阅读理解Read the text below and answer Questions How to deal with the annual performance appraisal The annual performance appraisal can help improve your productivity and provide a foundation for your work priorities

阅读理解READING PASSAGE 1 Raising the Mary Rose How a sixteenth-century warship was recovered from the seabed On 19 July 1545, English and French fleets were engaged in a sea battle off the coast of southern England in the area of water called the Solent, between Portsmouth and the Isle of Wight. Among the English vessels was a warship by the name of Mary Rose. Built in Portsmouth some 35 years earlier, she had had a long and successful fighting career, and was a favourite of King Henry VIII. Accounts of what happened to the ship vary: while witnesses agree that she was not hit by the French, some maintain that she was outdated, overladen and sailing too low in the water, others that she was mishandled by undisciplined crew. What is undisputed, however, is that the Mary Rose sank into the Solent that day, taking at least 500 men with her. After the battle, attempts were made to recover the ship, but these failed. The Mary Rose came to rest on the seabed, lying on her starboard (right) side at an angle of approximately 60 degrees. The hull (the body of the ship) acted as a trap for the sand and mud carried by Solent currents. As a result, the starboard side filled rapidly, leaving the exposed port (left) side to be eroded by marine organisms and mechanical degradation. Because of the way the ship sank, nearlyall of the starboard half survived intact. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the entire site became covered with a layer of hard grey clay, which minimised further erosion. Then, on 16 June 1836, some fishermen in the Solent found that their equipment was caught on an underwater obstruction, which turned out to be the Mary Rose. Diver John Deane happened to be exploring another sunken ship nearby, and the fishermen approached him, asking him to free their gear. Deane dived down, and found the equipment caught on a timber protruding slightly from the seabed. Exploring further, he uncovered several other timbers and a bronze gun. Deane continued diving on the site intermittently until 1840, recovering several more guns, two bows, various timbers, part of a pump and various other small finds. The Mary Rose then faded into obscurity for another hundred years. But in 1965, military historian and amateur diver Alexander McKee, in conjunction with the British Sub-Aqua Club, initiated a project called Solent Ships5. While on paper this was a plan to examine a number of known wrecks in the Solent, what McKeereally hoped for was to find the Mary Rose. Ordinary search techniques proved unsatisfactory, so McKee entered into collaboration with Harold E. Edgerton, professor of electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1967, Edgertons side-scan sonar systems revealed a large, unusually shaped object, which McKee believed was the Mary Rose. Further excavations revealed stray pieces of timber and an iron gun. But the climax to the operation came when, on 5 May 1971， part of the ships frame was uncovered. McKee and his team now knew for certain that they had found the wreck, but were as yet unaware that it also housed a treasure trove of beautifully preserved artefacts. Interest in the project grew， and in 1979, The Mary Rose Trust was formed, with Prince Charles as its President and Dr Margaret Rule its Archaeological Director. The decision whether or not to salvage the wreck was not an easy one, although an excavation in 1978 had shown that it might be possible to raise the hull. While the original aim was to raise the hull if at all feasible, the operation was not given the go-ahead until January 1982, when all the necessary information was available. An important factor in trying to salvage the Mary Rose was that the remaininghull was an open shell. This led to an important decision being taken: namely to carry out the lifting operation in three very distinct stages. The hull was attached to a lifting frame via a network of bolts and lifting wires. The problem of the hull being sucked back downwards into the mud was overcome by using 12 hydraulic jacks. These raised it a few centimetres over a period of several days, as the lifting frame rose slowly up its four legs. It was only when the hull was hanging freely from the lifting frame, clear of the seabed and the suction effect of the surrounding mud, that the salvage operation progressed to the second stage. In this stage, the lifting frame was fixed to a hook attached to a crane, and the hull was lifted completely clear of the seabed and transferred underwater into the lifting cradle. This required precise positioning to locate the legs into the stabbing guides of the lifting cradle. The lifting cradle was designed to fit the hull using archaeological survey drawings, and was fitted with air bags to provide additional cushioning for the hulls delicate timber framework. The third and final stage was to lift the entire structure into the air, by which time the hull was also supported from below. Finally, on 11 October 1982, millions of people around the world held their breath as the timber skeleton of the Mary Rose was lifted clear of the water, ready to be returned home to Portsmouth.

阅读理解Read the following text and answer the following questions HOLIDAY APARTMENTS TO LET A Sleeps 2-3

阅读理解Vietnam has become one of the fastest-growing countries in Asia If foreign investment is anything to go by, the nominally communist rulers of Vietnam have made their peace with capitalism. The country raked in foreign direct investment worth more than 8% of GDP last year, even more, proportionally, than China. After its oversized and overheating neighbors, Vietnam also boasts Asia''s best-performing economy. It has grown by an average of 7.4% a year over the past decade and is likely to achieve a similar figure this year. Better yet, the boom has lifted many Vietnamese out of poverty. As recently as 1993, the World Bank considered 58% of the population poor. By 2002, that had fallen to 29%. Can Vietnam maintain this remarkable momentum? So far, its economy has proved unstoppable. Neither last year''s outbreak of SARS, a respiratory disease which scared away tourists, nor this year''s avian flu epidemic, which hurt poultry farmers, made much of a dent. Even during the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s, when other countries in the region were plunged into recession, growth in Vietnam never fell below 4.8%. At first, agricultural reform, which redistributed land from the state to poor farmers, propelled the boom. More recently, export growth, fuelled by cheap, efficient labour and burgeoning foreign investment, has driven the economy. Exports leapt 20% last year. As Do Due Dinh, a local economist, points out, the money Vietnam earns from this trade — roughly $ 20 billion last year—now dwarfs the $ 2 billion — odd it gets each year in hand-outs from foreign donors. Vietnam''s exports to America doubled in 2002, after the two countries signed a trade pact, and again in 2003. Admittedly, as trade with America grows, it has become more controversial. Last year, American catfish farmers, by invoking arcane anti-dumping laws, persuaded their government to impose steep tariffs on imports of Vietnamese catfish. Now American shrimp-fishermen are trying to repeat the same trick. American bureaucrats are also contemplating reducing the amount of garments Vietnam can export to America, as a penalty for allowing Chinese-made clothes to enter America on Vietnam''s quota. Even if Vietnam is let off the hook, the quota will from now on only grow by a few percentage points a year. Between 2001 and 2003, by contrast, textile exports to the United States grew from $ 47 million to $2.4 billion. But Vietnam''s diversified exports — it produces commodities, agricultural goods and manufactures — provide insulation against fluctuations in any single product. Its markets are diverse, too, although catfish exports to America fell by a third after the new tariffs were imposed, overall exports of catfish grew, as Vietnamese exporters found new customers in Europe and Australia. Vietnam also hopes to join the World Trade Organisation next year. But even if this deadline slips, it still has its trade pact with America, its membership of AFTA, a South-East Asian free-trade area, and its proximity to China. Small businesses have also boomed, since the government passed a new law in 2000 making it easier to set them up. By the end of 2002, over 50,000 new companies had sprung up. But as Martin Rama of the World Bank points out, Vietnam has almost no middling private firms between these mom-and-pop ventures and big exporters backed by foreign investors. Such businesses find it hard to grow because they cannot readily get access to land or capital. About half of bank lending goes to state-owned enterprises, although that share is falling. What is more, even if banks (mostly state-owned themselves) wanted to lend to entrepreneurs, the latter have little collateral to pledge for their loans. In Vietnam, the state owns all the land and grants land-use rights to farmers, businesses and home-owners. Although these are theoretically transferable, banks are fearful that Vietnam''s antiquated courts would not enforce their rights. Such fears have precluded a free market for land, further adding to private firms'' difficulties. Corruption also weighs heaviest on small businesses: in some provinces, they can be subjected to as many as 15 different bureaucratic inspections each year. The government, although trying to solve some of these problems, appears addicted to public enterprise. It continues to provide state-owned firms with loans and land -- which many of them then rent on at a mark-up to the private sector. It invests with Stakhanovite zeal in impressive but uneconomical facilities, such as oil refineries, steel mills and fertiliser plants. The net result is a massive misallocation of resources. Vietnam''s ratio of investment to economic growth has fallen by roughly a quarter in recent years. To reverse that slide, argues Robert Glofcheski, an economist at the UN Development Programme, the government must revert to the same tactics that made its agricultural reforms so successful: more spending on health and education, further transfers of assets from the public to the private sector and faster deregulation. Such moves are particularly important if poverty is to be reduced further. Thanks in part to the stunning success of the past decade, tackling poverty have become more difficult. The poor are now concentrated in remote, rural districts populated chiefly by ethnic minorities -- just the sort of area least touched by the government''s reform programme. Now that industry has replaced agriculture as the main engine of the economy, cities are growing faster than the countryside. Vietnam cannot afford to provide services to the rural poor, or cope with a population influx in the cities, and cosset state-owned firms at the same time -- even during a boom.

阅读理解Read the text below and answer Questions Hilton Laboratory Health and safety in the workplace Personal safety You must be familiar with the emergency procedures in your building so that you know what to do in the event of fire, spillages or other accidents

阅读理解Read the text below and answer Questions City Park and Ride We have six purpose-built Park and Ride sites serving the city, more than almost anywhere else in the UK

阅读理解READING PASSAGE 3 Neuroaesthetks An emerging discipline called neuroaesthetics is seeking to bring scientific objectivity to the study of art, and has already given us a better understanding of many masterpieces

阅读理解Read the text below and answer Questions

阅读理解Cereal stocks to decline again in 2003/04 A 6 April 2004, Rome-Global cereal stocks will fall sharply again by the end of the 2003/2004 season, FAO said today. The forecast came in the UN food agency''s Food Outlook, a publication of the Global Information and Early Warning System. Closing inventories are expected to be down by 89 million tonnes, or 18 percent from their opening levels. The anticipated sharp decline in cereal stocks from the previous season would be mainly due to China, although substantial reductions are also anticipated in India, Russia, Ukraine and the European Union, mostly driven by the reductions in their 2003 cereal production, says the report. B However, the report says world cereal production in 2004 is forecast to increase to 2,130 million tonnes, some 2 percent up on last year and 3 percent above the average of the past five years and that could help alleviate the tight global supply situation in the new 2004/2005 season. The bulk of the cereals increase is expected in wheat, although rice output is also seen to rise significantly. By contrast, coarse grains production could decrease marginally. The report emphasizes, however, that this first forecast, especially for rice and coarse grains, is tentative and assumes normal weather conditions. According to the report, "The increase in global cereal output forecast for 2004 would come as a very welcome development for global food supply. The continued tightening of global cereal supplies for four successive years since 1999/2000 has brought international cereal prices under significant upward pressure in the past months. " The report says, "Export prices for wheat, maize and rice all registered strong gains, reflecting tight market conditions. " Because early prospects for wheat crops are favourable, some easing of wheat prices could be anticipated as the harvest approaches in the northern hemisphere in the coming months. But, the report says that export prices for coarse grains and rice are unlikely to recede any time soon based on current supply and demand prospects. C World cereal utilization in 2003/2004 is forecast at 1,971 million tonnes, up 1 percent from the previous year, but still slightly below the 10-year trend. In spite of a significant increase in international cereal prices and major animal disease outbreaks in the second half of the season, global cereal utilization is expected to rise above the previous season because of strong demand for feed and industrial use, especially in the linked States. The report anticipates an increase in food aid costs per unit in view of generally tighter world cereal supplies, strong international prices and soaring ocean freight rates for 2003/2004. It notes that total food aid shipments during this period "could decline slightly". D The report adds that although world imports of cereals are forecast to decline by around 10 million tonnes in 2003/2004, higher prices and freight rates, and smaller food aid shipments, are expected to push up the overall cost of cereal imports by 2 percent from the previous year. FAO''s Food Outlook will be published four times this year, in April, June, September and November. Questions 1-4 Below is a list of headings , choose the most suitable choices for parts (A — D) and write the appropriate numbers (i-v) on your answer sheet. NB: There are more headings than you need so you will not use all of them and you may use any heading more than once. List of heading i. Wheat and rice production increases b ii. Less food assistance made available d iii. Demand for cereals to remain strong c iv. Cereal production is forecast to increase in the coming season a v. Decline in cereal stocks

阅读理解Read the text below and answer Questions GZJ Travel - Recruitment Info Were looking for keen and ellective people who are passionate about travel to work as Travel Sales Consultants in our rapidly-growing team. Our recruitment process has five stages. Heres how it works: The first stage is to use our online application form to apply for a current vacancy. This is your chance to tell us about yourself, and the qualities and experience you have that make you the ideal person for the job. For the Travel Sales Consultant role, youll need to provide us with evidence that you have extensive experience in a marketing environment, as well as a solid academic background. If youre interested in a career as a Corporate Travel Consultant, youll need at least one years experience as a Travel Consultant. If you reach Stage Two, well arrange a telephone discussion, where you can find out more about us, including the rewards on offer. For instance, once a year we like to acknowledge outstanding efforts and celebrate successes with our co-workers, and we have prize-giving ceremonies designed to do just this. In Stage Three w ell be able to give you more information about GZJ Travel, and find out more about you, at an interview which youll attend with a small group of other applicants. W ell be asking you about your ambitions and of course your sales ability, the most vital quality for our business. Youll also be required to complete a psychometric test so we can find out more about your working style and characteristics. W ell also tell you about some of the perks for example, as a Flight Center employee you can take advantage of the free consultations conducted by our in-house health and wellbeing team, Healthwise. Next, in Stage Four, youll be introduced to the Area Leader and youll also visit one of our shops, where youll meet the team and find out more about the sort of work thats involved. If you successfully pass Stage Four, youve reached the final stage of the process and w ell be in touch with a job offer! And if you accept, w ell book you into our Learning Center to get your training under way as soon as possible. Careerwise, the department responsible for the training, will then organise individual coaching to assist in setting goals for you career path. Complete the flow-chart below. Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the text for each answer. Write your answers in boxes on your answer sheet. GZJ TraveI 一Recruitment Process

阅读理解READING PASSAGE 2 An Introduction to Film Sound Though we might think of film as an essentially visual experience, we really cannot afford to underestimate the importance of film sound

阅读理解Swarm intelligence can also be observed in everyday life.

阅读理解READING PASSAGE 1 Crop-growing skyscrapers By the year 2050, nearly 80% of the Earth5s population will live in urban centres

阅读理解Rights to remember NEW HN, CONNECTICUT One element of this doctrine is what I call "Achilles and his heel". September 11th brought upon America, as once upon Achilles, a schizophrenic sense of both exceptional power and exceptional vulnerability. Never has a superpower seemed so powerful and so vulnerable at the same time. The Bush doctrine asked: "How can we use our superpower resources to protect our vulnerability?" The administration has also radically shifted its emphasis on human rights. In 1941, Franklin Delano Roosevelt called the allies to arms by painting a vision of the world we were trying to make: a post-war world of four fundamental freedoms: freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want, freedom from fear. This framework foreshadowed the post-war human-rights construct-embedded in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and subsequent international covenants that emphasised comprehensive protection of civil and political rights (freedom of speech and religion), economic, social and cultural rights (freedom from want), and freedom from gross violations and persecution (the Refugee Convention, the Genocide Convention and the Torture Convention). But Bush administration officials have now reprioritised "freedom from fear" as the number-one freedom we need to preserve. Freedom from fear has become the obsessive watchword of America''s human-rights policy. Witness five faces of a human-rights policy fixated on freedom from fear. (A) Two core tenets of a post-Watergate world had been that our government does not spy on its citizens, and that American citizens should see what our government is doing. But since September 11th, classification of government documents has risen to new heights. The Patriot Act, passed almost without dissent after September 11th, authorises the Defence Department to develop a project to promote something called "total information awareness". Under this programme, the government may gather huge amounts of information about citizens without proving they have done anything wrong. They can access a citizen''s records-whether telephone, financial, rental, internet, medical, educational or library-without showing any involvement with terrorism. Internet service providers may be forced to produce records based solely on FBI declarations that the information is for an anti-terrorism investigation. Many absurdities follow: the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, in a study published in September, reports that 20 American peace activists, including nuns and high-school students, were recently flagged as security threats and detained for saying that they were travelling to a rally to protest against military aid to Colombia. The entire high-school wrestling team of Juneau, Alaska, was held up at airports seven times just because one member was the son of a retired Coast Guard officer on the FBI watch-list. (B) After September 11th, 1,200 immigrants were detained, more than 750 on charges based solely on civil immigration violations. The Justice Department''s own inspector — general called the attorney — general''s enforcement of immigration laws "indiscriminate and haphazard". The Immigration and Naturalisation Service, which formerly had a mandate for humanitarian relief as well as for border protection, has been converted into an arm of the Department of Homeland Security. The impact on particular groups has been devastating. The number of refugees resettled in America declined from 90,000 a year before September 11th to less than a third that number, 27,000, this year. The Pakistani population of Atlantic County, New Jersey has fallen by half. (C) Some 660 prisoners from 42 countries are being held in Guantanamo Bay, some for nearly two years. Three children are apparently being detained, including a 13-year-old, several of the detainees are aged over 70, and one claims to be over 100. Courtrooms are being built to try six detainees, including two British subjects who have been declared eligible for trial by military commission. There have been 32 reported suicide attempts. Yet the administration is literally pouring concrete around its detention policy, spending another $ 25m on buildings in Guantdnamo that will increase the detention capacity to 1,100. (D) In two cases that are quickly working their way to the Supreme Court, Yasser Hamdi and Jose Padilla are two American citizens on American soil who have been designated as "enemy combatants", and who have been accorded no legal channels to assert their rights. The racial disparities in the use of the "enemy combatant" label are glaring. Contrast, for example, the treatment of Mr Hamdi, from Louisiana but of Saudi Arabian ancestry, with that of John Walker Lindh, the famous "American Taliban", who is a white American from a comfortable family in the San Francisco Bay area. Both are American citizens; both were captured in Afghanistan in late 2001 by the Northern Alli?ance; both were handed over to American forces, who eventually brought them to the United States. But federal prosecutors brought criminal charges against Mr Lindh, who got an expensive lawyer and eventually plea-bargained to a prison term. Meanwhile, Mr Hamdi has remained in incommunicado detention, without a lawyer, in a South Carolina military brig for the past 16 months. (E) America''s anti-terrorist activities have given cover to many foreign governments who want to use "anti-terrorism" to justify their own crackdowns on human rights. Examples abound. In Indonesia, the army has cited America''s use of Guantanamo to propose building an offshore prison camp on Nasi Island to hold suspected terrorists from Aceh. In Australia, Parliament passed laws mandating the forcible transfer of refugees seeking entry to detention facilities in Nauru, where children as young as three years old are being held, so that Australia does not (in the words of its defence minister) become a "pipeline for terrorists". In Egypt, the government extended for another three years its emergency law, which allows it to detain suspected national-security threats almost indefinitely without charge, to ban public demonstrations, and to try citizens before military tribunals. President Hosni Mubarak announced that America''s parallel policies proved that "we were right from the beginning in using all means, including military tribunals, to combat terrorism". Around the globe, America''s human-rights policy has visibly softened, subsumed under the all-encompassing banner of the "war against terrorism". And at home, the Patriot Act, military commissions, Guantdnamo and the indefinite detention of American citizens have placed America in the odd position of condoning deep intrusions by law, even while creating zones and persons outside the law. Many, if not most, Americans would have supported dealing with September 11th in a different way. Imagine, for example, the Bush administration dealing with the atrocity through the then prevailing multilateralist strategy of using global cooperation to solve global problems. On the day after the attack, George Bush could have flown to New York to stand in solidarity with the world''s ambassadors in front of the United Nations. Questions 26-30 Below is a list of headings , choose the most suitable choices for paragraphs (A-E) and write the appropriate numbers (i-vi) on your answer sheet. i. Scapegoating immigrants ii. The creation of extra-legal zones iii. Closed government and invasions of privacy iv. The effect on the rest of the world v. Painting a vision of the world vi. The creation of extra-legal persons.

阅读理解READING PASSAGE 3 This Marvellens Imrentiom A Of all mankind s manifold creations, language must take pride of place

阅读理解READING PASSAGE 2 THE FALKIRK WHEEL A unique engineering achievement The Falkirk Wheel in Scotland is the worlds first and only rotating boat lift. Opened in 2002, it is central to the ambitious 84.5m Millennium Link project to restore navigability across Scotland by reconnecting the historic waterways of the Forth Clyde and Union Canals. The major challenge of the project lay in the fact that the Forth Clyde Canal is situated 35 metres below the level of the Union Canal. Historically, the two canals had been joined near the town of Falkirk by a sequence of 11 locks - enclosed sections of canal in which the water level could be raised or lowered - that stepped down across a distance of 1.5 km. This had been dismantled in 1933, thereby breaking the link. When the project was launched in 1994, the British Waterways authority were keen to create a dramatic twenty-firstcentury landmark which would not only be a fitting commemoration of the Millennium, but also a lasting symbol of the economic regeneration of the region. Numerous ideas were submitted for the project, including concepts ranging from rolling eggs to tilting tanks, from giant seesaws to overhead monorails. The eventual winner was a plan for the huge rotating steel boat lift which was to become The Falkirk Wheel. The unique shape of the structure is claimed to have been inspired by various sources, both manmade and natural, most notably a Celtic double-headed axe, but also the vast turning propeller of a ship, the propeller of a whale or the spine of a fish. The various parts of The Falkirk Wheel were all constructed and assembled, like one giant toy building set, at Butterley Engineerings Steelworks in Derbyshire, some 400 km from Falkirk. A team there carefully assembled the 1,200 tonnes of steel, painstakingly fitting the pieces together to an accuracy of just 1〇 mm to ensure a perfect final fit. In the summer of 2001, the structure was then dismantled and transported on 35 lorries to Falkirk, before all being bolted back together again on the ground, and finally lifted into position in five large sections by crane. The Wheel would need to withstand immense and constantly changing stresses as it rotated, so to make the structure more robust, the steel sections were bolted rather than welded together. Over 45,000 bolt holes were matched with their bolts, and each bolt was hand-tightened. The Wheel consists of two sets of opposing axe-shaped arms, attached about 25 metres apart to a fixed central spine. Two diametrically opposed water-filled gondolas, each with a capacity of 360,000 litres, are fitted between the ends Of the arms. These gondolas always weigh the same, whether or not they are carrying boats. This is because, according to Archimedes principle of displacement,floating objects displace their own weight in water. So when a boat enters a gondola, the amount of water leaving the gondola weighs exactly the same as the boat. This keeps the Wheel balanced and so, despite its enormous mass, it rotates through 1800 in five and a half minutes while using very little power. It takes just 1.5 kilowatt-hours (5.4 MJ) of energy to rotate the Wheel - roughly the same as boiling eight small domestic kettles of water. Boats needing to be lifted up enter the canal basin at the level of the Forth Clyde Canal and then enter the lower gondola of the Wheel. Two hydraulic steel gates are raised, so as to seal the gondola off from the water in the canal basin. The water between the gates is then pumped out. A hydraulic damp, which prevents the arms of the Wheel moving while the gondola is docked, is removed, allowing the Wheel to turn. In the central machine room an array often hydraulic motors then begins to rotate the central axle. The axle connects to the outer arms of theWheel, which begin to rotate at a speed of 1/8 of a revolution per minute. As the wheel rotates, the gondolas are kept in the upright position by a simple gearing system. Two eight-metre-wide cogs orbit a fixed inner cog of the same width, connected by two smaller cogs travelling in the opposite direction to the outer cogs - so ensuring that the gondolas always remain level. When the gondola reaches the top, the boat passes straight onto the aqueduct situated 24 metres above the canal basin. The remaining 11 metres of lift needed to reach the Union Canai is achieved by means of a pair of locks. The Wheel could not be constructed to elevate boats over the full 35-metre difference between the two canals, owing to the presence of the historically important Antonine Wall, which was built by the Romans in the second century AD. Boats travel under this wall via a tunnel, then through the locks, and finally on to the Union Canal.

阅读理解What is it like to run a large superm arket? Jill Insley finds out A You can5t beat really good service

阅读理解NHS chief praises fall in waiting list times The National Health Service could hit its most politically sensitive target early, Sir Nigel Crisp, the NHS chief executive, said on Friday. In his most bullish annual report since taking office four years ago, Sir Nigel said waiting times were falling faster and further than ever before, quality was improving and services were being redesigned. And productivity — hard though it is to measure — was improving, he said. "Something big is happening within the NHS," Sir Nigel said, as the government reported that it had reached its target in March with only 48 patients waiting more than nine months for an operation. The maximum wait for an out-patient appointment is down to 17 weeks from 21 weeks a year ago. Just over 40,000 are now waiting over 13 weeks for an appointment against 400,000 in March 2000. The service has also reduced by almost 60,000 the number of people waiting between six and nine months for in-patient procedures. The reduction seems to suggest that genuine changes are taking place in the way the NHS is organising services to make them more efficient — rather than simply achieving the shorter maximum waits by "tail-gunning" the end of the waiting list. What is as yet missing is robust data to show that average waits are also starting to fall significantly. "Not only are we hitting all of our targets in order to speed up patient care, but by reforming the way we work we are also improving the quality of patients care," Sir Nigel said. "The NHS is using the extra funding" — an extra ￡6bn. last year — "to good effect, with major improvements in quality and quantity". With extra capacity in treatment centres due to start coming online it was possible that the NHS would hit the target of having no-one wait for more than six months, once on a waiting list, ahead of December next year. Although the figures are not as robust as those used to measure hospital activity, Sir Nigel said it was clear more treatment was being provided outside hospitals, in a quicker and more convenient way for patients. Evidence for that includes the number of patients referred to hospital by GPs remaining almost flat last year while a ￡21 million increase in the bill for modern drugs to counter heart failure has brought an estimated reduction of 20,000 hospital admissions. With a big government review under way on how to measure productivity in the public services, Sir Nigel said the NHS still lacked "an adequate way of measuring overall productivity", but indicated there were clear improvements in the productivity of individual services.

阅读理解READING PASSAGE 3 ARCHITECTURE - Reaching for the Sky Architecture is the art and science of designing buildings and structures

阅读理解READING PASSAGE 3 Whatever happened to the Harappan Civilisation? New research sheds light on the disappearance of an ancient society AThe Harappan Civilisation of ancient Pakistan and India flourished 5,000 years ago, but a thousand years later their cities were abandoned