SECTION A MULTIPLE-CHOICE QUESTIONS
In this section there are several passages followed by ten multiple-choice questions. For each question, there are four suggested answers marked A, B, C and D. Choose the one that you think is the best answer and mark your answers on ANSWER SHEET TWO.
Passage One
The Mermaid , directed by Hong Kong director Stephen Chow, has been smashing box office records in China since its debut on Feb 8. In one scene of the movie, an old mermaid tells a story about a man surnamed Zheng who saved mermaids many times 600 years ago.
Zheng might be a fictional figure, but descriptions and illustrations of half-human and half-fish animals have been recorded since ancient times in China.
Shan Hai Jing , an ancient Chinese text from at least the fourth century BC contains the earliest reference to a mermaid, calling the creature lingyu or renyu. It said lingyu has a human face and a fish"s body and lives in the sea. According to the book, apart from lingyu, there were other kinds of mermaids, including chiru, diren and huren. In one chapter, mermaids are depicted as sounding like crying babies and have four feet. In addition, some mermaids have the ability to resurrect when they pass away.
He Bo, or Feng Yi, god of the Yellow River in Chinese fairy tales, is described as a man with a half-human and half-fish body. Shi Zi , a text book from the fourth century BC, relates that when Da Yu tried to end flooding on the Yellow River, a man with a fairy"s face and fish"s body gave him a book about the river and disappeared.
Sou Shen Ji , another Chinese book written in the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), records mermaids named jiaoren living in the South China Sea. Their tears can become pearls. The cloth or silk made by jiaoren is called jiaoxiao or jiaosha, which is mentioned in many poems in Chinese ancient literature. In Dream of Red Chamber , Ling Daiyu also used jiaoxiao to describe the silk handkerchiefs given by Jia Baoyu.
Mermaids recorded in Cheng Zhai Za Ji , a book composed by Lin Kun in the Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368), are more like humans. Without any fish-like features, they are beautiful females with fairy skin and very long hair.
Nie Huang, a biologist from the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) also mentioned mermaids in his Hai Cuo Tu . With black skin and yellow hair, the mermaids in his book have two sexes, webbed hands and feet and human eyes, mouths and noses. Unlike the others mentioned, they have red wings on their backs.
Liao Zhai Zhi Yi , a famous novel by Pu Songling written in the Qing Dynasty, pictures a kind-hearted mermaid named Bai Qiulian. Bai becomes human and get married to the son of a businessman. But she has to stay in a lake from time to time to remain vigorous and fit.
Passage Two
Delta could soon become the third major airline in the past two years to fail on its pensions. If it does, federal pension insurance would cover some $ 8.4 billion in benefits. Even so, many Delta employees could end up with less than they expected. And American taxpayers would move closer to the prospect of having to save the federal pension insurance agency.
The traditional employer-provided pension system is in trouble, and Congress is right to be considering reforms that would prevent defaults, or at least mitigate them, while shoring up federal pension insurance. Unfortunately, the bills that have emerged from the reform effort have serious weaknesses that would undercut those worthy goals, and in some cases could make things worse.
One of the worst provisions—currently in the Senate version of the reform bill—would exempt ailing airlines from tougher new pension-funding rules that would apply to all other companies. Delta and Northwest have lobbied hard for the exemption, saying that defaults would be much more likely if airlines had to compute their obligations the same way everyone else did. That"s debatable. What is certain is that once Congress eased the rules for a few companies, it would be hard-pressed not to do the same for others—like, say, the car-makers. The same dangerous tendency to loosen the rules governing a federally insured activity at a time of growing risks was a big catalyst in the savings and loan wipe-out of the 1980"s.
Another flawed reform proposal could make it easier for companies to hide their pension troubles. Currently, a company must tell the federal insurer when its pension deficit reaches $ 50 million, so the government can track its risk. A House measure would adopt a new formula to determine when a deficit must be disclosed. If the proposed formula had been in place all along, about half of the companies that have ever defaulted might never have had to give any warning of trouble, according to the Center on Federal Financial Institutions, a nonpartisan research organization in Washington.
Into this sausage mix President Bush recently threw a budget proposal that calls on Congress to raise $16.7 billion from underfunded pension plans. But to raise that much, the insurance premium would need to be as high as 1.8 percent of the underfunding. That"s twice as much as Congress would impose, and it would probably push weak plans over the edge. In fact, the administration"s proposal is not serious. It"s a silly attempt to show "savings" in one area in order to advance unaffordable presidential priorities—tax cuts—elsewhere.
That"s a shame, because the pension reform effort needs strong leadership. What started as a worthy cause is now falling victim to lobbying, partisan politics and all the other usual suspects.
Passage Three
Surely the right to keep and bear arms, outside a militia, shouldn"t include Uzis, AK-47s, and similar assault weapons. The high court"s decision should also firmly set Congress on course to renew the federal ban on assault weapons when it expires next year.
But when it comes to keeping guns out of criminal hands, there"s still much more work to do.
For instance, among the myriad provisions in a giant $373 billion omnibus spending bill currently before Congress is a rule change regarding gun-owner background checks. It would have the federal government destroy the record of a background check on a gun buyer within 24 hours—instead of the 90-day rule now in effect.
Keeping such records for only one day would deprive law-enforcement officials of a valuable tool to track individuals, including potential terrorists, who may have slipped through the Justice Department"s National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS).
It"s very difficult for gun-rights advocates to make a strong argument against 90-day rule. A General Accounting Office report last year found 228 guns mistakenly sold to NICS-disapproved buyers over a six-month-period—guns that law-enforcement officials later had to retrieve using NICS information. And the problems were discovered only after 24 hours had passed. Extend that statistic to a year, or five years, and one can more easily see the ironclad importance of the 90-day rule.
Gun-control opponents have long raised privacy concerns about the 90-day rule. They also argue that other tracking methods are available, such as checking the paper records of the information gun-store owners transmit to NICS. But that"s often a cumbersome and time-consuming process: Criminals routinely use fake IDs and aliases, and frequently switch locations to elude detection.
If an approved gun-purchaser turns out to be a terrorist, time becomes even more critical.
An even more egregious problem concerns the Justice Department"s narrow interpretation of the 1993 Brady gun-control law. If an individual who"s on the FBI terrorist watch list somehow clears the NICS background check and is able to buy a gun, Justice"s interpretation prevents counter-terrorism officials from seeing those records.
Clearly, if a suspected terrorist buys a gun, other law-enforcement officials should know about it.
Passage Four
A controversy erupted in the scientific community in early 1998 over the use of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) fingerprinting in criminal investigations. DNA fingerprinting was introduced in 1987 as a method to identify individuals based on a pattern seen in their DNA, the molecule of which genes are made. DNA is present in every cell of the body except red blood cells. DNA fingerprinting has been used successfully in various ways, such as to determine paternity where it is not clear who the father of a particular child is. However, it is in the area of criminal investigations that DNA fingerprinting has potentially powerful and controversial uses.
DNA fingerprinting and other DNA analysis techniques have revolutionized criminal investigations by giving investigators powerful new tools in the attempt to trove guilt, not just establish innocence. When used in criminal investigations, a DNA fingerprint pattern from a suspect is compared with a DNA fingerprint pattern obtained from such material as hairs or blood found at the scene of a crime. A match between the two DNA samples can be used as evidence to convict a suspect.
The controversy in 1998 stemmed from a report published in December 1991 by population geneticists Richard C. Lewontin of Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass., and Daniel L. Hartl called into question the methods to calculate how likely it is that a match between two DNA fingerprints might occur by chance alone. In particular, they argued that the current method cannot properly determine the likelihood that two DNA samples will match because they came from the same individual rather than simply from two different individuals who are members of the same ethnic group. Lewontin and Hartl called for better surveys of DNA patterns methods which are adequate.
In response to their criticisms, population geneticists Ranajit Chakraborty of the University of Texas in Dallas and Kenneth K.Kidd of Yale University in New Haven, Conn., argued that enough data are already available to show that the methods currently being used are adequate. In January 1998, however, the federal Bureau of Investigation and laboratories that conduct DNA tests announced that they would collect additional DNA samples from various ethnic groups in an attempt to resolve some of these questions. And, in April, a National Academy of Sciences called for strict standards and system of accreditation for DNA testing laboratories.Why is it difficult for gun rights advocates to argue strongly against 90-day rule (Passage Three)