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Nine states and theDistrict ofColumbia are doing away with the sales tax on items such as clothes, shoes and even notebooks over the next few weeks, just in time for back-to- school shopping. Most of the promotions last only a few days, so shoppers will have to act quickly to get a tax break. The tax holidays, which have already expired in two other states, apply to small and large items. For example, the tax break applies to any school supply that costs $15 or less in New Mexico. In Massachusetts, it covers most retail purchases of $2,500 or less. Stores may offer additional savings because these events "give retailers an opportunity to have a sale on top of what the state is doing," says Verenda Smith, government affairs associate at the Federation of TaxAdministrators. No industry-wide figures are available about how much consumers save annually from these tax breaks.But Texas estimates that shoppers will save $47.4 million in taxes this year, nearly a 3 percent increase from the previous year. Massachusetts says shoppers saved roughly $10 million in taxes during its 2005 event. States that cast aside these promotions when a slow economy pinched state budgets are now reviving them in hopes of stimulating local economies. Some states also believe the gain in {{U}}consumer goodwill{{/U}} helps balance out the loss in tax revenue. In some cases, tax losses are minimal because serious shoppers don’t stop at clothes and books. "While states give up sales tax, they usually break even on sales-tax collection," says J.Craig Shearman, a vice-president at the National Retail Federation. SophieBeckmann, a certified public accountant atA、G.Edwards in St. Louis, says she’ll avoid that temptation by making a list of necessities. On the Missouri resident’s shopping list: notebooks, pencils, glue and three or four outfits for her son, who is entering the fifth grade this month. She plans to pocket any tax savings. "When you start buying more and spending more just because of the savings, then you’re not doing yourself a favor,"Beckmann says. |
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It is simple enough to say that since books have classes -- fiction, biography, poetry -- we should separate them and take from each what it is right and what should give us. Yet few people ask from books what can give us. Most commonly we come to books with blurred and divided minds, asking of fiction that it shall be true, of poetry that it shall be false, of biography that it shall be flattering, of history that it shall enforce our own prejudices. If we could banish all such preconception when we read, that would be an admirable beginning.Do not dictate to your author; try to become him.Be his fellow-worker and accomplice. If you hang back, and reserve and criticize at first, you are preventing yourself from getting the fullest possible value from what you reaD、But if you open your mind as widely as possible, then signs and hints of almost imperceptible fineness, from the twist and turn of the first sentences, will bring you into the presence of a human being unlike any other. Steep yourself in this, acquaint yourself with this, and soon you will find that your author is giving you, or attempting to give you, something far more definite. The 32 chapters of a novel -- if we consider how to read a novel first -- are an attempt to make something as formed and controlled as a building: but words are more impalpable than bricks; reading is a longer and more complicated process than seeing. Perhaps the quickest way to understand the elements of what a novelist is doing is not to read, but to write; to make your own experiment with the dangers and difficulties of words. Recall, then, some event that has left a distinct impression on you -- how at the comer of the street, perhaps, you passed two people talking.A、tree shock; an electric light danced; the tone of the talk was comic, but also tragic; a whole vision, an entire conception, seemed contained in that moment. But when you attempt to reconstruct it in words, you will find that it breaks into a thousand conflicting impressions. Some must be subdued; others emphasized; in the process you will lose, probably, all grasp upon the emotion itself. Then turn from your blurred and littered pages to the opening pages of some great novelist --Defoe, JaneAusten, Hardy. Now you will be better able to appreciate their mastery. It is not merely that we are in the presence of a different person --Defoe, JaneAusten, or Thomas Hardy -- but that we are living in a different worlD、Here, in RobinsonCrusoe, we are trudging a plain high road; one thing happens after another; the fact and the order of the fact is enough.But if the open air and adventure mean everything toDefoe, they mean nothing to JaneAusten. Here is the drawing-room, and people talking, and by the many mirrors of their talk revealing their characters.And if, when we have accustomed ourselves to the drawing-room and its reflections, we turn to Hardy, we are once more spun arounD、The moors are round us and the stars are above our heads. The other side of the mind is now exposed -- the dark side that comes uppermost in solitude, not the light side that shows in company. Our relations are not towards people, but towards Nature and destiny. Yet different as these worlds are, each is consistent with itself. The maker of each is careful to observe the laws of his own perspective, and however great a strain they may put upon, they will never confuse us, as lesser writers so frequently do, by introducing two different kinds of reality into the same book. Thus to go from one great novelist to another -- from JaneAusten to Hardy, from Peacock to Trollope, from Scott to Meredith -- is to be wrenched and uprooted; to be thrown this way and then that. To read a novel is a difficult and complex art. You must be capable not only of great fineness of perception, but of grea A.Thenewsisjustentertainment.B.Thenewsis A、The news is just entertainment. B.The news is shallow. C.The news gets reported in the same style. D.The news is boring. |