Among investors, confidence in India has taken a knock. The stockmarket is down by a tenth in dollar terms this year. That reflects higher interest rates, but also a sense that the government has lost the plot. It has, say its critics, failed to control corruption and public borrowing, fallen behind on infrastructure and proven unable to make decisions. Vedanta, a London-listed resources firm, has been waiting for almost a year for ministerial approval to buy control of the Indian unit of Cairn Energy, which is also London-listed.
On June 28th, during a trip to America, India’s finance minister insisted that things were on track. Many business folk are sceptical. “Reforms will happen—after the whole system collapses,” predicts a corporate oligarch. He is just talking about India’s bankrupt electricity-distribution companies, which are a tiresome bottleneck. Overall, he remains an optimist on India, arguing that a “golden century” awaits the country.
But for many firms the usual jitters are now combined with a less familiar problem: falling profitability. Listed firms’ return on equity, which was 21-23% in the five years to March 2008, was only 17% last fiscal year, estimates IIFL, a broker, using a sample of 140 companies accounting for two-thirds of the stockmarket by value. Data for the Nifty Fifty index of big firms paint a similar picture. Few analysts expect a quick recovery.
Part of the fall reflects transient factors. Acquisitions abroad have hit some companies’ returns, for example. But deeper trends are at play, too. Labour costs have risen, particularly at some state-controlled firms: Steel Authority of India’s staff bill rose by a whopping 41% last fiscal year. Indiscipline and slower-than-expected growth have wilted profits in sectors such as cement, construction, property and telecommunications.
Some industries, such as consumer goods, continue to prosper. But to motor along, India’s economy needs not only shampoo but also new roads, shops, houses, factories and power plants. Lower returns and faltering reforms may make firms coy about sinking money into the ground. In the quarter to March, growth in gross fixed capital investment slumped, having been healthy for years (other than during the 2009 financial crisis).
The chairman of a manufacturing and retailing firm says he has recently tempered his expansion plans, just to play it safe. “I suppose everyone has done it,” he remarks, while acknowledging that this collective wobble risks becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The underlined phrase in the sentence (in Para. 1) “confidence in India has taken a knock” means ______.

A. has been damaged

B. has been blocked
C. has been revitalized

D. has been in rise

The Vedanta example shows ______.

A. government disapproval of Vedanta buying Cairn Energy
B. government restriction on trading in energy firms abroad
C. insufficiency of government
D. impatience of the company

For many firms, the problem facing them is that they are ______.

A. making less money

B. expecting a quick recovery
C. losing more money

D. expecting a large return

 Which is NOT true about the India’s economy?

A. Consumer industry grows consistently.
B. Infrastructural industry grows leg behind.
C. Firms are losing confidence in investment.
D. Capital investment keeps growing steadily.

The chairman of a manufacturing and retailing firm ______.

A. extended his plans

B. examined his plans to spot risks
C. contracted his plans

D. reviewed his plans to make safe

When you stop and think about your high school or college alma mater, are your experiences more positive or negative? Do your feelings of success or failure in that school have anything to do with whether or not your school was single-sex or co-ed? More and more Americans are electing to send their children to single-sex schools because they feel both boys and girls blossom when they study in the company of students of the same sex. They tend to achieve more.
For years, only parents who could afford to send their children to private schools, or who had strong religious or cultural reasons, chose single-sex education for their children. Today, however, along with costly private schools, public schools are experimenting with the idea of separating the sexes. However, because public schools are not allowed to discriminate on the basis of sex, they have been denied federal support.
Girls may be the ones who benefit most from single-sex schooling. Studies have shown that many girls get shortchanged in co-ed classrooms because teachers sometimes pay more attention to boys. Girls’ positive, exuberant attitude toward their studies tends to disappear as they begin to feel less successful. They start to watch their male peers outperform them in math and science. As boys begin to gain confidence, girls start to lose it. Moreover, adolescence is such a fragile time for girls. As they experience adolescent changes, some girls become depressed, develop an addiction, or suffer from an obsession with weight.
In the early 1990s, the American Association of University Women (AAUW) concluded that being in single-sex classes could raise a girl’s self-esteem. Schools across the country began creating single-sex classrooms and schools. But in a later report, that same organization could no longer support the claim that girls performed better without boys in the classroom. In addition, many critics claim that all-female schools may actually be harmful to a girl’s education because they “reinforce regressive notions of sex differences.”
The renewed interest in single-sex schooling has fostered a controversy among Americans. Those who give it full support believe girl’s need an all-female environment to take risks and find their own voices, proclaiming that they’re “better dead than co-ed.” Those who question the validity of single-sex schooling wonder whether students’ lack of achievement warrants returning to an educational system that divides the sexes. They believe there is no such thing as separate but equal.

It can be learned from the passage that single-sex schooling______.

A. aroused parents’ deep interest in the early 1990s
B. is welcomed by more and more Americans
C. receives more criticisms than praise
D. is an outdated educational idea

 Girls may ______ while studying in an all-female school.

A. feel less competitive
B. be less likely to take risks
C. gain more confidence in studies
D. care less about their appearances

Which of the following has NOT been mentioned as a factor that may affect girls’ performance in co-ed schools?

A. Girls’ adolescent changes.
B. Parents’ attitudes toward their studies.
C. Teachers’ attitudes toward different sexes.
D. Boys’ outstanding performance in math and science.

Those who question the possibility of single-sex education believe that ______.

A. boys and girls should be equal
B. sex discrimination affects students’ performance
C. single-sex public schools receive more financial aids
D. AAUW never changes its attitudes toward single-sex schooling

The passage is mainly about ______.

A. disadvantages of often neglected co-ed schooling
B. the differences between private schools and public schools
C. reasons why girls can benefit most from single-sex education
D. Americans’ controversial attitudes toward single-sex schooling

When she returned home after a year in South America, Judith Martin, a North American writer, began to have a problem. People kept interpreting her behavior as flirtatious, but she was not flirting. Fairly soon she figured out what was happening.
When most South Americans talk to each other face-to-face, they stand closer together than do North Americans. Martin had not readjusted to North American distances. Apparently, she had forgotten about the phenomenon known as personal space — the amount of physical distance people expect during social interaction. Everyone has expectations concerning the use of personal space, but accepted distances for that space are determined by each person’s culture.
Observations about personal space began about twenty years ago. Anthropologist Edward T. Hall was a pioneer in the field. He became very interested in how interpersonal distances affected communication between people. In his book The Hidden Dimension, Hall coined the word “proxemics” to describe people’s use of space as a means of communication. As Hall’s book title indicates, most people are unaware that interpersonal distances exist and contribute to people’s reactions to one another.
Personal space depends on invisible boundaries. Those boundaries move with people as they interact. Personal space gets larger or smaller depending on the circumstances of the social interaction at any moment. People do not like anyone to trespass on their personal space. As Worchel and Cooper explain, invasions of personal space elicit negative reactions that range from mild discomfort to retaliation to walking out on the situation.
Researchers working with Hall’s data found that accepted interpersonal distances in the United States also depend on other factors. For example, subcultures help determine expectations concerning personal space. Fisher, Bell, and Baum report that groups of Hispanic-Americans generally interact more closely within their subculture than Anglo-Americans do within theirs. They further explain that in general subcultural groups tend to interact at closer distances with members of their own subculture than with nonmembers.
Age also affects how people use personal space. Worchel and Cooper report that North American children seem unaware of boundaries for personal space until the age of four or five. As the children get older they become more aware of standards for personal space. By the time they reach puberty, they have completely adapted to their culture’s standards for interpersonal distances.
Gender also influences people’s use of personal space. For example, North American males’ most negative reaction is reserved for anyone who enters their personal space directly in front of them. Females, on the other hand, feel most negative about approaches from the side. Also, females have smaller interpersonal distances than do males, although pairs of the same sex communicate across larger spaces than do pairs of males and females. The gender factor shifts, however, in high-density situations such as crowded subways or elevators in the United States. As Maines observes, when people have some choice about where they stand or sit in crowded settings, they gravitate to people of the same sex.
As international travel and commerce increase, intercultural contact is becoming commonplace. Soon, perhaps, cultural variations in expectations for personal space will be as familiar to everyone as are cultural variations in food and dress. Until then, people need to make a special effort to learn one another’s expectations concerning personal space. Once people are sensitive to such matters, they can stop themselves from taking the wrong step: either away from or toward a person from another culture.

Judith Martin’s experience tells that interpersonal distance in social interaction is determined by ______.

A. personal preference

B. cultural background

C. location

D. race

According to Hall, personal space in social interaction is used ______.

A. consciously

B. favorably

C. unconsciously

D. unfavorably

Being unaware of interpersonal distance in communication may lead to the following EXCEPT ______.

A. discomfort

B. retaliation
C. a breakdown

D. an interaction

Accepted interpersonal distance in the US is better shown among ______.

A. subcultural groups

B. age groups
C. subregional groups

D. gender groups

Knowledge of cultural variations in personal space in communication is most important now in ______.

A. cultural differences

B. good communication
C. enjoying foreign food

D. interpersonal relationship

Because speech is the most convenient form of communication, in the future we want essentially natural conversations with computers. The primary point of contact will be a simple device that will act as our window on the world. It will have to be small enough to slip into your pocket, so there will be a screen but no keyboard: you will simply talk to it. The device will be permanently connected to the Internet and will beep relevant information up to you as it comes in. Such devices will evolve naturally in the next five to ten years.
Just how quickly people will adapt to a voice-based Internet world is uncertain. Many believe that, initially at least, we will need similar conventions for the voice to those we use at present on screen: click, back, forward, and so on. But soon you will undoubtedly be able to interact by voice with all those IT-based services you currently connect with over the Internet by means of a keyboard. This will help the Internet serve the entire population, not just techno-freaks.
Changes like this will encompass the whole world. Because English is the language of science, it will probably remain the language to which the technology is most advanced, but most speech-recognition techniques are transferable to other languages provided there is sufficient motivation to undertake the work.
Of course, in any language there are still huge problems for us to solve. Carefully dictated, clear speech can now be understood by computers with only a 4-5 percent error rate, but even state-of-the-art technology still records 30-40 percent errors with spontaneous speech. Within ten years we will have computers that respond to goal-directed conversation, but for a computer to have a conversation that takes into account human social behavior is probably 50 years off. We’re not going to be chatting to the big screen in the living room just yet.
In the past insufficient speed and memory have held us back, but these days they’re less of an issue. However, there are those in the IT community who believe that current techniques will eventually hit a brick wall. Personally, I believe that incremental developments in performance are more likely. But it’s true that by about 2040 or so, computer architectures will need to become highly parallel if performance is to keep increasing. Perhaps that will inspire some radically new approaches to speech understanding that will supplant the methods we’re developing now.
Questions 6-10 are based on Passage Two.

Having natural conversations with computers implies that computers will be able to______.

A. make artificial speech
B. connect people onto the Internet
C. keep relevant information
D. interact with people on the screen

The word “conventions” in Paragraph 2 means ______.

A. ways

B. traditions
C. customs

D. solutions

To let all people adapt to a voice-based world, operation procedures for conversing with computers should be ______.

A. language transferable

B. error free
C. techno compatible

D. user friendly

The last sentence in Paragraph 4 means ______.

A. a goal-directed conversation is on the way to completion
B. people have no desire to talk to screens in the living room
C. natural conversation with computers is a long way to go
D. other goal-directed conversations seem to be impossible

The writer and those in IT community feel there will need a (an) ______over the development of speech-recognition techniques.

A. step-by-step improvement

B. updated performance
C. rapid change in speed

D. completely new innovation

The over-60 population is growing faster than any other age group. Between 1950 and 2050 it is expected to increase from 200 million to 2 billion. As the number of older persons increases, so will the need to ensure their social inclusion, based on an income from decent work or retirement and a chance to participate in community life through employment, volunteer work or other activities. According to the International Labour Organization, “decent work” is work that meets people’s basic aspirations, not only for income, but also for security for themselves and their families, in a working environment that is safe. Decent work treats men and women equally, without discrimination or harassment. Finally, decent work provides social security and is carried out in conditions of freedom and human dignity.
But there are over 1.2 billion people in the world who live on an income of less than $1 a day, and another billion who live on less than $2 a day. They live hand to mouth, day to day, and do not have enough income to support their daily existence — much less put something aside for retirement. In most developing countries retirement is a luxury few older people can afford. Even in developed countries some hard working people will not have enough to live on retirement. Many women — paid less than men, working more at home than men, and working more informally than men — may not be ready or able to rest at 65.
By tradition, at least in developed countries, there is a change in roles as one moves from active middle years into “gentle” and “enjoyable” retirement. This change in roles has been viewed by the public, by government and by business, as a transition from a productive time of life to one that is unproductive and dependent. But today more than ever, this is not true. Most older people do not withdraw from society. Instead, they continue to contribute to their households, to their descendants and to their communities, although their contribution may not be paid employment.
Instead of producing goods or services — the traditional economic model “products”－older persons may contribute a “product” that has value to society, such as caring for children, caring for other older persons, caring for the oldest old, providing community leadership, mentoring or being an effective role model. But in spite of their significant human and economic benefits, such contributions have not been figured into an economy’s gross national product. And they have not been appropriately valued.
Over the past several decades, most industrialized countries have experienced a substantial drop in the average age at which individuals retire from the labour market. Longer life expectancy and better health have not been accompanied by longer working lives. As a consequence, these countries are facing serious concerns about the viability of social security systems. A key challenge for these countries is to mitigate the effects of a drop in the working age population by increasing and prolonging the participation of older people in the labour market.

The term “social inclusion” (in Para. 1) here means ______.

A. having decent work

B. being equal in jobs

C. having decent income

D. being productive in life

It is implied in Paragraph 2 that ______.

A. people in rich countries can enjoy luxury retirement
B. women if hard working can obtain decent retirement
C. women in informal work are free to choose when to retire
D. people in poor countries have no social security protection

The sentence “But today more than ever, this is not true.” (in Para. 3) means ______.

A. elder people used to be dependent
B. elder people used to enjoy retirement
C. elder people now do not want to retire from their work
D. elder people now do not want to be cut off from society

To meet the challenge of financing social security, the government in developed countries needs to ______.

A. provide more flexible choice for retirement
B. persuade elder people to postpone retirement
C. promote unpaid employment
D. reform social security system

The writer in the passage mainly wants to express that elder people would ______.

A. have an enjoyable retirement

B. prolong their productive life
C. have a more healthy life

D. prolong their work life