1 The banners are packed, the tickets booked. The glitter and white overalls have been bought, the gas masks just fit and the mobile phones are ready. All that remains is to get to the parties.
2 This week will see a feast of pan-European protests. It started on Bastille Day, last Saturday, with the French unions and immigrants on the streets and the first demonstrations in Britain and Germany about climate change. It will continue tomorrow and Thursday with environmental and peace rallies against President Bush. But the big one is in Genoa, on Friday and Saturday, where the G8 leaders will meet behind the lines of 18,000 heavily armed police.
3 Unlike Prague, Gothenburg, Cologne or Nice, Genoa is expected to be Europe's Seattle, the coming together of the disparate strands of resistance to corporate globalisation.
4 Neither the protesters nor the authorities know what will happen, but some things are predictable. Yes, there will be violence and yes, the mass media will focus on it. What should seriously concern the G8 is not so much the violence, the numbers in the streets or even that they themselves look like idiots hiding behind the barricades, but that the deep roots of a genuine new version of internationalism are growing.
5 For the first time in a generation, the international political and economic condition is in the dock. Moreover, the protesters are unlikely to go away, their confidence is growing rather than waning, their agendas are merging, the protests are spreading and drawing in all ages and concerns.
6 No single analysis has drawn all the strands of the debate together. In the meantime, the global protest "movement" is developing its own language, texts, agendas, myths, heroes and villains. Just as the G8 leaders, world bodies and businesses talk increasingly from the same script, so the protesters' once disparate political and social analyses are converging. The long-term project of governments and world bodies to globalise capital and development is being mirrored by the globalisation of protest.
7 But what happens next? Governments and world bodies are unsure which way to turn. However well they are policed, major protests reinforce the impression of indifferent elites, repression of debate, overreaction to dissent, injustice and unaccountable power.
8 Their options—apart from actually embracing the broad agenda being put to them—are to retreat behind even higher barricades, repress dissent further, abandon global meetings altogether or, more likely, meet only in places able to physically resist the masses.
9 Brussels is considering building a super fortress for international meetings. Genoa may be the last of the European super-protests.
According to the context, the word "parties" at the end of the first paragraph refers to ______.
A. the meeting of the G8 leaders.
B. the protests on Bastille Day.
C. the coming pan-European protests.
D. the big protest to be held in Genoa.
In addition to the economic considerations, there is a______ motive behind Bush's signing
A. partisan
B. social
C. financial
D. cultural
SECTION C NEWS BROADCAST
Directions: In this section you will hear everything ONCE ONLY. Listen carefully and then answer the questions that follow. At the end of each news item, you will be given 10 seconds to answer the questions.
听力原文: A new data shows that the global AIDS epidemic will cause a sharp drop in life expectancy in dozens of countries, in some cases, declines of almost three decades. Several nations are losing a century of progress in extending the length of life. Nations in every part of the world, 51 in all, are suffering declining life expectancies because of an increasing prevalence of HIV infection. The impact is occurring in Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, but is the greatest in Sub-Sahara Africa, a region with only ten percent of the world's population, but 700% of HIV infections.
Seven African countries have life expectancies of less than 40 years. For example, in Botswana, where 39% of the adult population is infected with HIV, life expectancy is 39 years. But by 2010, it will be less than 27 years. Without AIDS, it would have been 44 years. Life expectancies throughout the Caribbean and some central American nations will drop into the 60s by 2010, when it would otherwise be in tile 70s without AIDS. In Cambodia and Burma, they are predicted to decline to around 60 years old, for what would have been in the mid-60s. Even in countries where the number of new infections is dropping, such as Thailand, Uganda and Senegal, small life expectancy drop is forecast. Back in the early 1990s, we never would have suspected that population growth would turn negative because of AIDS mortality. In less than 10 years, we expect that 5 countries will be experiencing negative population growth because of AIDS mortality, including South Africa, Mozambique, Lesotho, Botswana and Swaziland.
Which of the following regions in the world will witness the sharpest drop in life expectancy?
A. Latin America.
B. Sub-Saharan Africa.
C. Asia.
D. The Caribbean.