Read the article and select the best answer. Article: Item 1: JK Rowling, the Harry Potter author, has signed a publishing deal with Little Brown, to release her first ever novel for adults. The deal means that Rowling's long-standing relationship with Bloomsbury, the London-based publisher that launched the Harry Potter books, has come to an end, at least in terms of new works by the author. Rowling, who is worth an estimated PS530 million, said that the new novel will be nothing like the Harry Potter series, which sold over 30 million copies in the UK alone. She said that with the move from children's to adult fiction, a move to a new publisher seemed like a logical step. Item 2: China's hurdler Liu Xiang was disqualified Thursday at the Stockholm indoor athletics tournament due to false start, giving his rival Dayron Robles of Cuba an easy win of 7.66 seconds. Liu was not willing to explain the reason of his false start, but he told Xinhua that it was not related to his foot injury. Another Cuban Orlando Ortega followed in 7.68 seconds and Balazs Baji of Hungary stood third in 7.70 seconds. Last Saturday, Liu won the men's 60m hurdle final in 7.41 seconds at the Birmingham indoor tournament, setting a new Asian record. He said Wednesday that he hoped to have an even better performance than he did in Birmingham at the Stockholm indoor tournament. Item 3: Former NBA star and current Bobcats owner Michael Jordan filed suit in a Chinese court against Qiaodan Sports Company Limited, a sportswear and footwear manufacturer, for the use of his name without permission. Jordan says "This complaint is not about money, it's about principle and protecting my name." The Chinese company has registered and uses the name "Qiaodan". Jordan has been known in China since he gained widespread popularity in the mid-1980s. Item 4: A commuter train crashed at a busy central station in Buenos Aires on Wednesday, killing 49 passengers and injuring more than 600 people, the deadliest in a series of train accidents in Argentina over the past years. The... Question: Where can we see the passage? Options: A: Textbook B: Guidebook C: Magazine D: Website
D

Read the article and select the best answer. Article: Of the 7,000 languages spoken in the world today, linguists say, nearly half are likely to disappear this century. In fact, one falls out of use about every two weeks. Some languages die out in an instant, at the death of the only surviving speaker. Others are lost gradually in bilingual cultures, as local tongues are edged out by the dominant language at school, in the marketplace and on television. New research, supported by the National Geographic Society and the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages, has found the five regions where languages are disappearing most rapidly. They are northern Australia, central South America, North America's upper Pacific coastal zone, eastern Siberia, and Oklahoma and the southwestern United States. K. David Harrison, an associate professor of linguistics at Swarthmore College, US, said that more than half the languages had no written form and were _ to loss and being forgotten." Their loss leaves no dictionary, no text, or no record of the accumulated knowledge and history of a disappeared culture. Harrison and other researchers started their rescue project last year. They have been trying to identify and record endangered languages. They interviewed and made recordings of the few remaining speakers of a language and collected basic word lists. The individual projects, some lasting three to four years, involve hundreds of hours of recording speech, developing grammar and preparing children's readers in the obscure language. The research has concentrated on preserving entire language families. "These are probably languages that cannot be brought back, but at least we made records of them," said Gregory Anderson, director of the Living Tongues Institute, in Oregon, US. Question: What does the passage mainly tell us? Options: A: Many languages are quickly disappearing. B: Some languages are disappearing because they are hard to remember. C: Chinese is one of the languages that are disappearing. D: Thanks to some researchers, many endangered languages have been rescued.
A

Read the article and select the best answer. Article: Which are you more likely to have with you at any given moment-your cell phone or your wallet? Soon you may be able to throw your wallet away and pay for things with a quick wave of your smart phone over an electronic scanner. In January, Starbucks announced that customers could start using their phones to buy coffee in 6,800 of its stores. This is the first pay-by-phone practice in the U.S., but we're likely to see more wireless payment alternatives as something called near field communication (NFC) gets into America's consumer electronics. Last December, some new smart phones which contain an NFC chip were introduced to the public. Already in use in parts of Asia and Europe, NFC allows shoppers to wave their phones a few inches above a payment terminal - a contact- free system built for speed and convenience. But before NFC becomes widely adopted in the U.S., a few problems need to be worked out, like who will get to collect the profitable transaction fees. Although some credit card providers have been experimenting with wave-and- pay systems that use NFC-enabled credit cards, cell phone service providers may try to muscle their way into the point-of-sale(POS)market. Three big cell phone service providers have formed a joint venture that will go into operation over the next 15 months. Its goal is "to lead the U.S. payments industry from cards to mobile phone." The other big NFC issue, apart from how payments will be processed, is security. For instance, what's to stop a thief from digitally pick-pocketing you? "We're still not at the point where an attacker can just brush against you in a crowd and steal all the money out of your phone," says Jimmy Shah. A mobile- security researcher, "Users may also be able to set transaction limits, perhaps requiring a password to be entered for larger purchases." Still uneasy about this digital-wallet business? Keep in mind that if you lose your smart phone, it can be located on a map and remotely disabled. Plus, your phone can be password protected. Your wallet isn't. Question: What is predicted to happen in the U.S.? Options: A: The expansion of cell phone companies. B: The boom of pay-by-phone business. C: The disappearance of credit cards. D: The increase of Starbucks sales.
B