商业经济类（Passage47～54）
Passage47
题材：商业经济类字数：633建议用时：6.5分钟
Talk is cheap when it comes to solving the problem of too-big-to-fail banks. From the luxury of even today's stuttering economic recovery it is easy to vow that next time lenders'losswill be pushed onto their creditors,not onto taxpayers.
But cast your mind back to late2008.Then,the share prices of the world's biggest banks could halve in minutes.Reasonable people thought that many firms were hiding vere loss.Anyone expod to them,from speculators to churchgoing custodians of widows'pensions,tried to yank(抽出)their cash out, causing a run that threatened another Great Depression.Now,imagine being sat not in the obrver's armchair but in the regulator's hot at and faced with such a crisis again.Can anyone honestly say that they would let a big bank go down.
And yet,somehow,that choice is what the people redesigning the rules of finance must try to make possible.The final rules are due in November and will probably call for banks in normal times to carry core capital of at least10%of risk-adjusted asts.This would be enough to absorb the loss most banks made during2007-2009with a decent margin for error.
But that still leaves the outlier banks that in the last crisis,as in most others,
lost two to three times more than the average firm.Wor,the crisis has shown that if they are not rescued they can topple the entire system.That is why swaggering talk of letting them burn next time is empty.Instead,a way needs to be found to impo loss on their creditors without causing a wider panic--the financial equivalent of squaring a circle.
America has created a resolution authority that will take over falling banks and force loss on uncured creditors if necessary.That is a decent start,but may be too indiscriminate.The biggest banks each have hundreds of billions of dollars of such debt,including overnight loans from other banks,short term paper sold to money-market funds and bonds held by pension funds.Such counter
parties are likely to run from any bank facing a risk of being put in resolution--which,as the recent crisis showed,could mean most banks.Indeed, the uncured Adebt market is so important that far from destabilising it, regulators might feel obliged tounderwrite it,as in2008.
js66A better alternative is to give regulators draconian power but over a smaller part of banks'balance-sheets,so that the panic is contained.The idea is practical since it means amending banks'debt structures,not reinventing them, although banks would need roughly to double the amount of this debt that they hold.It also avoids too-clever-by-half trigger mechanisms and the opposite pitfall of a laborious legal process.Indeed,it is conceivable that a bank could be recapitalid over a weekend.
The banks worry there are no natural buyers for such curities,making
them expensive to issue.In fact they remble a bog-standard insurance arrangement in which a premium is received and there is a small chance of perhaps one in50each year--of vere loss.Regulators would,though,have to ensure that banks didn't buy each other's curities and that they didn't all end up in the hands of one investor.Last time round American International Group
became the dumping ground for Wall Street's risk and had to be bailed out(帮助...摆脱困境)too.
Would it work?The one thing certain about the next crisis is that it will feature the same crushing panic,pleas from banks and huge political pressure to stabili the system,whatever the cost.The hope is that regulators might have a means to impo loss on the private ctor in a controlled way,and not just face a binary choice between bail-out or oblivion.
1.In2008,the following occurrences happened EXCEPT that_____．
A.banks'capital shrank dramatically
B.firms pretended to profit
C.another Great Depression followed
Danizations tried to take money back
小乌龟回家2.The resolution is_____in the author's point of view.
A.of no help
抑制胃酸的食物
探寻的近义词他笑了作文B.bound to fail
C.without careful lection
D.sort of socialism
3.The solution suggested in Paragraph6is better in the following ways EXCEPT _____．
A.making less effort on banks"debt structures
< having to face stupid Bigger mechanism
D.helping the banks collect enough capital鲈鱼养殖
4.Why can't the government take bank crisis for granted?
【答案及解析】
1.C由题干定位至第二段，其中第四句中提到“…causing a run that threatened another
Great Depression”，由此可知经济大萧条只是推测，并不是确实发生的事，故C为正确答案。
2.C文章第五段第二句中提到“That is a decent start,but may be too你怎么那么美
indiscriminate.”，之后作者对indiscriminate作出了进一步解释，由此可看出作者认为这个决定没有经过仔细斟酌，答案选C。
3.D由题干定位至第六段，该段末句提到“Indeed,it is conceivable that a bank could
be recapitalid over a weekend.”，由此可知银行本身就具备这样的能力，并不是在某项扶助政策下才能做到，选项D与原文内容不符，为答案。
4.Becau it may lead to incredible damage.由题干定位至文章第四段，其中第三句
提到“That is why swaggering talk of letting them burn next time is empty.”，由此可知具体的原因在前一句，即“if they are not rescued they can topple the entire system.”，因此可得出答案。
Passage48
题材：商业经济类字数：713建议用时：6.5分钟
For office innovators,the unrealized dream of the"paperless"office is a classic example of high-tech hubris(傲慢).Today's office drone is drowning in more paper than ever before.
硬盘排行
But after decades of hype,American offices may finally be losing their paper obssion.The demand for paper ud to outstrip the growth of the US economy, but the past two or three years have en a marked slow down in sales—despite a healthy economic scene.
Analysts attribute the decline to such factors as advances in digital databas and communication systems.Escaping our craving for paper,however,will be anything but an easy affair.
"Old habits are hard to break,"says Merilyn Dunn,a communications supplies direction"There arc some functions that paper rves where a screen display doesn't work.Tho functions are both its strength and its weakness."
In the early to mid-'90s,a booming economy and improved desktop printers helped boost paper sales by6to7percent each year.The convenience of desktop printing allowed office workers to indulge in pri
nting anything and everything at very little effort or cost.
But now,the growth rate of paper sales in the United States is flattening by about half a percent each year.Between2004and2005,Ms.Dunn says,plain white
office paper will e less than a4percent growth rate,despite the strong overall economy.A primary reason for the change,says Dunn,is that for the first time ever, some47percent of the workforce entered the job market after computers had already been introduced to offices.
"We're finally eing a reduction in the amount of paper being ud per worker in the workplace,"says John Maine,vice president of a pulp and paper economic consulting firm."More information is being transmitted electronically,and more and more people are comfortable with the information residing only in electronic form without printing multiple backups."
In addition,Mr.Maine points to the lackluster employment market for white-collar workers—the primary driver of other paper consumption—for the shift in paper usage.
The real paradigm shift may be in the way paper is ud.Since the advent of advanced and reliable office-network systems,data storage has moved away from paper archives.The cretarial art of"filing"is disappearing from job descriptions. Much of today's data may never leave its original digital format.
The changing attitudes toward paper have finally caught the attention of paper companies,says Richard Harper,a rearcher at Microsoft."All of a sudden,the paper industry has started thinking,"We need to learn more about the behavioral aspects of paper u,'"he says."They had never asked;they'd just assumed that70 million sheets would be bought per year as a literal function of economic growth."
To reduce paper u,some companies are working to combine digital and
