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The investigators seriously condemned the drug firms for
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Section B
Directions: There are 2 passages in this section. Each passage is followed by some questions or unfinished statements. For each of them there are four choices marked A, B, C and D. You should decide on the best choice.
Caught in a squeeze between the health needs of ageing populations on one hand and the financial crisis on the other, governments everywhere are looking for ways to slow the growth in healthcare spending. Increasingly ,they are looking to the generic-drugs(普通物) industry as a savior. In November Japan's finance ministry issued a report complaining that the country's use of generics was less than a third of that in America or Britain. In the stone month Canada's competition watchdog criticized the country's pharmacies for failing to pass on the savings made possible by the use of generic drugs. That greed, it reckoned, costs taxpayers nearly C ＄ 1 billion a year.
Then on November 28th the European Commission issued the preliminary results of its year-long probe into drug giants in the European Union. The report reached a damning, though provisional, conclusion: the drugs firms use a variety of unfair strategies to protect their expensive drugs by delaying the entry of cheaper generic opponents. Though this initial report does not carry the force of law (a final report is due early next year), it has caused much controversy. Neelie Kroes, the EU's competition commissioner, says she is ready to take legal action if the evidence allows.
One strategy the investigators criticize is the use of the "patent cluster(专利群) ". A firm keen to defend its drug due to go off-patent may file dozens or hundreds of new patents, often of dubious merit, to confuse and terrify potential copycats and maintain its monopoly. An unnamed drugs firm once took out 1,300 patents across the EU on a single drug. The report also suggests that out-of-court settlements between makers of patented drugs and generics finals may be a strategy used by the former to delay market entry by the latter.
According to EU officials, such misdeeds have delayed the arrival of generic competition and the accompanying savings. On average, the report estimates, generics arrived seven months after a patented drug lost its protection, though where the drug was a big seller the lag was four months. The report says taxpayers paid about 3 billion more than they would have had the generics gone on sale immediately.
But hang on a minute. Though many of the charges of bad behavior. leveled at the patented-drugs industry by EU investigators may well be true, the report seems to let the generics industry off the hook (钩子) too lightly. After all, if the drugs giants stand accused, in effect, of bribing opponents to delay the launch of cheap generics, shouldn't the companies that accepted those "bribes" also share the blame？
Why are governments around the world seeking ways to reduce their health-care spending？
What can we learn from the report issued by the European Commission？
Part Ⅱ Reading Comprehension (Skimming and Scanning)
Directions: In this part, you will have 15 minutes to go over the passage quickly and answer the questions on Answer Sheet 1. For questions 1-7, choose the best answer from the four choices marked A), B), C) and D). For questions 8-10, complete the sentences with the information given in the passage.
The Future of Television: What's on Next？
Bosses in the television industry have been keeping a nervous eye on two Scandinavians with a reputation for causing trouble. In recent years Niklas Zennstrom, a Swede, find Janus Friis, a Dane, have frightened the music industry by inventing KaZaA, a "peer-to-peer" (P2P) file-sharing program that was widely used to download music without paying for it. Then they horrified the mighty telecoms industry by inventing Skype, another P2P program, which lets Internet users make free telephone calls between computers, and very cheap calls to ordinary phones. Their next move was to found yet another start-up -- this time ,one that threatened to devastate(毁坏) the television industry.
It may do the opposite, as it turns out. The new service, called Joost and now in advanced testing, is based on P2P software that runs on people's computers, just like Skype and KaZaA. And it does indeed promise to transform. the experience of watching television by combining what people like about old-fashioned TV with the exciting possibilities of the Internet. "But unlike KaZaA and Skype," says Fredrik de Wahl, a Swede whom Mr. Zennstrom and Friis have hired as Joost's boss," Joost does not disrupt the industry that it is entering. Instead, rather than undercutting television networks and producers, Joost might, as it were, give them new juice. "
That is because Mr. de Wahl and his Joost team, working mostly in the Netherlands, have bravely ignored the totems (图腾) of the Internet-video boom. Chief among these fashions is letting users upload anything they want to a video service -- which might include clips of themselves doing odd things (" user-generated content") or, more questionably, videos pirated from other sources. The celebrated example of this approach is You Tube, which is now part of Google, the leader in Internet search. Its big problem, however, is that it can be illegal (if copyright is violated) and terribly hard to turn into a business.
On February 2nd Viacom, an American media giant, became the latest company to demand that YouTube remove copyright-infringing (侵犯版权的) clips from its website. YouTube has struck deals with some media firms, including NBC and CBS, to allow their material to appear on its site, and had been trying to thrash out a similar agreement with Viacom. Many observers regard Viacom's move as a negotiating tactic. But whether YouTube can make money is unclear. Last month Chad Hurley, YouTube's chief executive, sketched out plans for generating advertising revenues and sharing them with content providers, but so far his firm has none to speak of.
The Innovation of Joost
Joost is also ignoring the two business models seen as the most respectable alternatives to advertising. One is to make users pay for each television show or film they download, but then to let them keep it. This is the tack chosen by Apple, an electronics firm that sells videos on iTunes, its popular online store; by Amazon, the largest online retailer; and by Wal-Mart, the largest traditional retailer, which launched a video-download service this week. The other approach is to let users subscribe to what is, in effect, an all-you-can-eat buffet of videos, and then to" stream" video to their computers without leaving a permanent copy. This is the approach taken by, for instance, Netflix, a Californian firm that mostly delivers DVDs to its subscribers by post, but now als
承担和管理风险是商业银行的基本职能。商业银行通过吸收和承担客户不愿意承担的风险，成为整个经济社会参与者用来转嫁风险的主要对象。 ()
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