商务英语（BEC）二级模拟试题四（答案）

　　Part Two.

　　Questions 13 to 22.

　　Section One.

　　Questions 13 to 17.

　　Question Thirteen

　　Yesterday I bought this T-shirt in your shop. But it was too small for my son and my son wanted a blue one. So I want to change this white one for that blue one priced at twelve thirty-four. This white one is ten forty-nine. How much more will I have to pay you?

　　Question Fourteen .

　　I tried this pair of shoes and I think I like this color and style. Please pack them. By the way, I notice that all the goods in your shop are at 20% discount. And this price tag says 20pounds a pair. So how much will I have to pay you?

　　Question Fifteen

　　My wife, my children and I are going to visit Edinburgh for 3 days. We need a small room and a large room with a double bed. If a small room is 5pounds a day and a large one is 12pounds a day, how much will we pay for our stay?

　　Question Sixteen

　　This novel costs two ninety-nine. This book is one pound forty-two. And that pocket dictionary is priced at fourteen twenty-four. You gave me two ten pounds. Let s look at the calculator and find out how much change I ll give you.

　　Question Seventeen

　　One letter will be sixteen pence, so for three letters that s forty-eight pence. And the five postcards at .twenty-four pence that s l.20pounds. And the two airmail letters at twenty-four pence that s forty-eight pence. Let s see what the total comes to.

　　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 duri ng 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.

　　The American market for international calls is more open to competition than those of most other countries, so calls out of America are usually far cheaper than the calls into it. The discounters exploit this difference by routing calls from foreign subscribers to computerized switches in America ,undercutting normal rates by a third or more.

　　One technique, known as "ring-back", involves giving a customer in, say, Paris a free telephone number to a computerized switch in America. When the customer calls ,the switch automatically calls him back and puts him through to his American destination. Since the call technically originates with the switch, France Telecom s monopoly on outgoing calls remains unbroken but the caller in Paris is charged American rates.

　　A second technique, called "third-country calling", involves routing international calls via America to take advantage of cheap American rates on the second leg of the journey. On intercontinental calls the saving is usually so great that it more than makes up for the extra distance traveled.

　　One of the best-knows discounters , 2(1/2)year old international Discount Telecommunications (IDT) ,uses third-country calling to provides calls between countries whose own telephone companies are not on speaking terms ,such as Syria and Israel ,and Iraq and Kuwait. Today s small discounters may be short-lived.

　　But if the small discounters do go out of business, it will be because they have launched a trend. This year, America s established international carriers have started touting for business from over seas customers themselves. In April American Telephone & Telegraph (AT&T) launched a third-country calling service of its own. Dubbed World Connect, the service lets customers use a personal identification number to call from45 different countries of the world via switches in America. Customers pay call charges in dollars ,along with their normal domestic bills. In June AT&T s biggest rival, MCI, launched a similar service , called World Reach. Both products supplement the firms long-establishes "call-home" services , which make it easier for traveling Americans to call home

　　Though AT&T and MCI both hotly deny selling international calls to foreigners explicitly, some foreign carriers certainly fear this. Neither ATTEST nor MCI has been allowed to offer its new services in Japan, Australia, Spain, Italy, Brazil, Argentina or Mexico. The small discounters have run into similar problems.