I. Read the text and point out the main ideas which are discussed in it. Text 1. Gender Politics

Comparisons are odious. We are all individuals and should be treated and celebrated as such. But fashion, after all, is a discipline built on comparison - this skirt looks better on me than that skirt; his bespoke suit fits better than my off-the-peg version; the Elvis-in-the-Vegas-years interpretation of "sparkly black tie" is much worse than the Armani red carpet version, and so on. So: comparing the woman senator who has become the first female elected president in Argentina and the woman senator who hopes to be the first female elected president in the US? Stronger souls than I would find that one hard to resist.

Indeed, stronger souls have found it hard to resist. It's been difficult to pick up a newspaper recently and not find a Hillary Clinton/Cristina Fernández mention in there somewhere - this despite Fernández's canny refusal to be drawn on the subject.

Pundits compare their hair: Fernández's lush, dark curls curving sensuously over an eye and Clinton's blonde helmet. They set Fernández's announcement that she hasn't had plastic surgery (but certainly wouldn't rule it out) against Clinton's obfuscation about whether she had her eyes done, as her former senate opponent John Spencer suggested. And they discuss wardrobes: Fernández's expensive and colourful designer outfits and Clinton's uniform-like dark trouser suits. Then they prognosticate on whether what happened in Argentina is a good sign for the senator from New York. Wait a minute - the countries are a little different.

But no matter, because apparently the idea of a woman being elected trumps all. That similarity invites an examination of all other similarities, especially physical ones. Ridiculous and reductive. No one would dare link French president Nicolas Sarkozy and US presidential hopeful Dennis Kucinich just because they're both short.

And yet there is a way in which comparing Clinton and Fernández (and Sarkozy and Kucinich for that matter) is useful and valid. The quality that links all leaders, male or female, is simply that the way they look says something about the people who spend a lot of time looking at them. And that is worth thinking about. We vote for people who represent the way we want our country to be perceived: trustworthy, young, multicultural, whatever. Our leaders' self-presentation is fascinating not because of what it says about them, but because of what it says about us.

Pretty much every president of the US, for example, has been tall with lots of hair. Americans apparently identify power with height and follicular retention. Eisenhower was the exception, but he was a battlefield general, so his machismo wasn't really in doubt. It's not subtle - indeed, it's a bad cliché - but, generally, clichés are clichés because they are true. Why else would presidential hopeful John Edwards spend so much money on his lush brown locks? Indeed, Edwards' grooming budget simply highlights the fact that public interest in how a candidate looks is not a specifically female thing. But because females have more leeway with their clothes, the symbolism is more obvious, and the opportunity for discussion and analysis that much greater. The personal is political, and there is little that is as personal as what you put on your body.

Just consider Yulia Tymoshenko, the recently elected Ukrainian prime minister ousted from that same position a few years ago. Actually, consider her hair: baby-blonde and famously worn in a braid encircling her head à la peasant girl, a carefully calculated style that transforms her into a sort of living traditional icon, and which, when combined with her increasingly light-coloured clothing, sends a message of purity from corruption, nationalism, and avenging angeldom.

Or think of Ségolène Royal, whose understated and groomed beauty was seen as characteristically French, so much so that she was more often compared to Marianne, the face of the republic, than any other female political figure. She went far - almost to the Elysée - on the idea that she could represent people because, well, physically she seemed to represent them.

By this measure the flowered dress and wide, white figure-enhancing belt that Fernández wore on the day she won the election, along with her heavy eyeliner and tousled hair, are an in-your-face version of femininity, not unlike the typical Latin stereotype. "I am a woman," they say, "and I can eat you for breakfast" - which is pretty much what, as general wisdom has it, the voters want: someone to continue the economic recovery kick-started by her husband, not to mention build a profile internationally.

Likewise, you could see Clinton's trouser suits and simple shirts as the ultimate in corporate gender camouflage; sartorial attempts to uphold, not push, boundaries (despite her occasional penchant for wearing a Fernández-type pink or orange jacket). Her style is straight out of the C-suite, and suggests someone who will run a country in a businesslike manner as opposed to an ideological one.

In other words, Hillary Clinton doesn't look remotely like Cristina Fernández. But they both look a lot like a certain swathe of their countries.