51. According to the author it could be said that _______.
[A] more people speak Chinese dialects than English
more people speak English as an auxiliary language than as a first language
[C] about one seventh of the world’s population speaks Russian
[D] more people speak English in the UK than in Ireland
52. The extract implies that ________.
[A] a little less than half the native English speakers in the world live in the United States
the 55 million inhabitants of the British Isles speak like the 30 million inhabitants of the ex-British dominions and colonies
[C] about one tenth of the total English-speaking world population lives in ex-British dominions and colonies
[D] it would certainly be an underestimate to suppose 230 million people speaking English as a native language
53. The reason why English is the closest approach to a world language is that _______.
[A] Chinese and Indic languages are mutually unintelligible
Chinese is too complex to be a world language
[C] Russian is only spoken on two continents
[D] there are more native speakers of English than of any other language
54. According to the author the fact that the same individual will not pronounce his vowels and consonants identically every time shows that ________.
[A] everyone has their own literary style
mutual intelligibility is a myth
[C] people’s vocabularies vary
[D] no two people speak the same language in exactly the same way
55. According to the author, style is ________.
[A] significant when it comes to comparing only two people
a question of grammatical and syntactical correctness
[C] the particular way an individual uses language
[D] a strange type of language
第二篇：关于美国的mandated最低工资问题。一开始说最低工资统一规定不好，不同的州情况不一样。然后就举了几个州最低工资差异。有人反对最低工资，提出最低工资造成企业成本增加，社会失业率增加。后面好像说在经济繁荣的时候，最低工资不为人们关心，但是经济不好时，最低工资还是有用的，blabla~~~
第三篇：伦敦的千禧穹(Millennium Dome) 只找到断断续续的几段，是在New york times上的。
If in this season of annual achievement awards there were one for the biggest New Year's bang and sorriest year-ending whimper, the winner would be Britain's entrant, the Millennium Dome. 然后说千禧穹是一个ambitious的创作，代表了英国人的想象力。
No country built more ambitious millennial projects and talked them up more than Britain, and the centerpiece was the $1.2 billion Dome, on the meridian that gave the name to Greenwich Mean Time and afforded Prime Minister Tony Blair the opportunity to proclaim Britain in 2000 as the ''home of time.'' 然后说千禧穹虽说被认为代表英国人的想象力，但是却是让一个建了法国的迪斯尼的法国人建的。(好像是这样)
The trouble with the Dome began on opening night. Thousands of those invited got stuck on the new subway line built to speed people from central London out to Greenwich; others who did arrive could not get past security to see the show. Fatally for the Dome, among the barred and detoured were top newspaper editors.
By the spring, the enormous space was virtually deserted on weekdays. The original projection of 12 million visitors was officially scaled back to 10 million, then 7 million, and finally 6 million, of which only 4.5 million were expected to pay.