Graduate Trainee Verbal Ability Access Bank Job

Comprehension Passage 4

Mark Hughes is a master of the fine art of survival. His Los Angeles-based Herbalife International Inc. is a pyramid outfit that peddles weight-loss and nutrition concoctions of dubious value. Bad publicity and regulatory crackdowns hurt his U.S. business in the late 1980s. But Hughes, 41, continues to enjoy a luxurious lifestyle in a $20 million Beverly Hills mansion. He has been sharing the pad and a yacht with his third wife, a former Miss Petite U.S.A. He can finance this lavish lifestyle just on his salary and bonus, which last year came to $7.3 million.

He survived his troubles in the U.S. by moving overseas, where regulators are less zealous and consumers even more naive, at least initially. Today 77% of Herbalife retail sales derive from overseas. Its new prowling grounds: Asia and Russia. Last year Herbalife's net earnings doubled, to $45 million, on net sales of $632 million. Based on Herbalife's Nasdaq-traded stock, the company has a market capitalization of $790 million, making Hughes’ 58% stake worth $454 million.

There's a worm, though, in Hughes’ apple. Foreigners aren't stupid. In the end they know when they've been had. In France, for instance, retail sales rose to $97 million by 1993 and then plunged to $12 million last year. In Germany, sales hit $159 million in 1994 and have since dropped to $54 million.

Perhaps aware that the world may not provide an infinite supply of suckers, Hughes wanted to unload some of his shares. But in March, after Herbalife's stock collapsed, he put off a plan to dump about a third of his holdings on the public.

Contributing to Hughes' woes, Herbalife's chief counsel and legal attack dog, David Addis, quit in January. Before packing up, he reportedly bellowed at Hughes, "I can't protect you anymore." Addis, who says he wants to spend more time with his family, chuckles and claims attorney-client privilege.

Trouble on the home front, too. On a recent conference call with distributors, Hughes revealed he's divorcing his wife, Suzan, whose beaming and perky image adorns much of Herbalife's literature. Meanwhile, in a lawsuit that's been quietly moving through Arizona's Superior Court, former Herbalife distributor Daniel Fallow of Sandpoint, Idaho charges that Herbalife arbitrarily withholds payment to distributors and marks up its products over seven times the cost of manufacturing. Fallow also claims Hughes wanted to use the Russian mafia to gain entry to that nation's market.

Fallow himself is no angel, but his lawsuit, which was posted on the Internet, brought out other complaints. Randy Cox of Lewiston, Idaho says Herbalife "destroyed my business" after he and his wife complained to the company that they were being cheated out of their money by higher-ups in the pyramid organization.

Will Hughes survive again? Don't count on it this time.

According to Albert Einstein the non-mathematician, is seized by a mysterious shuddering when he hears of 'four-dimensional' things, he is seized by a feeling, which is very similar to the thoughts awakened by the occult. And at the same time the statement that the world in which we live is a four-dimensional space-time continuum is quite a commonplace statement.

This might lead to an argument regarding the use of the term "commonplace" by Einstein. Yet the difficulty lies more in the wording than the ideas. Einstein's concept of the universe as a four-dimensional space-time continuum becomes plain and clear when what he means by "continuum" becomes clear. A continuum is something that is continuous. A ruler, for example, is a one-dimensional space continuum. Most rulers are divided into inches and fractions, scaled down to one-sixteenth of an inch.

Will it be possible to conceive a ruler which is calibrated to a millionth or billionth of an inch? In theory there is no reason why the steps from point to point should not be even smaller. What distinguishes a continuum is the fact that the space between any two points can be sub-divided into an infinite number of smaller divisions.

A railroad track is a one-dimensional space continuum and on it the engineer of a train can describe his position at any time by citing a single co-ordinate point — i.e., a station or a milestone. A sea captain, however, has to worry about two dimensions. The surface of the sea is a two-dimensional continuum and the co-ordinate points by which a sailor fixes his position in his two-dimensional continuum are latitude and longitude.

An airplane pilot guides his plane through a three-dimensional continuum, hence he has to consider not only latitude and longitude, but also his height above the ground. The continuum of an airplane pilot constitutes space as we perceive it. In other words, the space of our world is a three-dimensional continuum.

Just indicating its position in space is not enough while describing any physical event which involves motion. How position changes in time also needs to be mentioned. Thus to give an accurate picture of the operation of a New York–Chicago express, one must mention not only that it goes from New York to Albany to Syracuse to Cleveland to Toledo to Chicago, but also the times at which it touches each of those points. This can be done either by means of a timetable or a visual chart. If the miles between New York and Chicago are plotted horizontally on a piece of ruled paper and the hours and minutes are plotted vertically, then a diagonal line properly drawn across the page illustrates the progress of the train in a two-dimensional space-time continuum. This type of graphic representation is familiar to most newspaper readers; a stock market chart, for example, pictures financial events in a two-dimensional dollar-time continuum.

Similarly, for the best picturization of the flight of an airplane from New York to Los Angeles, a four-dimensional space-time continuum is essential. The latitude, longitude and altitude will only make sense to the traffic manager of the airline if the time co-ordinate is also mentioned. Therefore, time is the fourth dimension. If a flight has to be looked at and perceived as a whole, it woul

From the 197 million square miles, which make up the surface of the globe, 71 per cent is covered by the interconnecting bodies of marine water; the Pacific Ocean alone covers half the Earth and averages near 14,000 feet in depth. The portions which rise above sea level are the continents — Eurasia, Africa, North America, South America, Australia, and Antarctica. The submerged borders of the continental masses are the continental shelves, beyond which lie the deep-sea basins.

The oceans are deepest not in the center but in some elongated furrows, or long narrow troughs, called deeps. These profound troughs have a peripheral arrangement, notably around the borders of the Pacific and Indian oceans. The position of the deeps, like the highest mountains, are of recent origin, since otherwise they would have been filled with waste from the lands. This is further strengthened by the observation that the deeps are quite often where world-shaking earthquakes occur. To cite an example, the "tidal wave" that in April 1946 caused widespread destruction along Pacific coasts resulted from a strong earthquake on the floor of the Aleutian Deep.

The topography of the ocean floors is none too well known, since in great areas the available soundings are hundreds or even thousands of miles apart. However, the floor of the Atlantic is becoming fairly well known as a result of special surveys since 1920. A broad, well-defined ridge — the Mid-Atlantic Ridge — runs north and south between Africa and the two Americas, and numerous other major irregularities diversify the Atlantic floor. Closely spaced soundings show that many parts of the oceanic floors are as rugged as mountainous regions of the continents. Use of the recently perfected method of submarine topography during World War II led to great strides in mapping submarine surfaces, particularly in many parts of the vast Pacific basin.

Most of the continents stand on an average of 2,870 feet above sea level. North America averages 2,300 feet; Europe averages only 1,150 feet; and Asia, the highest of the larger continental subdivisions, averages 3,200 feet. Mount Everest, which is the highest point on the globe, is 29,000 feet above the sea; and as the greatest known depth in the sea is over 35,000 feet, the maximum relief — that is, the difference in altitude between the lowest and highest points — exceeds 64,000 feet, or about 12 miles. The continental masses and the deep-sea basins are relief features of the first order; the deeps, ridges, and volcanic cones that diversify the sea floor, as well as the plains, plateaus, and mountains of the continents, are relief features of the second order.

The lands are unendingly subject to a complex of activities summarized in the term erosion, which first sculptures them in great detail and then tends to reduce them ultimately to sea level. The modeling of the landscape by weather, running water, and other agents is apparent to the keenly observant eye and causes thinking people to speculate on what must be the final result of the ceaseless wearing down of the lands. Long before there was any recognizable science as geology, Shakespeare wrote, "the revolution of the times makes mountains level."