[填空题]
NUROFEN RECOVERY (纽洛芬去痛片)
Please read these instructions carefully before you take this medicine.
Nurofen Recovery dissolves (溶解) quickly on the tongue without the need to use water. It delivers effective relief from headaches.
You should not take Nurofen Recovery if:
—you have had an allergic (过敏的) reaction to aspirin (阿司匹林).
—you have had a worsening of asthma (哮喘) when taking aspirin or similar medicines
—you are under 12 years of age
Administration: Place a tablet on the tongue, allow it to dissolve and then swallow - - no water is required.
Adults, the elderly and children of 12 years and older: Take 2 tablets, then if necessary, take 1 or 2 tablets every 4 hours. Do not exceed 6 tablets in 24 hours. Not suitable for children under 12 years.
Warnings: If you take too many tablets by mistake, contact your doctor as soo
[单项选择]Please read the passages and choose A, B, C or D to best complete the statements about them.
The Quiet Crisis
Close games for the Americans were rare in previous Olympics, but now it appears to be something the Americans should get used to.
You could find no better metaphor for the way the rest of the world can now compete head-to-head more effectively than ever with America than the struggles of the U. S. Olympic basketball team in 2004. The American team, made up of NBA stars, limped home to a bronze medal after losing to Puerto Rico, Lithuania, and Argentina. Previously, United States Olympic basketball team had lost only one game in the history of the modern Olympics. Remember when America sent only NCAA stars to the Olympic basketball events For a long time these teams totally dominated all corners. Then they started getting challenged. So we sent our pros. And they started getting challenged. Because the world keeps learning, the diffusion of knowledge happens faster; coaches in other countries now download American coaching methods off the Internet and watch NBA games in their own living rooms on satellite TV. Many of them can even get ESPN and watch the highlight reeds. And thank to the triple convergence, there is a lot of new raw talent walking onto the NBA courts from all over the world—including many new stars from China, Latin America, and Eastern Europe. They go back and play for their national teams in the Olympics, using the skills they honed in America. So the automatic American superiority of :wenty years ago is now gone in Olympic basketball. The NBA standard is increasingly becoming a global commodity—pure vanilla. If the United States wants to continue to dominate in Olympic basketball, we must, in that great sports cliche, step it up a notch. The old standard won"t do anymore. As Joel Cawley of IBM remarked to me, "
Star for star
, the basketball teams from places like Lithuania or Puerto Rico still don"t rank well versus the Americans, but when they play as a team—when they collaborate better than we do, they are extremely competitive."
There is something about post-World War II America that reminds me of the classic wealthy family that by the third generation starts to squander its wealth. The members of the first generation are nose-to-the-grindstone innovators, the second generation holds it all together then their kids come along and get fat, dumb, and lazy and slowly squander it all. I know that is both overly harsh and a gross generalization, but there is, nevertheless, some truth in it. American society started to coast in the 1990s, when our third postwar generation came of age. The dot-com boom left too many people with the impression that they could get rich without investing in hard work. All it look was an MBA and a quick IPO, or one NBA contract, and you were set form life. But while we were admiring the flat world we had created, a lot of people in India, China, and Eastern Europe were busy figuring out how to take advantage of it. Lucky for us, we were the only economy standing after World War II, and we had no serious competition for forty years. That gave us a huge head of steam but also a huge sense of entitlement and complacency—not to mention a certain tendency in recent years to extol consumption over hard work, investment, and long-term thinking. When we got hit with 9/11, it was a once-in-a-generation opportunity to summon the nation to sacrifice, to address some of its pressing fiscal, energy, science, and education shortfalls—all the things that we had let slide. But our president did not summon us to sacrifice. He summoned us to go shopping.
The truth is, we are in a crisis now, but it is a crisis that is unfolding very slowly and very quietly. It is a quiet crisis and this quiet crisis involves the steady erosion of America"s scientific and engineering base, which has always been the source of American innovation and our rising standard of living.
"The sky is not falling, nothing horrible is going to happen today," said Jackson, a physicist by training who chooses her words carefully. "The U. S. is still the leading engine for innovation in the world. It has the best graduate programs, the best scientific infrastructure, and the capital markets to exploit it. But there is a quiet crisis in U. S. science and technology that we have to wake up to. The U. S. today is in a truly global environment, and those competitor countries are not only wide awake, they are running a marathon while we are running sprints. If left unchecked, this could challenge our preeminence and capacity to innovate."
And it is our ability to constantly innovate new products, services, and companies that has been the source of American"s horn of plenty and steadily widening middle class for the last two centuries. It was American innovators who started Google, Intel, HP, Dell Microsoft, and Cisco, and it matters where innovation happens. The fact that all these companies are headquartered in America means that most of the high-paying jobs are here, even if these companies outsource or offshore some functions. The executives, the department heads, the sales force, and the senior researchers are all located in the cities where the innovation happened. And their jobs create more jobs. The shrinking of the pool of young people with the knowledge skills to innovate won"t shrink our standard of living overnight. It will be felt only in fifteen or twenty years, when we discover we have a critical shortage of scientists and engineers capable of doing innovation or even just high-value-added technology work. Then this won"t be a quiet crisis anymore, said Jackson, "it will be the real McCoy."
Today Americans are feeling the gradual and subtle effects of globalization that challenge the economic and strategic leadership that the United States has enjoyed since World War II. A substantial portion of our work-force finds itself in direct competition for jobs with lower-wage workers around the globe, and leading-edge scientific and engineering work is being accomplished in many parts of the world. Thanks to globalization, driven by modern communications and other advances, workers in virtually every sector must now face competitors who live just a mouse-click away in Ireland, Finland, China, India, or dozens of other nations whose economies are growing. This has been aptly referred to as "
the Death of Distance
".What can be inferred of the author"s feeling about the fact that many big companies are headquartered in America
A. Negative.
B. Indifferent.
C. Positive.
D. Worried.
