单选题We can learn from the first paragraph that

单选题These are hard times for Deutsehe Bank, despite its huge strides in investment banking. Next week its chief executive, Josef Ackerman, goes on trial in Dusseldorf. Careless words by Rolf Breuer, the head of its supervisory board, led to another court ruling last month that may cost Germany" s biggest bank several hundred million euros in damages. Then there is Parmalat. Although no evidence has emerged of complicity in the Italian dairy group" s fraud, Deutsche" s name has become entwined in the affair. In many other respects, however, Deutsche" s reputation has never been higher. In dubbing it " Bank of the Year 2003", International Financing Review, the capital markets" favorite newssheet, purred that Deutsche was a "lean, aggressive, focused universal bank" In the league tables that investment banks watch so keenly, Deutsche excelled last year as lead manager of bonds and convertible bonds and of some racier products, such as repackaged debt securities and high-yield "junk" bonds. In other disciplines it rarely fell below the top ten in the world. However, it is still nowhere near the top in equity offerings and advice on mergers and acquisitions, except in Germany. It still has a problem with costs,which were a fat 82% of income in the third quarter of 2003, thanks mainly to the thick pay packets of its investment bankers and its poor returns from corporate and retail banking. Mr. Ackermann must try to improve the weak spots while spending two clays a week, probably until June, in a courtroom. He and four others face charges of "breach of trust" over the way bonuses were awarded to board meinbers of Mannesmann, a telecoms company. Mr. Aekermann sat on Mannesmann" s supervisory board. There is no suggestion that he gained personally. Nor was there any harmful intent in Mr. Breuer" s remarks in a television interview about the financial health of the Kirch media group shortly before its bankruptcy. But he was careless, and a Munich court found Deutsche (but not Mr. Breuer) liable for damages, to be set in due course, without right of appeal. The bank said this week it has lodged a protest with the federal supreme court in Karlsruhe. Meanwhile, Kirch has filed a suit against Deutsche in America. Deutsche"s involvement with Parmalat also looks sloppy. It led a 350m bond issue fur the group in September. It was also a leading borrower and lender of Parma[at shares, so that in November it technically held the voting rights to over 5% of Parmalat stock. That stake had fallen to 1.5% by December 19th, the day the dairy company"s black hole became public. It reported this, perhaps over-zealously, to the Italian authorities. That may have given the wrong impression, say, sources close to the bank, because the transactions were for third parties. This is awkward for a bank that managed to avoid most serious attacks on conflicts of interest thai beset the investment-banking industry following the collapse of Enron in 2001 and the bursting of the tech-stock bubble. Mr. Ackermann will need a clear head to steer the bank through the coming storms.

单选题The United States is not (thank goodness) a culturally homogeneous country. It consists of many distinct moral communities. On certain social issues, such as abortion and homosexuality, people don't agree and probably never will—and the signal political advantage of the federalist system is that they don't have to. Individuals and groups who find the values or laws of one state obnoxious have the right to live somewhere else. The nationalization of abortion policy in the Supreme Court's 1973 Roe v. Wade decision created a textbook example of what can happen when this federalist principle is ignored. If the Supreme Court had not stepped in, abortion would today be legal in most states but not all; pro-lifers would have the comfort of knowing they could live in a state whose law was compatible with their views. Instead of endlessly confronting a cultural schism that affects every Supreme Court nomination, we would see occasional local flare-ups in state legislatures or courtrooms. America is a stronger country for the moral diversity that federalism uniquely allows. Moral law and family law govern the most intimate and, often, the most controversial spheres of life. For the sake of domestic tranquility, domestic law is best left to a level of government that is close to home. So well suited is the federalist system to the gay-marriage issue that it might almost have been set up to handle it. In a new land whose citizens followed different religious traditions, it would have made no sense to centralize marriage or family law. And so marriage has been the domain of local law not just since the days of the Founders but since Colonial times, before the states were states. To my knowledge, the federal government has overruled the states on marriage only twice. The first time was when it required Utah to ban polygamy as a condition for joining the Union—and note that this ruling was issued before Utah became a state. The second time was in 1967, when the Supreme Court, in Loving v. Virginia, struck down sixteen states' bans on interracial marriage. Here the Court said not that marriage should be defined by the federal government but only that states could not define marriage in ways that violated core constitutional rights. On the one occasion when Congress directly addressed same-sex marriage, in the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, it decreed that the federal government would not recognize same-sex marriages but took care not to impose that rule on the states.

单选题It is implied in the last paragraph that

单选题The scourge that's plaguing cruise lines—and causing thousands of Americans to rethink their holiday travel plans—didn't start this year, nor did it even start on a ship. It began, as far as the Centers for Disease Control(CDC) can tell, in Norwalk, Ohio, in October 1968, when 116 elementary-school children and teachers suddenly became ill. The CDC investigated, and the culprit was discovered to be a small, spherical, previously unclassified virus that scientists named, appropriately enough, the Norwalk virus. Flash forward 34 years, and Norwalk-like viruses(there's a whole family of them) are all over the news as one ocean liner after another limps into port with passengers complaining of nausea, vomiting, diarrhea and cramping. The CDC, which gets called in whenever more than 2% of a vessel's passengers come down with the same disease, identified Norwalk as the infectious agent and oversaw thorough ship scrubbings— which to the dismay of the owners of the cruise lines, haven't made the problem go away. So are we in the middle of an oceangoing epidemic? Not according to Dave Forney, chief of the CDC's vessel-sanitation program. He sees this kind of thing all the time; a similar outbreak on several ships in Alaska last summer got almost no press. In fact, he says, as far as gastrointestinal illness goes, fewer people may be getting sick this year than last. Norwalk-like viruses, it turns out, are extremely common—perhaps second only to cold viruses—and they tend to break out whenever people congregate in close quarters for more than two or three days. Oceangoing pleasure ships provide excellent breeding grounds, but so do schools, hotels, camps, nursing homes and hospitals. "Whenever we look for this virus," says Dr. Marc Widdowson, a CDC epidemiologist, "we find it." Just last week 100 students (of500) at the Varsity Acres Elementary School in Calgary, Alta stayed home sick. School prank? Hardly. The Norwalk virus had struck again. If ocean cruises are your idea of fun, don't despair. This might even be a great time to go shopping for a bargain. The ships have been cleaned. The food and water have been examined and found virus free. According to the CDC, it was probably the passengers who brought the virus aboard. Of course, if you are ill or recovering from a stomach bug, you might do everybody a favor and put off your travel until the infectious period has passed (it can take a couple of weeks). To reduce your chances of getting sick, the best thing to do is wash your hands—frequently and thoroughly—and keep them out of your mouth. One more thing: if, like me, you are prone to motion sickness, don't forget to pack your Dramamine.

单选题According to the passage, a conversation between two Americans may break down due to _______

单选题Companies have embarked on what looks like the beginnings of a re-run of the mergers and acquisitions (M＆A) wave that defined the second bubbly half of the 1990s. That period, readers might recall, was characterized by a collective splurge that saw the creation of some of the most indebted companies in history, many of which later went bankrupt or were themselves broken up. Wild bidding for telecoms, internet and media assets, not to mention the madness that was Daimler's $40 billion motoring takeover in 1998-1999 of Chrysler or the Time-Warner/AOL mega-merger in 2000, helped to give mergers a thoroughly bad name. A consensus emerged that M＆A was a great way for investment banks to reap rich fees, and a sure way for ambitious managers to betray investors by trashing the value of their shares. Now M＆A is back. Its return is a global phenomenon, but it is perhaps most striking in Europe, where so far this year there has been a stream of deals worth more than $600 billion in total, around 40% higher than in the same period of 2004. The latest effort came this week when France's Saint-Gobain, a building-materials firm, unveiled the details of its ￡3.6 billion ( $6.5 billion) hostile bid for BPB, a British rival. In the first half of the year, cross-border activity was up threefold over the same period last year. Even France Telecom, which was left almost bankrupt at the end of the last merger wave, recently bought Amena, a Spanish mobile operator. Shareholder's approval of all these deals raises an interesting question for companies everywhere: are investors right to think thin these mergers are more likely to succeed than earlier ones? There are two answers. The first is that past mergers may have been judged too harshly. The second is that the present rash of European deals does look more rational, but—and the caveat is crucial—only so far. The pattern may not hold. M＆A's poor reputation stems not only from the string of spectacular failures in the 1990s, but also from studies that showed value destruction for acquiring shareholders in 80% of deals. But more recent studies by economists have introduced a note of caution. Investors should look at the number of deals that succeed or fail (typically measured by the impact on the share price), rather than (as you might think) weighing them by size. For example, no one doubts that the Daimler-Chrysler merger destroyed value. The combined market value of the two firms is still below that of Daimler alone before the deal. This single deal accounted for half of all German M＆A activity by value in 1998 and 1999, and probably dominated people's thinking about mergers to the same degree. Throw in a few other such monsters and it is no wonder that broad studies have tended to find that mergers are a bad idea. The true picture is more complicated.

单选题{{B}}Text 4{{/B}} The idea is as audacious as it altruistic: provide a personal laptop computer to every schoolchild -- particularly in the poorest parts of the world. The first step to making that happen is whittling the price down to $100. And that is the goal of a group of American techno-gurus led by Nicholas Negroponte, the founder of the fabled MIT Media Lab. When he unveiled the idea at the World Economic Forum in January it seemed wildly ambitious. But surprisingly, it is starting to become a reality. Mr. Negroponte plans to display the first prototype in November at a UN summit. Four countries -- Brazil, Egypt, Thailand and South Africa -- have said they will buy over I m units each. Production is due to start in late 2006. How is the group, called One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), able to create a laptop so inexpensively? It is mainly a matter of cleverly combining existing technologies in new ways. The laptop will have a basic processor made by AMD, flash memory instead of a hard disk, will be powered by batteries or a hand-crank, and will run open-source software. The $100 laptop also puts all the components behind the screen, not under the keyboard, so there is no need for an expensive hinge. So far, OLPC has got the price down to around $130. But good news for the world's poor, may not be such great news for the world's computer manufacturers. The new machine is not simply of interest in the developing world. On September 22nd, Mitt Romney, the governor of Massachusetts, said the state should purchase one for every secondary-school student, when they become available. Sales to schools are just one way in which the $100 laptop could change the computer industry more broadly. By depressing prices and fuelling the trend for "good-enough computing", where customers upgrade less often, it could eventually put pressure on the world's biggest PC-makers.

单选题By citing examples of women employment in Sweden, the author intends to show that

单选题In the first paragraph, the author is mainly concerned with______.

单选题What can we infer from the last sentence of the passage?

单选题What may cause the percentage of workers to decline?