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What is the national average percent of unemployment?

A. 9 percent
B. 12 percent
C. 16 percent
D. 18 percent

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What day did Sonora choose as Father's Day?

A. June 19th
B. the third Sunday in June
C. the second Sunday in June
D. June 13th

The citizens of France are once again taking a pasting on the oped pages. Their failing this time is not that they are cheese-eating surrender monkeys, as they were thought to be during the invasion of Iraq, but rather that they voted to reject the new European Union constitution. According to the pundits, this was the timid, shortsighted choice of a backward-looking people afraid to face the globalized future. But another way of looking at it is that the French were simply trying to hold on to their perks-- their cradle-to-grave welfare state and, above all, their cherished 35-hour workweek.
What' s so bad about that? There was a time when the 35-hour workweek was the envy of the world, and especially of Americans, who used to travel to France just so they could watch the French relax. Some people even moved to France, bought farmhouses, adjusted their own internal clocks and wrote admiring, best-selling books about the leisurely and sensual French lifestyle.
But no more. The future, we are told, belongs to the modern, day Stakhanovites, who, like the famous Stalinist-era coal miner, are eager to exceed their quotas: to the people in India, say, who according to Thomas L. Friedman are eager to work a 35-hour day, not a 35-hour week. Even the Japanese, once thought to be workaholics, are mere sluggards compared with people in Hong Kong, where 70 percent of the work force now puts in more than 50 hours a week. In Japan the percentage is just 63 percent, though the Japanese have started what may become the next big global trend by putting the elderly to work. According to figures recently published in The Wall Street Journal, 71 percent of Japanese men between the ages of 60 and 64 still work, compared with 57 percent of American men the same age. In France, needless to say, the number is much lower. By the time they reach 60, only 17 percent of Frenchmen, fewer than one in five, are still punching the clock. The rest are presumably sitting in the cafe, fretting over the Turks, Bulgarians and Romanians, who, if they were admired to the European Union, would come flooding over the French border and work day and night for next to nothing.
How could the futurologists be so wrong? George Jetson, we should recall--the person many of us cartoon-watchers assumed we would someday become--worked a three-hour day, standard in the interplanetary era. Back in 1970, Alvin Toffier predicted that by 2000 we would have so much free time that we wouldn't know how to spend it.
Who does the word "Stakhanovites" refer to according to the passage?

A. Those that are of Russian origin.
B. Those Russian workers.
C. Those exceedingly hardworking ones.
D. Those socialists.

Its subtitle is "Synaesthesia in Art and Music Since 1900." Aristotle formulated the idea that each of the five senses--smell, taste, touch, hearing and sight--had its own proper and distinct sphere of activity. There were overlaps, he said (movement pertained both to sight and touch); and he speculated that the mysteries of color harmony might have something to do with musical harmony, an idea that would resonate for centuries. Musical harmony, as an expression of geometry, was thought to be useful to the study of art and architecture from the Renaissance on. But the notion that there was an essential separation among the sensual spheres persisted into the early 19th century. At the same time reports began to emerge of rare people who said they experienced two sensations simultaneously: they saw colors when they heard sounds, or they heard sounds when they ate something. The condition was called synaesthesia.
It' s no coincidence that scientific interest in synaesthesia coincided with the Symbolist movement in Europe, with its stresses on metaphor, allusion and mystery. Synaesthesia was both metaphorical and mysterious. Scientists were puzzled. People who claimed to have it couldn't agree about exactly what they experienced. "To ordinary individuals one of these accounts seems just as wild and lunatic as another but when the account of one seer is submitted to another seer," noted the Victorian psychologist and polymath Sir Francis Galton in 1883, "the latter is scandalized and almost angry at the heresy of the former."
I have come across via the color historian John Gage an amusing account from some years later by the phonologist Roman Jakobson, who studied a multilingual woman with synaesthesia. The woman described to him perceiving colors when she heard consonants and vowels or even whole words: "As time went on words became simply sounds, differently colored, and the more outstanding one color was, the better it remained in my memory. That is why, on the other hand, I have great difficulty with short English words like jut, jug, lie, lag, etc.: their colors simply run together." Russian, she also told Jakobson, has % lot of long, black and brown words," while German scientific expressions "are accompanied by a strange, dull yellowish glimmer."
What does the word "synaesthesia" refers to?

A. It means that people may appreciate two kinds of beauty at the same time.
B. It means that people may enjoy beauty with all senses at the same time.
C. It holds that different spheres of senses may overlap.
D. It is thoroughly studied by modem science.

Fischer doesn't agree with the critics, because he believe the constitution brings benefit

A. the decisions can be taken more easily
B. ELI' s relationship to the member states is clearly regulated
C. the voting procedures in the European Council have become more elaborate
D. the role of the Commission President has been defined

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