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Fridays are awesome. Hope yours is going well so far, as we start our 10-minute tour of international events. U.S. Special Forces recently participated in a dangerous overnight mission in Iraq. The Pentagon says the ISIS terrorist group was about to execute dozens of hostages at a prison in northern Iraq. U.S. troops, along with Iraqi forces and others from the region stormed to the prison before dawn yesterday. American officials say 70 hostages were rescued.They included civilians, Iraqi troops and some members of the ISIS terrorist group that had been accused of spying. More than 20 ISIS fighters were killed in the raid and one American service member was killed. U.S. officials say it was the first time than an American died in ground combat with ISIS. In 2014, President Obama had pledged that no U.S. troops would be involved in ISIS ground combat but he later said that special operations forces could play a role in certain missions. In Washington, D.C., former U.S. secretary of state and current Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton testified on Capitol Hill yesterday. A congressional panel was questioning Clinton about her decision as secretary when a U.S.compound in Benghazi, Libya, was attacked on September 11th, 2012.Four Americans were killed. Several investigations and hearings involving Clinton had been held since then. Republicans on the panel say there are still serious questions for her to answer about what happened. Democrats say the investigations and hearings are Republican attempts to hurt Clinton's presidential ambitions. There's a lot of talk these days about startup springing up in Silicon Valley and New York and everywhere in between.But before a startup can get started, it needs money.That's where venture capital or VC comes in. So, what is it? Venture capital is a high risk investment.A brave investor looking for a big profit gives money to a cash-hungry young company in exchange for a piece of that business. Their plan: sell that stake at a huge profit once the company starts making money. Now, that might not sound much different than investing in stocks, which are tiny pieces of huge companies. But here's the main difference, unless something goes really, really wrong, stocks rarely drop to zero. But that happens all the time in venture capital. According to one study from Harvard, three out of four venture capital bets don't return any money to investors. Venture capitalists know those odds.They expect the fourth winning bet to pay off big time, enough to make up for the first three that went nowhere. So, venture capitalists have to have a high appetite for risk and a lot of patients. You often hear about them when they strike gold, like early backers of Facebook and Twitter. But those are the exemptions. And in the end, the promise of finding the next Facebook is just too tempting to pass off. It looks 2015 could be the biggest year for venture capital investments since 2000.So far this fiscal year, investors have put up more than $47 billion for startup companies. The last time so much money was invested was during the dotcom bubble,which saw immense funding, some of it reckless for new Internet-related companies. For many of them, the bubble bursts in 2000 and businesses failed. But others like Amazon.com survived and became immensely profitable. What are venture capitalists investing in now? A lot of technology, health care and media companies. But the companies that are getting investments are fewer and farther between than in previous years. And many of them have been in business for a little while already. That could indicate that investors are being more cautious with their money than they were during the dotcom boom. Today's "Roll Call" is brought to you by Thursday's transcript page at CNNStudentNews.com.First up from Grand Junction, Colorado, welcome to Wolverines.They're watching from West Middle School.In this corner, from Floyd, Virginia, the Buffalos are stampeding in.Hello, Floyd County High School.And all the way from southwest Germany, we've got the Wolves today from Patch Middle School in the city of Stuttgart. Time for the "Shoutout". A person with protanopia has a form of what condition?If you think you know it, shout it out.Is it: A, color blindness, B, nutritional imbalance, C, nearsightedness, or D, stress?You got three seconds.Go! People with protanopia, a form of color blindness, often have troubled distinguishing between shades of red and green. That's your answer and that's your shoutout. |
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来自： Tidley9012 > 《英语》
