大学英语泛读

●Twenty Minutes’ Reading on P18-21

●Translate the following passage into Chinese

Trading error dims Everbright's prospects

The record 523 million yuan ($85 million) fine may seem big, but Everbright Securities Co's troubles are far from over.

The company is facing claims estimated at 2.7 billion yuan by investors alleged to have been misled by the company's deliberate withholding of information about its 7.2 billion yuan trading mistake.

But lawyers said potential claimants may need more information from the China Securities Regulatory Commission investigation to pin Everbright down.

According to the Securities Law of China, the principal should shoulder responsibility if insider trading incurs any losses. But Liu Mingjun, director of the capital market department of Beijing Celue Law Firm, told Xinhua News Agency that there is a lack of detailed interpretation and regulations in the Securities Law.

In the United States, investors who can prove they suffered a loss as a result of insider trading would bring a civil claim against the broker responsible for it, said Gene Buttrill, capital markets practice partner at the global law firm Jones Day.

So far, the commission has only handed down the penalty with a note saying that investors who felt cheated can seek redress through litigation. It has not disclosed details of its investigation that showed how Everbright stonewalled the stock exchange on Aug 16, allowing itself time to engage in insider trading to cover its potential losses.

Following Everbright's former president Xu Haoming's resignation on Aug 22, Yang Chizhong, assistant executive, and Mei Jian, secretary of the board of directors, resigned on Saturday. Xu and Yang, together with Shen Shiguang, general manager of the accounting department, and Yang Jianbo, general manager of the strategic department, were fined by the commission and banned from any work involving the stock exchange.

Buttrill of Jones Day said insider trading cases in the US carry both criminal and civil penalties. "For serious cases, jail sentences are often appropriate," he added.

The share price of Everbright Securities plummeted 8.54 percent to close at 9.21 yuan on Monday, while the benchmark Shanghai Composite Index

remained basically unchanged from the last trading day, closing at 2,098.45 points.

Media reports have said a programmer at Everbright changed the stock brokerage's internal order-placing system it had developed to cover up a malfunction before the commission's investigative team arrived on site in an attempt to put all the blame on the outside supplier of the trading system.

The allegation was supported by a company source who was quoted as saying on condition of anonymity that the "fat finger" which caused the trading error was actually two software bugs, one in the trading system provided by the outside provider and the other in Everbright's own order taking system. The commission's investigation team was back in Shanghai last week after the initial three-day investigation starting from Aug 19 after they discovered the alleged tinkering.

Everbright spent about 100,000 yuan on the supplier's trading system. Other trading system providers charge about 1 million yuan. Everbright chose the supplier because the provider was willing to program the system to Everbright's specifications and requests, the source said.

He added the strategic investment department, from where the mistaken buy order was issued, is likely to be merged into other departments or the whole team will be dismantled.

The department mistakenly sent huge buy orders valued at 23.4 billion yuan on Aug 16. Of this, a total of 7.27 billion yuan was transacted. The big buy order was widely attributed to having lifted the index 5.96 percent in three minutes.

The commission banned the company from proprietary trading for three months and suspended approval for new Everbright services.

Everbright's net profit was around 1 billion yuan last year. Interim results show that it made a net profit of 811 million yuan in the first half of this year.

Insider trading is the trading of a public company's stock or other securities (such as bonds or stock options) by individuals with access to non-public information about the company. In various countries insider trading based on inside information is illegal. This is because it is

seen as being unfair to other investors who don't have access to the information.

'Fat Finger Error ：A human error caused by pressing the wrong key when using a computer to input data.

Other words or phrases in this passage:

Everbright Securities: Everbright Securities Company Limited is one of the largest securities brokerage by assets in China, controlled

by state-owned financial conglomerate, China Everbright Group. It was founded in 1996 and is based in Shanghai.

It was listed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange in 2009 with capital raising of $10.96 billion yuan.

China Securities Regulatory Commission: The China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC) is an institution of the State Council of the People's Republic of China (PRC), with ministry-level rank. It is the main regulator of the securities industry in China.

Civil claim:

Criminal penalty:

Board of Directors: A board of directors is a body of elected or appointed members who jointly oversee the activities of a company or organization.

software bug: A software bug is an error, flaw, failure, or fault in a

computer program or system that produces an incorrect or unexpected result, or causes it to behave in unintended ways.

Shanghai Stock Exchange Composite Index:The SSE Composite Index (上海证券交易所综合股价指, 简称上证综指) is an index of all stocks (A shares and B shares) that are traded at the Shanghai Stock Exchange.

●Text A of Unit 2: Your Speech is Changing

What do you know about English vocabulary?

●Semantic change

Semantic change describes the evolution of word usage — usually to the point that the modern meaning is radically different from the original usage.

Types of semantic change

?Narrowing: Change from super-ordinate level to subordinate level.

For example, girl: a young person of either sex, a child, boy or

girl→female child

?Widening: Change from subordinate level to super-ordinate level.

For example, holiday: holy day, a day of religious significance→

day of festivity or recreation when no work is done

?Degeneration: The process, for one reason or another, a word falls into dispute. e.g.,” sad”: full, satisfied, contented →serious → "

sorrowful. Gay: happy and full of fun → sexually attracted to

people of the same sex

?Elevation: Words rise from humble beginnings to positions of greater importance. e.g., minister: an attendant, a servant → a

person at the head of a Department of State

New words appear in English every day.

Scholars guess that English has about 600 000 words, but there are probably more. New words continue to come into the language at such a rate that no dictionary could possibly keep up with them. The old words which were born centuries ago in the Anglo-Saxon, Germanic and French languages make up four fifths of the English language. The other one fifth is made up partly of borrowed words and partly of three other kinds of words: words from the names of peoples and places; imitative words;

and invented words.

● A loanword (or loan word) is a word borrowed from a donor

language and incorporated into a recipient language.

Examples of Loan English words of Chinese origin

Chopsticks: from Chinese Pidgin English chop chop.

Confucianism : from Confucius

Kowtow

Kung fu: the English term to collectively describe Chinese martial arts; Longan: from Cantonese 龙眼, name of the fruit, literally "Dragon's eye"

Lychee: from Cantonese 荔枝(laitzi), name of the fruit

Mahjong:from Mandarin 麻将(ma jiang), lit. the mahjong game Pekin: from southern Mandarin 北京, a patterned silk cloth

Tai Chi: from Mandarin 太极, "Great Ultimate."

Tofu: from Chinese 豆腐

●Words from the names of people and place

Ampere, volt and watt are all units of electricity, and they are named for the men who discovered them; Nowadays we all drink pasteurized milk, that is, milk which is clean and purified.

“Pasteurize”means to heat a liquid, especially milk to a particular temperature and then cool it, in order to kill harmful bacteria.

Pasteurized gets its name from Louis Pasteur, a French doctor who invented the process for purifying milk. There are many words like this in the English language.

●Imitative words are words that sound like the thing or action they

stand for. Here are some examples:

buzz click bang mumble c hirp bawl

crash clap mutter giggle hum gulp

●Then there are the invented words. English-speaking people have

always made up words as it suited them, and they continue to do

so every day. One kind of invented word is one which is made up

of two other words. Dictionaries call this kind of word a

compound. If you put "play" and "thing" together, you get the

compound, "plaything".

In English there are various ways of word-formation, which can be classified, according to frequency of usage, into major or minor.

The major ways are compounding, derivation and conversion. The

minor ways include clipping, initialism, acronym, blending etc.

●Compounding: a word-formation process in which words are

formed by putting two or more words together. E.g. highway

car-sick She-wolf sleep-walk

●Derivation: derivation or affixation is a method of

word-formation by which new words are created by adding affixes (prefixes or suffixes or both) to roots. E.g. im balance

mal function tri angle ampl ify

●Conversion: a way of word-formation which consists in turning a

word of a certain part of speech into a word of another part of

speech. E.g. They fueled the cars.

We will try our best to better our living conditions.

●Clipping: the term “clipping” (or shortening) denotes the deletion

of one or more syllables from a word. E.g. ad (ad vertisement)

quake (earth quake)

flu (in flu enza) Mr (m iste r)

●Initialism: a type of shortening made up of the first letters of

words that form a proper name, a technical term, or a phrase; an initialism is pronounced as a sequence of letters. E.g. BBC FBI VIP CIA EEC AP EU IMF ATM

●Acronym: word formed from the initial letters of the name of an

organization or a scientific term, etc. They are pronounced as a

word and are often used without our knowledge of what the letters stand for: e.g. UNESCO OPEC NATO APEC NASA

●Blending: a process of word-formation in which a new word is

formed from two words, one of which is not in its full form or

both of which are not in their full form. E.g. motel (motor + hotel) Chinglish ( Chinese + English) medicare (medical +care)

Heliport (helicopter airport)

Text A:

Twenty Minutes’ Reading