单选题 .  SECTION A  MULTIPLE-CHOICE QUESTIONS
    In this section, there are several passages followed by ten multiple-choice questions. For each questions, 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
    This month shops in the UK will begin to phase out traditional tungsten bulbs as part of a government plan to replace them completely by 2011 and save 5m tons of carbon emissions a year. However the current crop of low energy light bulbs are coming under criticism for causing skin complaints and migraines, releasing Mercury into the environment on disposal and not being as energy efficient as new LED equivalents.
    A typical low energy light bulb is said to contain between six and eight milligrams of mercury. If one is smashed in a home the room should be vacated for at least 15 minutes, the bulb cleared wearing rubber gloves, put in a sealed plastic bag and taken to the local council for disposal. Unbroken bulbs can also be taken back to the retailer if the owner is a member of the Distributor Take back Scheme.
    Greenpeace has called for a public information campaign to advise people how to dispose of low energy light bulbs safely, arguing that "Rather than being worried about the mercury these light bulbs contain, the general public should be reassured that using them will actually reduce the amount of mercury overall in our atmosphere."
    Further health concerns have come from the bulbs exacerbating of skin conditions in the estimated 100,000 people in the UK with photosensitive skin including suffers of lupus, Xeroderma Pigmentation, eczema and dermatitis.
    There have also been claims that the bulbs cause migraines, affect ME suffers and increase the risk of seizures in people with epilepsy and a growing number of charities including Spectrum and the British Association of Dermatologists are calling for exemptions to allow those affected to continue using traditional bulbs.
    But perhaps the biggest threat to the traditional energy saving light bulb comes from a new type of Light Emitting Diode (LED) developed by Glasgow and Strathclyde Universities.
    LEDs use less power than energy efficient light bulbs currently available but have not historically been powerful enough to be cheaply produced for the mass market. The Scottish scientists have overcome this by decreasing the costs and increasing the speed of Nano-imprint lithography, the process of putting microscopic holes in the LEDs to make them brighter, and suitable for home use.
    Dr. Faiz Rahman, who is leading the project, said: "This means the days of the humble light bulbs could soon be over."
    PASSAGE TWO
    Mother Rigby could do anything. She was a witch, a woman with strange powers. She could make water run uphill, or change a beautiful woman into a white horse. Many nights when the moon was full and bright, she could be seen flying over the tops of the houses in the village, sitting on a long wooden stick. It is a broomstick, and it helped her to do all sorts of strange tricks.
    Mother Rigby ate a quick breakfast and then started to work on her broomstick. She was planning to make something that would look like a man. It would fill the birds with fear, and scare them from eating her corn, the way most farmers protect themselves from those black, pesky birds.
    Mother Rigby worked quickly. She held her magic broomstick straight, and then tied another piece of wood across it. And already, it began to look like a man with arms.
    Then she made the head. She put a pumpkin, a vegetable the size of a football, on top of the broomstick. She made two small holes in the pumpkin for eyes, and made another cut lower down that looked just like a mouth.
    At last, there he was. He seemed ready to go to work for Mother Rigby and stop those old birds from eating her corn. But, Mother Rigby was not happy with what she made. She wanted to make her scarecrow look better and better, for she was a good worker. She made a purple coat and put it around her scarecrow, and dressed it in white silk stockings. She covered him with false hair and an old hat. And in that hat, she stuck the feather of a bird.
    She examined him closely, and decided she liked him much better now, dressed up in a beautiful coat, with a fine feather on top of his hat. And, she named him Feathertop.
    She looked at Feathertop and laughed with happiness. He is a beauty, she thought. "Now what?" she thought, feeling troubled again. She felt that Feathertop looked too good to be a scarecrow. "He can do something better," she thought, "than just stand near the corn all summer and scare the crows." And she decided on another plan for Feathertop.
    She took the pipe of tobacco she was smoking and put it into the mouth of Feathertop. "Puff, darling, puff," she said to Feathertop. "Puff away, my fine fellow. It is your life." Smoke started to rise from Feathertop's mouth. At first, it was just a little smoke, but Feathertop worked hard, blowing and puffing. And, more and more smoke came out of him.
    "Puff away, my pet," Mother Rigby said, with happiness. "Puff away, my pretty one. Puff for your life, I tell you." Mother Rigby then ordered Feathertop to walk. "Go forward," she said. "You have a world before you."
    Feathertop put one hand out in front of him, trying to find something for support. At the same time he pushed one foot forward with great difficulty. But Mother Rigby shouted and ordered him on, and soon he began to go forward. Then she said, "you look like a man, and you walk like a man. Now I order you to talk like a man."
    Feathertop gasped, struggled, and at last said in a small whisper, "Mother, I want to speak, but I have no brain. What can I say?"
    "Ah, you can speak," Mother Rigby answered. "What shall you say? Have no fear. When you go out into the world, you will say a thousand things, and say them a thousand times, and saying them a thousand time again and again, you still will be saying nothing. So just talk, babble like a bird. Certainly you have enough of a brain for that."
    PASSAGE THREE
    The world is going through the biggest wave of mergers and acquisitions ever witnessed. The process sweeps from hyperactive America to Europe and reaches the emerging countries with unsurpassed might. Many in these countries are looking at this process and worrying: "Won't the wave of business concentration turn into an uncontrollable anti-competitive force?"
    There's no question that the big are getting bigger and more powerful. Multinational corporations accounted for less than 20% of international trade in 1982. Today the figure is more than 25% and growing rapidly. International affiliates account for a fast-growing segment of production in economies that open up and welcome foreign investment. In Argentina, for instance, after the reforms of the early 1990s, multinationals went from 43% to almost 70% of the industrial production of the 200 largest firms. This phenomenon has created serious concerns over the role of smaller economic firms, of national businessmen and over the ultimate stability of the world economy.
    I believe that the most important forces behind the massive M&A wave are the same that underlie the globalization process: falling transportation and communication costs, lower trade and investment harriers and enlarged markets that require enlarged operations capable of meeting customer' demands. All these are beneficial, not detrimental, to consumers. As productivity grows, the world's wealth increases.
    Examples of benefits or costs of the current concentration wave are scanty. Yet it is hard to imagine that the merger of a few oil firms today could recreate the same threats to competition that were feared nearly a century ago in the U. S., when the Standard Oil Trust was broken up. The mergers of telecom companies, such as WorldCom, hardly seem to bring higher prices for consumers or a reduction in the pace of technical progress. On the contrary, the price of communications is coming down fast. In cars, too, concentration is increasing—witness Daimler and Chrysler, Renault and Nissan—but it does not appear that consumers are being hurt.
    Yet the fact remains that the merger movement must be watched. A few weeks ago, Alan Greenspan warned against the megamergers in the banking industry. Who is going to supervise, regulate and operate as lender of last resort with the gigantic banks that are being created? Won't multinationals shift production from one place to another when a nation gets too strict about infringements to fair competition? And should one country take upon itself the role of "defending competition" on issues that affect many other nations, as in the U. S. vs. Microsoft case?
    PASSAGE FOUR
    Most people would describe a dollar millionaire as rich, yet many millionaires would disagree. They do not compare themselves with teachers or shop assistants but with the other parents at their children's private schools. To count the number of rich people in the world, however, an arbitrary cut-off point is needed, and $1m is as good as any. Capgemini, a consultancy, defines anyone with investable assets of $1m or more (excluding their home) as a "high-net-worth individual", consultant—speak for rich. By this conservative measure the planet has about 10m millionaires, according to Capgemini and Merrill Lynch, a bank.
    Credit Suisse, another bank, uses a less stringent (and more obvious) definition: a millionaire is anyone whose net assets exceed $1m. That includes everything: a home, an art collection, even the value of an as-yet-inaccessible pension scheme. The Credit Suisse "Global Wealth Report" estimates that there were 24.2m such people in mid-2010, about 0.5% of the world's adult population. By this measure, there are more millionaires than there are Australians. They control $69.2 trillion in assets, more than a third of the global total.
    How did these people grow rich? Mostly through their own efforts. Only 16% of high-net-worth individuals inherited their stash, according to Capgemini. The most common way to get rich is to start a business: nearly half (47%) of the world's wealthy people are entrepreneurs.
    You do not have to be a genius to build a million-dollar business, but it helps if you are intelligent and extremely hard-working. In their book The Millionaire Next Door, Thomas Stanley and William Danko observed that a typical American millionaire is surprisingly ordinary. He has spent his life patiently saving and ploughing his money into a business he founded. He does not live in the fanciest part of town—why waste money that you can invest? And his tastes are so plain that you can barely tell him apart from his neighbours. He buys $40 shoes, and his car of choice is a Ford.
    Another 23% of the world's millionaires got rich through paid work, estimates Capgemini. A few vault easily over the million-dollar bar. Gregory Maffei, the boss of Liberty Media, an American cable-television firm, earned $87,095,882 in 2010. The median pay for chief executives at the 456 largest publicly quoted firms in America was $7.23m, according to the Hay Group, a consultancy. But the vast majority are skilled professionals or managers who have been careful with their money. An orthodontist in America makes about $200,000 a year. He may leave medical school heavily in debt, but after a lifetime of earning, saving and investing, he can probably amass $1m.1.  What is the most important measure to take when a low energy light bulb is smashed at home?(PASSAGE ONE)