单项选择题Will the European Union make it The question would have sounded strange not long ago. Now even the project"s greatest cheerleaders talk of a continent facing a "Bermuda triangle" of debt, population decline and lower growth. As well as those chronic problems, the EU face an acute crisis in its economic core, the 16 countries that use the single currency. Markets have lost faith that the euro zone"s economies, weaker or stronger, will one day converge thanks to the discipline of sharing a single currency, which denies uncompetitive members the quick fix of devaluation. Yet the debate about how to save Europe"s single currency from disintegration is stuck. It is stuck because the euro zone"s dominant powers, France and Germany, agree on the need for greater harmonisation within the euro zone, but disagree about what to harmonise. Germany thinks the euro must be saved by stricter rules on borrow spending and competitiveness, barked by quasi-automatic sanctions for governments that do not obey. These might include threats to freeze EU funds for poorer regions and EU mega-projects, and even the suspension of a country"s voting rights in EU ministerial councils. It insists that economic co-ordination should involve all 27 members of the EU club, among whom there is a small majority for free-market liberalism and economic rigour; in the inner core alone, Germany fears, a small majority favour French interference. A "southern" camp headed by French wants something different: "European economic government" within an inner core of euro-zone members. Translated, that means politicians intervening in monetary policy and a system of redistribution from richer to poorer members, via cheaper borrowing for governments through common Eurobonds or complete fiscal transfers. Finally, figures close to the France government have murmured, euro-zone members should agree to some fiscal and social harmonisation: e.g., curbing competition in corporate-tax rates or labour costs. It is too soon to write off the EU. It remains the world" s largest trading block. At its best, the European project is remarkably liberal: built around a single market of 27 rich and poor countries, its internal borders are far more open to goods, capital and labour than any comparable trading area. It is an ambitious attempt to blunt the sharpest edges of globalization, and make capitalism benign.The French proposal of handling the crisis implies that

A.poor countries are more likely to get funds.
B.strict monetary policy will be applied to poor countries.
C.loans will be readily available to rich countries.
D.rich countries will basically control Eurobonds.


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1.单项选择题The longest bull run in a century of art-market history ended on a dramatic note with a sale of 56 works by Damien Hirst, Beautiful Inside My Head Forever, at Sotheby"s in London on September 15th 2008. All but two pieces sold, fetching more than £70m, a record for a sale by a single artist. It was a last victory. As the auctioneer called out bids, in New York one of the oldest banks on Wall Street, Lehman Brothers, filed for bankruptcy. The world art market had already been losing momentum for a while after rising bewilderingly since 2003. At its peak in 2007 it was worth some $65 billion, reckons Clare McAndrew, founder of Arts Economics, a research firm—double the figure five years earlier. Since then it may have come down to $50 billion. But the market generates interest far beyond its size because it brings together great wealth, enormous egos, greed, passion and controversy in a way matched by few other industries. In the weeks and months that followed Mr. Hirst"s sale, spending of any sort became deeply unfashionable . In the art world that meant collectors stayed away from galleries and salerooms. Sales of contemporary art fell by two-thirds, and in the most overheated sector, they were down by nearly 90% in the year to November 2008. Within weeks the world"s two biggest auction houses, Sotheby"s and Christie"s, had to pay out nearly $200m in guarantees to clients who had placed works for sale with them. The current downturn in the art market is the worst since the Japanese stopped buying Impressionists at the end of 1989. This time experts reckon that prices are about 40% down on their peak on average, though some have been far more fluctuant. But Edward Dolman, Christie"s chief executive, says: "I"m pretty confident we"re at the bottom." What makes this slump different from the last, he says, is that there are still buyers in the market. Almost everyone who was interviewed for this special report said that the biggest problem at the moment is not a lack of demand but a lack of good work to sell. The three Ds—death, debt and divorce—still deliver works of art to the market. But anyone who does not have to sell is keeping away, waiting for confidence to return.The three Ds mentioned in the last paragraph are

A.auction house"s favorites.
B.contemporary trends.
C.factors promoting artwork circulation.
D.styles representing Impressionists.

2.单项选择题The rough guide to marketing success used to be that you got what you paid for. No longer. While traditional "paid" media—such as television commercials and print advertisements—still play a major role, companies today can exploit many alternative forms of media. Consumers passionate about a product may create "earned" media by willingly promoting it to friends, and a company may leverage "owned" media by sending e-mail alerts about products and sales to customers registered with its Web site. The way consumers now approach the process of making purchase decisions means that marketing"s impact stems from a broad range of factors beyond conventional paid media. Paid and owned media are controlled by marketers promoting their own products. For earned media, such marketers act as the initiator for users" responses. But in some cases, one marketer"s owned media become another marketer"s paid media—for instance, when an e-commerce retailer sells ad space on its Web site. We define such sold media as owned media whose traffic is so strong that other organizations place their content or e-commerce engines within that environment. This trend, which we believe is still in its infancy, effectively began with retailers and travel providers such as airlines and hotels and will no doubt go further. Johnson & Johnson, for example, has created BabyCenter, a stand-alone media property that promotes complementary and even competitive products. Besides generating income, the presence of other marketers makes the site seem objective, gives companies opportunities to learn valuable information about the appeal of other companies" marketing, and may help expand user traffic for all companies concerned. The same dramatic technological changes that have provided marketers with more (and more diverse) communications choices have also increased the risk that passionate consumers will voice their opinions in quicker, more visible, and much more damaging ways. Such hijacked media are the opposite of earned media: an asset or campaign becomes hostage to consumers, other stakeholders, or activists who make negative allegations about a brand or product. Members of social networks, for instance, are learning that they can hijack media to apply pressure on the businesses that originally created them. If that happens, passionate consumers would try to persuade others to boycott products, putting the reputation of the target company at risk. In such a case, the company"s response may not be sufficiently quick or thoughtful, and the learning curve has been steep. Toyota Motor, for example, alleviated some of the damage from its recall crisis earlier this year with a relatively quick and well-orchestrated social-media response campaign, which included efforts to engage with consumers directly on sites such as Twitter and the social-news site Digg.Toyota Motor" s experience is cited as an example of

A.responding effectively to hijacked media.
B.persuading customers into boycotting products.
C.cooperating with supportive consumers.
D.taking advantage of hijacked media.

3.单项选择题It never rains but it pours . Just as bosses and boards have finally sorted out their worst accounting and compliance troubles, and improved their feeble corporation governance, a new problem threatens to earn them—especially in America—the sort of nasty headlines that inevitably lead to heads rolling in the executive suite: data insecurity. Left, until now, to odd, low-level IT staff to put right, and seen as a concern only of data-rich industries such as banking, telecoms and air travel, information protection is now high on the boss" s agenda in businesses of every variety. Several massive leakages of customer and employee data this year—from organizations as diverse as Time Warner, the American defense contractor Science Applications International Corp and even the University of California, Berkeley—have left managers hurriedly peering into their intricate IT systems and business processes in search of potential vulnerabilities. "Data is becoming an asset which needs to be guarded as much as any other asset," says Haim Mendelson of Stanford University"s business school. "The ability to guard customer data is the key to market value, which the board is responsible for on behalf of shareholders." Indeed, just as there is the concept of Generally Accepted Accounting Principles(GAAP), perhaps it is time for GASP, Generally Accepted Security Practices , suggested Eli Noam of New York" s Columbia Business School. "Setting the proper investment level for security, redundancy, and recovery is a management issue, not a technical one," he says. The mystery is that this should come as a surprise to any boss. Surely it should be obvious to the dimmest executive that trust, that most valuable of economic assets, is easily destroyed and hugely expensive to restore—and that few things are more likely to destroy trust than a company letting sensitive personal data get into the wrong hands. The current state of affairs may have been encouraged—though not justified—by the lack of legal penalty (in America, but not Europe) for data leakage. Until California recently passed a law, American firms did not have to tell anyone, even the victim, when data went astray. That may change fast: lots of proposed data-security legislation is now doing the rounds in Washington, D.C.Meanwhile, the theft of information about some 40 million credit-card accounts in America, disclosed on June 17th, overshadowed a hugely important decision a day earlier by America"s Federal Trade Commission (FTC) that puts corporate America on notice that regulators will act if firms fail to provide adequate data security.According to Paragraph 4, what puzzles the author is that some bosses fail to

A.see the link between trust and data protection.
B.perceive the sensitivity of personal data.
C.realize the high cost of data restoration.
D.appreciate the economic value of trust.

4.单项选择题Will the European Union make it The question would have sounded strange not long ago. Now even the project"s greatest cheerleaders talk of a continent facing a "Bermuda triangle" of debt, population decline and lower growth. As well as those chronic problems, the EU face an acute crisis in its economic core, the 16 countries that use the single currency. Markets have lost faith that the euro zone"s economies, weaker or stronger, will one day converge thanks to the discipline of sharing a single currency, which denies uncompetitive members the quick fix of devaluation. Yet the debate about how to save Europe"s single currency from disintegration is stuck. It is stuck because the euro zone"s dominant powers, France and Germany, agree on the need for greater harmonisation within the euro zone, but disagree about what to harmonise. Germany thinks the euro must be saved by stricter rules on borrow spending and competitiveness, barked by quasi-automatic sanctions for governments that do not obey. These might include threats to freeze EU funds for poorer regions and EU mega-projects, and even the suspension of a country"s voting rights in EU ministerial councils. It insists that economic co-ordination should involve all 27 members of the EU club, among whom there is a small majority for free-market liberalism and economic rigour; in the inner core alone, Germany fears, a small majority favour French interference. A "southern" camp headed by French wants something different: "European economic government" within an inner core of euro-zone members. Translated, that means politicians intervening in monetary policy and a system of redistribution from richer to poorer members, via cheaper borrowing for governments through common Eurobonds or complete fiscal transfers. Finally, figures close to the France government have murmured, euro-zone members should agree to some fiscal and social harmonisation: e.g., curbing competition in corporate-tax rates or labour costs. It is too soon to write off the EU. It remains the world" s largest trading block. At its best, the European project is remarkably liberal: built around a single market of 27 rich and poor countries, its internal borders are far more open to goods, capital and labour than any comparable trading area. It is an ambitious attempt to blunt the sharpest edges of globalization, and make capitalism benign.To solve the euro problem, Germany proposed that

A.EU funds for poor regions be increased.
B.stricter regulations be imposed.
C.only core members be involved in economic co-ordination.
D.voting rights of the EU members be guaranteed.

5.单项选择题The longest bull run in a century of art-market history ended on a dramatic note with a sale of 56 works by Damien Hirst, Beautiful Inside My Head Forever, at Sotheby"s in London on September 15th 2008. All but two pieces sold, fetching more than £70m, a record for a sale by a single artist. It was a last victory. As the auctioneer called out bids, in New York one of the oldest banks on Wall Street, Lehman Brothers, filed for bankruptcy. The world art market had already been losing momentum for a while after rising bewilderingly since 2003. At its peak in 2007 it was worth some $65 billion, reckons Clare McAndrew, founder of Arts Economics, a research firm—double the figure five years earlier. Since then it may have come down to $50 billion. But the market generates interest far beyond its size because it brings together great wealth, enormous egos, greed, passion and controversy in a way matched by few other industries. In the weeks and months that followed Mr. Hirst"s sale, spending of any sort became deeply unfashionable . In the art world that meant collectors stayed away from galleries and salerooms. Sales of contemporary art fell by two-thirds, and in the most overheated sector, they were down by nearly 90% in the year to November 2008. Within weeks the world"s two biggest auction houses, Sotheby"s and Christie"s, had to pay out nearly $200m in guarantees to clients who had placed works for sale with them. The current downturn in the art market is the worst since the Japanese stopped buying Impressionists at the end of 1989. This time experts reckon that prices are about 40% down on their peak on average, though some have been far more fluctuant. But Edward Dolman, Christie"s chief executive, says: "I"m pretty confident we"re at the bottom." What makes this slump different from the last, he says, is that there are still buyers in the market. Almost everyone who was interviewed for this special report said that the biggest problem at the moment is not a lack of demand but a lack of good work to sell. The three Ds—death, debt and divorce—still deliver works of art to the market. But anyone who does not have to sell is keeping away, waiting for confidence to return.Which of the following statements is NOT true

A.Sales of contemporary art fell dramatically from 2007 to 2008.
B.The art market surpassed many other industries in momentum.
C.The art market generally went downward in various ways.
D.Some art dealers were awaiting better chances to come.

6.单项选择题The rough guide to marketing success used to be that you got what you paid for. No longer. While traditional "paid" media—such as television commercials and print advertisements—still play a major role, companies today can exploit many alternative forms of media. Consumers passionate about a product may create "earned" media by willingly promoting it to friends, and a company may leverage "owned" media by sending e-mail alerts about products and sales to customers registered with its Web site. The way consumers now approach the process of making purchase decisions means that marketing"s impact stems from a broad range of factors beyond conventional paid media. Paid and owned media are controlled by marketers promoting their own products. For earned media, such marketers act as the initiator for users" responses. But in some cases, one marketer"s owned media become another marketer"s paid media—for instance, when an e-commerce retailer sells ad space on its Web site. We define such sold media as owned media whose traffic is so strong that other organizations place their content or e-commerce engines within that environment. This trend, which we believe is still in its infancy, effectively began with retailers and travel providers such as airlines and hotels and will no doubt go further. Johnson & Johnson, for example, has created BabyCenter, a stand-alone media property that promotes complementary and even competitive products. Besides generating income, the presence of other marketers makes the site seem objective, gives companies opportunities to learn valuable information about the appeal of other companies" marketing, and may help expand user traffic for all companies concerned. The same dramatic technological changes that have provided marketers with more (and more diverse) communications choices have also increased the risk that passionate consumers will voice their opinions in quicker, more visible, and much more damaging ways. Such hijacked media are the opposite of earned media: an asset or campaign becomes hostage to consumers, other stakeholders, or activists who make negative allegations about a brand or product. Members of social networks, for instance, are learning that they can hijack media to apply pressure on the businesses that originally created them. If that happens, passionate consumers would try to persuade others to boycott products, putting the reputation of the target company at risk. In such a case, the company"s response may not be sufficiently quick or thoughtful, and the learning curve has been steep. Toyota Motor, for example, alleviated some of the damage from its recall crisis earlier this year with a relatively quick and well-orchestrated social-media response campaign, which included efforts to engage with consumers directly on sites such as Twitter and the social-news site Digg.The author indicates in Paragraph 3 that earned media

A.invite constant conflicts with passionate consumers.
B.can be used to produce negative effects in marketing.
C.may be responsible for fiercer competition.
D.deserve all the negative comments about them.

7.单项选择题It never rains but it pours . Just as bosses and boards have finally sorted out their worst accounting and compliance troubles, and improved their feeble corporation governance, a new problem threatens to earn them—especially in America—the sort of nasty headlines that inevitably lead to heads rolling in the executive suite: data insecurity. Left, until now, to odd, low-level IT staff to put right, and seen as a concern only of data-rich industries such as banking, telecoms and air travel, information protection is now high on the boss" s agenda in businesses of every variety. Several massive leakages of customer and employee data this year—from organizations as diverse as Time Warner, the American defense contractor Science Applications International Corp and even the University of California, Berkeley—have left managers hurriedly peering into their intricate IT systems and business processes in search of potential vulnerabilities. "Data is becoming an asset which needs to be guarded as much as any other asset," says Haim Mendelson of Stanford University"s business school. "The ability to guard customer data is the key to market value, which the board is responsible for on behalf of shareholders." Indeed, just as there is the concept of Generally Accepted Accounting Principles(GAAP), perhaps it is time for GASP, Generally Accepted Security Practices , suggested Eli Noam of New York" s Columbia Business School. "Setting the proper investment level for security, redundancy, and recovery is a management issue, not a technical one," he says. The mystery is that this should come as a surprise to any boss. Surely it should be obvious to the dimmest executive that trust, that most valuable of economic assets, is easily destroyed and hugely expensive to restore—and that few things are more likely to destroy trust than a company letting sensitive personal data get into the wrong hands. The current state of affairs may have been encouraged—though not justified—by the lack of legal penalty (in America, but not Europe) for data leakage. Until California recently passed a law, American firms did not have to tell anyone, even the victim, when data went astray. That may change fast: lots of proposed data-security legislation is now doing the rounds in Washington, D.C.Meanwhile, the theft of information about some 40 million credit-card accounts in America, disclosed on June 17th, overshadowed a hugely important decision a day earlier by America"s Federal Trade Commission (FTC) that puts corporate America on notice that regulators will act if firms fail to provide adequate data security.In bringing up the concept of GASP the author is making the point that

A.shareholders" interests should be properly attended to.
B.information protection should be given due attention.
C.businesses should enhance their level of accounting security.
D.the market value of customer data should be emphasized.

8.单项选择题Will the European Union make it The question would have sounded strange not long ago. Now even the project"s greatest cheerleaders talk of a continent facing a "Bermuda triangle" of debt, population decline and lower growth. As well as those chronic problems, the EU face an acute crisis in its economic core, the 16 countries that use the single currency. Markets have lost faith that the euro zone"s economies, weaker or stronger, will one day converge thanks to the discipline of sharing a single currency, which denies uncompetitive members the quick fix of devaluation. Yet the debate about how to save Europe"s single currency from disintegration is stuck. It is stuck because the euro zone"s dominant powers, France and Germany, agree on the need for greater harmonisation within the euro zone, but disagree about what to harmonise. Germany thinks the euro must be saved by stricter rules on borrow spending and competitiveness, barked by quasi-automatic sanctions for governments that do not obey. These might include threats to freeze EU funds for poorer regions and EU mega-projects, and even the suspension of a country"s voting rights in EU ministerial councils. It insists that economic co-ordination should involve all 27 members of the EU club, among whom there is a small majority for free-market liberalism and economic rigour; in the inner core alone, Germany fears, a small majority favour French interference. A "southern" camp headed by French wants something different: "European economic government" within an inner core of euro-zone members. Translated, that means politicians intervening in monetary policy and a system of redistribution from richer to poorer members, via cheaper borrowing for governments through common Eurobonds or complete fiscal transfers. Finally, figures close to the France government have murmured, euro-zone members should agree to some fiscal and social harmonisation: e.g., curbing competition in corporate-tax rates or labour costs. It is too soon to write off the EU. It remains the world" s largest trading block. At its best, the European project is remarkably liberal: built around a single market of 27 rich and poor countries, its internal borders are far more open to goods, capital and labour than any comparable trading area. It is an ambitious attempt to blunt the sharpest edges of globalization, and make capitalism benign.The debate over the EU"s single currency is stuck because the dominant powers

A.are competing for the leading position.
B.are busy handling their own crises.
C.fail to reach an agreement on harmonisation.
D.disagree on the steps towards disintegration.

9.单项选择题The longest bull run in a century of art-market history ended on a dramatic note with a sale of 56 works by Damien Hirst, Beautiful Inside My Head Forever, at Sotheby"s in London on September 15th 2008. All but two pieces sold, fetching more than £70m, a record for a sale by a single artist. It was a last victory. As the auctioneer called out bids, in New York one of the oldest banks on Wall Street, Lehman Brothers, filed for bankruptcy. The world art market had already been losing momentum for a while after rising bewilderingly since 2003. At its peak in 2007 it was worth some $65 billion, reckons Clare McAndrew, founder of Arts Economics, a research firm—double the figure five years earlier. Since then it may have come down to $50 billion. But the market generates interest far beyond its size because it brings together great wealth, enormous egos, greed, passion and controversy in a way matched by few other industries. In the weeks and months that followed Mr. Hirst"s sale, spending of any sort became deeply unfashionable . In the art world that meant collectors stayed away from galleries and salerooms. Sales of contemporary art fell by two-thirds, and in the most overheated sector, they were down by nearly 90% in the year to November 2008. Within weeks the world"s two biggest auction houses, Sotheby"s and Christie"s, had to pay out nearly $200m in guarantees to clients who had placed works for sale with them. The current downturn in the art market is the worst since the Japanese stopped buying Impressionists at the end of 1989. This time experts reckon that prices are about 40% down on their peak on average, though some have been far more fluctuant. But Edward Dolman, Christie"s chief executive, says: "I"m pretty confident we"re at the bottom." What makes this slump different from the last, he says, is that there are still buyers in the market. Almost everyone who was interviewed for this special report said that the biggest problem at the moment is not a lack of demand but a lack of good work to sell. The three Ds—death, debt and divorce—still deliver works of art to the market. But anyone who does not have to sell is keeping away, waiting for confidence to return.By saying "spending of any sort became deeply unfashionable"(Para. 3), the author suggests that

A.collectors were no longer actively involved in art-market auctions.
B.people stopped every kind of spending and stayed away from galleries.
C.art collection as a fashion had lost its appeal to a great extent.
D.works of art in general had gone out of fashion so they were not worth buying.

10.单项选择题The rough guide to marketing success used to be that you got what you paid for. No longer. While traditional "paid" media—such as television commercials and print advertisements—still play a major role, companies today can exploit many alternative forms of media. Consumers passionate about a product may create "earned" media by willingly promoting it to friends, and a company may leverage "owned" media by sending e-mail alerts about products and sales to customers registered with its Web site. The way consumers now approach the process of making purchase decisions means that marketing"s impact stems from a broad range of factors beyond conventional paid media. Paid and owned media are controlled by marketers promoting their own products. For earned media, such marketers act as the initiator for users" responses. But in some cases, one marketer"s owned media become another marketer"s paid media—for instance, when an e-commerce retailer sells ad space on its Web site. We define such sold media as owned media whose traffic is so strong that other organizations place their content or e-commerce engines within that environment. This trend, which we believe is still in its infancy, effectively began with retailers and travel providers such as airlines and hotels and will no doubt go further. Johnson & Johnson, for example, has created BabyCenter, a stand-alone media property that promotes complementary and even competitive products. Besides generating income, the presence of other marketers makes the site seem objective, gives companies opportunities to learn valuable information about the appeal of other companies" marketing, and may help expand user traffic for all companies concerned. The same dramatic technological changes that have provided marketers with more (and more diverse) communications choices have also increased the risk that passionate consumers will voice their opinions in quicker, more visible, and much more damaging ways. Such hijacked media are the opposite of earned media: an asset or campaign becomes hostage to consumers, other stakeholders, or activists who make negative allegations about a brand or product. Members of social networks, for instance, are learning that they can hijack media to apply pressure on the businesses that originally created them. If that happens, passionate consumers would try to persuade others to boycott products, putting the reputation of the target company at risk. In such a case, the company"s response may not be sufficiently quick or thoughtful, and the learning curve has been steep. Toyota Motor, for example, alleviated some of the damage from its recall crisis earlier this year with a relatively quick and well-orchestrated social-media response campaign, which included efforts to engage with consumers directly on sites such as Twitter and the social-news site Digg.According to Paragraph 2, sold media features

A.a safe business environment.
B.random competition.
C.strong user traffic.
D.flexibility in organization.