Could the bad old days of economic decline be about to return? Since OPEC agreed to supply-cuts in March, the price of crude oil has jumped to almost $26 a barrel, up from less than $10 last December. This near-tripling of oil prices calls up scary memories of the 1973 oil shock, when prices quadrupled, and 1979-80, when they also almost tripled. Both previous shocks resulted in double-digit inflation and global economic decline. So where are the headlines warning of gloom and doom this time? The oil price was given another push up this week when Iraq suspended oil exports. Strengthening economic growth, at the same time as winter grips the northern hemisphere, could push the price higher still in the short term. Yet there are good reasons to expect the economic consequences now to be less severe than in the 1970s. In most countries the cost of crude oil now accounts for a smaller share of the price of petrol than it did in the 1970s. In Europe, taxes account for up to four-fifths of the retail price, so even quite big changes in the price of crude have a more muted effect on pump prices than in the past. Rich economies are also less dependent on oil than they were, and so less sensitive to swings in the oil price. Energy conservation, a shift to other fuels and a decline in the importance of heavy, energy-intensive industries have reduced oil consumption. Software, consultancy and mobile telephones use far less oil than steel or car production. For each dollar of GDP(in constant prices)rich economies now use nearly 50% less oil than in 1973. The OECD estimates in its latest Economic Outlook that, if oil prices averaged $22 a barrel for a full year, compared with $13 in 1998, this would increase the oil import bill in rich economies by only 0.25-0.5% of GDP. That is less than one-quarter of the income loss in 1974 or 1980. On the other hand, oil-importing emerging economies—to which heavy industry has shifted—have become more energy-intensive, and so could be more seriously squeezed. One more reason not to lose sleep over the rise in oil prices is that, unlike the rises in the 1970s, it has not occurred against the background of general commodity-price inflation and global excess demand. A sizable portion of the world is only just emerging from economic decline. The Economist"s commodity price index is broadly unchanging from a year ago. In 1973 commodity prices jumped by 70%, and in 1979 by almost 30%.
BSection III Writing/B
Harmfulness of Fake Commodities
BSection II Reading Comprehension/B
BPart ADirections: Write a composition/letter of no less than 100 words on the following information./B
As many of the stories in this book are about man-eating tigers, it is perhaps (1)_____ to explain why those animals (2)_____ man-eating tendencies. A man-eating tiger is a tiger that has been compelled, through stress of circumstances beyond its (3)_____ to adopt a diet alien to it. The stress of circumstances is, in nine cases out of ten, wounds, and in the tenth case old age. The wound that has caused (4)_____ tiger to take up man-eating might be the result of a carelessly fired (5)_____ and failure to follow up and (6)_____ the wounded animal, or be the result Of the tiger having lost its temper when killing a porcupine. Human beings are not the natural prey of tigers, and it is only when tigers have been (7)_____ through wounds or old age that, in order to live, they are compelled to a diet of human flesh. They can no longer make a (8)_____ of animal in (9)_____ A tiger uses its teeth and claws when killing. When, therefore, a tiger is suffering (10)_____ one or more painful wounds, or when its teeth are, missing or defective and its claws (11)_____ down, and it is unable to catch the animals it has been accustomed to eating, it is (12)_____ by necessity to killing human beings. The (13)_____ from animal to human flesh is, I believe, in most cases accidental. As (14)_____ of what I mean by "accidental" I quote the case of the Muktesar man-eating tigers. This tigress, a comparatively young animal, in (15)_____ with a porcupine lost an eye and got some fifty quills, (16)_____ in length from one to nine inches, embedded under the (17)_____ of her right foreleg. Suppurating (18)_____ formed where she endeavoured to extract the quills with her teeth, and while she was lying up in a thick (19)_____ of grass, starving and licking her wounds, a woman selected this particular place to cut the grass as fodder for her cattle. At first the tigress took no notice, but when the woman had cut the grass right up to where she was lying the tigress struck once, the blow (20)_____ in the woman"s skull.
Eight months after Sep. 11, it is becoming increasingly apparent that various arms of the US government had pieces of information that, if put together, might have provided sketchy advance warning of the terrorist strikes to come. The White House now acknowledges, that the CIA told President Bush in August that suspected members of A1 Qaeda had discussed the hijacking of airplanes. At the same time, FBI agents were increasingly suspicious of some Middle Eastern men training at US flight schools. Yet the US government didn"t pay attention to this information. "There are always these little indicators that come in—of one sort or another—that don"t get enough decibels to receive attention," say former CIA Director Stansfield Turner. "The possibility of a traditional hijacking—in the pre-9.11 sense—has long been a concern of the government," White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said. But "this was a new type of attack that was not foreseen." In deed, he said the warnings did not suggest commercial airliners would be used as missiles and that the general assumption was that any attack would occur abroad, not in the US. Still, the White House says it did quietly alert several government agencies to the threat. Meanwhile, FBI agents were getting hints of the terrible plot. A classified memo drafted by the bureau reportedly warned in blunt language that Osama bin Laden might be linked to Middle Eastern men taking lessons at US flight schools. Mr. Turner sees this as a painful and avoidable mistake. The basic reason for the lack of coordination and communication is "a very large intelligence bureaucracy that is very compartmentalized," says Charles Penia, a senior defense analyst at the Cato Institute. Today, the disclosures raise a crucial question: Have recent reforms boosted Washington"s ability to pull together information from its many agencies—and thus disrupt future attacks? Indeed, since Sep. 11, the government has struggled to improve coordination. One change: FBI data is now merged with CIA intelligence in the president"s daily briefing. Another: A new command center near Washington was set up by White House Homeland Security. It"s one place the CIA, the FBI, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and others are able to coordinate and share information. It"s not clear yet whether they actually will.
Title: GET RID OF BAD HABITSWord limit: 160-200 wordsTime limit: 40 minutesYou are required to develop your essay according to the given topic sentence of each paragraph.Outline:1. We may have some bad habits that we are ashamed of.2. To get rid of a bad habit, we have, first of all, to come to realize how bad it really is.3. To get rid of a bad habit, we also need courage and determination.4. However, we should never stop trying to get rid of bad habits.
BSection III Writing/B
The "MyDoom" virus could presage a generation of computer attacks by organised gangs aiming to extract ransoms from online businesses, experts said yesterday. The warning came as the website run by SCO, a company that sells Unix computer software, in effect disappeared from the web under a blizzard of automated attacks from PCs infected by the virus, which first appeared a week ago. The "MyDoom-A" version of the virus is reckoned to be the worst to have hit the internet, in terms of the speed of its spread, with millions of PCs worldwide believed to be infected. Such "zombie" machines begin to send out hundreds of copies of the virus every hour to almost any e-mail address in their files. On Sunday they began sending automated queries to SCO"s website, an attack that will continue until 12 February. The attack is the web equivalent of ringing the company"s doorbell and running away a million times a second, leaving its computers unable to deal with standard requests to view its pages. "You have to wonder about the time limit", said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at the antivirus company Sophos. "Someone could go to SCO after the 12th and say, "If you don"t want this to happen again, here are our demands"". Raimund Genes, European president of the security software firm Trend Micro, said: "Such a programme could take out any major website on the internet. It"s not terrorism, but it is somebody who is obviously upset with SCO" SCO has earned the enmity of computer users through a lawsuit it has filed against IBM. SCO claims ownership of computer code it says IBM put into the free operating system Linux, and is demanding licence fees and damages of $1bn. Mr. Cluley said: "It might be that whoever is behind this will say to SCO, "if you don"t want the next one to target you, drop the lawsuit"". SCO has offered $250,000 (￡140,000) for information leading to the arrest of the person or people who wrote and distributed MyDoom. Nell Barrett, of the security company Information Risk Management, said, "I would give a lot of credence to the idea of gangs using viruses to extort money. It"s hard for law enforcement to track them down, because they"re using machines owned by innocent people". A second variant of MyDoom will start attacking part of Microsoft"s website later today. The antivirus company MessageLabs said it had blocked more than 16 million copies of the virus in transit over the net so far. But millions more will have reached their targets.
BPart BDirections: Write an essay of 160-200 words based on the following information./B
"If Congress won't act soon to protect future generations, I will," Barack Obama said last month in his state-of-the-union speech. "I will direct my cabinet to come up with executive actions we can take, now and in the future, to reduce pollution, prepare our communities for the consequences of climate change, and speed the transition to more sustainable sources of energy." This week Mr. Obama named the officials charged with fulfilling that directive: Gina McCarthy, his choice to head the Environmental Protection Agency, and Ernest Moniz, the prospective new secretary of energy. Their selection suggests that Mr. Obama is indeed serious about tackling climate change, but not doctrinaire in his approach. Ms Mc Carthy already works at the EPA, where she is in charge of air quality. That has given her a leading role drafting the administration's most ambitious and controversial environmental rules, including limits on emissions of greenhouse gases for new power plants and strict fuel-efficiency requirements for cars. She is the natural candidate to oversee the most obvious and consequential step Mr. Obama could take to stem global warming: a regulation curbing emissions from existing power plants. Republicans do not fancy that idea at all, and have introduced bills in Congress to strip the EPA of its regulatory authority over greenhouse gases. They often accused Lisa Jackson, the agency's previous boss, of disregarding the cumulative impact of its many clean-air rules, and suffocating industry as a result. Yet Ms McCarthy makes an unlikely target. She has worked for Republican governors in Massachusetts and Connecticut. Industry groups mustered kind words about her nomination. As Mr. Obama put it," She's earned a reputation as a straight-shooter."
China is no longer what it used to be.
BPart ADirections: Read the following four texts. Answer the questions below each text by choosing A, B, C or D./B
America"s Federal Reserve cut interest rates by another quarter-point, to 3.75%. Wall Street, which had been (1)_____ for a sixth half-point cut, was disappointed. The Dow fell by 2% (2)_____ the week. The past week"s economic statistics gave mixed signals. Exports dropped by 2% in both March and April, largely (3)_____ a decline in high-tech investment (4)_____; the merchandise-trade (5)_____ widened to $458 billion in the 12 months (6)_____ April. (7)_____, the Conference Board"s index of consumer confidence was higher than (8)_____ in June. Concerns (9)_____ inflation in the euro area (10)_____. Preliminary data (11)_____ that German consumer-price inflation fell to 3.1% in the year to June, from 3.5% in May; wage growth (12)_____ to 1.4% in April, a real pay cut of 1.5%. Some economists fear that Germany is on the (13)_____ of recession. The IFO index of business confidence dropped more (14)_____ than expected in May, and the institute has cut its forecast of GDP (15)_____ this year to only 1.2%, well (16)_____ the German government"s forecast of 2%. The euro area"s current-account deficit narrowed to $30 billion in the 12 months to April. Britain"s deficit in the first quarter was its smallest (17)_____ 1998, (18)_____ record investment income. There was more bad news from Japan, (19)_____ retail sales in large stores fell by 3.2% in May, the 37th consecutive monthly fall. The yen fell (20)_____ the dollar, touching almost Yen 125 on one point.
BSection I Use of EnglishDirections: Read the following text. Choose the best word(s) for each numbered blank and mark A, B, C or D./B
Writeanessayof160-200wordsbasedonthefollowingdrawing.Inyouressay,youshould1)describethedrawingbriefly,2)explainitsintendedmeaning,and3)giveyourcomments.YoushouldwriteneatlyontheANSWERSHEET.(20points)
Studythefollowingpicturecarefullyandwriteanessayto1)describethepicture,2)deducethepurposeofthepainterofthepicture,3)giveyourcommentonthephenomenon.Youshouldwriteabout160—200wordsneatly.
President Bush has once again started speaking out for comprehensive immigration reform, and a draft plan to rally Republican senators on the issue is circulating just as Congressional hearings on the issue approach. Members of Congress recognize that voters are looking for real reform that rests on resolute, effective enforcement of our immigration laws. The only serious legislative proposal on the table offers such enforcement, because it focuses on making employers accountable for their hiring practices. To that end, the bill incorporates lessons learned from the largest immigration enforcement operation ever undertaken. Last December, Department of Homeland Security agents descended on meat processing plants run by Swirl & Company in six states, arresting more than 1,200 unauthorized workers. The arrests were astonishing because Swift participates in Basic Pilot, a voluntary Department of Homeland Security program that allows employers to electronically verify the work eligibility of newly hired workers against department and Social Security databases. The program is seen as the precursor for a verification system that would become mandatory with comprehensive immigration reform. Since Swirl was using the department"s system, how did it end up with illegal workers? The Basic Pilot program has a fatal flaw, which is that it requires only electronic verification of employment qualification. An effective program should also insist on tamper-proof identification documents for job-seekers, incorporating biometrics like digital photographs and fingerprints to prove identity. Only then would it be possible to establish not only that job applicants are authorized to work, but also that they are who they say they are. Otherwise, valid Social Security numbers can be presented to employers, and Basic Pilot will verify them, but the numbers may not belong to the workers who present them. To insist on secure documents with biometric identifiers is not a call for a national ID. Green cards, temporary work permits and passports are secure and reliable for hiring purposes. Adding Social Security cards to this list, establishing a single standard for their security features, and replacing old cards over a designated period would resolve the problem on a national scale. Only then would employers be able to comply reliably with verification requirements as the basis for sound enforcement and, by extension, border control. Legal immigrants and American citizens could prove their identities and qualifications to work without facing discrimination based on appearance or language. Scarce enforcement resources could be spent on apprehending real criminals and addressing national security threats. And a new system of enforcement would at last have a chance to win back public confidence in the nation"s immigration policies. After more than 20 years of failed efforts, Congress must not bake half a loaf. Secure biometric Social Security cards are an essential ingredient in any comprehensive immigration reform.
BSection III Writing/B