问答题在数亿球迷的翘首企盼中，一场盛大的体育狂欢正在如火如荼地进行。32支顶尖球队明星云集德国，为争夺大力神杯而杀得昏天黑地。 世界杯会如何影响世界经济?各国球迷们享用四年一度的足球大餐时，可能无暇考虑这等严肃的问题，但冷静的经济学家们却已经研究出了新成果。像奥运会一样，世界杯作为一种商业赛事，对东道主而言，意味着财源滚滚的“金鸡”。有专家预测，今年世界杯，德国将至少获得 200亿美元的直接经济效益。所以，荷兰Hypercube咨询公司干脆提议，国际足联将目前四年一度的世界杯赛的频率加快一倍，变成两年一度的赛事。

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问答题Disparaging comments by adults about a children"s presenter have led to an angry backlash in support of Cerrie Burnell, the 29-year-old CBeebies host who was born missing the lower section of her right arm. One man said that he would stop his daughter from watching the BBC children"s channel because Burnell would give his child nightmares. Parents even called the broadcaster to complain after Burnell, with Alex Winters, took over the channel"s popular Do and Discover slot and The Bedtime Hour programme last month, to complain about her disability. And some of the vitriolic comments on the "Grown Up" section of the channel"s website were so nasty that they had to be removed. "Is it just me, or does anyone else think the new woman presenter on CBeebies may scare the kids because of her disability?" wrote one adult on the CBeebies website. Other adults claimed that their children were asking difficult questions as a result. "I didn"t want to let my children watch the filler bits on The Bedtime Hour last night because I know it would have played on my eldest daughter"s mind and possibly caused sleep problems," said one message. The BBC received nine other complaints by phone. While charities reacted angrily to the criticism of the children"s presenter, calling the comments disturbing, other parents and carers labeled the remarks as disgraceful, writing in support of Burnell and setting up a "fight disability prejudice" page on the social networking site Facebook. "I think that it is great that Cerrie is on CBeebies. She is an inspiration to children and we should not underestimate their ability to understand and accept that all of us have differences—some visible and some not," wrote "Surfergirlboosmum". Other websites were flooded with equally supportive comments. "I feel we should all post counter complaints to the BBC and I"m sure they will receive more complaints about the fact they have even considered accepting these complaints," wrote Scott Tostevin on Facebook. "It"s a disgrace that people still have such negative views against people who are "different"", he added. Burnell, who described her first television presenting role as a "dream job", has also appeared in EastEnders and Holby City and has been feted for performances in the theatre while also worked as a teaching assistant at a special needs school in London. She also has a four-year-old child. "I think the negative comments from those few parents are indicative of a wider problem of disabled representation in the media as a whole, which is why it"s so important for there to be more disabled role models in every area of the media," she said in response yesterday. "The support that I"ve received ... has been truly heartening. It"s brilliant that parents are able to use me as a way of talking about disability with their children and for children who are similarly disabled to see what really is possible in life and for their worlds to be represented in such a positive, high profile manner." Charities said that much still needed to be done to change perceptions in society. "In some way it is a pretty sad commentary on the way society is now and that both parents and children see few examples of disabled people. The sooner children are exposed to disability in mainstream education the better," said Mark Shrimpton at Radar, the U.K."s largest disability campaigning organisation. "She is a role model for other disabled people." Rosemary Bolinger, a trustee at Scope, a charity for people with cerebral palsy, said: "It is disturbing that some parents have reacted in this way ... Unfortunately disabled people are generally invisible in the media and wider society."

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问答题Last month the U.S. Army, bumped favored defense contractor L-3 Communications from a $ 4.6 billion contract to provide translators and interpreters in Iraq. A new venture called Global Linguistic Solutions (GLS), headed by retired Army Major General James (Spider) Marks and primarily formed to bid on the contract, landed the job. The surprise caused L-3 shares to fall nearly 6%; the company lowered its sales forecast this year by $ 500 million. Winning the contract may be the easy part for GLS. Luring interpreters to Iraq is another story. Job listings posted on L-3"s website read like something out of a Tom Clancy thriller. Wanted. "Arabic Linguist… Ability to deal unobtrusively with the local populace… Must be able to live in a harsh environment." The pay isn"t mentioned, but L-3 recently offered interpreters more than $175,000 annually to work in Iraq. Linguists usually don"t carry weapons and are often called on to participate in raids and other combat-related tasks. Casualty reports show that L-3"s Titan Corp, the major contractor supplying interpreters to the U.S. military, had 216 employees killed in Iraq—nearly 100 more fatalities than the entire British army stationed there. Danger is just one way that the linguistics industry—interpreters who relay live chat and translators who process documents—has changed dramatically. More benignly, the Web and the global economy have led to 7.5% annual growth in the market, now pegged as a $ 9.4 billion business, according to research group Common Sense Advisory. While much of that is due to the military, there has been renewed growth elsewhere. "Firms from Starbucks to McDonald"s now have to communicate and market to customers in dozens of different languages," says Common Sense Advisory president Don DePalma. The boom in translation jobs comes because of—and despite—technology. DePalma says there has been real acceleration in demand tied to software, since Microsoft"s new Vista operating system, updated versions of Mac and various other electronic devices have to conform to European standards. That requires local language to be used in everything from instruction manuals to safety standards. Add the growing use of bilingual signage aimed at Hispanics, multilingual U.S. court requirements and hospital needs, and over the next eight years, full-time linguistics employment is expected to jump more than 25%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Computers are certainly doing some of the work. Companies like eBay, GM and Motorola have all used software from Massachusetts firm Idiom Technologies to help power their efforts in localization, as language targeting is sometimes called. Still, it often takes a real brain to differentiate terms in context: the word trunk can refer to a suitcase, a car hatch or an elephant"s snout, for example. The biggest player in translation services last year was publicly held Lionbridge, employing 4,000 full-time staff members and 10,000 freelancers in 25 countries, with a current market cap of $350 million. Lionbridge, based in Massachusetts, translates technology for mobile-phone companies and clients such as McDonald"s, Google and Yahoo! "Computer code is code," says Lionbridge chief marketing officer Kevin Bolen. "But certain things such as metrics, time stamps and characters have to be re-engineered and hard-encoded into the software to display Japanese kanji, for instance." Lionhridge and its competitors recruit at universities and industry websites such as linguistlist, org with specialists of all stripes in demand, from automotive experts to those with a knack for medical jargon. "India has about a dozen dialects needed to capture a substantial customer base," says Bolen, "so for Nokia we? re translating applications and phones and instructions in nine different ways." Thanks to the Web, new companies become global from the get-go rather than at a later phase, Bolen explains. And localization companies don"t just deal in words but also the look, feel and design of text images. "We ask if buttons and keys scale to match the size of the text," he says, noting German characters are 30% longer than those in English, while those in Japanese are 30% shorter. Although English is the language of business, there is essential need for translators who understand Farsi, Urdu, Bahasa Indonesian, Tamil and Arabic. It goes back to what Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote: "There are no facts, only interpretations."

问答题Many private firms in coastal provinces have difficulty hiring employees, for they feel that the college students request high salary but have no practical skills. The students, on the other hand, feel frustrated at the job market because the pay is low. Topic: Is the pay too high or too low? Questions for Reference: 1. What do you think of the employers" viewpoint? 2. If you were a graduate, would you accept low pay for your first job? Why or why not? 3. Some people think college graduates are no better than vocational school students. Do you agree?

问答题Blood banks in Shanghai hospitals are suffering from a lack of reserve. It would seem that university students, a relatively healthy pool of men and women, would jump at the opportunity to help the needed. But many students are not keen on donating blood whereas they volunteer to donate money or other things. Topic: Who wants to be a blood donator? Questions for Reference: 1. People are unwilling to donate blood. What are the reasons? 2. The university students, who volunteer to donate money for the poor, are not eager to donate their blood to the sick. Why? 3. What's your attitude toward blood donation?

问答题Directions: In this part of the test, you will hear 2 passages in English. You will hear the passages only once. After you have heard each passage, translate it into Chinese and write your version in the corresponding space on your Answer Sheet. You may take notes while you are listening.

问答题Ithinkwemustmakeimportantdecisionssoon.Weneedtodecidehowtodevelopournaturalresourcesandmineralwealthwithoutdestroyingthewildernessandharmingthewildlife.Whatisdecidedonnowwillaffectthegenerationstocome.Fortoday'slecture,I'llfirstshowyousomepicturesofAlaska'swildernessasitwas20yearsago,foilowedbysomeofthewildernessasitistoday.ThenI'dliketooutlinemyspecificsuggestionsforthepreservationsofAlaska.

问答题在一个极为漫长的历史阶段中，人类只能通过音乐表演和口授来传播音乐。当人类发明了乐谱后，音乐便开始脱离表演而演变成“文字”得以记录和传播。然而，人类音乐传播的真正革命性里程碑的建立者无疑是科学家们。他们创造了令人叹为观止的音乐传播手段，从最早的机械“留声机”到今天五花八门的“电子媒体”。在20世纪诸多的音乐传播手段中，无线电广播的发明和发展对音乐的传播起了极为重要的作用。然而，高科技的高速发展也使我国广播音乐工作者在新世纪中面临着严峻的挑战。

问答题Just outside its wooded headquarters campus, McDonald"s Corp. is offering sneak previews of its fast-food future. Now playing at its new flagship restaurant: Digital-media kiosks for burning CDs, downloading cell-phone ring tones and printing photos. Dozens of plasma-screen TVs. Wi-Fi Internet access. New chicken sandwiches. Double-lane drivethrus. And an adjoining McCafe with gourmet coffees, fancy pastries and a fireplace. Coming soon: Other menu items and concepts not yet released to a general audience. Don"t expect Starbucks-like makeovers like this one at the 13,600 U. S. McDonald"s, or 30,000-plus worldwide; the Oak Brook restaurant, which opened late last month, doubles as public restaurant and test site. But the world"s largest restaurant chain is tinkering with various possibilities in technology and design to try to ensure it is a hangout of choice in the future. McDonald"s has undergone an image change in more ways than one since a time 2 1/2 years ago when its sales and reputation were sagging amid complaints about its service and food. Despite inconsistent results in some large European countries, that McSlump is no longer: Same-store sales have increased for 25 straight months in the key U. S. market.

问答题Introduce briefly some failed expansions Starbucks experienced in the past.

问答题The task of writing a history of our nation from Rome’s earliest days fills me, I confess, with some misgivings and even were I confident in the value of my work, I should hesitate to say so. I am aware that for historians to make extravagant claims is, and always has been, all too common: Every writer on history tends to look down his nose at his less cultivated predecessors, happily persuaded that he will better them in point of style, or bring new facts to light. But however that may be, I shall find satisfaction in contributing, not, I hope, ignobly, to the labor of putting on record the story of the greatest nation in the world. Countless others have written on this theme and it may be that I shall pass unnoticed amongst them. If so, I must comfort myself with the greatness and splendor of my rivals, whose work will rob my own of recognition. My task, moreover, is an immensly laborious one. I shall have to go back more than 700 years, and trace my story from its small beginnings up to these recent times when its ramifications are so vast that any adequate treatment is hardly possible. I am aware too that most readers will take less pleasure in my account of how Rome began and in her early history; they will wish to hurry on to more modern times and read of the period, already a long one, in which the might of an imperial people is beginning to work its own ruin. My own feeling is different; I shall find antiquity a rewarding study. If only, because, while I am absorbed in it, I shall be able to turn my eyes from the troubles, which for so long have tormented the modern world, and to write without any of that over anxious consideration, which may well plague a writer in contemporary life, even if it does not lead him to conceal the truth.

问答题 Alabama chief justice Roy Moore has long displayed a reverence—or obsession, depending on your point of view—for the Ten Commandments. The Scripture has been a good calling card for Moore, gaining him notoriety far beyond the realm of circuit-court judges after he first decorated his courtroom in 1995 with a hand-carved rosewood plaque bearing God's laws. He prevailed over civil libertarians who sued for its removal, and rode his fame even further in 2000, when he was elected chief justice of Alabama's supreme court on the slogan "Roy Moore: Still the Ten Commandments Judge". But while he earned folk-hero status among Evangelicals and conservatives, last week he finally pushed the legal establishment too far when he ignored a federal court order to remove his largest monument to the Commandments, a 5,280-1b. granite carving known as Roy's Rock. Moore and some helpers had installed the sculpture in the rotunda of the state's judicial building during off-hours one night in 2001. In a stunning show of defiance by a jurist, Moore disregarded the urging of all eight of his fellow supreme court justices and Alabama's attorney general to comply with the federal ruling that the religious artifact is inappropriate in a court of law. Instead Moore declared, to the amens of supporters gathered on the building's portico, "I will never, never deny the God upon whom our laws and country depends." The hundreds of protesters had flocked to Moore's monument last week as if to a revival, carrying Bibles, wooden crosses and placards with phrases like KEEP THE COMMANDMENTS. DUMP THE FEDS. But within 24 hours of Moore's speech, his judicial colleagues suspended him from the bench and ordered him to face trial before the Alabama Court of the Judiciary, which can remove judges for ethical violations. The legal case, brought by several civil-liberties groups, is virtually open and shut. Moore's lawyers had argued that U.S. law is founded on the Ten Commandments, which are displayed, more subtly and often surrounded by secular legal symbols, in other government buildings around the country. But federal District Judge Myron Thompson said in his ruling that Roy's Rock is "nothing less than an obtrusive year-round religious display ... The only way to miss the religious or nonsecular appearance of the monument would be to walk through the Alabama State Judicial Building with one's eyes closed." A federal appeals court agreed, and the U.S. Supreme Court declined to issue a stay in the case. Moore has said he plans to file an appeal with the Supreme Court by late September, but legal experts don't expect the court to take it. "[Moore] does not have any laws of man to stand on," says University of Alabama law professor Bryan K. Fair. "He's claiming to stand on the laws of God. Apparently he has some difficulty recognizing the separate spheres of his own creed and the laws of the people of Alabama. " Moore's supporters have compared him to Martin Luther King, to Daniel, and even to Moses. The son of a construction worker, Moore, 56, grew up in northeast Alabama and worshipped at a Baptist church, not "an overbearing church where they shout and dance around", says his brother Jerry, "just a nice little country church". Moore graduated from West Point, served in Vietnam in the military police and earned his law degree at the University of Alabama. After losing a hard-fought election for circuit judge in 1982, Moore turned from law to more exotic battles, training as a kickboxer and wrangling cattle in Australia. It was at this stage in his life that Moore carved his plaque of the Ten Commandments and, after being appointed as a circuit judge, hung it in his courtroom and started making headlines. The first lawsuit seeking to remove it was ultimately dismissed on a technicality. His victories in the court of public opinion, however, have been more decisive. He won his chief-justice post with 54% of the vote, and in a July poll of Alabama residents, 77% said they approve of his stone monument. His popularity has led to speculation that Moore is angling for higher office, although his staff denies that. In the meantime, however, his current job depends largely on whether he decides to obey the commandments of his legal colleagues.

问答题List some of the suggestions offered by Ferrazzi on "networking".

问答题Will lower energy prices add to inflationary pressure? If that sounds a bit countertuitive for you, consider this: The economy is already growing so rapidly that it is putting pressure on available labor, production capacity, and distribution channels. Recent price declines, including the drop in gasoline prices, mean that the headline inflation numbers will look better in coming months. But cheaper energy bills free up cash that can be spent on other items. A pickup in demand, especially by consumers, will only add to the fight market conditions that tend to foster broadly higher prices. For now, costlier energy and the potential pass-through of higher fuel bills to other prices remain a key focus of inflation worries. However, energy prices would be much less of a concern for inflation in general if the economy were not so fundamentally robust. Indeed, the biggest danger in the inflation outlook for 2006 is not necessarily the direction of oil prices. It"s the economy"s persistent tendency to exceed its speed limit. Even with the past spikes in energy prices as well as the summer"s hurricanes, demand continues to grow so fast that the available productive resources can barely keep up. For the past 2.5 years, the economy has expanded at an annual rate of 4%, with growth in any one quarter never less than 3.3%. That trend far exceeds the economy"s growth limit, generally accepted to be about 3.25%. Whatever slack was created by the recession in 2001, it"s now either nearly or completely gone. It is the broad upward pressures on inflation that will be the primary focus of the Federal Reserve and its presumptive new chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, who won near-unanimous support in a Nov. 16 vote of the Senate Banking Committee after his confirmation hearings the day before. Identifying the intensity of those forces and communicating the Fed"s policy goals to the markets will be the next chairman"s most critical tasks in the coming year. So far the price indexes show few signs that prices outside of energy are heating up. Consumer prices in October rose 0.2% from September, as did the core index, which excludes energy and food. At the wholesale level, energy pushed producer prices up 0.7% in October, while the core index fell 0.3% , although that fall resulted from a quirky drop in car prices, a reflection more of government statistical methods than sticker prices. Nevertheless, the continued buildup in demand suggests core inflation is more likely to rise than slow in coming months. How resilient is demand? Just consider how little an impact Hurricane Katrina and the related spike in energy prices had on consumer spending. If anything, the more dramatic shift in demand has come from the boom-bust pattern associated with the timing of the auto industry"s "employee discount pricing" plans. According to the Commerce Dept. , October retail sales slipped 0.1% from September. But excluding the slump in the month"s car buying after the pricing program ended, retail receipts jumped a strong 0.9%. That gain would have been higher but for the dip in gasoline prices, which dragged down receipts at gas stations. Commerce also said retail buying in both August and September were a bit higher than its earlier estimates. Further gains may be on the way, thanks to cheaper energy. Average gas prices are down 25% from their post-Katrina high, to $2.30 per gallon Nov. 14. And based on the current trend in wholesale prices, pump prices could approach $ 2 by yearend. Using commerce data, a 25% drop in gas prices over three months adds some $80 billion, at an annual rate, to household purchasing power, which can go to other things. Any further declines in gas prices mean even more money to spend. Little wonder then that some retailers are expressing a bit more confidence about yearend shopping. For example, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. expects its November same-store sales to be 3% to 5% higher than sales a year earlier. And company officials expressed optimism about holiday and post-holiday revenues, citing the recent declines in gas prices.

问答题 Since thin people can't enjoy life, we eke out pleasure by telling fat people how to lose weight, as if they don't know. Cook! Plant a garden! Read this posting of fast-food-menu calories! Buy fresh produce! Bike to work! Do stuff skinny folk would never do. So I wasn't surprised when two recent studies concluded that obesity isn't reduced by opening supermarkets in poor areas—the so-called food deserts without access to affordable fresh produce that food writer Michael Pollan has railed against and the Obama Administration has funded an initiative to fix. Sure, people can't eat healthy if there isn't a store nearby selling pomegranate seeds and kale. But most obesity isn't caused by a lack of access to affordable produce or time to cook. It's the result of short-term over long-term thinking. Cooking sucks. Eating a salad takes forever. Fast food is delicious, easy, fun, cheap, reliable and can be scarfed down so quickly there isn't time to fight with your family. One Thanksgiving meal does more emotional damage than a lifetime of Wendy's. The times when I've felt stuck in my life, I've made horrible decisions—avoiding work, blowing deadlines, going on seven dates with a woman during which I watched a movie on her bed and met her parents and yet did not kiss her once, there by starting, I'm sure, a rumor that I'm either gay or lack a working tongue. And my version of being stuck was hating my Manhattan magazine fact-checking job and living at home with my newly divorced dad. So, less like being poor and more like being in a 1980s sitcom. But if you're living in an impoverished community where the future doesn't look like a rewarding adventure and instead requires all your energy to figure out how to get by this month, you're unlikely to focus on activities with long-term benefits such as studying, saving, marriage, being drug-free and spicing up quinoa. In their 1988 paper "A Theory of Rational Addiction", economists Gary Becker and Kevin Murphy argued that shooting heroin is a logical choice when all you're giving up is a crappy existence. It also explains why so many people do drugs when listening to Phish. When I ran my theory by Marie Gallagher, the researcher who invented the term "food desert", she actually agreed with me. "That's why we don't have to combat food deserts but jobs deserts, crime and so many other things," she said. I asked Charles Duhigg—whose brilliant book The Power of Habit is about how to trick your brain into making better decisions—what a better solution is. He said telling people to eat well so they'll live longer is idiotic. "The No. 1 way not to form a good habit is to say, 'In three months I'm going to look a lot thinner.' There is no way you can say the long-term reward is going to outweigh a sugar rush," he said. "If you see doughnuts on the counter, it will feel really urgent that you need a doughnut. That's your basal ganglia." One proven way of turning people off doughnuts is to talk about basal ganglia. I asked A. J. Jacobs, who lost a bunch of weight for his hilarious new book, Drop Dead Healthy, how he did it. Jacobs, who has never been poor, used to think fatalistically about his future, as a poor person might: "I rationalized it and said even if you eat right and go to the gym three times a week, you get hit by a bus, so what's the point?" In his head, Jacobs lived a chaotic, violent Upper West Side life where young homies were constantly being iced by the M79 crosstown. So Jacobs tricked himself into thinking long-term results were immediate. "I try to visualize what that doughnut would do to my body. I do that CSI thing where you go inside your body like a bullet, and you visualize the arteries and a big chunk of doughnut blocking the artery," he said. He also stuck a computerized image of himself at 80 on his refrigerator. He agreed to start a company with me that would create an app that updates the elderly-you photo in real time, depending on how much you eat and exercise. Jacobs spent that evening looking for food at the airport, which is the only food desert rich people run into. "I went to a place called something like the Health Shack. They sold gummy bears and chocolate-chip cookies," he said. Jacobs resisted temptation. Though if this book doesn't sell, next time he probably won't.

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