[单项选择]

2009 was the worst year for the record labels in a decade. (31) was 2008, and before that 2007 and 2006. In fact, industry revenues have been (32) for the past 10 years. Digital sales are growing, but not as fast as traditional sales are falling.
Maybe that’s because illegal downloads are so easy. People have been (33) intellectual property for centuries, but it used to be a time-consuming way to generate markedly (34) copies. These days, high-quality copies are (35) . According to the Pew Internet project, people use file-sharing software more often than they do iTunes and other legal shops.
I’d like to believe, as many of my friends seem to, that this practice won’t do much harm. But even as I’ve heard over the past decade that things weren’t (36) bad, that the music industry was moving to a new, better business model, each year’s numbers have been worse. Maybe it’s ti
A. upgraded
B. inferior
C. ineffective
D. preferable

[单项选择]

2009 was the worst year for the record labels in a decade. (31) was 2008, and before that 2007 and 2006. In fact, industry revenues have been (32) for the past 10 years. Digital sales are growing, but not as fast as traditional sales are falling.
Maybe that’s because illegal downloads are so easy. People have been (33) intellectual property for centuries, but it used to be a time-consuming way to generate markedly (34) copies. These days, high-quality copies are (35) . According to the Pew Internet project, people use file-sharing software more often than they do iTunes and other legal shops.
I’d like to believe, as many of my friends seem to, that this practice won’t do much harm. But even as I’ve heard over the past decade that things weren’t (36) bad, that the music industry was moving to a new, better business model, each year’s numbers have been worse. Maybe it’s ti
A. As
B. Same
C. Thus
D. So

[单项选择]Hollywood racked up another "record" year at the box office. But the higher ticket sales mask fundamental issues in the U.S. movie industry, where the so-called blockbuster strategy is causing movies to open with big tallies that fall off faster than in previous years. Movie ticket sales reached an estimated $8.35 billion in 2001, up 8.4% from $7.7 billion in 2000, the largest gain since 1998. Moreover, the number of tickets sold--a more reliable indicator--rose to an estimated 1.49 billion, according to box-office tracking firm Exhibitor Relations Co. The strong sales were aided by the post-Christmas, pre-new Year weekend. Although many observers thought people would stay away from the theaters after the 9.11, the numbers have been up 5% industry-wide since then from year earlier levels.
Those positive trends, however, gloss over deeper problems facing the Hollywood studios and movie theater chains, where real audience growth has been marginal. Box-office totals have nearly tri
A. the box office figures have been declining ceaselessly without any improvement.
B. as the ticket price is going up rapidly these years, fewer people can afford it.
C. those "big" movies open with a extremely large box office figures, but decline quickly after a short period.
D. high quality movie are becoming marginal and the core of the movie goings audience is limite

[填空题]The warmest year on record occurred in 1998.

[单项选择]The country’s deficit that year （）to a record 169.8 billion dollars.
A. soared
B. soured
C. sored
D. sourced

[简答题] We fear the worst, expect the worst, thus invite the worst and the result is that we are becoming a nation of weaklings and hypochondriacs, a self-medicating society inca pable of distinguishing between casual, everyday symptoms and those that require profes sional attention.
Somewhere in our early education we become addicted to the notion that pain means sickness. We fail to learn that pain is the body’s way of informing the mind that we are do ing something wrong, not necessarily that something is wrong. We don’t understand that pain may be telling us that we are eating too much or the wrong things; or that we are smoking too much or drinking too much or that there is too much emotional congestion in our lives that we are being worn down by having to cope daily with overcrowded streets and highways, the pounding noise of garbage grinders, or the cosmic distance between the en trance to the airport and the departure gate. We get the message of pain all wrong. Inste