New US President Donald Trump’s ‘Buy American-hire American’ rallying cry has put the USD 150-billion Indian IT industry .

Local air traffic controllers Tuesday warned of a looming "staffing crisis" that they said could lead to major flight delays and possible safety concerns.

Representatives of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association argued that the Federal Aviation Administration has not adequately prepared for the wave of retirements expected to hit the industry in coming years.

Nearly half of the nation's controllers—about 7,100—may retire during the next nine years, according to a U. S. Department of Transportation report. That's more than three times the number of controllers who have left in the past eight years.

"If the FAA does not hire large numbers of controllers immediately, there will be a necessary, significant increase in delays and, unfortunately, maybe even a reduction in the margin of safety," said Mark Sherry, alternate Western Pacific regional vice president of the Air Traffic Controllers Association.

Sherry, a controller at San Francisco International Airport, joined other local union representatives at a news conference in Fremont—part of a nationwide NATCA public awareness drive leading up to a U. S. Senate Appropriations Committee vote next month on FAA funding.

The association and a bipartisan group of senators is calling on the committee to authorize $14 million for the FAA to begin hiring, saying 1,000 new controllers a year are needed to help stem the expected flood of retirees—those hired after 12,000 striking workers were fired by former President Reagan in 1981.

But FAA officials say only about one-quarter of controllers traditionally retire when they first become eligible, and there won't be a mass exodus of controllers at any one time.

FAA spokesman Donn Walker said the agency expects to see a large number of retirements when eligibility peaks in 2007, but denied there is a crisis. The agency will be ready to deal with the issue, he said.

"There is no staffing crisis, and there is no shortage of air traffic controllers," he said.

FAA Administrator Marion Blakey said in June that the agency would present Congress with a plan by December to deal with the expected retirements, and Walker flatly denied NATCA' s gloomy predictions.

"They (NATCA representatives) have a crystal ball, I guess, that I don't have. They're making all these sort of wild predictions that don't have any basis in fact... We have the world's safest aviation system, and we will continue to have the world's safest aviation system. We will not do anything to jeopardize safety, despite what some people may tell you. "

However, Jeff Tilley, president of the NATCA local at the Oakland Air Route Traffic Control Center in Fremont, said the center already is facing a staffing crunch.

"At Oakland Center, we do not have a looming staffing crisis—we are in the middle of one," Tilley said. "We have already had days when we have been forced to curtail services and limit the efficiency of airline operations due to staffing shortages. "

The center, which is responsible for 18.8 million square miles of airspace, has 191 fully trained controllers and 57 trainees—20 short of the 268 it is authorized to have, Tilley said. Twenty-nine of the controllers are eligible for retirement and could leave at any time, and 25 more are scheduled to transfer.

In the past eight years, about ______ controllers have retired.

A．14,200

B．7,100

C．3,550

D．2,300

Section B

Directions: There are 2 passages in this section. 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.

A few years ago a lone American campaigner wrote a book in which he set out the main points of his fascinating crusade —to abolish television. His manifesto(宣言、声明) Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television is an American Cult bestseller, and after eight editions is still generating concern and savage debate in the United States.

Jerry Mander, a former advertising expert, is convinced that for the sake of our freedom, and mental and physical health, we should learn to live without Television. Through his advertising background Mander is aware of how much of television is concerned with advertising. He sees the planting of values for profit as a deep, profound and disturbing act by the few against many, for a trivial purpose. And, even without commercials, he sees TV as disturbing because it crams people's heads with images which alter the way they feel and behave. Pictures formed by 300 000 tiny dancing dots altering 30 times per second, bombard their eyes as people scan the images 10 times a second. But, argues Mander, even if you reject or doubt what you see consciously, it is too late, the crucial messages have gone home.

He further argues that TV is a deadening experience as it is restricted to just two senses/sight and sound. Perception is dulled and flattened, says Mander, when you can't feel and smell and totally experience an event. People are just sitting passively for up to four hours a night watching a flickering screen and listening to artificial sound. "No culture in history has spent such an enormous amount of time looking at artificial light," says Mander, "and another worrying fact is that prolonged exposure to artificial light alters human cells, which is why it is being used for certain medical treatment Researchers do not know if lifelong TV exposure is a physical risk or not, but as Mander would argue, why run the risk? It is important that people get up now and switch off before the harm is done; They might also become brainwashed, or, who knows, even moribund(濒死的).

The book Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television written by Jerry Mander ______.

A．received extensive public attention and sold very well

B．was meant to arouse heated public debate

C．enjoyed popularity among those who live without TV

D．Won nationwide support

On the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, as most Americans went about their Monday routines, thousands gathered at ground zero, at the Pentagon (五角大楼) and in a field in Pennsylvania where the hijacked jetliners crashed. They included families and friends of the 2,973 people who died, President Bush and other public officials, and countess strangers united by haunting but receding memories.

At the pit in Lower Manhattan where the World Trade Center stood, they commemorated the day with familiar rituals: moments of silence to mark the times when the planes struck and the towers collapsed, wreath (花圈)-layings, prayers, the music and poetry of loss and remembrance. All were filled with emotions that still cut deeply but were showing signs of healing.

"How much do I love you?" Susan Sliwak, a mother of three, intoned (吟诵) at a microphone on a platform. above the grieving crowd, quoting from an Irving Berlin lyric in tribute to her husband, Robert Sliwak, a Cantor Fitzgerald employee and one of the 2,749 killed at the trade center. "How deep is the ocean? How high is the sky?"

About 200 spouses, partners and other loved ones took turns reading the names of the dead. Many spoke directly to their lost partners, often in firm, proud voices. Others told tearfully of the births of grandchildren or of having reaffirmed their marriage vows. Many simply expressed their love and that of their children, a promise never to forget.

Under shafts of golden sunlight, many family members knelt in the pit to pray. They hugged one another, cried softly or sobbed and set wreaths and roses adrift in reflecting pools that stand in the stead of the fallen towers. The waters were soon thick with flowers.

But if there was a theme to this year's proceedings, it was honoring the dead while moving on with life. "For all Americans, this date will be forever entwined (缠绕) with sadness," Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said in closing remarks during the noon hour. "But the memory of those we lost can burn with a softening brightness."

Behind the ceremonial day, the rhythms of life in America went on. There were jobs to do, classes to attend, soccer games, weddings, births, deaths and appointments. The armies of commerce, homemakers and civil servants went about their business, not quite as usual, perhaps, but with an awareness that 9/11, a date burned into the national psyche, had edged away from catastrophe toward the realm of tragic history. It was an occasion for solemnity but no longer a wrenching heartbreak.

The purpose of this article is ______.

A．in memory of the Sept. 11 attacks

B．to describe the hijacked jetliners crashed

C．to celebrate the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 event

D．with haunting but receding memories

Entertainment in London

Buying Books

Londoners are great readers. They buy vast numbers of newspapers and magazines and even of books especially paperbacks, which are still comparatively cheap in spite of ever-increasing rises in the costs of printing. They still continue to buy "proper" books, too, printed on good paper and bound between hard covers.

There are many streets in London containing shops which specialize in book-selling. Perhaps the best known of these is Charing Cross Road in the very heart of London. Here bookshops of all sorts and sizes are to be found, from the celebrated one which boasts of being "the biggest bookshop in the world" to the tiny, dusty little places which seem to have been left over from Dickens' time. Some of these shops stock, or will obtain, any kinds of books, but many of them specialize in second-hand books, in art books, in foreign books, in books or philosophy, politic or any other of the various subjects about which books may be written. One shop in this area specializes solely in books about ballet!

Although it may be the most convenient place for Londoners to buy books, Charing Cross Road is not the cheapest. For the really cheap second-hand volumes, the collector must venture off the busy and crowded roads, to Farringdon Road, for example, in the East Central district of London. Here there is nothing so grand as bookshops. Instead, the booksellers come along each morning and tip out their sacks of books on to barrows(推车) which line the gutters(贫民区). And the collectors, some professional and some amateur, who have been waiting for them, pounce towards the sellers. In places like this one can still, occasionally, pick up for a few pence an old volume that may be worth many pounds.

Both Charing Cross Road and Farringdon Road are well-known places of the book buyer. Yet all over London there are bookshops, in places not so well known, where the books are equally varied and exciting. It is in the sympathetic atmosphere of such shops that the loyal book buyer feels most at home. In these shops, even the life-long book-browser is frequently rewarded by the accidental discovery of previously unknown delights. One could, in fact, easily spend a lifetime exploring London's bookshops. There are many less pleasant ways of spending time!

Going to the Theatre

London is very rich in theatres: there are over forty in the West End alone--more than enough to ensure that there will always be at least two or three shows running to suit every kind taste, whether serious or lighthearted.

Some of them are specialist theatres. The Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, where the great opera singers of the world can be heard, is the home of opera and the Royal Ballet. The London Coliseum now houses the English National Opera Company, which encourages English singers in particular and performs most operas in English at popular prices.

Some theatres concentrate on the classics and serious drama, some on light comedy, some on musicals. Most theatres have a personality of their own, from the old, such as the Theatre Royal (also called the "Haymarket") in the Haymarket, to the more modern such as the recently opened Baibican centre in the city. The National Theatre has three separate theatres in its new building by Waterloo Bridge. At the new Barbican centre the Royal Shakespeare Company has their London home-their other centre is at Stratfor-on-Avon.

Most of the old London theatres are concentrated in a very small area, within a stone's throw of the Piccadilly and Leicester Square tube stations. As the evening performances normally begin either at seven-thirty or eight p. m., there is a kind of minor rush-hour between seven-fifteen and eight o'clock in this district. People stream out of the nearby tube stations, the pavements are crowded, and taxis and private cars

A．Newspapers.

B．Magazines.

C．Paperbacks.

D．Hardbacks.

Finding something new to say about America's love affair with the death penalty is not easy. The subject not only amuses intense emotions, it has produced an ocean of comment from lawyers, judges, politicians, campaigners, statisticians, social scientists and quite a few demagogues. Nevertheless, Franklin Zimring, one of America's leading criminologists, has managed to rise above this cacophony to write a thought-provoking and genuinely original book, 'The Contradictions of American Capital Punishment', which deserves to become a classic.

Mr. Zimring tackles head-on the most puzzling question of all: why are Americans so determined to keep the death penalty when nearly all other developed democracies have given it up, and now view it as barbaric? In the past two decades, attitudes in America and Europe have diverged so much that any dialogue on the subject has been replaced by blank incomprehension, and America's retention of capital punishment has become a significant diplomatic irritant. For European governments the abolition of capital punishment is a human-rights priority, and they have expended valuable political capital in trying to achieve it. American governments, Republican and Democratic, insist that the death penalty has nothing to do with human-rights, and deeply resent European efforts to make its abolition an international norm.

The difference between European and American attitudes, says Mr. Zimring, is not the breadth of support for the death penalty, but its depth. At the time of the death penalty's abolition in each developed country, a majority similar to America's, currently 65%, wanted to keep it, according to opinion polls. But when European political elites turned against it after the second world war, electorates acquiesced. Today most Europeans probably would not want it back.

The death penalty is a far more contentious issue in America, says Mr. Zimring, because the debate about it draws on a cherished American political tradition which does not exist anywhere else: vigilante justice. Many death-penalty supporters see executions not as acts of a distant or unreliable government, or even as a crime-control measure, but as an instrument of local, community justice, a form. of vengeance on behalf of the victims' relatives.

In a startling analysis, Mr. Zimring shows that most executions are performed in a few states in the south and south-west where, the lynching of African-Americans, other forms of mob violence and six-shooter justice were most endemic at the end of the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries. Opinion-poll support for the death penalty may be fairly uniform. across America, and 38 states have the death penalty on their books, but many states hardly ever execute anyone. The vast bulk of executions take place only where the values of the lynch mob have endured, he says.

Many people will find this linkage distasteful. But Mr. Zimring marshals a powerful ease for it, and sceptics will have to reply to his evidence, not just brash the argument aside. Americans, distrust of overweening government power is as deeply rooted a tradition as vigilante justice, Mr. Zimring concedes. However, when it comes to the death penalty, this distrust is manifest not in an abolitionist movement, as in other countries, but in the maze of legal-appeals procedures which mean that most murderers condemned to death spend years, even decades, on death mw. More death-row inmates are likely to die of old age than by execution. Neither supporters nor opponents of the death penalty are happy with this odd result.

What Americans really want is an error-free death penalty, but this can never be guaranteed, as the recent spate of death-row exonerations has shown. Moreover, Mr. Zimring argues that Americans' am bivalence about capital punishment can never be resolved. Sooner or later, one of these competing traditions——a regard for careful legal processes to seco

A．To discuss capital punishment in America

B．To support Mr. Zimring's views on capital punishment

C．To review Mr. Zimring's book on capital punishment

D．To help sell Mr. Zimring's book on capital punishment

A number of animals in Aesop' s fables are portrayed as being crafty.

A．vain

B．virtuous

C．artistic

D．cunning

A number of animals in Aesop's fables are portrayed as being crafty.

A．vain

B．virtuous

C．artistic

D．cunning

A number of animals in Aesop's fables are portrayed as being crafty.

A．vain

B．virtuous

C．artistic

D．cunning

The Fiat group took all the measures to rescue the firm EXCEPT for______.

A．regaining credit from the banks

B．shrinking its annual production

C．cutting down the employees

D．appointing new bosses