There’s no shortage of web sites offering deals-everything from daily deals to members-only private sales. But when it comes to real jaw-dropping deals, there’s one company that seems to have figured out a way to really deliver.

The company is called Quibids and they auction（拍卖）the hottest, in-demand electronics like Apple ipads and ipods, as well as other items like gift cards from the top retailers（零售商）. Unlike other sites, the prices people pay are nowhere near retail. How low are the prices?

$ 33.84 for a new Apple ipad 32 GB（retail $ 600）

$ 22.10 for a new Nikon D90 Digital SLR Camera（retail $ 1070）

Our first reaction on seeing these prices was disbelief. After all, how could Quibids possibly afford to sell these items for so little ---- surely they must be losing a lot of money.

That’s where its unique business model comes into play. You see, for every bid a buyer places for an item on Quibids, the company collects a small fee from the bidder. The fee to bid is only about 60 cents, but based on the volume of sales and bids, the company is able to collect enough to make up for the ridiculous prices the items sell for.

But best of all, participating in the Quibids auction is incredibly fun. Because each bid costs a little to place, shoppers can strategize when to place their bids. Each auction has a strict time limit. When you place your bid, the system adds a little time to the auction to see if any other bids come in. If you have the winning bid when the clock runs out ---- you win the item for that price.

But the best part of Quibids may be the “Buy-It-Now” feature. This allows bidders who did not win an auction to still buy the product they want and apply the cost of the bids they placed as a discount on the regular product price. So you still get the item and the bids you placed previously in the auction don’t cost you anything!

1.According to the passage, the success of Quibids mainly lies in          .

A. how its buying and selling is conducted         B. the change in people’s shopping model

C. the quality of the goods and service     D. their willingness to risk losing money

2.It can be inferred from the passage that          .

A. other retailers will be out of business B. winning a bid is not just a matter of luck

C. Quibids only sell popular electronics     D. the prices on Quibids are the lowest

3. A buyer who bid twice for a $ 20 MP4 can get one from “Buy-It-Now” for          .

A. $ 21.2   B. $ 20      C. $ 19.4   D. $ 18.8  

4.Which might be the most suitable title for the passage?

A. Buy Products for Next to Nothing          B. How to Buy New Must–have Electronics

C. The Most Successful Shopping Website          D. Tips on Shopping Online

All it took was a slice of Xinjiang cake to spark heated debates online over China's policy on ethnic（民族的）minorities .
Since Monday, qiegao (cut cake) has been a trending topic on Sina Weibo, China’s main Twitter-like microblogging service.
The cake was a reference to Xinjiang’s famed nut cake, sometimes known by its old Turkic name baklava, a popular pastry across Central Asia and the Middle East. In Xinjiang, they are sold by Uygur vendors（小贩）on tricycles who are known to charge dubious prices depending on the time and season.
The ethnic flare-up started after the Yueyang police from Hunan province posted a message on their official Weibo account. It reported a dispute in Pingjiang county over an overpriced piece of nut cake between a Xinjiang Uygur vendor and a villager named "Ling".
Villager Ling got into a fight with a Uygur due to a misunderstanding. The verbal dispute eventually escalated into a fight and then a mass fight. As a result, two people were injured and Xinjiang nut cakes worth about 160,000 yuan (US$25,000) were destroyed. The total damage was worth 200,000 yuan which included a broken motorcycle and injuries to people. Local police have detained（扣留） Ling. The 16 Uygur sellers were dully compensated and sent back to Xinjiang.
"Yueyang police incident" quickly became one of the most popular topics on Weibo. Yueyang police removed the post shortly after. As of Tuesday night, the topic was still amassing more than 66,000 hits.
The incident is just one of many similar cases of ethnic tensions across China, notably in Xinjiang province, where deeply entrenched social and racial frictions between the dominant ethnic Han Chinese and minority Uygur Muslims occasionally spark violence. Many Uygurs living in major Chinese cities are viewed by locals as thieves, crooks and even terrorists.
【小题1】Which of the following is true?

The government work report by Premier Wen covers a variety of issues, and the prices of agricultural products ______.?

  A. in common        B. in general         C. in particular     D. in practice

How do you usually buy what you need, shopping on line or going out to shop in person? With the help of the Internet, shopping is ___1.___(easy) than before. We can just click our mouse to choose the items we like, pay for them online, and the shopping ___2.___(finish). It is easy and quick. It helps save money, too. We can save thousands a year if we compare the prices of similar items before deciding ___3.___ to buy.

However, there are always traps in shopping online. If we are ___4.___(care), we may get into trouble. For example, we may find the color of the item different from ___5.___ in the picture online. Sometimes, the size of the item we receive can be too big ___6.___ too small. ___7.___(avoid) such troubles, we should compare similar items on different online stores and pay more attention to what other customers say. From their comments, we can know better ___8.___ an item’s color, size as well as ___9.___ shortcomings. In this way we increase our chance of buying ___10.___ more satisfactory item.

You're busy filling out the application form for a position you really need. Let's assume you once actually completed a couple of years of college work or even that you completed your degree. Isn't it appealing to lie just a little, to claim on the form that your diploma represents a Harvard degree? Or that you finished an extra couple of years back at State University? More and more people are turning to cheat like this to land their job or to move ahead in their careers, for personnel officers, like most Americans, value degrees from famous schools. A job applicant may have a good education anyway, but he or she assumes that chances of being hired are better with a diploma from a well-known university.
Registrars（登记员） at most well-known colleges say they deal with deceitful claims like these at the rate of about one per week. Personnel officers do check up on degrees listed on application forms, then. If it turns out that an applicant is lying, most colleges are unwilling to accuse the applicant directly. One Ivy League school calls them "cheats"; another refers to them as "special cases". One well-known West Coast school, in perhaps the most delicate phrase of all, says that these claims are made by "no such people". To avoid outright(彻底的) lies, some job-seekers claim that they "attending" means being dismissed after one semester. It may be that "being associated with" a college means that the job-seeker visited his younger brother for a football weekend. One school that keeps records of false claims says that the practice dates back at least to the turn of the century—that's when they began keeping records, anyhow. If you don't want to lie or even stretch the truth, there are companies that will sell you a false diploma.
　　One company, with offices in New York and on the West Coast, will put your name on a diploma from any number of nonexistent colleges. The price begins at around twenty dollars for a diploma from "Smoot State University". The prices increase rapidly for a degree from the "University of Purdue". As there is no Smoot State and the real school in Indiana is properly called Purdue University, the prices seem rather high for one sheet of paper.
【小题1】The main idea of this passage is that ______.