题目内容
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： The Clinton Administration Friday announced that it will close down US aid missions in 21 countries over the next three years. The move is seen as the key element in a plan to reorganize the US Agency for International Development and redefine its goals in the post Cold War era.
Details from VOA’s Douglas Roberts at the State Department. "The announcement has been expected for many months and the only question at the Friday’s news conference by AID Administrator Bryan Rat Wood was which nations would be affected by the cutbacks, nine in Africa, four in Asia, six in Latin America and two in the Near East. Mr. Rat Wood said some have developed beyond the need for aid operations but others have been what he termed ' poor partners in the development process. ' He singled out Zaire or a dictatorial government has followed policies that made AID operations ineffective. ' We can no longer expect to go to the Congress of the United States, to the American people and tell them that we' re going to be investing their dollars in countries with governments such as the government of Zaire. That is the princi pal message of the announcement that we are making today. ' Mr. Rat Wood said AID will now concentrate on sustainable development programs in some fifty nations focusing on key areas including the environment, health and population, economic growth and the promotion of democracy. Douglas Roberts, VOA news at the State Department."
The Clinton Administration announced Friday that ______.
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Policymakers and industry have four options: reduce vehicle use, increase the efficiency and reduce the emissions of conventional gasoline powered vehicles, switch to less harmful fuels, or find less polluting driving systems. The last of these-in particular the introduction of vehicles powered by electricity-is ultimately the only sustainable option. The other alternatives are attractive in theory but in practice are either impractical or offer only marginal improvements. For example, reduced vehicle use could solve traffic problems and a host of social and environmental problems, but evidence from around the world suggests that it is very difficult to make people give up their cars to any significant extent. In the U .S., mass-transit ridership and carpooling have declined since World War Il . Even in western Europe, with fuel prices averaging more than $ 1 a liter (about $ 4 a gallon) and with easily accessible mass transit and dense populations, cars still account for 80 percent of all passenger travel.
Improved energy efficiency is also appealing, but automotive fuel economy has barely made any progress in 10 years. Alternative fuels such as natural gas, burned in internal-combustion engines, could be introduced at relatively low cost, but they would lead to only marginal reductions in pollution and greenhouse emissions (especially because oil com panics are already spending billions of dollars every year to develop less polluting types of gasoline) .
From the passage we know that the increased use of cars will______.
Imagine eating everything delicious you want-with none of the fat. That would be great, wouldn't it？
New "fake fat" products appeared on store shelve in the United States recently, but not everyone is happy about it. Makers of the products, which contain a compound called olestra, say food manufacturers can now eliminate fat from certain foods. Critics, however, say the new. eliminate can rob the body of essential vitamins and nutrients and can also cause unpleasant side effects in some people. So it's up to decide whether the new fat-free products taste good enough to keep eating.
Chemists discovered olestra in tile late 1960s, when they were searching for a fat that could be digested by infants more easily. Instead of finding the desired Fat, the researchers created a fat that can't be digested at all.
Normally, special chemicals in the intestines "grab" molecules of regular fat and break them down so they can be used by the body. A
molecule of regular fat is made up of three molecules of substances called fatty acids.
The fatty acids are absorbed by the intestines and bring with them the essential vitamins A, D, E, and K. When fat molecules are present in the intestines with any of those vitamins, the vitamins attach to tbe molecules and are carried into the bloodstream.
Olestra, which is made from six to eight molecules of fatty acids, is too large for the intestines to absorb. It just slides through the intestines without being broken down. Manufacturers say it's that ability to slide unchanged through the intestines that makes olestra so valuable as a fat substitute. It provides consumers with the taste of regular fat without any bad effects on the body. But critics say olestra can prevent vitamins A, D, E, and K from being absorbed. It can also prevent the absorption of carotenoids, compounds that may reduce the risk of cancer, heart disease, etc.
Manufacturers are adding vitamins A, D, E, and K as well as carotenoids to their products now. Even so, some nutritionists are still concerned that people might eat unlimited amounts of food made with the fat substitute without worrying about how many calories they are consuming.
We learn from the passage that olestra is a substance that______.
When imaginative men turn their eyes towards space and wonder whether life exists in any part of it, they may cheer themselves by remembering that life need not resemble closely the life that exists on Earth. Mars looks like the only planet where life like ours could exist, and even this is doubtful. But there may be other kinds of life based on other kinds of chemistry, and they may multiply on Venus or Jupiter. At least we cannot prove at present that they do not.
Even more interesting is the possibility that life on their planets may be in a more advanced stage of evolution. Present-day man is in a peculiar and probably temporary stage. His individual units retain a strong sense of personality. They are, in fact, still capable under favorable circumstances of leading individual lives. But man's societies are already sufficiently developed to have enormously more power and effectiveness
than the individuals have.
It is not likely that this transitional situation will continue very long on the evolutionary time scale. Fifty thousand year's from now man's societies may have become so close-knit that the individuals retain no sense of separate personality. Then little distinction will remain between the organic parts of the multiple organism and the inorganic parts (machines) that have been constructed by it. A million years further on man and his machines may have merged as closely as the muscles of the human body and nerve cells that set them in motion.
The explorers of space should be prepared for some' such situation. If they arrive on a foreign planet that has reached an advanced stage (and this is by no means impossible), they may find it being inhabited by a single large organism composed of many closely cooperating units.
The units may be "secondary"-machines created millions of years ago by a previous form. of life and given the will and ability to survive and reproduce. They may be built entirely of metals and other durable materials. If this is the case, they may be much more tolerant of their environment, multiplying under conditions that would destroy immediately any organism made of carbon compounds and dependent on the familiar car bon cycle.
Such creatures might be relics of a past age, many millions of years ago, when their planet was favorable to the origin of life, or they might be immigrants from a favored planet.
Humans on Earth today are characterized by______.
Ours has become a society of employees. A hundred years or so ago only one out of every five Americans at work was employed, i. e., worked for somebody else. Today only one out of five is not employed but working for himself. And when fifty years ago "being employed" meant working as a factory laborer or as a farmhand, the employee of today is increasingly a middle-class person with a substantial formal education, holding a professional or management job requiting intellectual and technical skills. Indeed, two things have characterized. American society during these last fifty years: middle-class and upper-class employees have been the fastest-growing groups in our working population—rowing so
fast that the industrial worker, that oldest child of the Industrial Revolution, has been losing in numerical importance despite the expansion of industrial production.
Yet you will find little if anything written on what it is to be an employee. You can find a great deal of very dubious advice on how to get a job or how to get a promotion. You can also find a good deal of work in a chosen field, whether it be the mechanist's trade or bookkeeping. Every one of these trades requires different skills, sets different standards, and requires a different preparation. Yet they all have employeeship in common. And increasingly, especially in the large business or in government, employeeship is more important to success than the special professional knowledge or skill. Certainly more people fail because they do not know the requirements of being an employee than because they do not adequately possess the skills of their trade; the higher you climb the ladder, the more you get into administrative or executive work, the greater the emphasis on ability to work within the organization rather than on technical abilities or professional knowledge.
It is implied that fifty years ago______.
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