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哇又到了期末考试的日子了。。。。呜呜呜呜 又要开始熬夜了TT
SPEED
[Time1] White-collar workers setting up stalls become popular
Various kinds of street vendors are helping the city become more dynamic; and more and more white-collar workers are now part of this group of small retailers.
According to a recent survey by China Youth Daily, about 79.2 percent of 1,891 interviewees said they saw white-collar workers setting up street stalls. Besides, 68.1 percent said they supported this initiative.
About 35 percent of interviewees come from big cities, 29.5 percent, from midsized cities, 19.8 percent, from small cities, 11.5 percent, from counties and 3.8 percent, from the countryside.
Mr. Wu who comes from Henan province, Central China, has lived in Shenzhen for 15 years. He is now an engineering research and development manager in a company. Although he earns more than 10,000 yuan (US$1,629) per month, he has been setting up street stalls for eight years.
"The street in front of my house is crowded with various kinds of stalls at night. I sell clothes, snacks and fruits," said Mr. Wu. "When business was good, I could earn about 5,000 (US $814.5) to 6,000 yuan (US $977.4) a month."
He said a white-collar worker setting up stalls is very common in Shenzhen.
"It will cost millions to buy a house. If you rent a house, you have to pay an expensive rent too," said Mr. Wu. "Besides, I have to pay for my child's remedial class fees and living expenses. It would be very tight if I depended on my salary."
A young lady, Sun Jingjing, shares her experience with setting up a stall. She is a receptionist in an information technology company in the Haidian District of Beijing.
（269）
[Time2]
"As a stall owner, I can choose goods and decide prices myself. It feels so great," she said.
Although setting up a stall is a small business, vendors can make their own decisions.
As for the reason behind setting up stalls, 69.6 percent of interviewees said it could increase their incomes.
Tang Mengjuan, a career-planning columnist for www.abang.com said income polarization among white-collar workers is very serious. The income of primary white-collar workers is very limited. Living in cities force them to try to increase their income.
Young workers, who set up stalls, want to be free, pursue their own dreams, or try an alternative lifestyle.
However, it is not easy.
"I can't rest during weekends because I have to go very far to purchase goods," said Mr Wu, who decided to rent a store with friends. "Besides, I have to hide from city inspectors."
Sun Jingjing encountered problems too. Her business is not as profitable as before because there are more competitors. She also has less time to rest. Although having a "double career" is exhausting, she doesn't want to give up her "entrepreneurial dream".
"Setting up a stall will cost a lot of energy, which will affect a person's original career," Tang Mengjuan said. "If people find that they can't balance two careers, they have to make a choice. If it is good for their future career goals, they should continue."
（233）
Back to basics
Energy efficiency is not very flashy. That may be a selling point
Hope those are energy-saving bulbs
WHEN Richard Sanchez heard from a friend that the city of San Antonio would pick up most of the costs of installing a new lighting system in his barbershop, he quickly made a call. The city was running a new programme called City Lights, funded by a $2m grant from the 2009 stimulus, designed to make energy-efficient improvements to small businesses. But Mr Sanchez was not exactly motivated by greenery. “It was way better than our older lighting, which was costing twice as much,” he explains.
For many years energy efficiency was the poor relation to cutting-edge clean technology initiatives like wind and solar. But now the more workaday strategies are getting a new look-in. Efficiency measures can often save as much power as the more glamorous efforts can produce, at a fraction of the cost. One widely used estimate comes from a 2009 report from McKinsey, which reckoned that America could reduce its non-transport energy consumption by roughly 23% by 2020 through efficiency savings alone.
Some cities have come up with specific targets for efficiency. In San Antonio, the municipally owned power provider, CPS Energy, has plans to cut its consumption by 771 megawatts through energy efficiency by 2020, using various incentives and nudges. Customers who buy highly efficient cooling systems rather than the minimum-standard kind can, for example, get a rebate to make up the difference in price. As the more efficient systems yield lower bills, this is quite an attractive proposition. The 771MW figure represents about 10% of the utility’s current generation capacity, or about as much as a typical coal-fired power plant can produce. This summer, in fact, CPS announced that it will shut down a 900MW coal-fired plant by 2018, a Texas first.
（305）
[Time4]
Environmentalists hailed the announcement: coal is the most villainous fossil fuel. As with the customers, though, the city’s motivation was mostly pragmatic. San Antonio has its share of greenish priorities—downtown redevelopment, an electric fleet—but in deciding to close the coal-fired plant, the spur was simply cost. Installing a scrubber that would have brought the coal plant in question up to the Environmental Protection Agency’s standards would have cost half a billion dollars. The utility was keen to put off that expense, if not avoid it altogether, by making up the demand with natural gas or solar. Julián Castro, San Antonio’s mayor, argues that the energy efficiency is a complement to the latter, rather than a competitor. “One of the ways to bridge the time that those renewables need is by reducing the need for new energy,” he says.
It may be that cities like San Antonio are unusually well-placed to pursue energy efficiency. Having a municipally-owned utility, for example, helps local politicians plan an energy portfolio that meshes with their other concerns; this is one reason why nearby Austin Energy, which is owned by the tech-centric city of Austin, has an unusually strong renewables standard. But the energy efficiency approach could have broad appeal. The benefits are easily realised, the costs are reasonable, and the risks of something going wrong are relatively small.
（225）
[Time5]The cradle will rock
Lynne Ramsay has crafted an elegant adaptation of a tricky book
WHAT is more taboo than a woman who is repulsed by her own child? This is the genius of “We Need to Talk About Kevin”, a remarkable novel from Lionel Shriver (a former literary critic for this paper), which considers the life of a reluctant mother after her teenage son commits mass murder. The story unfurls as a stream of letters from Eva Khatchadourian to her husband as she retraces the steps of their lives together—the happy marriage that morphs into a toxic family, and the haunting event that casts everything in shadow. Yet even as Eva recounts evidence of her son’s malevolence at a young age, the reader is left with a galling question: would Kevin have fared better if his mother loved him more?
It takes courage to adapt an epistolary novel for the screen, particularly one as psychologically complex as this one. Yet Lynne Ramsay’s film of the same name, starring Tilda Swinton as Eva, is excellent. The gift of this version is its visual rendering of Eva’s claustrophobic thoughts. With a minimalist screenplay written with Rory Kinnear, Ms Ramsay translates Eva’s clot of dark and messy words into a collage of evocative and mostly wordless scenes. These vignettes shift from the present—Eva living as a social pariah, a husk of her former self—to the past, and are jumbled with the non-chronology of memory. As in the book, Kevin’s big, violent moment is left until the end, but the bloody fact of it infects everything that comes before.
Still, something is lost in witnessing Kevin in the flesh instead of through Eva’s unreliable recollections. In the novel, Eva perceives her son’s cruelty from the start, though it goes unseen by his doting father Franklin (played here by John C. Reilly, everyone’s favourite pushover). On-screen, Kevin is quite obviously malicious, first as a nasty little boy and then as a spiteful, ink-eyed teenager. As the latter Kevin, Ezra Miller seethes with ruthlessness, his face impenetrable. Yet he is also distractingly attractive, with cheekbones any starlet would covet, making him an awkward choice for such an enigmatic role.
This is not a problem that affects Ms Swinton, who carries this film. Not unlike a praying mantis, her odd and otherworldly beauty takes time to notice. Her face, powerful in its spareness, registers emotion with subtle ticks and readjustments. As Eva, she conveys the desolation of a life made meaningless, first by the lonely challenges of motherhood, then by tragedy. Driving in her car to the chirpy strains of Buddy Holly’s “Every day seems a little longer”, her ghost-eyed stare keeps us locked in her nightmare.
(450)
OBSTACLE
The China syndrome
American grumblings about their geopolitical rival are not about power, but other things
TO THE ham-lovers of Smithfield, Virginia, it is American weakness that explains why Chinese tycoons may soon own the giant pork producer that dominates their home town. Local hams, made from peanut-fed pigs and then hickory-smoked, first earned fame in colonial times. In Smithfield images of hogs vie with American flags as a badge of pride, adorning shopfronts, school sports kit and the town water tower. Yet if a multi-billion-dollar takeover goes ahead, Smithfield Foods—the world’s largest pork processor, based in the town—will become a subsidiary of a Chinese butcher, Shuanghui International.
News of the bid broke shortly before a summit between the American and Chinese presidents in California, set for June 7th and 8th. If approved, it will mark China’s largest investment in America, and more will surely follow. That raises questions about relative economic power, and about who holds the upper hand as the two rivals embark on a new stage of interdependence. That interdependence is all the more remarkable because it co-exists with knotty economic disputes about market opening and cybertheft of trade secrets—not to mention philosophical differences about democracy and the rule of law.
In Smithfield, specific questions about China’s rise and intentions could hardly be more urgent: Smithfield Foods is by far the largest employer. But on a muggy recent morning on Main Street, China’s intentions were not mentioned much.
Instead, stunned locals talked about their American bosses. The company has vowed that jobs are safe. How can managers promise anything, townsfolk scoffed, after selling out to foreigners? The nature of those foreigners was not much discussed. The talk was instead of sadness at seeing an American firm falling to outsiders. A woman suggested it was a moment for soul-searching. In the Bible, she advised, Isaiah says that foreigners will take over the lands of those who fail to serve God. Given the Chinese takeover, Americans were “evidently” falling short.
Nobody predicted strikes or called on the government to declare ham (like French yogurt) a strategic industry. There was a mood of resignation. Some endeavoured to sound cheery. The deal seems a sound one, ventured the mayor, Carter Williams: China needs cleaner food and America needs global markets. With luck Smithfield will have to build a new factory as exports to China boom. In any case, the mayor added, there is not a thing in the world that we can do about it.
If Mr Williams’s realism is admirable, some other Americans tend towards excessive gloom. A 2012 survey on global attitudes by the Pew Research Centre found Americans almost evenly divided on the question of whether China or America was now the world’s economic leader. Chinese respondents were much likelier to say (correctly) that America is still top dog. Among Barack Obama’s foreign-policy and economic aides, sources report “mystification” that so many Americans think that China is now richer. The government has, at times, attempted to push back against such pessimism. The vice-president, Joe Biden, gave a chin-jutting speech to students in Chengdu in 2011 in which he hailed America as still “the wealthiest nation in the history of the world”, with an education system and society set up to promote creativity and innovation (ie, unlike some he could mention).
The CEO of Smithfield Foods, Larry Pope, puts forward a similarly confident argument about his own enterprise. America is world-beating when it comes to producing good pork efficiently, he argues. His new Chinese partners want to feed their people, not take over the world. Nonetheless, he worries that Americans are scared of China.
He may be putting it too strongly. Americans, though far more mindful of China than Europeans are, have not had a “Japan moment”, suddenly waking up to a newly brash bully next door. They have not even had a “Sputnik moment”, when some piece of Chinese technological wizardry has shown up the United States as second-best and China as top nation. Policymakers in Washington worry more with each passing year about China’s military power. But polling shows the American public rather unfussed by it. In short, much American grumbling about China seems really to be about something different.
Often “China” is an avatar for globalisation. For many on the left, it stands for the supposed greed of American bosses who consciously choose to ship jobs elsewhere, rather than stand by their workers. Mr Obama has told aides that for most Americans, “China” stands for lost jobs, especially in manufacturing. In his first term, the president repeatedly sought a China policy that might help reclaim millions of jobs by prodding companies to keep or create positions in America. No such magical China policy exists, as Mr Obama has tacitly acknowledged by pragmatically pursuing economic engagement.
Republicans on the other hand, when polled, most powerfully associate the “China” threat with America’s public debts. They accuse Mr Obama of buying the votes of the feckless poor with welfare and other gifts, running up debts that leave America at the mercy of foreign creditors.
In these cases, political debates about China resemble the discussions on Smithfield’s Main Street: they are mostly arguments about America and its perceived internal weaknesses. Chinese politicians play a similar game in reverse, sometimes using a hard-to-recognise caricature of “America” as an all-purpose test of China’s development and resolve. But if the two geopolitical rivals are to co-exist, as they must, they need to get beyond caricatures and self-absorption and strive to understand each other. They have grown too big, and too close, to try anything else.
(919)
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发表于 2013-6-9 00:32:20
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