Sir Isaac Newton, as Master of the Royal Mint, defined the pound sterling in 1717 as 113 grains of pure gold. This took Britain off silver and onto gold as defining the unit of account. The pound was 113 grains of pure gold, the shilling was 1/20 of that, and the penny 1/240 of it.
By the end of the nineteenth century the gold standard had spread around most of the trading world, with the result that there was a single world money. It was called by different names in different countries, but all these supposedly different currencies were rigidly interconnected through their particular definition in terms of a quantity of gold.
Section Ⅱ
In economic life the prices of different commodities and services are always changing with respect to each other. If the potato crop, for example, is ruined by frost or flood, then the price of potatoes will go up. The consequences of that particular price increase will be complex and unpredictable. Be cause of the high price of potatoes, prices of other things will decline, as demand for them declines. Similarly, the argument that the Middle East crisis following the Iraqi annexation of Kuwait would, because of increased oil prices, haveled to sustained general inflation is, although widely accepted, entirely without foundation. With sound money (money whose purchasing power does not decline over time) a sudden price shock in any one commodity will not lead to a general price increase, but to changes in relative prices throughout the economy. As oil in creases, other goods and services will drop in price, and oil substitutes will rise in price, as the consequences of the oil price increase work their unpredictable and complex way through the economy.
The use of gold as the unit of account during the days of the gold standard meant that the price of all other commodities and services would swing up and down with reference to the price of gold, which was fixed. If gold supplies diminished, as they did when the 1850s gold rushes in California and Australia petered out, then deflation (a general price level decrease) would set in. When new gold rushes followed in South Africa and again in Australia, in the 1880s and 1890s, the general price level increased, gently, around the world.
Section Ⅲ
The end of the gold standard began with the introduction of the Bretton-Woods Agreement in 1946. This fixed the value of all world currencies relative to the US dollar, which in turn was fixed to a specific value of gold (US$0.35/oz).However, in 1971 the US government finally refused to exchange US dollars for gold, and other countries soon followed. Governments printed as much paper money or coinage as they wanted, and the more that was printed, the less each unit of currency was worth.
The key problem with these government “fiat” currencies is that their value is not defined: such value is subject to how much money a government cares to print . Their future value is unpredictable, depending as it does on political chance. In our economic calculations concerning the past we automatically convertincomes and expenditures to dollars of a particular year, using CPI deflators which a re stored in our computers. When we perform economic calculations into the future we guess at inflation rates and include these guesses in our figures. Our guesses are entirely based on past experience. In Australia most current calculation s assume a 3 to 4 per cent inflation rate.
Section Ⅳ
The great advantage of the nineteenth-century gold standard was not just that it defined the unit of account, but that it operated throughout almost the entire world. A price in England was the same as a price in Australia and in North America. Anthony Trollope tells us in his diaries about his Australian travels in 1872 that a pound of meat, selling in Australia for two pence, would have costten pence or even a shilling in the UK. It was this price difference which drove in vestment and effort into the development of shipboard refrigeration, and opening up of major new markets for Australian meat, at great benefit to British public.
Today we can determine price differences between countries by considering the exchange rate of the day. In twelve months' time, even a month's time, however, a totally different situation may prevail, and investments of time and money made on the basis of an opportunity at an exchange rate of the day, become completely wasted because of subsequent exchange rate movements.
The great advantage of having a single stable world money is that such money has very high information content. It tells people where to invest their time, energy and capital, all around the world, with much greater accuracy and predictability than would otherwise be possible.
Questions 1-4
The reading passage has four sections.
Choose the most suitable heading for each section from the list of headings in the box below. Write the appropriate numbers in boxes 1-4 on your answer sheet.Note: There are more headings than sections so you will not use all of them.
i. the price of gold
ii. the notion of money and its expression
iii. the rise of problematic modern currencies
iv. stable money compared to modern “fiat” currencies
V. the effects of inflation
vi. the interrelationship of prices
1. SECTION Ⅰ:
2. SECTION Ⅱ:
3. SECTION Ⅲ:
4. SECTION Ⅳ:
练习三
THE VALUE OF DRIVER TRAINING
1. Most fatal accidents involve a disproportionately high number of men under the age of 25. A report on young driver research prepared last year by Monash University's accident research centre found that in 1990 and 1991, almost a third of the people killed in road crashes were drivers under 25. Yet this age group rep resents only 14 per cent of the population. The report, which also updated a review of international literature about, among other things, driver training, also reached what many would consider a startling conclusion: training and education where they occur—principally in the US—do not appear to reduce younger drivers' risk of crashing.
2. The Monash University researchers looked at crash information from New South Wales for 1986 to 1990, from Victoria for 1984 to 1990 and from South Australia for 1986 to 1990. The only Australian evidence which possibly indicates that counter-measures targeted specifically at young/novice drivers have been effective comes from evaluations of zero blood alcohol concentration legislation. (In 1989, all Australian governments agreed from 1991 on, to ban provisional drivers from drink-driving at any level, and to extend the provisional licence to three years).
3. The Monash researchers also looked at United States road-crash information for 1989 on 6.6 million police-reported crashes involving fatalities, injuries and motor vehicle damage. The researchers looked at a sample of 44,000 crashes. The conclusion was that the available literature gives a pessimistic view of the efficacy of driver training and education, reflected in the inability to produce drivers safer than those who have not been trained. One study on driver training in the US was conducted in De Kalb county, Georgia between 1977 and 1981. 16,000 school students were split into three groups: one group received 70 hours practical driver education training, another a brief, school based course and the third no school-based driver education. Those comprehensively trained were 16 per cent more likely to get their licences, but 11 per cent more likely to crash and eight per cent more likely to get traffic fines.
4. In 1985, the researchers who conducted that study then reviewed 14 studies of defensive driver training courses and concluded that though people who attended such courses received fewer traffic fines, they did not have fewer crashes. Despite the intuitive conclusion that safe driving should be teachable(like many practical skills), there is insufficient evidence about the ability of practical d river training to reduce crashes for the general driving population.
5. The Monash University report into young drivers concluded that younger drivers were more likely to take risks at night, younger men were more likely to take risks than younger women, but younger women appeared to have “greater skills deficiency”. Overall, the researchers concluded that it appears that vehicle-control skills improve rapidly with increasing experience but that their development is still incomplete after one or two years and possibly after considerably longer periods.
Questions 1-4
The paragraphs in the reading passage are numbered 1-5. Below is a list of paragraph headings labelled A-I. For each questions 1-4, select the most suitable paragraph heading from the list and write your answers A-I, in the spaces numbered 1-4 on the answer sheet. The first one has been done for you as an example.
There are more headings than you will need, so you won't use them all.
Example:Paragraph 1
Answer:G
1. Paragraph 2
2. Paragraph 3
3. Paragraph 4
4. Paragraph 5
List of Headings
A Looking at young drivers
B Do driving courses prevent accidents?
C Results of safety campaigns
D A United States study
E Defensive driving—fewer traffic fines
F Male and female drivers
G The Monash University report
H An international review
I The situation in the United States
练习四
The Revolutionary Bridges of Robert Maillart
Swiss engineer Robert Maillart built some of the greatest bridges of the 20th century. His designs elegantly solved a basic engineering problem: how to support enormous weights using a slender arch
A Just as railway bridges were the great structural symbols of the 19th century, highway bridges became the engineering emblems of the 20th century. T he invention of the automobile created an irresistible demand for paved roads and vehicular bridges throughout the developed world. The type of bridge needed for cars and trucks, however, is fundamentally different from that needed for locomotives. Most highway bridges carry lighter loads than railway bridges do, and their roadways can be sharply curved or steeply sloping. To meet these needs, many turn-of-the-century bridge designers began working with a new building material: reinforced concrete, which has steel bars embedded in it. And the master of this new material was Swiss structural engineer, Robert Maillart.
B Early in his career, Maillart developed a unique method for designing bridges, buildings and other concrete structures. He rejected the complex mathematical analysis of loads and stresses that was being enthusiastically adopted by most of his contemporaries. At the same time, he also eschewed the decorative approach taken by many bridge builders of his time. He resisted imitating architectural styles and adding design elements solely for ornamentation. Maillart's method was a form of creative intuition. He had a knack for conceiving new shapes to solve classic engineering problems. And because he worked in a highly competitive field, one of his goals was economy—he won design and construction contracts because his structures were reasonably priced, often less costly than all his rivals' proposals.
C Maillart's first important bridge was built in the small Swiss town of Zuoz. The local officials had initially wanted a steel bridge to span the 30-metre wide Inn River, but Maillart argued that he could build a more elegant bridge made of reinforced concrete for about the same cost. His crucial innovation was incorporating the bridge's arch and roadway into a form called the hollow-box arch, which would substantially reduce the bridge's expense by minimising the amount of concrete needed. In a conventional arch bridge the weight of the roadway is transferred by columns to the arch, which must be relatively thick. In Maillart's design, though, the roadway and arch were connected by three vertical wall s, forming two hollow boxes running under the roadway. The big advantage of this design was that because the arch would not have to bear the load alone, it could be much thinner—as little as one-third as thick as the arch in the conventional bridge.
D His first masterpiece, however, was the 1905 Tavanasa Bridge over the Rhine river in the Swiss Alps. In this design, Maillart removed the parts of the vertical walls which were not essential because they carried no load. This produced a slender, lighter-looking form, which perfectly met the bridge's structural requirements. But the Tavanasa Bridge gained little favorable publicity in Switzerland; on the contrary, it aroused strong aesthetic objections from public officials who were more comfortable with old-fashioned stone-faced bridges. Maillart, who had founded his own construction firm in 1902, was unable to win any more bridge projects, so he shifted his focus to designing buildings, water tanks and other structures made of reinforced concrete and did not resume his work on concrete bridges until the early 1920s.
E His most important breakthrough during this period was the development of the deck-stiffened arch, the first example of which was the flienglibach Bridge, built in 1923. An arch bridge is somewhat like an inverted cable. A cable curves downward when a weight is hung from it, an arch bridge curves upward to support the roadway and the compression in the arch balances the dead load of the traffic. For aesthetic reasons, Maillart wanted a thinner arch and his solution w as to connect the arch to the roadway with transverse walls. In this way, Maillart justified making the arch as thin as he could reasonably build it. His analys is accurately predicted the behaviour of the bridge but the leading authorities of Swiss engineering would argue against his methods for the next quarter of a century.
F Over the next 10 years, Maillart concentrated on refining the visual appearance of the deck-stiffened arch. His best-known structure is the Salginatobel Bridge, completed in 1930. He won the competition for the contract because hi s design was the least expensive of the 19 submitted—the bridge and road were built for only 700,000 Swiss francs, equivalent to some $3.5 million today. Salginatobel was also Maillart's longest span, at 90 metres and it had the most drama tic setting of all his structures, vaulting 80 metres above the ravine of the Salgina brook. In 1991 it became the first concrete bridge to be designated an international historic landmark.
G Before his death in 1940, Maillart completed other remarkable bridges and continued to refine his designs. However, architects often recognised the high quality of Maillart's structures before his fellow engineers did and in 1947 the architectural section of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City devoted a major exhibition entirely to his works. In contrast, very few American structural engineers at that time had even heard of Maillart. In the following years, however, engineers realised that Maillart's bridges were more than just aesthetically pleasing—they were technically unsurpassed. Maillart's hollow-box arch became the dominant design form for medium and longspan concrete bridges in the US. In Switzerland, professors finally began to teach Maillart's ideas, which then influenced a new generation of designers.
