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How should one invest a sum of money in these days of inflation Left in a bank it will hardly keep its value, however high the interest rate is. Only a brave man, or a very rich one, dares to buy and sell on the Stock Market. Today it seems that one of the best ways to protect your savings, and even increase your wealth is to buy beautiful objects from the past. Here I am going to offer some advice on collecting antique clocks, which I personally consider are among the most interesting of antiques. I sometimes wonder what a being from another planet might report back about our way of life. "The planet Earth is ruled by a mysterious creature that sits or stands in a room and makes a strange ticking sound. It has a face with twelve black marks and two hands. Men can do nothing without its permission, and it fastens its young round people’s wrists so that everywhere men go they are still under its control. This creature is the real master of Earth and men are its slaves. " Whether or not we are slaves of time today depends on our culture and personality, but it is believed that many years ago kings kept special slaves to tell the time. Certain men were very clever at measuring the time of day according to the beating of their own hearts. They were made to stand in a fixed place and every hour or so would shout the time. So it seems that the first clocks were human beings. However, men quickly found more convenient and reliable ways of telling the time. They learned to use the shadows cast by the sun. They marked the hours on candies, used sand in hour-glasses, and invented water-clocks. Indeed, any serious student of antiques should spend as much time as possible visiting palaces, stately homes and museums to see some of the finest examples of clocks from the past. Antique clocks could be very expensive, but one of the joys of collecting clocks is that it is still possible to find quite cheap ones for your own home. After all, if you are going to be ruled by the time, why not invest in air antique clock and perhaps make a future profit The purpose of the passage is ______.
Trees should only be pruned (修剪) when there is a good and clear reason for doing so and, fortunately, the number of such reasons is small. Pruning involves cutting away of overgrown and unwanted branches, and the inexperienced gardener can be encouraged by the thought that more damage results from doing it unnecessarily than from leaving the trees to grow in their own ways. First, pruning may be done to make sure that trees have a desired shape or size. The object may be to get a tree of the right height, and at the same time to help the growth of small side branches which will thicken its appearance or give it a special shape. Secondly, pruning may be done to make the tree healthier. You may cut out diseased or dead wood, or branches that are rubbing against each other and thus causing wounds. The health of a tree may be encouraged by removing the branches that are locking up the centre and so preventing the free movement of air. One result of pruning is that an open wound is left on the tree and this provides an easy entry for diseases, but it is a wound that will heal (愈合). Often there is a race between the healing and the disease as to whether the tree will live or die, or that there is a period when the tree is at risk. It should be the aim of every gardener to reduce the risk as far as possible. It is essential to make the area which has been pruned smooth and clean, for healing will be slowed down by roughness. You should allow the cut surface to dry for a few hours and then paint it with one of the substances available from garden shops produced especially for this purpose. Pruning is usually done in winter, for then you can see the shape of the tree clearly without the interference (妨碍) from the leaves and it is, too, very unlikely that the cuts you make will bleed. If this does happen, it is, of course, impossible to paint them properly. What was the author’s purpose when writing this passage
It seems that politicians around the world are thinking about the health of their countries. While in China, Chen Zhu has announced his plans for a universal health service and reform across health services. Gordon Brown, the UK Prime Minister, has also announced he is planning to make some changes in our health service. The crux of Mr. Brown’s proposals is related to giving the NHS (National Health Service) a greater focus on prevention, rather than just curing patients. He is planning to introduce increased screening for common diseases such as heart disease, strokes and cancer, for example, breast cancer. In Britain there are 200,000 deaths a year from heart attacks and strokes, many of which might have been avoided if the condition had been known about. Initially, the diagnostic (诊断的) tests will be available for those who are vulnerable, or most likely to have the disease. One example is a plan to offer all men over 65 an ultrasound test to check for problems with the main artery (动脉), a condition which kills 3,000 men a year. The opposition have criticized Mr. Brown’s proposals, saying that they are just a trick, and claiming that there is no proper timetable for the changes. They also say that Mr. Brown is reducing the money available for the treatment of certain conditions while putting more money towards testing for them. The NHS was founded in 1948, and is paid for by taxation. The idea is that the rich pay more towards the health service than the poor. However, in recent years there has been a great increase in the use of private health care, and it’s much quicker. The NHS waiting lists for operations can be very long, so many people who can afford it choose to pay for medical care themselves. Which of the following is the reason for the increasing private health care
The police fired tear gas and arrested more than 5,000 passively resisting protestors Friday in an attempt to break up the largest antinuclear demonstration ever staged in the United States. More than 135,000 demonstrators confronted the police on the construction site of a 1,000-megawatt nuclear power plant scheduled to provide power to most of Southern New Hampshire. Organizers of the huge demonstration said that the protest was continuing despite the police actions. More demonstrators were arriving to keep up the pressure on state authorities to cancel the project. The demonstrator had charged that the project was unsafe in the densely populated area, would create thermal pollution in the bay, and had no acceptable means for disposing of its radioactive wasters. The demonstrations would go on until the jails and the courts were so overloaded that the state judicial system would collapse. Governor Stanforth Thumper insisted that there would be no reconsideration of the power project and no delay in its construction set for completion in three years. "This project will begin on time and the people of this state will begin to receive its benefits on schedule. Those who break the law in misguided attempts to sabotage the project will be dealt with according to the law," he said. And the police called in reinforcements from all over the state to handle the disturbances. The protests began before dawn Friday when several thousand demonstrators broke through the police lines around the cordoned-off construction site. They carried placards that read "No Nukes is Good Nukes," "Sunpower, Not Nuclear Power," and "Stop Private Profits from Public Peril. " They defied police order to move from the area. Tear gas canisters fired by the police failed to dislodge the protestors who had been prepared with their own gas masks or facecloths. Finally the gas-masked and helmeted police charged into the crowd to drag off the demonstrators one by one. The protestors did not resist the police, but refused to walk away under their own power. Those arrested would be charged with unlawful assembly, trespassing, and disturbing the peace. Which of the following was NOT mentioned as a reason for the demonstration
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