UNIT 4
In this section, you will hear everything ONCE ONLY.Listen carefully and then answer the questions that follow.
Question 1 is based on the following news. At the end of the news item,you will be given 10 seconds to answer the question.Now listen to the news.
A U.S. judge has approved a plan that could resolve the U.S.Security and Exchange Commission's fraud case against the company WorldCom. Under the terms of the recently revised deal,the telecom giant will pay 750 million dollars, 500 million in cash and 250 million in stock to defrauded investors.
And that would be the largest civil penalty ever imposed by the SEC. Later this month a U.S. bankruptcy court is expected to decide whether to sign off on WorldCom's settlement.

Questions 2 and 3 are based on the following news. At the end of the news item,you will be given 10 seconds to answer each of the two questions.Now listen to the news.
A United Nations report into global water resources has said that more than 1 billion people have no access to clean drinking water. The report,released just before the Fourth World Water Forum in Mexico City later this month, says the problem is chiefly caused by poor governance and bad water management.
More than a billion people lack good water,but this is not because the water isn't there. The UN's second World Water Development Report concludes that the world still has enough fresh water, but it's failing to meet the challenge of managing its supplies and distributing water fairly and at affordable cost. Issues of governance it concludes are central. The management of a country's water sector is likely to reflect the overall state of its administration. It says a system which is open and transparent and devolves responsibility and resources to local communities is far more likely to meet its water supply goals.

Questions 4 and 5 are based on the following news. At the end of the news item,you will be given 10 seconds to answer each of the two questions.Now listen to the news.
The Biotechnology Industry Organization, or BIO,held its two thousand and six international convention earlier this month in Chicago. It says attendance set a record with more than nineteen thousand people from sixty-two countries. BIO represents more than one thousand companies and other organizations.
Its members genetically engineer products in health care, agriculture and other areas. The convention included former President Bill Clinton and what the organizers called the world's largest indoor cornfield. Jose Manuel Pomar is a farmer from the Aragon area of Spain who attended the convention. Mister Pomar grows Bt maize.Bt maize contains a gene from a bacterium that produces a poison. This poison helps the plants resist insects, especially the maize borer. Some things do not change with biotech crops. Mister Pomar says he uses the same amount of fertilizer with Bt maize as he does with conventional corn.
The main difference, he says,is in the use of insecticide. Mister Pomar says he sprays his conventional maize with insect poisons three to four times a season. With Bt maize, he says,he might spray once if maize borers are present in large numbers.

UNIT 5
In this section, you will hear everything ONCE ONLY.Listen carefully and then answer the questions that follow.
Questions 1 to 2 are based on the following news. At the end of the news item,you will be given 10 seconds to answer each of the two questions.Now listen to the news.
The United States has released for the first time the names and nationalities of hundreds of prisoners it's holding at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. The information was divulged after the authorities lost a court case under the US Freedom of Information Act. The names are contained in transcripts of more than 300 military tribunals held at the base. It's thought that about 500 people are still detained at Guantanamo,Washington has classified them as enemy combatants. Most of them were captured in Afghanistan and Pakistan after American-led forces overthrew the Taliban,
and many had been held for up to 4 years without trial. Human Rights groups say the release of this new information is a significant blow to US government's secrecy.

Question 3 is based on the following news. At the end of the news item, you will be given 10 seconds to answer the question.Now listen to the news.
A dead cat found on the German island of Ruegen in the Baltic Sea has been confirmed as having the H5N1 strain of the bird flu virus. More than a hundred infected birds have been found dead on the island,but it's the first apparently natural occurrence of the virus in a mammal in Europe. The Chief Veterinary Officer of the UN said that the infection of cats was a very rare event. There had been previously documented cases of H5N1 infection killing tigers fed on chicken carcasses at a zoo in Thailand.

Questions 4 and 5 are based on the following news. At the end of the news item,you will be given 10 seconds to answer each of the two questions.Now listen to the news.
For years, companies have used stock options as a form of pay. At first, only top officers in companies got them. The value of a stock option rises or falls with the price of a company stock. So this gave the people at the top a strong reason to do their jobs well. During the nineteen nineties,technology companies started to offer stock options to skilled workers. Many of these businesses were newly formed Internet companies. Soon stock options became a common form of pay in American businesses. Since options are linked to stock market prices, estimating their value can be difficult. Most companies did not report them as an expense, a cost of doing business.As a result, shareholders were not getting a true picture of a company's financial condition. New rules from the Financial Accounting Standards Board are meant to change that. The board is a private organization that establishes how financial reports should be prepared. Its work is officially recognized by the United States Securities and Exchange Commission.