Section C

Directions: There are two passages in this section. Each passage is followed by some questions or unfinished statements. For each of them there are four choices marked A), B), C) and D). You should decide on the best choice.

Passage One
    China is designing its next generation of trains that can carry passengers at a top speed of 500 kilometers (310 miles) an hour and cargo at 250km/h, with wheels that can adjust to fit different track gauges(轨距) used around the world.
    Under an ambitious government plan starting this year, the country is developing trains that can run on a hybrid-propulsion(混合推进) system that allows higher speeds, said Jia Limin, a professor at Beijing Jiaotong University.
    Using the enhanced technology and expanded network, "China will have the experience to operate high-speed rail networks in the world's most diverse geographic and climatic conditions, from deserts to alpine plateaus to rainforests", said Jia during an interview in Hong Kong.
China's high-speed rail network is designed to operate in harsh winters in the northeastern provinces, where winter temperatures can plummet(暴跌) to 40 degrees Celsius below freezing, to the world's highest altitudes in the Tibet autonomous region, to deserts on its western frontiers.
    The domestic high-speed tracks already cover 20,000km, or 60 per cent of the world's installed network. That will expand to 30,000km by 2020 and 45,000km by 2030, said Jia, who heads the Chinese program to develop fast trains.
    The Chinese program began in 2004, when the Ministry of Railways called for bids to build a high-speed train that can run at 200km/h with a top speed of 350km/h. Three years later, the first of the Chinese high-speed trains, the CRH1A, rolled off the assembly line with a top speed of 250km/h.
    Chinese companies now have about 3,000km of high-speed rail contracts on their order books outside the country. Led by state-owned China Railway Rolling Stock, the firms have secured deals to build high-speed rail projects in Turkey, Indonesia, Thailand and Russia and are bidding for projects in Malaysia, the U.S. and South America.
    China wants to be the main builder for an overland rail network from Singapore in the southern tip of Southeast Asia northwards through Indochina and China, then westwards through central Asia and Europe.

Section C

Directions: There are two passages in this section. Each passage is followed by some questions or unfinished statements. For each of them there are four choices marked A), B), C) and D). You should decide on the best choice.

Passage Two
    Alibaba smashed its Singles' Day shopping record on Friday by clocking growth of more than 32 percent, the Chinese e-commerce giant said on Friday.
    Retailers on Alibaba's platforms had recorded $17.8 billion worth of gross merchandise volume (GMV). In 2015, the 24-hour e-commerce sales event racked up $14.3 billion GMV in total.
    Media reports had forecast GMV from Alibaba's 11.11 Global Shopping Festival, as Singles' Day is officially called, to come at $20 billion in 2016, easily eclipsing(使黯然失色) the $2.74 billion and $3.07 billion respectively generated online during the Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales in the U.S. this year.
    Singles' Day was first celebrated in the 1990s by young, single Chinese as an anti-Valentine's Day. In 2009, Alibaba began using the made-up "holiday" to promote discounts at retailers on its e-commerce platforms, as a means of boosting revenue in the traditionally quiet sales period before the Lunar New Year season.
    Increasingly, international brands have jumped on Alibaba's Singles' Day bandwagon, with more than 14,000 taking part in the 2016 sale, accounting for about 30 percent of total GMV half-way into the event, according to Alibaba stats. Orders, meanwhile, came from 207 countries and regions.
    Alibaba reported that deals offered by Apple, Nike and Siemens were among the top-sellers with Chinese consumers in the early hours of the day. Local Chinese brands that made a strong showing were appliance manufacturers Haier and Midea, and smartphone maker Meizu.
    Jessie Qian, head of consumer markets at KPMG China, told CNBC on Friday that mobile e-commerce transactions have been a major driver of China's online sales boom. At least 90 percent of online shoppers in China had used their smartphone at least once to make a transaction, she said, and forecast that that number would continue to grow.
    "There are several factors contributing to the growth in mobile users. First of all, it's the access of cheaper mobile phones and secondly, the confidence in the third party payments (systems)," she said.
    Meanwhile, the number of middle class consumers in Southeast Asia and India was also growing, and they wanted high-quality goods from the U.S. and Europe, Alibaba's President Evans said, according to the company's live blog.