Section A
Directions: In this section, you will hear 8 short conversations and 2 long conversations. At the end of each conversation, one or more questions will be asked about what was said. Both the conversation and the questions will be spoken only once. After each question there will be a pause. During the pause, you must read the four choices marked A, B, C and D, and decide which is the best answer.
听力原文:W: Jane missed the class again, didn’t she? I wonder why?
M: Well, I knew she had been absent all week. So I called her this morning to see if she was sick. It turned out that her husband was badly injured in a car accident.
Q: What does the man say about Jane?
(12)
A. She was absent all week owing to sickness.
B. She was seriously injured in a car accident.
C. She called to say that her husband had been hospitalized.
D. She had to be away from school to attend to her husband.
听力原文:W: Did you watch the 7 o’clock program on channel 2 yesterday evening? I was about to watch it when someone came to see me.
M: Yeah! It reported some major breakthrough in cancer research. People over 40 would find the program worth watching.
Q: What do we learn from the conversation about the TV program?
(17)
A. It could help people of all ages to avoid cancer.
B. It was mainly meant for cancer patients.
C. It might appeal more to viewers over 40.
D. It was frequently interrupted by commercials.
Market prices may move up or down (or remain the same)in response to a host of factors causing shifts in supply (the whole supply curve) or demand (the whole demand curve) or both together.
Bad weather makes prices go up--not just the prices of agricultural products, but of a great many other goods ranging from steel to nightgowns--because of interruptions in production, breakdowns in transportation, power failures, etc.
Changes in technology cause shifts in supply curves; a more efficient way of making transistors bring down the prices of calculators, computers, radios, television sets, record players, recorders. Increases in the scale of production, as we have seen, often bring down certain production prices.
Shrinking. oil and mineral reserves contract supply, and prices move up. "Diseconomies" resulting from shrinking scales of production, as when the market for handmade pocket books, horse-drawn carriage, grandfather clocks, custom tailoring, and handmade furniture contracts, push up the price of such products not only absolutely, but relatively far above what they were in the old days, when skilled labor was cheaper and more abundant.
With which of the following topics is the author primarily concerned?
A. The effects of climate on the economy.
B. The relation between market prices and technological change.
C. The effect of shifts in supply and demand on market prices.
D. The increasing cost of skilled labor.