考研英语题源

　　数字信息隐私在现代社会变得越来越重要了，出国网考研英语频道为大家提供2015考研英语题源阅读：Digital privacy，大家可以阅读一下!大家可以把好的词语和句子记下来，说不定写作文的时候能用得到哦!

　　2015考研英语题源阅读：Digital privacy

　　Cryptography for dummies

　　To the alarm of some lawmakers, scrambling data becomes easy as encryption turns into the default option on digital devices

　　A CAMPAIGN by American and British lawmakers and security officials to get social-media companies to take more responsibility for handing over information about criminals and terrorists using their networks gathered pace this week. It is happening because, following the documents leaked by Edward Snowden, a former American spy, technology companies are beefing up the encryption of data to protect users’ privacy, making it more difficult for law-enforcement agencies to find out what people have been up to online.

　　In Britain, a report into the jihadi-inspired killing of a soldier in London said websites such as Facebook provide a “safe haven for terrorists” to communicate. Such statements echo similar concerns made in America. James Comey, the director of the FBI, has said the encryption of computers, smartphones and other digital gadgets largely benefits paedophiles, criminals and terrorists.

　　This is not how technology firms see it. Apple and Google, for instance...

　　出国网考研英语频道为大家提供2015考研英语题源阅读：Retirement income，大家可以阅读一下!小编提醒大家要多阅读，考试阅读的速度才会快!

　　2015考研英语题源阅读：Retirement income

　　You can't always get what you want

　　THE British government announced this year that it was offering "freedom" for retirees. No longer did they have to use their pension pot to buy an annuity, a guaranteed income for life. Instead they could take the money as cash and spend it (subject to a tax charge on all but the first 25%) or squirrel it away and pass it to their heirs. As I argued at the time, this was a very dubious reform; pensions are given very generous tax breaks (the cost of which is £35 billion a year) to encourage workers to save so they do not become dependent on the state, not so they can pass money to their heirs.

　　The unpopularity of annuities may also be due to a degree of financial illiteracy, as a survey by NEST, the pension scheme behind auto-enrolment, shows. Asked for their main priorties for retirement savings, those polled favoured

　　1) Income that grows in line with inflation

　　2) Security of a guaranteed income that is fixed until you die; and

　　3) Protection from falls in the value of the fund due to stockmarket movements

　　Those three qualities are the hallmark of a product that is already on the market - inflation-linked annuities. Hardly anybody buys them. Why? Because guarantees and inflation-linking are expensive. A 65-year old with a £100,0...

　　出国网考研英语频道为大家提供2015考研英语题源阅读：Satellite imagery，大家可以阅读一下!小编提醒大家要多阅读，考试阅读的速度才会快!

　　2015考研英语题源阅读：Satellite imagery

　　FOR an industry that lurked in shadows for decades, satellite imaging’s transition into the mainstream has been dramatic. Such imagery is worth billions of dollars each year to governments and private industry. Imagery on demand—from a specified locale in near-real time—is still of enormous strategic value to spooks. But it has, in the years since satellites have shed their inaccessible-spy-technology image, also become an approach that lends itself to humanitarian, environmental and educational projects. Now Skybox, a recently acquired division of Google, is joining such efforts by promising free imagery for categories of work it deems "for good”.

　　There are a few factors that affect the ultimate value of satellite images, including the resolution (the fineness of the detail evident in the photographs), and how recently or how often the images can be acquired—that is, the degree to which the satellite’s view is a real-time picture of what is happening on the ground. The highest-resolution satellites are still the stuff of spy agencies. Lower-value, outdated imagery is available to the average consumer in the form of services such as Google Earth.

　　But that leaves quite a bit in the middle. The American government, for example, releases a stream of lower-resolution, specialised satell...

　　出国网考研英语频道为大家提供考研英语题源阅读：Why land value taxes are so popular, yet so rare，大家可以阅读一下!小编提醒大家要多阅读，考试阅读的速度才会快!

　　Why land value taxes are so popular, yet so rare

　　HOW should you tax wealthy homeowners? Britain's opposition Labour party thinks it has an answer: an annual mansion tax on homes worth over £2m. Meanwhile the Scottish government plans to reform taxes on house sales. Yet in the discussion over property taxes a favourite proposal of economists—a tax on the unimproved value of land—has been absent from the debate. Throughout history, economists have advocated such a tax. Adam Smith said "nothing [could] be more reasonable". Milton Friedman said it was "least bad tax". Yet there are only a handful of real-world examples of land value taxes (LVT). Why are they so popular yet so rare?

　　When thinking about any tax, economists focus on how it affects decision-making. Income tax reduces the incentive to work. Corporation tax reduces the incentive to invest. Stamp duty deters some marginal house sales. Such prevention of mutually beneficial transactions is generally considered bad (though the deterrence of actions which hurt third parties—such as pollution—is an exception). Distributional effects also matter, although are often ignored on the assumption that any redistribution can happen through separate mechanisms.

　　Land value taxation is so beloved of economists because, in theory, it does not distort decision ma...

　　出国网考研英语频道为大家提供2015考研英语题源阅读：US 2014 mid-term election results，大家可以阅读一下!小编提醒大家要多阅读，考试阅读的速度才会快!

　　US 2014 mid-term election results

　　The Republicans win the Senate

　　IN THE end it was a massacre. The Republicans easily gained control of the Senate in the mid-term elections, with projections showing them picking up at least six of the seats they needed, and probably more. Polling had showed that West Virginia, South Dakota and Montana were already in the bag, but other wins came thick and fast, and by wider margins of victory than had been thought. The Democrats were also defeated in Arkansas, Colorado and North Carolina, giving the Republicans their six seats. In Georgia David Perdue sailed past the 50% needed to avoid a run-off and held the seat for the Republicans. Mitch McConnell, the next Senate majority leader, retained his seat in Kentucky by swatting away his Democratic challenger with a 15-point margin of victory; the polls had suggested a closer result. Elsewhere there was little comfort for the Democrats in governors’ races, with the Republicans winning close elections in Wisconsin and Florida. Our analysis of how the Republicans are likely to govern the Senate for th...

　　出国网考研英语频道为大家提供2015考研英语题源阅读：China’s future growth，大家可以阅读一下!小编提醒大家要多阅读，考试阅读的速度才会快!

　　China’s future growth

　　A new study asks how long the Chinese economy can defy the odds

　　THE announcement this week that China’s economy had grown by 7.3% in the third quarter year-on-year was widely seen as marking the country’s “new normal” of slower growth. It was well below the roughly 10% pace China had averaged from 1980 until two years ago. Yet according to a new working paper by Lant Pritchett and Larry Summers of Harvard University, it is still abnormal: Chinese growth is likely to be lower still in future.

　　Forecasters often extrapolate from recent growth rates, the authors note. The IMF, for instance, projects that Chinese growth will slow almost imperceptibly over the next five years, from about 7.4% this year to 6.3% by the end of the decade. Yet Messrs Pritchett and Summers point out that if it is possible to infer anything from past patterns of growth around the world, it is that economies suffer from “regression to the mean”: growth rates in countries that have been growing fast tend to drop, often sharply, toward the long-run global average (of about 2% growth per year in real GDP per person).

　　Given this tendency, China’s long spell of breakneck growth—of more than 6% a year since 1...

　　出国网考研英语频道为大家提供2015考研英语题源阅读：The 2014 Nobel science prizes，大家可以练习一下!

　　2015考研英语题源阅读：The 2014 Nobel science prizes

　　Prizes for work on light-emitting diodes, animal navigation and microscopy

　　THE Nobel prizes were originally intended to reward people or organisations who, as the founder’s will put it, “have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind”. Often, in the field of physics, that benefit is a measure of understanding of the very small or the very distant: a light shone into the vast darkness of ignorance about how the universe works. This year, by contrast, the physics prize has been awarded for an actual light that has already conferred great benefit on mankind, and promises yet more. Isamu Akasaki of Meijo University, Hiroshi Amano of Nagoya University and Shuji Nakamura of the University of California, Santa Barbara, shared in cracking the problem of making diodes that give off blue light.

　　The light of candles and lamps gave way to the incandescent bulb in the 19th century, but such bulbs still squander a great deal of electrical energy as heat. A light-emitting diode (LED) uses semiconductors to convert electricity into light with almost perfect efficiency.

　　LEDs, though, make light in narrow bands of colour dictated by the properties of the semiconductor. Red LEDs ...

　　埃博拉成了这阵子最热点的话题，出国留学网考研英语频道为大家提供2015考研英语题源阅读：Ebola drug saves infected monkeys，希望本文能帮助大家了解到Ebola drug的最新研究动向。

　　2015考研英语题源阅读：Ebola drug saves infected monkeys

ZMapp is the first treatment to completely protect animals after they show symptoms of disease.

　　ZMapp, the drug that has been used to treat seven patients during the current Ebola epidemic in West Africa, can completely protect monkeys against the virus, research has found.

　　The study, published online today in Nature, comes the day after the World Health Organization (WHO) warned that the Ebola outbreak, which has killed more than 1,500 people, is worsening and could infect 20,000 people before it ends. A fifth West African nation, Senegal, reported its first case of the disease on Friday.

　　Public-health experts say that proven measures, such as the deployment of greater numbers of health-care workers to stricken areas, should be the focus of the response. But ZMapp, made by Mapp Pharmaceutical in San Diego, California, is one of several unapproved products that the WHO has said could be used in the outbreak.

　　The drug — a cocktail of three purified immune proteins, or monoclonal antibodies, that target the ...