Despite extensive construction programs, the problem of housing for the most underprivileged population groups has not been solved. According to the so-called Petrequin Report, between 2 and 3 million families had serious difficulties meeting their housing costs and were living in precarious and uncomfortable conditions.
Policies designed to address the housing problem have shifted over the past few decades from a macroeconomic approach promoting construction to housing subsidies. The reasons for this shift agree with the determination to limit public spending and to avoid some of the perverse effects of macroeconomic policies. The State has to some extent ceased to finance housing, especially the construction of new projects, with the result that the cost is now chiefly and directly borne by the family budget. Many underprivileged families, which were excluded from low-rent housing for various reasons (selection of tenants, saturation of existing capacity, insolvency), had no alternative but to purchase their own home and were encouraged to do so without restraint by the easy terms of housing loans. The housing sector thus contributed to the development of the "economy of indebtedness". It should indeed be emphasized that "widespread home ownership through resource to borrowing could only be to the detriment of low-income families".
In Belgium, the quality of housing, considered the prime indicator of housing deprivation, heaves much to be desired. Low-rent housing projects have been cut back as part of the austerity policy pursued by the national and regional governments, and low-income households are finding it increasingly difficult to find somewhere to live. The number of homeless has also taken on alarming proportions. An estimated 3,000 persons spend the night in refuges, but the figure is probably much higher. Moreover, the number of homeless women and young persons is increasing.
In the author's opinions, housing is _________.
A. a problem solved only by the society and not by individuals
B. invariable and unchangeable
C. not determined by the society
D. socially determinant and changeable
【39】
A. the author
B. the author's
C. the compiler
D. the compiler's
As its title implies, Women in Love is a novel about two pairs of lovers, around whom a series of episodes are dramatically presented. The two heroines are Ursula Brangwen and her younger sister Gudrun; and the two chief male characters are Gerald Crich, a young coalmine owner, and Ruport Birkin, a school inspector. At the opening of the story, Ursula and Birkin strike an immediate kinship with each other, while Gudrun is attracted by Gerald's physical energy. The rest of the novel is a working out of the relationships of these four through interrelating events and conflicts of personalities. After a series of ups and downs, Birkin and Ursula have reached a fruitful relationship by maintaining their integrity and independence as individuals and decided to get married in the end. But the passionate love between Gudrun and Gerald experiences a process of tension and deterioration. As both of them have lit their "will-power" and "ideals" interference with their proper relations, their love turns out to be a disastrous tragedy. Women in Love is rich in its symbolic meanings. Gerald Crich, an efficient but ruthless coalmine owner, who makes the machine his god and establishes the inhuman mechanical system in his mining kingdom, is a symbolic figure of spiritual death, representing the whole set of bourgeois ethics. Whereas Birkin, a self-portrait of Lawrence, who fights against the cramping pressures of mechanized industrialism and the domination of any kind of dead formulas , is presented as a symbolic figure of human warmth, standing for the spontaneous life force. Women in Love is a remarkable novel in which the individual consciousness is subtly revealed and strands of themes are intricately wound up. The structural pattern of the book derives from the contrast between the destinies of the two pairs of lovers and the subordinate masculine relationship between Birkin and Gerald. Thus, Women in Love is regarded to be a more profoundly ordered novel than any other written by Lawrence.
What is the theme of the passage?
A. D.H. Lawrence.
B. Lawrence's novels.
C. Lawrence's masterpieces.
D. A brief introduction of Women in Love.
Part A
Directions: Read the following four texts. Answer the questions below each text by choosing A, B, C or D . Mark your answers on ANSWER SHEET 1.
With the development of science and technology, we know much of glaciers. For all their great diversity of shapes and sizes, glaciers consist of two essential types: valley glaciers, which flow downhill from mountains and are shaped by the constraints of topography, and ice sheets, which flow outward in all directions from domelike centers of accumulated ice to cover vast expanses of terrain. Whatever their types, most glaciers are remnants of great shrouds of ice that covered the earth eons ago. In a few of these glaciers the oldest ice is very ancient indeed: the age of parts of tile Antarctic sheet may be over 500,000 years.
Glaciers are born in rocky wombs above the snow line, where there is sufficient winter snowfall and summer cold for snow to survive the annual melting. The long gestation period of a glacier begins with the accumulation and gradual transformation of snowflakes. Soon after they come to the ground, complex snowflakes are reduced to compact, roughly spherical ice crystals, the basic components of a glacier. As new layer of snow and firn, snow that survives the melting of the previous summer, accumulate, they squeeze out most of the air bubbles trapped within and between the crystals below. This process of recrystallization continues throughout the life of the glacier.
The length of time required for the formation of glacier ice depends mainly upon the temperature and the rate of snowfall. In Iceland, where snowfall is heavy and summer temperature is high enough to produce plenty of melt water, glacier ice may come into being in a relatively short time—for example, ten years. In parts of Antarctica, where snowfall is scant and the ice remains well below its melting temperature year-round, the process may require hundreds of years.
The ice does not become a glacier until it moves under its own weight, and it can not move significantly until it reaches a critical thickness—the point at which the weight of the piled-up layers overcomes the internal strength of the ice and the friction between the ice and the ground. This critical thickness is about 60 feet. The fastest moving glaciers have been gauged at not much more than two and a half-mile per year, and some cover less than 1/100 inch in that same amount of time. But no matter how infinitely small the flow, movement is what distinguishes a glacier from a mere mass of ice.
Which will be the best title for the passage?
A. How Glaciers Come into Being.
B. How Glaciers Move Around.
C. The Classification of Glaciers.
D. The Volume and Shape of Glaciers.