未知题型 &8226;Look at the statements below and the information about products on the opposite page.&8226;Which product (A, B, C or D) does each statement 1-7 refer to?&8226;For each statement 1-7, mark one letter (A, B, C or D) on your Answer Sheet.&8226;You will need to use some of these letters more than once.

未知题型 &8226;Read the article below about the top brands.&8226;Choose the best sentence from the opposite page to fill each of the gaps.&8226;For each gap 8-12, mark one letter (A-G) on your Answer Sheet.&8226;Do not use any letter more than once.THE 100 TOP BRANDSIt was a tough year to build a brand -- or defend one against the corrosive effects of a bear market, financial scandals, and shifting consumer priorities. For proof, look no further than the fact that roughly half of the 100 global brands that Interbrand Corp. and Business Week ranked this year fell in value compared with a year ago. In this environment, just holding your own is an accomplishment.To qualify for our ranking, brands had to have a value greater than $1 billion. They were selected according to two criteria: (8) They also had to have publicly available market and financial data on which to base the valuation. That excluded some big brands, such as Visa International, the BBC, and Mars.How do you place a value on a brand? (9) Business Week selected lnterbrand's method because it values brands the same way analysts value other assets: on the basis of how much they're likely to earn in the future. Those projected profits are then discounted to a present value based on how risky the projected earnings are -- that is, the likelihood that they will in fact materialize.To start the process, Interbrand first figures out that percentage of overall revenues are accounted for by the power of the brand. (10) Interbrand then deducts a charge for the cost of owning the tangible assets, on the theory that whatever income is generated beyond that cost is due to intangible factors. This is the economic value added by things like patents, customer lists, and, of course, the brand.(11) For example, are people buying Shell gasoline because of the brand name or because the gas station is conveniently located? Interbrand uses market research and interviews with industry executives to sift through those variables. The final phase is to analyze the strength of the brand to figure out how risks those future brand earnings are. To calculate the brand's strength, Interbrand looks at seven factors, including the brand's market leadership, its stability and its ability to cross geographical and cultural borders. (12) Business Week and Interbrand believe this figure comes closest to representing the true economic value of that complex array of forces that make up a brand.

未知题型 The most useful bit of the media is disappearing. A cause for concern, but not for panic.'A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself,' mused Arthur Miller in 1961. A decade later, two reporters from the Washington Post wrote a series of articles that brought down President Nixon and the status of print journalism soared. At their best, newspapers hold governments and companies to account. They usually set the news agenda for the rest of the media. But in the rich world newspapers are now an endangered species. The business of selling words to readers and selling readers to advertisers, which has sustained their role in society, is falling apart.Of all the 'old' media, newspapers have the most to lose from the internet. Circulation has been falling in America, western Europe, Latin America, Australia and New Zealand for decades (elsewhere, sales are rising). But in the past few years the web has hastened the decline. In his book The Vanishing Newspaper, Philip Meyer calculates that the first quarter of 2043 will be the moment when newsprint dies in America as the last exhausted reader tosses aside the last crumpled edition That sort of extrapolation would have produced a harrumph from a Beaverbrook or a Hearst, but even the most cynical news baron could not dismiss the way that ever more young people are getting their news online. Britons aged between 15 and 24 say they spend almost 30% less time reading national newspapers once they start using the web.Advertising is following readers out of the door. The rush is almost unseemly, largely because the internet is a seductive medium that supposedly matches buyers with sellers and proves to advertisers that their money is well spent. Classified ads, in particular, are quickly shifting online. Rupert Murdoch, the Beaverbrook of our age, once described them as the industry's rivers of gold— but, as he said last year, 'Sometimes rivers dry up.' In Switzerland and the Netherlands newspapers have lost half their classified advertising to the internet.Newspapers have not yet started to shut down in large numbers, but it is only a matter of time. Over the next few decades half the rich world's general papers may fold. Jobs are already disappearing. According to the Newspaper Association of America, the number of people employed in the industry fell by 18% between 1990 and 2004. Tumbling shares of listed newspaper firms have prompted fury from investors. In 2005 a group of shareholders in Knight Ridder, the owner of several big American dailies, got the firm to sell its papers and thus end a 114-year history. This year Morgan Stanley, an investment bank, attacked the New York Times Company, the most august journalistic institution of all, because its share price had fallen by nearly half in four years.Having ignored reality for years, newspapers are at last doing something. In order to cut costs, they are already spending less on journalism. Many are also trying to attract younger readers by shifting the mix of their stories towards entertainment, lifestyle. and subjects that may seem more relevant to people's daily lives than international affairs and politics are. They are trying to create new businesses on-and offline. And they are investing in free daily papers, which do not use up any of their meager editorial resources on uncovering political corruption or corporate fraud. So far, this fit of activity looks unlikely to save many of them. Even if it does, it bodes ill for the public role of the Fourth Estate.In future, argues Carnegie, some high-quality journalism will also be backed by non-profit organizations. Already, a few respected news organizations sustain themselves that way—including the Guardian, the Christian Science Monitor and National Public Radio. An elite group of serious newspapers available everywhere online, independent journalism backed by charitie