Part II   Reading Comprehension (35 minutes)
　　Direction: There are 4 passages in this part. Each passage is followed by some questions or unfinished statements. For each of them there are four choices marked A), B), C) and D). You should decide on the best choice and mark the corresponding letter on the Answer Sheet with a single line through the center.
　　Questions 11 to 15 are based on the following passage:
　　I believe very strongly that our overproduction of cheap grain in general, and corn in particular, has a lot to do with the fact that three-fifths of Americans are now overweight. The obesity crisis is complicated in some ways, but it’s very simple in another way. Basically, Americans are on average eating 200 more calories a day than they were in the 1970s. If you do that and don’t get correspondingly more exercise, you’re going to get a lot fatter. Many demographers are predicting that this is the first generation of Americans whose life span may be shorter than their parents’. The reason for that is obesity, essentially, and diabetes specifically.
　　Where do those calories come from? Except for seafood, all our calories come from the farm. Compared with the mid-to-late 1970s, American farms are producing 500 more calories of food a day per American. We’re managing to pack away 200 of them, which is pretty heroic on our part. A lot of the rest is being dumped overseas, or wasted, or burned in our cars.
　　Overproduction sooner or later leads to over-consumption, because we’re very good at figuring out how to turn surpluses into inexpensive, portable new products. Our cheap, value-added, portable corn commodity is corn sweetener, specifically high-fructose(高糖) corn syrup. But we also dispose of overproduction in corn-fed beef, pork, and chicken. And now we’re even teaching salmon to eat corn, because there’s so much of it to get rid of.
　　There is a powerful industrial logic at work here, the logic of processing. We discovered that corn is this big, fat packet of starch(淀粉) that can be broken down into almost any basic organic molecules and reassembled as sweeteners and many other food additives. Of the 37 ingredients in chicken nuggets, something like 30 are made, directly or indirectly, from corn.
　　11. Which of the following best summarizes the passage?
　　A. Overproduction of corn products leads to overweight.
　　B. Corn is the most popular portable product in America.
　　C. Corn processing is a powerful industrial logic at work.
　　D. A balanced diet of corn is beneficial to one’s life span.
　　12. The word “obesity”(Line 3, Para. 1) most probably means __________.
　　A. having much nutrition
　　B. becoming too fat
　　C. abundance in calories
　　D. shortening of life span
　　13. Which of the following is true according to the passage?
　　A. Americans’ standard of living is relatively low in the 1970s.
　　B. Americans are on average consuming 200 calories every day.
　　C. Farms are responsible for American over-consumption of calories.
　　D. Diabetes is the unavoidable result of Americans’ consuming corn.
　　14. Overproduced corn in American farms has been converted to __________.
　　A. feed cattle, pigs and poultry
　　B. manufacture automobile components
　　C. make artificial beef, pork, and chicken
　　D. become high-fructose low fat products
　　15. The reason why corn can be processed into other food additives is that __________.
　　A. it can serve as sweeteners during cooking
　　B. it contains an unparalleled amount of starch
　　C. its basic organic molecules can be broken down
　　D. its chemical composition can be changed and reorganized
　　Passage Two
　　Questions 16 to 20 are based on the following passage:
　　In California the regulators, the utilities and the governor all want the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to cap spot (现货的) market prices. The Californians claim it will rein in outrageous prices. Federal regulators have refused. The battle is on.
　　Governor Gray Davis says, “I’m not happy with the Federal Regulatory Commission at all. They’re living in an ivory tower. If their bills were going up like the people in San Diego, they would know that this is a real problem in the real world.”
　　As part of deregulation, price caps were removed to allow for a free market. Timing is everything; natural gas prices had already skyrocketed. Demand was high from California’s booming economy. No new power plants had been built here in ten years, and power producers had the right to hike prices along with demand. And hike them they did.
　　Loretta Lynch of the Public Utilities Commission says, “This commission and all of California was beating down the door of federal regulators to say ‘help us impose reasonable price caps to help to keep our market stable.’”
　　Federal regulators did ask for longer-term contracts between power producers and the utilities to stabilize prices. The federal commission, unavailable for comment on this story, released a recent statement defending its position not to re-regulate.
　　Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Dec. 15, 2000: “The commission’s intention is to enable the markets to catch up to current supply and demand problems and not to reintroduce command and control regulation that has helped to produce the current crisis.”
　　Some energy experts believe that, without temporary price caps, the crisis will continue.
　　Severin Borenstein of the U.C. Energy Institute says, “Some federal regulators have a blind commitment to making the market work and I think part of the problem is they really don’t understand what’s going on.”
　　Gary Ackerman of the Western Power Trading Forum says, “He’s dead wrong about that. The federal regulators understand far better than any individual state that, though it might be painful and it certainly is painful in California, price caps don’t work. They never work.”
　　16. The battle between Californians and federal regulators is about ________.
　　A. control over the price of power
　　B. necessity of removing price caps
　　C. hiking the energy prices in California
　　D. a regulation concerning power supply
　　17. Governor Gray Davis was dissatisfied with the Federal Regulatory Commission because ________.
　　A. they did not know what the real problem was
　　B. they were living an easy life in an ivory tower
　　C. they could not experience the life in San Diego
　　D. they turned a blind eye to the situation in California
　　18. The Federal Commission uncapped the energy price with the intention to ________.
　　A. help California’s economy booming steadily
　　B. prevent power price from going up any further
　　C. enable the market to deal with supply and demand problems
　　D. have contracts signed between power producers and the utilities
　　19. To help keep prices from going higher, people and groups in California ________.
　　A. imposed reasonable price caps
　　B. beat down the door of federal regulators
　　C. urged the federal authorities to take action
　　D. struggled against federal policy to hike prices
　　20. Energy experts against price caps believe that ________.
　　A. the present situation in California will continue unless there is price control
　　B. the current crisis is partly attributed to previous command and control policy
　　C. price caps can temporarily solve energy problems an individual state meets with
　　D. they do understand what is going on in California and will take proper measures