TEXT D
For nearly two years, Marisela Escobedo Ortiz led a one-woman campaign to bring the murderer of her 16-year-old daughter to justice. Ms Escobedo was outraged after a three-judge panel ignored overwhelming evidence pointing to her daughter's then boyfriend, a member of a criminal gangs Sergio Barraza, as the killer. The judges' decision was eventually overturned-but not before Barraza was released and Escobedo. herself murdered this past December, while protesting in front of the Chihuahua state governor's office.
Escobedo's death was recorded by a security camera and broadcast throughout the country, outraging the Mexican public and leading to the suspension of the three judges involved in the original trial. Her case is not only representative of the impunity with which activists are silenced in Mexico, but also highlights the marked increase in violence toward women as the country has been drawn deeper into its battle with organised crime.
Since President Calderon began to take on Mexico's crime in 2006, the country's drug war has taken a total of 34,612 lives, nearly half of which were claimed solely in 2010. Unbeknown to many, the deaths resulting from organized crime have also coincided with the murder of over 4,000 women since 2006 from causes unrelated to the nation's drug war. While violence toward women is not new to Mexico, the estimated number of female deaths suggests a callous disregard by Mexico's government of this growing phenomenon.
The authorities' negligence is especially evident in Escobedo's native state of Chihuahua, home to the notorious Ciudad .Juarez, where according to human rights organizations, femicides rose by 1300/6 between 2009 and 2010, resulting in a total of 446 murdered women only last year. This worsening epidemic has led local authorities throughout the country to downplay the mounting violence by misclassifying murders, attributing deaths to drug violence, or simply under-report the figures.
This national campaign of misinformation seems to be primarily motivated by electoral politics, as was recently demonstrated by Mexico state governor-and leading presidential candidate for the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI)-Enrique Pena Nieto. Earlier this month, authorities in Mexico state clashed with NGOs seeking to declare a "gender emergency" in the locality after federal prosecutors announced that over 900 women had been murdered in the state during the past five years. This figure would make Mexico state one of the most violent in the nation, and likely damage the closely guarded image of government of Pena Nieto. The government of Pena Nieto succeeded in lobbying national authorities to avoid applying the "gender emergency" designation to his state, prompting the condemnation of domestic and international NGOs.
While Mexico's authorities might continue to successfully obscure the extent of the country's increasing violence toward women, the rising death toll and public outrage make this task increasingly difficult. Ms Escobedo's death, along with that of activist Susana Chavez earlier this month, have already sparked protests throughout Mexico and at Mexican embassies around the world, as well as bringing mounting international criticism.
As Mexico enters its fifth year of conflict and escalating militarisation, the country's ability to ensure basic protections for its citizens-and, in particular, for those most at risk-has never been less certain. If Mexico's political class is intent on improving its reputation for governance, it should focus less on muddling with the figures and more on resolving the nation's problems.
What happened to the three judges?
[A] They were detained by the judicial department.
[B] They were prevented from their positions.
[C] They were threatened by the criminal gangs.
[D] They justly judged Ms Escobedo's daughter's case.
Text 4
Queuse are long. Life is short. So why waste time waiting when you can pay someone to do it for you? In Washington D. C. - a city that struggles with more than its share of bureaucratic prac- tices - a small industry is emerging that will queue for you to get everything from a driver's license to a seat in a congressional hearing.
Michael Dorsey,one of the pioneering" service expediters" ,began going to traffic courts for other people back in 1988. Today his fees start at $ 20 and can go into the thousands to plead indi- vidual cases at the Bureau of Traffic Adjudication(his former employer) . Mr. Dorsey knows what a properly written parking ticket looks like,and often gets fines invalidated on its failures in formali- ty. His clients include congressmen and diplomats,as well as firms for which tickets are an occupa- tional hazard,such as taxi operators and television broadcasters.
Service expediters are not universally loved. Non-tax income,like fines and fees,makes up a-bout 7% of local-government revenue in Washington. Mr. Dorsey alone relieves that fund of $ 150,000 a year. Meanwhile ,citizen advocacy groups keep complaining about expediters such as the Con-gressional Services Company and CVK Group that specialise in saving places for congressional hearings. Committees hearing hot topics such as energy regulation often do not have enough seats.Why should a well-heeled lobbyist who has paid $ 30 an hour to a professional place-holder grab the place? Critics say this perpetuates a two-layered system:the rich get good government service, but the poor still have to wait.
This seems a little harsh. Service expeditors can hardly be blamed for creating the unfair system they profit from. Anyway ,it's not only rich corporate types who benefit from their services. Poor foreigners with little English hire expediters to navigate the ticket-fighting process; so do elderly and disabled people who want to save time on errands that require long hours standing in line.
And ,who knows ,the service expediters might even shame the bureaucrats into pulling their socks up. Back in 1999,Washington's mayor ,Tony Williams ,promised to liberate citizens from the tyranny of the government queue. Things have gotten a bit better, but the 20-minute task of renewing a driver's license can still take days. Hiring an expert to confront the bureaucratic beast on your behalf takes care of that.
56. What is the new business which emerged in Washington D. C. ?
[ A] Helping to establish small industries.
[ B] Making false tickets and driver's licenses.
[ C] Assisting in organising congressional hearings.
[ D] Offering to go through official procedures for clients.
TEXT C
A period of climate change about 130,000 years ago would have made water travel easier by lowering sea levels and creating navigable lakes and rivers in the Arabian Peninsula, the study says. Such a shift would have offered early modern humans-which arose in Africa about 200,000 years ago-a new route through the formerly scorching northern deserts into the Middle East. The new paper was spurred by the discovery of several 120,000-year-old tools at a desert archaeological site in the United Arab Emirates. The presence of the tools-whose design is uniquely African, experts say-so early in the region suggests early humans marched out of Africa into the Arabian Peninsula directly from the Horn of Africa, roughly present- day Somalia. Previously, scientists had thought humans first left via the Nile Valley or the Far East.
"Up till now we thought of cultural developments leading to the opportunity of people to move out of Africa, " said study co-author Hans-Peter Uerpmann, a retired archaeobiologist at the University of tübingen in Germany. "Now we see, I think, that it was the environment that was the key to this," Uerpmann said during a press brie6ng Wednesday.
The discovery "leaves a lot of possibilities for human migrations, and keeping this in mind, might change our view completely." During the past few years, a series of tools were discovered at the Jebel Faya site in the U.A.E., some of which-such as hand axes-had a two-sided appearance previously seen only in early Africa.
Scientists used luminescence dating to determine the age of sand grains buried with the stone tools.
This technique measures naturally occurring radiation stored in the sand. For the climatic data, scientists studied the climate records of ancient lakes and rivers in cave stalagmites, as well as changes in the level of the Red Sea. This warmer period 130,000 years or so ago caused more rainfall on the Arabian Peninsula, turning it into a series of lush rivers that humans might have boated or rafted.
During this period the southern Red Sea's levels dropped, offering a "brief window of time" for humans to easily cross the sea-which was then as little as 2.5 miles wide, according to Adrian Parker, a physical geographer from Oxford Brookes University in the United Kingdom.
Once humans entered the peninsula, they dispersed and likely reached the Jebel Faya site by about 125,000 years ago, according to the study, published in the journal Science.
Geneticist Spencer Wells called the discovery a "very :interesting find," especially because the Arabian Peninsula is becoming a hot spot for archaeological finds-particularly underwater, since the Persian Gulf was a fertile river delta during early human migrations. But he noted that the study doesn't "rewrite the book on what we know about human migratory history." That's because tools dating to the same period have already been found in Israel, so it's "consistent with what we suspected" about an earlier wave of m1E7'ation into the Middle East, said Wells, director of the National Geographic Society's Geographic Project. Wells also noted there's no evidence yet that the migrants in the new paper were our ancestors-the group, and their genes, may have died out long ago.
Bence Viola, of the Max-Planck-Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, agreed the finding was interesting but not that surprising, also citing the evidence of humans in Israel about 120,000 years ago. Viola, who wasn't involved in the study, added that the migration route proposed in the paper makes sense on another level-the Arabian Peninsula would have been something early humans were used to. "If you look even today, the environment in the Hotn of Africa, in Somalia or northern Ethiopia, is similar to what you see in Oman or Yemen-not like the big desert," Viola noted. "It's not like they needed to adapt to a completely different environment-it's an environment that they knew."
Why they made the trek is another question since they wouldn't have been hurting for food or re- sources in their African homeland, Viola noted. "Curiosity," he said, "is a pretty human desire."
The word "scorching" in the first paragraph means
[A] aboriginal.
[B] primitive.
[C] luxuriant.
[D] baking-hot.
下图是一辆自行车,主动轮有36齿,从动轮有18齿,后轮直径为65厘米,如果每秒蹬2圈,则这辆自行车的速度为()千米/小时。
A. 9.6
B. 24
C. 28.8
D. 31.2