Tynan Phelan resolved to get in shape last year because he wasn’t happy with his appearance. After tough workouts, his weight【C1】________from 270 pounds to 200 pounds.

The resulting boost to his self-esteem, he expected. More shocking, he says, was suddenly getting【C2】_____at work. “It’s unfortunate, but people treat you【C3】_____,” says Phelan.

They aren’t sure whether it’s fair, but people who’ve lost weight say that getting【C4】_____has helped their careers. With the help of diet pills, weight loss feels more【C5】__than ever for many Americans, and the benefits might not be limited to a number on the【C6】__. Weight bias in the workplace is well documented, with studies showing that people with【C7】__are paid and promoted less on average than thinner【C8】_____.

A few say shedding weight and gaining【C9】_____has made them better at their jobs. Mostly, though, they attribute newfound success—from【C10】__attention to new clients and bigger commissions—【C11】_____the way others perceive them.

People who appear to be physically【C12】_____often enjoy a “health halo,” and we assume they’re hardworking,【C13】_____-oriented types, says Susan Albers, a psychologist at the Cleveland Clinic.

Weight【C14】_____is one of the most insidious forms of on-the-job discrimination, with heavier people often stereotyped as lazy or【C15】__. That reasoning has always been shaky, and, says Albers, assuming that a(n)【C16】__with the discipline to stay slim has the right discipline for the job vacancy could be totally wrong.【C17】__alone is an unreliable gauge of someone’s【C18】_____or work ethic.

【C19】_____, some say sticking to a wellness routine shows they are【C20】_____and have time-management skills that can translate to business.

Success in manufacturing depends on physical things: creating the best product using the best equipment with components assembled in the most efficient way. Success in the service economy is dependent on the human element: picking the right staff members and motivating them correctly. If manufacturing is akin to science, then services are more like the arts.

Motivating people has an extra complexity. Widgets do not know when they are being manipulated. Workers make connections with their colleagues, for social or work reasons, which the management might not have anticipated.

Marissa King is professor of organisational behaviour at the Yale School of Management, where she tries to make sense of these networks. She attempts a classification in her new book, “Social Chemistry: Decoding The Elements of Human Connection”.

The term “networking” has developed unfortunate connotations, suggesting the kind of person who sucks up to senior staff and ignores colleagues who are unlikely to help them win promotion. Ms King cites a study which found that two-thirds of newly promoted professionals were ambivalent about, or completely resistant to, thinking strategically about their social relationships.

From the point of view of productivity, the most important networks are those formed by employees from different parts of the company. Diverse viewpoints should lead to greater creativity. They are good for workers, too. A study found that catching up with colleagues in different departments was linked to salary growth and employee satisfaction.

Some employers had the bright idea of encouraging this co-operation by moving to open-plan offices. But research suggests that workers in open-plan layouts are less productive, less creative and less motivated than those in offices with a traditional, room-based design. The quality of interactions is more important than the quantity. The pandemic, by forcing many people to toil away at home, has probably corroded some of these cooperative arrangements.

Ms King says that people tend to construct three types of network. “Expansionists” have a wide set of contacts but their relationships tend to be shallow. “Conveners” have a small number of relationships, but these are more intense. “Brokers” link people from different network types.

On the surface, this categorisation seems reasonable. How useful is it? Readers can take an online test to see which category they fall into. I did so and found that I did not fit into any of them. Indeed, the author’s research shows that one in three people does not have a clearly defined style and 20-25% could be classed as mixed (for example, they are simultaneously brokers and expansionists). In other words, more than half of people cannot be neatly categorised.

It was never really in doubt. But the first week of COP28 (the 28th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) made one crucial fact impossible to ignore: the fossil fuel industry is not planning to go quietly. Far more of its lobbyists are in the UAE than have attended UN climate talks before.

The battle is hotting up over what next week’s report on progress towards the Paris goals, known as the global stocktake, will say. Fossil fuel interests—both corporate and national—are pushing hard to avoid references to the phase-out that would signal the end of their business model and vast profits. They don’t want an energy transition that leads to their demise.

One of the key battlegrounds at COP28 is that of language: whether fossil fuels will be phased “down” or “out”. The choice is either reducing carbon energy sources or getting rid of them entirely. The latter would be preferable, but there are many other battles to be won. There will be haggling over whether a transition to a cleaner future should see fossil fuels “unabated”, with greenhouse gas emissions released directly into the atmosphere, or “abated”, where carbon capture technology and carbon offsets reduce the harm caused. The latter have so far failed to deliver promised benefits, with which there appears more of a risk than a solution, in enabling the necessity of replacing fossil fuels to be ducked.

Currently, not a single G20 country has policies in place that are consistent with the 1.5°C target. Some, including the UK under Rishi Sunak, are moving in the wrong direction. Meanwhile, the former UN climate chief Christiana Figueres highlighted the unfinished business of financing a “global business plan” for decarbonisation. Climate change is eroding poor nations’ development gains, and if without cash to adapt, such gains will be unachievable in the future. Yet finance flows to developing countries, according to the UN, are roughly a tenth of the $340bn needed by 2030. Bitter divisions between developing and developed countries on this issue almost derailed climate talks earlier this year.

Climate scientists are increasingly desperate. The emissions-cutting process stewarded by COP is failing. Although the rate of increase has fallen, overall emissions are still rising. Perverse though it may seem, in one sense the strenuous efforts of fossil fuel interests to hijack the UN climate process could be seen as a sign of hope. The industry understands that it is under threat. Following through on that threat, by insisting on a just transition to a safer energy system, is the task facing governments and the societies they represent.

For more than a decade, unprecedented amounts of cheap money have encouraged companies to outsource innovation through M&A. Too many CEOs have fallen into the comfort zone of strategizing with bankers and external advisors, scheming about which company to buy—and neglecting to build their internal capacity for innovation.

In particular, leadership loses interest in internal innovation when interest rates are low because cheap money creates the illusion that acquisitions are easy. When funding is plentiful, executives can readily execute and justify deals, so they pour all their energy into buying companies instead of empowering internal research and development (R&D). But the more a company ignores internal innovation, the more aggressively it must acquire. As it buys more and more outside firms to boost its own innovative capacity, it simultaneously struggles to retain key R&D talent because its internal culture is no longer sufficiently supportive of innovation. I call this the financial control trap because it cedes innovation to financial deal-making.

Even in flush times, this cycle eventually risks the company’s failure altogether, as time and money get spent without sustainably generating any new innovations. Now, as the era of low interest rates and cheap money ends, many companies urgently need a new approach to strategic governance. To escape the trap, companies must replace the top-down approach of M&A with a more inclusive and bottom-up approach to innovation. For that reason, effective innovation strategy is inclusive and bottom-up. The financial control trap ignores that truth; and by seeking innovation outside the firm, it weakens internal capabilities.

There’s one question I frequently get when explaining the financial control trap: Why can’t the board prevent the company from falling into it? Too often, well-meaning “best practices,” such as ensuring board independence, have estranged the directors from strategy and innovation processes and unintentionally privileged financial control. Board members are not encouraged to go deep into the company’s operations but are instead valued for their networks and introductions they can make to outside firms, including for prospective acquisitions. As a result, boards usually end up facilitating acquisitions rather than pushing executives to build internal innovation.

If there’s a silver line in higher interest rates, it’s that M&A will look less alluring. Companies still need to work to avoid the financial control trap, and that requires executives to recognize the importance of internal innovation driven from the bottom up. To do this, ask yourself: how often am I looking for innovation outside my organization’s walls? And how often do I ask my team what they’re seeing and what they think we should try? The more you do the former relative to the latter, the more at risk you are. The ideas and insights you need are the ones from people who know your company from within and know your customers.

Belatedly it has dawned on the government that closing more than 1,000 of England’s railway station ticket offices, in an election year, would not be very smart politics. The transport secretary, Mark Harper, announced that train operators had been asked to withdraw the cost-cutting strategy, which the government itself had originally pushed on them. The writing was already on the wall in the summer, when public outrage led to an extension of the consultation period on the proposed closures. By the time it ended, 750,000 responses had been recorded, 99% of them negative.

The public’s concerns were over future access to travel information, assistance for disabled people, and consequences for the less digitally savvy and the digitally excluded. But the passionate backlash also underlined a widespread sense that railway stations must be more than arid transit zones, to be navigated solely through the use of a smartphone. Combined with a reformed fares and ticketing system, that insight should now inform a positive approach to reinvigorating England’s railways and attracting more people on to trains.

Developing stations as social hubs, providing a range of public services alongside tickets, has been popular and successful in countries such as Switzerland and the Netherlands. Great British Railways—the public body once billed as a future “guiding mind” for the rail sector—has been shunted to the sidings by a government more interested in creating political dividing lines around car ownership. But together with the operators, trade unions, the combined authorities and community rail partnerships, ministers could be convening a national conversation about a 21st-century model for our stations.

Similarly, while ministers are right to reflect on a drop-off in passenger numbers, there has been a lack of creative thinking on what to do about it. As a report published this autumn by the Campaign for Better Transport sets out, there is an urgent case for fairer fares and ticketing reform across the network.

For over a decade, the relative cost of taking the train rather than the car has soared, as fares have risen while fuel duty has been frozen. Over a third of the public are confused by the myriad types of ticket available, and the complex regulations that apply to them. The report also makes a compelling case for expanding single-leg pricing across the network and innovations such as an air-miles-style benefits scheme. It points to the success of low-cost regional transport passes, such as those introduced in Germany, France and Portugal.

The aborted attempt to shut down ticket offices had its roots in a short-termist ministerial response to falling revenues, as working habits changed post-Covid. But as the country strives to achieve a challenging green transition, consigning railways to a future of managed decline makes no sense at all. It should work instead to establish a simpler, fairer ticketing system that offers imaginative incentives to take the train.

Anticipating how natural ecosystems will respond to climate change, and determining which species are most at risk of extinction, are crucial aspects of conservation work.

Between about 10% and 50% of all species on Earth, including flowering plants, are predicted to be at high risk of extinction as a result of climate change. Such predictions are almost always generated by considering how individual species respond to a changing climate, without taking into account their potential interactions with other species. This gap in our understanding is not due to a lack of recognition of the importance of species interactions, but reflects the enormous challenge of measuring the strength of species interactions in realistic field conditions, let alone considering how a changing climate might alter those interactions.【G1】_____________________________

Van Dyke and colleagues provide a major advance in the prediction of species persistence under climate change by coupling a well-designed field experiment with predictive mathematical models in order to determine how climate change affects the outcome of competitive interactions. Sowing these seeds, the authors created experimental communities consisting of varying numbers of individuals of the same species orpairwise combinations of different species.【G2】________________________

The effects on individual plant survival in each of these contexts were measured, and the data used in mathematical models to generate predictions for whether one or both species would persist.

Surprisingly, climate change was less likely to affect competition between species pairs that were more similar in terms of their roles or functions in the ecosystem. Foundational theories of ecosystem resilience predict that communities that contain species with very different functions will be more resilient in a changing climate than will communities that consist of species with similar functions.【G3】________________

【G4】_____________________________Furthermore, the results have some direct relevance for conservation planning. For example, they confirm the crucial need to consider species interactions when attempting to predict the persistence of species in future climates.

【G5】_______________________________Although the influence of climate on competitive outcomes more broadly, it will also be important to establish whether measurable characteristics of species exist. These traits are indeed indicative of the species’ responses to climate change and other environmental drivers. Both of these factors will be required for making realistic predictions across whole communities of interacting species and for evaluating the potential for functionally diverse communities to either buffer or exacerbate the impacts of climate change.

[A] Van Dyke and colleagues’ findings provide a step forward in terms of linking hard-to-obtain field data and predictive models, yet the conclusions are inherently limited.

[B] Yet such estimates are clearly needed to provide realistic scenarios for the future that can guide conservation actions.

[C] The authors conclude that modest changes in climate strikingly alter the outcome of competitive interactions between species, whereas those same rainfall changes have little effect on how species fare when grown alone.

[D] The study reveals how climate change can have both direct and indirect effects on the persistence of species and community diversity.

[E] Each of these one-or two-species communities, which developed from seeds sown to generate different population sizes, were subjected to either the ecosystem’s current average precipitation or to a 20% reduction in the average precipitation—a scenario imitating the decreases in rainfall predicted for the area as a result of future climate change.

[F] The authors’ study convincingly demonstrates that climate can alter the effect of competition between species, providing a fundamentally new understanding of ecological interactions.

[G] However, Van Dyke and colleagues’ results reveal that, when species interactions are considered, communities with greater functional diversity might experience more turnover in species composition under climate change as a result of alterations in competitive interactions, compared with the amount of turnover for communities with less functional diversity.

Since the early 1990s, professional football in many countries has experienced an astonishing transformation.【T1】Player salaries have risen substantially, television contracts yield revenues on a scale unimaginable only a few years ago, many football stadiums have been completely rebuilt, and the importance of commercial sponsorship and merchandising has increased beyond measure. Commercial aspects of football feature regularly in the news headlines, and the media devote pages to coverage of football finances. Football’s importance is not only economic, but also social and cultural.【T2】Several million people attend matches each season, and many millions more watch football on television and follow its fortunes through coverage in the media. At the grassroots level, football’s popularity as a participant sport generates benefits for the health of the population. At the highest level, international footballing success generates intangible benefits in the form of prestige and goodwill.

Academic interest in the economic analysis of football has mirrored the growth in the sport’s popularity. In the US, economists have written and published books and scholarly articles on major league sports since the mid-1950s. Consequently, the older academic literature on sports economics is dominated by studies of sports such as baseball, basketball and (American) football.【T3】These writings shed light on a wide range of issues, including the determining factors of the compensation received by sports professionals, the nature of joint production in team sports, competitive balance, uncertainty of outcome and the distribution of playing talent in sports leagues, and the contribution of the coach or manager to team performance. The common thread linking research into all of these topics is the formulation and testing of economic hypotheses using sports as a laboratory.【T4】A major attraction of sports to empirical economists is that the availability of data permits investigation of economic propositions that would be difficult to test in other areas, owing to a lack of suitable data.

【T5】During the last decade of the old century and the first decade of the new, scholarly papers on the economics of football have been published with increasing regularity in academic journals. Undergraduate and postgraduate students in many universities study the economics of sports as part of their degree programmes. At the end of the 1990s, we felt that a monograph was needed to cover developments in the subject, and present a unifying overview of this relatively new area of academic research.