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Passage One Questions 56 to 60 are based on the following passage. Caught in a squeeze between the health needs of aging populations on one hand and the financial crisis on the other, governments everywhere are looking for ways to slow the growth in health-care spending. Increasingly, they are looking to the generic-drugs (普通药物) industry as a savior. In November Japans finance ministry issued a report complaining that the countrys use of generics was less than a third of that in America or Britain. In the same month Canadas competition watchdog criticized the countrys pharmacies for failing to pass on the savings made possible by the use of generic drugs. That greed, it reckoned, costs taxpayers nearly C$1 billion a year. Then on November 28th the European Commission issued the preliminary results of its year-long probe into drug giants in the European Union. The report reached a damning~, though provisional, conclusion: the drugs firms use a variety of unfair strategies to protect their expensive drugs by delaying the entry of cheaper generic opponents. Though this initial report does not carry the force of law (a final report is due early next year), it has caused much controversy. Neelie Kroes, the EUs competition commissioner, says she is ready to take legal action if the evidence allows. One strategy the investigators criticize is the use of the patent duster( 专利群). A firm keen to defend its drug due to go off-patent may file dozens or hundreds of new patents, often of dubious merit, to confuse and terrify potential copycats and maintain its monopoly. An unnamed drugs firm once took out 1,300 patents across the EU on a single drug. The report also suggests that out-of-court settlements between makers of patented drags and generics firms may be a strategy used by the former to delay market entry by the latter. | 
