2018职称英语考试时间【2018职称英语考试综合类阅读判断专项练习题(3)】

来源：用户分享时间：2025/9/26 0:39:07 本文由

说明：文章内容仅供预览，部分内容可能不全，需要完整文档或者需要复制内容，请下载word后使用。下载word有问题请添加微信号:xxxxxxx或QQ：xxxxxx 处理（尽可能给您提供完整文档），感谢您的支持与谅解。

2018职称英语考试时间【2018职称英语考试综合类阅读判

断专项练习题（3）】

The credit card was a revolutionary idea.Today,a small plastic card lets people charge purchases in millions of places.The sellers get paid through an electronic system of banks.The buyers get a monthly statement to pay off.They can buy now and pay later.

The credit card industry is changing all the time.

On June 30th,Bank of America announced it would buy MBNA,the nation\biggest independent provider of credit cards.Bank of America will have 20 percent of the credit card market in the United States.The deal was valued at about 35 thousand million dollars.

Bank of America is the second-biggest bank in the country after Citigroup.Bank of America will cut six thousand jobs to reduce costs.

MBNA had negotiated with another bank,Wachovia.In fact,on June 17th,a helicopter carrying top MBNA officials from secret

talks in New York crashed in the East River.All survived,but not hopes for a deal.Wachovia lost interest.

The first widely used credit cards did not use the bank system most monly used today.Diners Club started in

1980.American Express issued its first charge card in 1958.

That same year,Bank of America offered Bank Americards to sixty thousand people in Fresno,California.Bank Americard grew into the huge system known today as Visa.

Most American families have at least one credit card.The Federal Reserve,the central bank,says Americans have more than 700 thousand million dollars in credit card debt.They pay an average interest rate per year of about twelve to fourteen percent..

Some card users pay all their charges each month,so they do not owe interest.Others make only the small payment required.If they owe thousands of dollars,the debt can take years to pay off.

And that is not the only danger.Information security and identity theft are major issues these days.Recently there have been several incidents in which many people had financial information either lost or stolen.

Someone stole records from the puters of Card Systems Solutions,a payment processing pany.That incident put forty million Visa,MasterCard and other card numbers at risk of misuse.

16.Today,a small metal card lets people pay what they buy in millions of places