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World Trade Organization Director-general Renato Ruggiero predicted that the WTO would boost global incomes by ＄1 trillion in the next ten years. The pact paves the way for more foreign investment and competition in telecom markets. Many governments are making telecom deregulation a priority and making it easier for outsiders to enter the telecmmunication business.
The pace varies widely. The U.S. and Britain are well ahead of the pack, while Thailand won' t be fully open until 2006. Only 20% of the ＄ 601 billion world market is currently open to competition. That should jump to about 75% in a couple of years-largely due to the Telecom Act in the U. S. last year that deregulated local markets, the opening up of the European Union' s markets from Jan. 1, 1998 and the deregulation in Japan. The WTO deal now provides a forum for the inevitable disputes along the way. It is also symbolic: the first major trade agreement of the post-industrial age. Instead of being obsessed with textile quotas, the WTO pact is proof that governments are realizing that in an information age, telecom is the oil and steel of economies in the future. Businesses around the world are already spending more in total on telecom services than they do on oil.
Consumers, meanwhile, can look forward to a future of lower prices—by some estimates, international calling rates should drop 80% over several years—and better service. Thanks in part to the vastly increased call volume carded by the fiber-optic cables that span the globe today, calling half a world away already costs little more than telephoning next door. The monopolies can no longer set high prices for international calls in many countries. In the U. S. , the world' s most fiercely competitive long distance market, frequent callers since last year have been paying about 12 cents a minute to call Britain, a price not much more than domestic rates.
The new competitive environment on the horizon means more opportunities for companies from the U.S. and U. K. in particular because they have plenty of practice at the rough-and-tumble of free markets. The U. S. lobbied hard for the WTO deal, confident that its firms would be big beneficiaries of more open markets. Britain bas been deregulated since 1984 but will see even more competition than before: in December, the government issued 45 new international licenses to join British Telecom so that it will become a strong competitor in the international market. However, the once-cosseted industry will get rougher worldwide. Returns on capital will come down. Risks will go up. That is how free ,markets work. It will look like any other business.
Which of the following statements can best describe the main theme of the passage？
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Blalkie focuses in particular on the change in styles of growing old embodied in notion of the Third Age. This is the stage of the life course after retirement from paid work, where activity, leisure and pleasure are enjoyed before the onset of old age proper brings social dependency, physical infirmities and death. Blaikie' s book is not about how individuals with an accumulation of chronological years actually experience later life, but is instead an examination of the changing discourses of growing old as these are expressed in popular culture.
Blaikie' s analysis is sensitive to the issues raised by the reconstruction of old age as a "leisure and pleasure" filled life course stage, including its meaningfulness to those without the financial or other resources necessary to enjoy it. Importantly, he also discusses what the cultural reconstruction of the post-retirement phase of the life course means for our understandings and representations of "deep old age" and the biological inevitability of death.
For a book so concerned with the analyses of visual representations of later life, there are few actual illustrations. This must be regarded as a weakness. More often than not, the reader is wholly reliant on Blaikie' s own description of visual sources and his interpretation of how these represent later life. The reproduction of a greater number of cartoons or photographs would bare greatly improved the persuasiveness of his analysis. Nevertheless, this is a timely book which makes an important contribution to the literature on the cultural reconstruction of later life.
According to the first sentence of the article, you can conclude that______.
And so protection of the environment, specifically the control of pollution, now rests on the idea that we, as members of the public, share a right to clean air and water and to the good health that clean air and water quality can give us. But, as always, costs and benefits are involved in any decision to improve the environment.
In an Adam Smithian, self-interested world, entrepreneurs or businessmen are expected to increase their profits as much as possible. The natural way to do this is to produce at the lowest possible cost. But at whose cost？ It is obviously cheaper for entrepreneurs to dump waste into the nearest stream or into the atmosphere than to truck it to some waste disposal facility or to filter it as it comes out of smokestacks. Therefore, what may be sensible for entrepreneurs may not be desirable for the community.
Here is a classic trade-off: When the government intervenes to force entrepreneurs to stop polluting, entrepreneurs have to adopt more expensive means of production or waste disposal. Inevitably, they will charge higher prices, and, given no change in demand, the quantity demanded will drop and workers will be laid off. The trade-off is therefore cleaner air and water or more unemployment. This is how economists view this problem.
According to the passage, the unlawfulness of pollution is relevant to its______.
Days after days my men and I struggle to hold back a tidal wave of crime. Something has gone terribly wrong with our once-proud American way of life. It has happened in the area of values. A key ingredient is disappearing, and I think I know what it is: accountability.
Accountability isn' t hard to define. It means that every person is responsible for his or her actions and liable for their consequences.
Of the many values that hold civilization together—honesty, kindness and so on accountability may be the most important of all. Without it, there can be no respect, no trust, no law and ultimately no society.
My job as a police officer is to impose accountability to people who refuse, or have never learned, to impose it on themselves. But as every policeman knows, external controls on people' s behavior are far less effective than internal restraints such as guilt, shame and embarrassment.
Fortunately there arc still communities—smaller towns, usually where schools maintain disciplines and where parents hold up standards that proclaim, "in this family certain things are not tolerated-they simply are not done!"
Yet more and more, especially in our larger cities and suburbs, these inner restraints are loosening. Your typical robber has none. He considers your property his property; he takes what he wants, including your life if you enrage him.
The main cause of this breakdown is a radical shift in attitudes. Thirty years ago, if a crime was committed, society was considered the victim. Now, in a shocking reversal, it' s the criminal who is considered victimized: by his underprivileged upbringing, by the school that didn' t teach him to read, by the church that failed to reach him with moral guidance, by the parents who didn' t provide a stable home.
I don' t believe it. Many others in equally disadvantaged circumstances choose not to engage in criminal activities. If we free the criminal, even partly, from accountability, we become a society of endless excuses where no one accepts responsibility for anything.
We in America desperately need more people who believe that the person who commits a crime is the one responsible for it.
What the wise man said suggests that ______.
Wives tend to believe that their husbands are infinitely resourceful and versatile. Even husbands who can hardly drive a nail in straight are supposed to be born electricians, carpenters, plumbers and mechanics. When lights fuse, furniture gets rickety, pipes get clogged, or vacuum cleaners fail to operate, wives automatically assume that their husbands will somehow put things right. The worst thing about the do-it-yourself game is that sometimes husbands live under the delusion that they can do anything even when they have been repeatedly proved wrong. It is a question of pride as much as anything else.
Last spring my wife suggested that I call in a man to took at our lawn-mower. It had broken down the previous summer, and though I promised to repair it, I had never got round to it. I would not hear of the suggestion and said that I would fix it myself. One Saturday afternoon, I hauled the machine into the garden and had a close look at it. As far as I could see, it only needed a minor adjustment: a turn of a screw here, a little tightening up there, a drop of oil and it would be as good as new. Inevitably the repair job was not quite so simple. Tile mower firmly refused to mow, so I decided to dismantle it. The garden was soon littered with chunks of metal which had once made up a lawn-mower. But I was extremely pleased with myself. I had traced the cause of the trouble. One of the links in the chain that drives the wheels had snapped. Alter buying a new chain I was faced with the insurmountable task of putting tile confusing jigsaw puzzle together again. I was not surprised to find that the machine still refused to work after I had reassembled it, for the simple reason that I was left with several curiously shaped bits of metal which did not seem to fit anywhere. I gave up in despair. The weeks passed and the grass grew. When my wife nagged me to do something about it, I told her that either I would have to buy a new mower or let the grass grow. Needless to say our house is now surrounded by a jungle. Buried somewhere in deep grass there is a rusting lawn-mower which I have promised to repair one day.
People don't rely on specialized labor so much nowadays because______.
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