This was the World Cup the French would rather forget. The Blues returned without a single goal to their credit—an ignominious f

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问题     This was the World Cup the French would rather forget. The Blues returned without a single goal to their credit—an ignominious first for a defending champion. " Twisted and blinded by success and money," ran a typical editorial in Le Figaro , "the players and those around them neglected the most important thing: the football field. " The charge is a familiar one across Europe, where most of the sport’s superstars play for salaries that have an obscene number of zeros in them. The worry, however, is less that footballers are becoming too spoiled to play well than their teams are driving themselves to financial ruin.
    Each of the official footballing nations has its own specific problems, but the bottom line for many clubs is the same. "The increase in expenditure has simply exceeded the increase in revenue," says Thomas Kurth of G14, the loose association that groups Europe’s top clubs. Real Madrid had fallen $382 million into debt before selling off its training ground to developers last year.
    The scale of debts is tough to square with massive uptick in revenues the sport as a whole has enjoyed over the past decade. Rupert Murdoch set the ball rolling in 1992 when he outbid the BBC for the rights to show live matches of England’s Premier League on his BSkyB satellite channel. Competition intensified as other TV magnates quickly recognized the game’s potential as a means of pushing their new pay channels.
    Obviously club owners are the ones handing out the outlandish paychecks. "You can have highly talented businessmen who have run their own companies with huge success. But when the door shuts behind them at a club they become someone else," says Jean-Paul de la Fuente of Media Content, a sports-rights consultancy. These bosses are typically spared the more rigorous disciplines of the marketplace, including angry shareholders and stingy banks. Says Oliver Butler of Research Service Soccer Investor: "The financial authorities don’t regulate clubs as if they were limited companies—and the banks don’t want to be firebombed by the fans. "
    To avert ruin, however, clubs must learn the dreary business of cost control. One idea being discussed is to limit the team salary caps. Any form of compulsory cap, though, might fall afoul of EU anti-competition rules. Besides, such regulations won’t be welcome to the select band of clubs—mostly from the Premier League—that have already learned to balance their books and live by orthodox business codes. Other teams could learn a thing or two about winning from them.
The word "uptick"(Line 1, Paragraph 3)probably means

选项 A、scale.
B、rise.
C、reputation.
D、benefit.

答案B

解析 第三段第一行中uptick的意思可能是[A]规模。[B]增长。[C]声誉。[D]好处。uptick的意思可以根据单词的构成和上下文猜出。up是“向上”的意思,根据下文enjoy我们可以猜出uptick是褒义词,再加上它的修饰词是massive,比较四个选项,即可确定[B]最合适。
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