While marching on parade on Army Day, they shouted:"______!"

Last month the U.S. Army, bumped favored defense contractor L-3 Communications from a $ 4.6 billion contract to provide translators and interpreters in Iraq. A new venture called Global Linguistic Solutions (GLS), headed by retired Army Major General James (Spider) Marks and primarily formed to bid on the contract, landed the job. The surprise caused L-3 shares to fall nearly 6%; the company lowered its sales forecast this year by $ 500 million.

Winning the contract may be the easy part for GLS. Luring interpreters to Iraq is another story. Job listings posted on L-3's website read like something out of a Tom Clancy thriller. Wanted. "Arabic Linguist… Ability to deal unobtrusively with the local populace… Must be able to live in a harsh environment." The pay isn't mentioned, but L-3 recently offered interpreters more than $175,000 annually to work in Iraq. Linguists usually don't carry weapons and are often called on to participate in raids and other combat-related tasks. Casualty reports show that L-3's Titan Corp, the major contractor supplying interpreters to the U.S. military, had 216 employees killed in Iraq—nearly 100 more fatalities than the entire British army stationed there.

Danger is just one way that the linguistics industry—interpreters who relay live chat and translators who process documents—has changed dramatically. More benignly, the Web and the global economy have led to 7.5% annual growth in the market, now pegged as a $ 9.4 billion business, according to research group Common Sense Advisory. While much of that is due to the military, there has been renewed growth elsewhere. "Firms from Starbucks to McDonald's now have to communicate and market to customers in dozens of different languages," says Common Sense Advisory president Don DePalma.

The boom in translation jobs comes because of—and despite—technology. DePalma says there has been real acceleration in demand tied to software, since Microsoft's new Vista operating system, updated versions of Mac and various other electronic devices have to conform. to European standards. That requires local language to be used in everything from instruction manuals to safety standards. Add the growing use of bilingual signage aimed at Hispanics, multilingual U.S. court requirements and hospital needs, and over the next eight years, full-time linguistics employment is expected to jump more than 25%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Computers are certainly doing some of the work. Companies like eBay, GM and Motorola have all used software from Massachusetts firm Idiom Technologies to help power their efforts in localization, as language targeting is sometimes called. Still, it often takes a real brain to differentiate terms in context: the word trunk can refer to a suitcase, a car hatch or an elephant's snout, for example.

The biggest player in translation services last year was publicly held Lionbridge, employing 4,000 full-time staff members and 10,000 freelancers in 25 countries, with a current market cap of $350 million. Lionbridge, based in Massachusetts, translates technology for mobile-phone companies and clients such as McDonald's, Google and Yahoo! "Computer code is code," says Lionbridge chief marketing officer Kevin Bolen. "But certain things such as metrics, time stamps and characters have to be re-engineered and hard-encoded into the software to display Japanese kanji, for instance."

Lionhridge and its competitors recruit at universities and industry websites such as linguistlist, org with specialists of all stripes in demand, from automotive experts to those with a knack for medical jargon. "India has about a dozen dialects needed to capture a substantial customer base," says Bolen, "so for Nokia we? re translating applications and phones and instructions in nine different ways."

Thanks to the Web, new companies become global from the get-go rather than at a later phase, Bolen

Napoleon and his army once crossed the English Channel and conquered Britain.

A．Right

B．Wrong

C．Not mentioned

That summer an army of crickets started a war with my father. They picked a fight the minute they invaded our cellar. Dad didn't care for bugs much more than Mamma, but he could tolerate a few spiders and assorted creepy crawlers living in the basement. Every farm house had them. A part of rustic living, and something you needed to put up with if you wanted the simple life.

He told Mamma: Now that were living out here, you can't be jerking your head and swallowing your gum over what's plain natural, Ellen. But she was a city girl through and through and had no ears when it came to defending vermin. She said a cricket was just a noisy cockroach, just a dumb horny bug that wouldn't shut up. She said in the city there were blocks of buildings overrun with cockroaches with no way for people to get rid of them. No sir, no way could she sleep with all that chirping going on; then to prove her point she wouldn't go to bed. She drank coffee and smoked my father's cigarettes and she paced between the couch and the TV. Next morning she threatened to pack up and leave, so Dad drove to the hardware store and hurried back. He squirted poison from a jug with a spray nozzle. He sprayed the basement and all around the foundation of the house. When he was finished he told us that was the end of it.

But what he should have said was: This is the beginning, the beginning of our war, the beginning of our destruction. I often think back to that summer and try to imagine him delivering a speech with words like that, because for the next fourteen days mamma kept finding dead crickets in the clean laundry. Shed shake out a towel or a sheet and a dead black cricket would roll across the linoleum. Sometimes the cat would corner one, and swat it around like he was playing hockey, then carry it away in his mouth. Dad said swallowing a few dead crickets wouldn't hurt as long as the cat didn't eat too many. Each time Mamma complained he told her it was only natural that we'd be finding a couple of dead ones for a while.

Soon live crickets started showing up in the kitchen and bathroom. Mamma freaked because she thought they were the dead crickets come back to haunt, but Dad said these was definitely a new batch, probably coming up on the pipes. He fetched his jug of poison and sprayed beneath the sink and behind the toilet and all along the baseboard until the whole house smelled of poison, and then he sprayed the cellar again, and then he went outside and sprayed all around the foundation leaving a foot-wide moat of poison.

For a couple of weeks we went back to finding dead crickets in the laundry. Dad told us to keep a sharp look out, He suggested that we'd all be better off to hide as many as we could from mamma. I fed a few dozen to the cat who I didn't like because he scratched and bit for no reason. I hoped the poison might kill him so we could get a puppy. A couple of weeks later, when both live and dead crickets kept turning up, he emptied the cellar of junk. Then he burned a lot of bundled newspapers and magazines which he said the crickets had turned 'into nests.

He stood over that fire with a rake in one hand and a garden hose in the other. He wouldn't leave it even when Mamma sent me out to fetch him for supper. He wouldn't leave the fire, and she wouldn't put supper on the table. Both my brothers were crying. Finally she went out and got him herself. And while we ate, the wind lifted some embers onto the wood pile. The only gasoline was in the lawn mowers fuel tank but that was enough to create an explosion big enough to reach the house. Once the roof caught, there wasn't much anyone could do.

The word "rustic" in the first paragraph probably means

A．urban.

B．rural.

C．metropolitan.

D．extravagant.

Why have some tribes joined the Iraqi police and army?

A．They hate of being Sunni rebels in Ramadi.

B．They want to drive al-Qaida members from their region.

C．They would be able to move to southern city of Diwaniyah with military force.

D．They intend to stop rising influence of Shiite militia loyal to Moqtada al-Sadr.

听力原文： British force struck the police building in Basra before dawn on Monday. They had information that an Iraqi major crime unit based in the building was planning to execute civil prisoners.

Challenger tanks and warrior armoured vehicles took part in the assault and the British troops were backed up by the Iraqi army. British commanders said they came under rocket and machine gun fire as they approached the building. They responded with heavy machine gun fire and killed seven gunmen. Later that morning when the assault was over, royal engineers placed explosives around the building and demolished it.

The British military authorities in Basra said they had planned to disband the police unit, which has been accused of murders, kidnappings and attacks on coalition forces. But they decided to attack the building instead after learning of the planned executions.

Why did British force strike the police building in Basra?

A．Because some civil prisoners were planning to break the prison.

B．Because they found a major Iraqi criminal in the building.

C．Because they heard there would be planned executions.

D．Because they heard there would be an attack.