1、考研英语(一)-73 及答案解析(总分：100.00，做题时间：90 分钟)一、Reading Comprehensio(总题数：0，分数：0.00)As a young bond trader, Buttonwood was given two pieces of advice, trading rules of thumb, if you will: that bad economic news is good news for bond markets and that every utterance dropping from the lips of Paul Volcker, the
2、 then chairman of the Federal Reserve, and the man who restored the central bank“s credibility by stomping on runaway inflation, should be respected than Pope“s orders. Today“s traders are, of course, a more sophisticated bunch. But the advice still seems good, apart from two slight drawbacks. The f
3、irst is that the well-chosen utterances from the present chairman of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, is of more than passing difficulty. 1 The second is that, of late, good news for the economy has not seemed to upset bond investors all that much. For all the cheer that has crackled down the wi
4、res, the yield on ten-year bondswhich you would expect to rise on good economic newsis now, at 4.2%, only two-fifths of a percentage point higher than it was at the start of the year. Pretty much unmoved, in other words. Yet the news from the economic front has been better by far than anyone could h
5、ave expected. On Tuesday November 25th, revised numbers showed that America“s economy grew by an annual 8.2% in the third quarter, a full percentage point more than originally thought, driven by the ever-spendthrift American consumer and, for once, corporate investment. 2 Just about every other piec
6、e of information coming out from special sources shows the same strength. New houses are still being built at a fair clip. Exports are rising, for all the protectionist crying. Even employment, in what had been mocked as a jobless recovery, increased by 125,000 or thereabouts in September and Octobe
7、r. 3 Rising corporate profits, low credit spreads and the biggest-ever rally in the junk-bond market do not, on the face of it, suggest anything other than a deep and long-lasting recovery. Yet Treasury-bond yields have fallen. If the rosy economic backdrop makes this odd, making it doubly odd is an
8、 apparent absence of foreign demand Foreign buyers of Treasuries, especially Asian certral banks, who had been swallowing American government debt like there was no tomorrow, seem to have had second thoughts lately. 4 In September, according to the latest available figures, foreigners bought only $5
9、-6 billion of Treasuries, compared with $25.1 billion the previous month and an average of $38.7 billion in the preceding four months. 5 In an effort to keep a lid on the yen“s rise, the Japanese central bank is still busy buying dollars and parking the money in government debt. Just about everyboby
10、 else seems to have been selling.（分数：20.00）_6 It is too much to expect one man single-handedly to rescue Sony, the Japanese firm which formerly made world-beating electronic products but is now almost as well-known for making losses. Even so, Kazuo Hirai, who unveiled his outlook for the company on
11、April 12th less than a fortnight: after taking its management back into Japanese hands, has had a tumultuous start. On April 10th the company predicted it would lose 520 billion yen ($6.5 billion) in the fiscal year that ended on March 31st, the biggest loss in its 65-year history. 7 The new forecas
12、t, twice as bad as had been expected as recently as February, clobbered its shares, which have fallen by 40% in a year. The increased losses stemmed largely from an accounting charge: in the company“s fourth consecutive year of red ink, Sony decided it could no longer carry tax losses as an asset. “
13、The news hit me hard,“ Mr. Hirai admitted. But paper losses aside, the underlying electronics business is also bleeding money. 8 Mr. Hirai laid out aggressive targets to improve performance, though he offered few concrete ideas on how to achieve them. Interestingly, he named three products as core t
14、o Sony: digital imaging, including cameras; gaming; and mobile phones. Conspicuous by their absence were televisions. They are not just a problem for Sony, which has lost money on the business for eight years. 9 Sharp and Panasonic, its two main Japanese rivals, are also likely to lose money on TVs
15、this year, as well as on other parts of their electronic businesses. (On April 10th, Sharp, too, issued a profit warning). What makes televisions such a millstone for these firms is that none has the guts to exit the business completely; nor are they aggressively revamping it. Instead they lean towa
16、rds what YoshiharuIzumi of J. P. Morgan, a securities firm, calls “managed decline“. Mr. Hirai had already announced that Sony“s TV production goal would be halved, from 40m units to 20m. There was little to suggest he has any higher hope for TVs than to turn a profit in the year ending March 2014.
17、10 However, he left open the possibility of alliances with other Japanese television makers: talk of such cooperation has grown since Sharp was part-sold to Taiwan“s HonHai, Apple“s main supplier, last month.（分数：20.00）_When retailers want to entice customers to buy a particular product, they typical
18、ly offer it at a discount. According to a new study to be published in the Journal of Marketing, they are missing a trick. 11 A team of researchers, led by Akshay Rao of the University of Minnesota“s Carlson School of Mana gement, looked at consumers“ attitudes to discounting. Shoppers, they found,
19、much prefer getting something extra flee to getting something cheaper. The main reason is that most people are useless at fractions. Consumers often struggle to realize, for example, that a 50% increase in quantity is the same as a 33% discount in price. They overwhelmingly assume the former is bett
20、er value. 12 In an experiment, the researchers sold 73% more hand lotion when it was offered in a bonus pack than when it carried an equivalent discount (even after all other effects, such as a desire to stockpile, were controlled for). This numerical blind spot remains even when the deal clearly fa
21、vors the discounted product. 13 In an other experiment, this time on his undergraduates, Mr. Rao offered two deals on loose coffee beans: 33% extra free or 33% off the price. The discount is by far the better proposition, but the supposedly clever students viewed them as equivalent. Studies have sho
22、wn other ways in which retailers can exploit consumers“ innumeracy. One is to befuddle them with double discounting. 14 People are more likely to see a bargain in a product that has been reduced by 20%, and then by an additional 25% than one which has been subject to an equivalent, one-off, 40% redu
23、ction. Marketing types can draw lessons beyond just pricing, says Mr. Rao. 15 When advertising a new car“s efficiency, for example, it is more convincing to talk about the number of extra miles per gallon it does, rather than the equivalent percentage fall in fuel consumption. There may be lessons f
24、or regulators too. Evert well-educated shoppers are easily foxed. Sending every one back to school for maths refresher-courses seems out of the question. But more prominently displayed unit prices in shops and advertisements would be a great help.（分数：20.00）_France“s tradition of making exquisite lux
25、uries dates back at least to the court of Louis XIV. 16 The sun king financed ebenistes (cabinet-makers), tapisseurs (upholsterers), menuisiers (carpenters) and other artisans who made beautiful and largely useless things for the court of Versailles. Bernard Arnault might be his heir. Mr. Amault is
26、the chairman, chief executive and controlling shareholder of Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton (LVMH), the world“s largest luxury group. 17 Over the past quarter-century he has transformed a small, nearly defunct clothing manufacturer into a conglomerate that controls more than 60 luxury brands. Credit Su
27、isse, a bank, predicts that LVMH“s combined sales will reach ? 27 billion ($33 billion) this year. Its profits in 2011 were ? 3.5 billion and its market capitalization is a cork-popping ? 62 billion. LVMH is more profitable than other luxury groups. “LVMH is like a mini Germany,“ boasts an insider.
28、Like that country“s Mittelstand, it has built a reputation for craftsmanship and quality that people are happy to pay extra for. 18 The difference is, the Mittelstand makes unsexy things such as machine tools and shaving brushes, whereas LVMH makes champagne hand-bags and other objects of desire. Al
29、so like the Mittelstand, LVMH energetically pursues opportunities abroad. 19 After years of hard marketing, it has persuaded much of Asia“s new middle class that its wares confer a whiff of European sophistication. Sales in Asia (Japan except) accounted for 27% of the total in 2011, up from 17% in 2
30、001. In Japan, which generated 15% of the group“s sales a decade ago, a startling 85% of women now own a Louis Vuitton product. It takes a rare talent to be ubiquitous and yet retain an air of exclusivity. A final similarity is that, like the Mittelstand, LVMH is made up of lots of family firms. The
31、 difference is that the ones that make up LVMH have been swallowed by a hungry conglomerate. Some didn“t object. Last year LVMH bought Bulgari, an Italian jeweler, for ? 4.3 billion. The Bulgari family were happy to take the cash. 20 Their business had hit a rough patch after the collapse of Lehman
32、Brothers in 2008, and they thought Mr. Arnault would make a good sugar daddy for their brand.（分数：20.00）_A market is commonly thought of as a place where commodities are bought and sold. Thus fruit and vegetables are sold wholesale at Covent Garden Market and meat is sold wholesale at Smithfield Mark
33、et. But there are markets for things other than commodities in the usual sense. 21 There are real estate markets, foreign exchange markets, labor markets, short-term capital markets and so on; there may be a market for anything which has a price. And there may be no particular place to which dealing
34、s are confined. 22 Buyers and sellers may be scattered over the whole world and instead of actually meeting together in a market-place they may deal with one another by telephone, telegram, cable or letter. Even if dealings are restricted to a particular place, the dealers may consist wholly or in p
35、art of agents acting on instructions from clients far away. Thus agents buy meat at Smithfield on behalf of retail butchers all over England; and brokers on the London Stock Exchange buy and sell securities on instructions from clients all over the world. 23 We must therefore define a market as an a
36、rea over which buyers and sellers are in such close touch with one another either directly or through dealers, that the prices obtainable in one part of the market affect the prices paid in other parts. 24 Modern means of communication are so rapid that a buyer can discover what price a seller is as
37、k in, g, and can accept it if he wishes, although he may be thousands of miles away. Thus the market for anything is, potentially, the whole world. But in fact things have, normally, only a local or national market. This may be because nearly the whole demand is concentrated in one locality. These s
38、pecial local demands, however, are of quite minor importance. 25 The main reason why many things have not a world market is that they are costly or difficult to transport.（分数：20.00）_考研英语(一)-73 答案解析(总分：100.00，做题时间：90 分钟)一、Reading Comprehensio(总题数：0，分数：0.00)As a young bond trader, Buttonwood was given
39、 two pieces of advice, trading rules of thumb, if you will: that bad economic news is good news for bond markets and that every utterance dropping from the lips of Paul Volcker, the then chairman of the Federal Reserve, and the man who restored the central bank“s credibility by stomping on runaway i
40、nflation, should be respected than Pope“s orders. Today“s traders are, of course, a more sophisticated bunch. But the advice still seems good, apart from two slight drawbacks. The first is that the well-chosen utterances from the present chairman of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, is of more th
41、an passing difficulty. 1 The second is that, of late, good news for the economy has not seemed to upset bond investors all that much. For all the cheer that has crackled down the wires, the yield on ten-year bondswhich you would expect to rise on good economic newsis now, at 4.2%, only two-fifths of
42、 a percentage point higher than it was at the start of the year. Pretty much unmoved, in other words. Yet the news from the economic front has been better by far than anyone could have expected. On Tuesday November 25th, revised numbers showed that America“s economy grew by an annual 8.2% in the third quarter, a full percentage point more than originally thought, driven by the ever-spendthrift American consumer and, for once, corporate investment.
