外刊经贸知识选读2013年4月真题试题及答案解析（00096）

December 11, 2011 marks the tenth anniversary of an event, which profoundly changed the global economy: China’s accession to the World Trade Organization. It is difficult not to overstate the effects of this accession, certainly on China, but also on China’s trading partners and on the global trading system itself. By integrating fully into the global economy, China has become the largest exporter of manufactured goods and the second largest economy in the world. This remarkable trade expansion has contributed significantly to China’s growth and development and has helped lift some 500 million people out of poverty.

Passage 1

Dubai is making progress in its efforts to promote international awareness of its attractions. The emirate is now firmly on the world sporting map and reaping the rewards of more publicity. Tennis had been added to the growing list of sporting events, with a BMW/Dubai Duty Free-sponsored tournament in February. This joins horse racing, golf, powerboat racing and snooker championships, which are all already established on the international tournament circuit.Major investment is going into the Dubai-based Emirates airline, which added four new destinations last summer–Rome, Zurich, Paris and Jakarta–and on 14 April started operations to Dhahran, its 31st destination. (Emirates) now employs almost 3,500 staff, making it one of Dubai’s largest employers.

46、Why does Dubai make efforts to hold various kinds of sporting events?

47、What sport had recently been added to the sporting events in Dubai?

48、What does “Emirates” stand for according to the context?

Passage 2

If there is a road to China’s future, Highway 204 out of Shanghai is it. Along its two dusty (lanes), local trucks and buses jockey with Cadillacs driven by financiers from Taiwan and Hong Kong investors. Migrant workers crowd the narrow (shoulders). Factories line the highway, producing sneakers, toys, plastics, clothes, aircraft components and medical equipment. Eventually industry (gives way to) ricefields, which is being dug up to build still more factories. Cranes turn overhead as dump trucks and cement mixers nose onto the road. Outside the town of Jiading, one tractor-trailer leaves Asia’s largest container plant every three minutes, carrying goods bound for the Shanghai docks. The traffic on Highway 204 is so thick that the trip from Shanghai to Zhangjiagang- only 115 kilometers away- takes five hours.

49、What’s the exact meaning of “ lanes ” here in the sentence?

50、What does “shoulders” refer to?

51、What does the phrase “ to give way to something” mean in the sentence?

出口配额制

国内市场

黄金储备

商品交易所

贸易壁垒

空前的

财源，繁荣

倾销

中国国际信托投资公司

既得利益

entrepreneurship

trade sanctions

means of production

conglomerate

fledgling industries

stock-taking

appreciation of currency

equity joint venture

monopoly

profit margin

Carrefour has fallen behind Wal-Mart because it has few retail locations around the world.

Wal-Mart’s net income per employee (NIPE) is more than six times that of Carrefour.

LVMH and Colony Capital have lost quite a lot of money on their investment in Carrefour.

In the past year, Carrefour has undergone some personnel changes.

Passage 2

When Wal-Mart Stores (WMT) began expanding outside North America in the 1990s, its toughest rival was the French retail chain Carrefour. After opening the world’s first big-box superstore in 1963, Carrefour spent three decades spreading its combination grocery-and-general-merchandise stores across Europe, South America, and Asia. Today, the retailer is in trouble around the globe. On Oct. 13, Carrefour issued its fifth profit warning in less than a year as it reported slumping third-quarter sales in key Western European and Asian markets. Chief Executive Officer Lars Olofsson, recruited from Nestlé in 2009, is the company’s third CEO in seven years, and four top executives have been replaced in the past 12 months.Carrefour shares have plunged nearly two-thirds since 2007, when LVMH Moёt Hennessy Louis Vuitton CEO Bernard Arnault along with U.S. real estate investment group Colony Capital spent $5.5 billion on a 9. 8 percent stake. That investment is now worth less than $2 billion. They “got the timing wrong” on Carrefour, says Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) analyst Justin Scarborough. “The markets they’re in have come under huge amounts of pressure since 2008 and lots of those pressures aren’t going to go away. ” Arnault and Colony declined interview requests.That means Carrefour has fallen far behind $467 billion Wal-Mart. Though they have about the same number of retail locations (9,667 for Wal-Mart, vs. Carrefour’s 9,631), Wal-Mart’s international sales now top $109 billion, almost surpassing Carrefour’s total $114 billion in revenues. While Wal-Mart has generated roughly 7. 5 percent operating margins in recent years, Carrefour managed only 5. 5 percent. In profits, the divide is particularly acute: Walmart last year logged net income of $7,804 per employee while Carrefour earned just $1,260.

Wal-Mart Stores (WMT) is now in trouble around the globe.

With fuel export increasing, US natural gas prices will rise substantially.

From the last paragraph, we can infer that the idea of natural gas export is not popular with US manufacturers.

The long-term agreement to buy liquefied natural gas from the Gulf coast the BG Group signed has brought the US closer to the status of a gas exporter.

Passage 1

In a turnaround that would have been unthinkable a few years ago, the US is predicted to become the world’s top oil and gas producer by 2020, passing Russia and Saudi Arabia.That is the message of a report produced by PFC Energy, a consultancy, in November. The reason is the rapid growth of production from shale rock sources because of advances in technology.The forecast, on a barrel of oil equivalent basis, is a marked change for a country where overall oil, gas, and gas liquids production peaked in the early 1970s.The growth in extraction from shale has made the US the world’s largest producer of natural gas. It is now poised to enter the global liquefied natural gas export market.“North America is the second-largest source of additional LNG capacity in this decade after Australia,” Nikos Tsafos, senior manager in upstream and gas at PFC. “That is truly astonishing. ”Just 10 years ago the US was trying to build terminals to import LNG. Today, those who had expected to import are moving to refit facilities so they can now export.In late October, the BG Group signed the first long-term agreement to buy LNG from the Gulf coast, taking the US a step closer to becoming an exporter.Roger Ihne, principal in the energy and resources practice at Deloitte, the consultancy, estimates that if the three terminals that have been approved for export proceed with their plans, the amount of gas sent abroad would be just under 10 percent of current US consumption.And the impact on prices would be minimal, adds Tom Choi, Deloitte’s national practice leader for gas in the consultancy’s MarketPoint forecasting group. He estimates that even with that amount of fuel exported, US natural gas prices would only rise less than 2 percent because the resource is so abundant.“Even if the US substantially increased the use of natural gas, there would still be substantial gas left to meet its domestic needs for decades,” Mr Ihne says.Nonetheless, US manufacturers, who have gained substantially from the drop in US natural gas prices associated with the shale production boom, are worried. The Industrial Energy Consumers of America, a non-partisan association of leading manufacturing companies with $700bn in annual sales, is urging changes to the natural gas export permit process.

It has always been believed that the US will become the world’s top oil and gas producer.

In the past ten years, Australia has been the largest source of additional liquefied natural gas capacity.

The Fund seeks to profit from corporate events such as takeovers and bankruptcies and uses leverage to (amplify) returns.

One of the major factors in the growing wine market is increasing demand from China where consumers’ tastes have grown more (sophisticated).

A police task team was sent to investigate the security (breach) following the report.

He stressed that the trade imbalance was caused by a combination of factors, including structural trade and investment differences, (divergent) patterns of savings and consumption and the international division of labor.

Her words immediately invited a (backlash).

(Stagnating) property investments have sent a chill throughout relevant industries such as appliances and cement.

The urban-rural gap can be (exacerbated) by rapid urbanization, which is expected to sustain the demand for more and better urban healthcare.

Coupled with the rapid development of the 3G business, China has already (embraced) the mobile Internet era.

With a weakening dollar (in prospect), currencies of the emerging economies were pushed up by large inflow of hot money.

Researchers have debated whether economic and environmental regulations (unduly) burden small businesses.

The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) would never recognize the (legitimacy) of the agreement.

This move (spurred) car sales and propelled China to surpass the United States as the world’s largest auto market.

Yiwu has become a shopping paradise for tourists from all over the world with its (bewildering) range of cheap, quality merchandise.

The United States’s debt crisis has reached a stalemate due to the two parities refusing to make a (compromise) over their preferred debt reduction plans.

Every year, Thomson Reuters draws up a list of potential (nominees) for the economics, medicine, chemistry and physics prizes.