Questions 8 and 9 are based on the following news. At the end of the news item, you will be given 10 seconds to answer each question. Haier Group bid for Maytag is ______.
A. $1.75 billion
B. $18.5 billion
C. $16.4 billion
D. $1.3 billion
The orderly came back in a few minutes with a rifle and five cartridges, and meanwhile some Burmans had arrived and told us that the elephant was in the paddy fields below, only a few hundred yards away. As I started forward practically the whole population of the quarter flocked out of the houses and followed me. They had seen the rifle and were all shouting excitedly that I was going to shoot the elephant. They had not shown much interest in the elephant when he was merely ravaging their homes, but it was different now that he was going to be shot. It was a bit of fun to them, as it would be to an English crowd; besides they wanted the meat. It made me vaguely uneasy. I had no intention of shooting the elephant--I had merely sent for the rifle to defend myself if necessary--and it is always unnerving to have a crowd following you. I marched down the hill, looking and feeling a fool, with the rifle over my shoulder and an ever-growing army of people jostling at my heels. At the bottom, when you got away. from the huts, there was a metalled road and beyond that a miry waste of paddy fields a thousand yards across, not yet ploughed but soggy from the first rains and dotted with coarse grass. The elephant was standing eight yards from the road, his left side towards us. He took not the slightest notice of the crowd’s approach. He was tearing up bunches of grass, beating them against his knees to clean them and stuffing them into his mouth. I had halted on the road. As soon as I saw the elephant I knew with perfect certainty that I ought not to shoot him. It is a serious matter to shoot a working elephant--it is comparable to destroying a huge and costly piece of machinery--and obviously one ought not to do it if it can possibly be avoided. And at that distance, peacefully eating, the elephant looked no more dangerous than a cow. I thought then and I think now that this attack of "must" was already passing off; in which case he would merely wander harmlessly about until the mahout came back and caught him. Moreover, 1 did not in the least want to shoot him. I decided that I would watch him for a little while to make sure that he did not turn savage again, and then go home. But at that moment I glanced round at the crowd that had followed me. It was an immense crowd, two thousand at the least and growing every minute. It blocked the road for a long distance on either side. I looked at the sea of yellow faces above the garish clothes--faces all happy and excited over this bit of fun, all certain that the elephant was going to be shot. They were watching me as they would watch a conjurer about to perform a trick. They did not like me, but with the magical rifle in my hands I was momentarily worth watching. And suddenly I realized tat I should have to shoot the elephant after all. The people expected it of me and I and got to do it; I could fell their two thousand wills pressing me forward, irresistibly. And it was at this moment, as I stood there with the rifle in my hands, that l first grasped the hollowness, the futility of the white man’s dominion in the East. Here was I, the white man with his gun, standing in front of the unarmed native crowd--seemingly the leading actor of the piece; but in reality I was only an absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the will of those yellow faces behind. I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys. He becomes a sort of hollow, posing dummy, the conventionalized figure of a sahib. For it is the condition of his rule that he shall spend his life in trying to impress the natives and so in every crisis he has got to do what the "natives" expect of hi. He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it. I had got to shoot the elephant. I had committed myself to doing it when I sent for the rife. A sahib has got to act like a sahib; he has got to appear resolute, to know his own mind and do definite things. Orwell felt like a puppet because he ______.
A. resembled a conjurer about to perform a trick
B. was a victim of the crowd’s mass hysteria
C. was afraid of being laughed at
D. was doing what the crowd wanted him to do
Britain, under a Labour government, considered ditching (giving up) its nuclear deterrent as a way of making crucial savings to help pave the way for an International Monetary Fund-backed rescue package during the sterling crisis of 1976, according to previously secret documents. The crisis at the highest level of government and the British lobbying of international allies for assistance are revealed in Whitehall papers released to the National Archives, under the 30-year rule, covering the months after James Callaghan became prime minister in April 1976. he succeeded Harold Wilson who made his resignation announcement on March 16 after grappling unsuccessfully for months with an economic crisis. The papers reveal the extent of the panic in 1976 as Britain was forced to go to the IMF to bail out the economy. The crisis was a defining moment, destroying confidence in Labour’s economic competency and paving the way for Margaret Thatcher’s rise to power. The cabinet agreed to request a £2.3bn loan, then the biggest the IMF had made, and demanded massive spending cuts. A memo by Sir John Hunt, the cabinet secretary, on December 5 warned there would have to be a review of defence spending. He explained that withdrawing from Germany would be strongly resisted by the US while "abandoning the deterrent or at least scrapping its improvement would cause much less concern to our allies". The threat to ditch the nuclear deterrent came after months of discussions and protracted cabinet haggling over departmental cost-cutting. The severity of the country’s problems was spelt out on April 5, two days after Callaghan took office, in a stark report from Sir John. It said the world had been through the most serious boom and slump and the worst inflation since the war as a result of the oil crisis. "The going is likely to be rough indeed.., we are sailing in an unknown sea.., there is a serious imbalance in our economy.., unless action is taken there will be either a continuation of an unacceptably high level of unemployment or a balance of payments deficit which will be beyond our ability to finance," Sir John warned. The ensuing months saw sterling slide further, forcing the abandonment of the Labour programme of 1974, and the acceptance that the nation could no longer spend its way out of a recession, in spite of strong political resistance. Towards the end of September, Callaghan told the Trades Union Congress conference that things would never be the same again. He then rang Gerald Ford, then US president, whom he regarded as an inevitable broker of an IMF deal. A briefing note prepared for Callaghan ahead of the conversation underlined Britain’s precarious poison as well as the threat to international stability; "This week I have resisted pressure at the party conference... But I cannot be sure of continuing to do this if our policies are undermined by pressure on the pound which we do not have the resources to resist. In that case our value and partner in the western community would be put gravely at risk." In his conversation. Callaghan spelt out further the political tightrope he was walking, trying to fight off the left of his party while reaching an agreement with the international community. In a letter, Callaghan warned Ford that without a solution to the sterling crisis "we would be forced into action which would put at risk this country’s contribution as an ally and a partner in the western alliance and its value as a member of the international trading community". Separately, Callaghan set about lobbying Helmut Schmidt, the German chancellor, asking for a loan facility, led by the US and Germany. In November, he called Schmidt, telling him he was going to go for an IMF deal. This is an extract of the conversation. Callaghan: ’Tm going ahead with this. We either conquer or we die.," Schmidt: "... I have told our mutual friend on the other side that in my view the whole situation comes very near to a Churchillian situation in 1940. I am quite convinced that you would act with the same amount of vigour. I have no doubt about it." While Schmidt was privately sympathetic by the end of 1976 no safety net had been agreed by Germany and the US. A month later, the British government considered Sir John Hunt’s advice to scrap the nuclear deterrent, amid protracted cabinet haggling over cost-cutting. The cuts turned out to be less than forecast, an IMF deal was brokered--and Britain’ remained a nuclear power into a new century. According to the passage, which of the following statements about the British government’s forecast is NOT right in case it did not obtain the rescue from the International Monetary Fund
A. The Labour Party would lose power and pave the way for Margaret Thatcher’s rise to power.
B. There would be a continuation of high level of unemployment that the government would not able to deal with.
C. The government would not be able to finance the deficit.
D. Britain’s function as an ally and partner of the western community would be endangere