to pay most attention to issues that will have an immediate impact. "We worry most about now because if we don"t survive for the next minute, we"re not going to be around in ten years" time," says Professor Elke Weber of the Centre for Research on Environmental Decisions at Columbia University in New York. If the Thames were lapping around Big Ben, Londoners would face up to the problem of emissions pretty quickly. But in practice, our brain discounts the risks—and benefits—associated with issues that lie some way ahead.
E. Matthew Rush worth, of the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford, sees this in his lab every day. "One of the ways in which all agents seem to make decisions is that they assign a lower weighting to outcomes that are going to be further away in the future," he says. "This is a very sensible way for an animal to make decisions in the wild and would have been very helpful for humans for thousands of years."
F. Not any longer. By the time we wake up to the threat posed by climate change, it could well be too late. And if we"re not going to make national decisions about the future, others may have to help us to do so.
G. Few political libraries are without a copy of Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness, by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein. They argue that governments should persuade us into making better decisions—such as saving more in our pension plans—by changing the default options. Professor Weber believes that environmental policy can make use of similar tactics. If, for example, building codes included green construction guidelines, most developers would be too lazy to challenge them.
H. Defaults are certainly part of the solution. But social scientists are most concerned about crafting messages that exploit our group mentality(心态). "We need to understand what motivates people, what it is that allows them to make change," says Professor Neil Adger, of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research in Norwich. "It is actually about what their peers think of them, what their social norms are, what is seen as desirable in society." In other words, our inner cave-man is continually looking over his shoulder to see what the rest of the tribe are up to.
I. The passive attitude we have to climate change as individuals can be altered by counting us in—and measuring us against—our peer group. "Social norms are primitive and elemental," says Dr. Robert Cialdini, author of Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. "Birds flock together, fish school together, cattle herd together...just perceiving norms is enough to cause people to adjust their behavior in the direction of the crowd."
J. These norms can take us beyond good intentions. Cialdini conducted a study in San Diego in which coat hangers bearing messages about saving energy were hung on people"s doors. Some of the messages mentioned the environment, some financial savings, others social responsibility. But it was the one that mentioned the actions of neighbours that drove down power use.
K. Other studies show that simply providing the facility for people to compare their energy use with the local average is enough to cause them to modify their behaviour. The Conservatives plan to adopt this strategy by making utility companies print the average local electricity and gas usage on people"s bills.
L. Social science can also teach politicians how to avoid our collective capacity for self-destructive behaviour. Environmental campaigns that tell us how many people drive SUVs unwittingly (不经意地) imply that this behaviour is widespread and thus permissible. Cialdini recommends some careful framing of the message. "Instead of normalising the undesirable behaviour, the message needs to marginalise it, for example, by stating that if even one person buys yet another SUV, it reduces our ability to be energy-independent."
M. Tapping into how we already see ourselves is crucial. The most successful environmental strategy will marry the green message to our own sense of identity. Take your average trade union member, chances are they will be politically motivated and be used to collective action—much like Erica Gregory. A retired member of the Public and Commercial Services Union, she is setting up one of 1,100 action groups with the support of Climate Solidarity, a two-year environmental campaign aimed at trade unionists.
N. Erica is proof that a great-grandmother can help to lead the revolution if you get the psychology right—in this case, by matching her enthusiasm for the environment with a fondness for organising groups. "I think there must be something in it." She is expecting up to 20 people at the first meeting she has called, at her local pub in the Cornish village of Polperro.
O. Nick Perks, project director for Climate Solidarity, believes this sort of activity is where the future of environmental action lies. "Using existing civil society structures or networks is a more effective way of creating change...and obviously trade unions are one of the biggest civil society net-works in the UK," he says. The "Love Food, Haste Waste" campaign entered into a collaboration last year with another such network—the Women"s Institute. Londoner Rachel Talor joined the campaign with the aim of making new friends. A year on, the meetings have made lasting changes to what she throws away in her kitchen. "It"s always more of an incentive if you"re doing it with other people," she says. "It motivates you more if you know that you"ve got to provide feedback to a group."
P. The power of such simple psychology in fighting climate change is attracting attention across the political establishment. In the US, the House of Representatives Science Committee has approved a bill allocating $10 million a year to studying energy-related behaviour. In the UK, new studies are in development and social scientists are regularly spotted in British government offices. With the help of psychologists, there is fresh hope that we might go green after all.We would take our future into consideration in making decisions concerning climate change before it is too late.
答案： F[解析] 由F段By the time we wake up to the threat posed by clima...
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The Impossibility of Rapid Energy Transtions
A．Politicians are fond of promising rapid energy transitions. Whether it is a transition from imported to domestic oil or from coal-powered electricity production to natural-gas power plants, politicians love to talk big．Unfortunately for them(and often the taxpayers), our energy systems are a bit like an aircraft carrier: they are unbelievably expensive, they are built to last for a very long time, they have a huge amount of inertia(meaning it takes a lot of energy to set them moving), and they have a lot of momentum once they are set in motion. No matter how hard you try, you can"t turn something that large on a dime(10美分硬币), or even a few thousand dimes.
B．In physics, moving objects have two characteristics relevant to understanding the dynamics of energy systems: inertia and momentum. Inertia is the resistance of objects you back. Once you have started the boulder rolling, it develops momentum, which is defined by its mass and velocity. Momentum is said to be "conserved," that is, once you build it up, it has to go somewhere. So a heavy object, like a football player moving at a high speed, has a lot of momentum—that is, once he is moving, it is hard to change his state of motion. If you want to change his course, you have only a few choices: you can stop him, transferring (possibly painfully) some of his kinetic energy (动能)to your own body, or you can approach alongside and slowly apply pressure to gradually alter his course.
C．But there are other kinds of momentum as well. After all, we don"t speak only of objects or people as having momentum; we speak of entire systems having momentum. Whether it"s a sports team or a presidential campaign, everybody relishes having the big momentum, because it makes them harder to stop or change direction.
D．One kind of momentum is technological momentum. When a technology is deployed, its impacts reach far beyond itself. Consider the incandescent (白炽灯) bulb, an object currently hated by many environmentalists and energy-efficiency advocates. The incandescent light bulb, invented by Thomas Edison, which came to be the symbol of inspiration, has been developed into hundreds, if not thousands, of forms. Today, a visit to a lighting store reveals a stunning array of choices. There are standard-shaped bulbs, flame-shaped bulbs, colored globe-shaped bulbs, and more. It is quite easy, with all that choice, to change a light bulb.
E．But the momentum of incandescent lighting does not stop there. All of those specialized bulbs led to the building of specialized light fixtures, from the desk lamp you study by, to the ugly but beloved hand-painted Chinese lamp you inherited from your grandmother, to the ceiling fixture in your closet, to the light in your oven or refrigerator, and to the light that the dentist points at you. It is easy to change a light bulb, sure, but it is harder to change the bulb and its fixture.
F. And there is more to the story, because not only are the devices that house incandescent bulbs shaped to their underlying characteristics, but rooms and entire buildings have been designed in accordance with how incandescent lighting reflects off walls and windows.
G. As lighting expert Howard Brandston points out, "Generally, there are no bad sources, only bad applications. " There are some very commendable characteristics of the CFL (compact fluorescent (荧光的)light bulb), yet the selection of any light source remains inseparable from the luminaire (照明装置) that houses it, along with the space in which both are installed, and lighting requirements that need to be satisfied. The lamp, the fixture, and the room: all three must work in concert for the true benefits of end-users. If the CFL should be used for lighting a particular space, or an object within that space, the fixture must be designed to work with that simply installed in an incandescent fixture and then expected to produce a visual appearance that is more than washed out, foggy, and dim. The whole fixture must be replaced—light source and luminaire—and this is never an inexpensive proposition.
H. And Brandston knows a thing or two about lighting, being the man who illuminated the Statue of Liberty.
I. Another type of momentum we have to think about when planning for changes in our energy systems is labor-pool momentum. It is one thing to say that we are going to shift 30 percent of our electricity supply from, say, coal to nuclear power in 20 years. But it is another thing to have a sup-ply of trained talent that could let you carry out this promise. That is because the engineers, designers, regulators, operators, and all of the other skilled people needed for the new energy industry are specialists who have to be trained first (or retrained, if they are the ones being laid off in some related industry), and education, like any other complicated endeavor, takes time. And not only do our prospective new energy workers have to be trained, they have to be trained in the right sequence. One needs the designers, and perhaps the regulators, before the builders and operators, and each group of workers in training has to know there is work waiting beyond graduation. In some cases, colleges and universities might have to change their training programs, adding another layer of difficulty.
J. By far the biggest type of momentum that comes into play when it comes to changing our energy system is economic momentum. The major components of our energy systems, such as fuel production, refining, electrical generation and distribution, are costly installations that have lengthy lifespan. They have to operate for long periods of time before the costs of development have been recovered. When investors put up theirmoney to build, say, a nuclear power plant, they expect to earn that money back over the planned life of the plant, which is typically between 40 and 60 years. Some coal power plants in the United States have operated for more than 70 years ! The oldest continuously operated commercial hydro-electric plant in the United States is on New York"s Hudson River, and it went into commercial service in 1898.
K. As Vaclav Smil points out, "All the forecast, plans, and anticipations cited above have failed so miserably because their authors and promoters thought the transitions they hoped to implement would proceed unlike all previous energy transitions，and that their progress could be accelerated in an unprecedented manner."
L．When you hear people speaking of making a rapid transition toward any type of energy, whether it is a switch from coal to nuclear power, or a switch from gasonline-powered cars to electric cars, or even a switch from an incandescent to a fluorescent light, understanding energy system inertia and momentum can help you decide whether their plans are feasible.Physical characteristics of moving objects help explain the dynamics of energy systems.
答案： B[解析] 题目中的Physical characteristics of moving objects对应B段第一句的...
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First-Generation College-Goers: Unprepared and Behind
Kids who are the first in their families to brave the world of higher education come on campus with little academic know-how and are much more likely than their peers to drop out before graduation.
A. When Nijay Williams entered college last fall as a first-generation student and Jamaican immigrants, he was academically unprepared for the rigors of higher education. Like many first-generation student, he enrolled in a medium-sized state university many of his high school peers were also attending, received a Pell Grant, and board and the closeness of the school to his family, he chose to live at home and worked between 30 and 40 hours a week while taking a full class schedule.
B. What Nijay didn"t realize about his school—Tennessee State University—was its frighteningly low graduation rate: a mere 29 percent for its first-generation students. At the end of his first year, Nijay lost his Pell Grant of over $5,000 after narrowly missing the 2.0 GPA cut-off, making it impossible for him to continue paying for school.
C. Nijay represents a large and growing group of Americans: first-generation college students who enter school unprepared or behind. To make matters worse, these schools are ill-equipped to graduate these students—young adults who face specific challenges and obstacles. They typically carry financial burdens that outweigh those of their peers, are more likely to work while attending school, and often require significant academic remediation(补习).
D. Matt Rubinoff directs I"m First, a nonprofit organization launched last October to reach out to this specific population of students. He hopes to distribute this information and help prospective college-goers find the best post-secondary fit. And while Rubinoff believes there are a good number of four-year schools that truly care about these students and set aside significant resources and pro-grams for them, he says that number isn"t high enough.
E. "It"s not only the selective and elite institutions that provide those opportunities for a small subset of this population," Rubinoff said, adding that a majority of first-generation undergraduates tend toward options such as online programs, two-year colleges, and commuter state schools. "Un-fortunately, there tends to be a lack of information and support to help students think bigger and broader."
F. Despite this problem, many students are still drawn to these institutions—and two-year schools in particular. As a former high school teacher, I saw students choose familiar, cheaper options year after year. Instead of skipping out on higher education altogether, they chose community colleges or state schools with low bars for admittance.
G. "They underestimate themselves when selecting a university," said Dave Jarrat, a marketing executive for Inside Track, a for-profit organization that specializes in coaching low-income students and supporting colleges in order to help students thrive. "The reality of it is that a lot of low-income kids could be going to elite universities on a full ride scholarship and don"t even realize it."
H. "Many students are coming from a situation where no one around them has the experience of successfully completing higher education, so they are coming in questioning themselves and their college worthiness," Jarrat continued. That helps explain why, as I"m First"s Rubinoff indicated, the schools to which these students end up resorting can end up being some of the poorest matches for them. The University of Tennessee and Tennessee State are worth comparing. Tennessee State"s overall graduation rate is a tiny 39 percent, but at least it has a smaller gap between the outcomes for first-generation students and those of their peers.
I. Still, the University of Tennessee deserves credit for being transparent. Many large institutions keep this kind of data secret—or at least make it incredibly difficult to find. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, for instance, admits only that the graduation rate for its first-generation pupils is "much lower" than the percentage of all students who graduate within four years (81 percent).
J. It is actually quite difficult to find reliable statistics on the issue for many schools. Higher education institutions are, under federal law, required to report graduation rates, but these reports typically only include Pell recipient numbers—not necessarily rates specific to first-generation students. Other initiatives fail to break down the data, too. Imagine how intimidating it can be for prospective students unfamiliar with the complexities of higher education to navigate this kind of information and then identify which schools are the best fit.
K. It was this lack of information that prompted the launch of I"m First in 2013, originally as an arm of its umbrella organization, the Center For Student Opportunity. "If we can help to direct students to more of these types of campuses and help students to understand them to be realistic and accessible places, have them apply to these schools at greater frequency and ultimately get in and enroll, we are going to raise the success rate," Rubinoff said, citing a variety of colleges ranging from large state institutions to smaller private schools.
L. Chelsea Jones, who now directs student programming at I"m First, was a first-generation college student at Howard. Like other students new to the intimidating higher-education world, she often struggled on her path to college. "There wasn"t really a college-bound culture at my high school," she said. "I want to go to college but I didn"t really know the process." Jones became involved with a college-access program through Princeton University in high school. Now she attributes much of her understanding of college to that: "But once I got to campus, it was a completely different ball game that no one really prepared me for."
M. She was fortunate, though. Howard, a well-regarded historically black college, had an array of resources for its first-generation students, including matching kids with counselors, connecting first-generation students to one another, and TRIO, a national program that supported 200 students on Howard"s campus. Still, Jones represents a small percentage of first-generation students who are able to gain entry into more elite universities, which are often known for robust financial aid packages and remarkably high graduation rates for first-generation students. (Harvard, for example, boasts a six-year graduation rate for underrepresented minority groups of 98 percent.)
N. Christian Vazquez, a first-generation Yale graduate, is another exception, his success story setting him far apart from students such as Nijay. "There is a lot of support at Yale, to an extent, after a while, there is too much support." he said, half-joking about the countless resources available at the school. Students are placed in small groups with counselors (trained seniors on campus); they have access to cultural and ethnic affinity(联系)groups, tutoring centers and also have a summer orientation specifically for first-generation students (the latter being one of the most common programs for students).
O. "Our support structure was more like: "You are going to get through Yale; you are going to do well."" he said, hinting at mentors(导师), staff, and professors who all provided significant support for students who lacked confidence about "belonging" at such a top institution.Elite universities tend to graduate first-generation students at a higher rate.
答案： M[解析] 根据关键词Elite universities和higher rate可以定位M段倒数第二句： Still,...
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Plastic Surgery
A better credit card is the solution to ever larger hack attacks
A. A thin magnetic stripe(magstripe)is all that stands between your credit-card information and the bad guys. And they"ve been working hard to break in. That"s why 2014 is shaping up as a major showdown: banks, law enforcement and technology companies are all trying to stop a network of hackers who are succeeding in stealing account numbers, names, email addresses and other crucial data used in identity theft. More than 100 million accounts at Target, Neiman Marcus and Michaels stores were affected in some way during the most recent attacks, starting last November.
B. Swipe(刷卡)is the operative word: cards are increasingly vulnerable to attacks when you make purchases in a store. In several recent incidents, hackers have been able to obtain massive information of credit-, debit-(借记)or prepaid-card numbers using malware, i.e. malicious soft-ware, inserted secretly into the retailers" point-of-sale system—the checkout registers. Hackers then sold the data to a second group of criminals operating in shadowy corners of the web. Not long after, the stolen data was showing up on fake cards and being used for online purchases.
C. The solution could cost as little as $2 extra for every piece of plastic issued. The fix is a security technology used heavily outside the U. S. While American credit cards use the 40-year-old magstripe technology to process transactions, much of the rest of the world uses smarter cards with a technology called EMV(short for Europay, MasterCard, Visa)that employs a chip embedded in the card plus a customer PIN( personal identification number)to authenticate(验证)every transaction on the spot. If a purchaser fails to punch in the correct PIN at the checkout, the transaction gets rejected. (Online purchases can be made by setting up a separate transaction code.)
D. Why haven"t big banks adopted the more secure technology When it comes to mailing out new credit cards, it"s all about relative costs, says David Robertson, who runs the Nilson Report, an industry newsletter. "The cost of the card, putting the sticker on it, coding the account number and expiration date, embossing(凸印)it, the small envelope—all put together, you"re in the dollar range." A chip-and-PIN card currently costs closer to $3, says Robertson, because of the price of chips. (Once large issuers convert together, the chip costs should drop.)
E. Multiply $3 by the more than 5 billion magstripe credit and prepaid cards in circulation in the U. S. Then consider that there"s an estimated $12.4 billion in card fraud on a global basis, says Robertson. With 44% of that in the U. S. American credit-card fraud amounts to about $5.5 billion annually. Card issuers have so far calculated that absorbing the liability for even big hacks like the Target one is still cheaper than replacing all that plastic.
F. That leaves American retailers pretty much alone the world over in relying on magstripe technology to charge purchases—and leaves consumers vulnerable. Each magstripe has three tracks of information, explains payments security expert Jeremy Gumbley, the chief technology officer of CreditCall, an electronic-payments company. The first and third are used by the bank or card issuer. Your vital account information lives on the second track, which hackers try to capture. "Malware is scanning through the memory in real time and looking for data," he says. "It creates a text file that gets stolen."
G. Chip-and-PIN cards, by contrast, make fake cards or skimming impossible because the information that gets scanned is encrypted (加密). The historical reason the U. S. has stuck with magstripe, ironically enough, is once superior technology. Our cheap, ultra-reliable wired net-works made credit-card authentication over the phone frictionless. In France, card companies created EMV in part because the telephone monopoly was so maddeningly inefficient and expensive. The EMV solution allowed transactions to be verified locally and securely.
H. Some big banks, like Wells Fargo, are now offering to convert your magstripe card to a chip-and-PIN model. (It"s actually a hybrid(混合体)that will still have a magstripe, since most U. S. merchants don"t have EMV terminals.) Should you take them up on it If you travel internationally, the answer is yes.
I. Keep in mind, too, that credit cards typically have better liability protection than debit cards. If someone uses your credit card fraudulently(欺炸性地), it"s the issuer or merchant, not you, that takes the hit. Debit cards have different liability limits depending on the bank and the events surrounding any fraud. "If it"s available, the logical thing is to get a chip-and-PIN card from your bank," says Eric Adamowsky, a co-founder of CreditCardInsider. com. "I would use credit cards over debit cards because of liability issues. "Cash still works pretty well too.
J. Retailers and banks stand to benefit from the lower fraud levels of chip-and-PIN cards but have been reluctant for years to invest in the new infrastructure(基础设施)needed for the technology, especially if consumers don"t have access to it. It"s a chicken-and-egg problem: no one wants to spend the money on upgraded point-of-sale systems that can read the chip cards if shoppers aren"t car-tying them—yet there"s little point in consumers" carrying the fancy plastic if stores aren"t equipped to use them. (An earlier effort by Target to move to chip and PIN never gained progress.) According to Gumbley, there"s a "you-first mentality. The logjam(僵局)has to be broken."
K. JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon recently expressed his willingness to do so, noting that banks and merchants have spent the past decade suing each other over interchange fees—the percentage of the transaction price they keep—rather than deal with the growing hacking problem. Chase offers a chip-enabled card under its own brand and several others for travel-related companies such as British Airways and Ritz-Carlton.
L. The Target and Neiman hacks have also changed the cost calculation: although retailers have been reluctant to spend the $6.75 billion that Capgemini consultants estimate it will take to convert all their registers to be chip-and-PIN compatible, the potential liability they now face is dramatically greater. Target has been hit with class actions from hacked consumers. "It"s the ultimate nightmare," a retail executive from a well-known chain admitted to TIME.
M. The card-payment companies MasterCard and Visa are pushing hard for change. The two firms have warned all parties in the transaction chain—merchant, network, bank—that if they don"t become EMV-compliant by October 2015, the party that is least compliant will bear the fraud risk.
N. In the meantime, app-equipped smartphones and digital wallets—all of which can use EMV technology—are beginning to make inroads(侵袭)on cards and cash. PayPal, for instance, is testing an app that lets you use your mobile phone to pay on the fly at local merchants—without surrendering any card information to them. And further down the road is biometric authentication, which could be encrypted with, say, a fingerprint.
O. Credit and debit cards, though, are going to be with us for the foreseeable future, and so are hackers, if we stick with magstripe technology. "It seems crazy to me," says Gumbley, who is English, "that a cutting-edge-technology country is depending on a 40-year-old technology." That"s why it may be up to consumers to move the needle on chip and PIN. Robertson says "When you get the consumer into a position of worry and inconvenience, that"s where the rubber hits the road."The use of magstripe cards by American retailers leaves consumers exposed to the risks of losing account information.
答案： F[解析] 根据magstripe cards, American retailers, consumers和losin...
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Climate Change May Be Real, but It"s Still Not Easy Being Green
How do we convince our inner caveman to be greener We ask some outstanding social scientists.
A．The road to climate hell is paved with our good intentions. Politicians may tackle polluters while scientists do battle with carbon emissions. But the most pervasive problem is less obvious: our own behaviour. We get distracted before we can turn down the heating. We break our promise not to fly after hearing about a neighbor"s rip to India. Ultimately, we can"t be bothered to change our attitude. Fortunately for the planet, social science and behavioral economics may be able to do that for us.
B. Despite mournful polar bears and carts showing carbon emissions soaring, most people find it hard to believe that global warming will affect them personally. Recent polls by the Pew Research Centre in Washington, DC, found that 75-80 per cent of participants regarded climate change as an important issue. But respondents ranked it last on a list of priorities.
C. This inconsistency largely steins from a feeling of powerlessness. "When we can"t actually remove the source of our fear, we tend to adapt psychologically by adopting a range of defense mechanisms," says Tom Crompton, change strategist for the environmental organization World Wide Fund for Nature.
D. Part of the fault lies with our inner caveman. Evolution has programmed humans to pay most attention to issues that will have an immediate impact. "We worry most about now because if we don"t survive for the next minute, we"re not going to be around in ten years" time," says Professor Elke Weber of the Centre for Research on Environmental Decisions at Columbia University in New York. If the Thames were lapping around Big Ben, Londoners would face up to the problem of emissions pretty quickly. But in practice, our brain discounts the risks—and benefits—associated with issues that lie some way ahead.
E. Matthew Rush worth, of the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford, sees this in his lab every day. "One of the ways in which all agents seem to make decisions is that they assign a lower weighting to outcomes that are going to be further away in the future," he says. "This is a very sensible way for an animal to make decisions in the wild and would have been very helpful for humans for thousands of years."
F. Not any longer. By the time we wake up to the threat posed by climate change, it could well be too late. And if we"re not going to make national decisions about the future, others may have to help us to do so.
G. Few political libraries are without a copy of Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness, by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein. They argue that governments should persuade us into making better decisions—such as saving more in our pension plans—by changing the default options. Professor Weber believes that environmental policy can make use of similar tactics. If, for example, building codes included green construction guidelines, most developers would be too lazy to challenge them.
H. Defaults are certainly part of the solution. But social scientists are most concerned about crafting messages that exploit our group mentality(心态). "We need to understand what motivates people, what it is that allows them to make change," says Professor Neil Adger, of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research in Norwich. "It is actually about what their peers think of them, what their social norms are, what is seen as desirable in society." In other words, our inner cave-man is continually looking over his shoulder to see what the rest of the tribe are up to.
I. The passive attitude we have to climate change as individuals can be altered by counting us in—and measuring us against—our peer group. "Social norms are primitive and elemental," says Dr. Robert Cialdini, author of Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. "Birds flock together, fish school together, cattle herd together...just perceiving norms is enough to cause people to adjust their behavior in the direction of the crowd."
J. These norms can take us beyond good intentions. Cialdini conducted a study in San Diego in which coat hangers bearing messages about saving energy were hung on people"s doors. Some of the messages mentioned the environment, some financial savings, others social responsibility. But it was the one that mentioned the actions of neighbours that drove down power use.
K. Other studies show that simply providing the facility for people to compare their energy use with the local average is enough to cause them to modify their behaviour. The Conservatives plan to adopt this strategy by making utility companies print the average local electricity and gas usage on people"s bills.
L. Social science can also teach politicians how to avoid our collective capacity for self-destructive behaviour. Environmental campaigns that tell us how many people drive SUVs unwittingly (不经意地) imply that this behaviour is widespread and thus permissible. Cialdini recommends some careful framing of the message. "Instead of normalising the undesirable behaviour, the message needs to marginalise it, for example, by stating that if even one person buys yet another SUV, it reduces our ability to be energy-independent."
M. Tapping into how we already see ourselves is crucial. The most successful environmental strategy will marry the green message to our own sense of identity. Take your average trade union member, chances are they will be politically motivated and be used to collective action—much like Erica Gregory. A retired member of the Public and Commercial Services Union, she is setting up one of 1,100 action groups with the support of Climate Solidarity, a two-year environmental campaign aimed at trade unionists.
N. Erica is proof that a great-grandmother can help to lead the revolution if you get the psychology right—in this case, by matching her enthusiasm for the environment with a fondness for organising groups. "I think there must be something in it." She is expecting up to 20 people at the first meeting she has called, at her local pub in the Cornish village of Polperro.
O. Nick Perks, project director for Climate Solidarity, believes this sort of activity is where the future of environmental action lies. "Using existing civil society structures or networks is a more effective way of creating change...and obviously trade unions are one of the biggest civil society net-works in the UK," he says. The "Love Food, Haste Waste" campaign entered into a collaboration last year with another such network—the Women"s Institute. Londoner Rachel Talor joined the campaign with the aim of making new friends. A year on, the meetings have made lasting changes to what she throws away in her kitchen. "It"s always more of an incentive if you"re doing it with other people," she says. "It motivates you more if you know that you"ve got to provide feedback to a group."
P. The power of such simple psychology in fighting climate change is attracting attention across the political establishment. In the US, the House of Representatives Science Committee has approved a bill allocating $10 million a year to studying energy-related behaviour. In the UK, new studies are in development and social scientists are regularly spotted in British government offices. With the help of psychologists, there is fresh hope that we might go green after all.Existing social networks can be more effective in creating change in people"s behaviour.
答案： O[解析] 由O段Using existing civil society structures or networks...
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Plastic Surgery
A better credit card is the solution to ever larger hack attacks
A. A thin magnetic stripe(magstripe)is all that stands between your credit-card information and the bad guys. And they"ve been working hard to break in. That"s why 2014 is shaping up as a major showdown: banks, law enforcement and technology companies are all trying to stop a network of hackers who are succeeding in stealing account numbers, names, email addresses and other crucial data used in identity theft. More than 100 million accounts at Target, Neiman Marcus and Michaels stores were affected in some way during the most recent attacks, starting last November.
B. Swipe(刷卡)is the operative word: cards are increasingly vulnerable to attacks when you make purchases in a store. In several recent incidents, hackers have been able to obtain massive information of credit-, debit-(借记)or prepaid-card numbers using malware, i.e. malicious soft-ware, inserted secretly into the retailers" point-of-sale system—the checkout registers. Hackers then sold the data to a second group of criminals operating in shadowy corners of the web. Not long after, the stolen data was showing up on fake cards and being used for online purchases.
C. The solution could cost as little as $2 extra for every piece of plastic issued. The fix is a security technology used heavily outside the U. S. While American credit cards use the 40-year-old magstripe technology to process transactions, much of the rest of the world uses smarter cards with a technology called EMV(short for Europay, MasterCard, Visa)that employs a chip embedded in the card plus a customer PIN( personal identification number)to authenticate(验证)every transaction on the spot. If a purchaser fails to punch in the correct PIN at the checkout, the transaction gets rejected. (Online purchases can be made by setting up a separate transaction code.)
D. Why haven"t big banks adopted the more secure technology When it comes to mailing out new credit cards, it"s all about relative costs, says David Robertson, who runs the Nilson Report, an industry newsletter. "The cost of the card, putting the sticker on it, coding the account number and expiration date, embossing(凸印)it, the small envelope—all put together, you"re in the dollar range." A chip-and-PIN card currently costs closer to $3, says Robertson, because of the price of chips. (Once large issuers convert together, the chip costs should drop.)
E. Multiply $3 by the more than 5 billion magstripe credit and prepaid cards in circulation in the U. S. Then consider that there"s an estimated $12.4 billion in card fraud on a global basis, says Robertson. With 44% of that in the U. S. American credit-card fraud amounts to about $5.5 billion annually. Card issuers have so far calculated that absorbing the liability for even big hacks like the Target one is still cheaper than replacing all that plastic.
F. That leaves American retailers pretty much alone the world over in relying on magstripe technology to charge purchases—and leaves consumers vulnerable. Each magstripe has three tracks of information, explains payments security expert Jeremy Gumbley, the chief technology officer of CreditCall, an electronic-payments company. The first and third are used by the bank or card issuer. Your vital account information lives on the second track, which hackers try to capture. "Malware is scanning through the memory in real time and looking for data," he says. "It creates a text file that gets stolen."
G. Chip-and-PIN cards, by contrast, make fake cards or skimming impossible because the information that gets scanned is encrypted (加密). The historical reason the U. S. has stuck with magstripe, ironically enough, is once superior technology. Our cheap, ultra-reliable wired net-works made credit-card authentication over the phone frictionless. In France, card companies created EMV in part because the telephone monopoly was so maddeningly inefficient and expensive. The EMV solution allowed transactions to be verified locally and securely.
H. Some big banks, like Wells Fargo, are now offering to convert your magstripe card to a chip-and-PIN model. (It"s actually a hybrid(混合体)that will still have a magstripe, since most U. S. merchants don"t have EMV terminals.) Should you take them up on it If you travel internationally, the answer is yes.
I. Keep in mind, too, that credit cards typically have better liability protection than debit cards. If someone uses your credit card fraudulently(欺炸性地), it"s the issuer or merchant, not you, that takes the hit. Debit cards have different liability limits depending on the bank and the events surrounding any fraud. "If it"s available, the logical thing is to get a chip-and-PIN card from your bank," says Eric Adamowsky, a co-founder of CreditCardInsider. com. "I would use credit cards over debit cards because of liability issues. "Cash still works pretty well too.
J. Retailers and banks stand to benefit from the lower fraud levels of chip-and-PIN cards but have been reluctant for years to invest in the new infrastructure(基础设施)needed for the technology, especially if consumers don"t have access to it. It"s a chicken-and-egg problem: no one wants to spend the money on upgraded point-of-sale systems that can read the chip cards if shoppers aren"t car-tying them—yet there"s little point in consumers" carrying the fancy plastic if stores aren"t equipped to use them. (An earlier effort by Target to move to chip and PIN never gained progress.) According to Gumbley, there"s a "you-first mentality. The logjam(僵局)has to be broken."
K. JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon recently expressed his willingness to do so, noting that banks and merchants have spent the past decade suing each other over interchange fees—the percentage of the transaction price they keep—rather than deal with the growing hacking problem. Chase offers a chip-enabled card under its own brand and several others for travel-related companies such as British Airways and Ritz-Carlton.
L. The Target and Neiman hacks have also changed the cost calculation: although retailers have been reluctant to spend the $6.75 billion that Capgemini consultants estimate it will take to convert all their registers to be chip-and-PIN compatible, the potential liability they now face is dramatically greater. Target has been hit with class actions from hacked consumers. "It"s the ultimate nightmare," a retail executive from a well-known chain admitted to TIME.
M. The card-payment companies MasterCard and Visa are pushing hard for change. The two firms have warned all parties in the transaction chain—merchant, network, bank—that if they don"t become EMV-compliant by October 2015, the party that is least compliant will bear the fraud risk.
N. In the meantime, app-equipped smartphones and digital wallets—all of which can use EMV technology—are beginning to make inroads(侵袭)on cards and cash. PayPal, for instance, is testing an app that lets you use your mobile phone to pay on the fly at local merchants—without surrendering any card information to them. And further down the road is biometric authentication, which could be encrypted with, say, a fingerprint.
O. Credit and debit cards, though, are going to be with us for the foreseeable future, and so are hackers, if we stick with magstripe technology. "It seems crazy to me," says Gumbley, who is English, "that a cutting-edge-technology country is depending on a 40-year-old technology." That"s why it may be up to consumers to move the needle on chip and PIN. Robertson says "When you get the consumer into a position of worry and inconvenience, that"s where the rubber hits the road."Consumers will be a driving force behind the conversion from magstripe to EMV technology.
答案： O[解析] 根据Consumers, a driving force和conversion等可定位到O段最后两句。这两句...
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