The investors’ judgment of the present stock returns seems to be _____.
[A] fanciful [B] pessimistic [C] groundless [D] realistic
2. In face of the current stock market, most stock-holders_____.
[A] stop injecting more money into the stock market
[B] react angrily to the devaluing stock
[C] switch their money around in the market
[D] turn a deaf ear to the warning
3. In the author’s opinion, employees should _____.
[A] invest in company stock to show loyalty to their employer
[B] get out of their own company’s stock
[C] wait for some time before disposing of their stock
[D] give trust to a particular company’s stock
4. It can be inferred from the text that Lucent, Enron and Xerox are names of _____.
[A] successful businesses
[B] bankrupted companies
[C] stocks
[D] huge corporations
5. The author’s attitude towards the long-term investors’ decision is _____.
[A] positive [B] suspicious [C] negative [D] ambiguous
Text 2
Perhaps only a small boy training to be a wizard at the Hogwarts school of magic could cast a spell so powerful as to create the biggest book launch ever. Wherever in the world the clock strikes midnight on June 20th, his followers will flock to get their paws on one of more than 10m copies of “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix”. Bookshops will open in the middle of the night and delivery firms are drafting in extra staff and bigger trucks. Related toys, games, DVDs and other merchandise will be everywhere. There will be no escaping Pottermania.
Yet Mr Potter’s world is a curious one, in which things are often not what they appear. While an excitable media (hereby including The Economist, happy to support such a fine example of globalisation) is helping to hype the launch of J.K. Rowling’s fifth novel, about the most adventurous thing that the publishers (Scholastic in America and Britain’s Bloomsbury in English elsewhere) have organised is a reading by Ms Rowling in London’s Royal Albert Hall, to be broadcast as a live webcast. Hollywood, which owns everything else to do with Harry Potter, says it is doing even less. Incredible as it may seem, the guardians of the brand say that, to protect the Potter franchise, they are trying to maintain a low profile. Well, relatively low.
Ms Rowling signed a contract in 1998 with Warner Brothers, part of AOL Time Warner, giving the