留基委听力考试08年1月部分原文

留基委听力考试08年1月部分原文Section 2 Part 1L: Hello, I am Linda Beck, the owner. Well, this is it. It’s a wonderful little house for a young couple. Let’s go in.W: Oh, my, the house is much bigger than it looks from the outside.M: Not bad. Linda Beck, will you still clean the carpets?L: Of course. I am going to paint, too. My last tenants were the worst, very dirty people.W: Did you say the utilities were included in the rent, Ms. Beck?L: Please call me Linda. Only the water and trash, not the gas and electricity.M: What deposit is required?L: A security deposit of $300 and a cleaning deposit of $50. I also require the first and the last month’s rent.W: There’s a broken window in the master’s bedroom. What’s about the window, Linda?L: I’ll take care of it. If you decide to take the place, I’ll have it walked through before you move in. I’ll write down all that need repairs, one of you and I will sign the lists and I’ll fix everything before you move in. How is that?W: Terrific. When is the rent due?L: On the first day of every month.M: Do we need to sign the lease?L: No, but you’ll have to sign a month-to-month agreement. I’ll also need a written 30-day notice before you move out. I have left the copy of the contract with you. Would you like to check it?W: I like this house, Ted. It’s old, but it’s more comfortable than our apartment. Let’s look over the agreement.M: It says here that we can’t put any nails in the walls. It’s No. 10 in the contract, can you change that? We’d like to hang some pictu res.L: Sure, no problem. I’ll just cross out line No. 10 and write my initials by it. You’ll have your initials too.W: Let’s take the house, Ted. I love it.M: Hold your hose, Janet, not so fast. We’ve lots of houses to see. Linda,would you take a check for $100 to hold the house first? My wife and I would like to think it over and tell you for sure tomorrow.L: That’s fine with me. I hope you will decide to take it. When you have made up your mind, please give me a call. You’ve got my number, right? It’s 5076597892.W: 5076597892. Ok, we will call you. This is the most exciting thing that happened to us today. Bye, talk to you tomorrow.Section 2 Part 2P: Good morning, may I see your driver’s license?D: Of course, officer. Here it is.P: Do you know how fast you are going?D: Not exactly, officer. I’m late for work, you see. And I had a bad morning.P: A bad morning, ha? Well, it’s going to get a little worse, young lady. May I see your vehicle registration?D: Yes, I have it here in the gear co mpartment. It’s all in order.It was renewed last month.P: And your proof of insurance?D: Yes, of course. Here’s my insurance card. It’s all up to date.The insurance was paid months ago.P: I am glad to see that you have your safe belt on you, young lady.D: Oh, I always wear my safe belt. I would n’t be caught there without my safe belt on, ha?P: Did you know that your left taillight was out? It didn’t light up when you stopped.D: That can’t be true, officer. It was burnt out a month ago but it was fixed. My husband fixed it.P: Ok, I’ll let you go this time, but get it fixed ago, young lady. Here’s your driver’s license and here are your other papers.I’ll need your signature on the ticket.D: Oh, officer, I can’t believe this is happening to me. I’ve never had a ticket in my life. Can’t you just let me go? I won’t speed again, I promise. P: Sign here, please.D: This is the worst day of my life. The alarm doesn’t go off. No hotwater, soured milk, the speeding ticket, late for work and it’s only 8:30. P: That’s too bad. Look, young lady, it’s not my job to tell you this, but I will. You don’t have to pay that ticket. You can get out of it by going to traffic school.D: Traffic school? I don’t understand.P: You can call traffic court and have them send you all the information on traffic school. You pay the court a small fee for paper work, then you sign up for an 8-hour traffic class which costs about $35. The traffic school instructor gives you a certificate at the end of the course. You deliver the certificate to traffic court and everything is taken care of.D: Everything is taken care of? What do you mean?P: I mean that the ticket won’t be put on your driving record and your insurance won’t be informed.D: That’s great. Thank you very much, officer. You’ve been very helpful.I appreciate it.P: That’s ok. I hope your day gets better.D: It just did, officer.Section 3Listen to a lecture in a history class. The professor is talking about the California Gold Rush.Today I will be discussing the California Gold Rush, especially how the Gold Rush shaped the state of California. We can say that the Gold Rush began on January the 24th, 1848 when a man named James Marshall discovered gold at Sutters Mill near San Francisco, but it took another man Sam Brennan, a newspaper man in San Francisco to create frenzy about Marshall’s discovery. The informational Dam burst on May the 14th 1848 when Brennan published an article in his San Francisco newspaper about the gold strike. His newspaper was closed shortly thereafter, because even his own employees had caught the fever and headed for the hills.This excitement would lead to the biggest voluntary migration in the history of the world. The people who participated in this migration to find gold in 1849 were the so-called “forty-niners”. In the late 1840s, California wasn’t even an American state yet, but it already had areputation of the land full of people who came seeking adventure and riches. After Marshall’s discovery was further publicized by Partis an James Pop in his annual message to Congress in December, 1848, the mass migration truly began. In 1849, over 90,000 people would make the often dangerous journey to California by land and by sea, to try their luck at discovering gold for themselves. Ultimately, hundreds of thousands of people would travel to California as part of the gold rush.The routes people travelled to California were often filled with danger, not only were weather conditions unpredictable, especially through the Rockies, but there was always the possibility of fatal illness, malnutrition or attack from wild animals. Just making it to California was an achievement in itself.However once there, people found the availability of riches had been overstated. There were so many people looking for gold that it was difficult if not impossible for most people to find anything at all. But many of them stayed in California and tried to make a living doing other things. Indeed, the mass migration into California helped its case in American statehood. Only two years after the Gold Rush began, California was admitted to the Union as the 31st state.Section 4Last week, we looked at the stock market and how it functions, and so today I want to go on to look at business ownership and corporations, what they are and some reasons why they are formed. I’d like to start by talking about two different types of business ownership. If you start a restaurant by taking your own money to buy the building and the equipment, then what you have done has formed a sole proprietorship. You own the entire restaurant yourself. You get to make all of the decisions, and you keep all of the profit. If three people pool their money together and start a restaurant as a team, what they have done has formed a partnership. The three people own the restaurant themselves, sharing the profit and decision-making.A rather different way of setting up a business is to become a corporation. Any business that wants to sell shares of stock to a number of different people does so by turning itself into a corporation. This is in all legalways like a person, and it can act as an individual acts. It’s registered with the government, it can own property, it can go to court to sue people, it can be sued and it can make contracts. By definition, a corporation has stock that can be bought and sold. And all of the owners of the corporation hold shares of the stock to represent their ownership.So for example, if I buy 10 percent of the shares of a certain corporation, then I have a one tenth ownership of the company. There is a whole body of law that controls corporations----these laws are in place to protect the shareholders and the public. These laws control a number of things about how a corporation operates and is organized. For example, every corporation has a board of directors.It’s unlikely that even if all of the shares of a corporation are owned by one person, then that one person can decide that there will only be one person on the board of directors, but there is still a board.The shareholders in the company meet every year to vote on the people for the board. The board of directors makes the decisions for the company. It hires the officers of the company, for example, the president, makes the company's decisions and sets the company's policies. The board of directors can be thought of as the brain of the company, they don’t do any of the work of the company, but they make the important decisions. Let’s look at this flow cha rt of how a corporation works. Firstly, of course, a business idea has to be generated. It’s often something that needs a lot of capital. And one of the big reasons why corporations exist is to creature a structure for collecting lots of money for investment in a business.Let's say that you would like to start your own airline. Most people cannot do this, because an airplane costs millions of dollars. An airline needs a whole fleet of planes and other equipment, plus it has to hire a lot of employees. A person who wants to start an airline will therefore form a corporation and sell shares of stock in order to collect the money needed to get started.The company might sell one million shares of stock at $20 a share to raise $20 million very quickly. The company then invests the $20 million in equipment and employees. The investors (the shareholders who boughtthe $20 million in stock) hope that with the equipment and employees, the company will make a profit and pay a dividend.Another reason that corporations exist is to limit the liability of the owners to some extent. If the corporation gets sued, it is the corporation that pays the settlement. The corporation may go out of business, but that is the worst that can happen. If you are a sole proprietor who owns a restaurant and the restaurant gets sued, you are the one who is being sued. "You" and "the restaurant" are the same thing. If you lose the suit then you, personally, can lose everything you own in the process. And this is obviously not desirable.。