题目内容
BRITAIN locks up more of its people than any other country in western Europe: 145 out of every 100,000 compared with France's 88 (though a fraction of America's 738). Sentences have got tougher, with longer stints in prison for pettier offences. Crime is, broadly, falling. Yet the British have less confidence in their government's ability to crack down on violence and crime than the French, Germans, Italians, Spanish or Americans, an Ipsos-MORl poll revealed last week.
For that, thank a run of bad news which has Britons reeling from headline to headline. If one were to believe the tabloids, pedophiles are rampaging through the schools and unreported foreign felons through the countryside. A string of crimes by convicts on early release culminated in a particularly sad and nasty sexual assault on a three-year-old girl, which came before the courts this month.
Carefully stoked by the press, popular passions are running high against everyone involved with the administration of justice. One home secretary (the minister in charge of prisons, the police and immigration) got the boot in May. His successor, John Reid, is busily putting the boot into everyone else, lambasting judges for being soft on crime and scaring the daylights out of his department. The Tories are demanding more prisons. Meanwhile, Tony Blair was due on June 23rd to urge a new balance between the rights of offenders and those of victims in favour of the latter.
Mr. Blair is right to ask whether society's interests are best served by the status quo. The criminal justice system requires a degree of public trust that at the moment is lacking. This is a chance not for lock-'emup posturing, but for a dispassionate look at how to make the administration of justice more effective. Start with one simple fact behind most of the headlines: Britain's prisons are bursting at the seams.
At current rates of sentencing, the inspector of prisons warns, jails will be full by September. This matters: the shunting of prisoners from pillar to post by harried staff is undermining efforts to return offenders to society in a state fit to stay there. They lose touch with their families; they leave courses and drug-detox programmes; wardens they knew lose track of them. Two out of three re offend within two years of release. If politicians and judges, egged on by the press, insist on locking people up for longer, it will get worse.
How to fix things？ Building more prisons is the obvious answer. Labour has already added thousands of new places, and both main parties talk of adding more. But Britain's jails always fill up, no matter how many there are. And new cells cost about ￡100,000 ($184,000) apiece. A better answer than banging more people up inside is to strengthen facilities to deal with them outside.
Society is protected in the short run when offenders are locked up, and in the long run when they are reformed. Violent and dangerous criminals belong behind bars. But many others end up in prison for want of anywhere else to go. What about them？
Many mentally ill criminals would be more easily reclaimed in facilities other than catch-all prisons, though prison drug programmes are in fact quite successful. So would many women prisoners, who tend to show violence only to themselves and elsewhere thrive in smaller detention centres close to home. Halfway houses are a plausible place for non-violent offenders of both sexes on short sentences or nearing the end of their time. Those in touch with their families are less likely to re-offend, and so are those who have jobs to go to when they leave. Non-custodial community sentences have yet to prove their worth; the rate of recidivism seems disappointingly close to that of people who serve prison terms. But those figures may change as the approach becomes more common and new cohorts of offenders affect the statistics.
These suggestions are not new. The Home Office
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A．Colloquial ArabicB．EsperantoC．Proper ArabicD．Written Arabic
听力原文：Man: Good evening. Today, we invited Professor Lynch, an expert on Arabian culture to tell us some facts about the language that we may not really know.
Woman: Hi, good evening. It's my honor to be here to share my knowledge with everybody.
Man: So, professor, I wonder if all the Arabs speak the same language, Arabic, just like people living in the North America all speak English.
Woman: It is generally thought that Arabic is a single language, spoken, written and understood by people in countries as widely separated as Iraq, Egypt and Morocco, but this is not so. It is only written Arabic (that is, the Classical Arabic of the Koran and the Modem Arabic of contemporary literature, journalism and broadcasting), that is more or less common to the whole of the Arab world. The colloquial Arabic, which is spoken in the different Arab societies today, differs as widely between Arab countries as do Italian, Spanish and Portuguese.
Man: That's surprising! So you mean all the Arabs from different countries can understand others' written language, but not the spoken language？
Woman: You are partly right. In the Arab world, written Arabic acts as a kind of Esperanto, providing a means of communication between educated people of different Arab nationalities. Written Arabic is, paradoxically, spoken too: on the radio and television, in public speeches, as well as between Arabs from different countries. We could call it pan Arabic. It is used in rather the same way as Latin was used by educated people in Europe in the Middle Ages.
Man: It seems as if there are a lot of differences between written Arabic and colloquial Arabic. Shall we say that they belong to one language？
Woman: It's a little complicated to explain. As we all know, even in English, of course, there are differences of grammar and vocabulary between the written and spoken language, but this difference is far less than that between the artificial pan-Arabic and the living colloquial language of any Arab country. Moreover, both written and spoken English are recognized in English-speaking countries as belonging to one living language, and both are taught in schools. Colloquial Arabic, on the other hand, is not regarded by the people who speak it as "proper" Arabic. Unlike colloquial English, it is not taught in schools, and it is not written; indeed, there is a strong feeling in Arab societies that it should not be used in a written form.
Man: So what language, pan-Arabic or colloquial Arabic, does an Arab, say, an Egyptian, use mainly in his everyday life？
Woman: An educated Egyptian uses pan-Arabic to talk to equally educated Iraqis, Saudis and Moroccans. No reasonable man, however, wishes to talk like a book or a newspaper, and the language that the same educated Egyptian uses with his family and with other Egyptians is quite different. This language is wholly Egyptian, and it is only spoken.
Questions:
11.What mistaken view do most people hold about Arabic？
12.According to the talk, which language is more or less common to the whole of the Arab world？
13.How is pan-Arabic similar to Esperanto？
14.Which of the following is NOT taught in schools？
15.Which of the following statements is TRUE according to the talk？
(31)
A．Written English.B．Colloquial English.C．Written Arabic.D．Colloquial Arabic.
The duties of air freight agent include:()
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