Questions 16~20 Marjorie McMillan, head of radiology at a veterinary hospital, found out by reading a letter to the editor in her local newspaper. Pamela Goodwin, a labor-relations expert at General Motors, happened to see a computer printout. Stephanie Odle, an assistant manager at a Sam’s Club store, was slipped a co-worker’s tax form Purely by accident, these women learned they were making less than their male or, in Goodwin’s case, white colleagues at work. Each sued for pay discrimination under federal law, lucky enough to discover what typically stays a secret. "People don’t just stand around the watercooler to talk about how much they make," says McMillan. This, as they say, is the real world, one in which people would rather discuss their sex lives than salaries. And about a third of private employers actually prohibit employees from sharing pay information. It is also a world that the U. S. Supreme Court seems unfamiliar with. The Justices recently decided 5 to 4 that workers are out of luck if they file a complaint under Title Ⅶ—the main federal antidiscrimination law—more than 180 days after their salary is set. That’s six measly months to find out what your co-workers are making so that you can tell whether you’re getting chiseled because of your sex, race, religion or national origin. How many of the roughly 2,800 such complaints pending before the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission will fizzle because of this new rule is hard to say. Less of a mystery, though just as troubling, is how the court reached its decision. Lilly Ledbetter filed the case against Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. because at the end of a 19-year career, she was making far less than any of 15 men at her level She argued that Goodyear violated Title Ⅶ every time it gave her a smaller paycheck. Her complaint was timely, she said, because she filed it within 180 days of her last check. But the court majority read the statute to mean that only an actual decision to pay Ledbetter less could be illegal, and that happened well outside the 180-day period. A statute’s ambiguous wording is fair game, but why read it to frustrate Title Ⅶ’s purpose: to ease pay discrimination in a nation where women make only 77¢ on average for every $1 that men earn And while employers might like this decision, they could end up choking on the torrent of lawsuits that might now come their way. "The real message is that if you have any inkling that you are being paid differently, you need to file now, before the 180 days are up," says Michael Foreman of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights. All this sounds familiar. In June 1989, the Supreme Court issued three decisions that sharply limited the right to sue over employment discrimination. A day after the most prominent ruling, in Wards Cove v. Atonio, Senator Howard Metzenbaum (D., Ohio) declared that he would introduce a bill to overturn the decisions. It took civil rights advocates and their congressional allies eight months to introduce legislation. President George H. W. Bush vetoed the first version, arguing that it would encourage hiring quotas. Finally, in late 1991, the Democratic Congress and the Republican President reached a compromise fashioned by Senators John Danforth (R., Mo.) and Edward Kennedy (D., Mass.). It became the Civil Rights Act of 1991 and overturned parts of eight high-court decisions. Now, Foreman and others are working on a bill to overturn the Ledbetter case, and Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, among others, have expressed interest. A Democratic Congress may well cooperate, though with a Republican again in the White House, final legislation before next year’s elections isn’t guaranteed. In any event, we probably won’t see the kind of groundswell that shifted the law toward workers in 1991 because civil rights advocates aren’t sure these Justices are a threat to workers’ rights. Last June, for example, they made it harder for employers to retaliate against employees who complain of discrimination. That left the Ledbetter ruling looking particularly clueless. "I heard the decision and thought, what is wrong with this court" says McMillan. "It just doesn’t live in the real world. \ The author mentions Lilly Ledbetter’s case to show that ______.
A. she did not receive equal treatment as her male colleagues
B. her complaint is not timely enough to be validated
C. the new rule is problematic in practice due to its ambiguous wording
D. there is pay discrimination against women at work
Questions 11~15 It has been a lousy few years for much of the media, and 2008 has offered no respite. But to quote the hideous’70s band Bachman Turner Overdrive, b-b-b-baby, you just ain’t see n-n-nothing yet. Because on top of the wrenching change affecting essentially every non-online media, here comes a very scary-looking economic downturn. Think of the recession, says Barclays analyst Anthony DiClemente, "as a vine growing up a wall. Except instead of a healthy vine, like at Wrigley [Field], it’s like—’feed me, Seymour’— from The Little Shop of Horrors. " Forgive the surfeit of pop-culture jokes. I’m only trying to inject levity into an extremely grim picture. According to ad tracker TNS Media Intelligence, which provided all such figures for this column, automotive and financial services were the No. 1 and No. 3 U. S. ad categories last year. We all know what happened to the latter in recent months. In 2007, Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, and Washington Mutual spent $ 213.1 million on advertising. Even if those companies’ new owners spend something to reassure old customers, you’re likely looking at a nine- figure sum sucked out of the ad marketplace by those guys alone. And when major carmakers report sales drops of 30%, boffo ad buys do not follow. Ford Motor’s ad spending was down over 31% for the first half of this year. Car sales’ slide has accelerated since. In case you’re wondering, the No.2 ad category was retail, which is now under severe pressure as consumers spend less. The consequences of all this contraction are readily apparent when you talk to key media executives. Magazines sell ads long before they appear, and advertisers already are making noises about cutting back in the first half of 2009, says one senior executive in that industry. "Everyone says they are going to keep advertising in a downturn," says another executive, who has run major sales organizations in different media. "But not everyone actually does it. That’s just the reality of having to report earnings and profits." And while the wealthiest consumer may remain relatively untouched, those who have recently traded up to high-end products may slam the brakes on such consumption, raising chances that luxury advertisers will be affected, too. Food looks more likely to stay stable. One mordant TV executive puts it this way. "The auto industry is out. And Campbell’s Soup is in. " How the dollars flow—or rather don’t flow—in any downturn can shape events in ways obscured until much later. As strange as it sounds today, the tech bust that started in 2000 meant that total dollars spent on online display advertising declined 21% between 2001 and 2002. And as strange as it sounds today, many established media organizations used that decline as a rationale for deemphasizing the Web in favor of their traditional businesses—and underinvestment allowed all manner of Web-only startups to outflank them in the one medium that’s still growing. While online display ads will still be up in ’09, says BMO Capital Markets analyst Leland Westerfield, that growth rate will likely slow. Look for search advertising to hold up, so Google should be hurt the least. Elsewhere, Barclay’s DiClemente suggests, the slowdown’s effects will move up a media ladder of sorts, starting with newspapers, magazines, radio, local TV, and then hitting broadcast and—possibly—cable TV. There’s a "high probability," he says, that the "advertising malaise spreads to network TV"—the one long-running medium that’s held steadiest as others have fallen off. DiClemente is forecasting a 5.5% pullback in ad spending next year, with only Web and cable TV posting ad upticks. It may be hard to conjure a scenario worse than today’s, given what radio, local TV, and newspapers are currently experiencing. This has been a year, in which many unthinkable things have happened—newspaper executives, for instance, mulling which days of the week they won’t publish. But the coming downturn means that what once was unthinkable ... well, you better start thinking it. Why does the author begin the article with ’70s band Bachman Turner Overdrive
A. To cite a lousy example.
B. To display the main idea of the article.
C. To exemplify the gist as following.
D. To show the overtone of irony.
Questions 6 to 10 are based on the following news.
A. The United States has proposed a new solution to the nuclear issue of Iran.
B. Iran hopes to continue its nuclear activities through cooperation with Russia.
C. Iran welcomes the action taken by the IAES to refer its nuclear issue to the Security Council.
D. Iran is looking forward to discussing its nuclear issue with the Europeans.
Questions 1~5 Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia behind a veil of congressionally imposed secrecy in June 1776 for a country wracked by military and political uncertainties. In anticipation of a vote for independence, the Continental Congress on June 11 appointed Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, and Robert R. Livingston as a committee to draft a declaration of independence. The committee then delegated Thomas Jefferson to undertake the task. Jefferson worked diligently in private for days to compose a document. Proof of the arduous nature of the work can be seen in the fragment of the first known composition draft of the declaration, which is on public display here for the first time. Jefferson then made a clean or "fair" copy of the composition declaration, which became the foundation of the document, labeled by Jefferson as the "original Rough draught. " Revised first by Adams, then by Franklin, and then by the full committee, a total of forty-seven alterations including the insertion of three complete paragraphs was made on the text before it was presented to Congress on June 28. After voting for independence on July 2, the Congress then continued to refine the document, making thirty-nine additional revisions to the committee draft before its final adoption on the morning of July 4. The "Original Rough Draught" embodies the multiplicity of corrections, additions and deletions that were made at each step. Although most of the alterations are in Jefferson’s handwriting (Jefferson later indicated the changes he believed to have been made by Adams and Franklin), quite naturally he opposed many of the changes made to his document. Congress then ordered the Declaration of Independence printed and late on July 4, John Dunlap, a Philadelphia printer, produced the first printed text of the Declaration of Independence, now known as the "Dunlap Broadside. " The next day John Hancock, the president of the Continental Congress, began dispatching copies of the Declaration to America’s political and military leaders. On July 9, George Washington ordered that his personal copy of the "Dunlap Broadside," sent to him by John Hancock on July 6, be read to the assembled American army at New York. In 1783 at the war’s end, General Washington brought his copy of the broadside home to Mount Vernon. This remarkable document, which has come down to us only partially intact, is accompanied in this exhibit by a complete "Dunlap Broadside"—one of only twenty-four known to exist. On July 19, Congress ordered the production of an engrossed (officially inscribed) copy of the Declaration of Independence, which attending members of the Continental Congress, including some who had not voted for its adoption, began to sign on August 2, 1776. This document is on permanent display at the National Archives. On July 4, 1995, more than two centuries after its composition, the Declaration of Independence, just as Jefferson predicted on its fiftieth anniversary in his letter to Roger C. Weightman, towers aloft as "the signal of arousing men to burst the chains.., to assume the blessings and security of self-government" and to restore "the free right to the unbounded exercise of reason and freedom of opinion. \ Drafting the Declaration of Independence. ______.
A. was an artful work
B. involved a lot of efforts
C. was an ardent work
D. was rather easy for Jefferson