St Jude Medical spent 25 billion us dollars to take over Abbott Laboratories.

听力原文： General Motors announced today that it will eliminate at least 25,000 manufacturing jobs in the US within the next three years.

General Motors' CEO Rick Wagoner announced the planned job-cuts at the automaker's annual shareholders meeting in Willington, Delaware. GM also expects to close more vehicle assembly and parts plants. Wagoner says the moves are expected to save GM about 2.5 billion dollars a year. He also laid out a four-point approach to improve the company's profits. The world's largest automaker has been struggling with slumping sales and rising cost for raw materials and employee health care. Wagoner says health care adds about 1500 dollars to the cost of each GM vehicle.

What's the plan GM's CEO announced at the automaker's annual shareholders meeting?

A．Close vehicle assembly plants.

B．Close vehicle parts plants.

C．Job-cuts.

D．Both A and Ｂ.

STM-4的帧周期为4*l25us。()

Everyone uses the expressions AM and PM. But do you exactly know what they mean and how they came into being?

As you know, the turning of the earth makes the sun and the stars seem to move across the sky. Daylight, of course,【21】, when the sun rises in the east and when the sun is high【22】the sky, between these two positions, half of the daylight hours have been spent.

Therefore, by noticing【23】the sun stood in the sky, early man know they could tell the time of the day, At night the motion of the stars【24】the same purpose. The important thing in keeping time is to know the exact moment of【25】. For each of us, wherever we are, noon is when the sun is directly overhead. Think of an imaginary line【26】the sky, stretching from the north point of your horizon just to the south point.

When the sun cross your meridian (子午线), it is noon for you. When the sun still【27】of this line, or the meridian, it is morning. After the sun has crossed this line, it is【28】.

The Latin word for "midday" is "deridian",【29】which comes our word meridian. So AM is an abbreviation (缩写词) for "ante meridean", or before midday, and PM for after midday. Each or the world's time zones (时区) is about fifteen degrees wide in longitude (经度), which is about the distance the sun moves through tile sky in all hour.【30】lives in the same time zone observes noon at the same moment. In this way, the time is different by one hour as you move through each time zone.

(61)

A．comes

B．begins

C．appears

D．shines

Believe it or not, airlines really are trying to do better. They promised to improve customer service last year 【21】______ pressure from a Congress which was 【22】______ stories of nightmare flights.

So why is it that flying is getting 【23】______ for so many passengers, 【24】______ airlines are spending billions of dollars to improve service, 【25】______ in new equipment such as mobile check-in stations and portable phone banks so travelers can quickly 【26】______ a flight when it is delayed or canceled? The fact is that air travel has 【27】______ been such an annoyance, and customer complaints to the Transportation Department doubled in 1999 【28】______ 1998.

It seems Mother Nature would 【29】______ people by bus this year. An unusual run of bad weather, 【30】______ long walls of thunderstorms, has crippled airports lately and led to widespread delays and cancellations. After similar problems last summer, the FAA promised to work more closely with airlines 【31】______ weather slowdowns--for example, FAA and airline representatives now gather at a single location in Herndon, Va. , to 【32】______ the best way to allocate the available airspace. But even the FAA 【33】______ the new initiative has fallen 【34】______ of expectations, and many passengers complain that the delays seem 【35】______ .

Part of the problem is overcrowded planes. 【36】______ the strong economy, U.S. airlines are expected to carry a record 665 million passengers this year, up 5 percent from last year. On 【37】______ , planes are about 76 percent full these days, also a 【38】______ . That's good news for the Transport Department, which are profitably loading more passengers 【39】______ each flight, and bad news for passengers, 【40】______ irritations build rapidly in fight quarters.

【21】

A．under

B．below

C．beneath

D．beyond

Believe it or not, airlines really are trying to do better. They promised to improve customer service last year 【21】______ pressure from a Congress which was 【22】______ stories of nightmare flights.

So why is it that flying is getting 【23】______ for so many passengers, 【24】______ airlines are spending billions of dollars to improve service, 【25】______ in new equipment such as mobile check-in stations and portable phone banks so travelers can quickly 【26】______ a flight when it is delayed or canceled? The fact is that air travel has 【27】______ been such an annoyance, and customer complaints to the Transportation Department doubled in 1999 【28】______ 1998.

It seems Mother Nature would 【29】______ people by bus this year. An unusual run of bad weather, 【30】______ long walls of thunderstorms, has crippled airports lately and led to widespread delays and cancellations. After similar problems last summer, the FAA promised to work more closely with airlines 【31】______ weather slowdowns--for example, FAA and airline representatives now gather at a single location in Herndon, Va. , to 【32】______ the best way to allocate the available airspace. But even the FAA 【33】______ the new initiative has fallen 【34】______ of expectations, and many passengers complain that the delays seem 【35】______ .

Part of the problem is overcrowded planes. 【36】______ the strong economy, U.S. airlines are expected to carry a record 665 million passengers this year, up 5 percent from last year. On 【37】______ , planes are about 76 percent full these days, also a 【38】______ . That's good news for the Transport Department, which are profitably loading more passengers 【39】______ each flight, and bad news for passengers, 【40】______ irritations build rapidly in fight quarters.

【21】

A．under

B．below

C．beneath

D．beyond

On average, American kids aged 3 to 12 spent 29 hours a week in school, eight hours more than they did in 1981. They also did more household work and participated in more of such organized activities as soccer and ballet. Involvement in sports, in particular, rose almost 50% from 1981 to 1997: boys now spend an average of four hours a week playing sports; girls log half that time. All in all, however, children's leisure time dropped from 40% of the day in 1981 to 25%.

"Children are affected by the same time crunch that affects their parents," says Sandra Hofferth, who headed the recent study of children's timetable. A chief reason, she says, is that more mothers are working outside the home. (Nevertheless, children in both double-income and "male breadwinner" households spent comparable amounts of time interacting with their parents, 19 hours and 22 hours respectively. In contrast, children spent only 9 hours with their single mothers.)

All work and no play could make for some very messed-up kids. "Play is the most powerful way a child explores the world and learns about himself," says T. Berry Brazelton, professor at Harvard Medical School. Unstructured play encourages independent thinking and allows the young to negotiate their relationships with their peers, but kids aged 3 to 12 spent only 12 hours a week engaged in it.

The children sampled spent a quarter of their rapidly decreasing "free time"watching television. But that, believe it or not, was one of the findings parents might regard as good news. If they're spending less time in front of the TV set, however, kids aren't replacing it with reading. Despite efforts to get kids more interested in books, the children spent just over an hour a week reading. Let's face it, who's got the time?

By mentioning "the same time crunch" (Para. 2) Sandra Hofferth means

A．children have little time to play with their parents.

B．children are not taken good care of by their working parents.

C．both parents and children suffer from lack of leisure time.

D．both parents and children have trouble managing their time.