In parts of Brazil’s poor northeast, snakes and parrots are on sale by the roadside for a few reais. In Brazil, as elsewhere in Latin America, wild animals have been kept as pets for centuries. But in recent years they have become the target of a vast and flourishing illegal trade that is threatening the survival of some species. Governments and others are now trying to do more to end the trafficking. In Brazil alone, the trade in animals is worth $ 1 billion a year, according to the National Network Against the Trafficking of Wild Animals(RENCTAS), a coalition of NGOs. Some of the sellers are simply the rural poor, seeking a means of subsistence. Others, especially those involved in exports, are organised networks. The buyers include pet shops, pharmaceutical laboratories and foreign collectors. The international trade in animals is regulated by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora(CITES), which most Latin American countries have signed. Brazil has gone further, banning all trade in wild animals, whether endangered or not. Critics say that by pushing the trade underground, this has made it harder to regulate. In any event, Brazil lacks inspectors, and perhaps the will, to enforce the ban. Some of Brazil’s neighbours have looser rules. Many Brazilian animals are smuggled across the country’s long northern borders to Venezuela, Colombia or the Guyanas, whence they are exported with fake documentation. Efforts are now under way to improve regional co-operation. In July, in the first meeting of its kind, representatives from the United States government, Interpol and CITES met Latin American officials and NGOSA in Brasilia. What about the importing countries? The United States Fish and Wildlife Service carries out inspections at airports, and investigates smuggling networks. Each year it handles 4, 500 cases involving the import or export of animals. Under the Lacey act, American animal traffickers who break foreign laws can be prosecuted at home. Smugglers are regularly picked up in Miami: a Nicaraguan was caught last year at the airport with “Christmas gifts“ that included over 1, 100 sea turtles’ eggs. Tony Silva, a well-known exotic-bird fancier based in Chicago, was jailed in the mid-1990s for heading a ring importing rare parrots from South America. In an effort to deter would-be buyers, RENCTAS is working with tourism bodies to teach unsuspecting foreigners visiting Brazil that they should forget about wild life souvenirs. But in the long run the trade will be stopped only if incentives are generated to deter the rural poor from providing the raw material. Eco-tourism projects have spread across Latin America over the past decade, and the CITES secretariat is backing plans for more. The best hope for parrots is to become more valuable in the wild than in a plastic tube.

What did Selous want to be when he was young?W: Thank you for joining out talk about Mr. Frederick Selous. What was his background? M: Frederick Selous was born in 1851 to a London Stock Exchange official and a poet who loved adventure. From the early age, he had a fascination with David Livingstone, the great British explorer, who had made his name exploring Lualaba river in Southern Africa. At the age of 9, he was said to have been found sleeping in the nightshirt on the floor of his boarding school, Rugby, and when asked what he was doing there, he replied, “One day, I’m going to be a hunter in Africa, and I’m just hardening myself to sleep on the ground“. Selous first visited Southern Africa in 1871 and then spent the next twenty years exploring and hunting between Transvaal and Cango Basin. W: Why is he famous? M: As one of the few white men, the travel in the Africa interior at the time, Selous was instrumental in opening up Southern Africa for Ceil Rhodes and British, negotiating with many of the great indigenous leaders. He documented the progress of gold industry of Zimbabwe and invited US president Theodore Roosevelt on the hunting expedition. That was to effectively kick-start these foreign industries for travelers who want to follow in Roosevelt’s foot steps. W: What did he contribute to geography as a discipline? M: Selous was a typical example of the Victorian image of a great white hunter. However, he was also an enthusiastic naturalist and conservationist at the time when such interests were considered unfashionable. While his fellow hunters rested during the afternoon heat, Selous would be out with a net catching butterflies and taking detailed notes. His precise observations provided a valuable, historical record. And today, the British Museum houses hundreds of specimens. A hunter. A poet. An official. A rugby player.

When did Kant become a professor?W: Immanuel Kant was born in the east of Prussia in 1724. His parents hoped he would study theology: however his interest was towards the classics and he was recognized as one of the most promising classical scholars at college. In 1740, Kant entered the University of Konigsberg and studied primarily with the philosophy faculty. His father died in 1746 and for the next nine years, Kant earned his living as a private tutor. In 1756, he gained professorship and supplemented his income by working as an assistant librarian and through lecturing. Around this time, he introduced a series of popular lectures on physical geography. That regularly attracted audiences about fifty freshmen. Although Kant was a philosopher, he had a great impact on geography by helping to secure its places among university disciplines. He also played an important role in freeing geography from its previous close relationship with theology. Kant proposed that human knowledge could be organized in three ways, by classifying facts according to the type of objects studied, by exampling the temporal dimension and looking at things in terms of their history and by understanding facts relative to spatial relationships. This last represents the field of knowledge commonly known as geography. He taught geography for thirty years and began each term by clarifying the position of geography among the many fields of learning. He believed that geography represented the differentiation of places and that was fundamental to Kant’s understanding of the world. He also saw a clear distinction between the fields of history and geography. In contrast to his numerous philosophical writings, little is left of Kant’s geographical writings. Most of what we know was based on his lectures. Kant believed that the human element was an entangled part of geography. He claimed that physical geography was a summary of nature and the basis of history and all the other possible geographies. In 1740. In 1746. In 1750. In 1756.

Editor Laura talks with Mr. Brooks about his new book on robotics. As you listen, answer the questions or complete the notes in your test booklet for Questions 21 to 30 by writing no more than three words in the space provided on the right. You will hear the interview twice. You now have 1 minute to read Questions 21 to 30. [*]W: I really enjoyed your book. You are one of the robotics pioneers. This’s why I’m very excited to find out that at last you’re writing a book to give readers the first-time description of how robotics has been developing and where it is going. And what prompt you to write the book now? M: There is a confluence of three things happening in robotics right now then I thought what it was worth describing to the world. First, the old version of robots is now being refined and developed in cooperated research labs. So that they’re starting to pick the consumer market. Now the first generation of home robots, robot toys, lawn mowers and floor cleaners are starting to be sold through retail outlets. Second, more recent work in university research labs has led to robots that they were able to interact with humans in such life-like ways that they illuminate the question of whether we are anything more than machines and whether we will soon be able to build Sandia machines. And third, robotic technology is now being implanted in people to compensate for losses caused by diseases. We find ourselves on the thresh-hold of roboticizing on our own bodies. Since I’ve been involved in the aspects of all these developments, I thought I had some interesting perspectives to share with our readers. W: I have to say I’ve been especially interested in the notion of embodiment and how that relates to the ideas of robots learning and evolving, and ways came to biologically evolution. I also enjoyed your discussion of the possibility of machines such as these becoming conscious in some point. M: Well, I think this is a question we will need to address in the future. I think we’ll have some marginally simpler ethical issues to deal with in the shorter term over the next 10 to 20 years. We will be building robots much simpler than humans but perhaps it’s complex in some ways of insects. Under what condition should we extend our ethical treatment in such animals to those robots? What will it take to convince us that they are alive? Concurrently, with that issue we will also be adopting more and more technology into our bodies. What sorts of technology will be fair and what sorts are unfair? W: When I was at the MIT lab, I had the opportunity to spend some time with Corgan, Kitsman. I managed to get Corgan to hold my hand. And when I was playing with Kitsman, his current graduate students thanked me for keeping him entertained. I told her a story about how when I was living in an apartment I have packed Furby to one of the boxes. I think the move was already sole to disturb when there’s a tiny voice to start protesting “I’m bored“. I started to get this vision of robots who need a less of attention from us. Well programs need to consider how much time people will spend with their robots when creating these interacting machines. M: I’ve been involved in developing robotic toys------iRobot cooperation. We developed my real baby. It has an emotional system that makes for interesting play experiences for children. The toy responds differently to the same source of stimulus depending on what mode it’s in. It is of course interesting to design such systems as toys. But more interesting question is whether more complex robots will have emotional lives not for their entertainments or play value. But it is a way of providing regulation of their activities. Animals and humans have involved with emotional systems playing just such roles. We may end up building our emotional systems into our robots, so the people can both understand them and influence the robots in the same way they influence each other. W: You can conclude in your book that technology seems to be heading and the direction of incorporating machine elements senses into human bodies. Do you anticipate that this will happen so gradually? The society, when we really beware that we are returning into cyborgs until the significant percentage of the population, is already part machine. M: That is exactly what I think will happen, like many technologies, this one is going to sneak upon us. We all know people with hip replacements and we may know people who would have implants. More and more people are going to get implants to handle more and more diseases, ranging from Parkinson to Blindness. And more and more people will have prospected devices to compensate for stroke damage. Before too long, people are going to start having implants to ornament themselves not just repair damage. More and more people will be part flesh and part machine.

I always eat breakfast, and suggest that you do too. We all need food in the morning to supply ourselves【C1】______ sources of glucose, 【C2】______ is not stored in the body and 【C3】______needed to fuel the brain. Studies show that those who eat【C4】______are more productive at school and work【C5】______ those who skip it. But there is disagreement over 【C6】______should be eaten for the first meal of the day. I myself like leftovers. I’ve never cared【C7】______most of the common American breakfast foods and feel just terrible if I eat some of【C8】______. I do fine on a traditional Japanese breakfast【C9】______steamed rice, broiled fish, miso soup, pickled vegetables, seaweed, and green tea. I also like fruit, nuts, some fresh cheese, and olives. You will have to experiment to find out what you【C10】______and what works best for you. In any【C11】______, eating breakfast makes it easier to meet your daily nutritional【C12】______. Research shows that people who eat breakfast get more vitamins A, C, and E, folic acid, calcium, iron and fiber than those who skip【C13】______. They also do better with weight control, because they are【C14】______prone to overeat at other meals or load up on high-calorie snacks later in the day. Perhaps the most common excuse for skipping breakfast is lack of【C15】______: but considering the nutritional importance of the【C16】______meal of the day, you should try to find ways of eating something in the morning【C17】______is quick and easy to prepare. Breakfast should provide one-quarter【C18】______one-third of your day’s protein, some good carbohydrate, and some fat. Finally, 【C19】______all you take in the morning is coffee, try switching to green tea for the protection it provides【C20】______cancer and heart disease.

One pertinent question in the wake of the earthquake near Aceh and the tsunami it generated is how much notice of an approaching wave can be given to vulnerable people without the risk of crying “wolf“ too often. Earthquakes themselves are unpredictable, and likely to remain so. But detecting them when they happen is a routine technology. That was not the problem in this case, which was observed by monitoring stations all over the world. Unfortunately for the forecasters, although any powerful submarine earthquake brings the risk of a dangerous tsunami, not all such earthquakes actually result in a big wave, and false alarms cost money and breed cynicism. On top of that, most “ tsunamigenic“ earthquakes, which are caused when the processes of plate tectonics force heavy, oceanic crustal rock below lighter, continental rock to create a deep trench at the bottom of the sea, occur in the Pacific, which is almost surrounded by such trenches. In the Indian Ocean, deep trenches are confined to the southern coast of Indonesia, and tsunamis are rare. Since most of the countries affected by this tsunami are poor, or middle-income at best, and monitoring costs money, this might suggest that a fatalistic approach to the question is reasonable. But American and Japanese experience suggests that effective monitoring need not be that expensive. These two countries have networks of seabed pressure—detectors that can monitor tsunamis and indicate whether and where evacuation is necessary—data they share with their Pacific neighbors. A system of seven detectors, run from Hawaii, cost about $ 18 million to develop, and the experience gained doing so means a similar system might now be had for as little as $ 2 million. So, politicians in Southeast Asia and Australia are proposing one for the Indian Ocean. Detecting tsunamis directly, rather than relying on earthquake monitors, is important for another reason, too. Not all tsunamis are caused by earthquakes. Some of the worst, such as a 15-meter-high monster that killed more than 2 , 000 people in New Guinea in 1998, are the result of submarine landslides(though these can themselves be triggered by earthquakes, as was the case in New Guinea). Indeed, a few years ago it was suggested that a landslide in an unstable part of La Palma, one of the Canary Islands, might cause a tsunami that would devastate the east coast of America. Even if you have an effective detection system, though, it is useless if you cannot evacuate a threatened area. Here, speed is of the essence. Computer modeling can help show which areas are likely to be safest, but common sense is often the best guide—run like wind, away from the sea. Evacuation warnings, too, should be easy to give as long as people are awake. Radios are ubiquitous, even in most poor places. It is just a matter of having systems in place to tell the radio stations to tell people to run. The problem was that no one did.

In parts of Brazil’s poor northeast, snakes and parrots are on sale by the roadside for a few reais. In Brazil, as elsewhere in Latin America, wild animals have been kept as pets for centuries. But in recent years they have become the target of a vast and flourishing illegal trade that is threatening the survival of some species. Governments and others are now trying to do more to end the trafficking. In Brazil alone, the trade in animals is worth $ 1 billion a year, according to the National Network Against the Trafficking of Wild Animals(RENCTAS), a coalition of NGOs. Some of the sellers are simply the rural poor, seeking a means of subsistence. Others, especially those involved in exports, are organised networks. The buyers include pet shops, pharmaceutical laboratories and foreign collectors. The international trade in animals is regulated by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora(CITES), which most Latin American countries have signed. Brazil has gone further, banning all trade in wild animals, whether endangered or not. Critics say that by pushing the trade underground, this has made it harder to regulate. In any event, Brazil lacks inspectors, and perhaps the will, to enforce the ban. Some of Brazil’s neighbours have looser rules. Many Brazilian animals are smuggled across the country’s long northern borders to Venezuela, Colombia or the Guyanas, whence they are exported with fake documentation. Efforts are now under way to improve regional co-operation. In July, in the first meeting of its kind, representatives from the United States government, Interpol and CITES met Latin American officials and NGOSA in Brasilia. What about the importing countries? The United States Fish and Wildlife Service carries out inspections at airports, and investigates smuggling networks. Each year it handles 4, 500 cases involving the import or export of animals. Under the Lacey act, American animal traffickers who break foreign laws can be prosecuted at home. Smugglers are regularly picked up in Miami: a Nicaraguan was caught last year at the airport with “Christmas gifts“ that included over 1, 100 sea turtles’ eggs. Tony Silva, a well-known exotic-bird fancier based in Chicago, was jailed in the mid-1990s for heading a ring importing rare parrots from South America. In an effort to deter would-be buyers, RENCTAS is working with tourism bodies to teach unsuspecting foreigners visiting Brazil that they should forget about wild life souvenirs. But in the long run the trade will be stopped only if incentives are generated to deter the rural poor from providing the raw material. Eco-tourism projects have spread across Latin America over the past decade, and the CITES secretariat is backing plans for more. The best hope for parrots is to become more valuable in the wild than in a plastic tube.

There is one kind of pain for which nobody has yet devised a cure—the pain that comes from the ending of a relationship. The relationship—it can be a marriage, a love affair, or a deep friendship , in fact, any emotional bond between two people—may have come to an abrupt but premeditated end, or it may have simply fizzled out as people and circumstances change. You may have been the one to break it off, or you may have been on the receiving end a brief phone call, a “Dear John“ letter such as soldiers at the front used to dread receiving from their girlfriends back home who had got tired of waiting, or simply a quiet fading away. 【R1】______ Although there is no cure for grief, we cannot help looking for one to ease the pain, and help us forget our tears. We seek refuge in other relationships, keep ourselves busy with work, try to immerse ourselves in our hobbies. Perhaps we start to drink a little more than is good for us to “drown our sorrows“ , or we heed the conventional advice and join a club or society. 【R2】______ Moreover, we are always in a hurry to get rid of our grief. It is as if we were ashamed of it, feeling that we should be able to “pull ourselves together“ , and trying to convince ourselves as we bite on the pillow that we are much too old to be crying. 【R3】______ It is not easy to explain why we adopt this attitude to emotional pain, when it would never occur to us to suggest that we ought to overcome physical pain by a simple effort of will power. Part of the answer must lie in the nature of grief itself. When the love affair dies, you cannot believe that you will ever find another to replace the one who has gone so completely out of your life. 【R4】______ And yet, grief is like one of those illnesses that must run their course, regardless of what we might do. Memories do fade, a healing skin does start to grow over the wound, the intervals between sudden glimpses of the love you have lost do get longer and longer, and bit by bit, painfully, life resumes its normal flow. Such is the perversity of human nature that we can even start to feel guilty as these things start to happen, as if it were an insult to the lost loved one that we can begin to forget at all. 【R5】______ How much time is needed will vary from person to person, but psychiatrists have a rule of thumb: your grief will last as long as the original relationship. The sad thing is that when the breakdown occurs we can only stumble forward over the stones beneath our feet. It is dark ahead and we must be prepared to fall painfully many times on the way before we begin to discern the light at the end of the tunnel. A. Some bury their grief deep inside themselves so that few realize what they are going through: others seek relief by pouring their hearts out to their friends, or to anyone else who is prepared to offer a sympathetic shoulder to lean on. But even our friends after a while start to show their irritation, and suggest with their reproachful glances that it is about time we stopped our crying. They, too, are in a hurry for the thing to be over. B. The future stretches endlessly and bleakly ahead of you: you are utterly alone and without hope of consolation. Even after many, many months, when you think that you have begun to learn to live without your lost love, something—a familiar place, a snatch of music, a whiff of perfume, a casual work—will suddenly bring the bittersweet memories flooding back. You choke back the tears and the desperate, almost angry feeling that you are no better now than the day the affair ended. C. The important thing to admit about grief is that it will take its time. By trying to convince ourselves that it ought to be over sooner, we create an additional tension which can only aggravate the condition. People who have gone through the agony of a broken relationship—and there must be few who have not—agree that time is the great healer. D. The cultivation of a hobby and new forms of interest is therefore a policy of first importance to us. But this is not a business that can be undertaken in a day. The growth of alterative mental interest is a long process. E. Unfortunately, all of these things do little more than alleviate the symptoms without touching the cause of the ailment. F. However it ended and whoever took the initiative to end it, the pain is equally intense and hard to bear. It is a sort of death, and it requires the same period of mourning, the same time for grief.

You will hear a conversation between Miss Green, an educational journalist, and Professor Wilson, an expert in educational studies, about writing in American schools. As you listen, answer Questions 1 to 10 by circling TRUE or FALSE. You will hear the conversation only once. You now have 1 minute to read Questions 1 to 10. [*]M: Professor Wilson, recently, I read a report, saying that writing in schools is found to be both dismal and neglected, because students and teachers have to spend a lot of time preparing for external assessments given by the State. You have been a strong advocator for teacher and student rights. You wrote about the politics of education in “Testing is not teaching“ in 2002. How have things changed since you first wrote about writing in the 1970s? W: In my report to the Ford Foundation in 1976, I documented how the government founded no research in the teaching of writing. It was a polling how little opportunity there was to research writing. I actually got the first grant from the government in 1978 for my study in Atkinson, New Hampshire. There was also a cover story by News Week with a title “Why Johnny can’t“ that was around 1977, as I recalled. So there was a burst of advantage for writing in the early 80s. The national writing project expanded dramatically and there was more research money for studying and writing. Even Ronald Reagon allowed funds to go to writing and its improvement, I was on his panel for excellence. I’ve learned that American educators and the government can maintain focus on the subject area for only so long. In the early 90s and continuing to the present, testing and accountability have become a major focus. They have become almost like curriculum in their own rights. They steal the focus from learning and, more particularly from writing. M: What impact have federal decisions had on our schools? What has this meant for the teaching and writing? W: Testing and the emphasis on reading have stolen large blocks of time from writing. Writing requires human power and time to evaluate whatever is admitted. Reading on the other hand is much cheaper to assess. The No Child Left Behind Act is all about reading. The authors of the bill didn’t realize just how much writing creates a different reader. Writ- ing is the making of reading. People who construct things know far better how to take those things apart. The federal decisions want us to believe that it is much more important to find out if children are good receivers of information rather than good senders of information. In short, we don’t want their ideas but we do want to know if we can get the right answers about the information they should understand. In sum, for our political stand point, we don’t really want to know if they can write with a voice that has ideas and facts just to support those ideas. M: What can teachers do when they find they have less time for writing? W: Teacher should band together asking lots of questions both orally and in a writing. They need to ask questions such as “ How important is writing in relation to reading?“, “ Do you think writing is a medium for learning to think? Why or why not?“ To show how important the medium of writing is, we should put our questions in writing, then call for an appointment to have good dialogue with administrators and policy makers. Of course we need to have dialogue among ourselves about these matters first.

Why did Owen want to change his job?W: Why they move into industry? M: I got to the stage where I wanted to apply my research to actually treating diseases. As an academic, the only way to do that is to set up your own bio-tech company or to move to a pharmaceutical center. Also, although Cancer Research UK was an excellent place to work, it was a very flat structure and you ran a lab. That was it. I wanted to do something more than that before I retired. W: What were your first impressions? M: It is a cultural shock. No question! The main difference is the share size. A large pharmaceutical company may have over 10, 000 people in R&D. This means you have to fit into a larger R&D process. I have to interact with many other parts of the organization. You have to have a team mentality to be able to wave a project goodbye in giving up to another department. In academic research institutes, you are much more isolationist. Your success depends on what is your own CV but not on other people’s. Another difference is that the goal is more short-term in industry. You have clear time lines and if you do not meet mem, you have to explain why. You don’t have a less solved important topic even if it takes ten years, type of scenario. These are only surface differences. Both centers are driven by first-class science. Innovative science would be the keys to success in pharmaceutical companies. W: What about the financial side? M: In industry, there are excellent levels of funding. The salary packages available are good. Then, we don’t know anyone who says salary was a main driver to move from academia. It wasn’t for me. Today, institutes like Cancer Research UK pay scientists pretty well. In industry, financial rewards are often achievement-based. The better you do, the better you are rewarded. To put his research results into practice. To find a better working environment. To do something meaningful when retired. To set up his own pharmaceutical company.

At the dawn of the 20th century, suburbia was a dream inspired by revulsion to the poverty and crowding of the cities. In the visions of architects, there would be neighborhood parks, tree-lined streets and low-density housing free from the pollution and social problems of the cities. As the top map of the New York City metropolitan area shows, commuter suburbs had sprung up near the railway lines on Long Island and Westchester County by 1930, but further expansion was fueled in large part by the automobile. Eventually it was apparent that much of suburbia was not delivering on the early promise. The extraordinary growth of car ownership in 20th-century America was made possible by abundant domestic oil, the world’s largest highway system, and low taxes on vehicles and gasoline. But suburban growth would not have been nearly as great were it not for government policies that penalized cities and rewarded suburbs. For instance, federal mortgage insurance programs tended to promote new housing on outlying land rather than repair of existing city housing and, furthermore, excluded racially mixed neighborhoods that were deemed unstable. American communities have far fewer impediments to expansion than European ones: London, for instance, restricted sprawl by establishing greenbelts on its periphery. Tax deductions for mortgage interest in the U. S. have been larger than those of most other countries. Furthermore, suburban jurisdictions in the U. S. have far greater zoning powers than their foreign counterparts and use this power to reinforce low-density housing by requiring large lots, thus increasing the number of affluent taxpayers and reducing the need to supply services to needy families. Arguably, the most important stimulus to “white flight“ out of the city was fear of crime, particularly crime by blacks—a fear reinforced by the social pathologies of public housing, where blacks and other minorities predominate. Such apprehension helps to explain why revitaliza-tion projects and improved mass-transit systems have failed to lure the middle class back to the city in large numbers. Suburban expansion may conjure up images of aesthetic degradation and cultural sterility, but it has provided better housing for millions. In the process of suburbanization, low-income city families have also benefited because of the housing stock that became available as the middle class fled. By spreading out, U. S. cities avoided the sometimes oppressive densities of Japanese and European cities. Indeed, so great is the compactness in Tokyo that Japanese officials see deconcentration as a high priority. Overall, however, the suburban push financially hurt cities, which saw their tax bases shrink. They were disproportionately affected by unfunded federal mandates and thus hindered in efforts to provide quality schools and reliable municipal services. Indeed, New York City’s fiscal problems in the 1970s followed, and were worsened by the middle-class flight into the suburbs. The outflow, rather than population growth, drove rapid suburban spread.

A mother wrote to a newspaper inquiring whether her son should go abroad to study as an undergraduate or he should go to a Chinese university before going abroad to study as a postgraduate. Write a letter to the editor of the same newspaper to give your suggestions to this confused mother, and give reasons to justify your suggestions. You should write no less than 250 words. Write your letter on ANSWER SHEET 2.

Answer Questions 71 to 80 by referring to the four articles on the topic “ Does the free market erode character?“ written by four experts on the following pages. Answer each question by choosing A, B, CorDand mark it on ANSWER SHEET 1. Note: When more than one answer is required, these may be given in any order. Some choices may be required more than once. A = John Gray B = Ayaan Hirsi C = Qinglian He D = Michael Walzer Which author(s)believe(s)that the free market [*] A John Gray Free markets erode some aspects of character while enhancing others. Whether the result is good, on balance, depends on how one envisions a good life. Much also depends on whether one believes other economic systems can do better. The question can only be answered by comparing realistic alternatives and by understanding how different systems promote divergent types of human character. In real time, free markets rarely work according to the models constructed by economists. There are booms and bubbles, busts and crashes. It is only in economics textbooks that markets are self-regulating. Against this background, the relation between economics and ethics can be seen more clearly. The traits of character most rewarded by free markets are entrepreneurial boldness, the willingness to speculate and gamble, and the ability to seize or create new opportunities. It is worth noting that these are not the traits most praised by conservative moralists. Prudence, thrift, and the ability to press on patiently in a familiar pattern of life may be admirable qualities, but they do not usually lead to success in the free market. B Ayaan Hirsi There is little consensus on what is moral, let alone on what erodes morality. A man of faith measures moral character by one’s ability to abide by the demands of his God. A socialist might measure moral strength by one’s dedication to the redistribution of wealth. A liberal—by which I mean a classical, Adam Smith or Milton Friedman liberal, not a liberal in its American meaning of “pro-big government“—might be religious, and he might see the merits of income equality, but he will always put freedom first. This is the moral framework to which I subscribe. According to this school of thought, freedom of the individual is the highest aim, and the ultimate test of a person’s character is his ability to pursue his own chosen goals in life without infringing upon the freedom of others to pursue their own goals. From this perspective, free economic activity among individuals, corporations, and nations boosts such desirable qualities as trust, honesty, and hard work. Producers are compelled to continually improve their goods and services. The free market establishes a meritocracy and creates opportunities for better jobs for those students who work hard at school. The same mechanism pushes parents to invest more time and money in the education of their children. Producers invest in research and innovation to beat their competitors in the marketplace. C Qinglian He Over the past several centuries, the world has seen the many ways in which an active free market spurs material and social progress while at the same time strengthening moral character. By contrast, people who have lived under the free market’s primary modern rival, the ideologically-driven planned economy of state socialism, have suffered as economic performance stagnated, civil society withered, and morality was eroded. In recent decades, as planned economies collapsed under their own contradictions, this Utopian experiment has proved to be a systematic failure. Citizens who had endured long years of economic, moral, and political disaster were eager to get rid of them. Of course, the market economy is not a perfect system. But the market’s flaws stem from the actions and motivations of its human participants rather than from its design. Experience has taught us that a free market is closely associated with a free society. And in free societies, people are better able to act in concert to improve their lives. Free societies afford people the opportunity to make their own political and social systems more just. In general, these activities support rather than erode morality. D Michael Walzer Competition in the market puts people under great pressure to break the ordinary rules of decent conduct and then to produce good reasons for doing so. It is these rationalizations—the endless self-deception necessary to meet the bottom line and still feel okay about it—that erode moral character. But this isn’t in itself an argument against the free market. Think about the ways that democratic politics also erodes moral character. Competition for political power puts people under great pressure—to make promises they can’t keep, to take money from shady characters, to compromise principles that shouldn’t be compromised. All this has to be defended somehow, and moral character doesn’t survive the defense—at least, it doesn’t survive intact. But these obvious flaws don’t constitute an argument against democracy. To be sure, economic and political competition also produce cooperative projects of many different sorts—partnerships, companies, parties, unions. Within these projects, empathy, mutual respect, friendship, and solidarity are developed and reinforced. People learn the give-and-take of collective deliberation. They stake out positions, take risks, and forge alliances. All these processes build character. But because the stakes are so high, participants in these activities also learn to watch and distrust one another, to conceal their plans, to betray their friends. They become “characters“ in familiar stories of corporate corruption, political scandal, defrauded stockholders, and deceived voters.

How can the trade of wild animals be eliminated eventually?

The U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s responsibilities do NOT include

The purpose of the meeting between the U. S. and Latin American officials is to

According to critics, it is hard to regulate the trade in wild animals in Brazil because

The following groups are among buyers of wild animals EXCEPT