Passage One

(1) So Roger Chillingworth—a deformed old figure, with a face that haunted men’s memories longer than they liked—took leave of Hester Prynne, and went stooping away along the earth. He gathered here and there an herb, or grubbed up a root, and put it into the basket on his arm. His grey beard almost touched the ground, as he crept onward. Hester gazed after him a little while, looking with a half fantastic curiosity to see whether the tender grass of early spring would not be blighted beneath him, and show the wavering track of his footsteps, sere and brown-across its cheerful verdure. She wondered what sort of herbs they were, which the old man was so sedulous to gather. Would not the earth, quickened to by the sympathy of his eye, greet him with poisonous shrubs, of species hitherto unknown, that would start up under his fingers? Or might it suffice him, that every wholesome growth should be converted into something deleterious and malignant at his touch? Did the sun, which shone so brightly everywhere else, really fall upon him? Or was there, as it rather seemed, a circle of ominous shadow moving along with his deformity, whichever way he turned himself? And whither was he now going? Would he not suddenly sink into the earth, leaving a barren and blasted spot, where, in due course of time, would be seen deadly nightshade (龙葵). dogwood (山茱萸), henbane (天仙子), and whatever else of vegetable wickedness the climate could produce, all flourishing with hideous luxuriance? Or would he spread bat’s wings and flee away, looking so much the uglier, the higher he rose towards heaven?

(2) “Be it sin or no,” said Hester Prynne bitterly, as she still gazed after him, “I hate the man!”

(3) She upbraided herself for the sentiment, but could not overcome or lessen it. Attempting to do so, she thought of those long-past days, in a distant land, when he used to emerge at eventide (黄昏) from the seclusion of his study, and sit down in the firelight of their home, and in the light of her nuptial smile. He needed to bask himself in that smile, he said, in order that the chill of so many lonely hours among his books might be taken off the scholar’s heart. Such scenes had once appeared not otherwise than happy, but now, as viewed through the dismal medium of her subsequent life, they classed themselves among her ugliest remembrances. She marvelled how such scenes could have been! She marvelled how she could ever have been wrought upon to marry him! She deemed it her crime most to be repented of, that she had ever endured, and reciprocated, the lukewarm grasp of his hand, and had suffered the smile of her lips and eyes to mingle and melt into his own. And it seemed a fouler offence committed by Roger Chillingworth, than any which had since been done him, that, in the time when her heart knew no better, he had persuaded her to fancy herself happy by his side.

(4) “Yes, I hate him!” repeated Hester, more bitterly than before. “He betrayed me! He has done me worse wrong than I did him!”

(5) Let men tremble to win the hand of woman, unless they win along with it the utmost passion of her heart! Else it may be their miserable fortune, as it was Roger Chillingworth’s, when some mightier touch than their own may have awakened all her sensibilities, to be reproached even for the calm content, the marble image of happiness, which they will have imposed upon her as the warm reality. But Hester ought long ago to have done with this injustice. What did it betoken? Had seven long years, under the torture of the scarlet letter, inflicted so much of misery, and wrought out no repentance?

(6) The emotions of that brief space, while she stood gazing after the crooked figure of old Roger Chillingworth, threw a dark light on Hester’s state of mind, revealing much that she might not otherwise have acknowledged to herself.

(7) He being gone, she summoned back her child.

(8) “Pearl! Little Pearl! Where are you?”

(9) Pearl, whose activity of spirit never flagged, had been at no loss for amusement while her mother talked with the old gatherer of herbs. At first, as already told, she had flirted fancifully with her own image in a pool of water, beckoning the phantom forth, and—as it declined to venture—seeking a passage for herself into its sphere of impalpable earth and unattainable sky. Soon finding, however, that either she or the image was unreal, she turned elsewhere for better pastime. She made little boats out of birch-bark (桦树皮), and freighted them with snail-shells, and sent out more ventures on the mighty deep than any merchant in New England; but the larger part of them foundered near the shore. She seized a live horse-shoe (鲎) by the tail, and made prize of several five-fingers (海 星). and laid out a jelly-fish to melt in the warm sun. Then she took up the white foam, that streaked the line of the advancing tide, and threw it upon the breeze, scampering after it, with winged footsteps, to catch the great snow flakes ere they fell. Perceiving a flock of beach-birds, that fed and fluttered along the shore, the naughty child picked up her apron full of pebbles, and, creeping from rock to rock after these small sea-fowl, displayed remarkable dexterity in pelting them. One little grey bird, with a white breast, Pearl was almost sure, had been hit by a pebble, and fluttered away with a broken wing. But then the elf-child sighed, and gave up her sport; because it grieved her to have done harm to a little being that was as wild as the sea-breeze, or as wild as Pearl herself.

(10) Her final employment was to gather sea-weed, of various kinds, and make herself a scarf, or mantle, and a head-dress, and thus assume the aspect of a little mermaid. She inherited her mother’s gift for devising drapery and costume. As the last touch to her mermaid garb, Pearl took some eel-grass, and imitated, as best she could, on her own bosom, the decoration with which she was so familiar on her mother’s. A letter—the letter A—but freshly green, instead of scarlet! The child bent her chin upon her breast, and contemplated this device with strange interest; even as if the one only thing for which she had been sent into the world was to make out its hidden import.

Passage Two

(1) Another milestone on the journey towards digital cash was passed on November 13th. That date marked the emergence from beta-testing in America of V. me, a “digital wallet” that holds multiple payment cards in a virtual repository. Instead of providing their personal details and card numbers to pay for stuff online, customers just enter a username and a password. The service is provided by Visa, a giant card-payment network whose headquarters is in the heart of Silicon Valley, close to a host of technology firms which would love to get their hands on a chunk of the global payments business.

(2) In the short term new technology is actually boosting usage of plastic. Smartphone apps often require users to enter their card details to pay for services. Firms such as Square and PayPal have developed tiny card readers that plug into smartphones and allow small traders using their software to accept payments cheaply. Ed McLaughlin, who oversees emerging payments technologies at MasterCard, reckons such developments have added 1.2m new businesses over the past 12 months to the card firms’ list of merchants.

(3) But even if plastic cards eventually go the way of vinyl records, card networks should still prosper because they too are investing heavily in new technology and have several built-in advantages. Visa is betting its member banks can help it to narrow the gap with rivals like PayPal, for instance, which is part of eBay and has grown to 117m active users thanks in part to its use on the auction site. Over 50 financial institutions are supporting the launch of V. me, which accepts non-Visa cards in its wallet, too. MasterCard and others are also touting digital wallets, some of which can hold digital coupons and tickets as well as card details.

(4) Before long all of these wallets are likely to end up on mobile phones, which can be used to buy things in stores and other places. This is where firms such as Square, which has developed its own elegant and easy-to-use mobile wallet, and Google have been focusing plenty of energy. Jennifer Schulz, Visa’s global head of e-commerce, predicts there will be a shake-out that leaves only a few wallet providers standing. Thanks to their trusted brands, big budgets and payments savvy, one or more card companies will be among them.

(5) Card networks are also taking stakes in innovative firms to keep an eye on potentially disruptive technologies. Visa owns part of Square, which recently struck a deal with Starbucks to make its mobile-payment service available in 7,000 of the coffee chain’s outlets in America. Visa has also invested in Monitise, a mobile-banking specialist. American Express, for its part, has set up a $100m digital-commerce fund, one of whose investments is in iZettle, a Square-like firm based in Sweden.

(6) So far few have tried to create new payments systems from scratch. Those that have toyed with the idea, such as ISIS, a consortium of telecoms companies in America, have concluded it is far too costly and painful to deal with regulators, set up anti-fraud systems and so forth. Fears about the security of new-fangled payment systems also play into the hands of established card firms.

(7) Still, they cannot relax. Bryan Keane, an analyst at Deutsche Bank, points out that rival digital wallets could promote alternatives to credit and debit cards, including stored-value cards and direct bank-account-to-bank-account payments. Big retailers in America have clubbed together to create their own digital wallet and are likely to prompt users to choose the payment options that are cheapest for the chains, by offering them incentives like coupons.

(8) Jack Dorsey, the boss of Square and a co-founder of Twitter, agrees that digital wallets will make the tradeoffs between various payment options clearer to consumers and reckons this will force card networks to up their game. “They had a major innovation 60 years ago” he says, “and there have been very, very few innovations since. ” Some in the payments world might quibble with that but one thing they can all agree on is that the spread of mobile payments will bring many more customers. MasterCard’s Mr. McLaughlin claims that 85% of commerce still involves cash and cheques. As mobile purchases take off, more of this activity will move online.

(9) The biggest prize of all lies in emerging markets, where a lack of financial infrastructure is hastening the rise of phone-based payments systems such as M-Pesa, which serves Kenya and several other markets. Visa has snapped up Fundamo, which specialises in payment services for the unbanked and underbanked in emerging markets; MasterCard has set up a joint venture called Wanda with Telefonica, a Spanish telecoms firm, which aims to boost mobile payments across Latin America. The payments world is changing fast but the card firms are not about to let rivals swipe their business.

Passage Three

(1) In an interview near the end of his career the fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent confessed to a regret: that he had not invented blue jeans. “They have expression, modesty, sex appeal, simplicity,” sighed the owlish Frenchman. “All I hope for in my clothes.” American denim-lovers might add other attributes. As far back as the 1930s, when the popularity of cowboy films helped jeans make the leap from workwear into the wardrobes of Hollywood stars, denim has been understood to stand for something larger about the American spirit: for rugged individualism, informality and a classless respect for hard work.

(2) “Deep down in every American’s breast-is a longing for the frontier,” enthused Vogue magazine in 1935, advising readers on how to dress with true “Western chic” (combine jeans with a Stetson hat and “a great free air of Bravado,” it counselled). Levi Strauss & Co., the San Francisco firm which invented modern blue jeans in 1873, saw sales boom after it crafted posters showing denim-clad cowboys toting saddles and kissing cowgirls.

(3) Jump to the 1950s and 1960s, and American consumers learned the heroic history of denim from nationwide magazine and television advertising campaigns. They were told that the tough blue cloth began life as “Serge de Nimes”, in the French town of that name, and was used by Columbus for his ships’ sails, before outfitting the pioneers who tamed the West. In a country so often riven by culture wars, jeans crossed lines of ideology, class, gender and race. Presidents from Jimmy Carter onwards have worn denim when fishing, clearing brush or playing sports to signal their everyman credentials—though Barack Obama has endured mockery for donning capacious jeans that he later conceded were “a little frumpy”.

(4) Since the second world war, when GIs (美国兵) and sailors took blue jeans to the Old World and Asia, denim has carried ideas of American liberty around the globe, often leaving governments scrambling to catch up. Emma McClendon, a curator at the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) in New York, notes in a fine new book, Denim: Fashion’s Frontier, that when the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, reporters were surprised to see young East Berliners dressed exactly like their cousins from the West—in stonewashed jeans. Ms McClendon’s book accompanies a small but splendid exhibition on denim at the FIT on Seventh Avenue.

(5) The popularity of clothing invented to survive hard labour is of topical interest in America, a country gripped by election-year debates about blue-collar, working-class voters, and whether their interests have been ignored by ruling elites. Ms McClendon argues, persuasively, that much of what Americans think they know about denim draws on a set of “origin myths”, crafted and disseminated by manufacturers over many years, both individually and in campaigns run by the Denim Council, an industry group of clothing-makers and textile mills that was active from 1955- 1975. The council, whose papers are now in the FIT’s archives, was formed after jeans-clad motorcycle gangs and such films as The Wild One and Rebel Without a Cause led to something like a nationwide panic about denim and its unseemly effects on young bodies and minds. Committees of denim manufacturers and advertising executives set out to combat “anxieties over juvenile delinquency”. Wholesome films about jeans appeared on over 70 television stations, and How It All Began cartoons ran in newspapers, tracing the origins of denim back to medieval Europe. From the late 1950s Levi Strauss & Co. ran advertisements and a letter-writing campaign urging schools to allow students to attend classes in denim. Their pitch combined images of clean-cut, studious children in jeans with such slogans as “Right for School”, explains Tracey Panek, Levi’s company historian.

(6) Quite a lot of this marketing was hokum (胡扯), or close to it. There is no evidence that Columbus crossed oceans under billowing denim sails, while the latest research is that the term “denim” may have been invented in England. Perhaps most strikingly, relatively few cowboys wore blue jeans at the height of the Wild West, Ms McClendon says: canvas (粗帆布) and leather trousers were also common. Denim was mostly worn by small farmers, field-hands, labourers and miners—some of the oldest pieces in the archives of Levi Strauss & Co. were found in disused mines in California and Nevada (there is a whole world of denim-hunters out there, willing to endure much hardship to find a pair of 1880s Levi’s).

The best history money can buy

(7) Ms McClendon describes economic and commercial forces at work in the 1930s. Denim sales to working-class customers slumped during the Depression. At the same time ranchers in need of extra income touted their properties as “dude ranches (度假农场)” at which affluent tourists could play at cowboys, apeing favourite film stars. Even Depression-era protectionism arguably played a role: Sandra Comstock, a sociologist at Reed College in Oregon, has written that tariffs (关税) on imported French clothing prodded department stores to promote domestic fashions including jeans.

(8) Myth-making about jeans suggests a political conclusion, too: that for a supposedly classless country America takes a complicated view of work. Study denim’s history and it is hard to avoid concluding that heroic individuals roaming the land, such as cowboys, are easier to sell as fashion icons than folk who toil by the hour in a factory, garage or field, taking orders from a boss. The first gallery at the FIT exhibition shows how the earliest denim clothes were often uniforms: it includes a prison uniform, sailor’s overalls and, most tellingly, the sort of blue work-shirt made of chambray (a cousin of denim) that inspired the term “blue-collar worker” back in the 1920s. Yet, other than to a few urban hipsters in recent decades, chambray shirts have mostly lacked the “cross-over cool” of denim jeans, says Fred Dennis, senior curator at the FIT—they did not fit into a “romanticised, cool-dude weekend look”. Small wonder that blue-collar workers feel forgotten.

Passage Four

(1) Faith schools and academies should be stripped of their power to choose pupils, according to research that suggests that some secondary schools are flouting new rules designed to prevent middle-class pupils dominating the best comprehensives.

(2) Researchers at the London School of Economics, who studied more than 3,000 secondary school admission forms for 2008, said that faith schools and other establishments that control admissions, including academies, should hand over the job of allocating places to an independent body to ensure greater fairness. Anne West, director of the education research group at the LSE and lead author of the study, said that this could be the local authority, which already controls admissions for community schools, or a religious body such as the diocesan authority.

(3) The researchers found that some schools were operating a form of backdoor selection by asking for personal information about parents’ marital status, occupation and educational background and even children’s hobbies. It also found that a significant minority of nonselective schools—5 percent—were selecting pupils on the basis of aptitude for a particular subject.

(4) More than half a million 11-year-olds in England will discover this week whether they have got a place at their preferred secondary. Early indications suggest that nationally up to a sixth of children, more than 90,000 pupils, could be disappointed.

(5) An overall decline in the number of applications means that the proportion of those failing to get their first choice is likely to fall slightly.

(6) The Times has conducted a survey of 65 local authorities. The proportion of pupils not getting their first choice in the West London borough of Kensington and Chelsea was 40 per cent. Further west in Hillingdon the proportion was 29. 5 per cent. In Hertfordshire the figure was 33 per cent, in Bournemouth 29 per cent and in Bristol 19 per cent.

(7) In the grammar school areas of Kent and Buckinghamshire, the proportions were 21. 5 and 46.05 per cent respectively.

(8) Professor West said that despite the introduction of an admissions code in 2007 to outlaw backdoor selection several schools had breached the rules in letter and in spirit.

(9) The study, which was funded by the education charity RISE and the Esmee Fairbairn Foundation, found that some schools were using supplementary information forms to ask parents open-ended questions, which would indicate a great deal about the parents’ own educational and social background.

(10) Several schools asked about children’s hobbies and one even asked children to complete a 100-word statement. Another invited parents to meet the headteacher or deputy “to discuss the application for admission”, despite a ban on interviews.

(11) A small number of grammar schools (15 percent) asked about parents’ marital status through indirect questions, which is also against the rules.

(12) The sheer complexity of admissions procedures discriminated against certain groups of parents, the report suggests. More than a fifth of voluntary aided schools have at least four admissions criteria relating to religion and some have as many as 11.

(13) Closely tied to this, Professor West said, was the wide degree of discretion open to schools that controlled their own admissions. “Schools that are their own admission authority are in theory in a position to ’cream skim’. This means that they are able, if they so wish, to select pupils who will maximise their examination league tabic results,” she said. “We do not know what is going on behind closed doors. We do not know what happens in voluntary aided schools and how it is decided whether or not a particular applicant is offered a place. “

(14) The study found that the proportion of secondary schools selecting pupils by aptitude had risen from 3 per cent to 5 per cent between 2001 and 2008.

(15) Nonselective schools that specialise in specific subject areas may select up to 10 percent of their intake by aptitude. The LSE study found that some schools used prior attainment, for example in music examinations, as an indicator of aptitude. This, Professor West suggested, was tantamount to selecting by ability.

(16) Sarah McCarthy-Fry, the Schools Minister, said that the LSE report supported the Government’s own tough approach to the admissions code. “Admissions authorities must ensure their arrangements are not unnecessarily complex so as to disadvantage certain families,” she said.

(17) Faith authorities were highly critical of the report. The Rev Janina Ainsworth, chief education officer for the Church of England, said that the study was based on out-of-date information and denied that the procedures for deciding a child’s religious affiliation were complex or that schools had too much discretionary power.

(18) “Church attendance is the only measure our schools use when allocating places on the basis of faith, and you cannot get a much simpler way of assessing whether someone has a faith commitment or not,” she said.

Passage Three

Passage Four