After the disaster of flood

Their profits have grown rapidly in recent years, and this upward______is expected to continue.

Banks shall be unable to ______

He was busy writing the essay all the morning, only______occasionally to have a cup of tea.

A pervasive negative attitude of the engineers toward projects funded by his company is the cause of the delay of signing the contract.

I think you can take a(n)______language course to improve your English.

em>Questions 11 to 13 are based on the following conversation. At the end of the conversation, you will be given 15 seconds to answer the questions. Now listen to the conversation./em> What are they mainly talking about in the conversation?

The clash between Real Madrid and Arsenal is being ______ as the match of the season.

Americans believe time is a limited resource; they try to conserve and manage it. People in the U.S. often 1 seminars or read books on time management. It seems they all want to 2 their time better. Professionals carry around pocket planners—some in electronic form—to keep 3 of appointments and deadlines. People do all they can to 4 more life out of their time. The early American hero Benjamin Franklin expressed this 5 best: "Do you love life? Then do not waste time, for that is the 6 life is made of." To Americans, punctuality is a 7 of showing respect for other people's time. 8 more than 10 minutes late to an appointment usually 9 an apology, and maybe an explanation. People who are running late often call 10 to let others know of the delay. Of course, the less 11 the situation, the less important it is to be exactly on time. At informal get-togethers, for example, people often arrive 12 60 minutes past the appointed time. But they usually don't try that at work. To outsiders, Americans seem tied to the clock. People in other cultures value relationships more than 13 . In these societies, people don't try to 14 time, but to experience it. Many Eastern cultures, for example, view time as a cycle. The 15 of nature—from the passing of the seasons to the monthly cycle of the moon—shapes their view of events. People learn to 16 to their environment. As a result, they find it easier to "go with the flow" than Americans, who like plans 17 and unchangeable. Even Americans would 18 that no one can master time. Time, like money, 19 all too easily through our fingers. And time, like the weather, is very hard to predict. 20 , time is one of life's most precious gifts. And unwrapping it is half the fun.

That man claimed to be a (n) ______ of Confucius.

Starting a new business can be a risky ______.

Consumers and producers obviously make decisions that mold the economy, but there is a third major 1 to consider the role of government. Government has a powerful 2 on the economy in at least four ways: Direct Services. The postal system, for example, is a federal system 3 the entire nation, as is the large and complex establishment. Conversely, the construction and 4 of most highways the 5 of the individual states, and the public educational systems, despite a large funding role by the federal government, are primarily 6 for by country or city governments. Police and fire protection and sanitation 7 are also the responsibilities of local government. Regulation and Control. The government regulates and controls. Private 8 in many ways, for the 9 of assuring that business serves the best 10 of the people as a whole. Regulation is necessary in areas where private enterprise is granted a 11 , such as in telephone or electric service. Public policy permits such companies to make a reasonable 12 , but limits their ability to raise prices 13 , since the public depends on their services. Often control is 14 to protect the public, as for example, when the Food and Drug administration bans harmful drugs, or requires standards of 15 in food. In other industries, government sets guidelines to ensure fair competition without using direct control. Stabilization and Growth. Branches of government, including Congress and such entities as the Federal Reserve Board attempt to control the extremes of boom and bust, of inflation and depression, by 16 tax rates, the money supply, and the use of credit. They can also 17 the economy through changes in the amount of public spending by the government itself. Direct Assistance. The government provides many kinds of help to 18 and individuals. For example, tariffs 19 certain products to remain relatively free of foreign competition; imports are sometimes taxed so that American products are able to 20 better with certain foreign goods. In quite a different area, government supports individuals who cannot adequately care for themselves, by making grants to working parents with dependent children, by providing medical care for the aged and the indigent, and through social welfare system.

A deal of attention is being paid today to the so-called digital divide—the division of the world into the info (information) rich and the info poor. And that 1 does exist today. My wife and I lectured about this looming danger twenty years ago. What was less invisible then, however, were the new, positive 2 that work against the digital divide. Actually, there are reasons to be 3 . There are technological reasons to hope the digital divide will narrow. As the Internet becomes more and more 4 , it is in the interest of business to universalize access—after all, the more people online, the more potential 5 there are. More and more enterprises, afraid their countries will be left 6 , want to spread internet access. Within the next decade or two, one to two billion people on the planet will be netted together. As a result, I now believe the digital divide will narrow rather than widen in the years ahead. And that is very good news because the Internet may well be the most powerful tool for 7 world poverty that we've ever had. Of course, the use of the Internet isn't the only way to defeat poverty. And the Internet is not the only tool we have, But it has big potential. To 8 advantage of this tool, some poor countries will have to get over their outdated anti-colonial prejudices 9 respect to foreign investment. Countries that still think foreign investment is an invasion of their sovereignty might well study the history of 10 (the basic structural foundations of a society) in the United States. When the United States built its industrial infrastructure, it didn't have the capital to do so. And that is why America's Second Wave infrastructure—concerning roads, harbors, highways, ports and so on—were built with foreign investment.

Is language, like food

The Seats Company recently made ______ because of financial troubles.

I was so surprised when he turned up—I'd ______ someone much older.

The new washing machines are ______ at the rate of fifty a day.

That experiences influence subsequent behaviour is evidence of an obvious but nevertheless remarkable activity called remembering. Learning could not occur without the function popularly named memory. Constant practice has such as effect on memory as to lead to skillful performance on the piano, to recitation of a poem, and even to reading and understanding these words. So-called intelligent behaviour demands memory, remembering being a primary requirement for reasoning. The ability to solve any problem or even to recognize that a problem exists depends on memory. Typically, the decision to cross a street is based on remembering many earlier experiences. Practice (or review) tends to build and maintain memory for a task or for any learned material. Over a period of no practice what has been learned tends to be forgotten; and the adaptive consequences may not seem obvious. Yet, dramatic instances of sudden forgetting can seem to be adaptive. In this sense, the ability to forget can be interpreted to have survived through a process of natural selection in animals. Indeed, when one's memory of an emotionally painful experience lead to serious anxiety, forgetting may produce relief. Nevertheless, an evolutionary interpretation might make it difficult to understand how the commonly gradual process of forgetting survived natural selection. In thinking about the evolution of memory together with all its possible aspects, it is helpful to consider what would happen if memories failed to fade. Forgetting clearly aids orientation in time, since old memories weaken and the new tend to stand out, providing clues for inferring duration. Without forgetting, adaptive ability would suffer, for example, learned behaviour that might have been correct a decade ago may no longer be. Cases are recorded of people who (by ordinary standards) forgot so little that their everyday activities were full of confusion. This forgetting seems to serve that survival of the individual and the species. Another line of thought assumes a memory storage system of limited capacity that provides adaptive flexibility specifically through forgetting. In this view, continual adjustments are made between learning or memory storage (input) and forgetting (output). Indeed, there is evidence that the rate at which individuals forget is directly related to how much they have learned. Such data offers gross support of contemporary models of memory that assume an input-output balance. From the evolutionary point of view, ______.

These small companies now have their own ______ identity.