【Native Speaker每日综合训练—33系列】【33-14】经管

AceJ

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我们始终坚信，每一次阅读，都应是一次美妙的旅程
而工作组的使命就是带领大家领略阅读中的极致美景

Part I: Speaker

Diplomatic and Economic Sanctions

Andy:  Well, it’s happened.
Marjorie:  What’s happened?
Andy:  The U.S. has placed diplomatic and economic sanctions on  McQuillanland.  It’s about time!  The McQuillanland government has  violated international law for the last time!
Marjorie:  That’s great, but what does it really mean?
Andy:  Well, it means that all high-level talks between the U.S. and  McQuillanland have been called off, and the U.S. embassy is closing.
Marjorie:  That sounds serious.
Andy:  You bet it is, and that’s just the beginning.  With economic sanctions, there’ll be  serious consequences for business and trade.  There’ll be an  embargo on U.S. companies doing business there, and there’ll be a naval  blockade to enforce it.
Marjorie:  Wow, the McQuillanlanders have really done it this time.
Andy:  They have.  What made them think they could thumb their noses at us  and get away with it?
Marjorie:  I have no idea, but they’re about to find out what the repercussions are when they flout international law!

Source: ESLPOD
http://www.eslpod.com/website/show_podcast.php?issue_id=14864987


[Rephrase 1, 14:15]

AceJ

Part II: Speed

Hong Kong: The Most Expensive City to Work and Live
BY Jessica Morris

[Time2]
     Hong Kong is the most expensive city for companies to locate employees in terms of the costs of residential and office space, according to real estate agents Savills. The Savills World Cities Live-Work index, which measures the annual cost companies incur in renting homes and office space for employees, found that Hong Kong has the most expensive per employee averaging around US$123,000 a year. This makes it 1.6 times more expensive than Singapore, 3.8 times more expensive than Shanghai and 4.4 times more expensive than Mumbai. London took second place with a live-work cost of $115,000 per employee per year. New York followed closely behind with a live-work cost of $112,000 per employee. Globally, the yearly cost to rent residential and office space per employee jumped an average 21 percent since 2009, when most city rental markets bottomed out.

Tech discount?

     The financial sector pays the biggest premium for paying for employees to live and work in new cities. While Hong Kong is the world's most expensive city for its financial sector, it ranked the third most expensive city for tech and creative employee accommodation. And London, which came second for live/work costs for financial sector employees, was fourth for tech and creative employee accommodation. "The biggest financial sector premium is seen in Moscow, where Russian money is investing once again, pushing up demand for space in the city," says Barnes. "Similar forces also seem to be at play in Dubai, which has seen the impact of Middle Eastern cash in a market that has shown significant growth, prompting talk of cooling measures." Dubai experienced the biggest increase in the costs for companies to locate employees in the city. Total live-work costs soared by 41 percent in Dubai although, according to the report, this is in part due to a hangover from the city's previously high supply low rent era.
[310 words]

Source: Entrepreneur
http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/231942

Some Fascinating Facts about the World Wide Web o 25th Birthday
BY Kim Lachance Shandrow | March 13, 2014

[Time 3]
     “Go figure out what that World Wide Web thing is.” Ironically, that was my first newspaper assignment. I’m still trying to untangle the infinite tunneling intricacies of the Web all these years later, even today on its 25th birthday. It’s what I do for a job, which an old-school print journalist like me might not even have if not for the web.  

     The idea for what would become the World Wide Web was proposed 25 years ago today on a NeXT computer, on March 12, 1989. This threadbare, imageless cluster of text is what the first web landing page looked like. It was nothing more than a white background with black words and a smattering of blue “hypermedia” links to click on. No Google. No Twitter. No Facebook. They were still years away.

     The newborn web wasn’t exactly riveting, but it was a start. The birth of a fascinating intangible cultural force that matured into a churning virtual mass of some 4.1 billion pages, with countless more coming online right now as you read this.

     So grab a slice of cake and check out these some cool historical facts about the web on its 25th anniversary:

     1. The Internet’s first website went online on Aug. 6, 1991. Berners-Lee and his fellow CERN team members launched http://info.cern.ch with a landing page that only contained 153 words. It defined the World Wide Web (“W3”) as “a wide-area hypermedia information retrieval initiative aiming to give universal access to a large universe of documents” and contained 25 links to basic additional information about the pioneering initiative.
[262 words]

[Time 4]
     2. An all-girl band stars in the first ever picture posted online. Berners-Lee also boasts the bragging rights to another awesome first: uploading the first photo to the web in 1992. It was a picture snapped backstage of an all-girl physics-themed rock band called Les Horribles Cernettes, which was founded in 1990 by a graphic designer at CERN. Berners-Lee scanned the photo, uploaded it to a Mac and FTPd it to the now famous info.cern.ch. The web Berners-Lee invented lives on, but the Cernettes broke up in 2012. Bummer.

     3. The internet is not the web and the web is not the internet. Don’t get them twisted like most people do, especially not if you’re in Silicon Valley. The internet was a thing long before the web and the web wouldn’t exist without the internet. The internet, the roots of which can be traced as far back to the invention of the modem in 1958, is a massive infrastructure that bridges millions of computers throughout the globe. The World Wide Web is a vast system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed on the internet.

     4. Billions of people surf the web. Of the world’s 7.1 billion people, an estimated 2.4 billion people go online today. That’s 37.7 percent of the world’s total population. About six out of seven people across the globe have internet access. Approximately 70 percent of internet users surf the web every day.

     5. Americans rock the web the most. Users in the U.S. account for 78.6 percent of global web usage, trailed by Australia (67.6 percent), Europe (63.2 percent), Latin America/Caribbean (42.9 percent), Middle East (40.2 percent), Asia (25.7 percent) and Africa (15.6). Surprisingly, some 24 nations remain completely offline.
[283 words]

Source: Entrepreneur
http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/232149



Foe for frenemy? China’s giant banks are under attack
BY GEORGE DEEB | March 7, 2014

[Time 5]
     COULD internet-finance entrepreneurs upend China’s banking sector? The notion seems preposterous. After all, China is home to the world’s biggest banks. Its financial sector is heavily regulated, making life difficult for disruptive innovators. Yet these same goliaths are now under attack from online funds that are offering returns that are 15 times higher than those allowed on conventional deposit accounts at regulated banks. China’s cap on deposit rates at banks is causing money to flood into shadow-banking products such as those offered by “trust” companies in search of higher yields. Offerings by internet firms, with their large existing customer bases, have opened the spigots wider.
Alibaba, an e-commerce firm, led the charge with Yu’e Bao (“remnant treasure”), which allows customers to invest money parked in their accounts at Alipay, its online-payment service. Though launched only last June, it has already attracted some 400 billion yuan ($65 billion). Baidu, an online search firm, and Tencent, which makes online games, have also since entered the fray.

     Some see these online firms as a serious long-term threat to banks and the government’s ability to control the financial sector, prompting noisy demands (mostly by banks) to regulate the upstarts. Regulators have not yet expressed a clear view, but some observers see signals of a looming regulatory crackdown in attacks by the official media; a financial editor on the state-run television network recently branded online financial firms vampires and parasites. Online funds are indeed hurting the banks. For one thing, they are sucking away money: banking deposits fell by one trillion yuan in January. May Yan of Barclays observes that the internet firms use their deposits mostly to lend money at high rates to banks that are facing a squeeze on deposits? So will this lead to massive disruption of the sector? Possibly, but Ms. Yan thinks not. Though growing fast, as a share of total banking deposits the internet firms’ are minnows today. UBS, an investment bank, calculates that even if a tenth of bank deposits flee to online products (a heroic assumption), it might cut the net interest margin at banks by just 0.1%. China’s conservative regulators may well clamp down if the upstarts become big enough to pose systemic risks.
[368 words]

Source: Economist
http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21597966-chinas-giant-banks-are-under-attack-foe-or-frenemy



Safe skies
By G.S and L.P | March 11th 2014

[Time 6]
     THE disappearance of flight MH370, which lost contact with air-traffic control between Kuala Lumpur and Beijing, is a reminder of the dangers of air travel. Yet thankfully, such disasters are exceedingly rare. Over the past four decades fatalities on aeroplanes—be it from accidents or terrorism—have declined even as the number of travellers has increased almost ten-fold. Aviation is also much safer than other forms of transport. On a per passenger-mile basis, an individual is about 180 times more likely to die in a car than on a plane, according to America’s National Safety Council (though these types of travel are not in direct competition). As for flight MH370, the mysteriousness is heightened because the aircraft vanished while cruising. It is a phase of flight that accounts for only 9% of fatalities but almost 60% of time spent in the air, according to the Aviation Safety Network, an independent database in the Netherlands.



[154 words]

Source: Economists
http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2014/03/daily-chart-6

AceJ

Part III: Obstacle

Bridging the fiscal chasm
Fancy infrastructure is one example of local-government largesse. Which province is deepest in debt as a result?
Fed 22, 2014

[Paraphrase 7]
     CHINA’S provincial administrations are often referred to as “local” governments. But the phrase does not do them justice. The province of Guangdong, for example, boasts more than 105m people and a GDP worth more than $1 trillion. Only 11 countries (including China itself) have a bigger population and only 15 have a larger economy.

     Equally impressive is the scale of provincial debts. At the end of 2013 China’s national auditor revealed that the liabilities of local governments had grown to 10.9 trillion yuan ($1.8 trillion) by the middle of last year, or 17.9 trillion yuan if various debt guarantees were added. That was equivalent to about a third of China’s GDP. These “local” debts, in other words, had grown fast enough to become a national burden and an international concern.

     The audit documented the size of the problem, but revealed little about its location. The debts were all discussed at an aggregate, countrywide level. No provinces were singled out for blame or praise. In the past few weeks, however, almost all of the provincial-level governments have published audits of their own. As well as shedding light on the problem, this information may help to solve it. In principle, the least provident governments are now exposed to public scrutiny. Fiscal shame may help prevent a fiscal fright.

     But identifying the most indebted province is not as easy as it sounds. The figures can be sliced and diced in a variety of ways. The coastal provinces of Jiangsu (just north of Shanghai) and Guangdong (just north of Hong Kong) owe the most, accounting for 14% of the total between them. But these two provinces also have the largest economies, generating over 19% of the country’s GDP.

     Relative to the size of their economies, the poor western provinces of Yunnan, Qinghai and Gansu bear some of the heaviest burdens, along with the western municipality of Chongqing, which is renowned for its heavy public investment (see chart). The province with the biggest fiscal chasm to cross, however, is Guizhou (whose impressive Balinghe bridge is pictured below). It had liabilities in mid-2013 equivalent to over 80% of its GDP over the previous four quarters.

     These figures include money China’s provincial governments have borrowed themselves and other institutions’ debts that they have guaranteed. Sometimes this debt is guaranteed explicitly. Often, the backing is implicit. By the end of 2012 Chongqing had explicitly guaranteed debts worth 18% of its GDP. Gansu, for its part, had implicitly backed borrowings worth 20%.

     These guarantees are what accountants like to call “contingent” liabilities: obligations a government must only bear if bad things happen, such as an infrastructure company failing or a local hospital going under. What are the odds that these hypothetical fiscal dangers will materialise? On average, provinces expect the payout ratio to be about 23%. If these guarantees are booked at their expected cost, rather than their full face value, Gansu’s debt burden falls dramatically from 44% of its GDP to only 19%. Chongqing’s debt burden also falls from 59% to 38%.

     Even if these guarantees do not come back to haunt China’s provinces, their debts look heavy compared with the taxes they raise. The direct debts of Yunnan and Qinghai, for example, amounted to over 260% and 370% of their budget revenues in 2012. Fortunately China’s provinces do not have to rely on their budget revenues alone. All of them benefit from a variety of other funds, including transfers from the central government and land sales. Up-to-date information on these fiscal lifelines is not easy to come by. But their size can be inferred from other ratios presented in the provincial audit reports.

     They imply that off-budget revenues can loom large indeed. In some provinces, they were worth over 30% of GDP in 2012. Smaller economies collect a disproportionate amount of such revenues: in Qinghai’s case, they appear to have exceeded 50% of GDP. In bigger economies like Guangdong and Shandong, they are worth only about 8-10% of GDP.

     These extra fiscal resources make a big difference to the debt burden in some of China’s smaller provincial economies. Guizhou’s debts, for example, are the heaviest in the country relative to its modest GDP. But when its expected liabilities are weighed against its disproportionately large fiscal revenues, it is no longer the most improvident locality. That dishonour belongs instead to the capital, Beijing, which expects its debts to amount to a whopping 99.9% of its consolidated fiscal revenues. Beijing is also the jurisdiction with the highest direct debts per person. It is the capital of improvidence.

     This may be just as well. Any solution to China’s local-government debt will require the central government to shoulder some of the burden. Beijing, the metonym, will need to help tidy up the fiscal mess exemplified by Beijing, the place. Perhaps it is a local problem after all.
[806 words]

Source: Economists
http://www.economist.com/news/china/21596991-fancy-infrastructure-one-example-local-government-largesse-which-province-deepest-debt

FakeGloria

Time21’35

Hong Kong is the mostexpensive city for companies to locate employees in terms of the costs ofresidential and office space, and itranked the third most expensive city for tech and creative employeeaccommodation.

Time3 1’30

Check out some cool historical facts about theweb on its 25th anniversary:The Internet’s first website went online on Aug. 6,1991.

Time4 1’32

2. An all-girl band stars in the first everpicture posted online.

3. The internet is not the web and the web isnot the internet.

5. Americans rock the web the most.

4. Billions of people surf the web.

Time52’16

These same goliaths are now under attack fromonline funds.

Time6 0’45

Aviation is much safer than other forms oftransport.

Obstacle 5’03

xiaofan0205

现在的孩子，越来越早了！

Speaker:
diplomatic: things dealing with other countries
economic sanctions: financial penalize
It's about time: you are happy that something is about to happen
violated international law: to break a law that affect a lot of different countries
high-level talks: important discussion between the leaders of different countries
called off: cancel, usually used for business and offical meeting
embassy: the building with the officer of one country
trade: buy and sell things in another country
embargo: All the companies in one country is not allowed to buy or sell things to another country
naval blockade to enforce: make sure all the people are abey the rule or law
thumb their noses: to add disrespect to a law
get away with it: to do something bad but not to be punished
repercussions: negative consequence of something
flout: break

Time2: 2'28"
Hongkong is the most expensive city for companies to locate employees in terms of the costs of residential and office space. Moscow and Dubai are also experience the high costs for companies to locate employees due to high demand for space in the city.

Time3: 2'02"
Time4: 2'01"
Check out these some cool historical facts about the web on its 25th anniversary: 1, The internet's first website went online on Aug.6,1991; 2, An all-girl band stars in the first ever picture posted online; 3, The internet is not the web and the web is not the internet; 4, Billions of people surf the web; 5, Americans rock the web the most.

Time5: 2'55"
Could internet-finance entrepreneurs upend China's banking setor? Some see these online firms as serious long-term threat to banks, but others think China's conservative regulators may well clamp down if the upstarts become big enough to pose systemic risks.

China’s cap on deposit rates at banks: 中国的银行存款利率上限
upstarts: 新贵，暴发户

Time6: 0'57"
Over the past four decades fatalities on aeroplanes have declined even as the number of travellers has increased almost ten-fold.

Obstacle: 6'24"
The local debts of China had grown fast enough to become a national burden and an international concern, but identidfy the most indebted province is not easy. The figures can be sliced and diced in a variety of ways.
Any solution to China's local-government debt will require the central government to shoulder some of the burden.

debt guarantees 债务担保
public scrutiny 公众监督
coastal provinces 沿海省份
face value 面值

疏离无罪

差几秒变地板了

Speaker:Today's dialog is about the diplomatic and economic sanctions on a nation.

01:49
Hongkong is the most expensive live-work city in the world for its financial sector.And Hongkong also is the third most expensive city for tech and creative employees.

01:44
March 12 is the 25th brithday for world wide web.And the first website went online on Aug.6.1991.

01:38
The first photo was uploade in 1992. The internet exist long before the web,and the web can not exist without internet.Billions of people surf the web everyday.American rock the web most.

02:11
Internet companies are attracting money from citizens by online fund's high interest rates and then lend money at higher rates to bank which hurt china's finance sector.Government seems to have regulation on it.

00:47
According to the data,aeroplanes is the safest transporation.

06:54
Main Idea: Fiscal chasm in China;s province
The local debt of chinese government is about one-third of the GDP,which seems to be a big problem countrywide.But no province has signale out accurate data before.
Recently all provinces published their auditing documents,which clearly show the debt situation of every province.Jiangsu and Guangzhou have large debt,but the debt is not a big problem to them.Since their economy and GDP are also large.Then the debt is a big burden to those poor province such as Gansu and Yunnan when the debt is related to the economy size of province.
Most of the debt of those province is about the contingent liabilities which won't happen annually.Most provinces do not rely on budget revenue only.They have extra fiscal resources which makes provinces' income different.
So to solve the debt risk,central government should shoulder some of these burden of poor privce.

jenniferlyy125

Day 38

-----speaker

The two characters talked about diplomatic and economic sanctions of US on M as M violated the international law. The sanctions call off high-level talks and close embassy, as well as trade embargo and naval blockade. These are punishment to M since it flouts international law.

----speed

1’45

Hong kong is the most expensive place to locate business in terms of residential and office renting. As for tech and creative employee accommodation, HK is the third expensive around the world, with financial sector pay the premium.  

2.1’21

Some historical facts about WWW: the birth of idea of WWW 25 years ago in 1989 and the first website in 1991.

3.1’34

The first picture uploaded in 1992 was about an all-girl band, and the internet and web are totally two different tings. Internet is the base of web, and web is the system of interlinked text available on internet. In addition, huge number of users have accessed to web. Users in the US account for the highest proportion of global web usage.

4.2’05

Online-finance in China has attracted huge amounts of money and threats the banking sector. Online banks are sucking money and the government might depress online-finance at the right time when they pose systemic risks.  

5.0’52

The recent accident of MH370 reminds us that the safe rate of plane has improved tenth-fold and plane is safer than other transport forms. The awkwardness of MH370 is that the accident occurred when cruising, which is a phase only accounts 9 % of fatalities in the past four decades.

----obstacle

5’03

Chinese provincial debts are huge and more than 3 times of its GDP. The national debt has grown fast and has become the national burden to the country. Identifying most indebt provinces is hard as no individual province debt data is available.

Jiangsu and Guangdong bear the most debts, while with largest GDP around 19%. Poor western provinces have heaviest burden. However, the guarantee of the debts is contingent, which means debts will be paid only under rare and contingent situation.

How to tackle the huge local debts is that central government needs to share the debts, and Beijing itself needs to tidy up the mess and give a good example.

TaoRs92

占个首页……晚睡的孩子有福利！！！


time:1:56.72
Hong Kong is the most expensive city for company renting residentials and employees.(per)
The rank and list.
Also,the rank of tech and creative employees recommadation.Financial sector.
________________
time:1:31.97
The development of website from before to now.
Some interesting history of World Web.
1 The first web in 1991.
________________
time:1:33.84
2 The first picture put on the website in 1992.
3 Internet has longer history.Web is based on Internet.
4 How many people use Web.
5 Which country uses Web most.
_________________
time:2:28.08
Online firms threat conventional banks in China?
The situation.The introduction of Yu e Bao and other similar online firms.
The opinion--online funds turely reduce the deposits in conventional banks.But it will not become threat now.
______________
time:0:53.96
Plane is a safe transportation.The data.Compared with other tools.
The analysis of MH370.
_______________
time:5:30.00
The introduction of China's local government--but some of them have large economies that bigger than most coutires in the world.
But these provinces also have large debts.Some bigger to become national or even international burdens.
Which provinces have the largest debts?Guangdong and Jiangsu(but they also have largest economy).
The heavist burdens belong to Yunnan,Qinghai,Gansu and Chongqing.
The guarantees. Another angle to see the debts(decline,lesser in GDP)
But the debts in these provinces are heavier than their tax.
The off-budget revenues.Large in Qinghai's GDP.But far lesser than it is in Guangdong and Gansu.
Beijing has the highest debt per person.

Changpoyu

Thank acEj
Time 2:2'15"40
First part is talking about that hong kong is one of the most expensive city in the world and compare it with other city like Singapore shanghai Dubai...balabalabala
Then discuss the financial and cash in these city

kingdongwan

Hongkong ranked as the most expensive city in terms of costs of employees residential and office rental. According to a Silva organization. London ranks the 2nd and New York as 3rd. The global most expensive for live-work pay jumped average 21% since 2009, when most cities office rent pay bottomed up;


The biggest paying sector is financial, and Hongkong ranks the 1st in financial sector live-work most expensive city, while tech and creative as 4th. Dubai increased the most.


Some Fascinating Facts about the World Wide Web o25th Birthday

The www has come to live for 25 years. The history of the www is as the following:
        1. The first online web was on 1991, from a CERN team;
        2. Same person who invented www uploaded the first picture to the www on 1992;
        3. The www is not the same as the internet, which is created far before the invention of www.
        4. Nowadays there're billions of www users every day.
        5. America rocks the web.


Foe for frenemy? China’s giant banks are under attack

China's banks are facing challenges from online financial companies, there're lots of users deposits money off the banks and to the funds by some big online providers, such as Alipay's Yu'Ebao, and Baidu, Tecent companies.
There're certain critics on those e-company, as they use the big user amount to draw the money then deposit money with higher rates. Will the banks deposits be attracted to the e-companies all? Some economics doesn't think so.


Safe skies

The disappearence of the flight MH370 rose the fears of air-traffic, while actually air-traffic is actually still the safest traffic tool compared to others. With its passengers increasing and miles per passengers increase as well, the death rate is apparently reducing.



Bridging the fiscal chasm

China's local governments now facing lot of debts difficulties, and after a release of the auditor result. While which province or city has the most serious problem for possible bankrupcy, it's a difficult question to answer. Despite the largest debts, Jiangsu and Guangdong's debts doesn't count too much of its GDP, while certain provinces do. But still for the budget revenue or income, the result is different again.