Section B
Directions: In this section, you will hear 3 short passages. At the end of each passage, you will hear some questions. Both the passage and the questions will be spoken only once. After you hear a question, you must choose the best answer from the four choices marked A, B, C and D.
听力原文: Good afternoon. I want to thank Professor Jones for giving me the opportunity to talk to you students today about Alaska. One of the things that concerns me most is the future of Alaska environment. About 20 yearn ago before going on a wilderness research expedition, I visited Anchorage, the largest city in Alaska. It was then a small city of 40,000 inhabitants, surrounded by a quiet wilderness. When I made a recent trip to update my early work, I found amazing changes. Anchorage now has 180,000 people, more than four times as many as in 1960. Those skyscrapers, shopping centres and all the accompanying crowds and traffic jams. The forests and mountains are still nearby, but they seem diminished by the city's great size. The discovery of oil in 1968 on the north slope of Alaska caused many of these changes. The construction of the oil pipeline brought increased wealth to the state. However, them have been too many people moving to Alaska in a short period to work on the pipeline. There was not enough housing and transportation. I think Alaska must make important decisions soon. Alaska needs to decide how to develop their natural resources and mineral wealth without destroying the wilderness and harming the wild life. What is decided on now will affect generations to come.
(27)
An environment protector.
B. A visiting scholar.
C. An engineer on construction.
D. A tourist who have visited Alaska.
Is College Really Worth the Money?
The Real World
Este Griffith had it all figured out. When she graduated from the University of Pittsburgh in April 2001, she had her sights set on one thing: working for a labor union.
The real world had other ideas. Griffith left school with not only a degree, but a boatload of debt. She owed $15.000 in student loans and had racked up $4,000 in credit card debt for books, groceries and other expenses. No labor union job could pay enough to bail her out.
So Griffith went to work instead for a Washington, D.C. firm that specializes in economic development. Problem solved? Nope. At age 24, she takes home about $1,800 a month, $1,200 of which disappears to pay her rent. Add another $180 a month to retire her student loans and $300 a month to whittle down her credit card balance. "You do the math," she says.
Griffith has practically no money to live on. She brown-bags (自带午餐) her lunch and bikes to work. Above all, she fears she'll never own a house or be able to retire. It's not that she regrets getting her degree. "But they don't tell you that the trade-off is the next ten years of your income," she says.
That's precisely the deal being made by more and more college students. They're mortgaging their futures to meet soaring tuition costs and other college expenses. Like Griffith, they're facing a one-two punch at graduation: hefty (沉重的) student loans and smothering credit card debt—not to mention a job market that, for now anyway, is dismal.
"We axe forcing our children to make a choice between two evils," says Elizabeth Warren, a Harvard Law professor and expert on bankruptcy. "Skip college and face a life of diminished opportunity, or go to college and face a life shackled (束缚) by debt."
Tuition Hikes
For some time, colleges have insisted their steep tuition hikes are needed to pay for cutting-edge technologies, faculty and administration salaries, and rising health care costs. Now there's a new culprit (犯人): shrinking state support. Caught in a severe budget crunch, many states have sharply sealed back their funding for higher education.
Someone had to make up for those lost dollars. And you can guess who—especially if you live in Massachusetts, which last year hiked its tuition and fees by 24 percent, after funding dropped by 3 percent, or in Missouri, where appropriations (拨款) fell by 10 percent, but tuition rose at double that rate. About one-third of the states, in fact, have increased tuition and fees by more than 10 percent.
One of those states is California, and Janet Burrell's family is feeling the pain. A bookkeeper in Torrance, Burrell has a daughter at the University of California at Davis. Meanwhile, her sons attend two-year colleges because Burrell can't afford to have all of them in four-year schools at once.
Meanwhile, even with tuition hikes, California's community colleges are so strapped for cash they dropped thousands of classes last spring. The result: 54,000 fewer students.
Collapsing Investments
Many families thought they had a surefire plan: even if tuition kept skyrocketing, they had invested enough money along the way to meet the costs. Then a funny thing happened on the way to Wall Street. Those investments collapsed with the stuck market. Among the losers last year: the wildly popular "529" plans—federal tax-exempt college savings plans offered by individual states, which have attracted billions from families around the country. "We hear from many parents that what they had set aside declined in value so much that they now don't have enough to see their students through," says Penn State financial aid director Anna Griswold, who witnessed a 10 percent increase in loan applications last year. Even with a market that may be slowly recovering, it will take time, perhaps several years, for people to recoup (补偿) their losses.
Nadine Sayegh is
A. Y
B. N
C. NG
2010年3月13 在对某施工现场进行检查时发现,尚未完工的大楼内有8名建筑工人居住。施工单位解释由于现场场地狭窄,且工期紧,暂时无法解决这些建筑工人的居住问题。经行政部门核实,施工单位的说法属实。对此问题正确的解决方式是()。
A. 这些建筑工人可以居住,但不得使用明火
B. 这些建筑工人不能居住,必须立即搬出
C. 经建设行政主管部门同意,这些建筑工人可以居住,但要采取必要的消防安全措施
D. 经公安消防机构批准后,这些建筑工人可以居住,但要采取必要的消防安全措施