Section Two. Questions 18 to 22.
Question Eighteen
Accounts will be charged five pounds a month service fee if the minimum balance falls below four hundred pounds at any time during the stated period. You may keep three pounds in your account ,but we charge you five pounds a month.
Question Nineteen
The package containing the records appeared to be in perfect condition. But when we unpacked it with great care ,we found that one record was completely smashed. Could you send us a new one? 1’ll return the broken one at once.
Question Twenty
Thank you for asking me. You’ve already done a lot for the children. I believe this tea party on Friday will attract more people’s attention to the children’s problems. Unfortunately I’ve got an appointment then.
Question Twenty-one.
Thank you for your invitation. Our company is willing to explore with your corporation the possibility of closer ties through joint ventures. Here ,let me propose a toast to the success of our negotiations and to our friendship and future cooperation.
Question Twenty-two
As this is the last week in September, the two teams we’re going to watch tonight are tied for first place in this season. They both want to make the play-offs, so they’ll be playing their best.
Part Three. Questions 23 to 30.
For decades the world’s telephone companies ,nearly all state-owned monopolies ,have jointly set the rates for international calls. Now a handful of nimble, privately owned telephone discounters are using loopholes in regulations written to protect national telephone monopolies to undercut the cartel’s high prices. Eventually ,that could lead to the break-up of the cartel itself.
The small firms leading the trend are interesting for the way they do business rather than for the amount of business they do.
But because their activities expose monopoly overpricing so dramatically, they could help to bring about changes that are vastly out of proportion to their size.