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The couple departed ______ a heavy rain.

Passage One The world is going through the biggest wave of mergers and acquisitions ever witnessed. The process sweeps from hyperactive America to Europe and reaches the emerging countries with unsurpassed might. Many in these countries are looking at this process and worrying: 'Won't the wave of business concentration turn into an uncontrollable anti-competitive force?' There's no question that the big are getting bigger and more powerful. Multinational corporations accounted for less than 20% of international trade in 1982. Today the figure is more than 25% and growing rapidly. International affiliates account for a fast-growing segment of production in economies that open up and welcome foreign investment. In Argentina, for instance, after the reforms of the early 1990s, multinationals went from 43% to almost 70% of the industrial production of the 200 largest firms. This phenomenon has created serious concerns over the role of smaller economic firms, of national businessmen and over the ultimate stability, of the world economy. I believe that the most important forces behind the massive MA wave are the same that underlie the globalization process: falling transportation, and communication costs, lower trade and investment barriers and enlarged markets that require enlarged operations capable, of meeting customers' demands. All these are beneficial, not detrimental to consumers. As productivity grows, the world's wealth increases. Examples of benefits or costs of the current concentration wave are scanty. Yet it is hard to imagine that the merge of a few oil firms today could recreate the same threats to competition that were feared nearly a century ago in the U.S., when the Standard Oil trust was broken up. The mergers of telecom companies, such as World Corn, hardly seem to bring higher prices for consumers or a reduction in the pace of technical progress. On the contrary, the price of communications is coming down fast. In cars, too, concentration is increasing—witness Daimler and Chrysler, Renault and Nissan—but it does not appear that consumers am being hurt. Yet the fact remains that the merger movement must be watched. A few weeks ago, Alan Greenspan warned against the megamergers in the banking industry. Who is going to supervise, regulate and operate, as lender of last resort with the gigantic banks that are being created? Won't multinationals shift production from one place to another when a nation gets too strict about infringements to fair corn petition? And should one country take upon itself the role of 'defending competition' on issues that affect many other nations, as in the U. S..

Mike and Adam Hurewitz grew up together on Long Island, in the suburbs of New York City. They were very close, even for brothers. So when Adam's liver started failing, Mike offered to give him half of his. The operation saved Adam's life. But Mike, who went into the hospital in seemingly excellent health, developed a complication—perhaps a blood colt—and died last week. He was 57. Mike Hurewitz's death has prompted a lot of soul searching in the transplant community. Was it a tragic fluke or a sign that transplant surgery has reached some kind of ethical limit? The Mount Sinai Medical Center, the New York City hospital where the complex double operation was performed, has put on hold its adult living donor liver transplant program, pending a review of Hurewitz's death. Mount Sinai has performed about 100 such operations in the past three years. A 1-in-100 risk of dying may not seem like bad odds, but there's more to this ethical dilemma than a simple ratio. The first and most sacred rule of medicine is to do no harm. 'For a normal healthy person a mortality rate 1% is hard to justify,' says Dr. John Fung, chief of transplantation at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. 'If the rate stays at 1%, it's just not going to be accepted.' On the other hand, there's an acute shortage of traditional donor organs from people who have died in accidents or suffered fatal heart attacks. If family members fully understand the risks and are willing to proceed, is there any reason to stand in their way? Indeed, a recent survey showed that most people will accept a mortality rate for living organ donors as high as 20%. The odds, thankfully, aren't nearly that bad. For kidney donors, for example, the risk ranges from 1 in 2,500 to 1 in 4,000 for a healthy volunteer. That helps explain why nearly 40% of kidney transplants in the U. S. come from living donors. The operation to transplant a liver, however, is a lot trickier than one to transplant a kidney. Not only is the liver packed with blood vessels, but it also makes lots of proteins that need to be produced in the right ratios for the body to survive. When organs from the recently deceased are used, the surgeon gets to pick which part of the donated liver looks the best and to take as much of it as needed. Assuming all goes well, a healthy liver can grow back whatever portion of the organ is missing, sometimes within a month. A living-donor transplant works particularly well when an adult donates a modest portion of the liver to a child. Usually only the left lobe of the organ is required, leading to a mortality rate for living-donors in the neighborhood of 1 in 500 to 1 in 1, 000. But when the recipient is another adult, as much as 60% of the donor's liver has to be removed. 'There really is very little margin for error,' says Dr. Fung. By way of analogy, he suggests, think of a tree. 'An adult-to-child living-donor transplant is like cutting off a limb. With an adult-to-adult transplant, you're splitting the trunk in half and trying to keep both halves alive. ' Even if a potential donor understand and accepts these risks, that doesn't necessarily mean the operation should proceed. All sorts of subtle pressures can be brought to bear on such a decision, says Dr. Mark Siegler, director of the MacLean for Clinical Medical Ethics at the University of Chicago. 'Sometimes the sicker the patient, the greater the pressure and the more willing the donor will be to accept risks. ' If you feel you can't say no, is your decision truly voluntary? And if not, is it the medical community's responsibility to save you from your own best intentions? Transplant centers have developed screening programs to ensure that living donors fully understand the nature of their decision. But unexamined, for the most part, is the larger issue of just how much a volunteer should be allowed to sacrifice to save another human being. So far, we seem to be saying some risk is acceptable, although we're still vaguer about where the cutoff should be. There will always be family members like Mike Hurewitz who are heroically prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice for a loved one. What the medical profession and society must decide is if it's appropriate to let them do so.

阅读理解Passage 4 When Columbus reached the New World, corn was the most widely grown plant in the Americas

阅读理解Passage FourHenry Ford, the famous U. S. inventor and car manufacture, once said, The business of America is business. By this he meant that the U. S. way of life is based on the values of the business world.Few would argue with Fords statement. A brief glimpse at a daily newspaper vividly shows how much people in the United States think about business. For example, nearly every newspaper has a business section, in which the deals and projects, finances and management, stock prices and labor problems of corporations are reported daily. In addition, business news can appear in every other section. Most national news has an important financial aspect to it. Welfare, foreign aid, the federal budget, and the policies of the Federal Reserve Bank are all heavily affected by business. Moreover, business news appears in some of the unlikeliest places. The world of arts and entertainment is often referred to as 4tthe entertainment industry or show businessThe positive side of Henry Fords statement can be seen in the prosperity that business has brought to U. S. life. One of the most important reasons so many people from all over the world come to live in the United States is the dream of a better job. Jobs are produced in abundance （大量地）because the U. S.economic system is driven by competition. People believe that this system creates more wealth, more jobs, and a materially better way of life.The negative side of Henry Fords statement, however, can be seen when the word business is taken to mean big business. And the tom big business referring to the biggest companies, is seen in opposition to labor. Throughout U. S. history working people have had to fight hard for higher wages, better working conditions, and the righl to form unions. Today, many of the old labor disputes arc over, but there is still some employee anxiety. Downsizing—the laying off of thousands of workers to keep expenses low and profits high—creates feelings of insecurity for many.

阅读理解Passage 3 The blues was born on the Mississippi River Delta in the early 1900s

阅读理解Passage A Which is saferstaying at home, traveling to work on public transport, or working in the office? Surprisingly, each of these carries the same risk, which is very low

阅读理解Passage Two Questions 36 to 40 are based on the following passage

阅读理解Text D Several recent studies have found that being randomly assigned to a roommate of another race can lead to increased tolerance but also to a greater likelihood of conflict

阅读理解Passage 4 One important thing during the pre-Christmas rush at our house was the arrival of my daughter‟s kindergarten report card

阅读理解Directions: For this rusk, you are to read a short passage with 5 questions. Read the passage carefully Then answer the questions in the fewest possible words on the Answer Sheet.Three hundred years ago news travelled by word of mouth or letter, and circulated in taverns and coffee houses in the form of pamphlets and newsletters. “The coffee houses particularly are very roomy for a free conversation, and for reading at an easier rate all manner of printed news, ” noted one observer. Everything changed in 1833 when the first mass-audience newspaper, The New York Sun, pioneered the use of advertising to reduce the cost of news, thus giving advertisers access to a wider audience. The penny press, followed by radio and television, turned news flora a two-way conversation into a one-way broadcast, with a relatively small number of firms controlling the media.Now, the news industry is returning to something closer to the coffee house. The internet is making news more participatory, social and diverse, reviving the discursive characteristics of the era before the mass media. That will have profound effects on society and politics. In much of the world, the mass media are flourishing. Newspaper circulation rose globally by 6% between 2005and 2009. But those global figures mask a sharp decline in readership in rich countries.Over the past decade, throughout the Western world, people have been giving tip newspapers and TV news and keeping up with events in profoundly different ways. Most strikingly, ordinary people are increasingly involved in compiling, sharing, filtering, discussing and disturbing news. Twitter lets people anywhere report what they are seeing. Classified documents are published in their thousands online. Mobile phone footage of Arab uprisings and American tornadoes is posted on social networking sites and shown on television newscasts. Social networking sites help people find discuss and share news with their friends.And it is not just readers who are challenging the media elite. Technology firms including Google, Facebook and Twitter have become important conduits of news. Celebrities and world leaders publish updates directly via social networks: many countries now make raw data available through “open government” initiatives. The internet lets people read newspapers or watch television channels from around the world. The web has allowed new providers of news, from individual bloggers to sites, to prominence in a very short space of time. And it has made possible entirely new approaches to journalism, such as that practiced by Wikileaks, which provides an anonymous way for whistleblowers to publish documents. The news agenda is no longer controlled by a few press barons and state outlets.In principle, every, liberal should celebrate this. A more participatory and social news environment, with a remarkable diversity and range of news sources, is a good thing. The transformation of the news business is unstoppable, and attempts to reverse it are doomed to failure. As producers of new journalism, individuals can be scrupulous with facts and transparent with their sources. As consumers, they can be general in their tastes and demanding in their standards. And although this transformation does raise concerns, there is much to celebrate in the noisy, diverse, vociferous, argumentative and stridently alive environment of the news business in the age of the Internet. The coffee house is back. Enjoy it.

阅读理解Passage 2 A quality education is the basic liberator

阅读理解Passage B 1

阅读理解Directions: There are three passages in (his section. Eachpassage is followed by some questions or unfinishedstatements. For each of them there are four choices markedA, B, C and D. You should decide on the best choice andthen blacken the corresponding letter on the Answer Sheet.Passage ThreeAlong with red letterboxes and telephone booths, London’ s black taxis are touted as symbolic of the city. Fully 25, 600 drivers trundle around the capital’ s streets. They are privileged: unlike minicabs, they can pick up passengers hailing in the street and run on a pricey meter system rather than a fixed fee. Nationally the average fare is 5. 77 ($9. 56) for two miles; in London it is 7. 20. All cabbies are required to pass the “knowledge” , a test of all the roads within a six-mile radius of central London. If they take a daft route to their destination it is usually deliberate.But becoming a taxi driver is ever harder. In the 1970s the knowledge took around 23months to complete. Last year it took 50 months. “You can get a PhD in the same time. ” complains Malcolm Paice of City Fleet, a radio-taxi firm. Between 2009 and 2012, the number of taxi drivers increased by only 4% in London. Faced with such a high barrier to entry, more people are taking a shorter course that only allows them to drive black cabs in suburban areas, says Tom Moody Of Transport for London (TfL) .But in the same period the number of minicab drivers in London jumped by 19% to 67, 000,The scorn they receive from black-taxi drivers is little deserved. Liana Griffin, the boss of Addison Lee, a large minicab firm, says minicabs have become more comparable to black cabs since 2004, when regulations and criminal- record checks were introduced. All of the company s drivers take a six week course and rely on satellite navigation system__ as do some black-taxi drivers. Their fares are around a third cheaper, Mr. Griffin says.Technology is further bulldozing the distinction between black taxis and minicabs. Fully 14, 000 London taxis have signed up with Hailo, an app for ordering cabs that was introduced to London in 2011. Ron Zeghibe, Hailo’ s chairman, says that some drivers shun taxi ranks or “street work” in favor of punters who order through his service. Minicab companies have their own, similar, apps. One, from Greentomatocars, helped the firm nearly double in revenue in a year.Yet the separation between the two kinds of taxis looks likely to stay. In April the Law Commission, an independent body, will release a report on the taxi trade. Many of its recommendations will boost minicabs outside London. Larger firms Such as Addison Lee will find it easier to expand as licensing rules are simplified. But London’ s black cabs look likely to be protected. They will still be regulated by TfL; barriers to entry will remain high. Instead of nurturing a dwindling trade, this could have the opposite effect. Black cabs might soon become as quaintly archaic as telephone booths.

阅读理解Directions: There are 3 passages in this part. Each passage is followed by some questions or unfinished statements. For each of them there are four choices marked A., B., C. and D.. You should decide on the best choice and write the answer on the Answer Sheet.Passage threeAs Philadelphia grew from a small town into a city in the first half of the eighteenth century，it became an increasingly important marketing center for a vast and growing agricultural hinterland. Market days saw the crowded city even more crowded，as farmers from within a radius of 24 or more kilometers brought their sheep, cows, pigs, vegetables, cider, and other products for direct sale to the townspeople. The High Street Market was continuously enlarged throughout the period until 1736, when it reached from Front Street to Third. By 1745 New Market was opened on Second Street between Pine and Cedar. The next year the Callowhill Market began operation.Along with market days, the institution of twice-yearly fairs persisted in Philadelphia even after similar trading days had been discontinued in other colonial cities. The fairs provided a means of bringing handmade goods from outlying places to would-be buyers in the city.Linens and stockingsfrom Germantown, for example, were popular items.Auctions were another popular form of occasional trade. Because of the competition, retail merchants opposed these as well as the fairs. Although governmental attempts to eradicate fairs and auctions were less than successful，the ordinary course ofeconomic development was on the merchants’ side, as increasing business specialization became the order of the day. Export merchants became differentiated from their importing counterparts, and specialty shops began to appear in addition to general stores selling a variety of goods.One of the reasons Philadelphia’s merchants generally prospered was because the surrounding area was undergoing tremendous economic and demographic growth. They did their business, after all，in the capital city of the province. Not only did they cater to the governor and his circle, but citizens from all over the colony came to the capital for legislative sessions of the assembly and council and the meetings of the courts of justice.

阅读理解Directions: There are 3 passages in this part. Each passage is followed by some questions or unfinished statements. For each of them there are four choices marked A, B, C and D. You should decide on the best choice and write the answer on the Answer Sheet.Passage TwoPotash (the old name for potassium carbonate) is one of the two alkalis (the other being soda, sodium carbonate) that were used from remote antiquity in the making of glass, and from the early Middle Ages in the making of soap: the former being the product of heating a mixture of alkali and sand, the latter a product of alkali and vegetable oil. Their importance in the communities of colonial North America need hardly be stressed.Potash and soda are not interchangeable for all purposes, but for glass- or soap-making either would do. Soda was obtained largely from the ashes of certain Mediterranean sea plants, potash from those of inland vegetation. Hence potash was more familiar to the early European settlers of the North American continent.The settlement at Jamestown in Virginia was in many ways a microcosm of the economy of colonial North America, and potash was one of its first concerns. It was required for the glassworks, the first factory in the British colonies, and was produced in sufficient quantity to permit the inclusion of potash in the first cargo shipped out of Jamestown. The second ship to arrive in the settlement from England included among its passengers experts in potash making.The method of making potash was simple enough. Logs was piled up and burned in the open, and the ashes collected. The ashes were placed in a barrel with holes in the bottom, and water was poured over them. The solution draining from the barrel was boiled down in iron kettles. The resulting mass was further heated to fuse the mass into what was called potash.In North America potash making quickly became an adjunct to the clearing of land for agriculture, for it was estimated that as much as half the cost of clearing land could be recovered by the sale of potash. Some potash was exported from Maine and New Hampshire in the seventeenth century, but the market turned out to be mainly domestic, consisting mostly of shipments from the northern to the southern colonies. For despite the beginning of the trade at Jamestown and such encouragements as a series of acts “to encourage the making of potash,” beginning in 1707 in South Carolina, the softwoods in the South proved to be poor sources of the substance.

阅读理解Passage Three Questions 41 to 45 are based on the following passage

阅读理解Passage 2 A study of older men in the Netherlands, known for its delicious chocolate, showed those who ate the same amount of one-third of a chocolate bar every day had lower blood pressure and a reduced risk of death

阅读理解Directions: In the section, there are five numbered blanks where appropriate sentences are needed to fill in respectively. Choose the most suitable one from the list A-G to fit into the blanks. There are two extra choices, which do not fit in any of the blanks. Please write your answers on the Answer Sheet.Has English become the global language of communication and education? The question might seem obvious, but the answer is not so simple. Yes, English is the international language of commerce and science. And its utility has spread because up to now it has also been the prime moving language of the Internet. But this is beginning to change, and very fast.【A1】 ________ Languages like German, Russian and Spanish are spreading at exponential speed on the Web, Mr. Montviloff said. Because the Internet makes it possible, other languages are also starting to challenge the hegemony of English in distance education. The Internet is helping to revive minority languages and cultures by bringing together widely scattered linguistic communities.【A2】________. Global Reach Inc., a market research company, estimates that English is now the mother tongue of less than half of all Internet users, and the proportion is falling all the time. David Graddol, a language researcher and lecturer at the Open University in Britain, said that, on the one hand, English is becoming a language of everyday usage in some countries in Northern Europe. 【A3】________. “In other countries, however, English is more truly a foreign language,” said Mr. Graddol, “In some countries, like China, there is not very much English in the environment and people may be learning it from teachers who may not speak English very well themselves.” In a third group of countries, like India and Nigeria where English has been used a long time, distinct local varieties of the language are emerging, complete with their own dictionaries, textbooks, and literature. This means that different centers of authority are starting to emerge. 【A4】________. “Thus, the very reason for the rise of English—its guarantee of mutual intelligibility among people of different cultures—could dissolve if the language continues to fragment into a variety of ‘Englishes’”. Bertrand Menciassi, of the European Bureau for Lesser Used Languages in Europe, said the use of a world language both helps and hinders linguistic diversity. People can use English for their outside contacts, while cultivating their own tongue or dialect for use at home. On the other hand, he added, English is tending to push European national languages like Dutch or Danish into a corner. 【A5】________The Commission argues that the ability to speak two or three tongues will give the Europeans economic and technical advantages over their monolingual American rivals in world of diversity, and is about to kick off “The European Year of Languages” in an attempt to promote multilingualism. A. “Something like 70 percent of the Dutch population claim now that they can hold a conversation in English quite comfortably. In countries like the Netherlands, Sweden or Denmark you need English to complete your education,” said Mr. Graddol. B. In England, people like Spencer and Shakespeare went on an inventive spree of creating new words and usages and made the language suitable for literature. C. “We are observing that more and more other languages are taking over the Internet,” said Victor Montviloff, who is responsible for information policy in the communication and information sector at the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization here. D. English, like Latin before it, has become a language that is no longer the property of its native speakers, and like Latin, it too may give way to variety of vernacular tongues. E. Researches note a sudden surge of interest in endangered languages, such as those spoken by indigenous groups in North America. F. That could be extremely dangerous, because the university is the brain of the country and this proposal raised the question whether Dutch continues to be an all-purpose language. G. Maintaining linguistic diversity is an important aim of the European Commission, which is concerned that the increasing acceptance of English as the European lingua franca should not detract from the vitality of other languages.