44. Many teachers are going for blogs although some w______ about privacy issues.
Paragraph Ten
Employment of women with babies under one year dropped in the most recent period reported by the Census Bureau. The rate decreased from 59% in 1998 to 55% in 2002. The Census Bureau said this was the first recorded drop since it began to keep these records in 1976.
45. F______ women with infants are being employed.
IV. Translation. (20 points, 4 points for each)
Directions: In the following passage, there are five groups of underlined sentences. Read the passage carefully and translate these sentences into Chinese. Write the Chinese version on your Answer Sheet.
It's believed the Internet was born in 1969 when two computers at the University of California, Los Angeles, were connected by a 15-foot cable, with bits of meaningless data flowing between them. 46. Since then the Net has taken off, with some 137 million U.S. computers online plus another 152 million outside the United States. And while the number of Internet-linked computers is surging, the volume of traffic they are carrying is increasing even faster. Some projections have it doubling every 100 days.
47. This is not surprising since a hallmark of the Cyber Age is connectivity and the sharing of information. The assertion that "information is meant to be free" is an increasing reality since it can be moved from those who have it to those who need it in the blink of an eye - and at virtually no cost, unlike for other media. This computer-driven contribution to the vitality of the U.S. economy is immeasurable.
Auction sites have been springing up all over the Internet, but the undisputed leader is eBay.
48. You simply go to eBay's Web site, register, post a description of what you have to sell, along with photos and a minimum price, if you like. Bids from interested buyers appear on your computer screen, which is instantly updated as better bids come in. Once the auction ends, the highest bidder is obliged to pay for the item.
One of the Internet's truly great features is that anybody can be a player who has an idea for a Web site and a few dollars to get it up and running. Possibly the most notorious site of all is the one dreamed up by an 18-year-old dropout from Northeastern University in Boston, Shawn Fanning, nicknamed the "Napster" for his unruly red hair. 49. He created the world's biggest online free-music community, which allows 38 million popular music lovers to exchange hundreds of recordings, using the Napster system as a search engine to find exactly what they want.
Napster has outraged everyone connected with the record business, from artists whose creative work was being hijacked to the Recording Industry Association of America, which brought a lawsuit seeking an injunction aimed at ending Napster's brief, if notorious, life. It now appears, incredibly, that this deadlock may actually be resolved to almost everyone's satisfaction. Napster users may pay a modest monthly fee, which will be divided up among those creating, producing, and delivering the music. Napster is receiving financial backing from the German media giant Bertelsmann, which is getting a piece of Napster in return. There is a sticking point, however, since it's now unclear how to put a user name and price on every digital music file being downloaded.
