[简答题]

Nothing has come to embody corporate greed like executive perks: the corporate jets, chauffeured limousines and country-club memberships that bosses consume in a seemingly deliberate attempt to outrage public opinion. Not for nothing bas Warren Buffett. Omaha’s celebrated investor, named his corporate jet "The Indefensible".
The usual explanation for the perk is that it is a (rather enjoyable) way for corporate insiders to misappropriate shareholders’ money. (46) Because perks are poorly disclosed shareholders have no way of knowing when the boss is living it up at their expense. This has led to the theory that perk-laden executives are likeliest to be found in firms with lots of cash. but few investment prospects.
But in a recent paper, Raghuram Rajah, the IMF’s chief economist, and Julie Wulf, of the Wharton School, looked at how more than 300 big companies dished out perks to their executives in 1986-99. (47) It turns out

[简答题]Needs are limited, but not greed. Science has developed no cure for envy, so our wealth boosts our happiness only briefly while shrinking that of our neighbors. Thus the outlook for the future is gloomy in Easterlin’s view. "The future, then, to which the epoch of modem economic growth is leading, is one of never ending economic growth, a world in which ever growing abundance is matched by ever rising aspirations, a world in which cultural difference is leveled in the constant race to achieve the good life of material plenty, a world which is founded on belief in science and the power of rational inquiry and in the ultimate capacity of humanity to shape its own destiny. The irony is that in this last respect the lesson of history appears to be otherwise: that there is no choice. In the end, the triumph of economic growth is not a triumph of humanity over material wants; rather, it is the triumph of material wants over humanity./

[单项选择]

The question of where insights come from has become a hot topic in neuroscience, despite the fact that they are not easy to induce experimentally in a laboratory. Dr. Bhattacharya and Dr. Sheth have taken a creative approach. They have selected some brain-teasing but practical problems in the hope that these would get closer to mimicking real insight: To qualify, a puzzle had to be simple, not too widely known and without a methodical solution. The researchers then asked 18 young adults to try to solve these problems while their brainwaves were monitored using an electroencephalograph (EEG).
A typical brain-teaser went like this. There are three light switches on the ground-floor wall of a three-storey house. Two of the switches do nothing, but one of them controls a bulb on the second floor. When you begin, the bulb is off. You can only make one visit to the second floor. How do you work out which switch is the one that controls the light
This problem, or one equ
A. when his brainwave activity differs from others.
B. when he had a stable high-frequency gamma waves.
C. when his brainwave activity became abnormal.
D. when he had an increase in some kind of brainwaves.