Section A Multiple-Choice Questions
Text A
SYDNEY—Several foreign owners of residential property across Australia have been ordered to sell as the government intensifies its crackdown on the abuse of homeownership laws by buyers from China and elsewhere.
Treasurer Joe Hockey said foreign investors have been ordered to sell six properties in the cities of Sydney, Brisbane and Perth. The homes are valued between 152,000 and 1.86 million Australian dollars (US$112,000 and US$1.37 million).
The orders could be the tip of the iceberg , as Mr. Hockey said investigations have unearthed 462 possible breaches of foreign homeownership rules after the government ramped up its spending on enforcement in its May budget. The number of cases being investigated has more than doubled since the last estimate was given in June.
The treasurer said he expects more divestment orders will be announced soon, and promised to increase penalties for those who break the rules.
With skyrocketing house prices putting homeownership out of reach of many Australian citizens, the conservative government is under pressure to make housing more affordable, and rein in surging investor buying that some fear may push the market to unsustainable levels, causing a crash as the economy slows at the end of a long mining boom.
The worry is that money from places such as China and Southeast Asia is fuelling the housing problem. In April, Australia"s Foreign Investment Review Board said China had overtaken the U.S. as the country"s biggest source of investment from overseas, with a total of A$27. 6 billion last year. Real estate accounted for almost half of the money.
In March, the treasurer said he had ordered a Hong Kong-based buyer of an A$39 million Sydney mansion to sell the property after investigators said it was purchased illegally.
The latest divestment orders relate to properties owned by five investors from four countries, including China. Some had purchased properties with Foreign Investment Review Board approval, but their circumstances changed and they failed to comply with divestment requirements, Mr. Hockey said. Others broke the rules at the outset by purchasing a property without approval, he said.
The investors voluntarily came forward to take advantage of an amnesty (an official pardon) from criminal prosecution announced in May, Mr. Hockey said, and they now have 12 months to sell the properties. The treasurer said foreign investors had until Nov. 30 this year to voluntarily come forward under the amnesty if they had illegally purchased residential real estate in Australia.
The treasurer said he plans to introduce new legislation into federal parliament in the next two weeks that will increase penalties for foreign investors who break the rules.
Under the new regime, non-residents illegally acquiring established properties will face a maximum fine ofA$127,500 or three years imprisonment. They will also stand to lose the capital gain made on the property, 25% of the purchase price or 25% of the market value, whichever is greater.
Third parties, such as real-estate agents and financial advisers, also may be prosecuted under the changes for assisting in an unlawful purchase.
Rules on property buying by foreigners were strengthened about five years ago to restrict purchases to new dwellings that would boost the country"s housing stock, with the added benefit of spurring residential construction. Under those rules, temporary residents were allowed to buy established homes with approval from the foreign-investment regulator, but had to sell when their temporary visas expired.
Last year, a government committee recommended changes to the rules, including a clean-up of procedures to help uncover illegal home buying, penalties for breaches of the framework, punishments for third-party rule breakers and tweaks to ensure the immigration department informs the foreign-investment watchdog when a person leaves.
Text B
The doctors wanted to prolong her life, but they also had to respect Li"s living will for a natural death, without machines to keep her alive. After half a day in a coma, Li died peacefully in her sleep.
"Li"s family members were unwilling to go through with her plan at first, but after seeing Li pass away peacefully and dignified, they were relieved," said Zhang Huili, Secretary General of the Beijing Living Will Promotion Association and manager of the website, Choice and Dignity.
Li signed a living will through the website in 2006. It"s a legal document signed by healthy or conscious people, declaring whether they would want life support, or what kind of medical treatment they would prefer in the final stage of their life when they can"t speak or are unconscious, and cannot express their final life wishes. The living will contains five important details: whether the person wants medical treatment of any kind, whether they want life support, how they wish other people to treat them, what information should be made available to family and friends, and who should come to the person"s aid.
More people have been signing living wills in recent years. In 2011, when the website publicized statistics for the first time, only 198 people had signed a living will on the website. That number has now increased to 20,000 in 2015, said Zhang.
Before signing a living will, Li had been suffering from rectal cancer for three years. She had undergone numerous surgeries. One day, she came across the Choice and Dignity website, and agreed upon the principle of making her own end-of-life arrangements. She requested when her condition worsened, she did not want to receive any traumatic life support treatment. She gave her per-mission to receive painkillers and sleeping pills. Li printed a copy of the online living will, signed it and asked her children to honor her wishes and to hand it to the doctor when the day came.
Like Li, more people are gaining awareness of making their own end-of-life arrangements. According to research conducted by the Choice and Dignity website, 10.3 percent of 2,484 respondents had made their final life arrangements, while 67.1 percent of them think people should make their own end-of-life arrangements. Zhang said the people who have signed the living wills are from different age groups. "Most of them are between 30 and 40 years old, who have a good educational background." Zhang thinks the main reason that more people have started to sign living wills is because they have only recently become familiar with the notion as a result of its promotion through various organizations and the media.
The high rate of cancer and the rapidly aging Chinese population have also made people face and think more about death, Zhang said. "(People must decide) whether they want to use most of their savings on meaningless and traumatic treatment, or die naturally and make their final days peaceful."
Doctors on the front lines have also noticed more patients are making their own final life arrangements.
"On average, we have over 50 patients a month who are in their final stage of life. Around three of them will ask to forego treatment with the consent of their family members," said Zhuang Shaowei, a cardiologist from the Shanghai East Hospital. "I think it"s because people today have more knowledge about dying with dignity which is still more accepted in the West, and patients themselves and their children also tend to respect these decisions more."
The US "Five Wishes" living will, created by the NGO, Aging with Dignity, has been widely applied in 42 states and the District of Columbia. The living will has also been largely recognized in Europe and Singapore, where governments take the lead in encouraging citizens to complete the standard living will document, and even have regulations to guarantee that it will be obeyed.
Although the living will and the idea of dying in dignity are gaining momentum in China, doctors and organizers of the Choice and Dignity website say that they have encountered a unique problem when promoting the concept, due to social, cultural and legal issues.
"One factor is that death is a taboo topic in China," Zhuang said. "Western people"s religious beliefs help them make peace with death, unlike in China, where most people don"t follow a religion, and death holds unknown fears."
Another obstacle, said Zhuang, is the culture of filial piety in China.
Zhuang has dealt with many cases in which even though the patient is in a lot of pain and deep down the children know the treatment is of no use, they are reluctant to agree to stop treatment, because they think it goes against filial piety.
The tack of legal support also makes a living will difficult to enforce, said Liu Xiaohong, an oncologist at the Beijing Union Hospital. "We have received some patients with a living will in recent years, but there is no support in law to ensure its validity, so we still have to consult with the family members, and most of the time, the family doesn"t agree."
Zhang said her organization is lobbying for a law through the justice department. They have submitted proposals to the legislature five times over the last five years, but there has been no feedback. "Many law professors around the country have given their support for such legislation."
Text C
What we learned about ourselves anew this week was something that, in truth, we knew already. We rediscovered a simple, human weakness: that we cannot conceive of an abstract problem, or even a concrete problem involving huge numbers, except through one individual. The old Stalinist maxim about a million deaths being a statistic, a single death a tragedy, was demonstrated afresh.
The lesson was taught by a silent toddler washed ashore on a beach. Aylan Kurdi did not reveal a new horror. People in desperate search of European refuge have been drowning at sea for many months. The civilians of Syria, including children, have been dying in their hundreds of thousands for more than four years. So we can"t pretend we didn"t know. But somehow, it seems, we needed to see those little shoes and bare legs to absorb the knowledge, to let it penetrate our heads and hearts.
The result has been a collective resolve to do better, a bellowed demand that something be done. Much of the talk has been of governments and quotas and policy changes. But it has not all been about what the government or "Europe" can do. There has been a parallel discussion, one that begins from the ground up, starting with a family, a household, a town. Just as it took the story of one boy to allow us to see the problem, maybe a scale that is small and human offers our best chance of glimpsing the solution.
Witness the impact of the call-out by the Icelandic novelist Bryndis Bjorgvinsdottir. She did not just write a letter to her country"s welfare minister, demanding a change in policy. She urged her fellow Icelanders to tell their government they were ready to open their doors to refugees, so long as the government opened the borders. Via Facebook she found 11,000 people willing to house Syrians fleeing for their lives. Give them the right papers, she urged, and we are willing to do the rest.
Of course, this could never be a whole solution. Action for refugees means not only a welcome when they arrive, but also a remedy for the problem that made them leave. The people now running from Syria have concluded that it is a place where no one can live. They have come to that conclusion slowly, after four years of murderous violence. To make them think again would require an international effort to stop not just the killers of ISIS but also Bashar al-Assad"s barrel bombs.
This is the business of geopolitics at the highest level. For those taking to the seas and risking the razor wire, it"s all too far away. They can"t wait for summits and treaties. They are clinging to their children and clinging to their lives. Urging your local council to find room won"t solve the whole problem, just as taking in the 10,000 Jewish children of the Kindertransport did nothing for the six million Jews who would perish in the Holocaust. But every life matters. As Shale Ahmed says: "You can take local action here, right where you are, and make a change." It"s an echo of an ancient Jewish teaching: whoever saves one life is considered to have saved the whole world.What statement about Syria below is INCORRECT (Text C)