9. Whereas everybody wants a new president of the European Commission in place as soon as possible, Parliament — always keen on adding to its power — wants the procedure to go ahead under the new Amsterdam terms.
10. Iran and the Soviet Union once had the Caspian Sea to themselves, amicably dividing its precious caviar. The two knew the sea contained mineral wealth but neither did much about it.
11. «The larger a company gets, the more difficult it can be for the left hand to know what the right is doing».
12. Hurt by the economic slump in Asia and a litany of production and delivery problems, Boeing sought to put the best face on its annual production and delivery data.
13. Reflecting Japan's spectacular economic growth, Tokyo's rapid development and, above all, Maki's [architect] evolving architectural philosophy, the changes helped create a dynamic complex that today anchors one of Tokyo's most popular neighborhoods.
14. Many critics of the government's program argue that it reflects what they say is Mr Blair's Achilles' heel: the desire to be all things to all people, to appeal to the conservative-leaning middle class that helped propel him into office in 1997 while not abandoning the poor and working classes, labour's traditional base. The tough talk, they say, is one thing; the reality may fall short of the promise.
15. Human rights are a basic American interest, and the administration should not flinch from promoting them.
16. The civil service is a black abyss of underpaid, underemployed, unsackable people. There are calls for cutting the numbers radically, but if you do, you end up with an indigent army of unemployable people.
17. The once empty, and beautiful, Mediterranean shoreline has become a solid block of wall-to-wall holiday homes with their private beaches and marinas for middle-class Egyptians.
18. Genre painting existed in the ancient world but was generally deemed an inferior pursuit suitable for less talented artists, an assumption that was inherited by the Renaissance establishment.
19. The native Melanesian Ambonese are mainly Christians but many Asian Muslims from elsewhere in the vast Indonesian archipelago have come to the island for business and as civil servants.
20. The democratic peoples [of NATO members] admittedly do not relish sending their soldiers into foreign fields, but the evidence of the 20th century — two world wars, the cold war and, in the 1990s, the Gulf and Bosnia — suggests that they will generally act when they conclude that a principle or a major interest is under attack.
21. The public outrage gave Beijing «a chance to redirect some of the political energy in a population that might otherwise be antigovernment,» says a China scholar of Wellesley College.
22. French, long dominant at the commission of EU, has been rapidly losing ground to English, which, the French note acidly, is not even a language of continental Europe.
23. Some economists warn that a further slowdown in Europe's economy could encourage opponents of the common currency, the euro, to blame Monetary Union for the hard times.
24. ...the description of a solution to a problem as a «political» solution implies peaceful debate and arbitration as opposed to what is often called a «military» solution.
25. The record number of mergers of large companies into even larger ones last year has raised fears at many arts organizations and other nonprofit groups that a decline in corporate donations may be an unfortunate byproduct.
5. Проанализируйте и переведите следующие предложения.
1. The euro is expected to accelerate European crossborder creating the foundations of pan-European market for capital, it exposes markets to stiffer competition.
So it seems few taboos are left in Europe's once sleepy banking business: banks are merging with each other, with insurers, fund managers and others as never before.
But are Europe's banks really set for a merger wave to rival that seen in America? In theory, Europe already has a single banking system. The reality is rather different. For some years to come, further consolidation will be stymied by resistance from politicians, workers and even bank bosses and by the way that banking system has been structured.
2. EU presidency is enough to test any country's skills to the limit. It means arranging dozens of ministerial meetings and managing the paperwork for hundreds of specialist committees. Rare is the government that does not come to the end of its six months both relieved and exhausted.
The Finns have a big reputation to live up to. Since joining the EU, and despite coming from its most distant edge, they have displayed an almost uncanny mastery of its workings. Many point to them as the very model how a «small country should operate within the EU's institutions: merely modest and purposeful matching a sense of principle with a sense of proportion.
3. Once the state has rooted out absolute poverty, how much wealth, if any, should it confiscate to reduce inequality for its own sake? How much should it curtail individual freedoms — to purchase extra education, to pass on an inheritance — so that people have an equal chance in life? Is there some level beyond which inequality cannot be stretched without snapping the bonds that hold people together? Whatever the answer, these are questions a government should frame clearly, not bury in the obfuscation of «fairness». Still less should a budget be so subtle that nobody can divine, whether, why or how much a government believes in redistribution.
4. Devolution is a healthy and abiding tendency. To de-emphasize the federal government is to resurrect one of the original principles of American politics. The nation was conceived as a union of 13 pre-existing states. The concept of national citizenship, as distinct from state citizenship, did not even exist until 1787, 11 years after independence. In the early days, the states showed their distinctive personalities by what they did about slavery or the enfranchisement of non-citizens, rather than welfare policy or the length of prison terms. But whatever the issues the taste for autonomy has endured and now seems, once again, to be growing.
5. So long as the democracies remember what experience has taught them, they are probably unbeatable. Take Europe and America apart, and that comforting prospect vanishes. The Americans by themselves will still have the means to act, as well as their keener sense of ideological commitment; but they will have fewer material interests in the outside world to feel concerned about, and the shock of the break with Europe could push them back to their old dream of hemispheric self-sufficiency.
6. The goal of the EU constitutional conference will be to streamline the European Commission and to fine-tune the voting powers of national governments in the Council of Ministers, so that both institutions can accommodate an influx of new members, mainly from Central and Eastern Europe, in the decade ahead.
7. In contrast to Plato's claim for the social value of education, a quite different idea of intellectual purposes was propounded by the Renaissance humanists. Intoxicated with their rediscovery of the classical learning that was thought to have disappeared during the Dark Ages, they argued that the imparting of knowledge needs no justification — religious, social, economic or political. Its purpose, to the extent that it has one, is to pass on from generation to generation the corpus of knowledge that constitutes civilization.
8. The study [of two University of Chicago researchers] is not good news for minorities. First, Latinos are significantly more likely to live near a hazardous-waste site than blacks or whites with comparable incomes. Second, the authors suggest that blacks are less likely than whites to live near Chicago waste sites in part because they have been excluded from areas near high-paying industrial jobs by decades of residential segregation. The Chicago study will stimulate the debate. Some earlier studies in other cities have found a significant correlation between race and hazardous waste; others have no. But even in cases where hazardous-waste sites appear to be disproportionately located in minority neighborhoods, they may not have been put there deliberately.
9. It is currently fashionable to argue that nobody can hope to foresee what is going to happen to big-power politics in the next 30 or 40 years. Some of those who say this then add, contradicting themselves, that there is unlikely to be any great challenge to the security of Europe and America in the next generation or so: the world is for the time being, safe for democracy. Neither of these things is necessarily true. It is possible to make a reasonable guess at how power will redistribute itself round the world in the opening decades of the new century and how this redistribution of power will show itself in what counties do to each other. This reasonable guess holds little comfort for the democracies of the West.
10. Though they seldom admit it, many Hungarians continue to harbour prejudice against gypsies, which is one reason that campaigners prefer to use the term «Roma», arguing that from the lips of most Hungarians, «cigany» is itself derogatory and that the word's most usual (and value-free) English variant, gypsy, should also therefore be dropped.
What is less arguable is that it has been almost taboo, in Hungarian politics, to acknowledge that gypsies do have a real grievance. So for the foreign minister even to be discussing the subject is progress of a sort.
11. An inexperienced crew is working late shift, packing apples at the Northwestern fruit produce plant here. The new hires barely keep pace with roaring conveyor belts. But things are hard here. Last month, half the packing plant's 180 employees were laid off. In what turned out to be one of the biggest employment sweeps ever by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, agents sifted through the records of 5,000 workers in 13 local packing plants here — and forced the companies to sack 562 determined to be illegal immigrants.
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