大二下学期拿了专四，时间非常充分，想再学一门外...

During the first half of the seventeenth century, when the nations of Europe were quarreling over who owned the New World, the Dutch and the Swedes founded competing villages ten miles apart on the Delaware River. Not long afterward, the English took over both places and gave them new names, New Castle and Wilmington.

For a century and a half the two villages grew rapidly, but gradually Wilmington gained all the advantages. It was a little closer to Philadelphia, so when new textile mills opened, they opened in Wilmington, not in New Castle. There was plenty of water power from rivers and creeks at Wilmington, so when young Irenee DuPont chose a place for his gunpowder mill, it was Wilmington he chose, not New Castle. Wilmington became a town and then a city —a rather important city, much the largest in Delaware. And New Castle, bypassed by the highways and waterways that made Wilmington prosperous, slept ten miles south on the Delaware River. No two villages with such similar pasts could have gone such separate ways. Today no two pieces could be more different.

Wilmington, with its expressways and parking lots and all its other concrete ribbons and badges, is a tired old veteran of the industrial wars and wears a vacant stare. Block after city block where people used to live and shop is broken and empty.

New Castle never had to make way for progress and therefore never had any reason to tear down its seventeenth-and eighteenth-century houses. So they are still here, standing in tasteful rows under ancient elms around the original town green. New Castle is still an agreeable place to live. The pretty buildings of its quiet past make a serene setting for the lives of 4,800 people. New Castle may be America's loveliest town, but it is not an important town at all. Progress passed it by.

Poor New Castle.

Lucky Wilmington.

Which is the major factor that made the difference between Wilmington and New Castle?

A．Convenience for traffic.

B．The Delaware River.

C．The investment of Irenee DuPont.

D．The textiles mills.

What is TRUE about the Irish Republic's economy?

A．It was the most successful among the EU countries.

B．It has increased 8% in the last five years.

C．The unemployment rate has reached its lowest level for 5 years.

D．The commodity prices have decreased greatly in the country.

As can be gathered from the passage, before 1910 the normal running time of a film was probably ______.

A．15 minutes or less

B．between 15 and 30 minutes

C．between 30 and 45 minutes

D．1 hour or more

SECTION B ENGLISH TO CHINESE

Directions: Translate the following text into Chinese.

This is an exciting moment, where the torch and torch relay route will be presented to the world. The Olympic flame carried by the torch and passed around the world from the torch bearer to torch bearer will stimulate the excitement in the peoples across the globe and foucus on the attention at the coming Beijing Games.

By traveling along the historical "Silk Road", a symbol of ancient trade links between China and the rest of the world, crossing the five continents and going to new places, the Beijing 2008 Torch Relay will, as its theme says, be a "journey of harmony", bringing friendship and respect to people of different nationalities, races and creeds.