In Britain, business leaders are becoming increasingly concerned that growing numbers of new employees are unable to divide a real pie into eight equal slices.

There are so many examples of the shortage of basic literacy and numeration (读写和计算) skills among many school and university leavers.

A report from the Confederation of British Industry says the problem is so bad that one in three employers has to send staff for training to learn the English and maths they did not learn at school.

“Employers’ views on numeration and literacy are clear — people must read and write fluently and must be able to carry out basic mental arithmetic (算术).” Richard Lambert, director general of the CBI, said.

The CBI report, Working on the Three R’s, which was sponsored by the Department for Education, found that poor literacy was a problem in all fields, while poor numeration was of particular concern in the manufacturing and construction field.

One company manager complained of a “total lack of knowledge of timetables” among staff, which meant many were unable to carry out simple calculations.

A personnel manager for a construction firm said that many applicants were unable to construct a sentence and that grammar, and their handwriting and spelling were often “awful”. He also mentioned the case of an employee who became very expert at hiding his lack of literacy by getting his wife to write his reports for him. The problems are not limited to school leavers, but extend to higher levels of the education system, the CBI said.

Shakespeare once wrote: “Neither a borrower nor a lender be; For loan oft loses both itself and friend”. It’s often paraphrased and used as a warming about the dangers of lending, and how you could risk a friendship through it.【小题1】

If our friend or family member comes to us for hard cash, it can be very difficult to turn them away. You feel under pressure to help. 【小题2】 So how can we, as the lender, avoid these complications （纠纷）？ According to Bradley T. Klontz, an expert in financial psychology, there are some steps you can take.

Understanding why there is an unavoidable risk to lending anything to a friend is the first thing.【小题3】 This is because, psychologically speaking, the action of lending has changed the balance of power. The lender becomes superior, while the borrower may feel awkward with the new arrangement. Likewise, if you try to advise them on what to do with the money, it might make things difficult between you two.

【小题4】 Saying ‘no’ is hard when a friend comes asking, but if you need that money, denying them is probably the safest course of action. If you still feel the need to lend, making a legally binding （具有法律约束力的） agreement and putting things down in writing could guarantee deadlines.【小题5】

Finally, for some, it’s best to just see the money as a gift and be pleasantly surprised if something comes back. And if you do want to preserve your friendship, perhaps a bank is a better option.

Supermarkets have long been suffering as one of the thinnest-margined businesses in existence and one of the least-looked-forward-to places to work or visit. For more than a decade, they have been under attack from e-commerce giants, blamed for making Americans fat, and accused of contributing to climate change.

Supermarkets can technically be defined as giants housing 15,000 to 60,000 different products. The revolutionary idea of a self-service grocery, where people could hunt and gather food from aisles rather than asking a clerk to fetch items from behind a counter, first came about in America. There is some debate about which was the very first, but over the years a consensus has built around King Kullen Supermarket, founded in New York in 1930.

For some 300 years, Americans had fed themselves from small stores and public markets. Shopping for food involved mud, noisy chickens, clouds of flies, nasty smells, bargaining, and getting short-changed. The supermarket imitated the Fordist factory, with its emphasis on efficiency and standardization, and reimagined it as a place to buy food. Supermarkets may not feel cutting-edge now, but they were a revolution in distribution at the time. They were such strange marvels that, on her first official state visit to the United States in 1957, Queen Elizabeth Ⅱ insisted on an impromptu (即兴的) tour of a suburban-Maryland Giant Food.

The typical supermarket layout has barely changed over the past 90 years. Most stores open with flowers, fruit and vegetables at the front as a breath of freshness to arouse our appetite. Meanwhile, they keep the milk, eggs, and other daily basics all the way back so you’ll travel through as much of the store as possible, and be tempted along the way.

In the early days, as the supermarket multiplied, so did our suspicion of it. We have long feared that this “revolution in distribution” uses corporate black magic on our appetite. The book The Hidden Persuaders, published in 1957, warned that supermarkets were putting women in a “hypnoidal trance (催眠恍惚状态),” causing them to wander aisles, bumping into boxes and “picking things off shelves at random.”