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1. Nagging concerns about the global economic downturn and rising unemployment are forcing many young Britons to think twice about tying the knot this year, a think-tank said on Saturday.Almost 80 percent of young British couples living together want to get married, the think tank Civitas said, but would reconsider their wedding plans due to increasing job losses as companies cut costs and lay off workers.2. “As the recession bites it’s going to be harder for partners to make that commitment — without financial stability and jobs they won’t have the confidence to say ‘I do’,” the director of family and education at Civitas, said.The study, which surveyed 1,560 adults aged between 20 and 35, also found that for 50 percent of the people making a commitment was the most The study, which surveyed 1,560 adults aged between 20 to 35, also found that for 50 percent of the people making a commitment was the most important reason to get married, and only two percent considered marriage for tax advantages.“If my boyfriend asked me now, then I would still say ‘yes’, but I wouldn’t waste my money for a high-profile wedding,” Jenny Brown, an employee works in London’s central financial district.But De Waal said the recession would have a serious impact on planning a life together.“This is not about being able to afford a fancy wedding dress for 10,000 pounds or not.”3. A British Social Attitudes survey in January found that young people showed a less traditional attitude towards marriage and would put their careers first.About 40 percent of people aged between 18 and 34 said marriage was still the “best kind of relationship,” compared with 84 percent of people aged 65 and over, it said.

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African-American filmmakers should be in an enviable position, for since the early 1990s there has been a steady wave of low budget black films which have turned a solid profit due to a very strong response in the African-American community and a larger crossover audience than anticipated. Any rational business manager would now identify this sector as a prime candidate for expansion, but if the films have done so well with limited production and marketing costs, why have they not received full scale support?Many analysts feel the business is engulfed in a miasma of self-serving and self-fulfilling myths based on the unspoken assumption that African-American films can never be vehicles of prestige, glamour, or celebrity. The relationship players have convinced themselves that black films can do only a limited domestic business under any circumstance and have virtually no foreign box office potential. As executives who now control the film industry grew up in those decades when there were few black images on the screen and those that did exist were produced by film-makers with limited knowledge of the black community, it is little wonder that they avoid ideological issues, and seek to continue making films that they are comfortable with by avoiding the negative imagery of films they would prefer to eschew entirely.Also to blame for this deleterious phenomenon are legions of desperate and Machiavellian African-American film producers, directors, and writers who would transform The Birth of a Nation into a black musical as long as it would provide them with gainful studio employment. These filmmakers not only perpetuate negative stereotypes in their films, but they also season them with a sprinkling of African-American authenticity. This situation would be onerous enough, given the economic exploitation of the community involved; unfortunately these films also validate the pathologies they depict. The constant projection of the black community as a kind of urban Wild Kingdom, the glamorization of tragic situations, and the celebration of inner city drug dealers and gangsters has a programming effect on black youth. The power of music in film is a particularly seductive and propagandistic force which in the recent crop of African-American films has rarely been used in a positive social manner.What flows from this combination of factors is a policy of market exploitation rather than market development, evidenced by the fact that any number of films may open to 1,500 screens in one week, only to totally disappear in less than a month. This restricted body of film products erodes the genre’s long-term viability, particularly with the more fickle non-African-American audiences and foreign audiences. Furthermore, when African-American actors begin to emerge as stars, their projects are usually designed to be “more” than a black film, such that any success that follows is therefore perceived not as a reflection of the viability of African-American filmmaking but as the broader pursuit of celebrity.1.Which of the following best describes the main purpose of the passage?2.According to the passage, each of the following is characteristic of African-American films being produced at present, EXCEPT ( ) .3.According to the passage, film industry executives have been reluctant to support African-American cinema for which of the following reasons?4.It may be inferred that the author of the passage considers The Birth of a Nation to be ( ) .5.According to the author, African-Americans filmmakers have failed to take which of the following steps in properly promoting African-American cinema?

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While there have been countless attempts at correlating sunspot cycles with such diverse phenomena as the economy, crop yields, and the weather, there has been little evidence to support these correlations. The past few decades have seen a renewed interest in the sun-climate relationship with a comprehensive analysis of many different historical records of solar observation. Late in the seventeenth century, a period known as the Maunder Minimum, there were virtually no sunspots observed, indicating a “quiet” period in the sun’s activity coinciding with the height of a time known as the Little Ice Age, a period of lower temperatures in Europe. Once this evidence had been synthesized, it has become much clearer that there are indeed robust correlations between the Earth’s temperature and sunspots. Perhaps the most important development in the solar-climate link came when satellites were developed to measure, in rough terms, the Total Solar Irradiance(TSI), a factor shown to be directly related to these “activity” cycles. At the maxima of these cycles, there are more sunspots(magnetic phenomena that attenuate local irradiance), but new instruments show that these dark sunspots are more than compensated for by bright areas on the sun called faculae; therefore, the overall irradiance increases in correspondence with higher numbers of sunspots.Unfortunately, identifying this evident increase in minimum values as a trend provokes concern, as there have been only two minima ever measured in this way. We must be aware that the warming trend in the surface temperature goes far beyond the last two decades, and that an extension of the solar record is necessary to assess whether solar activity and irradiance is indeed increasing at the minima of the cycles and what the potential effect on the climate may be. The solar record has been extended by the use of the historical sunspot records already mentioned and correlations have been drawn between solar irradiance and the temperature curve since 1610, suggesting a predominant solar influence in the pre-industrial period. But since 1860 only half the observed warming could be attributable to the irradiance increase, indicating that some other influence is becoming more influential in controlling the temperature change: most likely industrial carbon-dioxide.Recent studies of global warming have necessitated a more comprehensive effort to quantify the natural climate variability so that the residual change may be attributed to the anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases. This attempt at quantification of the many different forces effect on the climate has re-emphasized the complexity of the climate system and the simultaneous interaction of many influences. Solar irradiance may indeed account for some of the temperature increases recorded over the last several decades, but as the atmospheric CO2 rises, due to the exponential increase in emissions from industrial sources, the influence of solar variability on the Earth’s climate will most likely decrease, and its relative contribution will be far surpassed by “greenhouse” gases.1.The author focuses primarily on ( ) .2.Which of the following statements concerning the comparison between pre-industrial and post-industrial climate change, as described in the passage, is accurate?3.According to the passage, extending solar record is important for which of the following reasons?4.According to the passage, sunspot cycles have which of the following characteristics?5.It can be inferred from the passage that the author regards the correlations drawn in recent decades between sunspots and terrestrial phenomena as( ).

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With few exceptions, the last words of history’s great players have been about as interesting and uplifting as a phone book. We may expect pearls of profundity from our expiring artists, philosophers, and world leaders, but more often we are left with dry-as-dust cliche.Admittedly, it’s not exactly fair to expect deep insights into life’s mysteries when the dying clearly have other things on their minds —hell, for instance, or unspeakable pain. Bullet-riddled Francisco “Pancho” Villa was probably preoccupied when he told a comrade, “Don’t let it end this way. Tell them I said something.” But don’t we have the right to expect eloquence in the final stanzas of legendary wordsmiths like Lord Byron and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe? Byron couldn’t be bothered to work up a decent rhyme: “Now I shall go to sleep. Good night.” Goethe’s last words were so dull biographers have been obliged to edit creatively; “Open the second shutter so that more light may come in” became the more sublime “More light!”(There is, by the way, some debate whether Goethe’s last words were not, in fact, “Come my little one, and give me your paw.")And one is loath to mention Whitman’s last barbaric yawp: “Hold me up; I want to shit.” Legendary wag Oscar Wilde’s last words were nothing more than shop talk. Commenting on a novel he had recently read, Wilde said, “This is a fine study of the American politician and possesses the quality of truth in characterization. What else has the lady written?”Queens have left little more for the living to chew on. Elizabeth I was whiny (“All my possessions for a moment of time”), while Marie Antoinette was clumsy but polite: “Pardonnez-moi, Monsieur, ” she said, after treading upon her executioner’s toe.Ironically, it may have been the relatively obscure who delivered history’s best exit lines. Has anyone departed the scene better than minor English playwright Henry Arthur Jones, who, asked whom he would prefer to sit with him during the evening, his nurse or his niece, replied, “The prettier. Now fight for it.” Actor Edmund Gwenn was terse: “Dying is easy. Comedy is difficult.” And you have to admire the singleness of purpose in the last words of French grammarian Dominique Bouhours: “I am about to —or I am going to —die; either expression is used.” For sheer entertainment value, you can’t beat the last words of condemned prisoners, particularly if you have a fondness for graveyard humor. Asked by the firing squad commander if he had a last request, James Roges said, “Why yes. A bullet-proof vest!” and you’ve got to love a condemned murderer who can continue to cut up from the electric chair. “How about this for a headline in tomorrow’s paper,” James French said. “French Fries!”Some last words will forever remain an enigma, their meaning gone to the grave along with their speakers. Henry David Thoreau’s “Moose, Indian, ” for instance, and the eerie last words of John Wilkes Booth as he emerged from a burning barn, fatally wounded, looked at his hands and muttered, “Useless, useless.” In a similar vein, what to make of conductor Leonard Bernstain’s last words “What’s this?” or novelist Victor Hugo’s “I see black light”?To me, the most genuine last words are those that arise naturally from the moment, such as Voltaire’s response to a request that he forswear Satan: “This is no time to make new enemies.” Compare that to the stagy, obviously rehearsed “Now comes the mystery” (Henry Ward Beecher) or Ludwig van Beethoven’s “Friends, applaud. The comedy is over.”It may well be that planning your last words is no more profitable a pursuit than preparing our Novel Prize acceptance speech. Who can say when the Grim Reaper will tap a bony finger on your shoulder? It is unlikely that poet Dylan Thomas thought “I’ve had 18 straight whiskeys. I think that’s the record” was going to be swan song.Could it be that “great last words” are a myth of the hale and hearty, and that the expiring understand that the deathbed is no place for philosophizing? Didn’t Christ himself sign off with the unpretentious “It is finished”? Besides, why should the mundane act of dying bring one any closer to the truth? Karl Marx may have had it right, for once, when he answered his housekeeper’s request for last words with: “Go on, get out! Last words are for fools who haven’t said enough!”1.The author’s attitude towards famous last words is ( ) .2.According to the author, when Francisco "Pancho" Villa gave his last words, he ( ).3.The author takes Byron, Goethe and Wilde as examples to show that ( ).4.According to the author, the last words of ( )were comparatively good.5.The author thinks the real last words should be those ( ).

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In the competitive model —the economy of many sellers each with a small share of the total market —the restraint on the private exercise of economic power was provided by other firms on the same side of the market. It was the eagerness of competitors to sell, not the complaints of buyers, that saved the latter from spoliation. It was assumed, no doubt accurately, that the nineteenth-century textile manufacturer who overcharged for his product would promptly lose his market to another manufacturer who did not. If all manufacturers found themselves in a position where they could exploit a strong demand, and mark up their prices accordingly, there would soon be an inflow of new competitors. The resulting increase in supply would bring prices and profits back to normal.As with the seller who was tempted to use his economic power against the customer, so with the buyer who was tempted to use it against his labor or suppliers, the man who paid less than the prevailing wage would lose his lab or force to those who paid the worker his full (marginal) contribution to the earnings of the firm. In all cases the incentive to socially desirable behavior was provided by the competitor. It was to the same side of the market —the restraint of sellers by other sellers and of buyers by other buyers, in other words to competition —that economists came to look for the self-regulatory mechanisms of the economy.They also came to look to competition exclusively and in formal; theory still do. The notion that there might be another regulatory mechanism in the economy had been almost completely excluded from economic thought. Thus, with the widespread disappearance of competition in its classical from and its replacement by the small group of firms if not in overt, at least in conventional or tacit, collusion, it was easy to suppose that since competition had disappeared, all effective restraint on private power had disappeared. Indeed, this conclusion was all but inevitable if no search was made for other restraints, and so complete was the preoccupation with competition that none was made.In fact, new restraints on private power did appear to replace competition. They were nurtured by the same process of concentration which impaired or destroyed competition. But they appeared not on the same side of the market but on the opposite side, not with competitors but with customers or suppliers. It will be convenient to have a name for this counterpart of competition and I shall call it countervailing power.To begin with a broad and somewhat too dogmatically stated proposition, private economic power is held in check by the countervailing power of those who are subject to it. The first begets the second. The long trend toward concentration of industrial enterprise in the hands of a relatively few firms has brought into existence not only strong sellers, as economists have supposed, but also strong buyers, a fact they have failed to see. The two develop together, not in precise step, but in such manner that there can be no doubt that the one is in response to the other.1.The word “spoliation” in the first paragraph probably means ( ).2.How is economic power applied when a manufacturer wants to hire more workers?3.Economists didn’t search for other restraints other than competition because ( ).4.What does the author think of other economists’ prediction about the outcomes of concentration?5.The passage mainly discusses about ( ).

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The teacher of reading is involved, whether this is consciously realized or not, in the development of a literate society. And every teacher, (1) , needs to determine what level of literacy is (2) by society, what role he or she should take in (3) the desired standard of literacy, and what the implications of literacy are in a world context.The Unesco report presents a world (4) of literacy. Too often we limit our thoughts to the (5) small proportion of illiterates in our own country and fail to see it in its international (6).The problems (7) developing nations are also facing industrialized nations. Literacy, as the report points out, is “inextricably intertwined with other aspects of national development”, (and)…national development as a whole is bound (8) with the world context. Literacy is not a by-product of social and economical development — it is a (9) of that development. Literacy can help people to function more effectively in a changing (10) and ideally will enable the individual to change the environment so that it functions more effectively.Literacy programmes (11) in different countries have taken and are taking different (12) to the problem: for example the involvement of voluntary non-governmental organizations, which (13) the importance of seeing literacy not as a condition imposed on people but as a consequence of active participation (14) society. People can learn from the attempts of other countries to provide as (15) “literacy environment”.Who are the “illiterates” and how do we define them? At what point do we decide that illiteracy ends and literacy begins? Robert Hillerich (16) these questions. An illiterate, he finds, “may mean anything from one who has no formal schooling to one who has attended four years or less, to one who is unable to read or write at the level necessary to (17) successfully in his social position.” Literacy, he points out, is not something one either has or has not got: “Any definition of literacy must recognize this quality as a continuum, representing all (18) of development.” An educational definition — i.e. in terms of grades completed or skills mastered — is shown to be inadequate in (19) educationally defined mastery may bear only minimal relation to the language proficiency needed in coping with environmental demands. From a sociological/economic viewpoint the literacy needs of individuals vary greatly, and any definition must recognize the needs of the individual to engage effectively and to act (20) responsible participation.Such a broadened definition excludes assessment based on a “reading-level type”;assessment must, rather, be flexible to fit both purpose and population.

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