—land and are asking why they should be bit players in that artifice.

    [A] Electoral competition is key to democracy, and America’s voters aren’t getting the full benefit of that. Only a couple of dozen of this year’s 435 US House races are competitive. Two years ago, 98.5 percent of incumbents won, typically by margins of 70 percent or more.

    [B] True leadership has become so rare that politicians may no longer even dream of stepping forward to say something other than what polls tell them is safe. Tuesday’s election will surely pass without much of a debate on the momentous foreign and domestic issues facing the nation.

    [C] Amid the uproar over Florida’s ballot irregularities, no commentator has seen fit to ask why polls there close at 7 p.m. Florida is one of 26 states that close their polls before 8 p.m. Unsurprisingly, turnout in these states is several percentage points below that of states where polls are open until 8 p.m. or later.

    [D] As for trivial issues, why did candidate Bush’s 1970s drunk—driving arrest get more time on the network newscasts in the final days of the 2000 election than Gore’s foreign policy statements got in the entire general election?

    [E] No doubt, ordinarily Americans share responsibility for their lapse in participation; it is always easier to leave the work of democracy to others.

    [F] Today, 87 percent of Americans reside in states that close registration two weeks or more before the election. The majority of unregistered Americans who otherwise would cast a vote are out of luck. Only six states allow election—day registration.

    [G] Their responses tell the story: 81 percent believe “most political candidates will say almost anything to get themselves elected”; 75 percent feel “political candidates are more concerned with fighting each other than with solving the nation’s problems”.

Part C
Directions:
Read the following text carefully and then translate the underlined segments into Chinese. Your translation should be written clearly on ANSWER SHEET 2.

    Why has global inequality increased? The answer is in four parts: (1) faster economic growth in developed OECD countries than developing countries as a group; (2) faster population growth in developing countries than in OECD countries; (3) slow growth of output in rural China, rural India, and Africa; and (4) rapidly widening output and income differences between urban China on the one hand, and rural China and rural India on the other.

    These trends in turn have deeper causes. (46) Technological change and financial liberalization result in a disproportionately fast increase in the number of households at the extreme rich end, without shrinking the distribution at the poor end. Population growth, meanwhile, adds disproportionately to numbers at the poor end. (47) These deep causes yield an important intermediate cause that makes things worse: the prices of industrial goods and services exported from high-income countries are increasing faster than the prices of goods and services exported by low-income countries, and much faster than the prices of goods and services produced in low-income countries that do little international trade.