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单项选择题
Passage One
It has become a cliche among doctors
who deal with AIDS that the only way to stop the epidemic is to develop a
vaccine against HIV, the virus that causes it. Unfortunately, there is no sign
of such a thing becoming available soon. The best hope was withdrawn from trials
just over a year ago amid fears that it might actually be making things worse.
As a result, vaccine researchers have mostly gone back to the drawing board of
basic research. Meanwhile, the virus marches on. Last year, according to UNAIDS,
the international body charged with combating it, 2.7 million people were
infected, bringing the estimated total to 33 million.
Reuben
Granich and his colleagues at the World Health Organization (WHO), though, have
been exploring an alternative approach. Instead of a vaccine, they wonder, as
they write in The Lancet, whether the job might be done with drugs.
In the spread of any contagious disease, each act of infection has two
parties, one who already has the disease and one who does not. Vaccination works
by treating the uninfected individual prophylactically (预防地). Since it is"
impossible to say in advance who might be exposed, that means vaccinating
everybody. The alternative, as Dr. Granich observes, is to treat the infected
individual and thus stop him being infectious. For this to curb an epidemic
would require an enormous public-health campaign of the sort used to promote
vaccination. But that campaign would be of a different kind. It would have to
identify all (or, at least, almost all) of those infected. It would then have to
persuade them to undergo not a short, simple vaccination course, but rather a
drug regime that would continue indefinitely.
The first question
to ask of such an approach is, could it work in principle It is this that Dr.
Granich and his colleagues have tried to answer. Using data from several African
countries, they have constructed a computer model to test the idea. In their
ideal world, everyone over the age of 15 would volunteer for testing once a
year. If found to be infected, they would be put immediately onto a course of
what are known as first-line antiretroviral drugs (ARVs). These are reasonably
cheap, often generic, pharmaceuticals (医药品) that, although they do not cure
someone, do lower the level of the virus in his body to the extent that he
suffers no symptoms. They also -- and this is the point of the study -- reduce
the level enough to make him unlikely to pass the virus on. For the 3% or so of
people per year for whom the first-line ARVs do not work, more expensive
second-line treatments would be used.
A.it tries to vaccinate everybody by preventing them from infected
B.it treats the individuals infected to prevent them from spreading
C.it tries to deal with all the contagious diseases
D.it persuades the infected patients to have a vaccination course
单项选择题Passage Two
There has rarely been a tougher time to
be a carmaker, Squeezed by the credit crunch, rocked by the seesawing price of
oil and now faced with a nasty recession as the banking crisis infects the real
economy, the traditional markets of North America, western Europe and Japan,
already sluggish (行动迟缓的) for several years, have all but packed up. In America
car sales are running at about 16% below last year’s level. Detroit’s struggling
big three -- General Motors, Ford and Chrysler- are in dire(可怕的) straits. They
have gotten a $25 billion bailout from Congress and are now looking for much
more. In Europe the market is also collapsing. Sales in Japan this year are
expected to be the lowest since 1974.
However, not all is doom
and gloom. Mature vehicle markets may be close to saturation (饱和), but there is
huge unsatisfied demand in the big emerging car markets of Brazil, Russia, India
and China (the so-called BRICs). Although not immune from the rich countries’
troubles, they are likely to suffer much less. For one thing, levels of personal
debt are far lower and a smaller proportion of cars are bought on credit. For
another, the BRIC economies have been expanding so fast that even a slowdown
should still leave them with growth rates that look respectable to Western
eyes.
One measure of the BRIC countries’ new importance to the
car industry is that, recession or not, global car sales in 2008 may still hit
an all-time record of about 59 million. For the first time passenger-vehicle
sales in the BRICs, at around 14 million, are likely to overtake those in
America, which are expected to be the worst since 1992. As recently as 2005
America outsold them by over 10 million. By the end of this decade China,
already the world’s second-biggest market, will probably overtake America’s
sales of 16 million-17 million in a "normal" year. In Brazil sales have
increased by nearly 30% in each of the past two years.
It is the
irresistible combination of rapid economic growth, favorable demographics (人口特征)
and social change in the BRICs that is coming to the carmakers’ rescue and that
is likely to account for nearly all their growth for the foreseeable future.
America has more than 900 cars (including light trucks) for every 1,000 people
of driving age.
When times are hard, an American family that
already has two or three cars will simply postpone buying a new one. But a
potential customer in an emerging market who has been saving for years to buy
his first car will still want to go ahead. As Carlos Ghosn, the boss of the
Renault-Nissan alliance, put it at this year’s Beijing motor show: "Nothing can
stop the car being the most coveted product that comes with
development."
A.The difficult situation in America is just temporary instead of permanent.
B.The mature vehicle markets are not doomed to suffer the gloom.
C.Not all vehicle markets are suffering such a gloomy situation.
D.Only carmakers in Detroit are undergoing the difficult situation.
单项选择题
Questions 11 to 18 are based on the conversation
you have just heard.
A.Chocolate flavored.
B.Garlic flavored.
C.Mint flavored.
D.Fruit flavored.
填空题
填空题
Legendary actress Katherine Hepburn died at the age of 96. She
held the record for winning the most Oscars for Best Actress. She won four. In
addition, she was (36) at the top spot 12 times. In all, she
made 42 movies.
Hepburn’s first (37) came on
Broadway. By the early 1930s, Hollywood was courting her. But when she arrived,
her unconventional behavior raised eyebrows. She was (38) ,
and wore slacks at a time when women didn’t.
Hepburn won her
first Academy Award in only her third movie, her 1933’s Morning Glory. Her
career had its (39) and downs following that. She was
(40) for the role of Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind.
It was another (41) comedy with Grant that brought her back.
In an unusual move for the time, she bought the (42) to The
Philadelphia Story and (43) the director and her leading
man.
With Woman of the Year in 1942, she began to cooperate with
Spencer Tracy. (44) . Their ninth and last film together was
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner in 1967. She won an Oscar for her work in that film
and earned her third the following year for The Lion in Winter. On Golden Pond
brought her an unprecedented fourth Academy Award. Hepburn’s final role came in
Love Affair in 1994. Through many unforgettable films like The African Queen,
(45)
Strong-willed, Intelligent, and
independent. That’s the image Katherine Hepburn projected in her acting career.
(46) .
填空题
Conventional wisdom says that it is better to be a large
company than a small one when credit is tight. Bigger firms have more room for
maneuver(机动):They have access to more types of funding, they have more fat to
cut, and they have greater bargaining power with lenders. Even so, life is
getting ever more uncomfortable for the bigger beasts of the corporate
jungle.
According to the Federal Reserve’s most recent lending
survey, American banks are tightening terms more aggressively for bigger firms
than for smaller ones. Lenders are more cautious than they
have been at least
since 1990. The story among European banks is similar. Lenders in emerging
markets can be more suspicious of multinational firms than they are of locals.
"We just don’t know what they’ve got on their balance-sheets back home," says
one bank boss in Africa.
Violent movements in exchange rates are
causing additional headaches, says Andrew Balfour of Slaughter & May, a law
firm. Calculations of financial ratios can be thrown out by wild currency
movements, potentially triggering breaches of loan agreements. Companies with
sterling-denominated credit lines may find that their facilities are not big
enough as a result of the pound’s recent sharp fall, for instance.
It is not panic stations yet. Most firms can survive for a while with the
credit tap turned off. Analysis by Moody’s, a rating agency, shows that the vast
majority of highly rated companies in America and Europe have enough headroom,
in the form of cash and undrawn bank facilities, to be able to survive for 12
months without needing new financing. European corporate-debt markets have seen
a rare flurry(惊慌) of issues in the past few days by opportunistic, highly rated
firms.
Governments are also working hard to prop up credit
markets. The Fed’s program to buy commercial paper, a form of short-term company
debt, had acquired almost $300 billion by November 26th. Banks on both sides of
the Atlantic are issuing lots of government-backed bonds, which should encourage
lending.
单项选择题
Overnight success usually takes at
least 10 years. One man said, "My overnight success was the longest night of my
life, I (62) many days and nights (63)
getting there. "Remember," Rome was not built in a day. "Many people are waiting
for their, ship to come (64) -- when they’ve not even
(65) it out of the harbor. You see, winners (66)
do what losers don’t want to do. And they keep doing it till they get
the success they want. Success is mostly just (67) on after
others have let go! So the most important trip you’ll make is when you go the
(68) mile.
Many people who (69)
did not know how close they were to success when they gave up. People
don’t (70) fail, they just (71) too
easily. One guy said," The secret to success is to start from (72)
and to keep on scratching. "Don’t quit (73) your
trying times are hard. The great inventor, Thomas Edison, tried a (74)
experiment hundreds of times, but didn’t work. So his assistant said
to him, "It’s too bad that we did all that work without any results." But Edison
said," Oh, we have lots of results! We now know 700 things that won’t work.
"
Never forget, delay does not always mean (75) . If we
hold (76) and hold on. We can (77)
almost anything we want. The British Prime Minister Winston Churchill said,
"Never, never, never, never give up! " And the American President Calvin
Coolidge said, "Nothing can (78) success like persistence.
Talent cannot, for there are many talented people who are not successful.
Education will not, for the world is full of (79) losers.
Only persistence and determination can give you the (80) to
succeed. "You see, you can succeed just like (81) else, just
keep wanting it enough and to keep working for it enough. So why not decide it
today to start going the extra mile on the road to your success Just think a
minute...
A.took
B.paid
C.spent
D.used
单项选择题
The Shy
Architect
Casting about for someone to run a big family firn
when a successful tyrant is due to retire is usually a troublesome business.
When the firm is still controlled by the same family that founded it back when
John D. Rockefeller was gobbling up refineries in Cleveland, it becomes still
more daunting. Add the fact that the ruling family is Parsees, a small
Zoroastrian sect who have been intermarrying in India for over a thousand years,
and the odds of finding someone who is up to the job lengthen again.
The
"individualist" or" loner"
Yet after indifferent early
reviews, Ratan Tata has transformed the Tata group, of which he is chairman.
When he took over from his uncle, J. R. D. Tata, it was a troublesome
conglomerate(企业集团) with stakes in a huge collection of companies that seemed
likely to wither in the face of foreign competition. Now it makes foreign
acquisitions and ventures into unfamiliar markets. Tata Steel’s bidding war with
CSN, a Brazilian firm, over Corus, an Anglo-Dutch steelmaker, is just one
example of the once-staid group’s new boldness. Mr. Tara was recently voted
Indian of the year by viewers of an Indian television channel, beating both
Sachin Tendulkar, India’s greatest cricketer, and Aishwarya Rai, the country’s
most famous screen goddess. And he has succeeded partly because he is what his
friends call an individualist, and others might call a loner.
Mr. Tata does hot like publicity and avoids the platforms and applause of
conferences. He lives frugally, does not drink or smoke and seems baffled by the
idea of time spent not working. Asked what he would do with it, he usually
replies that he would walk his dog along the beach near Mumbai. He does
not seem to be motivated by money, and talks constantly about fairness and doing
the right thing. "I want to be able to go to bed at night and say that I haven’t
hurt anybody." Mr. Tara says twice in the course of an interview at a hotel in
New Delhi owned by the sprawling group.
Mr. Tata became chairman
in 1991, just as India’s economy was opening up. His uncle, who had run Tata for
more than 50 years, had started Tata Airlines (which became Air India) and was
to India what Gianni Agnelli of Fiat was to Italy. He was a good-looking
philanthropist (慈善家) with a French wife and held the first pilot’s licence to be
issued in India. His shy and unglamorous nephew, in contrast, trained as an
architect at Cornell University, joined quietly into the family firm and was not
marked out for the succession even when his: uncle was due to retire.
Despite all the glory that surrounded J. R. D., when he retired in 1991,
Tata was a group of companies ill-equipped to deal with the changes about to
sweep through India. It earned most of its money in old-fashioned industries
that had grown fat during the centrally planned" licence raj", when the
government set limits on how much firms were allowed to produce and protected
them from foreign competitors.
The stakes held by the family in
many of the 300-odd companies in the group were tiny, and the main Tata
businesses were run as independent fiefs by men much older than Mr. Tata. They
might have expected Mr. Tata, who had never held an executive position, to leave
them alone. Instead, he retired them, improving their pensions to soften the
blow. He sold stakes in some companies and used cash from the sales and revenue
from Tata Consultancy Services, India’s largest IT firm, to reinforce control of
those that remained. There are now a mere 96 companies in the group, and Tata
Sons now owns at least 26% of each of them. That has made the portfolio a little
easier to manage, but it leaves Mr. Tata more isolated at the top.
Shortly after he became group chairman, Mr. Tata also decided that Tata
Motors would make its own cars, even though a joint venture with a foreign firm
would have been easier. Critics grumbled that a good truck business was about to
be destroyed for the sake of an ill-conceived vanity project. But after a
difficult start, Tata Motors is now India’s second-biggest carmaker by sales.
"If he had listened to what everyone told him, he would never have done it."
notes one of Mr. Tata’s friends.
First, do no harm
Although he has made Tata’s big businesses more competitive and more
inclined to look beyond India’s borders -- Corus would be just the latest in a
series of foreign acquisitions -- Mr. Tata has also run it in keeping with
Tata’s public-spirited tradition. Two-thirds of Tata Sons is owned by charitable
trusts that frequently help the poor to improve the standard of living in India.
The firm is known for refusing to pay bribes and for treating workers well. The
children of Tata’s steelworkers were given free education back in 1917. Foreign
investors sometimes wonder if this is good for business. "At first I didn’t have
an answer, "Mr. Tata says." But then I asked myself am I competitive Yes. And
this is the way companies are moving. "
Mr. Tata’s latest car
project -- producing a vehicle that will sell for under $3,000 -- combines two
of the things that keep him from those walking along the beach: securing the
fortunes of the family group and pleasing a highly developed sense of fairness.
The factory will be in West Bengal, a state chosen partly because it is in need
of industrial development. West Bengal’s government is eager for the investment,
but Tata Motors has faced protesting farmers, a politician on hunger strike and,
Mr. Tata thinks, commercial rivals trying to prevent the birth of a more
affordable car. Tata Motors is sticking it out, and expects to secure the land
to build its new plant at the end of the month.
Now Mr. Tata
wants to prove Tata companies can compete in the rich West as well as in the
unpredictable but hugely promising markets of the developing world. What’s more,
Mr. Tata wants to set the group solidly on a path to achieving all this before
he retires.
The barrel-chested tycoon hasn’t named a successor
or said when he plans to step down. He’ll turn 70 in December, but he still has
a vice-like handshake, and associates are amazed at his command of technical
details of the various Tata companies. That makes his failure to designate a
successor all the more disconcerting. Some even question whether his departure
might spur the group’s breakup. "Who will be the glue" worries one veteran
insider. "Will there even be a central leader"
Ratan could even
be the last Tata to oversee the group. The Tata family tree, on display at a
company museum, stretches back 800 years through generations of Parsi priests,
an Indian minority descended from Persians. Though Ratan leads the family to
unprecedented prosperity at present, it has to end with Ratan himself -- single
and childless.
Mr. Tata is due to retire in December 2012, when
he reaches 75. That will leave the group with a familiar succession problem.
Meanwhile, he is heading the government’s investment commission, which works to
increase foreign investment. And he may be about to create one of the largest
steelmakers in the world. Not bad for a shy
architect.
A.The centrally planned "licence raj".
B.Government policies.
C.No firms were allowed to produce.
D.Few competitors.
单项选择题Passage Two
There has rarely been a tougher time to
be a carmaker, Squeezed by the credit crunch, rocked by the seesawing price of
oil and now faced with a nasty recession as the banking crisis infects the real
economy, the traditional markets of North America, western Europe and Japan,
already sluggish (行动迟缓的) for several years, have all but packed up. In America
car sales are running at about 16% below last year’s level. Detroit’s struggling
big three -- General Motors, Ford and Chrysler- are in dire(可怕的) straits. They
have gotten a $25 billion bailout from Congress and are now looking for much
more. In Europe the market is also collapsing. Sales in Japan this year are
expected to be the lowest since 1974.
However, not all is doom
and gloom. Mature vehicle markets may be close to saturation (饱和), but there is
huge unsatisfied demand in the big emerging car markets of Brazil, Russia, India
and China (the so-called BRICs). Although not immune from the rich countries’
troubles, they are likely to suffer much less. For one thing, levels of personal
debt are far lower and a smaller proportion of cars are bought on credit. For
another, the BRIC economies have been expanding so fast that even a slowdown
should still leave them with growth rates that look respectable to Western
eyes.
One measure of the BRIC countries’ new importance to the
car industry is that, recession or not, global car sales in 2008 may still hit
an all-time record of about 59 million. For the first time passenger-vehicle
sales in the BRICs, at around 14 million, are likely to overtake those in
America, which are expected to be the worst since 1992. As recently as 2005
America outsold them by over 10 million. By the end of this decade China,
already the world’s second-biggest market, will probably overtake America’s
sales of 16 million-17 million in a "normal" year. In Brazil sales have
increased by nearly 30% in each of the past two years.
It is the
irresistible combination of rapid economic growth, favorable demographics (人口特征)
and social change in the BRICs that is coming to the carmakers’ rescue and that
is likely to account for nearly all their growth for the foreseeable future.
America has more than 900 cars (including light trucks) for every 1,000 people
of driving age.
When times are hard, an American family that
already has two or three cars will simply postpone buying a new one. But a
potential customer in an emerging market who has been saving for years to buy
his first car will still want to go ahead. As Carlos Ghosn, the boss of the
Renault-Nissan alliance, put it at this year’s Beijing motor show: "Nothing can
stop the car being the most coveted product that comes with
development."
A.It is hard for carmakers for the hiking oil price.
B.General Motors, Ford and Chrysler are all in a dilemma.
C.Traditional markets in America began to be inactive this year.
D.Sales this year will get to the lowest in America.
单项选择题
Passage One
It has become a cliche among doctors
who deal with AIDS that the only way to stop the epidemic is to develop a
vaccine against HIV, the virus that causes it. Unfortunately, there is no sign
of such a thing becoming available soon. The best hope was withdrawn from trials
just over a year ago amid fears that it might actually be making things worse.
As a result, vaccine researchers have mostly gone back to the drawing board of
basic research. Meanwhile, the virus marches on. Last year, according to UNAIDS,
the international body charged with combating it, 2.7 million people were
infected, bringing the estimated total to 33 million.
Reuben
Granich and his colleagues at the World Health Organization (WHO), though, have
been exploring an alternative approach. Instead of a vaccine, they wonder, as
they write in The Lancet, whether the job might be done with drugs.
In the spread of any contagious disease, each act of infection has two
parties, one who already has the disease and one who does not. Vaccination works
by treating the uninfected individual prophylactically (预防地). Since it is"
impossible to say in advance who might be exposed, that means vaccinating
everybody. The alternative, as Dr. Granich observes, is to treat the infected
individual and thus stop him being infectious. For this to curb an epidemic
would require an enormous public-health campaign of the sort used to promote
vaccination. But that campaign would be of a different kind. It would have to
identify all (or, at least, almost all) of those infected. It would then have to
persuade them to undergo not a short, simple vaccination course, but rather a
drug regime that would continue indefinitely.
The first question
to ask of such an approach is, could it work in principle It is this that Dr.
Granich and his colleagues have tried to answer. Using data from several African
countries, they have constructed a computer model to test the idea. In their
ideal world, everyone over the age of 15 would volunteer for testing once a
year. If found to be infected, they would be put immediately onto a course of
what are known as first-line antiretroviral drugs (ARVs). These are reasonably
cheap, often generic, pharmaceuticals (医药品) that, although they do not cure
someone, do lower the level of the virus in his body to the extent that he
suffers no symptoms. They also -- and this is the point of the study -- reduce
the level enough to make him unlikely to pass the virus on. For the 3% or so of
people per year for whom the first-line ARVs do not work, more expensive
second-line treatments would be used.
A.It is conventionally believed to be the only way to cure HIV.
B.It will be available to the public over several years.
C.Vaccine researchers are still marching on for their best hope.
D.Vaccination tries to treat the infected.