If American investors have learned any lesson in the last 25 years, it is to buy shares on the dips. The slide in 2000--2002 may have been longer and deeper than they were used to but normal service was eventually resumed, driving the Dow Jones Industrial Average to a record high on October 1st.
Among American financial commentators, it is almost universally accepted that shares always rise over the long run. And one ought to expect shares (which are risky) to deliver a higher return than risk free assets such as government bonds.
Nevertheless, investors ought also to remember the world’s second largest economy, Japan. Its most popular stock-market average, the Nikkei 225, peaked at 38,915 on the last trading day of the 1980s; this week, nearly 18 years later, it is still only around 17,000, less than half its peak. Buying on the dips did not work either.
Professionals of the London Business School examined the record of 16 stock markets which were in continuous operation over the course of the 20th century. In itself, this selection showed survivorship bias by excluding the likes of Russia and China. The academies found that only three other countries could match the American record of having no 20-year periods with negative real returns.
Other investors were far less lucky. Japanese, French, German and Spanish investors all suffered instances where they had to wait 50--60 years to earn a positive real return. It was no good following the famous advice to "put the shares in a drawer and forget about them"; the furniture would not have lasted that long.
Besides survivorship bias, there is another problem with the belief that stock markets must always go up. Investors will keep buying until prices reach stratospheric(稳定的) levels. That clearly happened in Japan in the late 1980s, and after seven years, it is still not much more than half its peak level.
A significant proportion of the return from equities in the second half of the 20(上标)th century came from a re-rating of shares; investors were willing to pay a higher multiple for profits. But re-rating cannot continue forever.
If investors want a simple parallel with share prices, they need only mm to the American housing market. Back in 2005 an economic adviser to the president said," We’ve never had a decline in housing prices on a nationwide basis. What I think is more likely is that house prices will slow, maybe stabilize."
Lots of people took the same view and were willing to borrow (and lend) on a vast scale on the grounds that higher house prices would always bail them out. They are now counting their losses. Investors in equities should beware of over-committing themselves on the basis of a similar belief Just ask the Japanese.
It can be interred from the text that in the recent two decades the share prices of ______.

A:China keeps increasing. B:America keeps increasing. C:Russia keeps declining. D:France keeps still.

When there is blood in the water, it is only natural that dorsal fins swirl around excitedly. Now that America’s housing market is ailing, predators have their sights on the country’s credit-card market. Analysts at Goldman Sachs reckon that credit-card losses could reach $ 99 billion if contagion spreads from subprime mortgages to other forms of consumer credit. Signs of strain are clearly visible. There are rises in both the charge-off and delinquency rates, which measure the share of balances that are uncollectable or more than 30 days late respectively. HSBC announced last month that it had taken a $1.4 billion charge in its American consumer-finance business, partly because of weakness among card borrowers.
It is too early to panic, though. Charge-offs and delinquencies are still low. According to Moody’s, a rating agency, the third-quarter delinquency rate of 3.89% was almost a full percentage point below the historical average. The deterioration in rates can be partly explained by technical factors. A change in America’s personal-bankruptcy laws in 2005 led to an abrupt fall in bankruptcy filings, which in turn account for a big chunk of credit-card losses ; the number of filings (and thus charge-off rates) would be rising again, whether or not overall conditions for borrowers were getting worse.
The industry also reports solid payment rates, which show how much of their debt consumers pay off each month. And confidence in credit-card asset-backed securities is pretty firm despite paralysis in other corners of structured finance. Dennis Moroney of Tower Group, a research firm, predicts that issuance volumes for 2007 will end up being 25% higher than last year.
Direct channels of infection between the subprime-mortgage crisis and the credit-card market certainly exist: consumers are likelier to load up on credit-card debt now that home- equity loans are drying up. But card issuers look at cash flow rather than asset values, so falling house prices do not necessarily trigger a change in borrowers’ creditworthiness. They may even work to issuers’ advantage. The incentives for consumers to keep paying the mortgage decrease if properties are worth less than the value of the loan; card debt rises higher up the list of repayment priorities as a result.
Card issuers are also able to respond much more swiftly and flexibly to stormier conditions than mortgage lenders are, by changing interest rates or altering credit limits. That should in theory reduce the risk of a rapid repricing of assets. "We are not going to wake up one day and totally revalue the loans," says Gary Perlin, Capital One’ s chief financial officer.
If a sudden subprime-style meltdown in the credit-card market is improbable, the risks of a sustained downturn are much more real. If lower house prices and a contraction in credit push America into recession, the industry will undoubtedly face a grimmer future. Keep watching for those dorsal fins.
According to the third paragraph, why would the number of bankruptcy filings be rising again

A:There is a change in America’s personal-bankruptcy laws. B:The charge-offs and delinquencies are still low. C:The influence of the personal-bankruptcy laws has been digested. D:The overall conditions for borrowers are getting worse.

Text 4

According to the third paragraph, why would the number of bankruptcy filings be rising again

A:There is a change in America’s personal-bankruptcy laws. B:The charge-offs and delinquencies are still low. C:The influence of the personal-bankruptcy laws has been digested. D:The overall conditions for borrowers are getting worse.

If American investors have learned any lesson in the last 25 years, it is to buy shares on the dips. The slide in 2000--2002 may have been longer and deeper than they were used to but normal service was eventually resumed, driving the Dow Jones Industrial Average to a record high on October 1st.
Among American financial commentators, it is almost universally accepted that shares always rise over the long run. And one ought to expect shares (which are risky) to deliver a higher return than risk free assets such as government bonds.
Nevertheless, investors ought also to remember the world’s second largest economy, Japan. Its most popular stock-market average, the Nikkei 225, peaked at 38,915 on the last trading day of the 1980s; this week, nearly 18 years later, it is still only around 17,000, less than half its peak. Buying on the dips did not work either.
Professionals of the London Business School examined the record of 16 stock markets which were in continuous operation over the course of the 20th century. In itself, this selection showed survivorship bias by excluding the likes of Russia and China. The academies found that only three other countries could match the American record of having no 20-year periods with negative real returns.
Other investors were far less lucky. Japanese, French, German and Spanish investors all suffered instances where they had to wait 50--60 years to earn a positive real return. It was no good following the famous advice to "put the shares in a drawer and forget about them"; the furniture would not have lasted that long.
Besides survivorship bias, there is another problem with the belief that stock markets must always go up. Investors will keep buying until prices reach stratospheric(稳定的) levels. That clearly happened in Japan in the late 1980s, and after seven years, it is still not much more than half its peak level.
A significant proportion of the return from equities in the second half of the 20(上标)th century came from a re-rating of shares; investors were willing to pay a higher multiple for profits. But re-rating cannot continue forever.
If investors want a simple parallel with share prices, they need only mm to the American housing market. Back in 2005 an economic adviser to the president said," We’ve never had a decline in housing prices on a nationwide basis. What I think is more likely is that house prices will slow, maybe stabilize."
Lots of people took the same view and were willing to borrow (and lend) on a vast scale on the grounds that higher house prices would always bail them out. They are now counting their losses. Investors in equities should beware of over-committing themselves on the basis of a similar belief Just ask the Japanese.

It can be interred from the text that in the recent two decades the share prices of （）

A:China keeps increasing. B:America keeps increasing. C:Russia keeps declining. D:France keeps still.

The United States is not (thank goodness) a culturally homogeneous country. It consists of many distinct moral communities. On certain social issues, such as abortion and homosexuality, people don’t agree and probably never will—and the signal political advantage of the federalist system is that they don’t have to. Individuals and groups who find the values or laws of one state obnoxious have the right to live somewhere else.
The nationalization of abortion policy in the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision created a textbook example of what can happen when this federalist principle is ignored. If the Supreme Court had not stepped in, abortion would today be legal in most states but not all; pro-lifers would have the comfort of knowing they could live in a state whose law was compatible with their views. Instead of endlessly confronting a cultural schism that affects every Supreme Court nomination, we would see occasional local flare-ups in state legislatures or courtrooms.
America is a stronger country for the moral diversity that federalism uniquely allows. Moral law and family law govern the most intimate and, often, the most controversial spheres of life. For the sake of domestic tranquility, domestic law is best left to a level of government that is close to home.
So well suited is the federalist system to the gay-marriage issue that it might almost have been set up to handle it. In a new land whose citizens followed different religious traditions, it would have made no sense to centralize marriage or family law. And so marriage has been the domain of local law not just since the days of the Founders but since Colonial times, before the states were states. To my knowledge, the federal government has overruled the states on marriage only twice. The first time was when it required Utah to ban polygamy as a condition for joining the Union—and note that this ruling was issued before Utah became a state. The second time was in 1967, when the Supreme Court, in Loving v. Virginia, struck down sixteen states’ bans on interracial marriage. Here the Court said not that marriage should be defined by the federal government but only that states could not define marriage in ways that violated core constitutional rights. On the one occasion when Congress directly addressed same-sex marriage, in the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, it decreed that the federal government would not recognize same-sex marriages but took care not to impose that rule on the states.
What we know about abortion law in American is that

A:it is illegal in all over America to have an abortion. B:the Supreme Court had not interfered in abortion law. C:abortion used to be a legal practice in most states. D:abortion is still legal in most states in America today.

If American investors have learned any lesson in the last 25 years, it is to buy shares on the dips. The slide in 2000--2002 may have been longer and deeper than they were used to but normal service was eventually resumed, driving the Dow Jones Industrial Average to a record high on October 1st.
Among American financial commentators, it is almost universally accepted that shares always rise over the long run. And one ought to expect shares (which are risky) to deliver a higher return than risk free assets such as government bonds.
Nevertheless, investors ought also to remember the world’s second largest economy, Japan. Its most popular stock-market average, the Nikkei 225, peaked at 38,915 on the last trading day of the 1980s; this week, nearly 18 years later, it is still only around 17,000, less than half its peak. Buying on the dips did not work either.
Professionals of the London Business School examined the record of 16 stock markets which were in continuous operation over the course of the 20th century. In itself, this selection showed survivorship bias by excluding the likes of Russia and China. The academies found that only three other countries could match the American record of having no 20-year periods with negative real returns.
Other investors were far less lucky. Japanese, French, German and Spanish investors all suffered instances where they had to wait 50--60 years to earn a positive real return. It was no good following the famous advice to "put the shares in a drawer and forget about them"; the furniture would not have lasted that long.
Besides survivorship bias, there is another problem with the belief that stock markets must always go up. Investors will keep buying until prices reach stratospheric(稳定的) levels. That clearly happened in Japan in the late 1980s, and after seven years, it is still not much more than half its peak level.
A significant proportion of the return from equities in the second half of the 20th century came from a re-rating of shares; investors were willing to pay a higher multiple for profits. But re-rating cannot continue forever.
If investors want a simple parallel with share prices, they need only mm to the American housing market. Back in 2005 an economic adviser to the president said," We’ve never had a decline in housing prices on a nationwide basis. What I think is more likely is that house prices will slow, maybe stabilize."
Lots of people took the same view and were willing to borrow (and lend) on a vast scale on the grounds that higher house prices would always bail them out. They are now counting their losses. Investors in equities should beware of over-committing themselves on the basis of a similar belief Just ask the Japanese.

It can be interred from the text that in the recent two decades the share prices of （）

A:China keeps increasing B:America keeps increasing C:Russia keeps declining D:France keeps still

When there is blood in the water, it is only natural that dorsal fins swirl around excitedly. Now that America’s housing market is ailing, predators have their sights on the country’s credit-card market. Analysts at Goldman Sachs reckon that credit-card losses could reach $ 99 billion if contagion spreads from subprime mortgages to other forms of consumer credit. Signs of strain are clearly visible. There are rises in both the charge-off and delinquency rates, which measure the share of balances that are uncollectable or more than 30 days late respectively. HSBC announced last month that it had taken a $1.4 billion charge in its American consumer-finance business, partly because of weakness among card borrowers.
It is too early to panic, though. Charge-offs and delinquencies are still low. According to Moody’s, a rating agency, the third-quarter delinquency rate of 3.89% was almost a full percentage point below the historical average. The deterioration in rates can be partly explained by technical factors. A change in America’s personal-bankruptcy laws in 2005 led to an abrupt fall in bankruptcy filings, which in turn account for a big chunk of credit-card losses ; the number of filings (and thus charge-off rates) would be rising again, whether or not overall conditions for borrowers were getting worse.
The industry also reports solid payment rates, which show how much of their debt consumers pay off each month. And confidence in credit-card asset-backed securities is pretty firm despite paralysis in other corners of structured finance. Dennis Moroney of Tower Group, a research firm, predicts that issuance volumes for 2007 will end up being 25% higher than last year.
Direct channels of infection between the subprime-mortgage crisis and the credit-card market certainly exist: consumers are likelier to load up on credit-card debt now that home- equity loans are drying up. But card issuers look at cash flow rather than asset values, so falling house prices do not necessarily trigger a change in borrowers’ creditworthiness. They may even work to issuers’ advantage. The incentives for consumers to keep paying the mortgage decrease if properties are worth less than the value of the loan; card debt rises higher up the list of repayment priorities as a result.
Card issuers are also able to respond much more swiftly and flexibly to stormier conditions than mortgage lenders are, by changing interest rates or altering credit limits. That should in theory reduce the risk of a rapid repricing of assets. "We are not going to wake up one day and totally revalue the loans," says Gary Perlin, Capital One’ s chief financial officer.
If a sudden subprime-style meltdown in the credit-card market is improbable, the risks of a sustained downturn are much more real. If lower house prices and a contraction in credit push America into recession, the industry will undoubtedly face a grimmer future. Keep watching for those dorsal fins.

According to the third paragraph, why would the number of bankruptcy filings be rising again （）

A:There is a change in America’s personal-bankruptcy laws B:The charge-offs and delinquencies are still low C:The influence of the personal-bankruptcy laws has been digested D:The overall conditions for borrowers are getting worse

__________to some parts of South America is still difficult, because parts of the continent are still covered with thick forests.

A:Orientation B:Access C:Procession D:Voyage

? ?下面有3篇短文，每篇短文后有5道题，每题后面有4个选项。请仔细阅读短文，并根据短文回答其后面的问题，从4个选项中选择1个最佳答案。
{{B}}第一篇{{/B}}

? ?Everybody loathes it, but everybody does it. A recent poll showed that 40% of Americans hate the practice. It seems so arbitrary, after all. Why does a barman get a tip, but not a doctor who saved lives?
? ?In America alone, tipping is now a $16 billion-a-year industry. Consumers acting rationally ought not to pay more than they have to for a given service. Tips should not exist. So why do they? The conventional wisdom is that tips both reward the efforts of good service and reduce uncomfortable feelings of inequality. The better the service, the bigger the tip.
? ?Such explanations no doubt explain the purported origin of tipping—in the 16th century, boxes in English taverns carried the phrase "To Insurance Promptitude" (later just "TIP"). But according to new research from Cornell University, tipping no longer serves any useful function. The paper analyses data from 2,547 groups dining at 20 different restaurants. The correlation between larger tips and better service was very weak: only a tiny part of the variability in the size of the tip had anything to do with the quality of service. Customers who rated a meal as "excellent" still tipped anywhere between 8% and 37% of the meal price.
? ?Tipping is better explained by culture than by economics. In America, the custom has become institutionalized: it is regarded as part of the accepted cost of a service. In a New York restaurant, failing to tip at least 15% could well mean abuse from the waiter. Hairdressers can expect to get 15-20%, the man who delivers your groceries $2. In Europe, tipping is less common; in many restaurants, discretionary tipping is being replaced by a standard service charge. In many Asian countries, tipping has never really caught on at all.
? ?How to account for these national differences? Look no further than psychology. According to Michael Lynn, the Cornell paper’s co-author, countries in which people are more extrovert, sociable or neurotic tend to tip more. Tipping relieves anxiety about being served by strangers. And, says Mr. Lynn, "in America, where people are outgoing and expressive, tipping is about social approval. If you tip badly, people think less of you. Tipping well is a chance to show off." Icelanders, by contrast, do not usually tip a measure of their introversion, no doubt.
? ?While such explanations may be crude, the hard truth seems to be that tipping does not work. It does not benefit the customer. Nor, in the case of restaurants, does it actually incentivise the waiter, or help the restaurant manager to monitor and assess his staff. Service people should "just be paid a decent wage" may actually make economic sense.

We can infer from the first paragraph that ______.

A:tipping has never been really popular in America B:tipping has been questioned by people though it still exists C:American people approve of giving tips to doctors instead of barmen D:American people think one way and act another

Questions from 36 to 40 are based on the following passage: Against this background, the WTO faces several daunting challenges. The first is to continue bringing down tariffs on traded goods. Average penalties have fallen steadily since the GATT’s formation but even the most open economies retain lofty barriers: for instance, America still charges a tariff of 14.6% on import of clothing,five times higher than its average levy. Resistance to tariff cuts is strongest in agriculture. According to Tim Josling,a trade expert at Stanford University, tariffs and other barriers on farm goods average a crippling 40% worldwide and create distortions that “destroy huge amounts of value”. A new set of global farm talks is planned to start in 1999. At the least,you might think, these could lock in impressive reforms in Latin America and encourage further watering-down of the European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy.But they will prove difficult: squabbles over agriculture almost sank the Uruguay round.

According to the passage, which statement is NOT true（）

A:The WTO faces several daunting challenges, one of which is to continue bringing down tariffs on traded goods. B:America still charges a tariff of 14.6% on import of clothing, four times higher than its average levy. C:The strongest resistance to tariff cuts is in agriculture field. D:A trade expert said that tariffs and other barriers on farm goods averaged a crippling 40% worldwide.