1.Nice juicy Apple
  ALTHOUGH he is still (1)__________ things up at Dell, an ailing computer-maker, Carl Icahn has found time to tilt at another tech titan. On August 13th the veteran shareholder activist (2) __________that he had built up a stake in Apple, though he stayed mum about exactly how many shares he had bought. Mr Icahn’s intentions, however, are crystal clear: he wants the consumer-electronics behemoth to expand plans to return some of its whopping $147 billion of cash and marketable securities to shareholders.
  Mr Icahn is also after more money at Dell, where he has been lobbying with allies against a (3)__________ buy-out plan put forward by Michael Dell, the firm’s founder, and Silver Lake, a private-equity firm. His pressing has already forced the buy-out group to raise its initial offer by over $350m, to $24.8 billion and he has taken his (4)__________ to the courts in a bid to extract an even higher price.
  Other tech firms have been attracting the attention of activist investors too. Earlier this year ValueAct Capital, an investment fund, said it had built up a $2 billion stake in Microsoft.
Jaguar Financial, a Canadian bank, has been (5)__________ fresh thinking at troubled BlackBerry, which announced on August 12th that it is exploring various (6) __________options, including alliances and a possible sale. And Elliott Management, a hedge fund, has been lobbying for change at NetApp, a data-storage firm that it thinks could do more to improve returns to (7)__________.
One reason tech firms have found themselves in activists’ crosshairs is that, like Apple, some built up big cash piles during the economic downturn and have been slow to use the money. Financiers hope to get them to loosen their purse-strings faster and to pocket some of the cash. Mr Icahn wants Apple to increase and (8)__________ a share buy-back programme that is currently set to return $60 billion to shareholders by the end of 2015.
  Another reason that tech firms make tempting targets for shareholder activists is that swift changes in technologies can trip up even the mightiest. Witness the case of Microsoft, which ruled the roost during the personal-computer era but has struggled to ad
apt to a world in which tablets and smartphones are all the rage. Investors hope to mint money by pushing companies to change more rapidly in response to such upheavals in their markets.
  The rewards can be substantial. Egged on by Third Point, an activist hedge fund, Yahoo (9) __________Marissa Mayer as its new chief executive in July 2012. By the time she celebrated a year in the job last month, the troubled web giant’s share price had risen by over 70%. In July the hedge fund sold a big chunk of shares back to Yahoo. Mr Icahn thinks Apple’s share price, which closed at $499 on August 14th, could soar too if the firm follows his advice on buy-backs. He tweeted this week that he had had a “nice (10)__________” with Tim Cook, Apple’s boss, about his idea, though he did not say what Mr Cook thought of it. If Apple drags its feet, expect things to turn nasty.
  A) shareholders      B) strategic    C) communication
  D) battle            E) conversation  F) encouraging
  G) exciting          H) stirring    　I) appointed
  J) race              K) revealed      L) method
  M) accelerate        N) proposed
  O)
A novel way of making computer memories, using bacteria
FOR half a century, the (1) of progress in the computer industry has been to do more with less.
Moore's law famously observes that the number of transistors which can be crammed into a given space (2) every 18 months.
The amount of data that can be stored has grown at a similar rate.
Yet as (3) get smaller, making them gets harder and more expensive.
On May 10th Paul Otellini, the boss of Intel, a big American chipmaker, put the price of a new chip factory at around $10 billion.
polarised
Happily for those that lack Intel's resources, there may be a cheaper option—namely to mimic Mother Nature,
who has been building tiny (4), in the form of living cells and their components, for billions of years, and has thus got rather good at it.
A paper published in Small, a nanotechnology journal , sets out the latest example of the (5).
In it, a group of researchers led by Sarah Staniland at the University of Leeds, in Britain, describe using naturally occurring proteins to make arrays of tiny magnets,
similar to those employed to store information in disk drives.
The researchers took their (6) from Magnetospirillum magneticum, a bacterium that is sensitive to the Earth's magnetic field thanks to the presence within its cells of flecks of magnetite, a form of iron oxide.
Previous work has isolated the protein that makes these miniature compasses. Using genetic engineering, the team managed to persuade a different bacterium—Escherichia coli, a ubiquitous critter that is a workhorse of biotechnology—to (7) this protein in bulk.

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