2. 职称英语
  3. When Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger announced the final cuts to an already pain-

When Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger announced the final cuts to an already pain-

游客2023-12-05  15
问题     When Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger announced the final cuts to an already pain-peppered California budget in July, one of the most shocking indications of how dire things had become was the decision to close more than a third of the state’s parks. Fort Ross State Historic Park, 80 miles north of San Francisco, is among those that would have been closed. It was founded in 1812 as the southernmost Russian settlement in North America. Demonstrators outside the State Capitol in Sacramento last summer hung photos to share memories of their park visits.
    On Friday, though, Mr. Schwarzenegger’s office said sufficient alternative savings had been found within the California Department of Parks and Recreation to avoid any closings at all, at least in this fiscal year. The savings, which the department had been unable to identify during months of budget wrangling, were suddenly realized with the help of Schwarzenegger administration finance experts looking over the shoulders of parks officials.
    In the two months since the July announcement, Mr. Schwarzenegger’s threat to close 100 parks had landed in a budget soft spot created by bipartisan outrage among lawmakers, their constituents and lobbyists, and by a growing sense in the administration that closing parks would do little to burnish the governor’s reputation as a public figure committed to the environment.
    Though few will rue the preservation of the park system, the 11 th-inning save does underscore how even in the worst fiscal conditions, the threat of vast cuts is sometimes false, fueling skepticism among lawmakers and voters about ominous budget pronouncements and the ballot measures that often ensue to address them. "The budget process is so complicated and confusing to people to begin with, and there is so much distrust in government, that when people hear about changes in spending cuts, they are left questioning whether or not real revenues are really needed," said Mark Baldassare, president of the Public Policy Institute of California, a nonpartisan research group based in San Francisco.
    A plan to cut $175 million from a health insurance program was also recently reversed, but that program was spared by bipartisan legislation that replaced one tax for another and used federal stimulus money to fill the gaps. The parks department situation is different, because it is essentially a re-do. The department’s budget for the current fiscal year, which began July 1, was dealt a reduction of 10 percent, or $14.2 million. As a result, the state said in July, 100 of California’s 279 parks were to close at least temporarily unless dpnations or private partnerships materialized. But in the last week, amid a growing outcry and a leaked parks department memorandum suggesting that closing state parks could result in breach-of-contract lawsuits by the parks’ vendors, the administration began to back away. The backpedaling was apparently made complete with Friday’s announcement by the governor’s office, which said the savings would instead be realized with steps like cutting back on maintenance, delaying the purchase of equipment and reducing days of operation in some parks, hours of operation in others.
    The announcement described these savings as one-time, suggesting that the cost of running the parks would have to be addressed again in the budget for the next fiscal year. Roy Stearns, a spokesman for the parks department, said the earlier budget negotiations, which lasted months, had perhaps not offered sufficient time to find the cuts that will now come to pass. Others attributed the impetus to political pressure from parks advocates and from lawmakers representing districts where businesses profit from the parks’ presence. Mindful that Friday’s rescue would nonetheless mean reduced hours for the parks, among other steps, Elizabeth Goldstein, president of the California State Parks Foundation, said: "They still have a $14.2 million budget cut. The governor found a clever way to find some political cover on this issue, but it’s not clear that the plan won’t actually leave Californians with just as limited an access to their state parks as if they were fully closed. "
    The foundation and other conservation groups hope to place a measure on the November 2010 ballot that would increase vehicle license fees by $15 a year to finance the parks, a move that would double their budget and free it from the state’s general fund. In exchange, California drivers would get free admission to all state parks. The governor rejected a similar measure proposed by lawmakers during the legislative session.  [br] It can be inferred from Paragraph One that______.
选项 A、parks seem to be quite important in people’s life
B、parks consume a large chunk of the state’s budget
C、the economic condition affects the running of parks least
D、all parks bear great historic significance with them
答案 A
解析 推断题。第一段开篇就直接指出加州州长准备通过关闭公园来减轻财政赤字，最后一句中提到，听到这个消息，有人在有着重要意义的公园悬挂照片表示纪念。由此可见，公园在人们心目中还是有一定重要性的，所以[A]为答案。文章并没有说公园花费了非常大的资金或经济状况对公园的影响最小，因此排除[B]和[C]；虽然该段第三句中提到了Fort Ross State Historic Park的建立时间和目的，但并没有说所有的公园都具有历史意义，故排除[D]。
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