1 . Directions: Complete the following passage by using the words in the box. Each word can only be used once. Note that there is one word more than you need.

One Medical

On Thursday, Amazon announced its first major acquisition (收购) under Mr. Jassy’s occupation as C.E.O., spending $3.9 billion for One Medical, a chain of primary care clinics around the country. The deal is a sign of Amazon’s health care ambitions. As the company has     1     from one business to another — including books, CDs, electronics, dog food and clothes — it has had to look in less obvious spots to find opportunities that can provide meaningful     2    .

Health care has been     3     to Amazon executives who believe it is an extremely large market, filled with inefficiencies and generally lacking the kind of     4     approach that Amazon tries to take with its businesses. “We think health care is high on the list of experiences that need     5    ,” Neil Lindsay, the senior vice president of Amazon Health Services, said in a statement announcing the deal. He also listed some of the     6     of modern health care: booking appointments, sitting in waiting rooms, even finding a parking spot.

Amazon wants to be the “front door” through which customers     7     health care. That One Medical sees about five times as many virtual visits as     8     appointments most likely made it attractive to Amazon. The company also has something Amazon values     9    : data. One Medical built its own electronic medical records system, and it has 15 years’ worth of medical and health-system data. While individual patient records are generally protected under federal health privacy laws, the big data skill that has     10     Amazon’s success can be powerful in health care — for predicting costs, targeting interventions and developing products and treatments.

2 . The environmental practices of big businesses are shaped by a fundamental fact that offends our sense of justice. A business may maximize the amount of money it makes by damaging the environment and hurting people. When government regulation is effective, and the public is environmentally aware, environmentally clean big businesses may out-compete dirty ones, but the reverse is likely to be true if government regulation is ineffective and the public doesn’t care.

It is easy to blame a business for helping itself by hurting other people. But blaming alone is unlikely to produce change. It ignores the fact that businesses are not charities but profit-making companies, and they are under obligation to maximize profits for shareholders by legal means.

Our blaming of businesses also ignores the ultimate responsibility of the public for creating the conditions that let a business profit through destructive environmental policies. In the long run, it is the public, either directly or through its politicians, that has the power to make such destructive policies unprofitable and illegal, and to make sustainable environmental policies profitable.

The public can do that by accusing businesses of harming them. The public may also make their opinion felt by choosing to buy sustainably harvested products; by preferring their governments to award valuable contracts to businesses with a good environmental track record; and by pressing their governments to pass and enforce laws and regulations requiring good environmental practices.

In turn, big businesses can exert powerful pressure on any suppliers that might ignore public or government pressure. For instance, after the US public became concerned about the spread of a disease, transmitted to humans through infected meat, the US government introduced rules demanding that the meat industry abandon practices associated with the risk of the disease spreading. But the meat packers refused to follow these, claiming that they would be too expensive to obey. However, when a fast-food company made the same demands after customer purchases of its hamburgers dropped, the meat industry followed immediately. The public’s task is therefore to identify which links in the supply chain are sensitive to public pressure.

Some readers may be disappointed or outraged that I place the ultimate responsibility for business practices harming the public on the public itself. I also believe that the public must accept the necessity for higher prices for products to cover the added costs of sound environmental practices. My views may seem to ignore the belief that businesses should act in accordance with moral principles even if this leads to a reduction in their profits. But I think we have to recognize that, throughout human history, government regulation has arisen precisely because it was found that not only did moral principles need to be made explicit, they also needed to be enforced.

My conclusion is not a moralistic one about who is right or wrong, admirable or selfish. I believe that changes in public attitudes are essential for changes in businesses’ environmental practices.

1. The main idea of Paragraph 3 is that environmental damage__________.

A．is the result of ignorance of the public

B．requires political action if it is to be stopped

C．can be prevented by the action of ordinary people

D．can only be stopped by educating business leaders

2. In Paragraph 4, the writer describes ways in which the public can__________.

A．reduce their own individual impact on the environment

B．learn more about the impact of business on the environment

C．raise awareness of the effects of specific environmental disasters

D．influence the environmental policies of businesses and governments

3. What pressure was given by big business in the case of the disease mentioned in Paragraph 5?

A．Meat packers stopped supplying hamburgers to fast-food chains.

B．Meat packers persuaded the government to reduce their expenses.

C．A fast-food company forced their meat suppliers to follow the law.

D．A fast-food company encouraged the government to introduce regulations.

4. What would be the best heading for this passage?

A．Will the world survive the threat caused by big businesses?

B．How can big businesses be encouraged to be less driven by profit?

C．What environmental dangers are caused by the greed of businesses?

D．Are big businesses to blame for the damage they cause to the environment?

3 . Some documents have been making the rounds lately — where people who work various positions in different industries share how much they’re paid.

Bravo! It’s about time we blew up that old belief that salaries have to stay secret. This is not just a matter of curiosity. Having information about salaries can help narrow the gender wage gap, which has barely changed for more than a decade. Recently released date from the US Census Bureau shows that, on average, women working full time still are paid only 82 cents for every dollar paid to a man. And the gap is even wider for many women of color: Black women make 62 cents, and Latinas just 54 cents. What’s more, the pay gap even extends into her retirement. Because she earned less and therefore paid less to the social security system, she receives less in social security benefits.

Having greater access to salary information is helping to speed things up. A new research report by the American Association of University Women shows that the wage gap tends to be smaller in job sectors where pay transparency (透明) is a must. For example, among federal government workers, there’s just a 13 percent pay difference between men and women, and in state government, the gap is about 17 percent. But in private, for-profit companies, where salaries are generally kept under wraps, the gender wage gap jumps to 29 percent.

Fortunately, salary information is increasingly available on some websites. Certain companies and many human resources departments are pushing ahead with this practice. Of course, it’s going to take more than salary transparency to equalize earnings between women and men. But sharing salaries can and must be part of the solution. The more information women have about how jobs are valued — and what different people earn — the better they will understand their value in the labor market and be able to push for the pay they deserve.

1. Why are the figures mentioned in paragraph 2?

A．To reveal the severity of gender wage gap.

B．To confirm the previous belief about salaries.

C．To satisfy readers’ curiosity about others’ salaries.

D．To appeal to readers to share their salary information.

2. What is paragraph 3 mainly about?

A．The inequality between men and women.

B．The need to keep salary information a secret.

C．The advantage of working for the government.

D．The benefit of making salary information public.

3. What is the author’s attitude towards sharing salary information?

A．Critical.	B．Favourable.
C．Unclean	D．Negative.

4. Which of the following is the best title for the passage?

A．Why It Pays to Share How Much You Make

B．Where Salary Information Difference Lies

C．What It Takes to Realize Gender Equality

D．How Woman’s Value Improves at Work.