1. According to the text, what can be inferred about Sandor
[A]He is the founder of Chicago Climate Exchange.
[B]He believes that people can also make money in the protection of environment.
[C]He is against the trade in permits for carbon dioxide.
[D]He believes there isn’t a marketplace for greenhouse gas emissions in U.S at present.
2. Who does “the economist” refer to
[A]The financial innovator
[B]The free-market advocator
[C]The U.S economist
[D]The CEO of Environmental Financial Products
3. Which of the following is NOT true according to the text
[A]The burning of oil, coal and other fossil fuels produces greenhouse gases.
[B]Sulfur dioxide emissions is one factor that causes acid rain.
[C]Carbon dioxide is a major greenhouse gas.
[D]The trade in permits of carbon dioxide is now allowed in Europe, Japan and U.S.
4. What does “the program” refers to
[A]The Kyoto treaty to combat climate change
[B]The 1990 amendments to the Clean Air Act
[C]Chicago Board of Trade
[D]Chicago Climate Exchange
5. The clause “It's not the 747 that exists after 50 years” means
[A]It is not 50 years old.
[B]It is not the creation of the 747 plane.
[C]It is an important initial action.
[D]It is Wright brother’s plane.
Unit 10
Directions
Read the following text Answer the questions below each text by choosing A,B,C or D. Mark your answer on ANSWER SHEET 1 (40 points)
Text 1
Among Bloomberg's web pages on April 7th appeared a story that looked ordinary enough Pair Gain, an American telecom equipment manufacturer, was to be taught by an Israeli company for about twice its market value. The company's stock price, predictably, rocketed from $8.50 to $11.13. All fine and normal-except that the story wasn't true. Somebody had copied Bloomberg's logo and layout and posted a bogus report on the Bloomberg site. When Pair Gain queried the report, it was taken off, and the share price crashed again. Bloomberg is now suing, unnamed parties who posted the page.
As more and more of life moves on to the Internet, so the difficulty of distinguishing fact from fiction on it becomes more and more of a worry. This problem springs from the Internet's central virtue low barriers to entry. In the real world, being a publisher costs a great deal of money. You have to have manufacturing facilities and distribution networks. So real world publishers have a great deal invested in their reputations and consequently need to be careful about what they print.
On the Internet, being a publisher costs next to nothing. Many Internet publishers, therefore, have little to lose from printing untruths and plenty to gain in notoriety if the story they put out is sensational enough. What's more, faking the real world newspaper, which has to be both manufactured and distributed, would be next to impossible; faking an Internet page is deadly easy.
Not all the efforts of the lowering of the barriers to entry are bad. Traditional news organizations can be too cautious and too protective of their more powerful sources. Many scandals have been unearthed first by outsiders with scrappy news sheets and a little to lose by way of influential contacts. The Internet is a golden age for what used to be the newsletter. The downside is the ease with which error spreads.
Rarely, though, falsehood takes the form of international fraud, more often it appears as malicious gossip, slovenly reporting and Chinese whispers. Last year everybody on the Internet knew that Tommy Hillier, a fashion designer, had made racist comments on the Opera Winfrey Show. Except that he didn't. Pierre Salinger, former television newsman, claimed at a news conference that TWA 800, a passenger plane that crashed into the Atlantic killing all aboard in 1996, had been downed by a missile-all on the basis of a web page of dubious origin. Mary Schmich of the Chicago Tribune wrote her column one week as a spoof graduation speech. Somehow this column became tagged on the web, as Kurt Vonnegut′s commencement speech at MIT.
Cyberspace can also be risky, for now, because even sophisticated people can be gullible about what they read there. This may be because of a lag between technology and perception. Smartly produced pages, and things on screens, impress us with an authority that springs from the resources needed to produce them in the old paper medium. Perhaps everyone should be more worldly wise about what can turn up on the web.
1. The Bloomberg incident in the first paragraph is a case of
A. malicious gossip.
B .slovenly report.
C .Chinese whisper.
D .international fraud.
2. The difference between a real world publisher and an Internet publisher is that
A .the real world publisher enjoys low barrier entry.
B. the Internet publisher is notorious for being untruthful.
C .the real world publisher is too cautious about their investment.
D. the Internet publisher enjoys easy access and low costs.
3. The falsehood that we often find on the Internet proves that
A. the Internet has nothing to lose if error occurs.
B. the Internet publisher is only a newsletter publisher.
C. the Internet news report has no powerful sources.
D .the Internet is a totally unreliable news media.
4. The lag between technology and perception in the last paragraph probably means that
A .paper medium publication is far behind Internet publication.
B. smartly produced pages appeal to people's perception.
C .the Internet page sometimes has a deceptive appearance.
D. printing techniques acquire authority from necessary sources.
5. The author seems to believe that one should what one reads in Internet news.
A. Reject B. watch C. accept D. appreciate
Text 2
The modern cult of beauty is a success in so far as more women retain their youthful appearance to a greater age than in the past. Old ladies are already becoming rare. In a few years, we may well believe that they will be extinct. White hair and wrinkles, a bent back and hollow cheeks will come to be regarded as medieval old fashioned. The crone of the future will be golden, curly and cherry lipped, and slender. This desirable consummation will be due in part to skin foods and injections of paraffin wax, facial surgery, mud baths, and paint, in part to improved health, due in its turn to a more rational mode of life. Ugliness is one of the symptoms of disease, beauty of health. In so far as the campaign for beauty is also a campaign for more health, it is admirable and, up to a point, genuinely successful.
Beauty that is merely the artificial shadow of these symptoms of health is intrinsically of poorer quality than the genuine article. Still, it is a sufficiently good imitation to be sometimes mistakable for the real thing. The apparatus for mimicking the symptoms of health is now within the reach of every moderately prosperous person; the knowledge of the way in which real health can be achieved is growing, and will in time, no doubt, be universally acted upon. When that happy moment comes, will every woman be beautiful-as beautiful, at any rate, as the natural shape of her features, with or without surgical and chemical aid, permits The answer is emphatically No. For real beauty is as much an affair of the inner as of the outer self. The beauty of a porcelain jar is a matter of shape, of color, of surface texture. The jar may be empty or tenanted by spiders, full of honey or stinking slime-it makes no difference to its beauty or ugliness. But a woman is alive, and her beauty is therefore not skin deep. The surface of the human vessel is affected by the nature of its spiritual contents. I have seen women who, by the standards of a connoisseur of porcelain, were ravishingly lovely.
Their shape, their color, their surface texture were perfect. And yet they were not beautiful. For the lovely vase was either empty or filled with some corruption. Spiritual emptiness or ugliness shows through. And conversely, there is an interior light that can transfigure forms that the pure aesthetician would regard as imperfect or downright ugly.
There are numerous forms of psychological ugliness. There is an ugliness of stupidity, for example, of unawareness (distressingly common among pretty women). An ugliness also of greed, of lasciviousness, of avarice. All the deadly sins, indeed, have their own peculiar negation of beauty. On the pretty faces of those especially who are trying to have a continuous good time, one sees very often a kind of bored sullenness that ruin all their charm. I remember in particular two young American girls I once met in North Africa. From the porcelain specialist's point of view, they were
extremely beautiful. But a sullen boredom was so deeply stamped into their fresh faces, their gait and gestures expressed so weary a listlessness, that it was unbearable to look at them. These exquisite creatures were positively repulsive.
1. Because of skin foods, paraffin wax, facial surgery, mud baths and paint,
A wrinkles and hollow cheeks will not be found.
B the desirable consummation will be achieved.
C curly hair will look medieval old fashioned.
D the elderly women will no longer be able to exist.
2. In the second paragraph, beauty is talked about as
A an artificial shadow of a genuine article.
B an apparatus for achieving good health.
C the poor imitation of true inner health.
D the good knowledge of health and disease.
3.The example of the porcelain jar illustrate the
A importance of shape, color and texture.
B ugliness of spiders and stinking slime.
C connection between inner and outer self.
D gap between appearance and contents.
4. The two American girls offer an example of what the author calls
A unawareness. B greed. C deadly sins. D stupidity.
5. The author probably writes this article to
A praise beauty campaign's success.
B demonstrate the improved living standards.
C suggest the importance of inner qualities.
D predict the future of beauty industry.
Text 3
The marvelous telephone and television network that has now enmeshed the whole world, making all men neighbours, cannot be extended into space. It will never be possible to converse with anyone on another planet. Even with today’s radio equipment, the messages will take minutes-sometimes hours-on their journey, because radio and light waves travel at the same limited speed of 186000 miles a second.
Twenty years from now you will be able to listen to a friend on mars, but the words you hear will have left his mouth at least three minutes earlier, and your reply will take a corresponding time to reach him. In such circumstances, an exchange of verbal messages is possible-but no a conversation.
To a culture which has come to take instantaneous communication for granted, as part of the very structure of civilized life, this “time barrier” may have a profound psychological impact. It will be a perpetual reminder of universal laws and limitations against which not all our technology can ever prevail. For it seems as certain as anything can be that no signal-still less any material object-can ever travel faster than light.
The velocity of light is the ultimate speed limit, being part of the very structure of space and time. Within the narrow confines of the solar system, it will not handicap us too severely. At the worst, these will amount to twenty hours-the time it takes a radio signal to span the orbit of Pluto, the outer-most planet.
It is when we move out beyond the confines of the solar system that we come face to face with an altogether new order of cosmic reality. Even today, many otherwise educated men-like those savages who can count to three but lump together all numbers beyond four-cannot grasp the profound distinction between solar and stellar space. The first is the space enclosing our neighbouring worlds, the planets; the second is that which embraces those distant suns, the stars, and it is literally millions of times greater. There is no such abrupt change of scale in the terrestrial affairs.
Many conservative scientists, appalled by there cosmic gulfs, have denied that they can ever be crossed. Some people never learn; those who sixty years ago scoffed at the possibility of flight, and ten years ago laughed at the idea of travel to the planets, are now quite sure that the stars will always be beyond our reach. And again they are wrong, for they have failed to grasp the great lesson of our age-that if something is possible in theory, and no fundamental scientific laws oppose its realization, then sooner or later it will be achieved.
On day we shall discover a really efficient means of propelling our space vehicles. Every technical device is always developed to its limit and the ultimate speed for spaceships is the velocity of light. They will never reach that goal, but they will get very near it. And then the nearest star will be less than five years’ voyaging from the earth.
1. For light to travel across the solar system, it will take
A. a year
B. nearly a day
C. two months
D .thirty minutes
2. The fact that it will never to be possible to converse with someone on another planet shows that
A .radio messages do not travel fast enough
B. no object can ever travel faster than light
C. western culture has a special idea of communication
D. certain universal laws cannot be prevailed against
3. Confronted with the new order of cosmic reality, many educated men
A .become ignorant savages again
B .find the “time barrier” unbearable
C. will not combine solar and stellar space
D .cannot adapt to the abrupt change of scale
4. Conservative scientists who deny that cosmic gulfs can ever be crossed will
A. laugh at the very idea of flight
B. learn a lesson as they did ten years ago
C. find space travel beyond their reach
D. oppose the fundamental scientific laws
5. The author of the passage, readers an infer, intends to show the
A. limitations of our technology
B. vastness of the cosmic reality
C. prospect of planetary travel
D. psychological impact of time and space
Text 4
Pursuing free trade through WTO has many attractions. Countries bind themselves and their trading partners to transparent and non-discriminatory trade rules, which the WTO then enforces evenhandedly. Since most governments operate on the premise that opening domestic markets is a concession to be traded for access to foreign markets, multilateral liberalization is often the most effective route to free trade.
A successful WTO round requires two big bargains to be struck a transatlantic deal between America and the EU and a north south deal between the rich and the poor. Yet at Seattle this year there is a long way to go before such broad bargains can be considered, let alone struck. America wants a few priority issues to be settled. Its list includes an extension of the duty-free status of e-commerce, a broader IT pact, reform of the WTO dispute settlement system, increased WTO transparency and the phase out of tariffs in eight sectors including chemicals, energy products and environmental products. The EU on the other hand professes to want a more comprehensive approach that focuses on removing tariff peaks for such imports as textiles, glass and footwear, but would preserve tariff preferences for developing countries.
