题目内容
Paris: Thanks to a French insurance company, brides and bridegrooms with cold feet no longer face financial disaster from a canceled wedding. For a small premium, they can take out a policy protecting them from love gone away or anything else that threatens to rain on their big day.
Despite France's economic woes, the amount of money spent on weddings is rising 5-10 per cent a year. And people in the Paris region now dish out an average of 60,000 francs on tying the knot. But life is unpredictable and non-refundable, so French insurers have stepped in to ease the risk, finding their own little niche in the business of love. They join colleagues in Britain, where insurers say wedding cancellation policies have been around for about a decade.
About 5 per cent of insured weddings there never make it to the altar. Indeed, better safe than sorry. "Obviously there are some who are superstitious, but in general people like the idea," said Jacqueline Loeb, head of a Parisian insurance company.
In the past six weeks, she has sold 15 policies at a premium of about 3 per cent of the amount a client wants to be insured for.
These careful customers, she said, have included a man who was worded his fiancee would have an allergic attack on her wedding day and a woman whose future mother-in-law was gravely ill.
The policy covers those and other nuptial impediments: an accident that forces a cancellation of a Wedding, an unexpected change of venue for the reception, damage caused at it, and even honeymoons that don't happen. As for the ultimate deal-breaker, cold feet, they are also insured-but only until eight days before the ceremony. British insurers, however, said they wouldn't touch that clause with a stick. Steve Warner, sales director of Insure Expo-Sure in London, says the six policies he sells each week in the wedding season protect against things like damaged wedding dresses, illness and death, but not changes of heart." Disinclination to marry is not covered," he said. Ms Loed, who says hers is the only French agency offering wedding policies, said she started the service last December.
A chateau outside Paris that hosts receptions was taking a beating from last-minute cancellations, and approached Ms Loed to see if there wash' t some way of protecting itself. She obliged, then started advertising with caterers and wedding departments in large department stores, and the idea has taken off nicely. "We respond to a need," she said.
What's the main purpose of the passage？
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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：Memorial Day honors those who died in all of America's wars. But the holiday began as a way to honor soldiers killed during the Civil War between the North and the South. On May thirtieth, eighteen sixty-eight, flowers were placed on the graves of Union and Confederate soldiers at Arlington National Cemetery. Today, more than two hundred sixty thousand men and women are buried there. Some fought in the Revolutionary War in the seventeen hundreds. The eighty-hectare cemetery is in Arlington, Virginia, across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C. Others buried at Arlington National Cemetery include government officials and Supreme Court justices. Presidents John F. Kennedy and William Howard Taft are buried there.
The holiday began as a way to honor soldiers killed during______
Some recent historians have argued that life in the British colonies in America from approximately 1763 to 1789 was marked by internal conflicts among colonists. Inheritors of some of the viewpoints of early twentieth century Progressive historians such as Beard and Becker, these recent historians have put forward arguments that deserve evaluation. The kind of conflict most emphasized by these historians is class conflict. Yet with the Revolutionary War dominating these years, how does one distinguish class conflict within that larger conflict？ Certainly not by the side a person supported. Although many of these historians have accepted the earlier assumption that Loyalists represented an upper class, new evidence indicates that Loyalists, like rebels, were drawn from all socioeconomic class. (It is nonetheless probably true that a larger percentage of the well-to-do joined the Loyalists than joined the rebels.). Looking at the rebels side, we find little evidence for the contention that lower-class rebels were in conflict with upper-class rebels. Indeed, the war effort against Britain tended to suppress class conflicts. Where it did not, the disputing rebels of one or another class usually became Loyalists. Loyalism thus operated as a safety valve to remove socioeconomic discontent that existed among the rebels. Disputes occurred, of course, among those who remained on the rebel side, but the extraordinary social mobility of eighteenth—century American society (with the obvious exception of slaves) usually prevented such disputes from hardening along class lines. Social structure was in fact so fluid—though recent statistics suggest a narrowing of economic opportunity as the latter half of the century progressed—that to talk about social classes at all requires' the use of loose economic categories such as rich, poor, and middle class, or eighteenth-century designations like" the better sort." Despite these vague categories one should not claim unequivocally that hostility between recognizable classes cannot be legitimately observed. Outside of New York, however, there were very few instances of openly expressed class antagonism.
Having said this, however, one must add that there is much evidence to support the further claim of recent historians that sectional conflicts were common between 1763 and 1789. The" Paxton Boys" incident and the Regulator movement are representative examples of the widespread, and justified, discontent of western settlers against colonial or state governments dominated by eastern interests. Although undertones of class conflict existed beneath such hostility, the opposition was primarily geographical. Sectional conflict-- which also existed between North and South—deserves further investigation.
In summary, historians must be careful about the kind of conflict they emphasize in eighteenth-century American. Yet those who stress the achievement of a general consensus among the colonists cannot fully understand the consensus without understanding the conflicts that had to be overcome or repressed in order to reach it.
The author considers the contentions made by the recent historians discussed in the passage to be______
听力原文： Largely because 0f rapid growth in Asia, world oil consumption is growing faster than production. Supply short fall, combined with sharply higher oil prices, is spurring the construction of new pipelines to get oil and gas to world markets. Most of them would transport Middle Eastern or Caspian Sea oil to seaports, from which it would head west to Europe and America or east to China and India. The two countries now account for 10 percent of global oil consumption. The rise of China and India, says Mr. Verleger, is the most important change in the global energy economy in 30 years. Oil analysts stress that despite rising demand there is at present no shortage of oil and gas, but the doubling of oil and gas prices over the past two years has made some expensive and long delayed pipelines economically feasible. One such proposal involves political adversaries India and Pakistan, whose fast growing economies require increasing supplies of energy. At the recent World Economic Forum meeting in Switzerland in January, Pakistan's prime minister unveiled a proposal to build a gas pipeline from the Persian Gulf to Pakistan and on to India.
According to Mr. Verleger, what is the most important change in the global energy economy in 30 years？
In place of the king, two chief executives were chosen annually by the whole body of citizens. These were known as praetors, or leaders, but later received the title of consuls. The participation of a colleague in the exercise of supreme power and the limitation of the tenure to one year prevented the chief magistrate from becoming autocratic. The character of the Senate was altered by the enrollment of plebeian members, known as conscripti, and hence the official designation of the senators thereafter was patres conscripti (conscript. fathers). As yet, only patricians were eligible for the magistracies, and the discontent of the plebs led to a violent struggle between the two orders and the gradual removal of the social and political disabilities under which the plebs had labored.
In 494 BC a secession of plebeian soldiers led to the institution of the tribuni plebis, who were elected annually as protectors of the plebs; they had the power to veto the acts of patrician magistrates, and thus served as the leaders of the plebs in the struggles with the patricians. The appointment of the decemvirate, a commission of ten men, in 451 BC resulted in the drawing up of a famous code of laws. In 445 BC, under the Canuleian law, marriages between patricians and members of the plebs were declared legally valid. By the Licinian-Sextian laws, passed in 367 BC, it was provided that one of the two consuls should thenceforth be plebeian. The other magistracies were gradually opened to the plebs: in 356 BC the dictatorship, an extraordinary magistracy, the incumbent of which was appointed in times of great danger; in 350 BC, the censorship; in 337 BC, the praetorship; and in 300 BC, the pontifical and augural colleges.
These political changes gave rise to a new aristocracy, composed of patrician and wealthy plebeian families, and admission to the Senate became almost the hereditary privilege of these families. The Senate, which had originally possessed little administrative power, became a powerful governing body, dealing with matters of war and peace, foreign alliances, the founding of colonies, and the handling of the state finances. The rise of this new nobilitas brought to an end the struggles between the two orders, but the position of the poorer plebeian families was not improved, and the marked contrast between the conditions of the rich and the poor led to struggles in the later Republic between the aristocratic party and the popular party.
The external history of Rome during this period was chiefly military. Rome had acquired the leadership of Latium before the close of the regal period. Assisted by their allies, the Romans fought wars against the Etruscans the Volscians, and the Aequians. The military policy of Rome became more aggressive in the 60 years between 449 and 390 BC. The defeat of the Romans at Allia and the capture and burning of Rome by the Gauls under the leadership of the chieftain Brennus in 3.90 BC were great disasters, but their effect was temporary. The capture of the Etruscan city of Veii in 396 BC by the soldier and statesman Marcus Furius Camillus spelled the beginning of the end for Etruscan independence. Other Etruscan cities hastened to make peace, and by the middle of the 4th century BC all southern Etruria was kept in check by Roman garrisons and denationalized by an influx of Roman colonists. Victories over the Volscians, the Latins, and the Hernicans gave the Romans control of central Italy and brought them into conflict with the Samnites of southern Italy, who were defeated in a series of three wars, extending from 343 to 290 BC. A revolt of the Latins and Volscians was put down, and in 338 BC the Latin League, a long-established confederation of the cities of Latium, was dissolved. A powerful coalition was at this time formed against Rome, consisting of Etruscans, Umbrians, and Gauls in the north, and of Lucanians, Bruttians, and Samnites in the south; this coalition endan
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