Text 3
Forget about the days when banks lured customers with offers of "free" toaster. In the harsh new world of consumer banking, it’s the account holder who may get burned.
Over the past few years, banks have systematically raised their old fees and invented new ones -- as many as 100 different kinds. The size of these charges jumped more than 50 percent on checking and savings accounts since 1990, according to Bank Rate Monitor, an independent provider of financial data. Meanwhile, interest rates paid on passbook savings and negotiable order of withdrawal (NOW) accounts failed to keep pace with inflation, let alone with other low-risk investments. And technologies like automated teller machines (ATMs) have truly turned into cash machines -- for the bank.
Checking Profits. According to a report by the Federal Reserve Board, fewer than eight percent of all commercial banks now offer tree checking. In some big cities, such as Los Ang
A. the slowdown of economy.
B. low-interest bank accounts.
C. the decrease of the number of bank investors.
D. the increase of the number of credit-card holders.
Text 3
Forget about the days when banks lured customers with offers of "free" toaster. In the harsh new world of consumer banking, it’s the account holder who may get burned.
Over the past few years, banks have systematically raised their old fees and invented new ones -- as many as 100 different kinds. The size of these charges jumped more than 50 percent on checking and savings accounts since 1990, according to Bank Rate Monitor, an independent provider of financial data. Meanwhile, interest rates paid on passbook savings and negotiable order of withdrawal (NOW) accounts failed to keep pace with inflation, let alone with other low-risk investments. And technologies like automated teller machines (ATMs) have truly turned into cash machines -- for the bank.
Checking Profits. According to a report by the Federal Reserve Board, fewer than eight percent of all commercial banks now offer tree checking. In some big cities, such as Los Ang
A. changing the old fees.
B. offering free checking.
C. offering free gifts.
D. creating new fees.
Text 3
When the Federal Communications Commission proposed giving low-power radio stations licenses on the FM dial, they knew they’d get flak from big broadcasting. The National Association of Broadcasters (NAB), after all, ’spends millions of dollars every year lobbying to keep everybody else off the radio spectrum—even locally managed, noncommercial stations that broadcast only within a four-mile radius. Sure enough, when the FCC proposed its new regulations, the NAB began screaming about all the terrible things those tiny radio transmitters could do to the big ones, whose signals are 500 times as strong and whose reach is nearly 20 times as far.
It was a pretty thin argument. So thin, in fact, that for a while if appeared the proposed regulations might survive the lobbying onslaught. And then the FCC and its allies ran into a most unlikely opponent, one with the moral authority to do real damage to their cause: National Public Radio. On
A. backers of commercial radio
B. National Public Radio
C. large radio stations in the U.S.
D. companies which produce large radio transmitters
Text 2
When enthusiasts talk of sustainable development, the eyes of most people glaze over. There is a whiff of sack-cloth and ashes about their arguments, which usually depend on people giving up the comforts of a modern economy to achieve some debatable greater good. Yet there is a serious point at issue. Modern industry pollutes, and it also seems to cause significant changes to the climate. What is needed is an industry that delivers the benefits without the costs. And the glimmerings of just such an industry can now be discerned.
That industry is based on biotechnology. At the moment, biotech’s main uses are in medicine and agriculture. But its biggest long-term impact may be industrial. Here, it will diminish demand for oil by taking the cheapest raw materials imaginable, carbon dioxide and water, and using them to make fuel and plastics.
Plastics and fuels made in this way would have several advantages. They could accurately be called
A. exhausted.
B. discarded.
C. abandoned.
D. wasted.
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