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发表于 2016-8-15 23:18:26
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II. Reading Passages
Part A 阅读理解
Passage One
Globalization has transformed Bangalore into the fastest growing city in India after New Delhi. Between 1991 and 2001, the city's population experienced 38% growth. In 2005, Bangalore's population was estimated at just over six million people and is one of India's major economic hubs.
In the mid 1990s, Bangalore became host to dozens of multinational Information Technology (IT), which have been lured by the city's highly educated and relatively cheap labor force. Nearly 1,500 IT companies have set up business in Bangalore in the last two decades churning out 38% of India's $22 billion IT and software exports. This has given Bangalore status as India's high-tech capital, often nicknamed the Silicon Valley of India after Silicon Valley, California where the software boom of the 1990s began.
A significant portion of these multinational IT companies are business process outsourcing companies (BPOs) or call centers and have set up their operations in Bangalore to take advantage of its large body of English speaking university graduates. Bangalore has a literacy rate of about 86% and is home to about 25,000 of India's 220,000 computer engineers. The city also has top science and technology institutes such as the Indian Institute of Information Technology and the Indian Institute of Science, ranked one of the top 20 universities in the world.
A large portion of these engineers are young graduates in their 20s and 30s, just beginning their careers. The salaries they can earn by working at a call center often enable them to become financially independent. Twenty years ago before the software boom arrived in Bangalore, it was not easy for young people to earn such high wages. Traditionally and in part for financial reasons, Indian children were expected to live at home until marriage. Today, however, the situation is changing in places like Bangalore where young adults are offered new opportunities to earn a living from IT companies, which were not available to their parents a generation ago. Even though entry-level workers in the IT sector earn about $6,000 a year, this is still significantly more than their parents could have ever earned at that age.
Affluent, young Bangaloreans are taking advantage of their newfound wealth by moving away from their families to live on their own. Women especially are putting off starting a family to focus on their careers. Nearly half of new recruits for many IT companies are women. This has also meant a rise in the number of love marriages as opposed to marriages arranged by families and less emphasis on staying a virgin before marriage. According to [I]India[/I][I] Today magazine[/I], 25% of women ages 18 to 30 in Bangalore have sex before they are married. These trends began slowly in the 1970s and 1980s and accelerated with India's rise in wealth attributed to the software boom in the 1990s. This frequently results in a clash between older and younger generations. Parents feel they have less ability to influence their children's decisions while their children feel their parents' traditional expectations are unreasonable.
Western companies-keenly aware of the growth in wealth and change in lifestyle among Bangalor's noveau riche-have designed clever marketing campaigns to woo customers. The infiltration of western luxury goods has created a cultural shift toward materialism and consumerism. Realizing that more young people are living on their own, companies present their goods as outlets of individual expression. American and European brands market clothes, accessories, cars, perfume and even furniture as status symbols to show off one's own personal style. Magazine covers, television and cinema feature beautiful Indian movie stars sporting the latest Yves St. Laurent fashion or Coach handbag. Enjoying one's financial independence has come to mean spending loads of money on western products. Bangalore's increasing number of shopping centers and malls are comparable to any in the United States or Europe and capable of catering to the increasing demands of Bangalore's shoppers.
1.Many multinational Information Technology have been attracted to Bangalore by ______.
[A]the city's abundant labor force
[B]the citizen's high education level
[C]the city's beautiful environments
[D]both A and B
2.Why in the past the Indian children were expected to live at home until marriage?
[A]Due to the traditional ideas and the immaturity of the children.
[B]Due to the financial situations and the immaturity of the children.
[C]Due to the traditional ideas and financial situations.
[D]Due to the immaturity of the children and the traditional ideas.
3.The phrase "entry-level workers" in paragraph four means ____.
[A]workers who join the company for a short time
[B]workers who belong to lower class
[C]workers who can only do simple work
[D]workers who are younger than others
4.Which one of the following is not belong to the characteristics of the Indian women in the past?
[A]They focused on the family.
[B]They all got a family-arranged marriage without any love.
[C]They usually stayed a virgin before marriage.
[D]Most of them got married early.
5.According to the passage, which statement is wrong?
[A]In the 1990s there emerged a software boom in India.
[B]It has become a trend since the 1960s for Bangalorian women ages 18 to 30 to have sex before marriage.
[C]The economic development has caused some unhappiness between different generations in this city.
[D]The Indian Institute of Information Technology belong to top science and technology institutes.
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Passage Two
Despite the hype in the international media about India's global integration, economic reform there has been halting and hesitant. Many cheerleaders of reform among corporate tycoons and financial columnists are unaware how unpopular reform is, rightly or wrongly, among the general public in India. In the National Election Survey 2004 more than two thirds of about 23,000 sample respondents who had any opinion on the subject say that the reforms benefit only the rich or none at all. Politicians are, of course, too savvy not to notice this. Even the ruling parties over the last decade that supported reforms played them down during election time. Any party that initiates some reforms is quick to oppose them once out of power.
This duplicity is currently on display within the left: In the states where they hold power, they are often driven by the inexorable logic of fiscal near-bankruptcy and competition for investment to be pro-reform; but in Delhi their leaders regularly indulge in ideological grandstanding. Opposition is not confined to the left. The recent reversal of a cabinet decision toward some privatization was under pressure from a non-left regional party. Trade unions of the right as well as left parties are opposed to privatization and labor reform. The Gandhians are vocal against the lifting of the policy of reservation, which currently limits more than 500 products-from bicycle parts to electronic equipment-exclusively for the small-scale industries. In the National Election Survey, respondents were asked about reduction in the size of government employees; among the poor, low-caste and indigenous respondents who had an opinion, the majority was opposed to such reduction. The newly emergent, hitherto subordinate, social groups, often represented by primarily caste-based or regional parties, as they capture state power and reserved jobs, are not keen to give up the loaves and fishes of office or reduce the role of the public sector.
Of course, politicians have also done a poor job of explaining reforms to the common people. If it was clear that electricity reform, which may involve a higher price, but implies a higher capacity for the public utility to provide less erratic power supply, or that deregulation means loosening the grip of corrupt inspectors over small enterprises, some opposition could decline.
What financial columnists call anti-reform populism is actually a product of the manifold inequalities and conflicts of Indian society. Data on inequality of household wealth distribution and that between the educated and uneducated classes suggest, along with the prevailing caste and other social inequalities, that India is one of the most unequal countries in the world. Severe educational inequality, worse in India than in Brazil, for example, makes it harder for many to absorb shocks in the industrial labor market, since education and training could provide some means of flexibility in adapting to market changes.
China, for example, was able to weather the disruptions and hardships of restructuring under a more intense process of global integration during the 1980s and 1990s due to its minimum rural safety net. This security was largely made possible by an egalitarian distribution of land-cultivation rights that followed the de-collectivization of 1978. In most parts of India, the poor have no similar rural safety net. So the resistance to the competitive process that market reform entails is that much stiffer in India.
In general, because of social heterogeneity and economic inequality, the social and political environment in India is conflict-ridden, and it is difficult in this environment to build consensus and organize collective action toward long-term reform and cooperative problem-solving efforts. When groups don't trust one another in the sharing of costs and benefits of long-run reform, there is the inevitable tendency to go for the "bird-in-hand" short-run subsidies and government handouts, which pile up as an enormous fiscal burden. Few politicians dare oppose the continuing serious under-pricing of water and electricity, the over-manning of the public payroll, and a longstanding refusal to tax the wealthiest farmers.
1.Why has economic reform in India been halting and hesitant?
[A]The reforms are not helpful for the Indian society.
[B]Most Indian people do not want any reform.
[C]The leaders are hesitant to carry out the reform.
[D]both A and B
2.Judging from the first sentence of Paragraph Two, the author's attitude towards the left leaders is ______.
[A]approving
[B]neutral
[C]critical
[D]affirmative
3.The word "weather" in the first sentence of paragraph five means ____.
[A] the state of the atmosphere at a given time and place
[B] to expose to the action of something
[C] changes of fortune
[D] to come through something safely
4.According to the passage, what may not be the cause of Indian people's opposition to the reforms?
[A]The reforms only benefit the rich.
[B]It is partly because of social heterogeneity and economic inequality.
[C]Politicians do not explain the reforms clearly to the common people.
[D]There is no rural safety net in most part of India.
5.Why few politicians dare oppose the existing problems in India?
[A]Because they have no authority to oppose.
[B]Because the Indian people are hard to administrate.
[C]Because the social and political environment of this country is an obstacle against any reform.
[D]Because there are too many "bird-in-hand" short-run subsides.

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