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So far, inflation is roaring in only a few sectors of the economy. While platinum has soared 121 percent, soybeans have risen 115 percent, and an index of Real Estate Investment Trusts has climbed 42 percent since May 2001, the consumer price index (CPI) has gone up only 4.2 percent during the same perioD.The challenge is figuring out what happens next.
Astute investors are asking two questions: 1) Will the dollar continue to decline? 2) Which assets will continue to inflate?
The value of the dollar matters because much of what Americans buy comes from abroaD.And in the past two years, the dollar has been slipping badly: down some 25 percent against a basket of foreign currencies, including the euro and the yen. That makes imported goods more expensivE.If the dollar falls further, the rise in prices could boost inflation.
And that's exactly what some analysts predict. 'This is not a run-of-the-mill problem where the currency corrects 25 percent' then stabilizes, says David Tice, Dallas-based manager of the Prudent Global Income FunD.'We have an economy that's very dependent upon ever-increasing amounts of debt. Look at borrowing in this country for automobiles and housing. At the federal level, we are creating credit as if it is going out of stylE.Given that, we think the dollar can decline substantially more from herE.'
That's why Mr. Tice's income fund has invested in government bonds in countries that are major trading partners of the US. These bonds tend to increase in value as the dollar weakens.
There are other ways for investors to protect themselves from inflation. For example: TIPS (Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities) are US government bonds that increase both principal and interest payments in line with the CPI/U, which measures prices for urban dwellers. Thus, if the price of consumer goods goes up, TIPS owners get a boost in their rate of return. That's a level of inflation protection that most bonds and money-market funds don't providE.
Still, there are no guarantees. If real interest rates rise faster than inflation, TIPS can lose value if they're not held to maturity. 'TIPS have generally been less volatile than traditional bonds,' but investors have already seen periods when their inflation-protection doesn't match the actual rise in prices, warns Duane Cabrera, head of the personal financial planning group at Vanguard, based in Valley Forge, PA.For example, the year-over-year change in the CPI/U is running about 1.9 percent, be points out, but college costs have been rising about 5 percent annually.
Investors should also discuss the tax consequences with their investment advisers, Mr. Cabrera notes.
On the stock front, investors can also turn to natural-resource stocks or mutual funds that invest in them. A slightly more exotic option: exchange-traded funds, which act like mutual funds but trade like stocks.
Commodities offer another avenue for profit during inflationary times. Individual investors probably want to avoid commodity trading, often a wild and woolly experiencE.But certain mutual funds offer share holders a chance to profit when commodity prices go up. The PIMCO Commodity Real Return Fund, for example, provides exposure to the performance of the Dow-Jones AIG Commodity Index while generating income from TIPS. Another option: the Oppenheimer Real Asset Fund, which is actively managed and tracks the Goldman Sachs Commodity Index.
There's no clear winner between these stock funds and the commodities their companies have invested in. When commodity prices are falling, natural-resource firms can protect themselves by hedging their risks, says Kevin Baum, portfolio manager of the Oppenheimer Real Asset FunD.On the other band, hedging may keep them from benefiting when commodity prices risE.And the stocks can be more volatile than the commodities themselves. Gold funds typically are three times more vo
A.the US economy is very dependent upon ever-increasing amounts of debt
B.the amount of borrowing today in the US for automobiles and housing is getting bigger and bigger
C.one of the main reasons for the depreciation of dollar is the ever increasing amounts of US domestic debts
D.the US federal government is creating credit because the people have already showed unwillingness to be indebted

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E.
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G.9
H.
I.
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O.the

【参考答案】

D
解析：本题主要涉及对原文这句话的理解联邦政府仍然在大量举债，好像这种举动不时兴了一样，要迫不及待地增加联邦债......

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Since ancient times, people have dreamed of leaving their home planet and exploring other worlds. In the later half of the 20th century, that dream became reality. The space age began with the launch of the first artificial satellites in 1963. A human first went into space in 1963. Since then, astronauts and cosmonauts have ventured into space for ever greater lengths of time, even living aboard orbiting space stations for months on enD.Two dozen people have circled the moon or walked on its surfacE.At the same time, robotic explorers have journeyed where humans could not go, visiting all but one of the solar system's major worlds. Unpiloted spacecraft have also visited a host of minor bodies such as moons, comets, and asteroids. These explorations have sparked the advance of new technologies, from rockets to communications equipment to computers. Spacecraft studies have yielded a bounty of scientific discoveries about the solar system, the Milky Way Galaxy, and the universE.And they have given humanity a new perspective on the earth and its neighbors in spacE.The first challenge of space exploration was developing rockets powerful enough and reliable enough to boost a satellite into orbit. These boosters needed more than brute force, however; they also needed guidance systems to steer them on the proper flight paths to reach their desired orbits. The next challenge was building the satellites themselves. The satellites needed electronic components that were lightweight, yet durable enough to withstand the acceleration and vibration of launch. Creating these components required the world's aerospace engineering facilities to adopt new standards of reliability in manufacturing and testing. On Earth, engineers also had to build tracking stations to maintain radio communications with these artificial 'moons' as they circled the planet.Beginning in the early 1920s, humans launched probes to explore other planets. The distances traveled by these robotic space travelers required travel times measured in months or years. These spacecraft had to be especially reliable to continue functioning for a decade or morE.They also had to withstand such hazards as the radiation belts surrounding Jupiter, particles orbiting in the rings of Saturn, and greater extremes in temperature than are faced by spacecraft in the closeness of Earth. Despite their great scientific returns, these missions often came with high price tags. Today the world' s space agencies, such as the United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA.and the European Space Agency (ESA), strive to conduct robotic missions more cheaply and efficiently.It was inevitable that humans would follow their unpiloted creations into spacE.Piloted space flight introduced a whole new set of difficulties, many Of them concerned with keeping people alive in the hostile environment of spacE.In addition to the vacuum of space, which requires any piloted spacecraft to carry its own atmosphere, there are other deadly hazards: solar and cosmic radiation, micrometorites (small bits of rock and dus0 that might puncture a spacecraft hull or an astronaut' s pressure suit, and extremes of temperature ranging from frigid darkness to broiling sunlight. It was not enough simply to keep people alive in space — astronauts needed to have a means of accomplishing useful work while they were therE.It was necessary to develop tools and techniques for space navigation, and for conducting scientific observations and experiments. Astronauts would have to be protected when they ventured outside the safety of their pressurized spacecraft to work in the vacuum. Missions and hardware would have to be carefully designed to help insure the Safety of space crews in any foreseeable emergency, from liftoff to landing.The challenges of conducting piloted space flights were great enough for missions that orbited Earth. They became even more daunting for the ApoA.Those explorations.B.The advance of new technologies.C.Spacecraft studies.D.Scientific discoveries.

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A Frenchman, the psychologist Alfred Binet, published the first standardized test of human intelligence in 1905. But it was an American, Lewis Terman, a psychology professor at Stanford, who thought to divide a test taker's 'mental age', as revealed by that score, by his or her chronological age to derive a number that he called the 'intelligence quotient', or IQ. It would be hard to think of a pop-scientific coinage that has had a greater impact of the way people think about themselves and others.No country embraced the IQ—and the application of IQ testing to restructure society—mote thoroughly than the U.S. Every year millions of Americans have their IQ measured, many with a direct descendant of Binet’s original test, the Stanford-Binet, although not necessarily for the purpose Binet intendeD.He developed his test as a way of identifying public school students who needed extra help in learning; and that is still one of its leading uses.But the broader and more controversial use of IQ testing has its roots in a theory of intelligence—part science, part sociology—that developed in the late 19th century, before Binte's work and entirely separate from it, Championed first by Charles Darwin' s cousin Francis Galton, it held that intelligence was the most valuable human attribute, and that if people who had a lot of it could be identified and put in leadership positions, all of Society would benefit.Terman believed IQ tests should be used to conduct a great s6rting out of the population, so that young people would be assigned on the basis of their scores to particular levels in the school system, which would lead to corresponding socioeconomic destinations in adult lifE.The beginning of the IQ-testing movement overlapped with the eugenics movement—hugely popular in America and Europe among the 'better sort' before Hitler gave it a bad name—which held that intelligence was mostly inherited and that people-deficient in it should be discouraged from reproducing. The state sterilization that Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes notoriously endorsed in a 1927.Supreme Court decision was done with an IQ score as justification.The American IQ promoters scored a great coup during World War I when they persuaded the Army to give IQ tests to 1.7 million inductees. It was the world's first mass administration of an intelligence test, and many of the standardized tests in use today can be traced back to it: the now ubiquitous and obsessed-over SAT(Stud), Ability Test); the Wechsler, taken by several million people a year, according to its publisher; and Terman's own National Intelligence Test, originally used in tracking elementary school children. All these tests took from the Army the basic technique of measuring intelligence mainly by asking vocabulary questions (synonyms, antonyms, analogies, reading comprehension).According to Termon's theory, a twelve-year-old boy's mental age is 10, then his IQ number is about______.A.0.8B.0.9C.1.0D.1,2

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