泰祺教育

Section II  Reading Comprehension

Part A

Directions: 

Read the following four texts. Answer the questions after each text by choosing A, B, C or D. Mark your answers on the ANSWER SHEET. (40 points)

Text 1

Over the past decade, marketers have increasingly turned to social-media networks like Facebook and Twitter to create buzz around their products. But what impact do tweets and other recommendations have on sales, and how can companies get a bigger return on their investments in these important channels?

To get a clearer view, we examined the purchase decisions of 20,000 European consumers, across 30 product areas and more than 100 brands, in 2013 and 2014. Respondents were asked how significantly social media influenced their decision journeys and about instances when they themselves recommended products.

We found that the impact of social media on buying decisions is greater than previously estimated and growing fast. Social recommendations induced an average of 26 percent of purchases across all product categories, according to our data. That’s substantially higher than the 10 to 15 percent others have estimated. For the 30 product categories we studied, roughly two-thirds of the impact was direct; that is, recommendations played a critical role at the point of purchase. The remaining third was indirect; social media has an effect at earlier decision-journey touch points — for example, when a recommendation created initial awareness of a product or interactions with friends or other influencers helped consumers to compare product attributes or to evaluate higher-value features. We found that in 2014, consumers made 10 percent more purchases on the back of social-media recommendations than they had in 2013.

Consumers, we found, access social media to very different degrees in different product categories. At the low end, only about 15 percent of our respondents reported using social media in choosing utility services. For other categories, such as travel, investment services, and over-the-counter drugs, 40 to 50 percent of consumers looked to social recommendations.

Product categories tend to have their own discrete groups of influencers. Our data showed that the overlap of recommenders between any two consumer categories was very small—a maximum of 15 percent for any two pairs of products we analyzed. Timing matters as well: a first-time purchaser, for example, is roughly 50 percent more likely to turn to social media than a repeat buyer.

While the role of digital influence is expanding, the analog world remains important. Among the more than 100 brands we studied, about half of the recommendations were made offline — in person or by phone.

Our research shows that a small number of active influencers accounted for a disproportionate share of total recommendations. These power users are even more significant for product categories such as shoes and clothing: 5 percent of the recommenders accounted for 45 percent of the social influence generated. 

Text 2

The relationship between formal education and economic growth in poor countries is widely misunderstood by economists and politicians alike. Progress in both areas is undoubtedly necessary for the social, political and intellectual development of these and all other societies; however, the conventional view that education should be one of the very highest priorities for promoting rapid economic development in poor countries is wrong. We are fortunate that is it, because building new educational systems there and putting enough people through them to improve economic performance, would require two or three generations. The findings of a research institution have consistently shown that workers in all countries can be trained on the job to achieve radically higher productivity and, as a result, radically higher standards of living.

Ironically, the first evidence for this idea appeared in the United States. Not long ago, with the country entering a recession and Japan at its pre-bubble peak, the U.S. workforce was mocked as poorly educated and one of the primary cause of the poor U.S. economic performance. Japan was, and remains, the global leader in automotive-assembly productivity. Yet the research revealed that the U.S. factories of Honda, Nissan, and Toyota achieved about 95 percent of the productivity of their Japanese counterparts——a result of the training that U.S. workers received on the job.

More recently, while examining housing construction, the researchers discovered that illiterate, non-English-speaking Mexican workers in Houston, Texas, consistently met best-practice labor productivity standards despite the complexity of the building industry's work.

What is the real relationship between education and economic development? We have to suspect that continuing economic growth promotes the development of education even when governments don't force it. After all, that's how education got started. When our ancestors were hunters and gatherers 10,000 years ago, they didn't have time to wonder much about anything besides finding food. Only when humanity began to get its food in a more productive way was there time for other things.

As education improved, humanity's productivity potential increased as well. When the competitive environment pushed our ancestors to achieve that potential, they could in turn afford more education. This increasingly high level of education is probably a necessary condition for the complex political systems required by advanced economic performance. Thus poor countries might not be able to escape their poverty traps without political changes that may be possible only with broader formal education. 

Text 3

Being a man has always been dangerous. There are about 105 males born for every 100 females, but this ratio drops to near balance at the age of maturity, and among 80-year-olds there are twice as many women as men. But the great universal of male mortality is being changed. Now, boy babies survive almost as well as girls do. This means that, for the first time, there will be an excess of boys in those crucial years when they are searching for a mate. More important, another chance for natural selection has been removed. Fifty years ago, the chance of a baby (particularly a boy baby) surviving depended on its weight. A kilogram too light or too heavy meant almost certain death. Today it makes almost no difference. Since much of the variation is due to genes, one more agent of evolution has gone.

There is another way to commit evolutionary suicide: stay alive, but have fewer children. Few people are as fertile as in the past. Except in some religious communities, very few women have 15 children. Nowadays the number of births, like the age of death, has become average. Most of us have roughly the same number of offspring. Again, differences between people and the opportunity for natural selection to take advantage of it have diminished. India shows what is happening. The country offers wealth for a few in the great cities and poverty for the remaining tribal peoples. The grand ordinary of today——everyone being the same in survival and number of offspring——means that natural selection has lost 80% of its power in upper-middle-class India compared to the tribes.

For us, this means that evolution is over; the biological Utopia has arrived. Strangely, it has involved little physical change. No other species fills so many places in nature. But in the pass 100,000 years —— even the pass 100 years —— our lives have been transformed but our bodies have not. We did not evolve, because machines and society did it for us. Darwin had a phrase to describe those ignorant of evolution: they “l(fā)ook at an organic being as a savage looks at a ship, as at something wholly beyond his comprehension.” No doubt we will remember a 20^th century way of life beyond comprehension for its ugliness. But however amazed our descendants may be at how far from Utopia we were, they will look just like us.

Text 4

Supporters of cutting corporate taxes argue that those savings would free up more capital for investment, allowing companies to expand operations and hire more workers. That was the argument that candidate Donald Trump offered last year when he proposed “reducing taxes tremendously” for both small and big businesses.

“That's going to be a job creator like we haven't seen since Ronald Reagan,” Trump said in the first presidential debate in September 2016. But the evidence for that outcome is slim, according to the Institute for Policy Studies analysis. To test the claim that corporate tax cuts create jobs, the group looked at the payroll changes at 92 publicly held U.S. corporations that posted profits every year from 2008 through 2015 and paid less than 20% of these earnings in federal income tax.

The researchers relied on companies' public accounting statements to calculate the amount of taxes paid on company and news reports to assess changes in payrolls. What they found was that more than half of these lightly taxed companies actually shed jobs during the period when the overall economy boosted payrolls by 6%.

Where did the tax savings go? Many of the companies on the list used the free cash to buy back stock, helping to boost the price of their company's shares. The top 10 job-cutters each spent $45 billion in stock buybacks over the 2008-2015 period, a pace six times that of the S&P 500 corporate average, according to the researchers.

Congressional Republicans favor deep cuts in both corporate and individual tax rates, but there is less consensus on how to pay for the lost revenues without adding to the national debt. The difficulty in striking that balance has, for decades, thwarted multiple efforts at overhauling the complex U.S. tax code.

The latest effort to cut corporate taxes will rely on generating popular support for the idea, which is one reason proponents insist it would create jobs. But the historical evidence is slim, according to Cornell economist Karel Mertens and University College London economist Morten Ravn.

“In contrast to the personal income tax cut, there is no evidence that a cut in corporate taxes is associated with any significant impact on employment, despite the considerable and significant immediate increase in output.” they wrote.

Part B

Directions:

Read the following text and answer the questions by finding information from the left column that corresponds to each of the marked details given in the right column. There are two extra choices in the right column. Mark your answers on the ANSWER SHEET . (10 points)

The United States Interstate Highway System is an infrastructure feat of unprecedented proportions. Not only does it join all fifty states in the union together allowing for rapid transport of goods and people, but it also has legitimate claim to the title of the largest public works program in history. The project was motivated by both military and economic goals. Interest in the project existed since the early 1940's, but was delayed by the outbreak of World War II, followed by the postwar recovery. Although approved by Congress in 1944, the building did not actually begin until 1956.

The postwar prosperity in America accentuated the need for such a massive infrastructure project. After America's success in World War II and recovery of its economy from the Great Depression, the population's disposable income soared, allowing most families to purchase automobiles, previously thought of as luxury items. With the sudden boom of cars, a more efficient road on which to travel was desperately needed, allowing travelers to safely and reliably visit other states or destinations closer to home.

The same surge in car ownership that created the need for the interstate highway system also provided the means by which to pay for the project. A new tax on gasoline provided 90 percent of the funding for the project, and state taxes covered the remaining 10 percent. With the new highway system in place, not only could travelers visit previously unfeasible destinations on their holidays and vacations, but businesses could transport their products to markets in other states, increasing competition across the country, to the benefit of consumers and product quality alike.

The military had a keen eye on the system as well. Troop transport was now possible to all corners of America in a rapid and efficient manner, and the long stretches of straight highways instantly provided runways for military aircraft in times of emergency. The country, linked together by a network of roads that greatly reduced travel time, could now more efficiently be defended.

In the last forty years alone, 17 trillion miles have been traveled on the US Interstate Highway System. Those miles can be equated to three trips around the world for every American, a trip to the moon for 75 million people, or three light years in space. No matter what figure is used, the numbers are stunning. The interstate highway has gotten and continues to get people where they need to go in America.