题目内容
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The Democrats are hesitant to support Mr. Bush on this issue in that ______.
A．the plan will be of no value to the Democrats.
B．this issue involves political competition between parties.
C．they want to wait for a democratic president to improve the plan.
D．they think it is selfish for Mr. Bush to carry out the plan.
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President George Bush tried again this week to bring a more rational tone to the debate. He urged the new Democratic Congress to revive the immigration reforms that the old Republican Congress killed last year. His proposal was broadly the same as before. He said he wanted to make it harder to enter America illegally, but easier to do so legally, and to offer a path to citizenship for the estimated 12m illegals who have already snuck in.
The first part faces few political hurdles and is already well under way. Mr. Bush expects to have doubled the number of Border Patrol agents by the end of next year. The new recruits are being trained. And to defend against the invading legions of would-be gardeners and hotel cleaners, the frontier is also equipped with high-tech military gizmos(小发明), such as unmanned spy planes with infra-red(红外) cameras. This may be having some effect. Mr. Bush boasted that the number of people caught sneaking over the border had fallen by nearly 30% this year.
And the controversial part of Mr. Bush's immigration package—allowing more immigrants in and offering those already in America a chance to become legal—is still just a plan. House Republicans squashed it last year. Mr. Bush senses a second chance with the new Democratic Congress, but Democrats, like Republicans, are split on the issue. Some, notably Ted Kennedy, think America should embrace hard-working migrants. Others fret that hard-working migrants will undercut the wages of the native-born.
Mr. Bush would like to see the pro-immigrant wings of both parties work together to give him a bill he can sign. The Senate is expected to squeeze in a debate next month. The administration is trying to entice law-and-order Republicans on board; a recent leaked memo talked of substantial fines for illegals before they can become legal and" much bigger" fines for employers who hire them before they do.
The biggest hurdle, however, may be the Democrats' reluctance to co-operate with Mr. Bush. Some figure that, rather than letting their hated adversary share the credit for fixing the immigration system, they should stall until a Democrat is in the White House and then take it all. So there is a selfish as well as a moral argument for making a deal.
The word "misdemeanours" (Line 3, Paragraph 1) can be replaced by ______.
A．severe crimes.
B．homicide.
C．misbehaviors.
D．nonsense doings.
But while momentum is building for several measures, including a bill that would allow the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries to be sued in American courts under antitrust laws, there is little sign that any of the proposals would do much, if anything, to lower prices quickly. And the oil executives warned that government intervention might only make things worse. Instead, they called on Congress to allow more drilling and exploration for domestic oil.
The increasing urgency to seem aggressive about gasoline prices was apparent on Tuesday when the House voted by an overwhelming 324 to 84 to approve the bill, commonly referred to as NOPEC, which classifies OPEC as a monopoly in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act. Senate Democrats have included that measure as part of a package of legislation intended to address the high price of gasoline, along with the tax on windfall profits and a measure to tamp down speculation in the oil futures market that many lawmakers think is contributing to the run-up in prices.
At the Judiciary Committee hearing, Democratic senators struggled to have the executives explain how oil prices had risen so high. The senators expressed doubt that basic laws of supply and demand were at work and suggested instead a more sinister combination of monopolistic behavior. by oil-producing countries, speculation in the futures markets and sheer corporate greed.
On Monday, President Bush signed a bill temporarily suspending the purchase of crude oil for the nation's Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Mr. Bush had initially opposed such action but relented after the House and Senate approved the bill by wide margins. Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois and a strong supporter of Senator Baraek Obama's presidential bid, made a particularly pointed attack, in which he seemed to warn the oil executives that they would soon no longer have such a good friend in the White House. He also suggested that Mr. Bush should be doing more to press the oil companies to help lower prices at the pump, while acknowledging that it would be difficult to pass a windfall profits tax while Mr. Bush was still in office.
Senate Democrats were angry with the oilmen because______.
A．they get tax-free pay packages
B．Congress took on actions but in vain
C．the showdowns were merely a routine
D．oil prices had risen so high
Some Democrats oppose to Ted Kennedy, because they believe that ______.
A．America should encourage the coming of hard-working migrants.
B．hard-working migrants will make the natives enjoy less salary.
C．diligent migrants will snatch more jobs from natives.
D．migrants will undercut the working conditions of the native-born.
One of the most important figures for Gordon Brown when presenting his pre-election budget on March 16th was the current-budget balance. This is the gap between current revenues and current spending. It matters to the chancellor of the exchequer(财政部长) because he is committed to meeting his own "golden rule" of borrowing only to invest, so he has to ensure that the current budget is in balance or surplus over the economic cycle.
Mr. Brown told MPs that he would meet the golden rule for the current cycle with & 6 billion ($11.4 billion) to spare—a respectable-sounding margin, though much less than in the past. However, the margin would have been halved but for an obscure technical change announced in February by the Office for National Statistics to the figures for road maintenance of major highways. The ONS said that the revision was necessary because it had been double-counting this spending within the current budget.
If this were an isolated incident, then it might be disregarded. But it is not the first time that the ONS has made decisions that appear rather convenient for the government. Mr. Brown aims to meet another fiscal rule, namely to keep pubic net debt below 40% of GDP, again over the economic cycle. At present he is meeting it but his comfort room would be reduced if the & 21 billion borrowings of Network Rail were included as part of public debt. They are not thanks to a controversial decision by the ONS to classify the rail-infrastructure corporation within the private sector, even though the National Audit Office, Parliament's watchdog, said its borrowings were in fact government liabilities.
This makes it particularly worrying that the official figures can show one thing, whereas the public experiences another. One of the highest-profile targets for the NHS is that no patient should spend more than four hours in a hospital accident and emergency department. Government figures show that by mid-2004, the target was being met for 96% of patients. But according to a survey of 55,000 patients by the Healthcare Commission, an independent body, only 77% of patients said they stayed no more than four hours in A&E.
One way to help restore public confidence in official statistics would be to make the ONS independent, as the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats have suggested. Another would be for the National Audit Office to assess how the government has been performing against targets, as the Public Administration Committee has recommended.
It can be inferred from the first paragraph that
A．the British politicians are often compared to boxers by the people.
B．it is a common practice that the government plays with figures.
C．people often overestimate the credibility of official statistics.
D．the Labor government usually underestimate its official figures.
B、The Labor Party
C、The Republican Party
D、The Liberal Democrats
As drafted, the bill seeks to mend America's broken immigration system in several ways. First, and before its other main provisions come into effect, it would tighten border security. It provides for 200 miles (320 km) of vehicle barriers, 370 miles of fencing and 18,000 new border patrol agents. It calls for an electronic identification system to ensure employers verily that all their employees are legally allowed to work. And it stiffens punishments for those who knowingly hire illegals.
As soon as the bill was unveiled, it was stoned from all sides. Christans, mostly Republicans, denounced it as an "amnesty" that would encourage further waves of illegal immigration. Tom Tancredo, a Republican congressman running for president (without hope of success) on an anti-illegal-immigration platform, demanded that all but the border-security clauses be scrapped. Even these he 'derided as "so limited it's almost a joke". Conservative talkradio echoed his call. No one is seriously proposing mass deportation, but Mr. Tancredo says the illegals will all go home if the laws against hiring them are vigorously enforced.
Most labor unions are skeptical, too. The AFL-CIO denounced the guest-worker program, which it said would give employers "a ready pool of labor that they can exploit to drive down wages, benefits, health and safety protections" for everyone else. Two Democratic senators tried to gut the program. One failed to abolish it entirely; another succeeded in slashing it from 400 000 to 200,000 people a year.
Employers like the idea of more legal migrants but worry that the new system will be cumbersome. Many object to the idea that they will have to check the immigration status of all their employees. The proposed federal computer system to sort legal from illegal workers is bound to make mistakes. Even ff only one employee in a hundred is falsely labeled illegal, that will cause a lot of headaches. And the points system has drawbacks, too. Employers are better placed than bureaucrats to judge which skills are in short supply. That is why the current mess has advantages—illegal immigrants nearly always go where their labor is in demand.
Other groups have complaints, too. Immigrant-rights groups say that the path to citizenship would be too long and arduous and too few Hispanics would qualify. Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic speaker of the House, fretted that the new stress on skills would hurt families, adding that her party is "about families and family values". Some people worry that House Democrats will kill it to prevent Mr. Bush from enjoying a domestic success.
Despite the indignation, public opinion favors the underlying principles. At least 60% of Americans want to give illegals a chance to become citizens if they work hard and behave.
Ted Kennedy is mentioned in the first paragraph to
A．introduce the main topic of immigration law reforming.
B．remind the Senate that they have an awesome responsibility.
C．stress the importance of securing the border and easing skills shortage.
D．emphasize the fact that even a Senator is a descendant of immigrants.
Most firms' annual general meetings (AGMs) owe more to North Korea than ancient Greece. By long-standing tradition, bosses make platitudinous speeches, listen to lone dissidents with the air of psychiatric nurses towards patients and wait for their own proposals to be rubber-stamped by the proxy votes of obedient institutional investors. According to Manifest, a shareholder-advice firm, 97% of votes cast across Europe last year backed management.
So should corporate democrats be cheered by the rebellion over pay at Royal Dutch Shell？ At the oil giant's AGM on May 19th, 59% of voting shareholders sided against pay packages for top executives. In particular they disliked 4.2 million ($ 5.8 million) in shares dished out to five executives, which comprised about 12% of their total pay for 2008．Under the firm's rules, such awards should be granted only if Shell's total return in the year is in the top three of its peer group. In 2007 and 2008, Shell came a very close fourth, so the firm decided to pay out anyway.
Shell is hardly a poster child for malfeasance: it is performing well, its pay is similar to that at other big oil firms and its shareholders previously gave directors discretion to bend the rules. They have used it to cut pay in the past. Still, although the vote is not binding, it is seriously embarrassing. The turnout was decent, at about 50%, and several big fund managers were clearly furious. The payouts have already been made and probably cannot be reversed, but Shell will be in disgrace for a while. Jorma Ollila, its chairman, said he took the vote "very seriously" and promised to "reflect carefully". After GSK, a British drugs firm, had a rebellion on pay in 2003, it completely redrew its pay policy.
It is not just Shell that is facing unrest. Rough markets and a wider political uproar over pay have fuelled discontent across corporate Europe. Almost half of the voting shareholders at BP, another oil giant, failed to support its pay policies in April. At Rio Tinto, a mining firm with a habit of digging holes for itself, a fifth of voting shareholders rejected its remuneration policy. So far this year 15% of votes cast on pay in Britain have dissented, compared with 7% last year. In continental Europe owners are grumpy, too: in February almost a third of voting shareholders at Novartis, a Swiss drugs firm, demanded the right to approve its remuneration policy each year.
But taking bosses to task for their ever-escalating salaries is not a substitute for keen oversight of performance and strategy. At Royal Bank of Scotland, which had to be rescued by taxpayers last year, 90% of voting shareholders rejected its pay policies last month. Yet back in August 2007, 95% of them ticked the box in support of the acquisition of ABN AMRO, the deal that brought the bank to its knees.
What can we infer from "most firms' annual general meetings (AGMs) owe more to North Korea than ancient Greece" in the first paragraph？
A．In the AGM there are some Greek traditions to be followed.
B．In the AGM, most of the time investors will vote in favour of the company's proposals without proposing any objections.
C．AGM was first created by North Korea and then accepted by European countries.
D．In the AGM it is always the case that any proposal will encounter severe debate, as Greeks are in strong favour of rhetoric.
Part A
Directions: Read the following four texts. Answer the questions below each text by choosing A, B, C or D. (40 points)
That low moaning sound in the background just might be the Founding Fathers protesting from beyond the grave. They have been doing it when George Bush, at a breakfast of religious leaders, scorched the Democrats for failing to mention God in their platform. and declaimed that a President needs to believe in the Almighty. What about the constitutional ban on "religious test(s)" for public office？ The Founding Fathers would want to know. What about Tom Jefferson's conviction that it is Possible for a nonbeliever to be a moral person, "find(ing) incitements to virtue in the comfort and pleasantness you feel in its exercise"？ Even George Washington must shudder in his sleep to hear the constant emphasis on "Judeo-Christian values". It was he who wrote, "We have abundant reason to rejoice that in this Land...every person may here worship God according to the dictates of his own heart".
George Bush should know better than to encourage the theocratic ambitions of the Christian right. The "wall of separation" the Founding Fathers built between church and state is one of the best defenses freedom has ever had. Or have we already forgotten why the Founding Fathers put it up？ They had seen enough religious intolerance in the colonies: Quaker women were burned at the stake in Puritan Massachusetts; Virginians could be jailed for denying the Bible's authority. No wonder John Adams once described the Judeo-Christian tradition as "the most bloody religion that ever existed", and that the Founding Fathers took such pains to keep the hand that holds the musket separate from the one that carries the cross.
There was another reason for the separation of church and state, which no amount of pious ranting can expunge: not all the Founding Fathers believed in the same God, or in any God at all. Jefferson was a renowned doubter, urging his nephew to "question with boldness even the existence of a God". John Adams was at least a skeptic, as were of course the revolutionary firebrands Tom Paine and Ethan Allen. Naturally, they designed a republic in which they themselves would have a place.
Yet another reason argues for the separation of church and state. If the Founding Fathers had one overarching aim, it was to limit the power not of the churches but of the state. They were deeply concerned, as Adams wrote, that "government shall be considered as having in it nothing more mysterious or divine than other arts or sciences". Surely the Republicans, committed as they are to "limited government", ought to honor the secular spirit that has limited our government from the moment of its birth.
What is implied in the first sentence？
A．The president confused religion with state unwisely.
B．The president's reference to God annoyed the dead.
C．The president criticized his opponents for ignorance.
D．The president's standpoint was boldly questioned.
______today, he would get there by Friday.
A．Would he leave
B．If he leaves
C．Was he leaving
D．Were he to leave
