Passage 2Disputes over farm trade have bedeviled the current round of GATT talks from the start. On cereals, Europe and America have squabbled most fiercely. However, officials on both sides were optimistic that a deal on farming, which would unlock the rest of the round, was within reach.America has shown some flexibility, and Europe should respond. Much of the EC would like to. Germany’s willingness to embrace farm reform enabled the Community to produce its planned reform of the CAP last spring. Germany’s role over the next few days will again be crucial, for it must tell France that its threat to block the Uruguay round is intolerable. To carry out that threat, France is likely to need German support. The Community decides its trade policy by qualified majority vote; France has not straight forward right of veto. Without allies, its only 【course】 would be to block the decision by citing “vital national interests”——the sort of profoundly 【unEuropean thing】 that Britain might do, but which France would rather not.39.What does CAP stand for?

Passage 2Disputes over farm trade have bedeviled the current round of GATT talks from the start. On cereals, Europe and America have squabbled most fiercely. However, officials on both sides were optimistic that a deal on farming, which would unlock the rest of the round, was within reach.America has shown some flexibility, and Europe should respond. Much of the EC would like to. Germany’s willingness to embrace farm reform enabled the Community to produce its planned reform of the CAP last spring. Germany’s role over the next few days will again be crucial, for it must tell France that its threat to block the Uruguay round is intolerable. To carry out that threat, France is likely to need German support. The Community decides its trade policy by qualified majority vote; France has not straight forward right of veto. Without allies, its only 【course】 would be to block the decision by citing “vital national interests”——the sort of profoundly 【unEuropean thing】 that Britain might do, but which France would rather not.40.What does “course” mean here?

Passage 2Disputes over farm trade have bedeviled the current round of GATT talks from the start. On cereals, Europe and America have squabbled most fiercely. However, officials on both sides were optimistic that a deal on farming, which would unlock the rest of the round, was within reach.America has shown some flexibility, and Europe should respond. Much of the EC would like to. Germany’s willingness to embrace farm reform enabled the Community to produce its planned reform of the CAP last spring. Germany’s role over the next few days will again be crucial, for it must tell France that its threat to block the Uruguay round is intolerable. To carry out that threat, France is likely to need German support. The Community decides its trade policy by qualified majority vote; France has not straight forward right of veto. Without allies, its only 【course】 would be to block the decision by citing “vital national interests”——the sort of profoundly 【unEuropean thing】 that Britain might do, but which France would rather not.41.What’s your understanding of the “unEuropean thing”?

52Analysis explains the recent rise in Japan’s trade surplus as follows: because of the recession at home, Japan has seen a decline in expensive imports of luxuries, which were enormously fashionable during the second half of the 1980s. This effect has been compounded, thanks to slow growth elsewhere, by low prices for the international commodities that Japanese industry depends upon. Exports of Japanese machinery, on the other hand, withstood the downturn quite well because the Asian economies that buy them continued to boom.

The authorities are willing to permit a run-down in the country’s international reserves over the next few years as means of 【accelerating】 the introduction of foreign technology.

Another 20% worked well, but the remaining 60% should have been 【scrapped】.

Now Zhangjiagang is China’s seventh largest port and a 【tumultuous】 construction zone of half-built office buildings and hotels.

Against this 【deteriorating】 global background, the improvement in economic performance in a few developing regions in 1991 was especially noteworthy.

Balanced against that criticism is the positive reaction in Latin America to Mr. Clinton’s 【embrace】 of the free-trade agreement.

As Europe’s economy has 【soured】, free-market ideas that are new to much of Europe face new challenges.