Text 4 Short of money Need an instant loan Since the early 1990s your best bet has been to go to the low-rent end of town and find an appointed loan-shop. There you can borrow money in small amounts, generally not much more than $500, against your post-dated pay-cheque. You will be charged around $15 interest for every $100 you borrow--and that is per month. For many people, there is no alternative. Banks refuse to make small loans because there is no money in it, and completely unregulated lending, via the internet or loan sharks, is too alarming. According to the Community Financial Services Association, an advocacy group for the industry, most borrowers are responsible and pay off their loans in a timely manner. But some don’t. The Centre for Responsible Lending, a consumer group, says that many borrowers routinely roll over their loans. This quickly brings them into debt traps. A typical borrower may end up paying $793 for a $325 loan. The centre estimates that payday loans cost Americans $4.2 billion a year in interest and fees. The industry thrives, in large part, because it operates mostly outside state usury laws that prohibit excessive interest rates. Its spokesmen say lenders need such exemptions to make a profit on their basic service, small loans. Lenders say that their returns would amount to pennies on the dollar if interest rates were capped. In fact, they say, such restrictions would put them out of business. And that is exactly what many of their opponents would like to see--particularly when it comes to loans made to the families of soldiers. In one of the last acts of the Republican Congress, payday lenders were restricted to interest rates of 36% on loans to military personnel and their spouses. The Pentagon is worried that uniformed personnel, especially those serving in Iraq, have been losing their security clearances because of excessive debt at home. This, among other things, was leading to the costly reassignment of highly trained troops, such as communications experts, to ordinary low-skill jobs. Robert Frank, an economist at Cornell University, wrote recently in the New York Times that the industry -- not unlike the sub-prime mortgage sector -- is a beneficiary of the sweeping deregulation of the financial-services industry that has made credit more accessible. Its adverse consequences, he says, were" completely predictable". Once poor people get in over their heads, they will borrow themselves into bankruptcy if the law permits; and" if we are unhappy about that, the only solution is to change the rules." According to the author, the small loan industry ______.
A. is a nice practice for people who need money urgently.
B. has both advantages and disadvantages which need to be modified.
C. is dangerous, especially for military personnel.
D. may lead to large amounts of bankruptcies and needs to be forbidden.
患者,男,19岁,车祸致伤,即来院急诊,神志不清、咯血,口鼻均有泥沙夹血外溢,呼吸困难、烦躁不安。左侧胸部严重擦伤、肿胀,心率98次/分,血压16/12kPa(120/90mmHg),四肢活动尚可,左大腿中下段中度肿胀,有淤斑和严重擦伤。 下列哪项诊断可不予考虑
A. 颅脑创伤
B. 鼻骨骨折
C. 肋骨骨折
D. 左股骨骨折
E. 血气胸
Directions:Read the following text carefully and then translate the underlined segments into Chinese. Your translation should be written clearly on ANSWER SHEET 2.One thing that distinguishes the online world from the real one is that it is very easy to find things. To find a copy of The Economist in print, one has to go to a newsstand, which may or may not carry it. Finding it online, though, is a different proposition. Just go to Google, type it in" economist" and you will be instantly directed to economist.com. (46) Indeed, until Google, now the world’s most popular search engine, came on to the scene in September 1998, searching online was a hit-or-miss affair.Google was vastly better than anything that had come before: so much better, in fact, that it changed the way many people use the web. (47) Almost overnight, it made the web far more useful, particularly for non-specialist users, many of whom regard Google as the Internet’s front door. It’s now a worldwide phenomenon. Not only has it made the Internet into an extremely fast and valuable research tool, it’s become a common word and has even created a new verb" to google." (48)The recent fuss over Google’s stock market flotation obscures its far wider social significance: few technologies, after all, are so influential that their names have become a household verb such as the cloning technology creates the verb" to clone".Google began in 1998 as an academic research project by Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, who were then graduate students at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. It was not the first search engine, of course. (49) Existing search engines were able to scan a large portion of the web, build an index, and then find pages that matched particular words, but were less good at presenting those pages, which might number in the hundreds of thousands, in a useful way.Mr. Brin’s and Mr. Page’s accomplishment was to devise a way to sort the results by determining which pages were likely to be most relevant. They did so by using a mathematical program, called PageRank. (50) This program is at the heart of Google’s success, distinguishing it from all search engines and accounting for its apparently magical ability to find the most useful web pages. With this powerful ability. Google distinguished itself from among all the search engines and became an established standing research tool in the online world. Existing search engines were able to scan a large portion of the web, build an index, and then find pages that matched particular words, but were less good at presenting those pages, which might number in the hundreds of thousands, in a useful way.
It has been justly said that while" we speak with our vocal organs we (1) with our whole bodies." All of us communicate with one another (2) , as well as with words. Sometimes we know what we’re doing, as with the use of gestures such as the thumbs-up sign to indicate that, we (3) . But most of the time we’re not aware that we’re doing it. We gesture with eyebrows or a hand, meet someone else’s eyes and (4) . These actions we (5) are random and incidental. But researchers (6) that there is a system of them almost as consistent and comprehensible as language, and they conclude that there is a whole (7) of body language, (8) the way we move, the gestures we employ, the posture we adopt, the facial expression we (9) , the extent to which we touch and the distance we stand (10) each other.The body language serves a variety of purposes. Firstly it can replace verbal communication, (11) with the use of gesture. Secondly it can modify verbal communication, loudness and (12) of voice is an example here. Thirdly it regulates social interaction: turn taking is largely governed by non-verbal (13) . Finally it conveys our emotions and attitudes. This is (14) important for successful cross-culture communication.Every culture has its own" body language", and children absorb its nuances (15) with spoken language. The way an Englishmen crosses his legs is (16) like the way a mate American does it. When we communicate with people from other, cultures, the body language sometimes help make the communication easy and (17) , such as shaking hand is such a (18) gesture that people all over the world know that it is a signal for greeting. But sometimes--the body language can cause certain misunderstanding (19) people of different cultures often have different forms behavior for sending the same message or have different (20) towards the same body signals. Read the following text. Choose the best word (s) for each numbered blank and mark A, B, C or D on ANSWER SHEET 1.9()
A. wear
B. put on
C. bring
D. hold