Can technology improve your trip? Meet Judy Williams. When she and her husband recently checked into Blu Hotel in Zurich, a clerk asked them to sign the dotted line on a room rate hundreds of dollars higher than their online offer. "It was not a cheap stay," says Williams, a lawyer from Billings, Mont. But it became more of one after her husband fired up the Booking.com app he'd used to book their room on his smart phone. "As soon as we showed him the cost, he honored it," Williams says. Technology may create challenges for travelers but it can also solve them. It's more than making sure of a hotel cost. The latest Booking.com can help users select hotels by location, make a secure booking and view the confirmed cost so they never need to re-discuss their hotel price. Another pain point for travelers is traffic that eats away precious vacation time. There's a new app called Commute which is aimed at users who have to make the same trip every day. But if you're headed to Los Angeles or Honolulu, where visitors can easily get stuck in hours of heavy traffic, Commute can help. Just input basic information about your destination and expected leaving time, and the app will start sending you traffic information 15 minutes before you leave. Testing Commute proved to be a challenge for me, because my home address is about 900 miles from my place of work. But if you have only a short distance to travel through a heavily populated area, you can use Commute to avoid traffic jams. Another source of travel-related problems is money. That's particularly true when you're dealing with a foreign currency. The latest Travel Money Tracker helps travelers prevent currency mix-ups. It immediately changes a country's native currency to yours, so you know exactly how much that Espresso in Milan costs in dollars. It can also warn you when you're overspending, which can sometimes be a problem when you're on vacation. The only catch, of course, is that you have to remember to record all your purchases. Taken together, these apps... What is the function of Travel Money Tracker? A) It tells people how much Espresso costs. B) It warns people when they are shopping. C) It changes the native currency to yours. D) It records all people's purchases.
C
(Question)
Recently Dr. Cleiman has proved that everyone has a daily energy cycle. During the hours when you labor (work) through your work, you may say that you are "hot". That is true, the time of day when you feel most energetic is when your cycle of body temperature is at its peak . For some people the peak comes during the forenoon . For others it comes in the afternoon or evening. No one has discovered why this is so. Much family quarrelling ends when husbands and wives realize what this energy cycle means and which cycle each member of the family has. You cannot change your cycle, but you can learn to make your life fit it better. "Habits can help," Dr. Cleiman believes. If your energy cycle is low in the morning but you have an important job early in the day, rise before your usual hour, and then you will work better at your low point. Get off to a slow start which saves your energy. Get up with a lazy yawn and stretch . Sit on the edge of bed before putting your feet on the floor. Avoid the troublesome searching for clean clothes by laying them out the night before. Dr. Cleiman did not explain in the passage _ . A) how people can make their life fit their cycle B) whether everyone has a daily cycle or not C) why people have their energy cycle at different times D) what will happen in the family if the couple fail to realize which cycle each member has
(Answer)
C
Ques: We've considered several ways of paying to cut in line: hiring line standers, buying tickets from scalpers , or purchasing line-cutting privileges directly from, say, an airline or an amusement park. Each of these deals replaces the morals of the queue (waiting your turn) with the morals of the market (paying a price for faster service). Markets and queues--paying and waiting--are two different ways of allocating things, and each is appropriate to different activities. The morals of the queue, "First come, first served, have an egalitarian appeal. They tell us to ignore privilege, power, and deep pockets. The principle seems right on playgrounds and at bus stops. But the morals of the queue do not govern all occasions. If I put my house up for sale, I have no duty to accept the first offer that comes along, simply because it's the first. Selling my house and waiting for a bus are different activities, properly governed by different standards. Sometimes standards change, and it is unclear which principle should apply. Think of the recorded message you hear, played over and over, as you wait on hold when calling your bank: "Your call will be answered in the order in which it was received." This is essential for the morals of the queue. It's as if the company is trying to ease our impatience with fairness. But don't take the recorded message too seriously. Today, some people's calls are answered faster than others. Call center technology enables companies to "score" incoming calls and to give faster service to those that come from rich places. You might call this telephonic queue jumping. Of course, markets and queues are not the only ways of allocating things. Some goods we distribute by merit, others by need, still others by chance. However, the tendency of markets to replace queues, and other non-market ways of allocating goods is so common in modern life that we scarcely notice it anymore. It is striking that most of the paid queue-jumping schemes we've considered--at airports and amusement parks, in call... According to the author, which of the following seems governed by the principle "First come, first served"? A) Taking buses. B) Buying houses. C) Flying with an airline. D) Visiting amusement parks.
Ans: A
It is the so-called city of dreams that counts some of the greatest masters of music and art among its former inhabitants. And it seems Vienna still has plenty to feel proud of, as it has been named the best place to live in the world -- for the third year running. The Austrian capital, which was home to Mozart and Beethoven, and has a population of 1.7million, has the best living standards in the world, according to an annual quality of living survey. European cities represent more than half of the top 25 cities in the rankings, which are based on factors such as crime, food and climate. Zurich was ranked second, followed by Auckland, and Munich and Dusseldorf. But just one UK city makes it into the top fifty, with London coming in at 38th - one place up from last year and ahead of New York in 47th. Other UK cities, including Birmingham, Aberdeen, Glasgow and Belfast, crept into the top 100. This year, the survey included for the first time a list of the safest cities. Luxembourg topped the list, followed by Bern, Switzerland, Helsinki, Finland, and Zurich, Switzerland. London came 68th, joint with New York, highlighting the crime rates in the capital. www.ks5u.com At the bottom of the 221-strong list, for the second year in a row, was Baghdad, in Iraq, which had the lowest standard of living and was ranked the least safe city by the Mercer survey. Slagin Parakatil, senior researcher at Mercer, said: "European cities in general continue to have high standards of living, because they enjoy advanced and modern city services combined with high-class facilities. But London, high levels of unemployment and lack of confidence in political institutions make their future positions hard to predict." What would be the best title for the passage? A) Vienna--home to masters B) European cities--high standards of living C) What can we see from a living survey D) Vienna named as best in the world
D