News Exercise # 109

1. Why do Myanmar jade traders have such low quality stones?
2. What does one official say to disagree with the answer to 1)?
3. How fast, according to the speaker, is this mining happening?
4. What is the value of Myanmar’s jade mining?

Answers:
1 The best quality jade is smuggled directly across the border into China.
2 An official at the National Jade Museum said that this hasn’t happened during that last five years, and that most of the jade had been stockpiled.
3 It is going at ‘breakneck speed’, meaning incredibly fast.
4 Thirty billion (30,000,000,000) dollars a year.