题目内容
Task 1
Directions: After reading the following passage, you will find 5 questions or unfinished statements, numbered 36 through 40. For each question or statement there are 4 choices marked A, B, C, and D. You should make the correct choice.
Ours has become a society of employees. A hundred years or so ago only one of every five Americans at work was employed, i. e., worked for somebody else. Today only one out of five is not employed but working for himself. And when fifty years ago "being employed" meant working as a factory laborer or as a farmhand, the employee of today is increasingly a middle-class person with a substantial formal education, holding a professional or management job requiring intellectual and technical skills. Indeed, two things have characterized American society during these last fifty years; middle-class and upper-class employees have been the fastest-growing groups in our working population—growing so fast that the industrial worker, the oldest child of the Industrial Revolution, has been losing in numerical importance despite the expansion of industrial production.
Yet you will find little if anything written on what it is to be an employee. You can find a great deal of very dubious advice on how to get a job or how to get a promotion. You can also find a good deal of work in a chosen field, whether it be the mechanist's trade or bookkeeping. Every one of these trades requires different skills, sets different standards, and requires a different preparation. Yet they all have employeeship in common. And increasingly, especially in the large business or in government, employeeship is more important to success than the special professional knowledge or skill. Certainly more people fail because they do not know the requirements of being an employee than because they do not adequately possess the skills of their trade; the higher you climb the ladder, the more you get into administrative or executive work, and the greater the emphasis on ability to work within the organization rather than on technical abilities or professional knowledge.
It is implied that fifty years ago .
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The passage manly refutes the wrong ideas about the economic interaction between rich and
Which of the following statements is NOT true？
Rich North, Hungry South
A few years ago, the rich world's worry about economic interaction with developing countries was that the poor could not profit from it. So unbalanced were terms of exchange between the North's mighty industries and the South's weakling sweatshops that trade between the two could be nothing more than exploitation of the one by the other: far from helping the poor countries, global integration would actually deepen their poverty. This fear has now given way to a pessimism that is equal and opposite—namely, that trade with the developing world will impoverish today's rich countries.
Like the previous scare, this view contains an iota of truth—enough to lend plausibility. Also like its processor, it is a hysterical exaggeration. However, this new fear is more dangerous than the old one. The earlier scare tacitly affirmed that the industrial countries would suffer if they cut their links with the third world. Starting from there, campaigning in the North to restrict trade with developing countries was going to be an uphill straggle. Those who oppose deeper economic integration now have a better platform. Vital interests oblige the rich countries to protect their industries from the new onslaught. Unlike its processor, this idea may sell.
The grip that this thinking already has on popular opinion owes little to economic history or principles. The new fear, like the old one, express the conviction that growth in one part of the world must somehow come at the expense of another. This is a deeply rooted prejudice, and plainly wrong. Very nearly all of the world is more prosperous now than it was 30 years ago. Growth has been a story of mutual advance, not redistribution; and where living standards have not improved in recent decades (notably, in parts of Africa), excessive integration in the international economy has not been the cause.
Lending useful support to this first error is a second—the idea that there is only so much work to go round. If new technologies render some jobs obsolete, or if an increase in the supply of cheap imports makes other jobs uneconomic, the result must be a permanent rise in unemployment. Again, on a moment's reflection, this is wrong: otherwise, technological progress this century would have pushed unemployment rates in the industrial countries to something in excess of 95%.
At the core of both fallacies is blindness to the adaptive power of a market economy. When today's rich economies were predominantly agricultural, it seemed certain that rapidly rising farm productivity (thanks to new technology) would create a permanent army of unemployed. In the days of labor-intensive manufacturing, the same fears were expressed about labor-saving technology in the factory. Farm employment in the industrial countries has dwindled to nearly nothing: manufacturing employment in America now stands at a mere 15% of the labor-force. But other jobs have taken their place. As a result, these changes have happened alongside—indeed, they have been part and parcel of—an extraordinarily rapid, persistent and widely shared improvement in living standards.
Yet it does not suffice to refute elementary fallacies. Sophisticated alarmists avoid them (taking care, obviously, not to educate their listeners). But carefully, their case goes as follows. The breadth and intensity of third-world competition is increasing. The pressure is concentrated on particular parts of the economy—for the moment, on low-skill manufacturing. Wages there are being forced down and jobs lost. This change will accelerate. Modem societies (with weak ties of family and religion) are no longer equipped to withstand such strains. The result will be great social distress.
This argument rests on a series of claims that need to be examined one by one. One survey does this at length. It agrees that in many industries the developing cou
A．It becomes smaller and works faster.B．It becomes larger and works faster.C．It becomes
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