【正确答案】 C

【答案解析】[听力原文] Many people have asked, what impact has the single market had on industry in Europe? Well, it's already had an enormous impact. Here in Spain there have been a great number of cross-border mergers and acquisitions where French and German companies have seen opportunities to enter a growing market. And as the barriers have been removed this has become more and more possible. As far as specific industries have been concerned, food and drink, for example, is an industry which you would think was very culturally bound, but we've seen over the last ten years how much different eating and drinking habits have changed, and this is very much a function of the single market. French companies have been particularly aggressive in this area. They've moved heavily into Spain and Italy and they have been largely responsible for marketing many Spanish and Italian products. We're seeing, in fact, southern eating habits moving north in Europe. The reverse cannot be said; we have yet to convince the Italians that eating British is preferable to eating Italian, but the move has been north to south in the drinks industry. Britain actually is one of the largest drinks producers in the world and Guinness has, for example, been very active in Spain in acquiring companies. So the food and drink industry has really opened out. With regard to utility companies, we see a great deal more regulation of these companies because they're obviously more environmentally sensitive. With electricity, you've got power plants giving off sulphur and all sorts of unpleasant things. With water companies everybody's ditching everything they don't want into the rivers, so there's more regulation now from Brussels. And there were also a lot of privatizations when the European markets opened up. Banking is an area where there has been a tremendous amount of activity with mergers between French and Spanish banks, English and German banks. Or if not full mergers, at least joint ventures. And there will be more of this to come. This was something that was unheard of some years ago: governments felt that the banking system was strategic to their own economic development and there had always been a very protective attitude. This has now changed. Added to this there are controls on banks that have been applied across Europe, and indeed beyond Europe, in terms of their control of risk and exposure to poor credit quality. This is being applied worldwide and it is just a measure of how the internationalization of industry is taking place. And there will certainly be more controls in the future. What is the main topic of this talk?