Text 4
Shortly after dawn on February 17th 2003, the world’s most ambitious road pricing experiment will start in London. Though cordon toll schemes have been operating in Norway for years, and Singapore has an electronic system, no one has ever tried to charge motorists in a city of the size and complexity of London.
For decades, transport planners have been demanding that motorists should pay directly for the use of roads. According to the professionals, it is the only way of civilizing cities and restraining the growth of inter urban traffic. Politicians have mostly turned a deaf ear, fearing that charging for something what was previously free was a quick route to electoral suicide. But London’s initiative suggests that the point where road pricing becomes generally accepted as the most efficient way to restrain traffic is much nearer than most drivers realize.
The mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, has pinned his political reputation on the scheme’s success. If it works, cities around the world will rush to copy it. If it fails, he will be jeered from office when he seeks re-election in 2004. But how will success be judged The mayor claims that congestion charging will produce￡130m in net annual revenues, reduce traffic in central London by 15% and reduce traffic delays by about a quarter. Unfortunately these ambitious targets are unlikely to be met.
For a start, the low level at which the charge has been set owes more to politics than traffic planning. Its impact, modest in comparison with the already high ￡4 an hour on-street parking charges in the area, may be less than anticipated. But most transport experts are cautiously optimistic that it will help improve the capital’s chaotic transport system. As for the mayor, his political prospects look good. Those who drive cars in the center of London during the day are a tiny fraction of the millions who walk or use public transport to get to work.
London’s willingness to take the plunge has moved congestion charging from the realm of transport planners into mainstream politics. Yet the low-tech solution it has adopted has been overtaken by modern microwave radio systems allowing cars to communicate with roadside charging units. The next generation of technology will use global positioning satellites (GPS) to track the position of vehicles wherever they are, on a second-to- second basis.
The brave new world of paying as you go is not far away. For those who drive in rural areas, the cost will come down. But for motorists who spend most of their time in congested urban areas, travel is rightly going to become much more expensive.

The implementation of road pricing in London is primarily intended to（）

A:restrain the capital's traffic growth. B:produce net annual municipal revenues. C:remove on-street parking lots. D:meet ambitious political aims.

Text 1
Shortly after dawn on February 17th 2003, the world’s most ambitious road-pricing experiment will start in London. Though cordon toll schemes have been operating in Nor-way for years, and Singapore has an electronic system, no one has ever tried to charge motorists in a city of the size and complexity of London.
For decades, transport planners have been demanding that motorists should pay directly for the use of roads. According to the professionals, it is the only way of civilizing cities and restraining the growth of inter-urban traffic. Politicians have mostly turned a deaf ear, fearing that charging for something what was previously free was a quick route to electoral suicide. But London’s initiative suggests that the point where road pricing he-comes generally accepted as the most efficient way to restrain traffic is much nearer than most drivers realize.
The mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, has pinned his political reputation on the scheme’s success. If it works, cities around the world will rush to copy it. If it fails, he will be jeered from office when he seeks reelection in 2004. But how will success be judged The mayor claims that congestion charging will produce ￡130m in net annual revenues, reduce traffic in central London by 15% and reduce traffic delays by about a quarter. Unfortunately these ambitious targets are unlikely to be met.
For a start, the low level at which the charge has been set owes more to politics than traffic planning. Its impact, modest in comparison with the already high ￡4 an hour on-street parking charges in the area, may be less than anticipated. But most transport experts are cautiously optimistic that it will help improve the capital’s chaotic transport system. As for the mayor, his political prospects look good. Those who drive cars in the center of London during the day are a tiny fraction of the millions who walk or use public transport to get to work.
London’s willingness to take the plunge has moved congestion charging from the realm of transport planners into mainstream politics. Yet the low-tech solution it has adopted has been overtaken by modern microwave radio systems allowing cars to communicate with roadside charging units. The next generation of technology will use global positioning satellites (GPS) to track the position of vehicles wherever they are, on a second-to-second basis.
The brave new world of paying as you go is not far away. For those who drive in rural areas, the cost will come down. But for motorists who spend most of their time in congested urban areas, travel is rightly going to become much more expensive.

The implementation of road pricing in London is primarily intended to（）

A:restrain the capital% traffic growth. B:produce net annual municipal revenues. C:remove on-street parking lots. D:meet ambitious political aims.

If in this season of annual achievement awards there were one for the biggest New Year’s bang and sorriest year-ending whimper, the winner would be Britain’s entrant, the Millennium Dome (千 年圆顶).
No country built more ambitious millennial projects and talked them up with more hucksterism than Britain, and the centerpiece was the $1.2 billion Dome, located on the meridian that gave the name to Greenwich Mean Time and gave Prime Minister Tony Blair the opportunity to proclaim Britain in 2000 as the " home of time" His closest political associate and first director of the project, Peter Mandelson, said, "Other countries will be kicking themselves that they did not have the imagination to go ahead as we did. "
That the project had to dump its English director and two English chairmen and turn to a new chief executive who not only learned his trade at Disneyland Paris but also was a Frenchman is an indication of just how much a triumph of British ingenuity the project ended up not being.
Actually the trouble with the Dome began on opening night. Thousands of the invitees got stuck on the new subway line that had been built to speed people from central London out to Greenwich, and others who managed to arrive could not get past security to see the show. Fatally for the Dome, among the barred and detoured were the editors of some of Britain’s biggest newspapers.
If opening night gave the vengeance-bent media a shovel, the hapless Dome operators supplied the dirt, and the piles of bad publicity mounted.
Some attractions had lines that were intolerably long, others had no lines because they were deemed so uninspiring. Ticket and transportation foul-ups abounded. The displays and zones were roundly condemned as falling far short of their purpose of showing Britain at its inventive best.
People stayed away, and by the spring, the massive space was virtually deserted on weekdays. The original projection of 12 million visitors was officially scaled back a number of times.
In fact, the project may be more a victim of its own hyped expectations than of its actual performance. The anticipated final figures of 6.5 million visitors (5.7 million paying) compares favorably with other London tourist attractions, and surveys show 85% customer satisfaction.
The government will soon negotiate a deal to sell off the Dome and much of the land around it to Legacy PLC, an Irish-English development company that plans to build middle-class and luxury housing on the site and to turn the huilding into a high-tech business center with 14,000 jobs.
The author says that the Millennium Dome would win the award for the biggest New Year’s bang, because it ______.

A:is the most ambitious millennial project B:enables Britain to become the "home of time" C:receives loudest publicity and promotion D:represents the triumph of British imagination

This weekend marks 25 years since the publication of the U.S. Department of Education’s explosive report "A Nation at Risk. " Its powerful indictment of American education launched the largest education-reform movement in the nation’s history, paving the way for strategies as different as charter schools and the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act. But even after a vast political and financial investment spanning two and a half decades, we’re far from achieving the report’s ambitious aims.
We’ve learned a lot about school reform in 25 years, lessons that suggest that it is possible, eventually, to achieve "A Nation at Risk’s" ambitious aims. We’ve learned that a lot of public schools require incentives to lift their sights for their students. The nation’s long tradition of letting local school boards set standards isn’t going to get us where we need to go educationally. If anything, NCLB’s requirement of statewide standards needs to be taken to its logical conclusion—rigorous national standards. Make them voluntary. Give states and school systems different ways of measuring their progress against the standards by sanctioning a number of different national examination boards. And reward educators for meeting the new standards (NCLB only punishes schools for not meeting state standards, which encourages states to keep standards low because they don’t want a lot of their schools labeled as failures).
But improvement can’t merely be imposed on schools from the outside. Schools are complex social enterprises; their success depends on thousands of daily personal interactions. They are, in the end, only as
good as the people in them and the culture in which those people work. So it’s crucial to get everyone in a school community invested in a school’s mission. Ownership is key. That comes from giving schools autonomy—in staffing, budgeting and instruction. From giving families a chance to choose their public schools. And from school leadership that promotes a strong sense of school identity and clear expectations of success. Reform has to come from the inside-out as well as the outside-in. There’s a human side of school reform that we ignore at our peril.
But if achieving "A Nation at Risk’s" vision is becoming increasingly difficult, the alternative is really no alternative. The American economy hasn’t collapsed in the absence of public-school reform because its success is driven mainly by the small segment of the workforce that is highly educated. But the plight of the middle class that the reform reports of the 1980s warned about has worsened as the wage gap between high-school graduates and the college-educated has widened, creating an increasingly two-tiered society—and an ever-greater need to arm every American with the high-quality education that "A Nation at Risk" envisioned.
The author suggests that the aims of the education reform

A:should and can be realized. B:are too ambitious for public schools. C:have actually widened the gap between schools. D:cannot provide the much-desired high-quality education.

Text 4 Shortly after dawn on February 17th 2003, the world’s most ambitious road pricing experiment will start in London. Though cordon toll schemes have been operating in Norway for years, and Singapore has an electronic system, no one has ever tried to charge motorists in a city of the size and complexity of London. For decades, transport planners have been demanding that motorists should pay directly for the use of roads. According to the professionals, it is the only way of civilizing cities and restraining the growth of inter urban traffic. Politicians have mostly turned a deaf ear, fearing that charging for something what was previously free was a quick route to electoral suicide. But London’s initiative suggests that the point where road pricing becomes generally accepted as the most efficient way to restrain traffic is much nearer than most drivers realize. The mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, has pinned his political reputation on the scheme’s success. If it works, cities around the world will rush to copy it. If it fails, he will be jeered from office when he seeks re-election in 2004. But how will success be judged The mayor claims that congestion charging will produce￡130m in net annual revenues, reduce traffic in central London by 15% and reduce traffic delays by about a quarter. Unfortunately these ambitious targets are unlikely to be met. For a start, the low level at which the charge has been set owes more to politics than traffic planning. Its impact, modest in comparison with the already high ￡4 an hour on-street parking charges in the area, may be less than anticipated. But most transport experts are cautiously optimistic that it will help improve the capital’s chaotic transport system. As for the mayor, his political prospects look good. Those who drive cars in the center of London during the day are a tiny fraction of the millions who walk or use public transport to get to work. London’s willingness to take the plunge has moved congestion charging from the realm of transport planners into mainstream politics. Yet the low-tech solution it has adopted has been overtaken by modern microwave radio systems allowing cars to communicate with roadside charging units. The next generation of technology will use global positioning satellites (GPS) to track the position of vehicles wherever they are, on a second-to- second basis. The brave new world of paying as you go is not far away. For those who drive in rural areas, the cost will come down. But for motorists who spend most of their time in congested urban areas, travel is rightly going to become much more expensive.

The implementation of road pricing in London is primarily intended to（）

A:restrain the capital's traffic growth. B:produce net annual municipal revenues. C:remove on-street parking lots. D:meet ambitious political aims.

Her novel depicts an ambitious Chinese（　）

A:writes B:sketches C:describes D:indicates