The captive, Kenneth Bigley, appealed to British Prime Minister Tony Blair to intervene. "I think this is possibly my last chance,'" he said. "I don't want to die."
Bigley was being held by a militant group led by Jordanian-born terror mastermind Abu Musabal Zarqawi. The group has already beheaded Americans Eugene Armstrong and Jack Hensley, whom it abducted along with Bigley from the Westerners' Baghdad home last week.
On Wednesday, the group also posted a video of Hensley's killing on the Internet, as it had two days earlier of Armstrong's beheading. Henaley's decapitated body was found Wednesday in Baghdad.
More than 130 foreigners have been kidnapped in Iraq, and at least 26 of them have been killed. Many more Iraqis have also been seized in the chaos since Saddam was ousted last year, in many eases for ransom.
In the video, the British hostage ______.
A. assured his family members that he was safe
B. asked the British government to save his life
C. criticize the British government for not taking action
D. denounced those who captured him very bravely
Prices determine how resources are to be used. They are also the means by which products and services that are in limited supply are rationed among buyers. The price system of the United States is a very complex network composed of the prices of all the products bought and sold in the economy as well as those of a myriad of services, including labor, professions, transportation, and public-utility services. The interrelationship of all these prices make the "system" of prices. The price of any particular product or service is linked to a broad, complicated system of prices in which everything seems to depend more or less upon everything else. If one were to ask a group of randomly selected individuals to define "price", many would reply that price is an amount of money paid by the buyer to the seller of a product or service, or in other words, that price is the money value of a product or service as agreed upon in market transaction. This definition is, of course, valid as far as it goes. For a complete understanding of a price in a particular transaction, much more than the money involved must be known. Both the buyer and seller should be familiar with not only the money amount, but with the a mount and quality of the product or service to be exchanged, the time and place at which the exchange will take place and payment will be made, the form. of money to be used, the credit terms and discounts that apply to the transaction, guarantees on the product or service, delivery terms, return privilege, and other factors. In other words, both the buyer and seller should be fully aware of all the factors that compose the total "package" being exchanged for the asked--for amount of money in order that they may evaluate a given price. (308)
The best title for the passage is ______.
A. The Inherent Weaknesses of the Price System
B. The Complexities of the Price System
Credit Terms in Transactions
D. Resource Allocation and the Public Sector
What is Chief Kufa's attitude towards the work of the women farmers?
A. Neutral.
B. Indifferent,
C. Negative.
D. Positive.
Civilization and History
Most of the people who appear most often and most gloriously in the history books are great conquerors and generals and soldiers, whereas the people who really helped civilization forward are often never mentioned at ail. We do not know who first set a broken leg, or launched a seaworthy boat, or calculated the length of the year, or manured a field; but we know all about the killers and destroyers. People think a great deal of them, so much so that on all the highest pillars in the great cities of the world you will find the figure of a conqueror or a general or a soldier. And I think most people believe that the greatest countries are those that have beaten in battle the greatest number of other countries arid ruled over them as conquerors. It is just possible they are, but they are not the most civilized. Animals fight; so do savages; hence to be good at fighting is to be good in the way in which an animal or a savage is good, but it is not to be civilized. Even being good at getting other people to fight for you and telling them bow to do it most efficiently--this, after all, is what conquerors and generals have done--is not being civilized. People fight to settle quarrels. Fighting means killing, and civilized peoples ought to be able to find some Way of settling their disputes other than by seeing which side can kill off the greater number of the other side, and then saying that side which has killed most has won. And not only has won, but, because it has won, has been in the right. For that is what going to war means; it means saying that might is right.
That is what the story of mankind has on the whole been like. Even our own age has fought the two greatest wars in history, in which millions of people were killed or mutilated. And while today it is true that people do not fight and kill each other in the streets--while, that is to say, we have got to the stage of keeping the rules and behaving properly to each other in daily life--nations and countries have not learnt to do this yet, and still behave like savages.
But we must not expect too much. After all, the race of men has only just started. From the point of view of evolution, human beings are very young children indeed, babies, in fact, of a few months old. Scientists reckon that there has been life of some sort on the earth in the form. of jellyfish and that kind of creature for a- bout twelve hundred million years, and there have been civilized men for about eight thousand years at the out side. These figures are difficult to grasp; so let us scale them down. Suppose that we reckon the whole past of living creatures on the earth as one hundred years; then the whole past of man works out at about one month, and during that month there have been civilizations for between seven and eight hours. So you see there has been little time to learn in, but there will be oceans of time in which to learn better. Taking man's civilized past at about seven or eight hours, we may estimate his future, that is to .say, the whole period between now and when the sun grows too cold to maintain life any longer on the earth, at about one hundred thousand years. Thus mankind is only at the beginning of its civilized life, and as I say, we must not expect too much. The past of man has been on the whole a pretty beastly business, a business of fighting and bullying and gorging and grabbing and hurting. We must not expect even civilized peoples not to have done these things. All we can ask is that they will sometimes have done something else. (668)
The author says that civilized people should ______.
A. not have any quarrels to settle
B. not fight when there are no quarrels to settle
C. settle their quarrels without fighting
D. settle their quarrels by seeing which side can kill off the greatest number of the other side