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Menorca or Majorca It is that time of the year again. The brochures are piling up in travel agents while newspapers and magazines bulge with advice about where to go. But the traditional packaged holiday, a British innovation that provided many timid natives with their first experience of warm sand, is not what it was. Indeed, the industry is anxiously awaiting a High Court ruling to find out exactly what it now is.Two things have changed the way Britons research and book their holidays: low-cost airlines and the internet. Instead of buying a ready made package consisting of a flight, hotel, car hire and assorted entertainment from a tour operator’s brochure, it is now easy to put together a trip using an online travel agent like Expedia or Travelocity, which last July bought Lastminute. com for ￡577m (＄1 billion), or from the proliferating websites of airlines, hotels and car-rental firms.This has led some to sound the death knell for high street travel agents and tour operators. There have been upheavals and closures, but the traditional firms are starting to fight back, in part by moving more of their business online. First Choice Holidays, for instance, saw its pre tax profit rise by 16% to ￡114m ( ＄196m) in the year to the end of October. Although the overall number of holidays booked has fallen, the company is concentrating on more valuable long-haul and adventure trips. First Choice now sells more than half its trips directly, either via the internet, over the telephone or from its own travel shops. It wants that to reach 75% within a few years.Other tour operators are showing similar hustle. MyTravel managed to cut its loss by almost half in 2005. Thomas Cook and Thomson Holidays, now both German owned, are also bullish about the coming holiday season. Highstreet travel agents are having a tougher time, though, not least because many leading tour operations have cut the commissions they pay.Some high-street travel agents are also learning to live with the internet, helping people book complicated trips that they have researched online, providing advice and tacking on other services: This is seen as a growth area. But if an agent puts together separate flights and hotel accommodation, is that a package, tooThe Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) says it is and the agent should hold an Air Travel Organisers- Licence, which provides financial guarantees to repatriate people and provide refunds. The scheme dates from the early 1970s, when some large British travel firms went bust, stranding customers on the Costas. Although such failures are less common these days, the CAA had to help out some 30,000 people last year. The Association of British Travel Agents went to the High Court in November to argue such bookings are not traditional packages and so do not require agents to acquire the costly licences. While the court decides, millions of Britons will happily click away buying online holidays, unaware of the difference. According to the text, the shift in the method of holiday booking in UK is associated with （）
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The Californian coastline north and south of Silicon Valley is a trend-setting sort of place. Increasingly, the home interiors of the well-heeled there tend toward one of two (1) . Houses are (2) light flooded, sparse and vaguely Asian in (3) , with perhaps a Zen fountain in one corner, a Yoga area in another. Or they resemble electronic control rooms with all sorts of (4) , computers, routers, antennae, screens and remote controls. Occasionally, both elements are (5) . "She" may have the living room and’public areas, (6) "he" is banished with his toys up or down the stairs.Currently, the gadget lovers have powerful allies. Many of the largest companies in the consumer-electronics, computer, telecoms and internet industries have made a strategic decision to (7) visions of a "digital home", "eHome", or "connected home". Doubting that (8) from corporate customers will ever (9) to the boom levels of the late 1990s, Microsoft, Intel, Sony, Verizon, Comcast, Hewlett-Packard, Apple and others see the consumer (10) their best chance for growth and will be throwing a bewildering (11) of home "solutions" at (12) in the coming months and years.To understand what the (13) ultimately have in (14) it is best to visit the (15) homes that most have built on their campuses or at trade shows. (16) cosy and often intimidating, these feature flat screens almost everywhere, (17) electronic picture frames in the bedroom from the large TV-substitute in the living room. Every (18) has a microchip and can be (19) to, typed into or clicked onto. Everything is (20) to a central computer through wireless links. Read the following text. Choose the best word (s) for each numbered blank and mark A, B, C or D on ANSWER SHEET 1.11（）
They may not be the richest, but Africans remain the world’s staunchest optimists. An annual survey by Gallup International, a research outfit, shows that, when asked whether this year will be better than last, Africa once again comes out on top. Out of 52 000 people interviewed all over the world, under half believe that things are looking up. But in Africa the proportion is close to 60% almost twice as much as in Europe.Africans have some reasons to be cheerful. The continent’s economy has been doing fairly well with South Africa, the economic powerhouse, growing steadily over the past few years. Some of Africa’s long-running conflicts, such as the war between the north and south in Sudan and the civil war in Congo, have ended. Africa even has its first elected female head of state, in Liberia.Yet there is no shortage of downers too. Most of Africa remains dirt poor. Crises in places like Cote d’ Ivoire, Sierra Leone and Zimbabwe are far from solved. And the democratic credentials of Ethiopia and Uganda, once the darlings of western donors, have taken a bad knock. AIDS killed over gm Africans in 2005, and will kill more this year.So is it all just a case of irrational exuberance Meril James of Gallup argues that there is, in fact, usually very little relation between the survey’s optimism rankings and reality. Africans, this year led by Nigerians, are consistently the most upbeat, whether their lot gets better or not. On the other hand, Greece--hardly the worst place on earth--tops the gloom and doom chart, followed closely by Portugal and France.Ms James speculates that religion may have a lot to do with it. Nine out of ten Africans are religious, the highest proportion in the world. But cynics argue that most Africans believe that 2006 will be golden because things have been so bad that it is hard to imagine how they could possibly get worse. This may help explain why places that have suffered recent misfortunes, such as Kosovo and Afghanistan, rank among the top five optimists. Moussaka for thought for those depressed Greeks. The statistics are employed in the first paragraph so as to indicate sort of （）
The Californian coastline north and south of Silicon Valley is a trend-setting sort of place. Increasingly, the home interiors of the well-heeled there tend toward one of two (1) . Houses are (2) light flooded, sparse and vaguely Asian in (3) , with perhaps a Zen fountain in one corner, a Yoga area in another. Or they resemble electronic control rooms with all sorts of (4) , computers, routers, antennae, screens and remote controls. Occasionally, both elements are (5) . "She" may have the living room and’public areas, (6) "he" is banished with his toys up or down the stairs.Currently, the gadget lovers have powerful allies. Many of the largest companies in the consumer-electronics, computer, telecoms and internet industries have made a strategic decision to (7) visions of a "digital home", "eHome", or "connected home". Doubting that (8) from corporate customers will ever (9) to the boom levels of the late 1990s, Microsoft, Intel, Sony, Verizon, Comcast, Hewlett-Packard, Apple and others see the consumer (10) their best chance for growth and will be throwing a bewildering (11) of home "solutions" at (12) in the coming months and years.To understand what the (13) ultimately have in (14) it is best to visit the (15) homes that most have built on their campuses or at trade shows. (16) cosy and often intimidating, these feature flat screens almost everywhere, (17) electronic picture frames in the bedroom from the large TV-substitute in the living room. Every (18) has a microchip and can be (19) to, typed into or clicked onto. Everything is (20) to a central computer through wireless links. Read the following text. Choose the best word (s) for each numbered blank and mark A, B, C or D on ANSWER SHEET 1.18（）
The Californian coastline north and south of Silicon Valley is a trend-setting sort of place. Increasingly, the home interiors of the well-heeled there tend toward one of two (1) . Houses are (2) light flooded, sparse and vaguely Asian in (3) , with perhaps a Zen fountain in one corner, a Yoga area in another. Or they resemble electronic control rooms with all sorts of (4) , computers, routers, antennae, screens and remote controls. Occasionally, both elements are (5) . "She" may have the living room and’public areas, (6) "he" is banished with his toys up or down the stairs.Currently, the gadget lovers have powerful allies. Many of the largest companies in the consumer-electronics, computer, telecoms and internet industries have made a strategic decision to (7) visions of a "digital home", "eHome", or "connected home". Doubting that (8) from corporate customers will ever (9) to the boom levels of the late 1990s, Microsoft, Intel, Sony, Verizon, Comcast, Hewlett-Packard, Apple and others see the consumer (10) their best chance for growth and will be throwing a bewildering (11) of home "solutions" at (12) in the coming months and years.To understand what the (13) ultimately have in (14) it is best to visit the (15) homes that most have built on their campuses or at trade shows. (16) cosy and often intimidating, these feature flat screens almost everywhere, (17) electronic picture frames in the bedroom from the large TV-substitute in the living room. Every (18) has a microchip and can be (19) to, typed into or clicked onto. Everything is (20) to a central computer through wireless links. Read the following text. Choose the best word (s) for each numbered blank and mark A, B, C or D on ANSWER SHEET 1.1（）
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