【文章內(nèi)容簡介】 whichcould be applied to many types of products and have extended to other countries.劉曉華 liuxiaohua72@10Lesson 9 Royal espionageAlfred the Great acted as his own spy, visiting Danish camps disguised as aminstrel. In those days wandering minstrels were wele everywhere. Theywere not fighting men, and their harp was their passport. Alfred had learnedmany of their ballads in his youth, and could vary his programme with acrobatictricks and simple conjuring.While Alfred39。s little army slowly began to gather at Athelney, the king himselfset out to penetrate the camp of Guthrum, the mander of the Danish invaders.These had settled down for the winter at Chippenham: thither Alfredwent. He noticed at once that discipline was slack: the Danes had the selfconfidenceof conquerors, and their security precautions were casual. They livedwell, on the proceeds of raids on neighbouring regions. There they collectedwomen as well as food and drink, and a life of ease had made them soft.Alfred stayed in the camp a week before he returned to Athelney. The forcethere assembled was trivial pared with the Danish horde. But Alfred haddeduced that the Danes were no longer fit for prolonged battle : and that theirmissariat had no organization, but depended on irregular raids.So, faced with the Danish advance, Alfred did not risk open battle but harriedthe enemy. He was constantly on the move, drawing the Danes after him. Hispatrols halted the raiding parties: hunger assailed the Danish army. Now Alfredbegan a long series of skirmishesand within a month the Danes had surrendered.The episode could reasonably serve as a unique epic of royal espionage!劉曉華 liuxiaohua72@11*Lesson 10 Silicon valleyTechnology trends may push Silicon Valley back to the future. Carver Mead, a pioneer in integrated circuitsand a professor of puter science at the California Institute of Technology, notes there are now workstationsthat enable engineers to design, test and produce chips right on their desks, much the way an editor creates anewsletter on a Macintosh. As the time and cost of making a chip drip to a few days and a few hundred dollars,engineers may soon be free to let their imaginations soar without being penalized by expensive failures. Meadpredicts that inventors will be able to perfect powerful customized chips over a weekend at theoffice—spawning a new generation of garage startups and giving the . a jump on its foreign rivals ingetting new products to market fast. ‘We’ve got more garages with smart people,’ Mead observes. ‘We reallythrive on anarchy.’And on Asians. Already, orientals and Asian Americans constitute the majority of the engineering staffs atmany Valley firms. And Chinese, Korean, Filipino and Indian engineers are graduating in droves fromCalifornia’s colleges. As the heads of nextgeneration startups, these Asian innovators can draw on customsand languages to forge tighter links with crucial Pacific Rim market. For instance, Alex Au, a Stanford .from Hong Kong, has set up a Taiwan factory to challenge Japan’s near lock on the memorychip market.Indiaborn N. Damodar Reddy’s tiny California pany reopened an ATamp。T chip plant in Kansas City lastspring with financing from the state of Missouri. Before it bees a retirement village, Silicon Valley mayprove a classroom for building a global business.劉曉華 liuxiaohua72@12Lesson 11 How to grow oldSome old people are oppressed by the fear of death. In the young there is a justification for this feeling.Young men who have reason to fear that they will be killed in battle may justifiably feel bitter in the thoughtthat they have been cheated of the best things that life has to offer. But in an old man who has known humanjoys and sorrows, and has achieved whatever work it was in him to do, the fear of death is somewhat abjectand ignoble. The best way to overe itso at least it seems to meis to make your interests gradually widerand more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life bees increasingly merged inthe universal life. An individual human existence should be like a riversmall at first, narrowly containedwithin its banks, and rushing passionately past boulders and over waterfalls. Gradually the river growswider ,the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they beemerged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being. The man who, in old age, can see his life in thisway, will not suffer from the fear of death, since the things he cares for will continue. And it, with the decay ofvitality, weariness increases, the thought of rest will be not unwele. I should wish to die while still at work,knowing that others will carry on what I can no longer do, and content in the thought that what was possiblehas been done.劉曉華 liuxiaohua72@13Lesson 12 Banks and their customersWhen anyone opens a current account at a bank, he is lending the bank money, repayment of which hemay demand at any time, either in cash or by drawing a cheque in favour of another person. Primarily, thebankercustomer relationship is that of debtor and creditorwho is which depending on whether the customer39。saccount is in credit or is overdrawn. But, in addition to that basically simple concept, the bank and its customerowe a large number of obligations to one another. Many of these obligations can give rise to problems andplications but a bank customer, unlike, say, a buyer of goods, cannot plain that the law is loadedagainst him.The bank must obey its customer39。s instructions, and not those of anyone else. When, for example, acustomer first opens an account, he instructs the bank to debit his account only in respect of cheques drawn byhimself. He gives the bank specimens of his signature, and there is a very firm rule that the bank has no rightor authority to pay out a custome