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Lotteries are quite popular in China and also in many other countries. Some people argue that lotteries are a form of gambling, which should be abolished. From the following article, you may find both merit and demerit of lottery. Write an article of NO LESS THAN 300 words, in which you should: 1. summarize briefly both merits and demerits of lottery; 2. express your opinion towards lottery, especially whether national lotteries should be abolished. The Good and Bad of National Lotteries Lotteries and prize draws are big businesses throughout the world, and entice significant annual investments from individuals who dream of scooping a huge and potentially life-changing cash prize. According to the North American Association of State and Provincial Lotteries, Americans spent a total of $50.4 billion on lotteries last year. In actual fact, while your chances of winning the lottery anywhere are decidedly slim, the sheer size of the U.S. population and popularity of the game means that Americans must climb an even steeper mountain towards any potential windfall. This was evident to see in the formative part of this year, as the nation’s Mega Millions jackpot soared to $656 million. When the first winner was announced, an estimated 1.5 billion tickets had been sold nationwide. Americans still invested more than $1 billion into chasing their fanciful dreams of wealth and fortune. This is reflective of a growing trend, where lottery sales continue to soar despite the uncertain economic climate. There has been a significant rise in the number of syndicates that are purchasing tickets. This proves that rather than being discouraged by the seeming insurmountable odds of victory, Americans are instead looking for innovative ways to improve their chances and actively investing more into buying tickets. Now, while an estimated one in three global lotteries are won by syndicates, the likelihood of winning remains remote in the extreme. Even for those who win the lottery, their financial future or long-term happiness is not necessarily secured. Acquiring huge sums of money can inspire any number of extreme emotive reactions. There are individual state statistics which suggest that the majority of people only purchase lottery tickets when the jackpot has been steadily building over a period of weeks, with just nine to 12% of Illinois residents playing regularly. This would suggest that rather than being symbolic of a growing gambling culture in the U.S., national lotteries are in fact played responsibly and only intermittently by most participants. Another factor in favor of lotteries is the money that they generate for state funded projects, with public education bodies in particular benefiting from the investment made by participants. People who play the lottery responsibly are contributing towards local community development, which actually means that their small weekly investment at least creates some form of social change. In terms of monetary value, 34 cents out of every $1 spent on lottery tickets is invested into education, with 58 cents being awarded to winners in the form of prizes and 6 cents paid to participating retailers for sales commissions. National lotteries across the globe are always likely to be the subject of extreme opinion and controversy. Europe is looking to invest more during periods of sustained austerity. The fact remains, however, that participants have an individual responsibility to play the game responsibly, and spend within their means while pursuing the dream of huge cash prizes. As long as they do so, then there is no reason why they cannot enjoy the lottery while also contributing to state funded educational projects.

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正确答案： National Lotteries Should Be Preserved Both merits and......

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Bookstores are disappearing in cities and town, both big and small, while online sellers like Amazon, e-readers and other evolving technologies threaten both physical books and the brick and mortar venues. The following article is discussing the prospects of physical bookstores. Read it carefully and write your response in NO LESS THAN 300 words, in which you should: 1. summarize briefly the article’s main idea; 2. give your comment. Two of the world’s largest bookstore chains—Barnes & Noble and Borders—are in danger of being forced into bankruptcy; their plight raises the broader question of whether bookstores will survive in any significant number. There are two clear threats, both Internet-related, to the bookstore. The newest is the e-book, in which the contents of a book are transmitted over the Internet to an electronic reader owned by the book’s buyer. No bookstore is involved. Slightly older is the sale, as opposed to the delivery, of a book online; Amazon is the principal seller in this market No bookstore is involved unless Amazon doesn’t have the book in inventory. A possible third threat is diminished appetite for books. It seems that the amount of entertainment and instruction available online is so great that online substitution for reading books must have reduced the demand for them. At the same time, however, the demand for books should be stimulated by the fall in cost when books are bought online, cutting out the middleman—the bookstore. It seems inevitable that the number of books sold through bookstores will plummet. Books bought through bookstores are more costly not only in price (to cover the costs of the bookstore), but also in customers’ time—the time required to travel to and from the bookstore, find the book one wants to buy, and complete the purchase. The only offsetting advantages of the bookstore are the opportunity it provides for browsing and the fact that the customer can see and handle the book before buying it. But these advantages are offset to a considerable extent (doubtless more than offset, for many customers) by the use by online sellers of artificial-intelligence programs to recommend books to their customers, by the much vaster inventory of an online seller like Amazon, by ease of search, by the reader reviews that the seller presents, and by the seller’s ability to allow customers to look inside the online book before ordering it, much as if he were leafing through a printed book in a bookstore. At present fewer than 30 percent of all books are bought online (either in hard copy or as an e-book), this figure is estimated to grow to 75 percent within a few years. Very few bookstores will have enough customers to survive if bookstore sales fall from 70 percent to 25 percent of all book sales, except those bookstores specializing in out of print books—whose customers will largely be online. In time, moreover, with more and more publishing electronic, there will be fewer and fewer out of print books. As technology continues its forward march, online booksellers will find it increasingly feasible to duplicate and indeed improve on the point-of-sale services that bookstores offer. Bookstores will decline, and perhaps vanish when the current older generation, consisting of people habituated to printed books (as to printed newspapers), dies off. Yet this may well represent genuine economic progress, just as department stores and supermarkets represent progress though they cause the demise of countless small retailers.

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As online shopping becomes yet more prevalent, and prepaid credit cards take the place of more and more low-value cash transactions, cash is now on its way out, accounting for just 40% of payments last year globally and dropping. From the following excerpts, you may find both benefits and concerns of removing cash from the economy. Write an article of NO LESS THAN 300 words, in which you should: 1. summarize the trend of cashless society, and then 2. express your opinion towards the tendency.Excerpt 1 To see how a society might operate without cash, we can look to Sweden, which is almost cashless already. In Stockholm, you don’t need to carry bills or change. You can make donations to your church using a credit card, and give money to a friend using an inter-person payment app called Swish—when splitting a restaurant check, for example. Many banks don’t accept or provide cash in their branches, and payment apps are on the rise. Swedish banks and businesses have good reason to prefer electronic payments. Stockholm has been a heist capital, with robberies targeting banks and cash-carrying security vans. But it’s not just the banks that prefer payments that can’t be stolen. Stockholm native Peter Mathsson says that locals rarely use cash. Even the smallest transaction is made with a card. Living experiments like Sweden prove that cash-free living is not only possible, but desirable and potentially advantageous. In fact, many parts of the world are already cash free. People pay for a single cup of coffee with a credit card, often without signing or entering a PIN. People are already happy to operate without cash, and with new options like Apple Pay, which lets you use your iPhone and your fingerprint to pay with better security than an actual card, that trend is likely to accelerate. The end of cash may seem like fancy thinking, but look at how money has changed since credit and debit cards started to usurp cash. We already route money around with bank transfers enacted from our tablets, we pay for Uber cars with the convenience of a phone app, and we travel abroad without even thinking about buying foreign currency before we go. And PayPal, the original cashless payment system, turned 18 years old this year.Excerpt 2 Governments and their agencies love electronic transactions. Without cash, it’s much harder to hide money from the tax man. The police and government agencies like the NSA love the trackable records that cashless payments leave behind. Last year, France and Spain both enacted laws that limit cash transactions. The promise is that banning cash would end black markets, but for honest citizens, the end of paper cash brings many unsettling downsides. Credit card transactions are already trackable, and electronic cash could bring that lack of anonymity to every single transaction you make. Once this information exists, it will become a target of government agencies such as the police and intelligence services and trafficked to insurance companies, tax collectors, fraud squads, and even marketers. When all our payment transactions are tracked, says Rainey Reitman, activism director at the Electronic Frontiers Foundation, it creates a trove of data we have no control over. It’s easy to imagine a daring divorce lawyer or a government agent trying to gain access to our financial history to try to build a story about who we are.