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The UN human rights chief, Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, recently announced he would not be seeking a second term in office. “To do so, in the current geopolitical context, might involve bending a knee in supplication... lessening the independence and integrity of my voice,” he explained.His vivid words implied that civil rights advocacy has become untenable and this statement of resignation—from a highly respected and effective voice—is a tragic indictment of the current state of play. Consider, for a start, the Trump administration’s record, including attempts to ban Muslim travel and exclude transgender people from the military, and how it highlights a UN system now deprived of an important historical champion. What’s more, faced with rising populist nationalism, European states have largely failed to fill the void and the continent’s treatment of refugees has seriously damaged its moral authority.Deprived, then, of its traditional liberal democratic allies, the UN system appears increasingly toothless. It effectively operates as a peer network, and without strong government leadership, it struggles to bring about change. Instead, for the “west”, arms exports to Saudi Arabia, migration deals with Turkey and trade deals with China have been prioritised over speaking out on civil rights. And the consequences of silence and complicity have been manifest—from slaughter and starvation in Yemen to forced repatriation of the Rohingya, impunity in Syria and extrajudicial killings in the Philippines.However, the mood of resignation is premature and wrongheaded. It is time to fight for civil rights—but equally time to reimagine how they are achieved in a changing world. And this requires leadership from within and beyond the UN system. This year marks the 70th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which heralded a historical period during which a swath of treaties were agreed. These treaties are among the great achievements of the 20th century and must be maintained. But alone they are insufficient to ensure compliance and implementation. Reminding governments that they are breaking the laws they signed up to is no longer working.The temptation for UN agencies is to try to see out the current impasse and hope for a return of the bygone era. The problem with this strategy, however, is that the current geopolitical climate may not be a blip but instead result from fundamental changes. The rise of “multi-polarity”—where power is widely dispersed among nations—may indefinitely deprive the civil rights system its “enforcer of last resort”. Meanwhile, populist nationalism could be a long-term feature of the political landscape. Sustaining a viable civil rights system in the new world order will require adaptation and innovation.Non-traditional players can play a significant role. Last week, the executive director of a relevant organization, Kenneth Roth, suggested that the story of 2017 was one of quietly effective resistance. These scattered successes were the result of political mobilisation by small groups of states, filling the void left by others and often working with civil society. For example, the Netherlands led a coalition at the civil rights council to investigate Saudi-backed atrocities in Yemen. Iceland led the council to condemn Rodrigo Duterte’s backing for summary executions in the Philippines’ war on drugs.“Constructive engagement” offers hope. Reporting violations and resorting to legal channels, including courts, to assert civil rights law can influence state behaviour, but it doesn’t always. In areas such as alternatives to detention for asylum seekers and police reform, working with states to identify “good practices” that better reconcile national interests with civil rights can bring more success.If traditional intergovernmental mechanisms are failing, let’s find ways to bypass them. States are not the only route to progress. Press investigations, businesses managing their global supply chain, charities tackling modern slavery and environmental standards all have implications for civil rights. They respond to consumers and shareholders rather than voters and their choices can influence elite political preferences, even in authoritarian regimes. In 1961, an article published in the Observer led to the creation of an important civil rights organization.More recently, the transnational media investigation into slavery in the Thai prawn processing market led to major global retailers being exposed, passing pressure on to their Thai suppliers, which were forced to commit to reform. Thai law changed, arrests were made. Serious questions remain about slavery within the industry, but progress has been made. And yet business is still not a central focus of the civil rights system.There are also new technologies available to empower transnational civil society. Though the extent of tech influence can be debated, the Arab spring revealed the rapidity with which the internet can now mobilise action. And yet there has been too little systematic reflection on how this can change the business model of the civil rights system. How, for instance, can a digital world offer greater protection from reprisals and lend voice to civil rights defenders? To be effective, human rights defenders need to be technologically ahead of repressive regimes. And this requires a system with technological capacity.Promoting civil rights in a multipolar world of rising nationalism will not be easy. But the core principles developed over the past 70 years are needed now at least as much as at any time in that period. The system requires innovation, not resignation. It needs us all to work together to overcome collective indifference. The reinvigoration of civil rights must entail a commitment to justice and inalienable rights at every level of society.1. What does the word “supplication” in paragraph one most probably mean?2. What is the author’s attitude toward promoting civil rights?3. According to the passage, which of the following statement is NOT true?4. Which of the following serves best as the last sentence of the passage?5. Which of the following would be the best title of the passage?

Professor Joseph Mifsud once said he was not a Russian spy. Then he vanished and stayed vanished despite multiple attempts by journalists to put pertinent questions to him. Though he is not named in the indictment, prosecutors working for the Mueller inquiry into Russian involvement in Donald Trump’s election allege this ghostly presence, this incredible vanishing man, was the conduit between the Trump foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos and a Kremlin with “dirt” to share on Hillary Clinton. The rest of us are in the dark. But perhaps not wholly so.Papadopoulos has pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI, and joined the list of officials who would rather send their former friends on the alt-right to jail than go to jail themselves. For his part, the “professor” has at least raised questions about how respectable academic institutions and the highest levels of British politics are open to penetration by kleptomaniac regimes.Anyone who examines Mifsud’s career should be wary of believing a word he says. But on one point he is right. He’s not a traditional spy, if your image of the spy is a brutal cold war colonel from the KGB. He appears to be something altogether more modern.Mifsud is from Malta. He received a Phd from Queen’s University, Belfast in 1995, on how to reform primary school education, and then served as an assistant to a Maltese foreign minister, which I suppose gave him a little experience of diplomacy. In 2008, he popped up at the EMUNI University in Slovenia. It may not be Europe’s most distinguished academic institution, but it was too distinguished for Mifsud. The Times of Malta reported he left in haste after pocketing €39,000 in expenses, including an impressive €13,767 for mobile calls.Where would a man like this head to? Why, dear old London town, of course, where half the oligarchs, thieves, spies, spivs and shits on the planet are welcomed. Mifsud set up the “London Academy of Diplomacy” and boasted to the Washington Diplomat that it was “one of the best diplomatic academies in the world”.Mifsud denies any wrongdoing and is, of course, innocent until proved guilty. Still, when the necessary caveats have been made, I have to say the London Academy of Diplomacy does not look like an elite diplomatic finishing school. It’s my fault, for having a suspicious mind but at first glance it appears to resemble just the type of front organisation an espionage agency would establish.“It felt like something was weird,” Simona Mangiante told the Guardian last week. “I never met any Russians there… But the centre certainly wasn’t what it pretended to be.”Mifsud recruited Mangiante from the European parliament because of her excellent contacts book. Through the academy, she met and fell in love with Papadopoulos. She’s now moved in with him in Chicago, but remembered that, while the academy had an impressive London address in a townhouse overlooking Lincoln’s Inn Fields, behind its doors there was just one table for the staff to work from. They had to supply their own laptops and were wary of the “sneaky” Mifsud.Undeterred by the rickety surroundings, Mifsud quickly found institutions ready to boost his credentials. The University of East Anglia took him on in 2011 and claimed he was a professor, although no one can see how he earned the title. In 2016, he moved to Stirling University, which was delighted that he flew “the University of Stirling flag” at “high-profile” meetings with Putin. You have to have encountered the fierce jealousy with which academics guard their specialisms to realise how unusual it is for two universities to treat Mifsud as an authority on international diplomacy when what expertise he possessed was on early years’ education.I asked Stirling and East Anglia what academic qualifications Mifsud had for the posts they granted him, what checks they had run on his academy and what financial arrangements they had made with him. Britain’s universities are as bad at replying to questions in the public interest as they are at defending freedom of speech. Stirling refused to answer. East Anglia said it might get back to me this week.1. What does paragraph 1 imply?2. What is the most likely reason that Mifsud relocated to the UK?3. The phrase “kleptomaniac regimes” in the second paragraph probably means ________.4. According to the passage, what a kind of professor is Joseph Mifsud?5. What is the author’s opinion?

A new generation of historians is exploring some of the untold stories of the civil rights movement and its legacies: the experiences not of heroes or murderous villains, but of ordinary Southern whites. And their research is challenging some long-held beliefs about the nation’s political realignment and the origins of modern conservatism.This new wave of historians, many of them young, believe that one cannot understand today’s housing, schooling, economic development or political patterns without understanding the mostly apolitical white Southerners of that era. None of these scholars play down the inbred racism of the region, but they argue that the focus on race can obscure broader economic and demographic changes, like the dizzying corporate growth, the migration of white Northerners to the South and the shifting emphasis on class interests after legal segregation ended.The conventional wisdom, said Jacquelyn Hall, director of the Southern Oral History Project at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is that the general backlash to the civil rights movement “was exported out of the South to the rest of the country,” and that the Republican Party benefited from the shift. But she said a raft of new scholarship is showing “the strength of the Republican Party in the South is linked to the economic boom in the South.” Corporations moved down to the once-solidly Democratic South and brought with them traditional suburban Republican voters. Their interests matched up with a growing neo-conservatism in the North. “What’s going on is much more a regional convergence story as opposed to the South influencing the rest of the country,” she said.Conservative appeals to limit the government’s reach and emphasize individual freedoms resonated not only in the South, but in the North as well, said Joseph Crespino, 35, whose book, “In Search of Another Country: Mississippi and the Conservative Counterrevolution” (Princeton University Press), was just published. The racial and religious conservatism of whites, for instance, “converged in unexpected ways in the fight over federal tax policy toward Southern private schools,” Mr. Crespino writes. He said that while many Southern whites set up “segregation academies” for the sole purpose of avoiding school integration, others were genuinely interested in sending their children to church schools for religious reasons. “By the late ’70s, this issue of defending church schools against harassment by the federal government and the I.R.S.,” Mr. Crespino explained in an interview, led to the “mobilization of evangelical and fundamentalist Christians.” Like Mr. Crespino, Matthew D. Lassiter was motivated to research his own Southern roots. He found a gap between the history he had learned in school and his experience growing up in its wake in Sandy Springs, a white, middle-class suburb of Atlanta. “I was trying to find my own people, my parents and grandparents,” said Mr. Lassiter, 36, who wrote “The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South” (Princeton) published last year. “There were a few white Southerners who were liberals, a larger number throwing the rocks with the rioters and the vast group in the middle was left out of the story.”As a graduate student at the University of Virginia, he taught undergraduates and assigned the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter From Birmingham Jail,” in which he wrote, “I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride towards freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than justice.” Mr. Lassiter, who now teaches history at the University of Michigan, said: “Who are these moderates? They don’t seem to be participating, yet they’re completely complicit in the system of Jim Crow.”Mr. Lassiter’s book looks at how the federal government subsidized white flight to the suburbs, where middle-class whites could embrace colorblind values but still maintain all-white enclaves and schools. “When you look at suburbs and middle class, then you start getting a national story,” he said. “White suburbs outside Charlotte are reacting the same as white suburbs outside Los Angeles or in New Jersey.”That Southern whites have become the leading edge of academic research is not all that surprising, Mr. Crespino explained: “The first generation of scholarship looked at key figures and key organizations. The second generation focused on recovering the roots of the movement, and telling the story of African-Americans.”Taylor Branch, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of a trilogy on King, suggested that another reason for the long neglect of this group has been the difficulty in getting ordinary white Southerners to tell their stories. “I do think that subject is one of the harder ones to write about because those people are quite reticent and not that prominent,” he said, referring to people he knew from his own childhood growing up in Atlanta. The subject of civil rights made “otherwise intelligent people seem evasive.”James C. Cobb, a senior historian at the University of Georgia, has written several books about the South and praises the new scholarship. Although he said some people may perceive this work as an apologia, there is now generally “more ideological leeway to go back and see how white people behaved during this period.” Still, he warned, “You have to be very careful” not to make this inquiry a justification of veiled racism. “We can go overboard in downplaying the racial angle,” he said. After all, while opposition to busing may not stem racism, he said, the effects on blacks are the same.Although the scholarly books published in the last couple of years focus on widely different areas—metropolitan power centers, rural backwaters, employment practices, schools—nearly all make the same point: The idea that the South is exceptional, a region apart from the rest of the country, is no longer true. Though the thesis discomfits some professors of Southern history, Mr. Kruse argues “a lot of those regional differences have really dropped out the closer we get to the present day.”1. What is the attitude of the author?2. Why are White Southerners reserved in telling their side of the story about civil rights?3. The writer argues that “Racism” in US .4. What is the best title for this passage?5. According to the writer, the most significant impediment for African-Americans to reach their freedom is .

In his 1978 book The Emperor: The Downfall of an Autocrat, an account of the final years of the reign of Haile Selassie I, Polish writer Jaroslaw Kapuściński invented a new subgenre of political reportage. Kapuściński himself called his work “literary reportage”. In the English-speaking world, his genre is sometimes characterized as “magic journalism”. In a series of linked, interpolated testimonies from former Ethiopian court officials he created an arresting picture of the accelerating collapse of an authoritarian regime.This was a story that had special resonance for his audience in Poland, where dissent against its autocracy was growing. The Emperor was also the book that established Kapuściński’s reputation in the West. When it appeared in English translation in 1983 it was an immediate critical success. Questions about the reliability of Kapuściński’s reportage begin with The Emperor. His informants here are mainly former Ethiopian court servants labouring under anonymising initials, making them sound curiously like characters in an eighteenth-century English novel. Only one of those who assisted him is given a full name (that, we are told, is because he is safely dead), yet the power of the book derives to a large extent from the fact that the story is told almost entirely through the transcribed speech of these unnamed witnesses. Their antiquated cadences have a mesmeric quality. With courtly unctuousness they speak of “His Venerable Majesty”, “His Most Virtuous Highness”, “His Benevolent Majesty, “His Sublime Majesty”, “His Charitable Majesty”, “His Exalted Majesty”, “His Indefatigable Majesty”, “His Masterful Highness”, “Our Omnipotent Ruler”. These expressions of fealty acquire an air of increasing irony as the excesses of the imperial court are borne in on the reader. It is a subtle piece of reportorial rhetoric, yet native speakers of Amharic say that these honorifics correspond to no known expressions in their language. In particular, they say, they could not occur in the formal registers of speech that were employed at the court, where there were only one or two acceptable forms of address for the Emperor. So it seems these resonant phrases cannot have been spoken as transcribed. Some of the ceremonial titles that Kapuściński gives his sources are invented too. In the absence of proper names these inventions may be held to cast further doubt on the actual existence of these informants.What Kapuściński and his unnamed translators created in The Emperor was a brilliant device, rumors rather than transcription, an imaginary archaic language, with touches of comic opera, one that bespeaks homage while conveying subversion. It falls short, though, of both scholarly and journalistic standards of verity, or even of verisimilitude. In answer to such criticisms it has been argued that The Emperor is not meant to be about Ethiopia at all, that it is an allegory of autocratic power in Poland. Certainly, the book is informed and deepened by such parallels; and its reception among literati in the West was conditioned by an awareness of its doubly exotic origin—a book about a far-off country by an author who was himself rara avis, a master of the new journalism sprung miraculously from within the Soviet bloc. Some apologists for The Emperor have located it, specifically, in a Polish literary genre where dissent masquerades as descriptive prose; and Kapuściński has subsequently endorsed this interpretation. Yet there is no indication in the book itself that it is meant to be read as an allegory—or as a traveller’s tale, or a parable (one in the same genre, say, as Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas the legendary Abyssinian king, or the mediaeval European stories of Prester John, the Emperor of Ethiopia). Like Kapuściński’s other books, The Emperor is presented unambiguously as factual reportage and it asserts its claim on the reader’s attention as such. The dearth of other sources on the subject—no member of the Imperial court of Ethiopian survived to write a memoir of Haile Selassie—means that the book would have considerable documentary importance if the information in it could be relied on. At the time of first publication there was, of course, every reason for Kapuściński to maintain the confidentiality of any living sources he might have.1. The aim of the author is to suggest that .2. Despite the facts that The Emperor is unambiguously presented as factual reportage, the book should be read as .3. The Emperor refers to .4. Baroque description, exaggeration and hyperbole may be regarded as exemplary in .5. This passage most likely takes the form of .

As a stimulus for debate, the week-long removal of John William Waterhouse’s “Hylas and the Nymphs” from the walls of the Manchester Art Gallery certainly did the trick. After its exile to the museum store hit the news, the air became thick with protest and cries of “censorship”. Its banishment was regarded as dangerous political correctness, and the thin end of the wedge. If Waterhouse’s image of a youth surrounded by naked young women was to be taken down, where would it end? Would all our museums and galleries be dismantled, their “offensive” works, a.k.a. most Old Masters, locked away from the gaze of the public?The painting’s week-long absence (it is back in its place by popular demand) probably focused more attention and thought upon it than it would have received over six months on the wall. Its removal was part of a project by artist Sonia Boyce, an exhibition of whose work opens at the museum in March. The action had arisen from discussions between the artist and staff about power and taste, about who decides what is seen and not seen on the walls of museums and galleries.Cries of censorship have tended to obscure the complexities of this case. Works of art, after all, do not exist in isolation from the conditions in which they are viewed. Standards and tastes constantly change. Artists overlooked in their own time have belatedly found their place in the canon. Sometimes work valued in one period has lost currency in another. That is not to say that “Hylas and the Nymphs” should not be on show, but, rather, to suggest that the way we look at art is a dynamic process. In practice, curators make decisions about what is seen all the time. This should not disturb us. This is their job.The painting itself, first shown in 1896, deserves more attention. The story of Hylas is told by Theocritus, Apollonius of Rhodes and Propertius, among others. It is Theocritus’s 13th Idyll that Waterhouse follows most closely. Heracles and his lover, the young Hylas, are among the Argonauts, the heroes intent on stealing the Golden Fleece. En route to Colchis, while their ship is moored, Hylas goes inland for water. Finding a spring, he plunges his pitcher into the water—but nymphs, desiring the young man, grab hold of his arm, dragging him under. The women are the predators, not Hylas. At the same time, the painting clearly invites the viewer to enjoy the nymphs’ naked breasts, while betraying more than a little anxiety about female sexuality. There is a tragic homoerotic story latent in the work, for Theocritus tells how Heracles deserts the Argonauts to wander the land, seeking his lover.Taking down a Waterhouse for a week need not send anyone to the barricades. It was not censorship. A critical, self-reflective, open-eyed relationship with the past is a good thing (just as denying, or attempting to tidy up the past, is a bad thing). It was a clumsy gesture by Manchester Art Gallery, perhaps. But one that was neither repressive nor merely a stunt.1. What is the purpose of Paragraph 3?2. Why did the author write this article?3. Which of the following is NOT true?4. An idiom that would make a useful title for this article could be ________.5. What do we know about the author?

With nearly every utterance, Donald Trump affirms the conclusion we reached two years ago that he is temperamentally and intellectually unfit to serve as president of the United States. But there he is, a year after his inauguration, waging a war of words with the world from behind the Resolute desk in the Oval Office. He has denigrated fellow citizens and international allies; threatened nuclear war; undermined public faith in the judiciary, Congress, and the media; found some “very fine people” at a gathering of neo-Nazis; and dispensed utterly with the idea of presidential gravitas.In fact, there’s been so much public attention paid to his tweets, to his character and temperament, to the ongoing investigations into how he came to power, that close scrutiny has sometimes lagged into what this administration has actually done.In brief, it’s bad. Here’s a quick look.Internationally, Trump has only partly translated his narrow and historically fraught “America first” campaign rhetoric into policy. Despite some early drama over NATO’s budget, Trump has followed a fairly traditional policy of supporting the postwar alliance. His oft-stated desire for better relations with Vladimir Putin stalled over broad condemnation of Russian meddling in the 2016 election, and Trump signed legislation imposing sanctions on Russia (with some reservations) and also approved selling lethal weapons to help Ukraine fend off pro-Russia separatists.The president no doubt deserves some of the credit for routing Islamic State from strongholds in Iraq and Syria, although those victories were built on decisions made by military planners during the Obama administration.But Trump has rattled sabers with North Korea (bragging about the size of his “nuclear button”), threatened the international deal to limit Iranian nuclear development, and withdrawn the U.S. from a Pacific Rim trade pact (and now has his sights set on NAFTA, a function of his ill-advised protectionist views of trade). He has been less than supportive of the United Nations, withdrawing the U.S. from UNESCO and cutting aid to the agency that works with Palestinian refugees, among other things. His decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital seems certain to damage the prospects for peace in the region.Domestically, Trump has embraced a scorched-earth attitude toward regulations on businesses. He has failed to fill positions across his administration while simultaneously appointing foxes to oversee such henhouses as the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Education and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. He has sought to weaken worker and consumer protections, to end policies aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions, to shrink public lands (including slashing the size of national monuments), while seeking to open more federally controlled land and waters to oil, gas and other exploitative industries. His nationalistic opposition to immigration, his decision to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program and his draconian approach to immigration enforcement have made a broken system worse.Trump inherited an economy that, while growing slowly, was fundamentally strong, with steadily rising consumer and business confidence, an epic bull run in the stock market, low unemployment, rebounding median incomes and modestly improving wages. Those trends have continued on his watch, boosted by his business-friendly agenda, but so has the grossly unequal distribution of gains that has sustained wide income inequality. Trump’s policies have exacerbated those problems—the tax cut he championed disproportionately favored high-income families and businesses, and his administration’s relentless attacks on the Affordable Care Act helped cause millions more Americans to go uninsured in 2017—the biggest increase since the ACA passed in 2010.Trump has been successful in quietly reshaping the judiciary. The Senate has confirmed 23 judicial nominees, including Supreme Court Justice Neil M. Gorsuch. Although the American Bar Assn. rated a handful of the nominees not qualified, most are the sort of well-credentialed conservative jurists that any Republican president would be likely to appoint. But Trump has also pushed a racially tinged and outmoded view of law and order, which has played out with directives by Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions to end federal oversight of troubled police departments, endorse asset forfeiture from people not convicted of crimes and reverse Obama administration sentencing reforms by seeking harsher sentences for drug crimes.So where is the nation after the first year of President Trump? Paying attention, in some cases, to the wrong things. Lies and provocations and Twitter rants are only one part of this presidency. Another is the ongoing effort to dismantle not just government agencies but the mission of government itself.1. Which of the following statements is true?2. Which of the following is an embodiment of Trumps’ scorched-earth attitude toward regulations on businesses?3. It can be inferred from the passage ________.4. Which of the following might undermine public faith in the judiciary?5. What is the author’s attitude toward the first year of President Trump?

The Earth Charter (EC) is an invaluable resource for Education for Sustainable Development (ESD), which outlines global values and principles for a sustainable peaceful earth. For these values and principles to be adopted and for action to be taken, however, people need to root them in their own context and local culture.The Shangri-la Institute for Sustainable Communities (SISC) has been working with local communities in different parts of China to facilitate ESD by reconnecting with local culture and engaging with the principles of the Earth Charter. Through a range of project activities communities are engaged in cultural preservation and re-connection with local traditional culture. The Earth Charter can be used as a tool in this process. Assessment and evaluation of the principles outlined in the Earth Charter encourages communities to contemplate and confirm their traditional cultural values. By situating these individual or community values within the scope of global values for Sustainable Development (SD), communities assess the relevance of traditional knowledge, and consider how to update or adapt values and practices in order to live more sustainable lives.The integration of local and global principles for sustainability into all aspects of education and learning is necessary if we are to make the changes needed for global sustainability. The learning should not just occur in schools, but in formal, non-formal and informal learning settings and should involve all sectors of society: teachers and community educators, community members, young people, governments, monasteries or other community organizations, businesses and corporations—all need to participate for the changes in thinking and action to be meaningful and effective at a local, regional and global level. This integration requires the facilitation of a learning process that develops the values, knowledge and skills needed for sustainable development. The learning needs to take a global perspective and also link to the local context so that localized and appropriate action can be taken on a global scale. By considering traditional Eastern cultural values, belief systems and traditional knowledge and combining these with global values, we can also find a new approach: one which balances the individualism, and rights based approach of the West, with the more collective mindset, and responsibilities based approach of Eastern philosophies and cultures.In the face of the current global social and ecological crises caused by modernity, local culture and traditions offer inspiration for us to find solutions to many of the problems. Although this wisdom and philosophy was realized thousands of years ago, much remains relevant to the crisis the world faces today. The emphasis in traditional Chinese philosophy on harmony with nature, with our surroundings and within ourselves, our families, our communities and as one interconnected Earth, provides a useful way of understanding the worldview embedded in ESD and the Earth Charter. The emphasis on the collective and individual learning for the good of the collective, contrasts with the importance of the individual and emphasis on the self in modern society, and can be valuable to the implementation of the ESD and EC principles, which need a collective effort. By taking a balanced approach between the two worldviews, ESD can be facilitated. Individuals are given opportunities to fulfill their potential and nurture the knowledge, skills and values needed to become informed, responsible, active and capable citizens of the earth, whilst at the same time keeping a global perspective and contributing to collective learning and action.Reconnecting with local culture not only allows people to better understand their heritage and where they come from, but also provides a basis for linking to the global community. By reconnecting with local culture and by learning about other cultures and traditions, the principles embedded in ESD and the EC can be strengthened, and methods for implementing these principles within the local and global context can be harnessed, providing spiritual and moral education for sustainable living.1. When the writer discusses the “rooting of global values”, the writer is thinking that .2. When the writer encourages communities to “confirm” and “reconnect” with their local traditional cultures, the writer is attempting to .3. The writer believes that traditional Chinese culture is of great benefit to Education for Sustainable Development because .4. The learning process of education for sustainable development involves .5. The main thesis of this essay is that to succeed in Education for Sustainable Development, societies need to .

Picture a coffee shop in a big city almost anywhere on earth. It is filled with stylish, firm-bodied people aged under 50 drinking $5 coffees. Fresh from yoga class, they are reading New Yorker magazine articles about inequality before returning to their tiny $1.5m apartments. This is the cultural elite—or what Elizabeth Currid-Halkett, professor of public policy at the University of Southern California, calls the “aspirational class”. Her book The Sum of Small Things anatomises it using fascinating American consumption data. Currid-Halkett herself is a class member, and yet she helps explain why the cultural elite is so despised as to have generated a global political movement against it. Though Trump is the unmentioned elephant in the room in her book, you think of him on almost every page as the antithesis of this class—indeed, in the minds of his supporters, as the antidote to it.Trump likes to tag the cultural elite as “the elite” but not all class members are rich. Adjunct professors, NGO workers and unemployed screenwriters belong alongside Mark Zuckerberg. Rather, what defines the cultural elite is education. Most of its members went to brand-name universities, and consider themselves deserving rather than entitled. They believe in facts and experts. Most grew up comfortably off in the post-1970s boom. Their education is their insurance policy and, so almost whatever their income, they suffer less economic anxiety than older or lesser educated people. Their political utopia is high-tax, egalitarian, feminist and green. They aim to be “better humans” rather than simply rich, writes Currid-Halkett. Though often too busy to be happy, they feel good about themselves. The inequality they see everywhere is never their fault.When it comes to consumption, the cultural elite’s core belief is a scorn for stuff. Branded goods no longer convey status now that any old oaf can buy them. The top 10 per cent of American earners (which includes most of the cultural elite) spends a shrinking slice of its income on cars, TVs and household items, things that the middle class still values. With the sharing economy taking off, hipsters barely own anything at all. Forget shared bikes—Americans can now rent designer dresses.What stuff the cultural elite does buy is used to adorn their bodies. Living in dense cities where everyone is on display, they need expensive clothes. New Yorkers in particular also have watch fetishes. In 2010 they “spent about 27 times more on watches as a share of total expenditures than everyone else—no city even compares”, writes Currid-Halkett in a typically delicious titbit.The cultural elite spends relatively little on beauty products, but splurges on exercise, because it thinks that bodies (like food) should look natural. The thin, toned body expresses this class’s worldview: even leisure must be productive. Instead of trawling shopping malls, class members narrate their family hikes on Facebook.These people maximise what Currid-Halkett calls “inconspicuous consumption”: things you cannot see. They buy nannies to save time, elite magazines to feed their brains and status, and education to propel their children upwards. “The top 1-5 per cent [of American earners] spend on average 5 per cent of their total expenditures on education, while the middle class barely spends 1 per cent,” writes Currid-Halkett. Her intellectual ancestor Thorstein Veblen, in his 1899 study The Theory of the Leisure Class, portrayed WASPs frittering away money, but today’s cultural elite is engaged in a ruthless project to reproduce its social position. Barring some huge economic shift, today’s breastfed elite toddlers will be the elite of 2050. The meritocracy is becoming hereditary.This is where the cultural elite’s self-image diverges from the view held by its critics. Trump voters see a class that talks equality while living privilege and exuding contempt. Here are Greenpeace members who are always on planes, proclaiming their goodness instead of improving the world. Maybe if everyone shopped at Whole Foods (the upscale grocery chain nicknamed “Whole Paycheck”) the world would improve, suggests Currid-Halkett. But there’s a counterargument: if everyone shopped at Whole Foods, it would lose its status, and the cultural elite would have to shop elsewhere.These people live in places and ways that hardly anyone else can afford. The only poor people they know are their nannies. Their New Yorker subscriptions might cost just $90, but are usually premised on expensive educations.Though Currid-Halkett is too polite to do more than hint at this, class members regard outsiders with either scorn or pity. Overproductive themselves, they look down on iPad parents, the obese and the uninformed. Many even mock their own parents as kitsch provincials. In fact, long before Trump became president, he was the exemplar of everything the cultural elite abhors. His hair and orange skin scream artificiality. He loves buying stuff. He is fat and ignorant. He thinks exercise depletes the body. He gets his information from cable TV.No wonder the key rite of cultural-elite conversation has become Trump-dissing. And so the cultural wars that got him elected rage on.1. What is Professor Currid-Halkett’s book The Sum of Small Things about?2. Which of the following statements about the cultural elite is true?3. According to Currid-Halkett, which of the following can be seen as inconspicuous consumption?4. Trump voters think the cultural elite are people who .5. The author’s attitude toward the cultural elite can best be described as .

Last week, universities in England were preparing reports on how they have diversified their student populations. These reports will be submitted to the director of fair access at the Office for Students. My university, King’s College London, will report, happily, that our undergraduate intake is now 77% state school, more than 52% ethnic minority and has the fastest growing population of low-income students in the Russell Group.And what has made all this progress and vital work possible? The very thing that many believe to be the enemy of educational opportunity: tuition fees.When, in 2012, the coalition government introduced the then £9,000 fee regime, what’s little known is that it came with serious regulatory machinery to secure gains in access and participation. As a result, higher tuition fees have leveraged £800m into schemes and bursaries for poorer students.The system, then, acts in a redistributive way. Alongside the poorest, its beneficiaries include refugees, forced migrants, care leavers and “estranged students” (those not supported by their parents). Thanks to the tuition fee regime, programmes designed to widen intake are now delivered at every single university. Education centres, homework clubs, tutoring by PhD students, summer schools and teacher training events are just some of the initiatives under way across the country. It’s a shame that this work does not feature more in the debates the Augar review of post-18 education funding in England.The 2016 Labour party manifesto proposed the abolition of tuition fees, while there are suggestions that the Augar review will recommend a significant reduction. Both proposals endanger vital widening participation resources and infrastructure. In fact, without compensatory safeguards, universities will have to dismantle programmes and initiatives, and dismiss staff who support students to fulfil their ambitions. The loss will be massive and will hurt a generation of young people and their communities.In the past few decades, there has been a transformation in who gets to become a graduate. Now, more than one in three 18-year-olds are studying in higher education. Entry rates have increased in 95% of parliamentary constituencies since 2006. And perhaps, most hearteningly, in 2017 English pupils receiving free school meals were 83% more likely to go to university than they were in 2006.However, this picture does vary by region. While in 2017 41.8% of 18-year-olds in London went to university, only 28.9% of the same population in the south-west and 30.3% in the north-east did. In terms of undergraduates from black and minority ethnic groups, the numbers rose by 38% between 2007-08 and 2015-16.While widening participation is concerned with all university attendees, the fair access debate focuses on who gets to study at the most selective institutions. Here, progress has been much slower. Access to Oxbridge, for instance, is moving at glacial speed, though there are green shoots, with programmes such as the Lady Margaret Hall foundation year and University College Oxford’s Opportunity Programme showing some lateral thinking. Change must come at these universities—and others not performing well that still seem to avoid the glare of press scrutiny.But if you abolish tuition fees you also abolish the cash that provides the means to support low-income and underrepresented students. And there is scant evidence that higher fees have deterred less-advantaged young people.There are less drastic changes that would help. These include a recasting of the current regime as a graduate tax to relieve the sense of debt burden, a grace period on interest rates while studying and a block on early repayment. Most fundamentally, a reintroduction of maintenance grants to the poorest learners gives a powerful message that the government wants these students to go to university and significantly reduces the strain of their living costs.When the fruits of higher education are fairly distributed, I will be happy to see a free system. Until that day, tuition fees are a smart and socially just way to ensure the widest range of students.1. What might be the best title of the passage?2. What does “bursanes” mean in paragraph 3?3. What does the author refer to by “the fruits of higher education” in the last paragraph?4. What does paragraph 2 mean?5. What can be inferred from the passage?

For well over a century, schoolchildren have greeted the dawning of the summer break with joy. Many aspects of the Victorian school system—blackboards, easels and corporal punishment—have fallen by the wayside. But the long summer holiday, originally adopted in order to allow children to help with the harvest, has remained a fixture of the education system long after child labour was outlawed in the UK.It’s tempting to romanticise the extended break as a precious time out from the pressure of tests, a chance for children to enjoy spending time with their friends and to learn important life skills outside the classroom. But as the holidays draw to a close, a report from the children’s commissioner for England warns of important shifts in the way children spend their summer holidays.In this age of screens and social media, children are spending less time playing outside and more online, with many leading a “battery hen existence”. On average, children from five to 15 years old spend almost three hours a day online over the weekend, but just four hours a week playing outside—half the time that their parents did. There are inevitable consequences: research suggests children experience “dramatic and significant” reductions in their fitness over the summer break.Unsurprisingly, it is children from poorer backgrounds whose fitness suffers the most. Low-income parents face a greater struggle to make ends meet during the long school holiday than in termtime: half say they stay in more often during the school holidays than in term time because of the expense of taking children out for summer activities. As safety concerns mean parents are less likely than ever to let their children play outside unsupervised, it is the children of more affluent parents who are the most likely to stay active, thanks to expensive camps and sports courses.There are other pressures on the family budget: parents whose children normally get free school meals have to somehow meet the extra food costs, estimated to be £30-£40 a week for each child. Two in five low-income parents say they skip meals over the summer break to ensure they’re able to feed their children and, according to the Trussell Trust, the use of food bank spikes every summer.The children’s commissioner makes a number of sensible recommendations, including providing more funding for subsidised summer holiday clubs and meals for children from disadvantaged backgrounds. The government should also consider increasing benefits for low-income parents over the summer break.But another, complementary measure should also be on the table. There’s an established body of research from both the US and the UK that shows children forget some of what they have learned over the long summer break—the “summer slide”—and that this learning loss is, again, biggest for children from poorer backgrounds, In other words, the long summer break comes with an inequality double whammy: it increases the social gap not just in terms of physical health and fitness, but in educational attainment too.Shortening the summer break to four weeks could help reduce these effects. One method would be to restructure the existing school year into five eight-week terms—two before Christmas, and three after—each separated by a two-week holiday. This would give teachers and children a similar amount of holiday, just spaced more evenly over the year. And it would make life easier for all parents who struggle to find childcare for six weeks on the trot. Currently, school term dates are set at the discretion of councils. Some councils, such as the Isle of Wight and Nottinghamshire, will be experimenting with a shorter break next summer. Were the government to roll out a shorter break nationally, it would prompt sighs of relief from many working parents. The long summer break is a relic that disadvantages poorer children and makes life difficult for modern working families. Its time is long past.1. In the passage, the use of the phrase “battery hen existence” is meant to describe the way that .2. The most accurate title for this article would be .3. Which of the following disadvantages of holidays is NOT mentioned in the passage?4. The writer’s attitude towards school holidays is .5. Much of the motivation for making a change in the holiday system is .

Man is born naked but is everywhere in clothes (or their symbolic equivalents). We cannot tell how this came to be, but we can say something about why it should be so and what it means.Decorating, covering, uncovering or otherwise altering the human form in accordance with social notions of everyday propriety or sacred dress, beauty or solemnity, status or changes in status, or on occasion of the violation and inversion of such notions, seems to have been a concern of every human society of which we have knowledge. This objectively universal fact is associated with another of a more subjective nature—that the surface of the body seems not only to be the boundary of the individual as a biological and psychological entity but as the frontier of the social self as well. As these two entities are quite different, and as cultures differ widely in the ways they define both, the relation between them is highly problematic. The problems involved, however, are ones that all societies must solve in one way or as individuals, that is, of integrating them into the societies to which they belong not only as children but throughout their lives.The surface of the body, as the common frontier of society, the social self, and the psycho-biological individual becomes the symbolic stage upon which the drama of socialization is enacted and bodily adornment (in all its culturally multifarious forms, from body-painting to clothing and from feather head-dresses to cosmetics) become the language through which it is expressed. The adornment and public presentation of the body, however inconsequential or even frivolous a business it may appear to individuals, is for cultures a serious matter; that the feeling of being in harmony with fashion gives man a measure of security he rarely derives from his religion. The seriousness with which we take questions of dress and appearance is betrayed by the way we regard not taking them seriously as an index, either of a “serious” disposition or of serious psychological problems. As Lord Chesterfield remarked:Dress is a very foolish thing; and yet it is a very foolish thing for a man not to be well dressed, according to his rank and way of life; and it is so far from being a disparagement to any man’s understanding, that it is rather a proof of it, to be as well dressed as those whom he lives with: the difference in this case, between a man of sense and a fop, is, that the fop values himself upon his dress; and the man of sense laughs at it, at the same time that he knows that he must not neglect it. The most significant point of this passage is not the explicit assertion that a man of sense should regard dress with a mixture of contempt and attentiveness, but the implicit claim that by doing so, and thus maintaining his appearance in a way compatible with “those he lives with,” he defines himself as a man of sense. The uneasy ambivalence of the man of sense, whose “sense” consists in conforming to a practice he laughs at, is the consciousness of a truth that seems as scandalous today as it did in the eighteenth century. This culture, which we neither understand nor control, is not only the necessary medium through which we communicate our social status, attitudes, desires, beliefs and ideals (in short, our identities) to others, but also to a large extent constitutes these identities, in ways in which we are compelled to conform regardless of our self-consciousness or even our contempt. Dress and bodily adornment constitute one such cultural medium, perhaps the most specialized in the shaping and communication of personal and social identity. The Kayapo natives of Brazil possess a quite elaborate code of what could be called “dress”, a fact which might escape notice by a casual Western observer because it does not involve the use of clothing. There are, however, very few Western observers, including the anthropologist, who have ever taken the trouble to go beyond the superficial recording of such exotic paraphernalia to inquire into the system of meanings and values which it evokes for its wearers. A closer look at the Kayapo bodily adornment discloses that the apparently naked savage is as fully covered in a fabric of cultural meaning as the most elaborately draped Victorian lady or gentleman. A well turned out adult Kayapo male, with his large lower-lip plug, penis sheath, large holes pierced through the ear lobes from which hang small strings of beads, overall body paint in red and black patterns, plucked eyebrows, eyelashes and facial hair, and head shaved to a point at the crown with the hair left long at the sides and back, could on the other hand hardly leave the most insensitive traveler with the impression that bodily adornment is a neglected art among the Kayapo.1. According to the passage, which of the following statements is NOT true?2. The term fop is utilized by the author to establish .3. In the last paragraph, the case study about the Kayapo is meant to .4. According to the passage, if a woman wore the corset and hoop skirt of a Victorian woman in today’s society then she .5. What is the passage meant to do?

Fritz Lang’s 1927 film Metropolis translated social divisions and conflicts into urban form, drawing inspiration from metropolitan Manhattan. He also drew on visions of the future city from such architects and artists as Antonio Sant Elia, Le Corbusier, and Hugh Ferris. For modern architects, a functionalist division of urban space became a key tenet of design, and the utopian vision of modernist urban designs was predicated on a separation of spaces for living, working, and recreation. These divisions were typically horizontal, but some of the more fantastic plans applied these principles vertically as well. Lang, for instance, transformed this functional division vertically, and a strict vertical hierarchy structure in his Metropolis. Mid-air bridges and train lines spawn the yawning canyons between towering skyscrapers. The upper classes live in the upper reaches, in graciously partitioned spaces of play and repose. Underground, far from the light of day, are two levels of austerely delineated space. There are the worker’s tenements, where the bodies that labor for the wealthy reside. In addition, there are the machine rooms, where they work and occasionally die as they labor to keep the machinery of the city running. The New Tower of Babel, a skyscraper dominating the skyline, provides an axis for the vertical hierarchy. It is the control center for the entire city, with main thorough fares radiating from it, while its internal mechanisms plunge down into the lowest levels. The subterranean tenements and machine rooms form part of this rational axis. Insofar as the New Tower of Babel serves as the axis for this fundamentally vertical gesture, the entire city appears as one great tower.Now the biblical Tower of Babel that this structure evokes was in fact a ziggurat, a species of pyramid that one ascended along a path that spiraled up its perimeter to the apex. The Tower of Babel thus combines two diﬀerent, potentially contradictory architectural structurations of movement: the tower and the labyrinth. In Greek mythology, the labyrinth was the maze built by the first architect Daedalus at the behest of a sovereign, Minos, in order to hide his wife’s monstrous offspring. At the center of the labyrinth dwelled the Minotaur, half bull, half man. Each year Minos forced young men and women into the maze, where they invariably lost their way and fell prey to the Minotaur. The Labyrinth implies both disorientation and hybridization. It spatially poses the question of “where?” and “who?” but offers only cryptic replies. In contrast to the Labyrinth, the tower unequivocally marks a place and acts as a beacon, as if to answer the question posed by the Labyrinth: “Where?” “Here!” And, in response to the question of confused identity or tangled origins, the Tower poses a unitary and unifying entity. In effect, the Tower of Babel can be read as an architecture that superimposes the convoluted question mark of the Labyrinth upon the soaring exclamation mark of the Tower. It is a figure that rectifies and twists spatial orientations, actions, and identities.In the Judeo-Christian tradition, the Tower of Babel came to represent man’s hubris, his attempt to ascend to the level of God. Hence it supplied an apt metaphor for modernity, when man really did lay claim to godlike powers, which pushed God aside and proclaimed Him dead, only to discover that human works did not prove a suffcient replacement for divinity. This is ostensibly how Metropolis conjures forth the Tower of Babel: as an icon for the inevitable failure of the modern proiect.While the giant city of Metropolis in Lang’s film is structured around the New Tower of Babel, it also offers a labyrinth: twisting passages and catacombs beneath the city, at once spaces of danger, secrecy, and safety. Yet even as these labyrinthine structures appear to unravel the vertical authority of the city, they are inseparable from it. The city generates them and imparts intensity to them. Ultimately even the rational axis of the New Tower partakes of the labyrinth. The austere worker housing and the machine rooms that form part of its modern machinery are also shadowy, smoky, and are connected to the twisting underground catacombs. In other words, if Lang’s Metropolis can be understood as a Tower of Babel, it is because it combines tower and labyrinth in specific ways. Another dominant building in the film, the Gothic Cathedral, also combines tower and labyrinth and provides some insights into the specificity of Lang’s Metropolis.Significantly, in medieval Europe, the soaring Gothic cathedrals were imagined as Towers of Babel, and on their floors, labyrinthine symbols of religious perambulation were etched. They thus combined a heavenward gesture with the convoluted motion of ritual. In circles of architecture and urban planning in 1920s Germany, however, the cathedral took on another meaning. It was taken as the model for a truly German version of the American skyscraper. Many believed that one massive central building in each city, in the manner of the cathedral, was preferable to the American model of unbridled commercial growth. In this sense, the cathedral promised a way to produce a German modernity free of foreign influence.1. What can be inferred from paragraph one?2. Which of the following statements are NOT true about the “tower” and “labyrinth” in paragraph 2?3. The tone in the last paragraph concerning German views on American skyscrapers can be described as ________.4. Which source material is NOT drawn upon as examples in this passage?5. What is the best title for the passage?

Directions: Please summarize this article in English in about 200 words.At the age of 17, he began dissecting corpses from the church graveyard. Between the years 1508 and 1512 he painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome. Michelangelo Buonarroti—known by his first name the world over as the singular artistic genius, sculptor and architect—was also an anatomist, a secret he concealed by destroying almost all of his anatomical sketches and notes. Now, 500 years after he drew them, his hidden anatomical illustrations have been found—painted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, cleverly concealed from the eyes of Pope Julius II and countless religious worshipers, historians, and art lovers for centuries—inside the body of God.This is the conclusion of Ian Suk and Rafael Tamargo, in their paper in the May 2010 issue of the scientific journal Neurosurgery. Suk and Tamargo are experts in neuroanatomy at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland. In 1990, physician Frank Meshberger published a paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association deciphering Michelangelo’s imagery with the stunning recognition that the depiction of God and Adam in The Creation of Man in the central panel on the ceiling included a perfect anatomical illustration of the human brain in cross section. Meshberger speculates that Michelangelo surrounded God with a shroud representing the human brain to suggest that God was endowing Adam not only with life, but also with supreme human intelligence. Now in another panel, The Separation of Light from Darkness, Suk and Tamargo have found more. Leading up the center of God’s chest and forming his throat, the researchers have found a precise depiction of the human spinal cord and brain stem.Is the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel a 500 year-old puzzle that is only now beginning to be solved? What was Michelangelo saying by construction the voice box of God out of the brain stem of man? Is it a sacrilege or homage? It took Michelangelo four years to complete the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. He proceeded from east to west, starting from the entrance of the Chapel to finish above the altar. The last panel he painted depicts God separating light from darkness. This is where the researchers report that Michelangelo hid the human brain stem, eyes and optic nerve of man inside the figure of God directly above the altar. Art critics and historians have long puzzled over the odd anatomical irregularities in Michelangelo’s depiction of God’s neck in this panel, and by the discordant lighting in the region. The figures in the fresco are illuminated diagonally from the lower left, but God’s neck, highlighted as if in a spotlight, is luminated straight-on and slightly from the right. How does one reconcile such clumsiness by the world’s master of human anatomy and skilled portrayer of light with bungling the image of God above the altar? Suk and Tamargo propose that the hideous goiter-disfigured neck of God is not a mistake, but rather a hidden message. They argue that nowhere else in any of the other figures did Michelangelo foul up his anatomically correct rendering of the human neck. They show that if one superimposes a detail of God’s odd lumpy neck in the Separating of Light and Darkness on a photograph of the human brain as seen from below, the lines of God’s neck trace precisely the features of the human brain.There is something else odd of about this picture. A roll of fabric extends up the center of God’s robe in a peculiar manner. The clothing is bunched up here as is seen nowhere else, and the fold clashes with what would be the natural drape of fabric over God’s torso. In fact, they observe, it is the human spinal cord, ascending to the brain stem in God’s neck. At God’s waist, the robe twists again in a peculiar crumpled manner, revealing the optic nerves from two eyes, precisely as Leonardo Da Vinci had shown them in his illustration of 1487. Da Vinci and Michelangelo were contemporaries and well acquainted with each other’s work.The mystery is whether these neuroanatomical features are hidden messages or whether the Sistione Chapel is a Roshach test upon which anyone can extract an image that is meaningful to themselves. The authors of the paper are, after all, neuroanatomists. The neuroanatomy they see on the ceiling may be nothing more than the man on the moon. But Michelangelo also depicted other anatomical features elsewhere in the ceiling, according to other scholars; notably the kidney, which was familiar to Michelangelo and was of special interest to him as he suffered from kidney stones.If the hidden figures are intentional, what do they mean? The authors resist speculation, but a great artist does not merely reproduce an object in a work of art, he or she evokes meaning through symbolism. Is Separation of Light from Darkness an artistic comment on the enduring clash between science and religion? Recall that this was the age when the monk Copernicus was denounced by the Church for theorizing that the Earth revolved around the sun. It was a period of struggle between scientific observation and the authority of the Church, and a time of intense conflict between Protestants and Catholics.It is no secret that Michelangelo’s relationship with the Catholic Church became strained. The artist was a simple man, but he grew to detest the opulence and corruption of the Church. In two places in the masterpiece, Michelangelo left self portraits—both of them depicting himself in torture. He gave his own face to Saint Bartholomew’s body martyred by being skinned alive, and to the severed head of Holofemes, who was seduced and beheaded by Judith.Michelangelo was a devout person, but later in life he developed a belief in Spiritualism, for which he was condemned by Pope Paul IV. The fundamental tenet of Spiritualism is that the path to God can be found not exclusively through the Church, but through direct communication with God. Pope Paul IV interpreted Michelangelo’s Last Judgment, painted on the wall of the Sistine Chapel 20 years after completing the ceiling, as defaming the church by suggesting that Jesus and those around him communicated with God directly without need of Church. He suspended Michelangelo’s pension and had fig leaves painted over the nudes in the fresco. According to the artists wishes, Michelangelo’s body is not buried on the grounds of the Vatican, but is instead interred in a tomb in Florence.Perhaps the meaning in the Sistine Chapel is not of God giving intelligence to Adam, but rather that intelligence and observation and the bodily organ that makes them possible(i.e. the brain) lead direct to God without the necessity of Church. The material is rich for speculation and the new findings will doubtlessly spark endless interpretation. We may never know the truth, but in Separation of Light form Darkness, Michelangelo’s masterpiece combines the worlds of art, religion, science and faith in a provocative and awe inspiring work of art, which may also be a mirror.

Bob enjoys breakfasts of caviar, dips in his own saltwater pool and biweekly foot messages on the beach. A charmed life, perhaps, but you could say he deserves it: Bod spends a lot of his time interacting with schoolchildren on his native island of Curasao, serving as an emissary for conservation. Bob, you see, is a flamingo.Veterinarian Odette Doest rescued Bob in 2016, after the bird slammed into a hotel window and got a concussion. While rehabilitating the bird at her nonprofit wildlife sanctuary, Fundashon Dier en Onderwijs Cariben (Foundation for Animals and Education in the Caribbean), Doest discovered that Bob previously had been domesticated: He was very captive birds, which would have impaired his ability to catch food in the wild.For those reasons, Doest decided to keep him as an educational animal at her sanctuary, alongside some 90 other animals. He lives on her property with, among others, a caracara, a species of tropical falcon; a donkey; a bevy of cats and dogs; and until their deaths, two naughty pelicans that were always trying to escape. “I’ve stopped counting,” Doest admits. (Read about the surprising origin of American flamingos.) When Doest began taking the then nameless bird on her foundation’s weekly visits to schools and other community gathering spots on the Dutch Caribbean isle, the flamingo became an instant celebrity. Media appearances followed, and when asked the bird’s name during a radio interview, Doest blurted out “Bob”. The name stuck.“Bob’s like the hot item-everyone wants Bob,” Doest says. That’s because most people have never seen such an elegant, colorful bird up close, much less one that’s so friendly. “When Bob starts flapping his wings,” she says, “children start to flap their arms, and so do grown-ups. They are so mesmerized by his beauty."Just don’t try to take a Bobselfie. “That’s not what Bob’s about,” Doest says firmly. “I have Bob for people to think about nature and the environment, and how a slight change in their habits can have a big impact on nature around us.”That could mean opting for reusable cups instead of plastic bottles or skipping the balloons at a birthday party or picking up trash on the beach—all things Doest says children take to heart because they’re so dazzled by Bob.“She’s using him to tell a bigger story,” says Jasper Doest, a Netherlands-based photographer and Odette’s cousin who has chronicled the bird’s adventures for three years. “He by himself would just be a flamingo, and without Bob, she would not have that emblematic animal that gives her the attention to do her educational work.”Jasper Doest first got the idea to photograph Bob when the bird sauntered into his bedroom at Odette’s house early one morning. “He walks around like he’s king,” Jasper says. “We see a lot of gloom-and-doom stories. This was a great chance to show a positive side.”At home, Bob plays another educational role: He regularly takes other rehab flamingos under his wing, showing them how to eat from a bucket, for example. Odette says his presence helps newly arrived flamingos stay calm. Bob lives in a room in Odette’s house called the “bird room,” sharing the space with two other permanent flamingo rescues, George and Thomas. They each had to have a wing amputated after serious injuries—George from a dog bite and Thomas possibly from a feral animal or fishing gear—making it impossible for them to return to the wild.Many of Odette’s rescued birds were entangled in fishing lines, an environmental threat that she highlights in her talks, along with plastic pollution, coral reef degradation, and loss of mangrove forests to tourism development. As a local who speaks Curacao’s language, Papiamento, Odette can connect with children on a level others might not.It can be difficult to determine the impact of any education program, but Odette says students remember her lessons. When a female flamingo died recently after getting tangled in fishing line, Odette brought the line to a school and showed the kids. She told them: “She was just as beautiful as Bob, just as big and powerful and healthy, but because someone left a fishing line out, she’s dead.” Weeks later, teachers told her the children were still talking about it.Odette encourages kids to be proud of their native wildlife—including a transient population of American flamingos, which number 400 to 600 in Curacao and often are seen foraging among the island’s salt flats, where they use their webbed feet to stir up the crustaceans and algae that give them their characteristic pink color.American flamingos were hunted nearly to oblivion for food and feathers during the late 1800s, when the species dipped to a low of about 10,000 animals restricted to a single Bahamian island. American flamingos have since rebounded throughout the Caribbean, Venezuela, and the southern United States. One location now has more than 50,000 nesting pairs, according to Jerry Lorenz, a flamingo expert and director of research at Audubon, Florida.Lorenz says that American flamingos generally are sociable with people, making rescued birds that can’t be returned to the wild “wonderful” ambassadors for wildlife conservation. Busch Gardens Tampa Bay, in Florida, had an amiable Chilean flamingo, Pinky, that would greet guests at the park—and particularly liked kids, he says.Odette estimates that Bob is 15 years old. Flamingos have been recorded living up to 50 years in the wild—and they likely can live longer in captivity, Lorenz says—so Jasper believes that he has many years left to document this Caribbean odd couple.“I have pictures in my mind Odette being an old lady in a rocking chair,” he says, laughing, with flamingos all around her.

What a beautiful city. Lights blinking serenely, highways and rivers flowing bridges on guard like giant eagles. And playgrounds, playgrounds everywhere. New York City is already on the map-specifically, the huge permanent Panorama that takes up an entire gallery at the Queens Museum, displaying all 895,000 buildings in the five boroughs. The organizers of the NYC2012 bid took the Olympic evaluation committee to the Panorama yesterday to demonstrate what this city would look like during a Summer Games—with just a nip here, a tuck there and, oh, by the way, a humongous stadium that would bring Western civilization and a bigger cash flow to the West Side of Manhattan. Yesterday these very able organizers trotted out fabled athletes like Billie Jean King, Grete Wait, Bill Bradley, Nadia Comaneci, Bart Connor, Bob Beamon, Janet Evans and Eamonn Coghlan, who all testified that New York would be a grand host in 2012 and an even better playground in the years afterward. Even with vital needs for more schools, more hospitals, it is hard not to be tantalized by more sports facilities when King tells how her apprenticeship on the public courts of Long Beach, Calif, led directly to her glories at the United States Open in Forest His and Flushing Meadows. It is hard not to feel the international dynamics of the Olympics when Bradley relates how he used his minimal Russian to trash-talk a Soviet player at the 1964 Summer Games, before he became a member of the championship Knicks of melancholy and ancient memory. It is hard not to be pulled into the sporting energy of New York when Waitz recalls her first New York marathon, how she plodded through the quiet streets of Queers before crossing the Queensboro bridge. “I’m dying,” she said, recalling that wall of sound in Manhattan, which made her think, “Are they talking to me?” They were indeed talking to her, urging her to run faster. King and Bradley agreed that there was something in the New York air—maybe the legendary New York echo, the one that talks back—that makes people run faster, leap higher, think quicker. Does any of this mean New York needs to be the host of the 2012 Summer Games? The organizers are putting on an impressive dog-and-pony show in New York. Central Park always looks good in snow, but this time it balances out the gaudy and temporary stunt of the bright-orange “Gates”. Not needing gimmicks. New York already has the heady confidence of a city deeply involved in its sports teams. The International Olympic Committee’s scouts are inspecting the city, but most New Yorkers care more about whether Jason Giambi and Mike Piazza get their power back.The evaluation committee was taken out to Queens yesterday morning to visit the National Tennis Center. Despite the snowstorm Sunday night, the parking lots and walkways at the center were dry. “I had my five kids out there shoveling at 4 in the morning, paid them 1$ an hour,” said Jay Kriegel, the executive director of NYC2012, who was, perhaps, joking. The NYC2012 people even organized a sortie to Madison Square Garden, the proposed site of Olympic basketball in 2012. The Garden is run by the Dolan Cablevision people, who are fighting the three-in-one stadium plan, but the visit was gracious on all sides. Bradley, the former three-term senator from New Jersey, was at the Garden, where he used to push Jack Marin of the Baltimore Bullets and get free for backdoor layups. This time he shot baskets with the evaluation commission. There is apparently no I.O.C. law against that.The organizers are planning to build pools and whitewater canoe courses and equestrian centers that would theoretically benefit New Yorkers for generations. They make a very good presentation about the lasting value of the Games to any host city. “The I.O.C. does not want white elephants,” King said. To guarantee a lasting impact, the NYC2012 people have organized a Legacy Foundation, which started with a $75 million endowment. Andrew Kimball, the director of operations for NYC2012, addressed the evaluation committee and said legacy “is a critical issue for them.”The drawback is that this entire bid is hinged upon NYC2012’s insistence on building a multipurpose center with a retractable dome that would serve as convention center, indoor arena and Jets football stadium. “In fact, we are creating an entirely new neighborhood in New York City,” Kriegel said while overlooking the low-slung railroad yards and warehouses alongside the Hudson River.The organizers may have painted themselves into a corner by ignoring the prospect of an Olympic stadium on cheaper, more accessible open space in Queens. New York can always use better sports facilities. But this is one city that does not need the Summer Games to put itself on the map.

A college education provides lots of benefits. Those benefits include acquiring skills, identifying interests, learning about others across time and space, and establishing personal and professional connections. Abundant evidence exists that college graduates are more mature and self-confident, better citizens, healthier, wealthier and happier than individuals who do not have an undergraduate degree. As the cost of attendance has skyrocketed, however, students and their parents are focusing more and more on short-term considerations. Does college constitute a sound financial investment? Will a graduate get a good job with a high salary? In Will College Pay Off? Peter Cappelli, a professor of management and director of the Center for Human Resources at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, draws on existing data on employment and higher education in the United States to provide some surprising and provocative answers to these questions. In the process, he busts pervasive myths and misconceptions. Cappelli acknowledges that the average college graduate now earns considerably more than a person with a high school degree and that the gap between them is growing. He points out, however, that the “college wage premium,” the difference between the annual and lifetime earnings of college graduates and those who do not have an undergraduate degree, has been volatile in the United States over time. As recently as the 1960s and the 1970s, no gap existed. The current gap is higher for workers who have been out of college longer. Cappelli implies that it may well narrow sometime soon. In Italy and China, for example, college grads are no more successful than high school grads in the job market.According to Cappelli, the current labor force is overeducated—a controversial claim at variance with recommendations by the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness and other organizations dominated by corporate executives, who, Cappelli implies, have an interest in generating a surplus of qualified workers. The average worker, he indicates, has about 30% more education than his or her job requires. About 60% of parking lot attendants have some college education. To document this conclusion, Cappelli includes the results of a survey on employment outcomes 2010-2012 conducted by the Center for Economic and Policy Research.Cappelli insists as well that the assumptions about the (decidedly positive) average financial impact of a college education have limited utility. One reason is that graduation rates have declined significantly, with fewer than 60% of students, many of them laden with loans, getting a degree six years after they entered as freshman. There are also dramatic differences between the “sticker price” and the tuition and fees families actually pay. Also, the variation across schools and fields for those who do graduate is quite large. Additionally, there is an excessive emphasis these days on first jobs, even though they are no longer a reliable indicator of a successful career path.Equally important, Cappelli maintains that choosing a major in a field that is “hot”, an approach many politicians want to tie to financial support, is a “fool’s errand”. For one thing, labor markets are notoriously volatile. In response to the fracking boom, for example, enrollments in petroleum engineering have tripled; this huge surge, he predicts, will soon make the field as unattractive as it was in the 1980s. And, contrary to conventional wisdom, there does not appear to be a shortage of “STEM” (science, technology, engineering, math) grads. While the number of STEM grads is increasing dramatically, only 22% of recent undergraduates who completed majors in science and math got jobs using these skills. Cappelli also asserts that the increasingly pervasive tendency to push students into specialized, occupation-specific courses or majors—in animation, invasive cardiovascular technology, bakery science, turf and turf grass management, fire protection engineering—“may well be exactly the wrong advice”.Employers prefer to hire people who have decision-making, organizational and planning, problem solving, writing and communication skills. These skills, Cappelli suggests, are best learned in liberal arts programs. Currently derided by proponents of a more “practical” curriculum, "the liberal arts", he writes, “may make the greatest intellectual and learning demands on students of any field.” To be sure, a liberal arts degree does not come with a guarantee of a big financial payoff. But then again, despite implicit and explicit promises, neither do the much ballyhooed applied vocational degrees.Sending a child to college is often the most significant decision a family makes. A college degree can, and often does, pay substantial dividends (some of them financial) on that investment. But the relationship between the choice of a specific institution and a major and a lucrative and fulfilling first job and career is complicated. It has lots of moving parts. And so the best advice to prospective students may well be advice that has been around for a long time: after factoring in need-based financial and/or merit-based scholarships, go to the college with the best students and the most distinguished faculty. Major in what interests you most and what you are best at.

Directions: Please summarize this article in English in about 200 words.Finally, there’s the thorny question of the role of war in forager societies. Some scholars imagine ancient hunter-gatherer societies as peaceful paradises, and argue that war and violence began only with the Agricultural Revolution, when people started to accumulate private property. Other scholars maintain that the world of the ancient foragers was exceptionally cruel and violent. Both schools of thought are castles in the air, connected to the ground by the thin strings of meagre archaeological remains and anthropological observations of present-day foragers. The anthropological evidence is intriguing but very problematic. Foragers today live mainly in isolated and inhospitable areas such as the Arctic or the Kalahari, where population density is very low and opportunities to fight other people are limited. Moreover, in recent generations, foragers have been increasingly subject to the authority of modern states, which prevent the eruption of large-scale conflicts. European scholars have had only two opportunities to observe large and relatively dense populations of independent foragers: in northwestern North America in the nineteenth century, and in northern Australia during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Both Amerindian and Aboriginal Australian cultures witnessed frequent armed conflicts. It is debatable, however, whether this represents a timeless’ condition or the impact of European imperialism.The archaeological findings are both scarce and opaque. What telltale clues might remain of any war that took place tens of thousands of years ago? There were no fortifications and walls back then, no artillery shells or even swords and shields. An ancient spear point might have been used in war, but it could have been used in a hunt as well. Fossilized human bones are no less hard to interpret. A fracture might indicate a war wound or an accident. Nor is the absence of fractures and cuts on an ancient skeleton conclusive proof that the person to whom the skeleton belonged did not die a violent death. Death can be caused by trauma to soft tissues that leaves no marks on bone. Even more importantly, during pre-industrial warfare more than 90 per cent of war dead were killed by starvation, cold and disease rather than by weapons. Imagine that 30,000 years ago one tribe defeated its neighbor and expelled it from coveted foraging grounds. In the decisive battle, ten members of the defeated tribe were killed. In the following year, another hundred members of the losing tribe died from starvation, cold and disease. Archaeologists who come across these 110 skeletons may too easily conclude that most fell victim to some natural disaster. How would we be able to tell that they were all victims of a merciless war?Duly wared, we can now turn to the archaeological findings. In Portugal, a survey was made of 400 skeletons from the period immediately predating the Agricultural Revolution. Only two skeletons showed clear marks of violence. A third survey of 400 skeletons in the Danube Valley found evidence of violence on eighteen skeletons. Eighteen out of 400 may not sound like a lot, but it’s actually a very high percentage. If all eighteen indeed died violently, it means that about 4.5 percent of deaths in the ancient Danube Valley were caused by human violence. Today, the global average is only 1.5 per cent, taking war and crime together. During the twentieth century, only 5 per cent of human deaths resulted from human violence-and this is a century that saw the bloodiest wars and most massive genocides in history. If this revelation is typical, the ancient Danube Valley was as violent as the twentieth century.The depressing findings from the Danube Valley are supported by a string of equally depressing findings from other areas. At Jabl Sahaba in Sudan, a 12,000-year-old cemetery containing fifty nine skeletons was discovered. Arrowhead and spear points were found embedded in or lying near the bones of twenty-four skeletons, 40 percent of the find. The skeleton of one woman revealed twelve injuries. In Ofnet Cave in Bavaria, archaeologists discovered the remains of thirty eight foragers, mainly women and children, who had been thrown into two burial pits. Half the skeletons, including those of children and babies, bore clear signs of damage by human weapons such as clubs and knives. The few skeletons belonging to mature males bore the worst marks of violence. In all probability, an entire forager band was massacred at Ofnet.Which better represents the world of the ancient foragers: the peaceful skeletons from Israel and Portugal, or the abattoirs of Jabl Sahaba and Ofnet? The answer is neither. Just as foragers exhibited wide array of religions and social structures, so, too, did they probably demonstrate a variety of violence rates. While some areas and some periods of time may have enjoyed peace and tranquility, others were riven by ferocious conflicts. If the large picture of ancient forager life is hard to reconstruct, particular events are largely irretrievable. When a Sapiens band first entered a valley inhabited by Neanderthals, the following years might have witnessed a breathtaking historical drama. Unfortunately, nothing would have survived from such an encounter except, at best, a few fossilized bones and a handful of stone tools that remain mute under the most intense scholarly inquisitions. We may extract from them information about human anatomy, human technology, human diet, and perhaps even human social structure. But they reveal nothing about the political alliance forged between neighboring Sapiens bands, about the spirits of the dead that blessed this alliance, or about the ivory beads secretly given to the local witch doctor in order to secure the blessing of the spirits. Scholars tend to ask only those questions that they can reasonably expect to answer. Without the discovery of as yet unavailable research tools, we will probably never know what the ancient foragers believed or what political dramas they experienced. Yet it is vital to ask questions for which no answers are available, otherwise we might be tempted to dismiss 60,000 of 70,000 years of human history with “the excuse that the people who lived back then did nothing of importance”. The truth is that they did a lot of important things. In particular they shaped the world around us to a much larger degree than most people realize. Trekkers visiting Siberian tundra, the deserts of central Australia and the Amazonian rainforest believe that they have entered pristine landscapes, virtually untouched by human hands. But that’s an illusion. The foragers were there before us and they brought about dramatic changes even in the densest jungles and the most desolate wildernesses.

It’s often said that in a city you are never more than 2 metres from a rat. In the north of Scandinavia, in the middle of an Arctic winter, the same might be said of Norway’s most famous furry little mammal, the lemming. Every three to four years, when the conditions are right, you could be surrounded by hundreds of lemmings scurrying around in a network of branching tunnels beneath your feet. When the population is at its lowest, lemmings will be so thin on the ground that there might be just one in 100,000 square meters. However, in good times the same area could be home to as many as 3000. This dramatic cycling of the population helps account for an enduring myth about lemmings: that they emerge from these burrows and run, en masse, to their death. “It is said they are marching to the sea and committing suicide,” says Nils Christian Stenseth of the University of Olso in Norway, and coauthor of The Biology of Lemmings, “which is of course a fable, and a result of the common habit of people to anthropomorphise animals.”Accounts of lemming migrations go back hundreds of years. In 1823, for instance, one explorer wrote of seeing “inconceivable numbers” in his Scandinavian travels and an army of lemmings advancing with extraordinary purpose, “never suffering itself to be diverted from its course by any opposing obstacles” not even when confronted by rivers, or even the branches of narrow fjords. Given such sudden and apparently reckless behaviour, it is perhaps inevitable that local people in bygone centuries came to see the lemming as a crazed creature, and a swarm as the “forerunner of war and disaster. But we have Walt Disney to thank for really embedding this stereotype in the public consciousness, who undertook a series of feature-length nature documentaries known as True-life Adventures, one of which, White Wilderness, featuring a scene dramatising a lemming mass suicide.There was little that was true in these True-life Adventures. For a start, White Wilderness-filmed in Canada rather than Scandinavia-depicts the wrong species of lemming. Although all lemmings experience population highs and lows, the accounts of mass movements were all based on observations of Norwegian lemmings, not the brown lemmings used in the film. In an infamous sequence, the lemmings reach the edge of a precipitous cliff, and the voiceover tells us that “this is the last chance to turn back, yet over they go, casting themselves bodily out into space.” It certainly looks like suicide. “Only they didn’t march to the sea,” says Stenseth. “They were tipped into it from the truck.” In the film we can see several of the brown lemmings pause at the edge. One or two look like they are trying to turn back. They don’t want to be there at all, let alone jump. If lemmings do not commit suicide, what are the causes and the consequences of these wild fluctuations in lemming numbers? Based on data collected between 1970 and 1997, Stenseth and his colleagues were able to demonstrate in 2008 that what lemmings really need to thrive is the right kind of snow. “If the snow is soft and dry then a space under the snow builds up within which the lemmings can survive very well during the winter and foster many offspring,” says Stenseth. If there are a couple of consecutive winters like this, vast numbers of lemmings can emerge in the spring. With too many hungry lemmings about, the vegetation quickly gets overgrazed and the animals are forced to seek new pastures. It is in these circumstances, as they move from higher to lower ground, that they can occasionally tumble down a slope. “By way of gravitation they tend to move downwards,” says Stenseth. At its peak, the lemmings also become noticeably more aggressive. “A person walking across the meadow would cause the lemmings, several metres away, to give themselves away by unexpectedly shrieking and jumping about,” noted one group of researchers. “Even a farm tractor was greeted in this way, leaving a trail of infuriated lemmings behind it.” These displays of aggression may have fueled another age-old myth about lemmings: that they get so furious they explode. But this fanciful notion probably has a simple explanation. In the months after a reproductive boom, lemming predators will have a field day, slaying but not eating their victims. Once ravens have pecked their way through these killing fields, the eviscerated lemmings do look like they might have burst with anger. What’s more, as Stenseth points out, “no one has seen a lemming explode.”

Prison gangs are flourishing across the country. Organized, stealthy and deadly, they are reaching out from their cells to organize and control crime in America’s streets. Prison gangs are flourishing from California to Massachusetts. In 1996, the Federal Bureau of Prisons found that prison disturbances soared by about 400 percent in the early nineties, which authorities say indicated that gangs were becoming more active. In states such as Illinois, as much as 60 percent of the prison population belong to gangs, Godwin says. The Florida DC has identified 240 street gangs operating in their prisons. Street gangs, as opposed to gangs originating in prisons, are emerging as a larger problem on the East Coast. Of the 143,000 inmates Texas houses in state pens, 5.000 have been identified as gang members and another 10,000 are under suspicion. Texas prison-gang expert Sammy Buentello says the state’s prisons are not infested with gangs, but those that have set up shop are highly organized. “They have a paramilitary type structure.” he says. “A majority of the people that come in have had experience with street-gang membership and have been brought up in that environment accepting it as the norm. But some join for survival.”As they are being released into the community on parole, these people are becoming involved in actions related to prison-gang business. Consequently, it is no longer just a corrections problem-it is also a community problem. It is a misnomer that when you lock a gang member up they cease criminal activity. It has only been in the last five years that law enforcement has realized that what happens on the inside can affect what happens on the outside and vice versa. According to gang investigators, the gang leaders communicate orders through letters. Where mail is monitored they may use a code-for instance making every 12th word of a seemingly benign letter significant. They use visits, they put messages into their artwork and in some states they use the telephone.Of the two kinds of gangs, prison gangs and street gangs, the prison gangs are better organized, according to gang investigators. They are low-key, discreet-even stealthy. They monitor members and dictate how they behave and treat each other. A serious violation means death, say investigators. The street gangs are more flagrant. “Their members are going into the prisons and realizing that one of the reasons they are in prison is that they kept such a high profile” making it easier for the police to catch them, says Buentello. “So, they are coming out more sophisticated and more dangerous because they aren’t as easily detected. They also network and keep track of who is out and so forth.”According to gang investigators and prisoners, the prison gangs were formed for protection against predatory inmates, but racketeering, black markets and racism became factors. Protection remains an important factor. When a new inmate enters the prison system he is challenged to a fight, according to a Texas state-pen prisoner. The outcome determines who can fight, who will be extorted for protection money and who will become a servant to other prisoners. Those who can’t join a gang or afford to spend $5 a week in commissary items for protection are destined to be servants. Godwin explains; “The environment is set up so that when you put that many people with antisocial behavior and criminal history together, someone is going to be the predator and someone the prey, and that is reality.”The Texas inmate describes a system in which gangs often recruit like fraternities, targeting short-term inmates because they can help the gang-pay them back, so to speak-when they leave prison for the free world. Most of the groups thrive on lifelong membership, according to the Florida DC with “blood in, blood out” oaths extending leadership and membership beyond the prison into the lucrative drug trade, extortion and pressure rackets. What prisoners may not realize is that because the gangs are monitored by prison authorities the law-enforcement community is becoming very sophisticated about the gangs outside. “Sixty percent of what we learn about what is going on in the city streets of Florida is garnered in prison and not from observing the streets”, says Godwin. Prison officials say they concentrate on inmate behavior to identify gang members. They do not single out gang leaders to strike any deals because acknowledging the gang as anything other than a “security-threat group” gives them too much credibility. This has been a particular problem in Puerto Rico with the native and political Neta gang. Recognizing groups during the 1970s, in a system in which prisoners have the right to vote, has led to a tendency among politicians to award clemency to some inmates.

Paradigm shifts happen slowly, then all at once. Covid-19 has shown us this. Climate change has too. Pandemics and global warming are linked. So are rising flood waters, violent hurricanes and recent wildfires in California that threw up enough smoke to darken east coast skies. Business is usually ahead of government on coping with change. We’ve already seen multiple adaptations to the pandemic, including working from home and curbside pick-up of shopping. But I think the shifts are about to get bigger and more profound. One area to watch closely, because it is linked to climate change as well as disruptions such as cross-border migration and deglobalization, is vertical farming. This involves growing produce on giant, multistorey walls that are nourished with precise levels of light and water, a concept developed by Columbia University professor Dickson Despommier. Vertical farming has the potential to increase the production of fruits and vegetables without genetic modification or the cultivation of new farmland. That is important because many plants needed for a healthy diet can be grown all year round in the traditional way in only a few places-and climate change is causing trouble for many of those areas. The US fires wiped out crops and endangered thousands of farm workers. One of the affected producers was Driscoll’s, a California-based company that is the world’s largest distributor of berries. Soren Bjorn, president of Driscoll’s of the Americas, told me there are basically three types of climate (outside greenhouses) in which you can grow berries, including California. Alter the temperature even a little bit, and the crop is ruined. Is it any wonder, then, given changing weather patterns and rising global temperatures, that Driscoll’s has decided to make a major investment and enter into a new joint venture with Plenty, a San Francisco vertical farm start-up? “Instead of worrying about moving an entire farm further up a mountain”, says Mr. Bjorn, “we can move to vertical farms.”These farms rely on high-tech materials, bespoke water systems and powerful data analytic software. They can cost tens of millions of dollars to build. But, says Plenty chief executive Matt Barnard, it’s all about context: “We can produce an acre of capacity cheaper than California farmland can be bought-which is, in any case, a false choice, since the land isn’t available.”For high-margin produce vertical farming makes a lot of sense. It has the potential to slash the fossil fuel needed for harvest and transport, as well as reduce the risk of weather-related crop failures and cut fertiliser runoff and water waste. Done right, vertical farming uses about 5 per cent as much water as traditional agriculture.Smart cities in China and elsewhere are already implementing these systems. In the next two to five years, they will start springing up in cities or even at corporate headquarters around the world. Google’s campus in the Bay Area was one of Plenty’s demonstration projects, and the company’s early investors include Alphabet’s Eric Schmidt and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos.Backers are seeking to limit and eventually eliminate long supply chains, particularly those that involve air transport. But vertical farming has the potential to distance the business of agriculture from an ongoing point of geopolitical conflict-migrant labour. For many crops, the industrial agricultural business model requires large amounts of relatively low-skilled labour. These workers are generally brought in from outside the local farming area and that can lead to populist backlash in a time of rising debts and shrinking public budgets. “Labour is more than half our cost,” says Mr. Bjorn, adding that it is also “a source of tension” in nearly every country. Vertical farms, which serve their local area and are mechanized, avoid this issue. To the extent that the world continues to deglobalise, regionalise or localise, the appeal of vertical farming may be as much about minimising these risks as about trade and tariff wars. They could save energy, satisfy new environmental standards and feed growing urban populations in emerging markets clamouring for more high-nutrient produce. That said, there is no doubt that it is better for a country to have its own food production sources than be at risk of being hit with a 30 per cent strawberry tariff as part of a trade conflict. Vertical farms also create a way for producers to meet demand in new markets. Two of Driscoll’s biggest strawberry markets are China and the Arab world. “We are never going to grow outside there,” says Mr. Bjorn.But a vertical farm can go anywhere with water and power. And, as with most types of manufacturing, the sector is already showing strong multiplier effects that are driving up local wealth and innovation. Plenty invented new forms of plastic and LED lights in order to build its farms. It does not sell them to other companies yet-but it could. One-third of its workforce are engineers, the sort of high-wage workers who spend and fuel more job growth. “We make farms like Intel makes chips,” says Mr. Barnard. Both may be made more locally in the future.

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