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Perhaps only a small boy training to be a wizard at the Hogwarts School of magic could cast a spell so powerful as to create the biggest book launch ever. Wherever in the world the clock strikes midnight on June 20th, his followers will flock to get their paws on one of more than 10m copies of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Bookshops will open in the middle of the night and delivery firms are drafting in extra staff and bigger trucks. Related toys, games, DVDs and other merchandise will be everywhere. There will he no escaping Potter mania. Yet Mr. Potter’s world is a curious one, in which things are often not what they appear. While an excitable media (here by including The Economist, happy to support such a fine example of globalization)is helping to hype the launch of J.K. Rowling’s fifth novel, about the most adventurous thing that the publishers (Scholastic in America and Britain’s Bloomsbury)have organized is a reading by Ms.Rowling in London’s Royal Albert Hall to be broadcast as a live web cast. Hollywood, which owns everything else to do with Harry Potter, says it is doing even less. Incredible as it may seem, the guardians of the brand say that, to protect the Potter franchise, they are trying to maintain a low profile, well, relatively low. Ms. Rowling signed a contract in 1998 with Warner Brothers, part of AOL Time Warner, giving the studio exclusive film, licensing and merchandising rights in return for what now appears to have been a steal: some $500,000. Globally, the first four Harry Potter books have sold some 200m copies in 55 languages; the two movies have grossed over $1.8 billion at the box office. This is a stunning success by any measure, especially as Ms. Rowling has long demanded that Harry Potter should not be over-commercialized. In line with her wishes, Warner says it is being extraordinarily careful, at least by Hollywood standards, about what it licenses and to whom. It imposed tough conditions on Coca-Cola, insisting that no Harry Potter images should appear on cans, and is now in the process of making its licensing programme even more restrictive. Coke may soon be considered too mass market to carry the brand at all. The deal with Warner ties much of the merchandising to the films alone. There are no officially sanctioned products relating to Harry Potter and Order of the Phoenix; nor yet for Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, the film of the third book, which is due out in June 2004. "Warner agrees that Ms. Rowling’s creation is a different sort of commercial property, one with long-term potential that could be damaged by a typical Hollywood marketing blitz," says Diane Nelson, the studio’s global brand manager for Harry Potter. "It is vital," she adds, "that with more to come, readers of the books are not alienated. The evidence from our market research is that enthusiasm for the property by fans is not waning.\ Paragraph 5 intends mainly to show Warner’s ______.

A. determination to promote Potter
B. consistence in conducting business
C. high regard for Ms. Rowling’s request
D. careful restrictions on licensing to Coca-Cola

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American dramas and sitcoms (连续剧) would have been candidates for prime time several years ago. But today those programs--though some remain popular- increasingly occupy fringe times slots on foreign networks. Instead, a growing number of shows produced by local broadcasters are on the air at the best times. The shift counters longstanding assumptions that TV shows produced in the United States would continue to overshadow locally produced shows from Singapore to Sicily. The changes are coming at a time when the influence of the United States on_ international affairs has chafed (使恼火) friends and foes, and some people are expressing relief that at least on television American culture is no longer quite the force it once was. "There has always been a concern that the image of the world would be shaped too much by American culture," said Dr. Jo Groebek, director general of the European Institute for the Media, a non-profit group. Given the choice, he adds, foreign viewers often prefer homegrown shows that better reflect local tastes, cultures and historical events. Unlike in the United States, commercial broadcasting in most regions of the world--including Asia, Europe and a lesser extent Latin American, which has a long history of commercial TV--is a relatively recent development. A majority of broadcasters in many countries were either state-owned or state- subsidized for much of the last century. Governments began to relax their control in the 1980’s by privatizing national broadcasters and granting licenses to dozens of new commercial networks. The rise of cable and satellite pay-television increased the spectrum of channels. Relatively inexperienced and often financed on a shoestring, these new commercial stations needed hours of programming fast. The cheapest and easiest way to fill airtime was to buy shows from American studios, and the bidding wars for popular shows were fierce. The big American studios took advantage of that demand by raising prices and forcing foreign broadcasters to buy less popular programs if they wanted access to the best-selling shows and movies. "The studios priced themselves out of prime time," said Harry Evans Sloan, chairman of SBS Broadcasting, a Pan-European broadcaster. Mr. Sloan estimates that over the last decade, the price &American programs has increased fivefold even as the international ratings for these shows have declined. American broadcasters are still the biggest buyers of American-made television shows, accounting for 90% of the $25 billion in 2001 sales. But international sales which totaled $2.5 billion last year often make the difference between a profit and a loss on a show. As the pace of foreign sales slows--the market is now growing at 5% a year, down from the double-digit growth of the 1990’s--studio executives are rethinking production costs. The phrase "on a shoestring" (Line 1, Par

A. 6) most probably means ______.A. after a fashionB. on second thoughtsC. in need of capitalD. in the interests of themselves

The mental health movement in the United States began with a period of considerable enlightenment.①Dorothea Dix was shocked to find the mentally ill in jails and almshouses(养老院)and crusaded for the establishment of asylums in whish people could receive humane care in hospital like environments and treatment which might help restore them to sanity.By the mid 1800s,20 states had established asylums, but during the late 1800s and early 1900s,in the face of economic depression, legislatures were unable to appropriate sufficient funds for decent care.Asylums became overcrowded and prison like. Additionally, patients were more resistant to treatment than the pioneers in the mental health field had anticipated, and security and restraint were needed to protect patients and others. Mental institutions became frightening and depressing places in which the rights of patients were all but forgotten. These conditions continued until after World War Ⅱ. ②At that time, new treatments were discovered for some major mental illnesses theretofore considered untreatable(penicillin for syphilis of the brain and insulin treatment for schizophrenia) and depressions), and a succession of books, motion pictures, and newspaper exposes called attention to the plight of the mentally ill. Improvements were made and Dr. David Vail’s Humane Practices Program is a beacon for today. But changes were slow in coming until the early 1960s. ③At that time, the Civil Rights movement led lawyers to investigate America’s prisons, which were disproportionately populated by blacks, and they in turn followed prisoners into the only institutions that were worse than the prisons--the hospital for the criminally insane . The prisons were filled with angry young men that, encouraged by legal support, were quick to demand their rights. ④The hospital for the criminally insane, by contrast, were populated with people who were considered "crazy" and who were often kept obediently in their place through the use of severe bodily restraints and large doses of major tranquilizers, The young cadre (骨 干) of public interest lawyers liked their role in the mental hospitals. The lawyers found a population that was both passive and easy to champion. These were, after all, people who, unlike criminals, had done nothing wrong. And in many states, they were being kept in horrendous institutions, an injustice, which once exposed, was bound to shock the public and, particularly, the judicial conscience. Patients’ rights groups successfully encouraged reform by lobbying in state legislatures. Judicial interventions have had some definite positive effects, but there is growing awareness that courts cannot provide the standards and the review mechanisms that assure good patient care. ⑤The details of providing day-to-day care simply cannot be mandated by a court, so it is time to take from the courts the responsibility for delivery of mental health care and assurance of patient right and return it to the state mental health administrators to whom the mandate was originally given. Though it is a difficult task, administrators must undertake to write roles and standards and to provide the training and surveillance (监督) to assure that treatment is given and patient rights are respected. It can be inferred from the passage that, had the Civil Rights movement not prompted an investigation of prison conditions, ______.

A. states would never have established asylums for the mentally ill
B. new treatments for major mental illness would have likely remained untested
C. the Civil Rights movement in America would have been politically ineffective
D. conditions in mental hospitals might have escaped judicial scrutiny

案例分析题[背景材料]某化工集团欲投资设立一家生产剧毒磷化物的工厂,委托某安全服务中心对其项目进行安全评价。该安全服务中心接受委托后,在对项目进行考察时发现了几个不能保障安全的因素:一是供水水源距离不符合国家规定;二是生产工艺不完全符合国家标准;三是储存管理人员不适应生产、储存工作的要求。集团公司筹建项目负责人对安全服务中心的考察人员说:“你们拿了钱,只管好好办事就行了,照我们的意思来,其他的都好说,要不我们就换人。”随后,集团公司将原定的报酬标准提高了1/3。安全中心明知有问题,但不愿意失去这个机会,便按照集团公司的意思,出具了筹建项目符合要求的安全评价报告,集团公司持这份安全评价报告向所在地的省人民政府经济贸易管理部门提出申请,省经济贸易管理部门在组织专家审查时,发现安全评价报告和其他有关材料存在一些疑点,经过进一步审查,发现安全评价报告严重失实,是一份虚假的报告。根据以上场景,回答下列问题: 分析案情的责任和提出处理建议。

For Tony Blair, the outside world is a place of moral certainty. There are good guys and bad guys, and what needs to be done is pretty clear. Home, by contrast, is a messy sort of place, where the prime minister’s job is not to uphold eternal values but to force through some unpopular changes that may make the country work a bit better. So, if, as Britain dispatches 1,700 marines to help finish off the bad guys in Afghanistan, Mr. Blair cuts a more impressive figure abroad than he does at home, it is not surprising. Mr. Blair’s government is at that dangerous stage. The gloss of last year’s landslide(政党或候选人的胜利) has worn off; the next election is too far away to foster unity among the Labor Party and its allies; fighting the battles that need to be fought seems like hard work. No wonder Mr. Blair is not looking so steady. The area where this is most obvious, and where it matters most is the public services. Mr. Blair faces a difficulty here which is partly of his own making. By focusing his last election campaign on the need to improve hospitals, schools, transport and policing, he built up expectations. And he has been admirably frank about how that improvement needs to be achieved. A lazier and more cynical prime minister might have blamed past failure on Tory under funding, thrown some more money at the relevant ministries and hoped for the best. Mr. Blair has said many times those reforms in the way the public services work need to go alongside increases in cash. The trouble is that public services are, for the most part, people--teachers, doctors, nurses, policemen--so reforming them means changing working practices. People don’t much like having new ways of working forced on them, and their unions see resisting change as their raison d’etre(存在的目的或理由). So the hardest part of the government’s task is getting the unions to agree to change. Mr. Blair has made his task harder by committing a classic negotiation error. Instead of extracting concessions from the other side before promising his own, he has pledged himself to higher spending on public services without getting a commitment to change from the unions. Nor are other ministries conveying quite the same message as the treasury. On March 19th, John Hutton, a health minister, announced that cleaners and catering staff in new privately funded hospitals working for the National Health Service will still be government employees, entitled to the same pay and conditions as other health service workers. Since one of the main ways in which the government hopes to reform the public sector is by using private providers, and since one of the main ways in which private providers are likely to be able to save money is by cutting labor costs. this move seems to undermine the government’s strategy. The Blair’s government is looking so uncertain in the area which ______.

A. underlies the government strategy
B. matters most to voters
C. welcomes easy concessions
D. entitles workers to pensions

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