【每日阅读训练——速度3系列】【速度3-5】&【越障3-5】+【难度LSAT 04】

kidvii

速度越障汇总帖子：

http://forum.chasedream.com/GMAT_RC/thread-562296-1-1.html

【速度3-5】

In Baring Facts of Train Crash, Blogs Erode China Censorship

Sim Chi Yin for The New York Times

By MICHAEL WINES and SHARONL a FRANIERE

Published: July 28, 2011

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They were a few short sentences, typed by a young girl with the online handle Smm Miao. But five days later, the torrent that followed them was still flooding this nation’s Internet, and lapping at the feet of government bureaucrats, censors and the state-controlled press.

The train the girl saw, on a track outside Wenzhou in coastal Zhejiang Province, was rammed from behind minutes later, killing 40 people and injuring 191. Since then, China’s two major Twitter-like microblogs — called weibos here — have posted an astounding 26 million messages on the tragedy, including some that have forced embarrassed officials to reverse themselves. The messages are a potent amalgam of contempt for railway authorities, suspicion of government explanations and shoe-leather journalism by citizens and professionals alike.

The swift and comprehensive blogs on the train accident stood this week in stark contrast to the stonewalling of the Railways Ministry, already stained by a bribery scandal. And they are a humbling example for the Communist Party news outlet sand state television, whose blinkered coverage of rescued babies only belatedly gave way to careful reports on the public’s discontent.

While the blogs have exposed wrongdoers and broken news before, this week’s performance may signal the arrival of weibos as a social force to be reckoned with, even in the face of government efforts to rein in the Internet’s influence.

The government censors assigned to monitor public opinion have let most, though hardly all of the weibo posts stream onto the Web unimpeded. But many experts say they are riding a tiger. For the very nature of weibo posts, which spread faster than censors can react, makes weibos beyond easy control. And their mushrooming popularity makes controlling them a delicate matter.

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Saturday’s train disaster is a telling example — an event that resonated with China’s growing middle class, computer-savvy, able to afford travel by high-speed rail, already deeply skeptical of official propaganda.

As state television devoted Saturday evening to reports of mass murder in Norway, SinaWeibo weighed in four minutes after the train accident with a post from the crash scene, by a passenger reporting a power blackout and “two strong collisions.” Nine minutes later, another passenger posted a call for help, reposted 100,000 times: “Children are crying all over the train car! Not a single attendant here!” Two hours later, a call for blood quickly clogged local hospitals with donors.

Then the reaction began to pour in. “Such a major accident, how could it be attributed to weather and technical reasons?” blogged Cai Qi, a senior Zhejiang Province official.“Who should take the responsibility? The railway department should think hard in this time of pain and learn a good lesson from this.”

From a Hubei Province blogger: “I just watched the news on the train crash in Wenzhou, but I feel like I still don’t even know what happened. Nothing is reliable anymore. I feel like I can’t even believe the weather forecast. Is there anything that we can still trust?”

There is no clearer sign of the rising influence of microblogs than their impact on government itself.

Last weekend, Wenzhou bureaucrats ordered local lawyers not to accept cases from families of victims without their permission. After weibos exposed them, they withdrew the order and apologized.

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Railway workers had quickly buried the first car of the oncoming train at the site of the accident. On Monday, after an online outcry charging a cover-up, they unearthed it and took it to Wenzhou for analysis. China Daily, the state-controlled English-language newspaper, noted that they had met the request of “many netizens.”

“I call it the microblogging revolution, “Zhan Jiang, a professor of international journalism and communications at Beijing Foreign Studies University, said in an interview on Thursday. “In the last year, microbloggers, especially Sina and Tencent, have played more and more a major role in coverage, especially breaking news.”

The few newspapers and magazines here that consistently push back at censors with investigative journalism are not just printing the results of their digging into the train wreck, but posting them on weibos for millions to see. So were hundreds of more traditional state-controlled news outlets.

Even the Communist Party organ People’s Daily maintains a weibo. But the field is dominated by two players. Sina Holdings Ltd.’s Sina Weibo(pronouncedSEE-nah WAY-bo) counts 140 million users, generally better-educated and more interested in current events than those at competitors. Tencent Inc.’s weibo hosts 200 million generally younger users who are more interested in socializing.

In some ways, the Chinese weibos replicate their Western counterparts: they limit posts to 140 characters (though in Chinese, where many characters are words by themselves, much more can be said). Posts can bere-tweeted, too, although in China, tweeting is called knitting, because the word “weibo” sounds like the word for scarf.

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There are also differences. Bloggers can comment on others’ posts, turning a message into a conversation. Users also can include photographs and other files with their posts, to telling effect: on Thursday, fact-checking bloggers posted photos of Prime Minister Wen Jiabao’s recent official activities to counter his assertion at a Wenzhou news conference that illness had kept him from visiting the disaster site earlier.

While Western social networks like Twitter and Facebook are blocked here, their Chinese counterparts thrive, largely because their owners consent to government monitoring and censorship — and perhaps because the government fears the reaction should it shut them down. The outpouring over the rail tragedy appears to have enjoyed at least some official approval; many analysts believe the government sees microblogs as a virtual steam valve through which citizens can safely vent complaints.

If needed, the weibos have literally dozens of electronic levers they can press to dilute, hide or delete offending posts, according to one Tencent Web editor who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of dismissal in disclosing that information. Yet the weibos also play cat and mouse with the censors.

“If we did not have any free speech then this company would not have any influence, so the company must act proactively to safeguard our space,” he said. “So that’s why they must go through this process of bargaining with the government departments.”

And even dedicated censors find the weibos hard to restrain. Government minders can electronically delete posts with offending keywords like “human rights” and “protest.” But like Twitter, the ability to instantly forward posts to dozens of fellow users means that messages can spread, well before censorship orders can be implemented.

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And there are always screenshots to preserve posts that are deleted, such as this one by Ge You, one of China’s most distinguished actors:

“If a higher-level leader died,” he wrote, “there would be countless wreaths; however, when many ordinary people died, there was only endless harmony” — a euphemism for censorship. “If a higher-level leader died, there would be nationwide mourning; however, when many ordinary people died, there was not a single word of apology. If a higher-level leader died, there would be high-end funerals; however, when many ordinary people died, there were only cold numbers.”

Five Days Later, Chinese Concede Design Flaw Had Role in Wreck

By SHARONL a FRANIERE

Published: July 28, 2011

BEIJING — China broke days of stony silence on Thursday about the cause of a deadly crash on its new high-speedrail system, as officials acknowledged a serious design flaw in signaling equipment and the prime minister visited the crash site and promised to prosecute those responsible for an accident that has infuriated the Chinese public.

“I believe related departments will seriously learn a lesson from this incident,” the prime minister, Wen Jiabao,said after inspecting the scene of the Saturday crash near the eastern city of Wenzhou, which killed 40 people and injured 191. “We must get to the bottom of this.”

Mr. Wen spoke at an extraordinary hour long news conference streamed live on the Web site of Xinhua, the official news agency, in what appeared to be part of an urgent public relations effort by China’s leadership to show that it was aggressively policing flaws in a new rail system that lies at the heart of the country’s breakneck effort to modernize.

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自由阅读

China’s high-speed rail system is one of the world’s largest and most costly public works projects. High-speed rail has an excellent safety record elsewhere, especially in Japan, which has never had a fatality.

In the first detailed explanation of the accident, a high-ranking railway official said that after a lightning strike, a signaling device at the Wenzhou South Station in Zhejiang Province had malfunctioned and failed to turn from green to red. He also said that inadequately trained workers had failed to notice. The accident occurred when a high-speed train rear-ended another train that had left the station roughly 10 minutes earlier but had stalled on the tracks.

The government’s account raised fresh questions about how such an accident could have happened.

Chinese residents have flooded microblogging sites with furious complaints about breakneck development without heed to safety, and fears of a cover-up.

On Wednesday, more than 100 relatives of victims protested at the Wenzhou South Station, demanding answers, according to Global Times, an English-language newspaper affiliated with the Communist Party. They held up a giant banner that read: “Disclose the true reason behind the July 23 train crash and respect the dignity of victims.”

At his news conference, Mr. Wen promised that investigators would undercover the truth, “whether it was an equipment problem, a management problem, or a production problem.” He added: “If there is any corruption exposed in the investigation, we will handle it according to the law, and the consequences will be severe.”

Mr. Wen, 68, said he had only now arrived in Wenzhou because “I’ve been ill recently, on a sick bed for 11 days.” Asked why the accident site was so hastily cleaned up, Mr. Wen said the government’s first priority was to rescue victims.

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Although news conferences by top leaders are typically broadcast live, China’s central television network, CCTV, skipped the event, prompting some Chinese to question whether the network was censoring the prime minister. But Phoenix Television, based in Hong Kong, broadcast the conference live, and Xinhua’s Web site ran simultaneous video.

Viewers kept up a running commentary on the Chinese equivalents of Twitter. One person questioned how Mr. Wen could have been sick for 11 days when Chinese news media reports showed that during that time he had met with several foreign officials and hosted two sessions of the State Council, China’s cabinet.

Others were sympathetic. “His job is not easy, with everyone below him being completely incompetent,” read one post.

The government’s initial explanation for the crash was terse and vague: equipment failure caused by a lightning strike. On Thursday, An Lu sheng, chief of the Shanghai Railway Bureau, faulted the quality of equipment, personnel and on-site controls. He described safeguards as “still quite weak.”

The Beijing National Railway Research and Design Institute of Signals and Communication said it would “shoulder responsibility” for the design flaw in the signal device.

He Jinliang, director of the China Standardization Association of Lightning Protection Technology, said that proper equipment would have averted the tragedy. While it might not be cost-effective to make rail equipment “100 percent lightning-proof,” he said, “you can definitely prevent this kind of serious accident.”

Li  Bibo, Adam Century, Li Mia and Edy  Yin contributed research.

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【越障3-5】

What Does the U.S. Debt-Ceiling Debate Mean for Science?

Across-the-board budget cut would hit science agencies hard.

| July 28, 2011 | 2

By Eugenie Samuel Reich of Nature magazine

The US Treasury has warned that if the US debt ceiling, the amount that the country may legally borrow, is not raised by2 August, the country will not legally be able to pay all its obligations. Republican members of Congress have demanded cuts to the budget as a condition of agreeing to raise the debt ceiling and avoid a default. Both Republican and Democratic proposals would cut more than US$1 trillion in spending over a decade, amounting to a budget reduction of at least $100 billion per year. Nature examines how this might affect the scientific community.

Which areas would bear the brunt of the cuts?

Republicans have made it clear that they will not cut defense spending, and Democrats are keen to protect social security and health-care programs such as Medicare and Medicaid. Thus, the cuts are likely to fall on the roughly$600-billion discretionary, domestic budget, which includes funding for scientific agencies including the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Department of Energy's Office of Science. A reduction of $100 billion, applied across the board, would result in a 17% cut to such agencies.

What is the worse-case scenario for science?

The least-favorable outcome is that a deal to cut $100 billion per year is reached, and that it starts in fiscal year 2012. In that case, it might be hard for legislators to re-evaluate the 2012 appropriations bills program by program, given that several have already been passed by the House of Representatives. It would be more likely that they would apply the reduction roughly equally to all programs. That would result in cuts of more than $5 billion to the NIH, $1billion to the NSF (which is already under stress because stimulus grants awarded in2009 are about to run out) and $800 million to the Office of Science, enough to force the closure of one national lab or cuts in personnel at many.

What is the best-case scenario?

If a deal to cut $100 billion is not reached this year, and the full force of cuts is applied only in fiscal year 2013, then science might fare better. Advocates for science would have an opportunity to make their case to both parties, which generally wish to be seen to be protecting science as an investment in future prosperity. Even if a deal is reached for this year, it is still possible that science will be protected. On 13 July, for example, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives's subcommittee for commerce, justice and science sent a bill to the House floor that maintains current funding for the NSF, even though the overall allocation was cut 6%. That reflects support for science from everyone.

What if no deal is reached?

If no deal is reached, President Barack Obama could unilaterally raise the debt ceiling, which would be likely to prompt legal challenges and apolitical row, but would remove the threat of default. House Republicans could still refuse to pass the budget for fiscal year 2012 unless cuts are implemented, and threaten a government shutdown (as happened with the fiscal year 2011 budget earlier this year). Alternatively, the White House and Congress could reach an interim agreement to raise the debt ceiling for a short time--a month, for example--while they continue to work on a final deal.

What if there is a default?

The short answer is that nobody knows, but there would probably be widespread economic chaos that would affect everybody, including scientists. The US Treasury would have to prioritize which bills to pay, but because scientific funding comes directly through appropriations, rather than borrowing, it seems unlikely that it would be directly affected by unpaid bills.

This article is reproduced with permission from the magazine Nature. The article was first published on July 28,2011.

抓抓sandra

LSAT第04套 SECTION IV——PASSAGE 1

Governments of developing countries occasionally enter into economic development agreements with foreign investors who provide capital and technological expertise that may not be readily available in such countries. Besides the normal economic risk that accompanies such enterprises, investors face the additional risk that the host government may attempt unilaterally to change in its favor the terms of the agreement or even to terminate the agreement altogether and appropriate the project for itself. In order to make economic development agreements more attractive to investors, some developing countries have attempted to strengthen the security of such agreements with clauses specifying that the agreements will be governed by “general principles of law recognized by civilized nations”—a set of legal principles or rules shared by the world’s major legal systems. However, advocates of governments’ freedom to modify or terminate such agreements argue that these agreements fall within a special class of contracts known as administrative contracts, a concept that originated in French law. They assert that under the theory of administrative contracts, a government retains inherent power to modify or terminate its own contract, and that this power indeed constitutes a general principle of law. However, their argument is flawed on at least two counts.


First, in French law not all government contracts are treated as administrative contracts. Some contracts are designated as administrative by specific statute, in which case the contractor is made aware of the applicable legal rules upon entering into agreement with the government. Alternatively, the contracting government agency can itself designate a contract as administrative by including certain terms not found in private civil contracts. Moreover, even in the case of administrative contracts, French law requires that in the event that the government unilaterally modifies the terms of the contract, it must compensate the contractor for any increased burden resulting from the government’s action. In effect, the government is thus prevented from modifying those contractual terms that define the financial balance of the contract.


Second, the French law of administrative contracts, although adopted by several countries, is not so universally accepted that it can be embraced as a general principle of law. In both the United States and the United Kingdom, government contracts are governed by the ordinary law of contracts, with the result that the government can reserve the power to modify or terminate a contract unilaterally only by writing such power into the contract as a specific provision. Indeed, the very fact that termination and modification clauses are commonly found in government contracts suggests that a government’s capacity to modify or terminate agreements unilaterally derives from specific contract provisions, not from inherent state power.




1.    In the passage, the author is primarily concerned with doing which one of the following?
(A) pointing out flaws in an argument provided in support of a position
(B) analyzing the weaknesses inherent in the proposed solution to a problem
(C) marshaling evidence in support of a new explanation of a phenomenon
(D) analyzing the risks inherent in adopting a certain course of action
(E) advocating a new approach to a problem that has not been solved by traditional means


2.    It can be inferred from the passage that the author would be most likely to agree with which one of the following assertions regarding the “general principles of law” mentioned in lines 16-17 of the passage?
(A) They fail to take into account the special needs and interests of developing countries that enter into agreements with foreign investors.
(B) They have only recently been invoked as criteria for adjudicating disputes between governments and foreign investors.
(C) They are more compatible with the laws of France and the United States than with those of the United Kingdom.
(D) They do not assert that governments have an inherent right to modify unilaterally the terms of agreements that they have entered into with foreign investors.
(E) They are not useful in adjudicating disputes between developing countries and foreign investors.


3.    The author implies that which one of the following is true of economic development agreements?
(A) They provide greater economic benefits to the governments that are parties to such agreements than to foreign investors.
(B) They are interpreted differently by courts in the United Kingdom than they are by courts in the United States.
(C) They have proliferated in recent years as a result of governments’ attempts to make them more legally secure.
(D) They entail greater risk to investors when the governments that enter into such agreements reserve the right to modify unilaterally the terms of the agreements.
(E) They have become less attractive to foreign investors as an increasing number of governments that enter into such agreements consider them governed by the law of ordinary contracts.


4.    According to the author, which one of the following is true of a contract that is designated by a French government agency as an administrative contract?
(A) It requires the government agency to pay for unanticipated increases in the cost of delivering the goods and services specified in the contract.
(B) It provides the contractor with certain guarantees that are not normally provided in private civil contracts.
(C) It must be ratified by the passage of a statute.
(D) It discourages foreign companies from bidding on the contract.
(E) It contains terms that distinguish it from a private civil contract.


5.    It can be inferred from the passage that under the “ordinary law of contracts” (lines 53-54), a government would have the right to modify unilaterally the terms of a contract that it had entered into with a foreign investor if which one of the following were true?
(A) The government undertook a greater economic risk by entering into the contract than did the foreign investor.
(B) The cost to the foreign investor of abiding by the terms of the contract exceeded the original estimates of such costs.
(C) The modification of the contract did not result in any increased financial burden for the investor.
(D) Both the government and the investor had agreed to abide by the general principles of law recognized by civilized nations.
(E) The contract contains a specific provision allowing the government to modify the contract.


6.    In the last paragraph, the author refers to government contracts in the United States and the United Kingdom primarily in order to
(A) Cite two governments that often reserve the right to modify unilaterally contracts that they enter into with foreign investors.
(B) Support the assertion that there is no general principle of law governing contracts between private individuals and governments.
(C) Cast doubt on the alleged universality of the concept of administrative contracts.
(D) Provide examples of legal systems that might benefit from the concept of administrative contracts.
(E) Provide examples of characteristics that typically distinguish government contracts from private civil contracts.


7.    Which one of the following best states the author’s main conclusion in the passage?
(A) Providing that an international agreement be governed by general principles of law is not a viable method of guaranteeing the legal security of such an agreement.
(B) French law regarding contracts is significantly different from those in the United States and the United Kingdom.
(C) Contracts between governments and private investors in most nations are governed by ordinary contract law.
(D) An inherent power of a government to modify or terminate a contract cannot be considered a general principle of law.
(E) Contracts between governments and private investors can be secured only by reliance on general principles of law.


8.    The author’s argument in lines 57-62 would be most weakened if which one of the following were true?
(A) The specific provisions of government contracts often contain explicit statements of what all parties to the contracts already agree are inherent state powers.
(B) Governments are more frequently put in the position of having to modify or terminate contracts than are private individuals.
(C) Modification clauses in economic development agreements have frequently been challenged in international tribunals by foreign investors who were a party to such agreements.
(D) The general principles of law provide that modification clauses cannot allow the terms of a contract to be modified in such a way that the financial balance of the contract is affected.
(E) Termination and modification agreements are often interpreted differently by national courts than they are by international tribunals.




答案(此行全选可见)：ADDEE CDA

fox0923

天哪。。完不成任务了，咋这多呢？晚上去朋友的生日party，high够了，看了新的3-5人也彻底老实了，到现在越障3-4和LSAT3还没来得及看呢。。”飞补~~~“

fox0923

刚刚在”走出GMAT困境“一栏里发现了这个可以速度阅读的软件，下载了感觉挺好的，由于这个网页在第二页，所以可能不容易发现。虽说我们有速度练习，不过这个软件是逼迫你在指定时间内完成文章的软件，读完后马上就会出现一系列detail等等的问题让你作答，而且里面还有一些有关于每篇文章的背景资料，要注意的phrases，还有生词查询等等。。最主要的是你可以自己设置阅读时间从low level-mid level-advanced level,每一个level里面也有时间的设置，这样阅读起来有伸缩性。我做了第一篇，感觉简单。

怎么感觉自己像是做广告的，只是没提成罢了，不过拿出来让大家了解一下，有兴趣的可以试试。反正当作是辅助性的也不错。

这里是link:
http://forum.chasedream.com/GMAT_Preparation/thread-390283-1-2.html

好了，夜猫子我去睡了，明天：越障速度3-5，LSAT~~

jeffreysoon

单词好多凑一块了，能改改吗？

superbat28

你们怎么都没影了~我报数睡觉了~
今天我又慢了……
90s
69s
68s
90s
85s

superbat28

越障~
6’33’’
美联储发话说，不涨debt ceiling的话，他们就没办法很好的去履行义务。然而Republican说只有在cut budget的情况下， 他们才同意上调debt ceiling. 而如果真的要去cut的话，那可能就得cut more than $1 trillion.

那这个cut会cut啥？~
Republican明确说不会削减国防，而民主党热衷于保护social security and health care, 比如Medicaid and Medicare（哈哈，这两个这学期刚学过！bingo！）所以，600 billion的什么国内budget就会遭殃，包括科技预算100 billion，这就意味着给那些agency减少了10%的钱。

什么是最坏的结果？
如果2012年就开始实行的，那这个削减计划就会使立法者很难re-evaluate这个削价计划program by program，因为许多program已经被众议院通过了。所以更有可能的是，每个计划都被等量地削减一定的数额，比如5billion to NIH, 1 billion to NSF，这基本意味着少开一个实验室或者要去裁人。

什么是最好的结果？
如果这个100 billion的预算今年不动，那scientists就可以采取措施去保护他们的资金。即是通过了削减计划，他们也可以去动用一些手段去保护。（这块跑神了。。）

如果没有达成deal会怎样？
那奥巴马通知就可以去raise the ceiling，但这会promote legal challenges and a politic row。 民主党可能威胁说要shutdown政府（这个情形之前出现过）。也有可能双方先一致同意暂时上调ceiling一段时间，比如一个月，然后去寻求final agreement。

如果真的出现了default怎么办？
这个后果还是未知的，但是肯定会引起economic chaos。这时候，美联储就有责任去prioritize the pays。但是science的资金一般都是来自拨款，不是借款，所以可能影响会小些？

superbat28

我从下午三点多……看了快6个小时的曼哈顿第九章的idiom list竟然还剩6页没看完。。。
困死我了……我歇着去了。。。

裤裤melo

重感冒还木有好~好难受啊~~~貌似离考试一天天近了~~~

1.1:23s 4行
2.56s
3.1:07s 1行
4.1:14s 2行
5.58s
6.1:02s
7.52s

daisyの小夢想

3 75s
60s
60s
4 78s
4 73s
越障LSAT明天补上！刚做了昨天的LSAT3，错了一半，简单总结了一下，明天再放上来~~