BPart CDirections: Read the following text carefully and then translate the underlined segments into Chinese./B
Short of money? Need an instant loan? Since the early 1990s your best bet has been to go to the low-rent end of town and find an appointed loan-shop. There you can borrow money in small amounts, generally not much more than $500, against your post-dated pay-cheque. You will be charged around $15 interest for every $100 you borrow—and that is per month. For many people, there is no alternative. Banks refuse to make small loans because there is no money in it, and completely unregulated lending, via the internet or loan sharks, is too alarming. According to the Community Financial Services Association, an advocacy group for the industry, most borrowers are responsible and pay off their loans in a timely manner. But some don"t. The Centre for Responsible Lending, a consumer group, says that many borrowers routinely roll over their loans. This quickly brings them into debt traps. A typical borrower may end up paying $793 for a $325 loan. The centre estimates that payday loans cost Americans $4.2 billion a year in interest and fees. The industry thrives, in large part, because it operates mostly outside state usury laws that prohibit excessive interest rates. Its spokesmen say lenders need such exemptions to make a profit on their basic service, small loans. Lenders say that their returns would amount to pennies on the dollar if interest rates were capped. In fact, they say, such restrictions would put them out of business. And that is exactly what many of their opponents would like to see—particularly when it comes to loans made to the families of soldiers. In one of the last acts of the Republican Congress, payday lenders were restricted to interest rates of 36% on loans to military personnel and their spouses. The Pentagon is worried that uniformed personnel, especially those serving in Iraq, have been losing their security clearances because of excessive debt at home. This, among other things, was leading to the costly reassignment of highly trained troops, such as communications experts, to ordinary low-skill jobs. Robert Frank, an economist at Cornell University, wrote recently in the New York Times that the industry—not unlike the sub-prime mortgage sector—is a beneficiary of the sweeping deregulation of the financial-services industry that has made credit more accessible. Its adverse consequences, he says, were" completely predictable". Once poor people get in over their heads, they will borrow themselves into bankruptcy if the law permits; and" if we are unhappy about that, the only solution is to change the rules".
Much of the world should go on a diet in 2014. More than a third of adults【C1】______were estimated to be【C2】______or obese in 2008, according to a report by the Overseas Development Institute(ODI), a think tank in London. That"s a 23 per cent increase on 1980. In the last three decades, the number of adults estimated to be obese in the developing world has almost quadrupled to 904 million, overtaking the number in【C3】______countries. "The most shocking thing is the degree to which obesity is now【C4】______developing as well as developed economies," says Tim Lobstein of the International Association for the Study of Obesity in London. "The problems【C5】______by overconsumption of fats and【C6】______are now global, not just Western, problems." The rise is【C7】______to a "creeping homogeni-sation"(spreading)of diets across the world, says the report, which says rising【C8】______, advertising and globalisation all play a part It criticizes policy-makers in most countries for being slow or【C9】______to tackle the problem. "We see a big【C10】______in what governments recommend people eat as part of their【C11】______campaigns and what people actually eat," says Sharada Keats. "We need governments to【C12】______the scale of the problem and start putting in place【C13】______steps to tackle it" Some countries have【C14】______to go against the grain and【C15】______. For example, South Koreans ate four times more【C16】______in 2008 than they did in 1980. The report【C17】______this to government health drives, which include【C18】______programs on how to【C19】______low-fat meals, showing what governments can do when they【C20】______.
Music is a mystery. It is unique to the human race: no other species produces elaborate sound for no particular reason. It has been, and remains, part of every known civilization on Earth. Lengths of bone fashioned into flutes were in use 40,000 years ago. And it engages people"s attention more comprehensively than almost anything else: scans show that when people listen to music, virtuallyevery area of their brain becomes more active. Yet it serves no obvious adaptive purpose. Charles Darwin, in The Descent of Man, noted that "neither the enjoyment nor the capacity of producing musical notes are faculties of the least direct use to man in reference to his ordinary habits of life." Then, what is the point of music. Steven Pinker, a cognitive psychologist, has called music "auditory cheesecake, an exquisite confection crafted to tickle the sensitive spots of at least six of our mental faculties." If it vanished from our species, he said, "the rest of our lifestyle would be virtually unchanged." Others have argued that, on the contrary, music, along with art and literature, is part of what makes people human; its absence would have a brutalizing effect. Philip Ball, a British science writer and an avid music enthusiast, comes down somewhere in the middle. He says that music is ingrained in our auditory, cognitive and motor functions. We have a music instinct as much as a language instinct, and could not rid ourselves of it. He goes through each component of music to explain how and why it works, using plentiful examples drawn from a refreshingly wide range of different kinds of music, from Bach to the Beatles, and from nursery rhymes to jazz. His basic message is encouraging and uplifting: people know much more about music than they think. They start picking up the rules from the day they are born, perhaps even before, by hearing it all around them. Very young children can tell if a tune or harmony is not quite right and most adults can differentiate between kinds of music even if they have had no training. Music is completely sui generis. It should not tell a non-musical story; the listener will decode it for himself. Many, perhaps most, people have experienced a sudden rush of emotion on hearing a particular piece of music; a thrill or chill, a sense of excitement or exhilaration, a feeling of being swept away by it. They may even be moved to tears, without being able to tell why. Musical analysts have tried hard to find out how this happens, but with little success. Perhaps some mysteries are best preserved.
[A] The role of natural selection in this colorful world[B] The delicate hierarchy of the natural system[C] The agency of selection can account for more cases[D] The impotence of creationism[E] Natural selection acts by competition [F] No leaps in natural evolution As each species tends by its geometrical rate of reproduction to increase excessively in number; and as the modified descendants of each species will be enabled to increase by as much as they become more diversified in habits and structure, so as to be able to seize on many and widely different places in natural selection to preserve the most divergent offspring of any one species. Hence, during a long-continued course of modification, the slight differences characteristic of varieties of the same species, tend to be augmented into the greater differences characteristic of the species of the same genus.【C1】______ New and improved varieties will inevitably displace and destroy the older, less improved, and intermediate varieties; and thus species are rendered to a large extent defined and distinct objects. Dominant species belonging to the larger groups within each class tend to give birth to new and dominant forms; so that each large group tends to become still larger, and at the same time more divergent in character. But as all groups cannot thus go on increasing in size, for the world would not hold them, the more dominant groups beat the less dominant.【C2】______ This tendency in the large groups to go on increasing in size and diverging in character, together with the inevitability of much extinction, explains the arrangement of all the forms of life in groups subordinate to groups, all within a few great classes, which has prevailed throughout all time. This grand fact of the grouping of all organic beings under what is called the Natural System, is utterly unexplainable on the theory of creation.【C3】______ As natural selection acts solely by accumulating slight, successive, favorable variations, it can produce no great or sudden modifications; it can act only by short and slow steps. We can see why throughout nature the same general end is gained by an almost infinite diversity of means, for every peculiarity when once acquired in long inherited, and structures already modified in many different ways have to be adapted for the same general purpose. We can, in short, see why nature is extravagant in variety, though not generous in innovation. But why this should be a law of nature if each species has been independently created no man can explain.【C4】______ Many other facts are, as it seems to me, explicable on this theory. How strange it is that a bird, under the form of a woodpecker, should prey on insects on the ground and that upland geese which rarely or never swim, should possess webbed feet, and so in endless other cases. But on the view of each species constantly trying to increase in number, with natural selection always ready to adapt the slowly varying descendants of each to any unoccupied or ill-occupied place in nature, these facts cease to be strange, or might even have been anticipated.【C5】______ We can to a certain extent understand how it is that there is so much beauty throughout nature; for this may be largely attributed to the agency of selection. That beauty, according to our sense of it, is not universal, must be admitted by every one who will look at some hideous bats with a distorted resemblance to the human face. Sexual selection has given the most brilliant colors, elegant patterns, and other ornaments to the males. With birds it has often rendered the voice of the male musical to the female, as well as to our ears. Flowers and fruit have been rendered conspicuous by brilliant colors in contrast with the green foliage, in order that the flowers may be readily seen, visited and fertilized by insects. As natural selection acts by competition, it adapts and improves the inhabitants of each country only in relation to their co-inhabitants; so that we need feel no surprise at the species of any one country being beaten and supplanted by the naturalized productions from another land. The wonder indeed is, on the theory of natural selection, that more cases of the want of absolute perfection have not been detected. The long and progressive reign of Queen Victoria came to a climax at a time of peace and plenty when the British Empire seemed to be at the summit of its power and security. Of the discord that soon followed we shall here note only two factors which had large influence on contemporary English literature.
BPart ADirections: Read the following four texts. Answer the questions below each text by choosing A, B, C or D./B
Your friend lives in another city and came to visit you last Sunday, but due to some reason you were not at home. Write a note expressing your regrets on having missed seeing him or her. You should write about 100 words. Do not sign your own name at the end of the note. Use "Li Ming" instead.
Euthanasia is clearly a deliberate and intentional aspect of a killing. Taking a human life, even with subtle rites and consent of the party involved is barbaric. No one can justly kill another human being. Just as it is wrong for a serial killer to murder, it is wrong for a physician to do so as well, no matter what the motive for doing so may be. Many thinkers, including almost all orthodox Catholics, believe that euthanasia is immoral. They oppose killing patients in any circumstances whatever. However, they think it is all right, in some special circumstances, to allow patients to die by withholding treatment. The American Medical Association"s policy statement on mercy killing supports this traditional view. In my paper "Active and Passive Euthanasia" I argue, against the traditional view, that there is in fact no normal difference between killing and letting die—if one is permissible, then so is the other. Professor Sullivan does not dispute my argument; instead he dismisses it as irrelevant. The traditional doctrine, he says, does not appeal to or depend on the distinction between killing and letting die. Therefore, arguments against that distinction "leave the traditional position untouched". Is my argument really irrelevant? I don"t see how it can be. As Sullivan himself points out, nearly everyone holds that it is sometimes meaningless to prolong the process of dying and that in those cases it is morally permissible to let a patient die even though a few more hours or days could be saved by procedures that would also increase the agonies of the dying. But if it is impossible to defend a general distinction between letting people die and acting to terminate their lives directly, then it would seem that active euthanasia also may be morally permissible. But traditionalists like Professor Sullivan hold that active euthanasia—the direct killing of patients—is not morally permissible; so, if my argument is sound, their view must be mistaken. I can not agree, then, that my argument "leave the traditional position untouched". However, I shall not press this point. Instead I shall present some further arguments against the traditional position, concentrating on those elements of the position which professor Sullivan himself thinks most important. According to him, what is important is, first, that we should never intentionally terminate the life of a patient, either by action or omission, and second, that we may cease or omit treatment of a patient, knowing that this will result in death, only if the means of treatment involved are extraordinary.
Women, according to Chairman Mao, hold up half the sky—but in California some are better rewarded for this effort than others. According to a new study from the Public Policy Institute of California, Asian women born in the United States outstrip all their sisters in terms of earning power. The average hourly wage for American-born Asian ladies in 2001(the latest year with reliable figures) was $19.30, with American-born whites coming next. On the bottom rungs of the ladder came Latinas: if born abroad, they earned a mere $10.40 an hour (though this was comfortably above California"s then $6.25 minimum wage); if born in America, they managed $15.10 an hour. Education is the biggest reason for the ethnic disparities. Some 55% of California"s American-born Asian women have at least a bachelor"s degree, and an impressive 84% of them either have jobs or are looking for them. By contrast, only 14% of American-born Hispanic women have a bachelor"s degree and only 74% of them are in the labour market. Meanwhile, Latinas born abroad are often condemned to low-paying jobs by an even inefficient education or a poor knowledge of English. Much the same can be said of Asian women born in South-East Asia, a category that includes refugees from Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia. The institute calculates that they earned an average of $15.80, almost $1 less than other foreign-born Asians. But education is not the only factor in play for California"s women. Larger families make it more difficult for Latinas to go out to work in the first place; blacks often live too far away to commute to well-paid jobs; and just as Asians may benefit from high expectations, so other groups may suffer from low ones. The institute makes an attempt, heroic or politically correct, to adjust for such factors, imagining, for example, that a foreign-born Latina has the same family structure, education and place of residence as the average Californian woman. That brings the average wage for foreign-born Latinas up to a more respectable $15.20; yet American-born Asians still rule the roost. But before the golden girls get too happy, the institute reckons that Californian women of all sorts tend to earn roughly 20% less than their menfolk do.
Maintaining Cultural Heritages of Traditional Holidays A. Title: Maintaining Cultural Heritages of Traditional Holidays B. Word limit: 160~200 words (not including the given opening sentence) C. Your composition should be based on the OUTLINE below and should start with the given opening sentence: "Traditional holidays, passed down from generation to generation, have stories behind with significant cultural heritages.'' OUTLINE: 1. The significance of traditional holidays 2. People's improper attitudes towards traditional holidays 3. My opinion on maintaining cultural heritages of traditional holidays
When a search engine guesses what you want before you finish typing it, or helpfully ignores your bad spelling, that is the result of machine learning, a branch of artificial intelligence. Although AI has been through cycles of
hype
and disappointment before, big technology companies have recently been scrambling to hire experts in the field, in the hope of building machines that can learn even more sophisticated tasks.
IBM said this month it would invest $1 billion in a new division to develop uses for Watson, its computer that understands human language. But this week Google enhanced its lead in this field by paying around $660m for DeepMind Technologies, a startup in London that has yet to announce a product. The boss of DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, previously created video games such as "Evil Genius" and "Theme Park".
DeepMind's 75 geniuses will join the world's leading group of machine-learning experts, which Google has been assembling in the past few years. Google's main source of income, its search engine and the accompanying ad-placement system, is driven by machine learning. The firm's self-driving cars rely on it, as do the intelligent thermostats made by Nest, a firm it has just taken over, and the robots made by Boston Dynamics and other robotics outfits it has been buying.
The technology is already the backbone of many other internet firms. It is why Facebook and Linkedln have that slightly creepy ability to find people you know, and why Amazon and Netflix are good at suggesting books and films you might like. It also helps intelligence agencies to identify terrorist networks.
As machine learning leaves the lab and goes into practice, it will threaten white-collar, knowledge-worker jobs just as machines, automation and assembly lines destroyed factory jobs in the 19th and 20th centuries. For example, the technique has been applied by researchers at Stanford University to tell whether a biopsy of breast cells is highly cancerous, something that until now has required a human expert to assess.
Another of DeepMind's founders, Shane Legg, has predicted that artificial intelligence running wildly will be the biggest existential risk to humans in this century. Its founders have asked Google to set up an "ethics board" to consider the appropriate use of machine learning in its products. The creator of "Evil Genius" is ensuring that his new overlord sticks to its motto, "Don't be evil".
Education: Examination-orientation or Quality-orientation?
Nearly two-thirds of businesses in the UK want to recruit staff with foreign language skills. French is still the most highly prized language, but Spanish and Mandarin speakers are more 【B1】______ demand than in the past. Katja Hall, deputy director-general of Confederation of British Industry (CBI), said that,【B2】______the EU was the UK's largest export market, it was no surprise to see European languages so【B3】______valued. "【B4】______ with China and Latin America seeing solid growth, ambitious firms want the language skills that can【B5】______the path into new markets," she said. The 2014 annual education and skills survey by the CBI and Pearson, the educational【B6】______that owns the Financial Times, 【B7】______ that 41 percent of the 291 companies surveyed across the UK【B8】______knowledge of a foreign language was 【B9】______ to their business. European languages—French, German and Spanish—still 【B10】______ the list in terms of desirability, but these were closely【B11】______by Mandarin and Arabic. Ms Hall said it was【B12】______whether recent government initiatives to encourage language learning in schools would have any【B13】______. "It has been a【B14】______to see foreign language study in our schools under pressure with one in five schools having a【B15】______low take-up of languages," she said. "Young people【B16】______their future subject choices should be made more【B17】______of the benefits to their careers that can【B18】______from studying a foreign language." The number of students studying foreign languages has 【B19】______ in the past decade. In January, the UK Commission for Employment and Skills said the number of "skills shortage vacancies" had risen from 16 per cent of all 【B20】______ in 2009 to 22 per cent in 2013.
It vanished in 2002, a result of a bad fall. As my neurosurgeon explained, when my head hit the ground, my brain sloshed around, which smashed delicate nerve endings in my olfactory system. Maybe they"ll repair themselves, she said (in what struck me as much too casual a tone), and maybe they won"t. If I had to lose something, it might as well have been smell; at least nothing about my personality or my memory had changed, as can happen with head trauma. So it seemed almost churlish to feel, as the months went on, so devastated by this particular loss. But I was heartbroken. My sense of smell was always something I took pleasure in. Without scent, I felt as ff I were walking around the city without my contact lenses, dealing with people while wearing earplugs, moving through something sticky and thick. The sharpness of things, their specificity, diminished. I couldn"t even tell when the milk had gone bad. Oddly, my sense of taste remained perfectly fine, but I was still nervous about opening a carton of yogurt without having someone nearby to sniff it for me. I had been stripped of the sense we all use, often without realizing it, to negotiate the world, to know which things are safe and which are dangerous. After nearly a year, I talked to a colleague savvying about neuro-science, who suggested I try to retrain my sense of smell on the assumption that the nerve endings had repaired themselves but that something was still broken along the pathway from nose to brain, where odor molecules activate olfactory receptors (the subject of this year"s Nobel-winning research). Her advice was to expose myself to strong, distinctive fragrances, asking the person I was with to tell me exactly what I was smelling even if I wasn"t conscious of smelling anything at all. I began sticking my nose into everything that seemed likely to have a scent—the cumin in the spice cabinet, freshly ground coffee, red wine. I interrupted friends midsentence if we happened to be walking past a pizza place or a garbage truck and asked, stupidly, "What are you smelling now?" Slowly, the smell therapy started to work. At first, distressingly, all I could smell were unnatural scents: dandruff shampoo, furniture polish, a cloud of after-shave from a stocky young man. The first time I smelled cut grass again, in the small park near the American Museum of Natural History, was almost exactly two years after my fall. It made me cry. The tears embarrassed me, but cut grass is one of those fragrances that transport me directly to the landscape of childhood. And that"s what I had been missing, really, and why getting back my sense of smell was so precious: a visceral connection to the person I used to be.
Study Home or Abroad? A. Title: Study Home or Abroad? B. Word limit: 160~200 words (not including the given opening sentence) C. Your composition should be based on the OUTLINE below and should start with the given opening sentence: "Nowadays more and more students choose to study in such developed countries as the U.S.A., the U.K., France, etc." OUTLINE: 1. The phenomenon that more and more students choose to study abroad 2. People"s different views on this phenomenon 3. My opinion
In the first years of the 21st century, no area of the American economy has excited more emotion than the property market. First came the excitement of soaring prices. Then spirits came crashing down with the subprime crisis, and now homeowners are agonizing over how far values could fall. An even bigger story, however, may be yet to come. America should be bracing itself for the end of the "generational housing bubble", according to a new study by Dowell Myers and SungHo Ryu of the University of Southern California. As the country"s 78 million baby-boomers retire, the report argues, the housing market will change dramatically. For three decades baby-boomers have helped push prices up: they settled down, and then bought bigger houses and second homes. But as the first of them celebrate their 65th birthdays in 2011, this may change. The old sell more homes than they buy. The ratio of old to working-age people is expected to grow by 67% over the next two decades. Will the younger generation be able to buy all the homes on the market? Young adults make up the bulk of new demand, with most purchasing homes when they reach their early 30s. The flood of elderly people selling their homes, Mr. Myers suggests, may lead to a drawn-out buyers" market. Prices may fall further as younger people, perceiving a downturn, delay purchasing. This phenomenon will unfold differently across the country. Some states will begin the sell-off later than others. In 15 southern and western states—including the retirement magnets of Florida and Arizona— the elderly do not become net sellers until their 70s. Expensive states such as California and the cold states of the mid-west and northeast are likely to lose them more quickly. The mismatch between buyers and sellers may be most acute in the rustbelt, where numbers of young people and immigrants are rising slowly, if at all, says William Frey of the Brookings Institution, a think-tank. Of course, there may be other outcomes. Suburbs, which swelled with the baby-boomers, may begin to decline. If the building industry contracts, home prices may remain more stable. Or developers may switch to serving the old, building more compact housing near amenities. Towns may make new efforts to attract immigrants, who already accounted for 40% of the growth in homeownership between 2000 and 2006. Among these unknowns, one thing is more certain: the housing market is about to enter a long period of transition. The youngest baby-boomers will not turn 65 until 2029.
In the early 1960s Wilt Chamberlain was one of only three players in the National Basketball Association(NBA)listed at over seven feet. If he had played last season, however, he would have been one of 42. The bodies playing major professional sports have changed dramatically over the years, and managers have been more than willing to adjust team uniforms to fit the growing numbers of bigger, longer frames. The trend in sports, though, may be obscuring an unrecognized reality: Americans have generally stopped growing. Though typically about two inches taller now than 140 years ago, today's people— especially those born to families who have lived in the U.S. for many generations—apparently reached their limit in the early 1960s. And they aren't likely to get any taller. "In the general population today, at this genetic, environmental level, we've pretty much gone as far as we can go," says anthropologist William Cameron Chumlea of Wright State University. In the case of NBA players, their increase in height appears to result from the increasingly common practice of recruiting players from all over the world. Growth, which rarely continues beyond the age of 20, demands calories and nutrients—notably, protein—to feed expanding tissues. At the start of the 20th century, under-nutrition and childhood infections got in the way. But as diet and health improved, children and adolescents have, on average, increased in height by about an inch and a half every 20 years, a pattern known as the secular trend in height. Yet according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, average height—5'9" for men, 5'4" for women—hasn't really changed since 1960. Genetically speaking, there are advantages to avoiding substantial height. During childbirth, larger babies have more difficulty passing through the birth canal. Moreover, even though humans have been upright for millions of years, our feet and back continue to struggle with bipedal posture and cannot easily withstand repeated strain imposed by oversize limbs. "There are some real constraints that are set by the genetic architecture of the individual organism," says anthropologist William Leonard of Northwestern University. Genetic maximums can change, but don't expect this to happen soon. Claire C. Gordon, senior anthropologist at the Army Research Center in Natick, Mass, ensures that 90 percent of the uniforms and workstations fit recruits without alteration. She says that, unlike those for basketball, the length of military uniforms has not changed for some time. And if you need to predict human height in the near future to design a piece of equipment, Gordon says that by and large, "you could use today's data and feel fairly confident."
BSection II Reading Comprehension/B
【F1】
Ever since the mid-1980s, when OPEC"s attempts to keep the oil price high collapsed in the face of rising supply, only war has been potent enough to lift the price hack to the levels of the 1970s.
The difference today from the last era of high prices, says Tom Collina, of 20/20 Vision, an environmentalist group, is that "oil producers are pumping as fast as they can, but cannot keep pace with demand".
The robust economic growth of America, coupled with industrial revolutions in China and India, has helped to ensure a very different market for energy.【F2】
The world got used to relying on spare capacity of a few million b/d in Saudi Arabia that could always cap price spikes in an emergency(it did just that in the first Gulf war and again during an oil-workers" strike in Venezuela in 2003).
Hut demand has steadily eaten away reserves and investment has failed to keep up. In the tight markets for energy since 2004, some identified a "fear premium" of $ 10-15 a barrel reflecting the threat of lost supply. Even slower demand growth in 2005 did little to lower prices.
【F3】
The tightness of capacity extends into refining and gas supply, leaving consumers vulnerable to any external shocks—such as the two hurricanes, Katrina and Rita, which hit the Gulf of Mexico in the autumn.
The hurricanes put a dozen oil refineries accounting for 16% of U. S. capacity temporarily out of action. American refining fell to its lowest level since March 1987, according to Petroleum Economist. The price of petrol rose above $ 3 a gallon—a level shockingly high to Americans, cheap as it might seem to Japanese or Europeans. Democrats accused the oil companies of price gouging, while Republicans argued for an easing of environmental laws restricting oil drilling and refinery building.
All this makes it a producers" world, which no one has exploited as gleefully as Hugo Chavez. Venezuela"s president has always believed in oil as a tool of geopolitics, to be used against American "imperialism". In 2004 he unilaterally raised the royalties on super-heavy crude production in the Orinoco belt from 1% to 16. 6%—and may yet increase it to 30%. In 2005 he increased the tax rate paid by the foreign oil companies from 34% to 50% , and then hit them with huge bills for unpaid "back taxes".【F4】
The latest of his measures was to insist on the 22 foreign companies operating service contracts to switch, by December 31st 2005, to joint-ventures, in which the government would hold the lion"s share. All but Exxon Mobil eventually did so.
Strangely, perhaps, consumers can learn a comforting lesson from all this. For all his mischief-making, even a populist like Mr. Chavez has never looked like cutting supplies to what Venezuela calls its "fundamental market" in America. America would notice a cut in Venezuelan supplies, which normally account for about 12-13% of its imports. Rut it could always buy oil on the world market. Venezuela would be worse hit.【F5】
It would be hard-pressed to find other markets for about half of its production, especially since most of its crude is high in sulphur and unsuitable for most refineries.
Study the following account of a personal experience carefully and write an essay in no less than 200 words. Your essay must be written clearly and your essay should meet the requirements below: 1) Elaborate your impressions on the story told. 2) And point out its implications in our life. One summer my wife Chris and I were invited by friends to row down the Colorado River in a boat. Our expedition included many highly successful people—the kind who have staffs to take care of life"s daily work. But in the wilder rapids, all of us naturally set aside any pretenses and put out backs into every stroke to keep the boat from tumbling over. At each night"s encampment, we all hauled supplies and cleaned dishes. After only two days in the river, people accustomed to being spoiled and indulged had become a team, working together to cope with the unpredictable twists and turns of the river. I believe that in life—as well as on boat trips-teamwork will make all our journeys successful ones. The rhythms of teamwork have been the rhythms of my life...
