首发：新东方寅发布9.13高口阅读P3评析

Section 2 passage ３

整篇文章的难度比较高，专业性较强，从新东方长期的教学经验来看，一旦涉及经济和财税问题，考生的心理压力普遍就会比较大。

这篇是英国卫报２００９年２月２日的文章，是一个总分总的结构，主要内容是无论是ＨＭＲＣ还是各大主流媒体，甚至是ＭＰ都无法得知企业的税款到底是多少，全文主旨出现在了第二段：＂secrecy and complexity＂清晰地表达出了无法得知税收的根本原因就是保密性和复杂性，而后面的文章则就是针对这两点而做的阐述。

文章的第三段提到了本文的另一个关键词汇＂tax avoidance＂，提出了一切问题都源于大家对“避税”一词的不同理解。接下来的第四和第五段，第六段就详细描述了第一点“secrecy＂的问题，连自己的shareholders有时候都无法知道所有的subsidiary的情况，更何况是我们这些outlanders。文章中把这种情况比喻为一种jigsaw(拼图)。

文章的第七段开始，就说到了另一个问题“complexity”,这样的复杂的情况来自于“Each company has its own method of accounting for tax”（第七段）计算税款的标准不同，“registers of several different countries”（第八段）注册的子公司实在太多。

文章的第九段，表达了现在四大财务公司的基本工作思路，他们“have no interest in helping outsiders understand their world”，正是因为专家们的不合作，更让政府和媒体云里雾里了。最后一段中也就表达了政府的无奈情绪。

在理清楚文章的基本行文结构和思路之后，我们就不难发现，文章的理解并不困难，文章所述还是比较常见的经济思路。于是乎，我们看到，题目的难度也不小，几乎这篇文章所有的题目都不仅仅是“fact Questions”, 相反，它们都是需要分析的，只有在看懂了文章的基础上才可以进行答题，理解了深层含义才能体会言下之意。

The Guardian, Monday 2 February 2009

１Even the people in charge of collecting the taxes - Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs (HMRC) 英国税务及海关- admit they have only the vaguest idea of how many further billions of pounds they could be getting ... and it took a freedom of information request before they would admit the extent of their lack of knowledge.

２Any media organisation or MP attempting to pursue the subject will find themselves hampered by the same difficulties faced by the tax collectors - secrecy and complexity. The Guardian's investigation, which we publish over the coming two weeks, is no different.

３The difficulty starts with an inability of anyone to agree a definition of "tax avoidance". It continues through the limited amount of information in the public domain. And it is further hampered by the extraordinary complexity of modern global corporations.

４International companies based in the UK may have hundreds of subsidiary companies, which many use to take advantage of differing tax regimes as they move goods, services and intellectual property around the world. It is estimated that more than half of world trade consists of such movements (known as transfer-pricing) within corporations.

５Companies are legally required publicly to declare these subsidiaries. But they generally tell shareholders of only the main subsidiaries. The Guardian's investigation found five major UK-based corporations which had ignored the requirements of the Companies Act by failing to identify offshore subsidiaries.This is just one example of the atmosphere of secrecy and non-disclosure in Britain which has allowed tax avoidance避税 to flourish. The result is that few outside of the lucrative获利多的industries of banking, accountancy and tax law have understood the scale of the capital flight that is now taking place.

６British tax inspectors privately describe as formidable the mountain outsiders have to climb in order to comb through the accounts of international companies based in London."The companies hold all the cards," said one senior former tax inspector. "It's very difficult because you don't always know what you're looking for.""You are confronted with delay, obstruction and a lot of whingeing絮絮叨叨地抱怨from companies who complain about 'unreasonable requests'. Sometimes you are just piecing together a jigsaw."

７Another former senior tax inspector said: "One of the problems the Revenue has is that the company doesn't have to disclose the amount of tax actually paid in any year and the accounts won't reveal the liability. Each company has its own method of accounting for tax: there's no uniform way of declaring it all."For journalists trying to probe these murky waters, the problems are so substantial that few media organisations attempt it. They face the additional hurdle that the British libel laws can land them with costs or damages in the millions if they make mistakes on the basis of the publicly available information.

８A trawl 搜罗through the published accounts of even a single major group of companies can involve hunting around in the registers of several different countries. It takes a lot time, and, when literally hundreds of specially-created subsidiaries exist, a lot of money.　Companies - with some far-sighted British exceptions - simply refuse to disclose any more than what appears in the published figures.　The legal fiction that a public company is a "legal person", entitled to total tax secrecy, and even to "human rights", makes it normally impossible for a journalist to penetrate the tax strategies of big business. HMRC refuse, for example, to identify the 12 major companies who used tax avoidance schemes to avoid paying any corporation tax whatever.

９It is difficult to access experts to guide the media or MPs through this semantic jungle. The "Big Four" accountants and tax QCs Queen's Counsel'御用大律师 who make a living out of tax avoidance, have no interest in helping outsiders understand their world. Few others have the necessary knowledge, and those that do, do not come cheap or may be conflicted."Secrecy is the offshore world's great protector, " writes William Brittain-Caitlin, a London-based former Kroll investigator in his book, Offshore.

１０"Government and states are generally at a loss to diagnose in detail what is really going on inside corporate internal markets. Corporations are extremely secretive about the special tax advantages these structures give them. It is only when some outlandish transfer pricing scheme or other particularly blatant公开的bit of tax fixing goes on that even a small window is opened onto the hidden offshore world of corporations."