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  3. The shiny black Mercedes limos left early this morning for the Vienna airport, whisking the OPEC ministers attending the cartel’

The shiny black Mercedes limos left early this morning for the Vienna airport, whisking the OPEC ministers attending the cartel’

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问题     The shiny black Mercedes limos left early this morning for the Vienna airport, whisking the OPEC ministers attending the cartel’s meeting this week back to their jets for long rides home to Saudi Arabia, the Gulf, Africa and Venezuela. But despite the usual media circus surrounding the pronouncements of the cartel and its various oil chieftains, OPEC lately seems to have lost its power to control surging crude prices.
    Despite the cartel’s promise at Wednesday’s meeting to add a half-million barrels a day(to 28 million)in new production by July 1 and another half-million, if necessary, by year’s end, crude oil prices stayed comfortably above the $55-a-barrel mark on the New York Mercantile Exchange Thursday. The market shrugged off OPEC’s announcement partly because members are already pumping flat out—the International Energy Agency puts actual production by the 10 quota-bound OPEC members at 28 million already—and because few of them aside from Saudi Arabia have the ability to produce much more crude in the near future.
    Besides, the real story behind the buoyancy of oil prices is limited refining capacity, especially in the U.S. With supplies tight, traders have been bidding up prices of gasoline, heating oil and other refined products, which in turn has caused crude to keep moving higher. So OPEC has had to watch the tail wag the dog in the energy markets, with traders paying more attention to U.S. inventories of gasoline and other end-products than to the amount of crude OPEC has been pumping out of the ground. Don’t take our word for it—just listen to Sheikh Ahmad Fahad Al-Sabah, OPEC’s president as well as Kuwait’s energy minister. "Everyone should invest in refining," Sheikh Ahmad noted that while everyone was focused on geopolitics in 2004, "in 2005 we have to speak about refining." And increasing refining capacity wasn’t just a job for OPEC, but for private oil companies, non-OPEC countries, and governments.
    The sheikh’s comments are an admission that in the midst of surging demand for energy from the U.S. and China, and little new supply, OPEC is as powerless as the rest of us. The U.S. hasn’t built a new refinery in decades, and any future plants won’t come online for years. At this point, the only relief for drivers will come from conservation measures and other government-led efforts. But that’s not likely to happen under the current administration. Of course, if oil prices stay high enough to cause real economic pain, demand will cool off—but that’s a remedy few of us want to come to pass.
The problem with OPEC’s promise to increase production lies in that______.
选项 A、OPEC is running out of oil
B、OPEC members are quota-bound
C、OPEC is already producing at near full capacity
D、the IE A controls production, not OPEC
答案C
解析 属细节题。第二段第二句表明：市场原油价格上升使OPEC的公告化为泡影，部分原因在于成员国的原油日产量已经达到了最大值，还因为除了沙特以外几乎没有国家在不久的将来有能力生产更多的石油。从而推出答案为C。A、B与原文不符。D与事实不符，且并非原因。
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