单选题The author would be most likely to agree with which of the following conclusions?

单选题Barring an extraordinary change in investor behavior in the largest emerging economies, the role of equities in the global financial system will likely be reduced in the coming decade. That"s the central finding of a new report from the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI). As emerging-market households attain a level of income that enables them to purchase financial assets, they are becoming a powerful new investor class, whose choices will help determine global demand for different asset classes. The actions of these new investors will, in turn, shape how businesses obtain the capital they need to grow, how other investors around the world fare, and how stable and resilient economies will be. The MGI study found that financial assets held by investors in developing nations have been growing at more than three times the rate of assets in developed nations, raising their share of global financial wealth from 7 percent to 21 percent over the past decade, or about $ 41.3 trillion. By the end of the current decade, investors in developing economies will hold as much as 36 percent of global financial wealth, or between $114 trillion and $141 trillion. Emerging-market investors currently behave differently than those in mature economies. Investors in Europe, the United States, and wealthier parts of Asia, hold 30 to 40 percent or more of their financial assets in equities, but the new investors of the emerging economies keep three-quarters of theirs in deposit accounts. While the use of equities in developing economies to finance growth and build savings is increasing, this evolution is taking place slowly. The likely result: a shift in the global allocation of financial assets toward deposits and fixed-income instruments and away from equities in this decade. This shift is being exacerbated by aging and other trends in the developed world that are dampening investor appetite for equities. As a result, equities could decline from 28 percent of global financial assets in 2010 to 22 percent in 2020. What"s behind the slow adoption of equity investing in developing markets? For an equity-investing culture to take root, there must be trusted, transparent markets with strong protections for small investors, as well as the institutions and systems to provide easy market access. Rules and regulations may be in place in emerging markets today, but enforcement is often unreliable. When the correct conditions are in place, investors are likely to gravitate to equities for higher returns. In the meantime, even though total investor demand for equities will grow over the next decade, it will fall short of what corporations need by $12. 3 trillion. This imbalance between the supply and demand for equity will be most pronounced in emerging economies, where companies need significant external financing for growth.

单选题From the passage we know that the author is very concerned with the role that ______.

单选题Over the past few years, a growing number of America's parentless children have found homes. In 2008 there were 463,000 children in foster care, a system where the government places orphans and children with parents who are abusive or unable to take care of them in the care of guardians. That is 11% down since 2002, and great news. But experts worry the trend might now go into reverse. Some welfare advocates fear that the bad economy may cause parents with frayed nerves to abuse and neglect their children, and even cause some to abandon them. Already, several hospitals across the country have reported an increase in the frequency and severity of injuries from child abuse. The most recent national data on child welfare available dates from September 2008, before the recession was in lull throttle; data from 2009 won't be reported until later this year. But there is some question about whether the data, when reported, will even be accurate. Many states and counties, in an attempt to cope with their fiscal straits, are considering cutting down on child-welfare services, such as benefits for foster parents and the number of social workers they employ. The average workload of caseworkers had already increased by 7% between 2006 and 2007, says Mary Hansen, of American University in Washington, DC. With more budget cuts, there will be fewer caseworkers to take notice of abuse and neglect, she says, and it will be more difficult to find someone to report problems to, potentially affecting the collection data. In the meantime, more parents are trying to keep their families intact. New York Foundling, an agency in New York, runs a crisis centre, where parents can leave their children tot up to three weeks. Requests for beds increased 20% in the last year. Safe Families, a non-profit outfit that places children in temporary homes with volunteer families until jobless parents can get back on their feet, saw the number of children it serviced triple in 2009, and it expects that number to double again in 2010. Most people are asking ['or help from Safe Families, says the organization's founder, David Anderson, because they don't want to risk losing custody, as they would if they put their kids into foster care. Thankfully, the recession has actually spurred more volunteers to come forward, says Mr. Anderson.

单选题Even at the Vatican. not all sacred beliefs are absolute: Thou shalt not kill, but war can be just. Now, behind the quiet walls, a clash is shaping up involving two poles of near certainty: the church's long-held ban on condoms and its advocacy of human life. The issue is AIDS. Church officials recently confirmed that Pope Benedict XVI had requested a report on whether it might be acceptable for Catholics to use condoms in one narrow circumstance: to protect life inside a marriage when one partner is infected with H.I.V. or is sick with AIDS. Whatever the pope decides, church officials and other experts broadly agree that it is remarkable that so delicate an issue is being taken up. But they also agree that such an inquiry is logical, and particularly significant from this pope, who was Pope John Paul II’s strict enforcer of church doctrine. "In some ways, maybe he has got the greatest capacity to do it because there is no doubt about his orthodoxy," said the. Rev. Jon Fuller, a Jesuit physician who runs an AIDS clinic at the Boston Medical Center. The issue has surfaced repeatedly as one of the most complicated and delicate facing the church. For years, some influential cardinals and theologians have argued for a change for couples affected by AIDS in the name of protecting life, while others have fiercely attacked the possibility as demoting the church's long advocacy of abstinence and marital fidelity to fight the disease. The news broke just after Benedict celebrated his first anniversary as pope, a relatively quiet papal year. But he devoted his first encyclical to love, specifically between a man and a woman in marriage. Indeed, with regard to condoms, the only change apparently being considered is in the specific case of married couples. But any change would be unpopular with conservative Catholics, some of whom have expressed disappointment that Benedict has displayed a softer face now as defender of the faith than he did when he was still Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the papal adviser. "It's just hard to imagine that any pope—and this pope—would change the teaching," said Austin Ruse, president of the Culture of Life Foundation, a Catholic-oriented advocacy group in Washington that opposes abortion and contraception. It is too soon to know where the pope is heading. Far less contentious issues can take years to inch through the Vatican's nexus of belief and bureaucracy, prayer and politics, and Cardinal Javier Lozano Barragan, the pope's top aide on health care issues, and other officials declined requests for interviews.

单选题Many Europeans have a great puzzle in many things EXCEPT

单选题The expression "follow the headlines" shows ______.

单选题E-mail—can't live with it, can't live without it. Con artists and real artists, advertisers and freedom fighters, lovers and sworn enemies-they’ve all flocked to email as they would to any new medium of expression. E-mail is convenient, saves time, brings us closer to one another, helps us manage our ever-more-complex lives. Books are written, campaigns conducted; crimes committed-all via e-mail. But it is also inconvenient, wastes our time, isolates us in front of our computers and introduces more complexity into our already too-harried lives. To skeptics, E-mails just the latest chapter in the evolving history of human communication. A snooping husband now discovers his wife's affair by reading her private e-mail--but he could have uncovered the same sin by finding letters a generation ago. Yet E-mail-and all online communication-is in fact something truly different; it captures the essence of life at the close of the 20th century with an authority that few other products of digital technology can claim. Does the pace of life seam ever faster? E-mail simultaneously allows us to cope with that acceleration and contributes to it. Are our attention spans shriveling under barrages of new, improved forms of stimulation? The quick and dirty E-mail is made to order for those whose ability to concentrate is measured in nanoseconds. If we accept that the creation of the globespanning Internet is one of the most important technological innovations of the last half of this century, then we must give E-mail--the living embodiment of human connections across the Net--pride of place. The way we interact with each other is changing; E-mail is both catalyst and the instrument of that change. The scope of the phenomenon is mind-boggling. Worldwide, 225 million people can spend and receive E-mail. Forget about the Web or e-commerce or even online pornography: E-mail is the Internet's true killer app—the software application that we simply must have, even if it means buying a $2,000 computer and plunking down ＄20 a month to America Online. According to Donna Hoffman, a professor of marketing at Vanderbilt University, one survey after another finds that when online users are asked what they do on the Net, "E-mail is always No. 1." Oddly enough, no one planned it, and one predicted it. When research scientists first began cooking up the Internet's predecessor, the Arpanet, in 1968, their primary goal was to enable disparate computing centers to share resources. "But it didn't take very long before they discovered that the most important thing was the ability to send mail around, which they had not anticipated at all," says Eric Auman, chief technical officer of Sendmail, Inc.

单选题oracle's current difficulty to take over PeopleSoft is that

单选题Which of the following can best summarize the way the author writes the passage?

单选题{{B}}Part A{{/B}}{{B}}Directions:{{/B}} Read the following four texts. Answer the questions below each text by choosing A, B, C or D. Mark your answers on ANSWER SHEET 1. (40 points){{B}}Text 1{{/B}} The news from America's housing market is getting no better. As sales declines and defaults and foreclosures climb, pessimists fear that over a million Americans could be driven out of their homes as adjustable-rate mortgages are reset. What should policymakers do? Congress is eager to do more: hence the calls to expand the role of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the giant government-sponsored enterprises (GSES) that tower over America's mortgage market. Fannie's and Freddie's political allies want two things. The first is the raising of the $417,000 limit on the size of loans that the pair may handle. The second demand is the lifting of caps on the amount of mortgages they may buy and hold for themselves. Fannie and Freddie could then ride to the rescue of struggling borrowers, injecting liquidity into parts of the market that have seized up. Their arguments are winning support, and opposition from the Bush administration and the GSES' regulator is softening. Unfortunately, the ideas are likely to do more for Fannie and Freddie than for the mortgage market. Start with the $417,000 limit. Lifting this could help if Fannie and Freddie scoured the upper bracket for borrowers who were struggling but viable. But their history suggests that they would cherry-pick those who could get refinanced elsewhere. And the huge-mortgage market may be correcting itself anyway: spreads over GSE-backed loans, though still unusually high, are falling. It is also riskier. When they hold a mortgage, they take on not only credit risk but also interest-rate and prepayment risk. The loans they guarantee, in contrast, carry only credit risk. So as well as being just as effective, the guarantee business is also safer—and thus better for the taxpayer who unwittingly stands behind the GSES. Moreover, even if they grow no more, the mortgage giants pose a clear systemic threat. Their portfolios of retained mortgages and mortgage-backed securities add up to no less than $1.4 trillion. It is bad enough that this is concentrated in two institutions. No matter how much risk they take or how they manage it, they can borrow at rock-bottom interest rates. If they got into trouble, banks as well as taxpayers would be on the hook. Banks may hold as much GSE debt as they want. Many have amounts that exceed their regulatory capital. The giants were set up decades ago to help banks pool concentrated regional mortgage risk and to make housing more affordable. But as the market has grown deeper and more sophisticated, history has left them behind—hence their desire to get into any bit of the business that will turn a profit. The eventual aim should be to turn them into normal private-sector companies, by stripping them of the charters that give rise to the implicit government guarantees, and break them into smaller pieces.

单选题How could anybody dislike the notion of fairness? Everything is better when it is fair: a share, a fight, a maiden, or a game. Even defeat sounds more attractive when it is fair and square. For the British fair play is especially important: without it, life isn't cricket. Their country becomes quite pleasant when the weather is fair, though unfortunately it rarely is. And these days fair-trade goods crowd their supermarket shelves. Fairness is not only good, but also moderate, which is another characteristic that the British approve of. It does not claim too much for itself. Those who, on inquiry, admit that their health and fortunes are fair-to-middling navigate carefully between the twin dangers of boastfulness and ill-temperedness, while gesturing in a chinup sort of way towards the possibility of future improvement. Fairness appeals to the British political class, for it has a common sense down-to-earthiness which avoids the grandiosity of American and continental European political discourse while aspiring to do its best for all men--and of course for maidens too, fair and otherwise, for one of its virtues is that it does not discriminate on grounds of either gender or skin colour. Not surprising, then, that Britain's government should grab hold of the word and cling to it in the buffeting the coalition has had since the budget on June 22nd proposed higher taxes and even sharper spending cuts. "Tough but fair" is what George Osborne, the Conservative chancellor of the exchequer, called the cuts he announced. "It is going to be tough, but it is also very fair," said Vince Cable, the Liberal Democrat business secretary. At last, something they could agree on. "Fairness" suits Britain's coalition government so well not just because its meanings are all positive, but also because they are wide-ranging. To one lot of people, fairness means establishing the same rules for everybody, playing by them, and letting the best man win and the winner take all. To another, it means making sure that everybody gets equal shares. Those two meanings are not just different: they are opposite. They represent a choice that has to be made between freedom and equality. Yet so slippery--and thus convenient to politicians-- is the English language that a single word encompasses both, and in doing so loses any claim to meaning.

单选题In the third paragraph, the author use the example of laboring people tending to drink standardized beer to _______.

单选题Despite increased airport security since September 11th, 2001, the technology to scan both passengers and baggage for weapons and bombs remains largely unchanged. Travellers walk through metal detectors and carry-on bags pass through x-ray machines that superimpose colour-coded highlights, but do little else. Checked-in luggage is screened by "computed tomography", which peers inside a suitcase rather like a CAT scan of a brain. These systems can alert an operator to something suspicious, but they cannot tell what it is. More sophisticated screening technologies are emerging, albeit slowly. There are three main approaches: enhanced x-rays to spot hidden objects, sensor technology to sniff dangerous chemicals, and radio frequencies that can identify liquids and solids. A number of manufacturers are using "reflective" or "backscatter" x-rays that can be calibrated to see objects through clothing. They can spot things that a metal detector may not, such as a ceramic knife or plastic explosives. But some people think they can reveal too much. In America, civil-liberties groups have stalled the introduction of such equipment, arguing that it is too intrusive. To protect travellers 'modesty, filters have been created to blur genital areas. Machines that can detect minute traces of explosive are also being tested. Passengers walk through a machine that blows a burst of air, intended to dislodge molecules of substances on a person's body and clothes. The air is sucked into a filter, which instantaneously analyses it to see whether it includes any suspect substances. The process can work for baggage as well. It is a vast improvement on today's method, whereby carry-on items are occasionally swabbed and screened for traces of explosives. Because this is a manual operation, only a small share of bags are examined this way. The most radical of the new approaches uses "quadrupole resonance technology". This involves bombarding an object with radio waves. By reading the returning signals, the machines can identify the molecular structure of the materials it contains. Since every compound—solid, liquid or gas—creates a unique frequency, it can be read like a fingerprint. The system can be used to look for drugs as well as explosives. For these technologies to make the jump from development labs and small trials to full deployment at airports they must be available at a price that airports are prepared to pay. They must also be easy to use, take up little space and provide quick results, says Chris Yates, a security expert with Jane's Airport Review. Norman Shanks, an airport security expert, says adding the new technologies costs around $100,000 per machine; he expects the systems to be rolled out commercially over the next 12 months. They might close off one route to destroying an airliner, but a cruel certainty is that terrorists will try to find others.

单选题Denim ______.