搜档网
当前位置:搜档网 › 雅思阅读:练习题-9解析

雅思阅读:练习题-9解析

雅思阅读:练习题-9解析
雅思阅读:练习题-9解析

智课网 IELTS 备考资料

雅思阅读:练习题 -9

摘要:今天为大家带来的是雅思阅读:练习题 -9,希望大家通过本章内容的学习,能在原有的基础上提高一个档次,让自己的雅思考试成绩有所提高。

Selling Digital Music without Copy-protection Makes Sense

A. It was uncharacteristically low-key for the industry's greatest showman. But the essay published t his week by Steve Jobs, the boss of Apple, on his firm’s website under the unassuming title "Thoughts on Music" has nonetheless provoked a vigorous debate about the future of digital music, which Apple dominates with its iPod music-player and iTunes music-store. At issue is "digital rights management" (DRM— the technology guarding downloaded music against theft. Since there is no common standard for DRM, it also has the side-effect that songs purchased for one type of music-player may not work on another. Apple's DRM system, called FairPlay, is the most widespread. So it came as a surprise when Mr. Jobs called for DRM for digital music to be abolished.

B. This is a change of tack for Apple. It has come under fire from European regulators who claim that its refusal to license FairPlay to other firms has "locked in" customers. Since music from the iTunes store cannot be played on non-iPod music-players (at least not without a lot of fiddling, any iTunes buyer will be deterred from switching to a device made by a rival firm, such as Sony or Microsoft. When French lawmakers drafted a bill last year compelling Apple to open up FairPlay to rivals, the company warned of "state-sponsored piracy". Only DRM, it implied, could keep the pirates at bay.

C. This week Mr. Jobs gave another explanation for his former defence of DRM: the record companies made him do it. They would make their music available to the iTunes store only if Apple agreed to protect it using DRM. They can still withdraw their

catalogues if the DRM system is compromised. Apple cannot license FairPlay to others, says Mr Jobs, because it would depend on them to produce security fixes promptly. All DRM does is restrict consumer choice and provide a barrier to entry, says Mr Jobs; without it there would be far more stores and players, and far more innovation. So, he suggests, why not do away with DRM and sell music unprotected? "This is clearly the best alternative for consumers," he declares, "and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat."

D. Why the sudden change of heart? Mr Jobs seems chiefly concerned with getting Europe's regulators off his back. Rather than complaining to Apple about its use of DRM, he suggests, "those unhappy with the current situation should redirect their energies towards persuading the music companies to sell their music DRM-free." Two and a half of the four big record companies, he helpfully points out, are European-owned. Mr Jobs also hopes to paint himself as a consumer champion. Apple resents accusations that it has become the Microsoft of digital music.

E. Apple can afford to embrace open competition in music players and online stores. Consumers would gravitate to the best player and the best store, and at the moment that still means Apple's. Mr Jobs is evidently unfazed by rivals to

the iPod. Since only 3% of the music in a typical iTunes library is protected, most of it can already be used on other players today, he notes. (And even the protected tracks can be burned onto a CD and then re-ripped. So Apple's dominance evidently depends far more on branding and ease of use than DRM-related "lock in".

F. The music giants are trying DRM-free downloads. Lots of smaller labels already sell music that way. Having seen which way the wind is blowing, Mr Jobs now wants to be seen not as DRM's defender, but as a consumer champion who helped in its downfall. Wouldn't it lead to a surge in piracy? No, because most music is still sold unprotected on CDs, people wishing to steal music already can do so. Indeed, scrapping DRM would probably increase online-music sales by reducing confusion and incompatibility. With the

leading online store, Apple would benefit most. Mr Jobs's argument, in short, is transparently self-serving. It also happens to be right.

以上就是小编为大家带来雅思阅读:练习题 -9的全部内容,希望大家在平时要多加练习,只有在平时的时候多加练习,才能在雅思考试当中熟练掌握,正确应用,从而提高我们的雅思成绩,预祝大家取得好成绩。

编辑推荐:

雅思大作文范文:国防的重要性

雅思大作文范文:计算机

雅思大作文范文:幸福是什么

相关字搜索:雅思阅读材料

雅思阅读选择题解题技巧

雅思阅读选择题解题技巧 雅思阅读选择题解题技巧这篇*系统地给大家讲解一下雅思阅读当中选择题这种题型的有关知识点,其中包括雅思阅读选择题的题型要求和特点,做题步骤和解题技巧。下面就和大家分享,来欣赏一下吧。 雅思阅读选择题解题技巧 雅思阅读选择题解题技巧为大家带来雅思阅读中最常见的 一种题型之一——选择题的解题方法和技巧的总结。选择题是我们非常熟悉也是雅思阅读的高频常客之一。虽说选择题无论随便乱选一个选项都有25%的正确率,如果掌握了正确的做题方法和步骤,就有机会达到100%正确率。 Multiple Choice(选择题) 题型要求 这是一个传统题型,大家都很熟悉。但就是这种大家都熟悉的题型,IELTS考试也要弄出新花样:四选一和多选多两种。 四选一,选项肯定是四个。即要求从A、B、C、D四项中选择一个最符合题意的选项。

多选多,选项肯定是五个或五个以上,而正确答案的数目肯定在两个以上。 哪个更难呢?很多同学会好不犹豫地说是多选多。实际上,多选多很容易,是一种简单题型。它具有以下几个特点: (1) 正确答案的数目是已知的。在题目的要求中会告诉你要选出几个选项。题目要求中常WHICH FOUR,WHICH THREE 等字样。 (2) 答案在原文中是集中出现的,对应原文中的例举。找着一个答案,其余几个就在它的前后不远处。 我们举一个中文阅读的例子来说明。*如下: 帕金森症是一种顽症。它是由大脑中缺乏一种叫多巴胺的化学物质引起的。(后面删减100字)很多名人深受其苦。比如,我们的改革的总设计师邓小平、拳王阿里、以故数学家陈景润等等。(后面删减100字) 题目是:以下哪三个人得过帕金森症? A. 邓小平 B. 里根 C. 拳王阿里

雅思阅读模拟试题及答案解析(2)

雅思阅读模拟试题及答案解析(2)

Next Year Marks the EU's 50th Anniversary of the Treaty A. After a period of introversion and stunned self-disbelief,continental European governments will recover their enthusiasm for pan-European institution-building in . Whether the European public will welcome a return to what voters in two countries had rejected so short a time before is another matter. B. There are several reasons for Europe’s recovering self-confidence. For years European economies had been lagging dismally behind America (to say nothing of Asia), but in the large continental economies had one of their best years for a decade, briefly outstripping America in terms of growth. Since politics often reacts to economic change with a lag,’s improvement in economic growth will have its impact in , though the recovery may be ebbing by then. C. The coming year also marks a particular point in a political cycle so regular that it almost seems to amount to a natural law. Every four or five years, European countries take a large stride towards further integration by signing a new treaty: the Maastricht treaty in 1992, the Treaty of Amsterdam in 1997, the Treaty of Nice in . And in they were supposed to ratify a European constitution, laying the ground for yet more integration—until the calm rhythm was rudely shattered by French and Dutch voters. But the political impetus to sign something every four or five years has only been interrupted,not immobilised, by this setback. D. In the European Union marks the 50th anniversary of another treaty—the Treaty of Rome, its founding charter. Government leaders have already agreed to celebrate it ceremoniously, restating their commitment to “ever closer union” and the basic ideals of European unity. By itself, and in normal circumstances, the EU’s 50th-birthday greeting to itself would be fairly meaningless, a routine expression of European good fellowship. But it does not take a Machiavelli to spot that once governments have signed the declaration (and it seems unlikely anyone would be so uncollegiate as to veto

2014年雅思阅读模拟试题及答案解析(6)

1. A European spacecraft took off today to spearhead the search for another "Earth" among the stars. 2. The Corot space telescope blasted off aboard a Russian Soyuz rocket from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan shortly after 2.20pm. 3. Corot, short for convection rotation and planetary transits, is the first instrument capable of finding small rocky planets beyond the solar system. Any such planet situated in the right orbit stands a good chance of having liquid water on its surface, and quite possibly life, although a leading scientist involved in the project said it was unlikely to find "any little green men". 4. Developed by the French space agency, CNES, and partnered by the European Space Agency (ESA), Austria, Belgium, Germany, Brazil and Spain, Corot will monitor around 120,000 stars with its 27cm telescope from a polar orbit 514 miles above the Earth. Over two and a half years, it will focus on five to six different areas of the sky, measuring the brightness of about 10,000 stars every 512 seconds. 5. "At the present moment we are hoping to find out more about the nature of planets around stars which are potential habitats. We are looking at habitable planets, not inhabited planets. We are not going to find any little green men," Professor Ian Roxburgh, an ESA scientist who has been involved with Corot since its inception, told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme. 6. Prof Roxburgh said it was hoped Corot would find "rocky planets that could develop an atmosphere and, if they are the right distance from their parent star,they could have water". 7. To search for planets, the telescope will look for the dimming of starlight caused when an object passes in front of a star, known as a "transit". Although it will take more sophisticated space telescopes planned in the next 10 years to confirm the presence of an Earth-like planet with oxygen and liquid water, Corot will let scientists know where to point their lenses.

2015年雅思阅读模拟试题及答案解析三

Time to cool it 1 REFRIGERATORS are the epitome of clunky technology: solid, reliable and just a little bit dull. They have not changed much over the past century, but then they have not needed to. They are based on a robust and effective idea--draw heat from the thing you want to cool by evaporating a liquid next to it, and then dump that heat by pumping the vapour elsewhere and condensing it. This method of pumping heat from one place to another served mankind well when refrigerators' main jobs were preserving food and, as air conditioners, cooling buildings. Today's high-tech world, however, demands high-tech refrigeration. Heat pumps are no longer up to the job. The search is on for something to replace them. 2 One set of candidates are known as paraelectric materials. These act like batteries when they undergo a temperature change: attach electrodes to them and they generate a current. This effect is used in infra-red cameras. An array of tiny pieces of paraelectric material can sense the heat radiated by, for example, a person, and the pattern of the array's electrical outputs can then be used to construct an image. But until recently no one had bothered much with the inverse of this process. That inverse exists, however. Apply an appropriate current to a paraelectric material and it will cool down. 3 Someone who is looking at this inverse effect is Alex Mischenko, of Cambridge University. Using commercially available paraelectric film, he and his colleagues have generated temperature drops five times bigger than any previously recorded. That may be enough to change the phenomenon from a laboratory curiosity to something with commercial applications. 4 As to what those applications might be, Dr Mischenko is still a little hazy. He has, nevertheless, set up a company to pursue them. He foresees putting his discovery to use in more efficient domestic fridges and air conditioners. The real money, though, may be in cooling computers. 5 Gadgets containing microprocessors have been getting hotter for a long time. One consequence of Moore's Law, which describes the doubling of the number of transistors on a chip every 18 months, is that the amount of heat produced doubles as well. In fact, it more than doubles, because besides increasing in number,the components are getting faster. Heat is released every time a logical operation is performed inside a microprocessor, so the faster the processor is, the more heat it generates. Doubling the frequency quadruples the heat output. And the frequency has doubled a lot. The first Pentium chips sold by Dr Moore's company,Intel, in 1993, ran at 60m cycles a second. The Pentium 4--the last "single-core" desktop processor--clocked up 3.2 billion cycles a second. 6 Disposing of this heat is a big obstruction to further miniaturisation and higher speeds. The innards of a desktop computer commonly hit 80℃. At 85℃, they

最新雅思阅读解题技巧方法——选择题

选择题解题技巧 一分类:四选一(单选),多选多, 主旨题 一单选题(得分题) 二顺序性:有序 三解题步骤 1.读题目和选项, 划定位词。 注意:1选项快看 2选项主要关注各项不同处(谓语就不同的话,主要关注谓语即可,宾语略看或不看. 另外,还要关注各项感情色彩的不同!!!) 2.复记题目和选项关键词 为毛? 因为若记得好,文中看到时能立马反映出,直选法,正确率高) (***小标题题,匹配题,选择三类看的内容多,不像填空判断摘要填空,只是一两句,所以要复记) 3.回原文定位考点。 4.比较原文与选项,确定答案. 注意:(**与原文用词太简单一致(尤其形容词动词)的要小心。 3. 正确选项多有同替。) 四直选法和排除法 直选法:看到与某选项含义接近的原文,直接选!(又快又准),不关注剩余项的对错和理由(每题四个点,时间不够的!) 排除法: 都没把握,才用排除法(排除毫无关系和冲突的)(比较费时间),排除很不靠谱的,剩下的是只能是答案. 五注意事项: ●选择题里常有些好定位的题(如明定/根据第五段),挑出来先做,不要按正常顺序做. ●题目不好定位时,选项中常有名定如大写,数字,用选项内容定位 ●避免根据自己的认知自行选择, 尽量在原文在找到考点,正确率高 ●选择题特点是阅读量大,关键是读题读文快,并尽量读一遍就理解 ●若这组题目都无明定,都不好定位,读2,3题关键词,一起定位,效率高(其他题型也是)●选择题正确答案是与原文最接近的一个,即使其他三个也与原文有关。 ●注意选项中是否有both…and…或者all of the above ,若有很可能选它们(出现不多)●注意题干中是否有EXCEPT字样 例如:Many cities are included in this program EXCEPT________

雅思阅读模拟试题及答案解析(4)

雅思阅读模拟试题及答案解析(4)

Selling Digital Music without Copy-protection Makes Sense A. It was uncharacteristically low-key for the industry’s greatest showman. But the essay published this week by Steve Jobs, the boss of Apple,on his firm’s website under the unassuming title “Thoughts on Music” has nonetheless provoked a vigorous debate about the future of digital music,which Apple dominates with its iPod music-player and iTunes music-store. At issue is “digital rights management” (DRM)—the technology guarding downloaded music against theft. Since there is no common standard for DRM, it also has the side-effect that songs purchased for one type of music-player may not work on another. Apple’s DRM system, called FairPlay, is the most widespread. So it came as a surprise when Mr. Jobs called for DRM for digital music to be abolished. B. This is a change of tack for Apple. It has come under fire from European regulators who claim that its refusal to license FairPlay to other firms has “locked in” customers. Since music from the iTunes store cannot be played on non-iPod music-players (at least not without a lot of fiddling), any iTunes buyer will be deterred from switching to a device made by a rival firm, such as Sony or Microsoft. When French lawmakers drafted a bill last year compelling Apple to open up FairPlay to rivals, the company warned of “state-sponsored piracy”. Only DRM, it implied, could keep the pirates at bay. C. This week Mr. Jobs gave another explanation for his former defence of DRM: the record companies made him do it. They would make their music available to the iTunes store only if Apple agreed to protect it using DRM. They can still withdraw their catalogues if the DRM system is compromised. Apple cannot license FairPlay to others, says Mr Jobs, because it would depend on them to produce security fixes promptly. All DRM does is restrict consumer choice and provide a barrier to entry, says Mr Jobs; without it there would be far more stores and players, and far more innovation. So, he suggests, why not do away with DRM and sell music unprotected?“This is

雅思阅读练习题及答案

雅思阅读练习题及答案 ★Next Year Marks the EU's 50th Anniversary of the Treaty A. After a period of introversion and stunned self-disbelief, continental European governments will recover their enthusiasm for pan-European institution-building in 2007. Whether the European public will welcome a return to what voters in two countries had rejected so short a time before is another matter. B. There are several reasons for Europe’s recovering self-confidence. For years European economies had been lagging dismally behind America (to say nothing of Asia), but in 2006 the large continental economies had one of their best years for a decade, briefly outstripping America in terms of growth. Since politics often reacts to economic change with a lag, 2006’s improvement in economic growth will have its impact in 2007, though the recovery may be ebbing by then. C. The coming year also marks a particular point in a political cycle so regular that it almost seems to amount to a natural law. Every four or five years, European countries take a large stride towards

雅思阅读选择题四种解题技巧

雅思阅读选择题四种解题技巧 雅思阅读选择题总会用各个选项来迷惑人,下面教育优选来为大家分享雅思阅读选择题的解题技巧 1. 如果一个选项合乎题意,还要看其它选项中是否有both…and、all of theabove 的字样。 我们举一个中文阅读的例子: 原文:如果你随便停车,要罚你款,还要把你的车拖走。 题目:如果你随便停车,将: A. 被罚款 B. 你的车被拖走 C. 没事儿 D. both被罚款and你的车被拖走答案:D 如果选项中有一个是all of the above,它是正确选项的可能性很大。Both…and是正确选项比all of the above小一些。总之,如果一个选项合乎题意,不要马上选。看一眼其余选项中是否有both…and,all of theabove的字样。 2. 注意题干中是否有not,except的字样。 题干中有这些词时,通常是将它们大写并使用黑体,特别醒目。如果不注意看,必然答错题。

如前面的关于帕金森症的中文阅读文章,可能出一道四选一的题目: 题目:下面的人得过帕金森症EXCEPT A. 邓小平 B. 里根 C. 拳王阿里 D. 陈景润答案:B 3. 干扰选项的特点 做选择题的过程就是与干扰选项做斗争的过程。清楚干扰选项的特点,就能做到百战百胜。干扰选项特征如下: A. 无 选项中所讲的内容在原文中根本不存在,或找不到语言依据。要注意,答题的唯一依据是原文,不能凭借自己的知识或主观想象。 B. 反 与原文相矛盾的选项。这时要注意题干或原文中是否有NOT、EXECPT等词,也要注意反义词。 C. 满 含有“绝对意义”的词汇如must、always、all、will的选项,一般为错误选项。选项中含有“相对意义”的词汇如can、may、sometimes、some、not always,一般为正确答案。也就是说,越是模棱两可、含含糊糊,越可能是正确答案,因为它适用的范围更广。这条规律的适用性很强,实践证明它的准确率在90%以上。 D. 偏 似是而非,与原句部分相似的选项。这是不太容易排除的。

2019雅思阅读考试真题(2)

2019年11月4日雅思阅读机经真题答案及解析 一、考试概述: 本次考试的文章两篇新题一篇旧题,第一篇描述了两个科学家在撒哈拉的发现,研究了古代人的生存方式,第二篇是讲了利用心理学对课堂行为实行研究,第三篇是讲非语言交流的,人类除了用语言交流,其他手势、行为等的非语言形式也很重要 二、具体题目分析 Passage 1: 题目:Human Remain in Green Sahara 题型:判断题4 +简答题3+填空题6 新旧水准:旧题 文章大意:描述了两个科学家在撒哈拉的发现,研究古代人的生存方式。 参考文章: Human Remain in Green Sahara A On October 13,2,000, a small team of paleontologists led by Paul Sereno of the University of Chicago clambered out of three battered Land Rovers, filled their water bottles, and scattered on foot across the toffee-colored sands of the Tenere desert in northern Niger. The Tenere,on the southern flank of the Sahara, easily ranks among the most desolate landscapes on Earth. The Tuareg,turbaned nomads who for centuries have ruled this barren realm, refer to it as a

2017年雅思考试阅读练习试题附答案

2017年雅思考试阅读练习试题附答案 人的知识和人的力量这两件东西是结合为一体的;工作的失败都起于对因果关系的无知。以下是小编为大家搜索整理2017年雅思考试阅读练习试题附答案,希望能给大家带来帮助!更多精彩内容请及时关注我们应届毕业生考试网! Volatility Kills You should spend about 20 minutes on Question 1-13 which are based on Reading Passage below. A Despite gun battles in the capital of Chad, rioting in Kenya and galloping inflation in Zimbabwe, the economics of sub-Saharan Africa arc, as a whole, in better shape than they were a few years ago. The World Bank has reported recently that this part of the continent experienced a respectable growth rate of 5.6 percent in 2006 and a higher rate from 1995 to 2005 than in previous decades. The bank has given a cautious assessment that the region may have reached a turning point. An overriding question for developmental economists remains whether the upswing will continue so Africans can grow their way out of a poverty that relegates some 40 percent of the nearly 744 million in that region to living on less than a dollar a day. The optimism, when inspected more closely, may be short-lived because of the persistence of a devastating pattern of economic volatility that has lingered for decades. B “In reality, African countries grow as fast as Asian countries and other developing countries during the good times, but afterward they see growth collapses,” comments Jorge Arbache, a senior World Bank economist. “How to prevent collapses may be as important as promoting growth.” If these collapses had not occurred, he observes, the level of gross domestic product for each citizen of the 48 nations of sub-Saharan Africa would have been a third higher. C The prerequisite to prevent the next crash are not in place, according to a World Bank study issued in January. Is Africa's Recent Growth Robust? The growth period that began in 1995, driven by a commodities boom spurred in particular by demand from China, may not be sustainable, because the economic fundamentals—new investment and the ability to stave off inflation, among other factors—are absent. The region lacks the necessary infrastructure that would encourage investors to look to Africa to find the next Bengaluru (Bangalore) or Shenzhen, a November report from the bank concludes. For sub-Saharan countries rich in oil and other resources, a boom period may even undermine efforts to institute sound economic practices. From 1996 to 2005, with growth accelerating, measures of governance—factors such as political stability, rule of law, and control of corruption—actually worsened, especially for countries endowed with abundant mineral resources, the January report notes. D Perhaps the most incisive analysis of the volatility question comes from Paul Collier, a longtime specialist in African economics at the University of Oxford and author of the recent book The Bottom Billion. He advocates a range of options that the U.S. and other nations could adopt when formulating policy toward African countries. They include revamped trade measures, better-apportioned aid and sustained military intervention in certain instances, to avert what he sees as a rapidly accelerating divergence of the world’s poorest, primarily in Africa, from the rest

雅思阅读填空题(让考官告诉你)

雅思阅读summary填空题是雅思阅读题中常见题型, 在阅读考试中占较大的比重. 同时也是众多考生头痛的一种题型. 因为此题型不仅考查考生快速准确理解阅读文章的主旨能力, 也考查考生对定位,同义转化以及语义间逻辑关系的灵敏度. 总的来说, 雅思阅读summary填空题主要有两种形式: 一种是单词填空式, 这种形式主要针对文章全文或者部分段落写出的一篇摘要, 空出若干空格, 要求考生从文章中寻找相应的单词进行填空; 另一种是单词选择式, 就是在第一种形式的基础上, 额外提供了一个词库, 要求考生从词库中选词填空. 下面环球雅思的老师将详细讲解如何快速而有效的解答这两种形式的summary填空题. 单词填空式 解题策略 对于单词填空式题, 一般把握三个关键信息: 逻辑关系词, 语法属性, 定位. 首先, 观察空格前后是否有语义间有逻辑关系的连接词, 即逻辑关系词推断. 这类表示空格前后内容逻辑关系的连接词主要包括:

①表示因果关系的词, 如because, as, since, for, due to, thanks to, as a result of等. 在考试中, 在因果关系中除了一些连接词的衔接外, 还有一些表示因果关系的大词, 如trigger, breed, induce, engender, generate, be responsible for, affect, determine等, 这些词在语义中隐含了因果关系. 所以也是考生在解题中值得注意的. ②表示转折关系的词, 如but, however, while, yet, instead, rather, whereas等 ③表示让步关系的词, 如despite, in spite of, although等 ④表示并列关系的词, 如and, both…and…, neither…nor等 ⑤表示举例关系的词, 如such as, for example等 观察有无这类词的目的在于为了回原文定位时, 能缩小寻找范围, 使定位更加准确. 在文章阅读中, 题目中的某些单词会进行同义转换而变得面目全非,但是句意不会变,语义关系不会变,这是最可靠的定位依据。从而逻辑关系词对于考生在解题中把握语义间的内在关系起了关键作用. 如剑桥4 Test 2 Passage 1 Lost for words 一篇中的summary 题中This great variety of languages came about largely as a result of geographical ___Q1______. But in today’s world, factors such as government initiatives and ____Q2_____ are contributing to a huge decrease in the number of languages. One factor which may help to ensure that some endangered languages do not die out completely is people’s increasing appreciation of their ____Q3_____.

2014年雅思阅读模拟试题及答案解析(2)

Next Year Marks the EU's 50th Anniversary of the Treaty A. After a period of introversion and stunned self-disbelief, continental European governments will recover their enthusiasm for pan-European institution-building in 2007. Whether the European public will welcome a return to what voters in two countries had rejected so short a time before is another matter. B. There are several reasons for Europe’s recovering self-confidence. For years European economies had been lagging dismally behind America (to say nothing of Asia), but in 2006 the large continental economies had one of their best years for a decade, briefly outstripping America in terms of growth. Since politics often reacts to economic change with a lag, 2006’s improvement in economic growth will have its impact in 2007, though the recovery may be ebbing by then. C. The coming year also marks a particular point in a political cycle so regular that it almost seems to amount to a natural law. Every four or five years,European countries take a large stride towards further integration by signing a new treaty: the Maastricht treaty in 1992, the Treaty of Amsterdam in 1997, the Treaty of Nice in 2001. And in 2005 they were supposed to ratify a European constitution,laying the ground for yet more integration—until the calm rhythm was rudely shattered by French and Dutch voters. But the political impetus to sign something every four or five years has only been interrupted, not immobilised, by this setback. D. In 2007 the European Union marks the 50th anniversary of another treaty —the Treaty of Rome, its founding charter. Government leaders have already agreed to celebrate it ceremoniously, restating their commitment to “ever closer union”and the basic ideals of European unity. By itself, and in normal circumstances,the EU’s 50th-birthday greeting to itself would be fairly meaningless, a routine expression of European good fellowship. But it does not take a Machiavelli to spot that once governments have signed the declaration (and it seems unlikely anyone would be so uncollegiate as to veto it) they will already be halfway towards committing themselves to a new treaty. All that will be necessary will be to incorporate the 50th-anniversary declaration into a new treaty containing a number of institutional

相关主题