Passage One

(1) Some one else had said that: “Like must marry like or there’ll be no happiness.” Who was it? It seemed a million years since she had heard that, but it still did not make sense.

(2) “But you said you cared. “

(3) “I shouldn’t have said it. “

(4) Somewhere in her brain, a slow fire rose and rage began to blot out everything else.

(5) “Well, having been cad enough to say it—”

(6) His face went white.

(7) “I was a cad to say it, as I’m going to marry Melanie. I did you a wrong and Melanie a greater one. I should not have said it, for I knew you wouldn’t understand. How could I help caring for you—you who have all the passion for life that I have not? You who can love and hate with a violence impossible to me? Why you are as elemental as fire and wind and wild things and I—”

(8) She thought of Melanie and saw suddenly her quiet brown eyes with their far-off look, her placid little hands in their black lace mitts, her gentle silences. And then her rage broke, the same rage that drove Gerald to murder and other Irish ancestors to misdeeds that cost them their necks. There was nothing in her now of the well-bred Robillards who could bear with white silence anything the world might cast.

(9) “Why don’t you say it, you coward! You’re afraid to marry me! You’d rather live with that stupid little fool who can’t open her mouth except to say ’ Yes’ or ’ No’ and raise a passel of mealy mouthed brats just like her! Why—”

(10) “You must not say these things about Melanie!”

(11) “’I mustn’t’ be damned to you! Who are you to tell me I mustn’t? You coward, you cad, you—You made me believe you were going to marry me—

(12) “Be fair,” his voice pleaded. “Did I ever—”

(13) She did not want to be fair, although she knew what he said was true. He had never once crossed the borders of friendliness with her and, when she thought of this fresh anger rose, the anger of hurt pride and feminine vanity. She had run after him and he would have none of her. He preferred a whey-faced little fool like Melanie to her. Oh, far better that she had followed Ellen and Mammy’s precepts and never, never revealed that she even liked him—better anything than to be faced with this scorching shame!

(14) She sprang to her feet, her hands clenched and he rose towering over her, his face full of the mute misery of one forced to face realities when realities are agonies.

(15) “I shall hate you till I die, you cad—you lowdown—lowdown—” What was the word she wanted? She could not think of any word bad enough.

(16) “Scarlett—please—”

(17) He put out his hand toward her and, as he did, she slapped him across the face with all the strength she had. The noise cracked like a whip in the still room and suddenly her rage was gone, and there was desolation in her heart.

(18) The red mark of her hand showed plainly on his white tired face. He said nothing but lifted her limp hand to his lips and kissed it. Then he was gone before she could speak again, closing the door softly behind him.

(19) She sat down again very suddenly, the reaction from her rage making her knees feel weak. He was gone and the memory of his stricken face would haunt her till she died.

(20) She heard the soft muffled sound of his footsteps dying away down the long hall, and the complete enormity of her actions came over her. She had lost him forever. Now he would hate her and every time he looked at her he would remember how she threw herself at him when he had given her no encouragement at all.

(21) “I’m as bad as Honey Wilkes,” she thought suddenly, and remembered how everyone, and she more than anyone else, had laughed contemptuously at Honey’s forward conduct. She saw Honey’s awkward wigglings and heard her silly titters as she hung onto boys’ arms, and the thought stung her to new rage, rage at herself, at Ashley, at the world. Because she hated herself, she hated them all with the fury of the thwarted and humiliated love of sixteen. Only a little true tenderness had been mixed into her love. Mostly it had been compounded out of vanity and complacent confidence in her own charms. Now she had lost and. greater than her sense of loss, was the fear that she had made a public spectacle of herself. Had she been as obvious as Honey? Was everyone laughing at her? She began to shake at the thought.

(22) Her hand dropped to a little table beside her, fingering a tiny china rose-bowl on which two china cherubs smirked. The room was so still she almost screamed to break the silence. She must do something or go mad. She picked up the bowl and hurled it viciously across the room toward the fireplace. It barely cleared the tall back of the sofa and splintered with a little crash against the marble mantelpiece.

(23) “This,” said a voice from the depths of the sofa, “is too much.”

(24) Nothing had ever startled or frightened her so much, and her mouth went too dry for her to utter a sound. She caught hold of the back of the chair, her knees going weak under her, as Rhett Butler rose from the sofa where he had been lying and made her a bow of exaggerated politeness. “It is bad enough to have an afternoon nap disturbed by such a passage as I’ve been forced to hear, but why should my life be endangered?” He was real. He wasn’t a ghost. But, saints preserve us, he had heard everything! She rallied her forces into a semblance of dignity.

Passage Two

(1) Some people describe Darwinian evolution as “only a theory”. Try explaining that to the friends and relatives of the 700,000 people killed each year by drug-resistant infections. Resistance to antimicrobial (抗菌的) medicines, such as antibiotics (抗生素) and antimalarials (抗疟疾药), is caused by the survival of the fittest. Unfortunately, fit microbes mean unfit human beings. Drug-resistance is not only one of the clearest examples of evolution in action, it is also the one with the biggest immediate human cost. And it is getting worse. Stretching today’s trends out to 2050, the 700,000 deaths could reach 10m.

(2) Cynics might be forgiven for thinking that they have heard this argument before. People have fretted about resistance since antibiotics began being used in large quantities during the late 1940s. Their conclusion that bacterial diseases might again become epidemic as a result has proved false and will remain so. That is because the decline of common 19th-century infections such as tuberculosis (结核病) and cholera (霍乱) was thanks to better housing, drains and clean water, not penicillin (青霉素).

(3) The real danger is more subtle—but grave nonetheless. The fact that improvements in public health like those the Victorians pioneered should eventually drive down tuberculosis rates in India hardly makes up for the loss of 60,000 newborn children every year to drug-resistant infections. Wherever there is endemic infection, there is resistance to its treatment. This is true in the rich world, too. Drug-resistant versions of organisms such as Staphylococcus aureus (金黄色葡萄球菌) are increasing the risk of post-operative infection. The day could come when elective surgery is unwise and organ transplants, which stop rejection with immunosuppression (免疫抑制), are downright dangerous. Imagine that everyone in the tropics was vulnerable once again to malaria and that every pin prick could lead to a fatal infection. It is old diseases, not new ones, that need to be feared.

Common failings

(4) The spread of resistance is an example of the tragedy of the commons (公地悲剧); the costs of what is being lost are not seen by the people who are responsible. You keep cattle? Add antibiotics to their feed to enhance growth. The cost in terms of increased resistance is borne by society as a whole. You have a sore throat? Take antibiotics in case it is bacterial. If it is viral, and hence untreatable by drugs, no harm done—except to someone else who later catches a resistant infection.

(5) The lack of an incentive to do the right thing is hard to correct. In some health-care systems, doctors are rewarded for writing prescriptions (药方). Patients suffer no immediate harm when they neglect to complete drug courses after their symptoms have cleared up, leaving the most drug-resistant bugs alive. Because many people mistakenly believe that human beings, not bacteria, develop resistance, they do not realise that they are doing anything wrong.

(6) If you cannot easily change behaviour, can you create new drugs instead? Perversely, the market fails here, too. Doctors want to save the best drugs for the hardest cases that are resistant to everything else. It makes no sense to prescribe an expensive patented medicine for the sniffles when something that costs cents will do the job.

(7) Reserving new drugs for emergencies is sensible public policy. But it keeps sales low, and therefore discourages drug firms from research and development. Artemisinin (青蒿素), a malaria treatment which has replaced earlier therapies to which the parasite became resistant—and which now faces resistance problems itself— was brought to the world not by a Western pharmaceutical company, but by Chinese academics.

Sugar the pill

(8) Because antimicrobial resistance has no single solution, it must be fought on many fronts. Start with consumption. The use of antibiotics to accelerate growth in farm animals can be banned by agriculture ministries, as it has in the European Union. All the better if governments jointly agree to enforce such rules widely. In both people and animals, policy should be to vaccinate more so as to stop infections before they start. That should appeal to cash-strapped (资金短缺的) health systems, because prophylaxis is cheaper than treatment. By the same logic, hospitals and other breeding grounds for resistant bugs should prevent infections by practising better hygiene. Governments should educate the public about how antibiotics work and how they can help halt the spread of resistance. Such policies cannot reverse the tragedy of the commons, but they can make it a lot less tragic.

(9) Policy can also sharpen the incentives to innovate. In a declaration in January, 85 pharmaceutical and diagnostic companies pledged to act against drug resistance. The small print reveals that the declaration is, in part, a plea for money. But it also recognises the need for “new commercial models” to encourage innovation by decoupling payments from sales.

(10) That thought is taken up this week in the last of a series of reports commissioned by the British government and the Wellcome Trust, a medical charity. Among the many recommendations from its author, Jim O’Neill, an economist, is the payment of what he calls “market-entry rewards” to firms that shepherd new antibiotics to the point of usability. This would guarantee prizes of $ 800m- 1.3 billion for new drugs, on top of revenues from sales.

(11) Another of Lord O’Neill’s suggestions is to expand a basic-research fund set up by the British and Chinese governments in order to sponsor the development of cheap diagnostic techniques. If doctors could tell instantaneously whether an infection was viral or bacterial, they would no longer be tempted to administer antibiotics just in case. If they knew which antibiotics would eradicate an infection, they could avoid prescribing a drug that suffers from partial resistance, and thereby limit the further selection of resistant strains (耐药菌株).

(12) Combining policies to accomplish many things at once demands political leadership, but recent global campaigns against HIV/AIDS and malaria show that it is possible. Enough time has been wasted issuing warnings about antibiotic resistance. The moment has come to do something about it.

Passage Three

(1) When George Orwell wrote in 1941 that England was “the most class-ridden country under the sun”, he was only partly right. Societies have always had their hierarchies, with some group perched at the top. In the Indian state of Bihar the Ranveer Sena, an upper-caste private army, even killed to stay there.

(2) By that measure class in Britain hardly seems entrenched (根深蒂固的). But in another way Orwell was right, and continues to be. As a new YouGov poll shows, Britons are surprisingly alert to class—both their own and that of others. And they still think class is sticky. According to the poll, 48% of people aged 30 or over say they expect to end up better off than their parents. But only 28% expect to end up in a different class. More than two-thirds think neither they nor their children will leave the class they were born into.

(3) What does this thing that people cannot escape consist of these days? And what do people look at when decoding which class someone belongs to? The most useful identifying markers, according to the poll, are occupation, address, accent and income, in that order. The fact that income comes fourth is revealing: though some of the habits and attitudes that class used to define are more widely spread than they were, class still indicates something less blunt than mere wealth.

(4) Occupation is the most trusted guide to class, but changes in the labour market have made that harder to read than when Orwell was writing. Manual workers have shrunk along with farming and heavy industry as a proportion of the workforce, while the number of people in white-collar jobs has surged. Despite this striking change, when they were asked to place themselves in a class, Brits in 2006 huddled in much the same categories as they did when they were asked in 1949. So, jobs, which were once a fairly reliable guide to class, have become misleading.

(5) A survey conducted earlier this year by Expertian shows how this convergence on similar types of work has blurred class boundaries. Expertian asked people in a number of different jobs to place themselves in the working class or the middle class. Secretaries, waiters and journalists were significantly more likely to think themselves middle-class than accountants, computer programmers or civil servants. Many new white-collar jobs offer no more autonomy or better prospects than old blue-collar ones. Yet despite the muddle over what the markers of class are these days, 71% of those polled by YouGov still said they found it very or fairly easy to figure out which class others belong to.

(6) In addition to changes in the labour market, two other things have smudged the borders on the class map. First, since 1945 Britain has received large numbers of immigrants who do not fit easily into existing notions of class and may have their own pyramids to scramble up. The flow of new arrivals has increased since the late 1990s, multiplying this effect.

(7) Second, barriers to fame have been lowered. Britain’s fast-growing ranks of celebrities—like David Beckham and his wife Victoria—form a kind of parallel aristocracy open to talent, or at least to those who are uninhibited enough to meet the requests of television producers. This too has made definitions more complicated.

(8) But many Brits, given the choice, still prefer to identify with the class they were born into rather than that which their jobs or income would suggest. This often entails pretending to be more humble than is actually the case: 22% of white-collar workers told YouGov that they consider themselves working class. Likewise, the Expertian survey found that one in ten adults who call themselves working class are among the richest asset-owners, and that over half a million households which earn more than $191,000 a year say they are working class. Pretending to be grander than income and occupation suggest is rarer, though it happens too.

(9) If class no longer describes a clear social, economic or even political status, is it worth paying any attention to? Possibly, yes. It is still in most cases closely correlated with educational attainment and career expectations.

Passage Four

(1) It’s hard to miss them: the epitome of casual “geek chic” and organized within the warranty of their Palm Pilots, they sip labor-intensive cafelattes, chat on sleek cellphones and ponder the road to enlightenment. In the U. S. they worry about the environment as they drive their gas-guzzling sports utility vehicles to emporiums of haute design to buy a $ 50 titanium spatula; they think about their tech stocks as they explore specialty shops for Tibetan artifacts in Everest-worthy hiking boots. They think nothing of laying out $ 5 for a wheatgrass muff, much less $ 500 for some alternative rejuvenation at the day-spa—but don’t talk about raising their taxes.

(2) They are “Bourgeois Bohemians”—or “Bobos”—and they’re the new “enlightened elite” of the information age, their lucratively busy lives a seeming synthesis of comfort and conscience, corporate success and creative rebellion. Well-educated thirty-to-forty something, they have forged a new social ethos from a logic-defying fusion of 1960s counter-culture and 1980s entrepreneurial materialism.

(3) Combining the free-spirited, artistic rebelliousness of the Bohemian beatnik or hippie with the worldly ambitions of their bourgeois corporate forefathers, the Bobo is a comfortable contortion of caring capitalism. “It’s not about making money; it’s about doing something you love. Life should be an extended hobby. It’s all about working for a company as cool as you are. “

(4) It is a world inhabited by dotcom millionaires, management consultants,“culture industry” entrepreneurs and all manner of media folk, most earning upwards of $ 100,000 a year—their money an incidental byproduct of their maverick mores, the kind of money they happen to earn while they are pursuing their creative vision. Often sporting such unconventional job titles as “creative paradox”“corporate jester” or “learning person”, Bobos work with a monk-like self-discipline because they view their jobs as intellectual, even spiritual. It is a reverse the Midas touch: everything a Bobo touches turns to spirituality, everything has to be about enlightenment. Even their jobs are a mission to improve the world.

(5) It is now impossible to tell an espresso-sipping artist from a cappuccino-gulping banker, but it isn’t just a matter of style. If you investigate people’s attitudes towards sex, morality, leisure time and work, it is getting harder and harder to separate the anti-establishment renegade from the pro-establishment company man. Most people seemed to have rebel attitudes and social-climbing attitudes all scrambled together.

(6) These Bobos are just normal middle-class people who are living out a protracted adolescence. Their political interests are either “intensely close and personal”(abortion or gun control) ,or very remote (the rainforests, Tibet or Third World poverty). But they will most likely express their conscience in their consumerism, relieved to be helping someone somewhere by collecting the hand-carved artifacts of distant cultures.

(7) Motivated by spiritual participation, but cautious of moral crusades and religious enthusiasms, they tolerate a little lifestyle experimentation, so long as it is done safely and moderately. They are offended by concrete wrongs, such as cruelty and racial injustice, but are relatively unmoved by lies or transgressions that don’t seem to do anyone any obvious harm.

(8) It is an elite that has been raised to oppose elites. They are by instinct anti-establishmentarian, yet in some sense they have become a new establishment. They are prosperous without seeming greedy; they have pleased their elders, without seeming conformists; they have risen toward the top without too obviously looking down on those below.

(9) While bemoaning the Bobo’s “boring politics”, the Bobos are an elite superior to their intolerant and warring predecessors—they’ve certainly made shopping more fun, and they have a good morality for building a decent society.

Passage One

Passage Three

Passage Four