Introduce briefly the development of RFID and its possible prospects.

their official and religious affairs. In addition, the forum was used as a meeting place.

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ecently, he was intrigued by the nonprofit's high-tech efforts to fight poverty and create jobs in Africa. But he wanted to learn more before shelling out money, so he scheduled a meeting with the founder. "I wasn't sure it was as good as it sounded," says Brewer, who lives in New York. Six months later, he boarded a plane for Kenya—at ApproTEC's behest—to check out their programs in person. "It turned out to be better."

Forget slide shows or annual reports. Charitable organizations are finding that field visits are far more effective marketing tools for deep-pocket donors looking for new experiences. The invitation—only travel programs allow donors, who typically don't mind paying their own way, to see firsthand what their money can accomplish. Such field trips—whether to AIDS orphanages in China, famine-relief programs in Sudan or earthquake-proof building sites in Indonesia—almost always result in increased awareness and bigger checks. Some donors become more active in the aid organization—Brewer now chairs ApproTEC's boardd—or throw fund-raising parties. "Lifetime passionate supporters means first they fall in love with the people and places that they meet," says Sherry Villanueva, Who started organizing trips two years ago as a board member of Direct Relief International, which supplies medical and financial aid to locally run health programs. "We're not sitting around on a fancy deck somewhere with waiters in white gloves."

Indeed, donor trips tend to mix fun with the fund-raising. Miracle Comers of the World, which provides small-business training and housing for young adults in Tanzania, will host its first donor trip in August, with a safari in addition to the ribbon—cutting ceremony at its new housing project. Last month, the London-based International Childcare Trust cycled 300 kilometers in southern India to raise money for children orphaned by the tsunami. The Philanthropy Workshop, a program cosponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation that acts as a boot camp for new donors, recently sent 14 participants to Uganda for a week to look at innovative school reform. for girls and sustainable farming—as well as some gorillas in the bush.

While some critics argue that charities should focus on honing their mission statements instead of organizing adventure trips, others say only a field visit can change a donor's view of the world. "I had a lot of ideas of how to fix Africa before I went over—and all of them were wrong," says Brewer. "I felt very humbled." Roderic Mast, the founder of Conservation International's donor travel program, CI-Sojourns, which enables top supporters to investigate endangered ecosystems around the globe, says he owes the rise in million-dollar-plus contributions to the growing popularity of his nature trips, up from three in 2000 to 13 this year. On one recent trip, Mast recalls how he left a donor and his wife on a beach in Michoacan, Mexico, at night to watch a nesting sea turtle. At breakfast the next morning, they marveled over how the mother gently covered her eggs and then spread sand over a wide area to obscure their location. "The experience was so moving, he cried," says Mast, a marine biologist, of the donor. "No amount of direct mail is ever going to achieve that."

What does the author want to tell us from the example of Jeffrey Brewer, the philanthropist?

he global economy. The headlines of the business press tell the story, "Compaq buys Digital"; "WorldCom buys MC1"; "Citibank merges with Travelers"; "Daimler-Benz acquires Chrysler" Yet when we look beneath the surface of all merger and acquisition activity, we see signs of a counter-phenomenon: the disintegration of the large corporation.

Twenty-five years ago, one in five US workers was employed by a Fortune 500 company. Today, the ratio has dropped to less than one in 10. Large companies are far less vertically integrated than they were in the past and rely more and more on outside suppliers to produce components and provide services. While big companies control ever larger flows of cash, they are exerting less and less direct control over actual business activity. They are, you might say, growing hollow.

Even within large corporations, decisions are increasingly being pushed to lower levels. Workers are rewarded not for efficiently carrying out orders but for figuring out what needs to be done and doing it. Many large industrial companies have broken themselves up into numerous independent units that transact business with one another almost as if they were separate companies.

What underlies this trend? The answers lie in the basic economics of organizations. Business organizations are, in essence, mechanisms for co-ordination. They exist to guide the flow of work, materials, ideas and money, and the form. they take is strongly affected by the co-ordination technologies available. When it is cheaper to conduct transactions internally, within the bounds of a corporation, organizations grow larger, but when it is cheaper to conduct them externally, with independent entities in the open market, organizations stay small or shrink.

The co-ordination technologies of the industrial era—the train and the telegraph, the car and the telephone, the mainframe. computer and the fax machine—made internal transactions not only possible but advantageous. Companies were able to manage large organizations centrally, which provided them with economies of scale in manufacturing, marketing, distribution and other activities. It made economic sense to control many different functions and businesses directly and to hire the legions of administrators and supervisors needed to manage them. Big was good.

But with the introduction of powerful personal computers and broad electronic networks— the coordination technologies of the 21st century—the economic equation changes. Because information can be shared instantly and inexpensively among many people in many locations, the value of centralized decision-making and bureaucracy decreases. Individuals can manage themselves, co-ordinating their efforts through electronic links with other independent parties. Small becomes good.

In one sense, the new co-ordination technologies enable us to return to the pre-industrial organizational model of small, autonomous businesses. But there is one crucial difference: electronic networks enable these microbusinesses to tap into the global reservoirs of information, expertise and financing that used to be available only to large companies. The small companies enjoy many of the benefits of the big without sacrificing the leanness, flexibility and creativity of the small.

In the future, as communications technologies advance and networks become more efficient, the shift to e-lancing promises to accelerate. Should this happen, the dominant business organization of the future may not be a stable, permanent corporation but rather an elastic network that might sometimes exist for no more than a day or two. We will enter the age of the temporary company.

Why does the author say "the big companies are growing hollow" ?

ns? (para. 5)

d. In most World Cups the home team, or the team from the host country, usually plays better than most people expect. In 1966,1974 and 1978, the home teams of England, West Germany and Argentina all won the World Cup. However, since the Cup began, all of the winning teams have been from Europe or South America. Teams from Asia or Africa Mways do well, but they haven't yet won.

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imes 240 kilometers per hour ripped up the roofs and left at least 1 person dead and more than 100 injured.

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er, Tony Blair, has changed pretty much every aspect of education policy in England and Wales, often more than once. "The funding of schools, the governance of schools, curriculum standards, assessment and testing, the role of local government, the role of national government, the range and nature of national agencies, schools admissions" —you name it, it's been changed and sometimes changed back. The only thing that hasn't changed has been the outcome. According to the National Foundation for Education Research, there had been (until recently) no measurable improvement in the standards of literacy and numeracy in primary schools for 50 years.

England and Wales are not alone. Australia has almost tripled education spending per student since 1970. No improvement. American spending has almost doubled since 1980 and class sizes are the lowest ever. Again, nothing. No matter what you do, it seems, standards refuse to budge. To misquote Woody Allen, those who can't do, teach; those who can't teach, run the schools.

Why bother, you might wonder. Nothing seems to matter. Yet something must. There are big variations in educational standards between countries. These have been measured and re-measured by the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) which has established, first, that the best performing countries do much better than the worst and, second, that the same countries head such league tables again and again: Canada, Finland, Japan, Singapore, South Korea.

Those findings raise what ought to be a fruitful question, what do the successful lot have in common? Yet the answer to that has proved surprisingly elusive. Not more money. Singapore spends less per student than most. Nor more study time. Finnish students begin school later, and study fewer hours, than in other rich countries.

Now, an organisation from outside the teaching fold- McKinsey, a consultancy that advises companies and governments—has boldly gone where educationalists have mostly never gone: into policy recommendations based on the PISA findings. Schools, it says, need to do three things, get the best teachers; get the best out of teachers; and step in when pupils start to lag behind. That may not sound exactly "first-of-its-kind": schools surely do all this already? Actually, they don't. If these ideas were really taken seriously, they would change education radically.

Begin with hiring the best. There is no question that, as one South Korean official put it, "the quality of an education system cannot exceed the quality of its teachers." Studies in Tennessee and Dallas have shown that, if you take pupils of average ability and give them to teachers deemed in the top fifth of the profession, they end up in the top 10% of student performers; if you give them to teachers from the bottom fifth, they end up at the bottom. The quality of teachers affects student performance more than anything else.

Yet most school systems do not go all out to get the best. The New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce, a non-profit organisation, says America typically recruits teachers from the bottom third of college graduates. Washington, DC recently hired as chancellor for its public schools an alumna of an organisation called Teach for America, which seeks out top graduates and hires them to teach for two years. Both her appointment and the organisation caused a storm.

A bias against the brightest happens partly because of lack of money (governments fear they cannot afford them), and partly because other aims get in the way. Almost every rich country has sought to reduce class size lately. Yet all other things being equal, smaller classes mean more teachers for the same pot of money, producing lower salaries and lower professional status. That may explain the paradox that, after primary school

ns should be stopped in this country, and the result shows that despite the increasing number of violent activities in recent years, the public remained reluctant to totally ban the sale of guns.

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r homes, we can't be truly elegant without good manners because elegance and good manners always go hand in hand.

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