2012年4月7职称英语综合c试卷.docVIP

第四部分：阅读理解（第31~45题，每题3分，共45分） 　　下面有3篇短文，每篇短文后有5道题。请根据短文内容，为每题确定1个最佳选项。 　　第一篇 From Ponzi to Madoff 　　The year was 1920. The country was the United States of America. The mans name was Charles Ponzi. Ponzi told people to stop depositing money in a savings account. Instead, they should give it to him to save for them. Ponzi promised to pay them more than the bank. For example, a savings account might pay you $5 a year for every $100 you deposit. Ponzi, however, would pay you $40 a year for every $100 you gave him to hold. Many people thought this was a good plan. They began to give their money to Ponzi. 　　How could Ponzi make so much money for people? This is what he did with the money people gave him: He used some of that money to pay other people who gave him money. However, he also kept a lot of the money for himself. Soon he had $250 million. This was a kind of theft, and it was against the law. The people who gave him their money didnt think anything was wrong. Ponzi paid them every month, just like a bank. Ponzi continued this way of working for two years. Then one day, he didnt have enough money to pay all the people. They discovered his crime, and he went to prison for fraud. 　　Ninety years later, people began to hear about a businessman in New York named Bernard Madoff. People said he gave good advice about money. They said when they gave him their money, he paid them a lot more than the bank. Madoff helped hospitals, schools, and individuals earn money. Over a period of 40 years, people gave him $170 billion. However, no one investigated what he did with the money. The people who gave Madoff their money also didnt think anything was wrong because he paid them every month. 　　One day, Madoff didnt have enough money to pay all the people he needed to pay. Thats when people discovered how Madoff worked: He was taking money from some people to pay other people, just the way Charles Ponzi did. However, this time, instead of losing millions of dollars, people lost bi