中口0209聽力原文

II. Passage Translation

(1) (Woman) I am a computer programmer. My problem is with my mother. She is now well over 70 and she really needs help, as my father died of a car accident more than ten years ago. But where she lives, in the countryside, there's no work available for me, no job with a decent pay. If I work there as something else, perhaps as a secretary or as a post-office clerk, it means we have to take a drastic drop in salary. So I don't really know what to do.

(2) (Man) In Britain today, almost half of the houses are owned by the people who live in them. About one third are owned by the local authorities, and the rest are rented from private owners. A typical rent for a two bed roomed house is about ￡300 a month. If people want to buy their own house, they can borrow from the banks up to 90 per cent of the cost of that house. But large mortgages may take 20 to 30 years to pay off.