Reading Comprehension
Directions: Read the following passage. Choose the best answer from the four choices marked A, B, C and D for each question.

     Electronic computers are among the fastest and most useful instruments for sorting and comparing in use today. Computers provide means for greater speed and accuracy in working with ideas than had previously been possible. With the development of these new tools, it is as if man has suddenly become a millionaire of the mind.
     Although man has been growing mentally richer ever since he started to think, the electronic computer allows and will continue to allow him to perform tremendous mental tasks in a relatively short time. Great scientists of the past produced ideas which were the basis for great advances, but their ideas sometimes had to wait for years before they were understood sufficiently well to be of practical use. With the computer, the ideas of today’s scientists can be studied, tested, distributed, and used more rapidly than ever before.
     Old lines and methods of communication do not work easily or efficiently with as much information as we have now. The repeated actions of preparing, sorting, filling, distributing, and keeping track of records and publications can be as troublesome as calculating. Errors occur because men grow tired and can be distracted.
     The basic job of computers is the processing of information. For this reason computers can be defined as devices which accept information, perform mathematical or logical operations with the information, and then supply the results of these operations as new information.
     Although a sharp dividing line between types of computers is not always easy to see, computers are usually divided into two broad groups: digital and analog. Digital computers work by using specific information which is usually in the form of numbers. Analog computers, on the other hand, usually process continuous information.
     To explain the differences, let us consider two devices which handle information in a manner similar to the two types of computers. A turnstile, which has a counter attached to it, can help to explain the way a digital computer works. Each time a person passes through the turnstile, the indicator quickly jumps from one number to another. Each number registered is separate and specific.
     The continuous change in the level of sand in an hourglass as time passes makes it an analog device. Perhaps the first analog computation was the use of graphs for the solution of surveying problems.

Reading Comprehension
Directions: Read the following passage. Choose the best answer from the four choices marked A, B, C and D for each question.

     A boom economy coupled with dramatic changes in technology has created entirely new jobs and expanded opportunities in age-old professions. Many of these occupations —from computer programmers and Web page designers to chefs and police officers — don’t require a bachelor’s degree. Neither do many good jobs in the arts, crafts, skilled trades, construction, service industry, science, and health fields. Such jobs include: aircraft mechanic , cardiovascular technologist, electronic technician, law clerk, registered nurse , sales rep, secretary, travel agent …. This list goes on.
     Jenna Novell, 21, is now full of career ideas thanks to a ten-month cosmetology program she attended at the Aveda Institute in Minneapolis. Although Novell got lots of career leads from salon recruiters at a career fair hosted by the institute, she didn’t meet any from California — where she wants to live. So she plans to find a job out West on her own, perhaps in television or maybe doing makeup for fashion shows. Or selling cosmetics. Or managing a salon. “You’d be surprised how many occupations there are in this field, ”she says.
     High school students often don’t understand there are so many options available to them, says Farr, author of America’s Jobs for People Without a Four-Year Degree. “That’s a shame. People who are interested in various things really can earn a decent living even if they don’t want to go to college.”
     It’s still true that people with more education, on average, earn more money. But 28% of workers without a four-year degree earn more than the average worker with a bachelor’s degree, according to Harlow G Unger, author of But if I Don’t Want to Go to College?, a guide to educational alternatives to college. And more and more computer-savvy young people are skipping college to join the high-tech revolution as computer network engineers, Internet entrepreneurs, and game designers.
     Don’t get the wrong idea. This doesn’t mean you can waltz into a great job straight out of high school with no skills, training, or effort. To get a good job without a four-year degree, you still must have at least a solid high school education. “Even if you think you’re not going to college, you still need to pay attention, ”says Farr. “You need to know how to be part of a team, how to communicate effectively, how to learn.”

Reading Comprehension
Directions: Read the following passage. Choose the best answer from the four choices marked A, B, C and D for each question.

     From good reading we can derive pleasure, companionship, experience and instruction. A good book may absorb our attention so completely for the time being that we forget our surroundings and even our identity. Reading good books is one of the greatest pleasures in life. It increases our contentment when we are cheerful, and lessens our troubles when we are sad. Whatever may be our main purpose in reading, our contact with good books should never fail to give us enjoyment and satisfaction.
     With a good book in our hands we need never be lonely. Whether the characters portrayed are taken from real life or are purely imaginary, they may become our companions and friends. In the pages of books we can walk with the wise and the good of all lands and all times. The people we meet in books may delight us either because they resemble human friends whom we hold dear or because they present unfamiliar types whom we are glad to welcome as new acquaintances. Our human friends sometimes may bore us, but the friends we make in books never weary us with their company. By turning the page we can dismiss them without any fear of hurting their feelings. When human friends desert us, good books are always ready to give us friendship, sympathy and encouragement.
     One of the most valuable gifts bestowed by books is experience. Few of us can travel far from home or have a wide range of experiences, but all of us can lead varied lives through the pages of books. Whether we wish to escape from the seemingly dull realities of everyday life or whether we long to visit some far-off place, a book will help us when nothing else can. To travel by book we need no bank account to pay our way, no airship or ocean liner or stream-lined train to transport us, no passport to enter the land of our heart’s desire. Through books we may get the thrill of hazardous adventure without danger. We can climb lofty mountains; brave the perils of an Antarctic winter, or cross the scorching sands of the desert, all without hardship. In books we may visit the studios of Hollywood; we may mingle with the gay throngs of the Paris boulevards; we may join the picturesque peasants in an Alpine village or the kindly natives on a South Sea island. Indeed through books the whole world is ours for the asking. The possibilities of our literary experiences are almost unlimited. The beauties of nature, the enjoyment of the music, the triumphs of architecture, the marvels of engineering, are all open to the wonder and enjoyment of those who read.

Reading Comprehension
Directions: Read the following passage. Choose the best answer from the four choices marked A, B, C and D for each question.

     We were pleased to see the Defense Department finally recognize the power of the Supreme Court over prisoners of the military and order the armed forces to follow the Geneva Conventions requirement of decent treatment for all prisoners, even terrorism suspects. It was a real step forward for an administration that tossed aside the Geneva rules years ago and then tried to place itself beyond the reach of the courts.
     However, the Pentagon memo released yesterday, claimed, falsely, that its prisoner policies already generally complied with the Geneva Conventions — the sole exception being the military commissions created by President Bush and struck down by the high court. That disingenuousness may have simply been an attempt to save face. If so, it was distressing but ultimately not all that significant. What really matters is that Congress bring the military prisons back under the rule of law, and create military tribunals for terrorism suspects that will meet the requirements of the Constitution and the Geneva Conventions.
     The other thing that really matters is that the White House actually agrees to obey the law this time. Yesterday, the Senate Judiciary Committee held the first of three hearings scheduled this week on this issue, and the early results were mixed. Most of the senators, including key Republicans, said they were committed to drafting legislation that did more than merely rubber-stamp the way Mr. Bush decided to set up Guantánamo Bay.
     The government’s witnesses, including top lawyers from the Justice and Defense Departments, seemed most interested in arguing that the military commissions were legal. They argued for what would be the worst possible outcome: that Congress just approve what Mr. Bush did and enact exceptions to the Geneva Conventions.
     But Lt. Cmdr. Charles Swift of the Navy, who represented Salim Ahmed Hamdan, the prisoner whose case was before the Supreme Court, provided damning evidence about how utterly flawed those commissions were — from military prosecutors. He quoted one, Capt. John Carr of the Air Force (since promoted to major), who condemned “a halfhearted and disorganized effort by a skeleton group of relatively inexperienced attorneys to prosecute fairly the low-level accused in a process that appears to be rigged. ”
     The administration has professed its allegiance to the humane treatment of prisoners and to the rule of law before. But repairing the constitutional balance of powers and America’s profoundly damaged global image demands more than lip service.

Reading Comprehension
Directions: Read the following passage. Choose the best answer from the four choices marked A, B, C and D for each question.

     The temperature of the Sun is over 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit at the surface, but it rises to perhaps more than 16 million degrees at the center. The Sun is so much hotter than the Earth that matter can exist only as a gas except at the core. In the core of the Sun, the pressures are so great against the gases that, despite high temperature, there may be a small solid core. However, no one really knows, since the center of the Sun can never be directly observed.
     Solar astronomers do know that the Sun is divided into five layers or zones. Starting at the outside and going down into the Sun, the zones are the corona, chromosphere, photosphere, convection zone, and finally the core. The first three zones are regarded as the Sun’s atmosphere. But since the Sun has no solid surface, it is hard to tell where the atmosphere ends and the main body of the Sun begins.
     The Sun’s outermost layer begins about 10,000 miles above the visible surface and goes outward for millions of miles. This is the only part of the Sun that can be seen during an eclipse such as the one in February 1979. At any other time, the corona can be seen only when special instruments are used on cameras and telescopes to shut out the glare of the Sun’s rays.
     The corona is a brilliant, pearly white, filmy light, about as bright as the full Moon. Its beautiful rays are a sensational sight during an eclipse. The corona’s rays flash out in a brilliant fan that has wispy spikelike rays near the Sun’s north and south poles. The corona is thickest at the Sun’s equator.
     The corona rays are made up of gases streaming outward at tremendous speeds and reaching a temperature of more than 2 million degrees Fahrenheit. The rays of gas thin out as they reach the space around the planets. By the time the Sun’s corona rays reach the Earth, they are weak and invisible.

Reading Comprehension
Directions: Read the following passage. Choose the best answer from the four choices marked A, B, C and D for each question. 

     Spelunking has been called “mountain climbing upside down in the dark”. However, this description is not entirely accurate. The mountain climber knows where he is going. He climbs a mountain because it is there. A spelunker, on the other hand, doesn’t know what is there. All he sees when he enters a wild cave is a hole in the surface of the earth — a very dark hole. Once he gets inside he may find it runs only a few hundred feet or, like one cave in Switzerland, more than 35 miles. He may find big hall, subway like tunnels, rivers or strange and beautiful limestone formations.
     Some spelunkers have become famous for their discoveries. Several years ago Norbert Castreet, a Frenchman, was exploring a cave that had a rapidly flowing underground river. He followed the river until it went under a cave wall and disappeared. Wearing a bathing suit and a rubber cap, he dived into the river. He surfaced on the other side of the cave wall and found a huge hall untouched and undisturbed for tens of thousands of years.
     My wife and I became spelunkers almost by accident. We were driving down the Pan-American Highway to Mexico City when I noticed several black openings up in the mountains near the road. I stopped and asked what they were, and learned that they were a network of large caves. Following a guide, we were climbing slowly up the mountain. When we reached the top, a large opening appeared under an overhanging cliff. Inside was a smaller hole covered by a wooden door. Taking a gasoline lamp in one hand, the guide opened the door. We followed him down the smooth cement steps. Strange shapes moved on the walls as his lamp swung back and forth at each step.
     This was a limestone cave, formed hundreds of thousands of years ago by the slow dripping of water through the cracks of the rock. The guide pointed out formations that looked like horses, tigers, hands and plants.
     When we left the cave about an hour later, we saw a sign mentioning the National Speleological Society. Our interest awakened, we noted the address and wrote for further information. The reply informed that there were “grottoes”, local chapter of the society, all over the United States. We joined one that was near our home. Soon we were making our first trip through a wild, unmapped cave. That was 12 years ago. Since then I have explored caves in Europe, Central and South America, and all over the United States.

Reading Comprehension
Directions: Read the following passage. Choose the best answer from the four choices marked A, B, C and D for each question. 

     In a competitive economy, the consumer usually has the choice of several different brands of the same product. Yet underneath their labels, the products are often nearly identical. One manufacturer’s toothpaste tends to differ from another’s. Thus manufacturers are confronted with a problem — how to keep sales high enough to stay in business. Manufacturers solve this problem by advertising. They try to appeal to consumers in various ways. In fact, advertisements may be classified into three types according to the kind of appeals they use.
     One type of advertisement tries to appeal to the consumer’s reasoning mind. It may offer a claim that seems scientific. For example, it may say the dentists recommend Flash toothpaste. In selling a product, the truth of the advertising may be less important than the appearance of truth. A scientific approach gives the appearance of truth.
     Another type of advertisement tries to amuse the potential buyer. Products that are essential boring, such as insecticide, are often advertised in an amusing way. One way of doing this is to make the products appear alive. For example, the advertisers may personify cans of insecticide, and show them attacking mean-faced bugs. Ads of this sort are silly, but they also tend to be amusing. Advertisers believe that consumers are likely to remember and buy products that the consumers associate with fun.
     Associating the product with something pleasant is the technique of the third type of appeal. In this class are ads that suggest that the product will satisfy some basic human desires. One such desire is the wish to be admired by other people. Many automobile advertisements are in this category. They imply that other people will admire you, may even be jealous, when they see you driving the hot, new Aardvark car.
     Another powerful desire to which advertisements appeal is the desire for love. Thus ads for bandages are unlikely to emphasize the way the bandages are made or their low cost; instead, the ads may show a mother tenderly binding up and then kissing her small boy’s cut finger. In the picture there is an open package of Ouch Bandage. The advertiser hopes the consumer will mentally insert an equal sign to create the equation “Ouch Bandage = Love”.
     One only needs to look through a magazine or watch an hour of TV in order to see examples of these three different advertising strategies.

Reading Comprehension
Directions: Read the following passage. Choose the best answer from the four choices marked A, B, C and D for each question.

     Everybody loves a fat pay rise. Yet pleasure at your own can vanish if you learn that a colleague has been given a bigger one. Indeed, if he has a reputation for slacking, you might even be outraged. Such behavior is regarded as “all too human”, with the underlying assumption that other animals would not be capable of this finely developed sense of grievance. But a study by Sarah Brosnan and Frans de Waal of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, which has just been published in Nature, suggests that it is all too monkey, as well.
     The researchers studied the behavior of female brown capuchin monkeys. They look cute. They are good-natured, co-operative creatures, and they share their food tardily. Above all, like their female human counterparts, they tend to pay much closer attention to the value of “goods and services” than males. Such characteristics make them perfect candidates for Dr. Brosnan’s and Dr. de Waal’s study. The researchers spent two years teaching their monkeys to exchange tokens for food. Normally, the monkeys were happy enough to exchange pieces of rock for slices of cucumber. However, when two monkeys were placed in separate but adjoining chambers, so that each could observe what the other was getting in return for its rock, their behavior became markedly different.
     In the world of capuchins grapes are luxury goods (and much preferable to cucumbers). So when one monkey was handed a grape in exchange for her token, the second was reluctant to hand hers over for a mere piece of cucumber. And if one received a grape without having to provide her token in exchange at all, the other either tossed her own token at the researcher or out of the chamber, or refused to accept the slice of cucumber. Indeed, the mere presence of a grape in the other chamber (without an actual monkey to eat it ) was enough to reduce resentment in a female capuchin.
     The researches suggest that capuchin monkeys, like humans, are guided by social emotions. In the wild, they are a co-operative, group living species. Such co-operation is likely to be stable only when each animal feels it is not being cheated. Feelings of righteous indignation, it seems, are not the preserve of people alone, and refusing a lesser reward completely makes these feelings abundantly clear to other members of the group. However, whether such a sense of fairness evolved independently in capuchins and humans, or whether it stems from the common ancestor that the species had 35 million years ago, is, as yet, an unanswered question. 

Reading Comprehension
Directions: Read the following passage. Choose the best answer from the four choices marked A, B, C and D for each question.

     Time talks. It speaks more plainly than words. Time communicates in many ways. Consider the different parts of the day, for example. The time of the day when something is done can give a special meaning to the event. Factory managers in the United States fully realize the importance of an announcement made during the middle of the morning or afternoon that takes everyone away from his work. Whenever they want to make an important announcement, they ask, “When shall we let them know?”
     In social life, time plays a very important part. In the United States, guests tend to feel they are not highly regarded if the invitation to a dinner party is extended only three or four days before the party date. But this is perhaps not true in some other countries. There it may be considered foolish to make an appointment too far in advance because plans which are made for a date more than a week away tend to be forgotten.
     The meanings of time differ in different parts of the world. Thus, misunderstandings arise between people from cultures that treat time differently. Promptness is valued highly in American life. For example, no one would think of keeping a business associate waiting for an hour. It would be too impolite. When equals meet, a person who is five minutes late is expected to make a short apology. If he is less than five minutes late, he will say a few words of explanation, though perhaps he will not complete the sentence.
     In the western world, particularly in the United States, people tend to think of time as something fixed in nature, something from which one cannot escape. As a rule, Americans think of time as a road stretching into the future, along which one progresses. The road has many sections which are to be kept separate — “one thing at a time”. People who cannot plan events are not highly regarded. The American idea of the future is limited, however. It is the foreseeable future, not the future of the South Asian, which may involve centuries. Someone has said of the South Asian idea of time. “Time is like a museum with endless halls and rooms. You, the viewer, are walking through the museum in the dark, holding a light to each scene as you pass it. God is in charge of the museum, and only He knows all that is in it. One lifetime represents one room.”
     Since time has such different meanings in different cultures, communication is often difficult. We will understand each other a little better if we can keep this fact in mind.

Reading Comprehension
Directions: Read the following passage. Choose the best answer from the four choices marked A, B, C and D for each question. 

     The word population reached 6.6 billion this year, up from 6 billion in 1999. By 2025, researchers expect nearly 8 billion people will be living on the planet. Ninety-nine percent of those new inhabitants will be in developing countries.
     Three million migrants are moving from poor countries to wealthier ones each year, and increasingly, their destination is a neighboring country in developing parts of the world. Those statistics come from an annual demographic snapshot of global population numbers and trends, produced by the Population Reference Bureau.
     Rachel Nugent, an economist with the research group, points to the population shifts that are occurring now from Bangladesh to India or from India, Egypt and Yemen to the Persian Gulf.
     She says people are moving within the developing world for the same reasons they migrate to wealthier nations. “People from very poor countries [are] going to less poor countries, people fleeing wars and conflict.” She adds that they are also responding to population pressures because, she says, “some countries are very densely populated, and they often have high population growth. Those people need to go somewhere, and they are often going looking for jobs.”
     Nugent says migration from Guatemala to Mexico is one such example. “And many Guatemalans go to Mexico, probably 25,000 a year that stay and 100,000 a year that go back and forth. And that is a pretty high proportion of the Guatemalan population.”
     The United Nations projects that by 2050, the population of Europe, now at 750 million, will fall by 75 million; and Japan, home to 128 million people, will lose 16 million. Population Reference Bureau senior demographer and survey author Carl Haub says this is going to be a threat to economic health.
     “The number of young people in many European countries is half of the size of their parents’ generation,” he says, “So what you see today are the corporations, the health care system in this country saying, ‘Listen! We can’t find workers. We haven’t had enough workers and now we can’t find workers.’ So they will have to come from some place and that’s going to have to come from outside the country.”

Directions: Choose the phrases closest to their definitions.

assess
assemble 

execute 

hazard 

scarcity 

regulator 

strategic 

controversial 

vulnerable 

apparently 

Directions: Choose the phrases closest to their definitions.

challenge  

inaccessible  

surge  

diverse       

foul  

emerge 

heed 

absurd  

lava  

magnitude 

Directions: Choose the phrases closest to their definitions.

accrue
intensive
erase
constant 

coercion 

vulnerable
permeate
contemporary 

plead 

confidentiality 

Directions: Choose the phrases closest to their definitions.

accrue
intensive
erase
constant 

coercion 

vulnerable
permeate
contemporary 

plead 

confidentiality 

Skim the following pasasge and read the statements given right after the passage and judge whether they are true or false. Write“T”for true and“F”for false.

(1) A crucial political transition in Iraq began at the end of the occupation on June 28 and will last until the general elections set for December 31,2005, as has been documented in the supreme law of today’s Iraq, the Transitional Administrative Law. The interim government was sworn in on June 1, waiting to take the reigns of sovereignty from the Coalition Provisional Authority. Questions remain whether, in the coming 18 months, the interim government can revive Iraq’s sluggish post-war reconstruction and exert effective control over the country.
(2) First of all, the legitimacy of the new government remains an issue. The president, vice presidents, prime minister and ministers have all been appointed, not elected popularly. Both President Ghazi al-Yawer and Prime Minister Iyad Allawi were plucked from the U.S.-picked Governing Council. Also, one third of the new cabinet are also members of the council. The only difference between the interim government and the Governing Council is that all the 25 members of the council were appointed by the United States alone, while the 33 members of coming government have a UN stamp of approval. As the interim government, like the Governing Council, was not elected by the Iraqi people, its authority as a pro-democratic institution is questionable.
(3) The second unknown is whether the interim government can establish some kind of power balance. The Transitional Administrative Law says that the interim government is a federal body consisting of legislative, executive and judicial authorities. The National Congress (275 members) is the legislature. The presidency council (one president and two vice presidents) and the council of ministers (including the prime minister) constitute the executive offices, while the judiciary is made up of a higher judicial council and a federal supreme court, including its branches. Based on a “checks and balances”system among the legislature, judicial and executive bodies, the three branches of government, in theory, provide decentralized balance of powers inside a federal framework, which is based on the government of the United States.
(4) It is still to be seen whether the interim government can agree on a workable constitution and relinquish authority to the will of the Iraqi people once elections do take place. According to the Transitional Administrative Law, from the handover to the end of 2005, Iraq will hold several regional elections, including two for the national congress. There will also be a national referendum on the constitution. The UN will dispatch a group to facilitate the process, but it will not be easy.
(5) Iraq had long been under the role of a hereditary monarch and then a military general after a coup in 1958. Saddam Hussein had exercised heavy-handed rule, allowing no political opposition in the country. Most Iraqis have never experienced democratic rights and may indeed find it hard initially to adapt themselves to such a system. The interim government, therefore, faces a task to implement a political system that Iraqis are neither familiar with nor fully trusting of. Nor are the new leaders.
(6) Furthermore, numerous political factions, religious sects and tribes in Iraq remain deep-rooted. Kurds, in the mountainous north, accounting for 22 percent of Iraqi population, have a standing army of nearly 70,000. Many locals do not want to let go of the de facto autonomy they have had, under U. S. and British air protection, since the 1991 Gulf war. Hussein attempted to subjugate the Kurds under his role, so they have thus been very cooperative with the coalition army.
(7) Yet another variable is whether the interim government can independently exert state power. Despite the explicit support of the UN (supposed to represent the international community), the interim government is still on the leash of the United States, though perceptions may vary to what degree and for how long this will be the case. It is undeniable, nonetheless, that this new government will have limited power. The United States will keep its 138,000 troops in Iraq at least for the duration of the transitional period. The new Iraqi Government has expressed its wish to have, at minimum, a supervisory role in military operations after the turnover. But the Iraqi army and police force will continue to be largely under U. S. leadership. It is very possible, especially in the election of 2005, that there will be differences between the U. S. authorities and the Iraqi Government to regarding the rate at which the army is put under Iraq control.
(8) The security situation in Iraq is still very volatile. Since U. S. President George W. Bush declared the end to major combat on May 1 last year, terrorist bombings against coalition forces and UN personnel as well as Iraqi people have continued, worsening as of late. Several kidnappings of foreigners have occurred. Worse still, the prisoner abuse scandal has seriously eroded U. S. and British credibility in Iraq. Many Iraqis see occupation forces as an invader and occupier rather than liberator. The political vacuum in Iraq has allowed Al Qaeda to extend its violent campaign to Iraq. How the interim government will restore law and the people’s loyalty is yet to be seen.

Directions: Read the statements given right after the passage and judge whether they are True or False. 

     Everybody feels pain sometimes: the pain in the head that comes after eating ice cream or drinking cold water; the sudden muscular pain; the “stitch” that attacks long-distance runners or others whose activities have put great demands on the oxygen supply of the body. These transient pains are not cause for alarm; they usually disappear quickly, return rarely and signify very little.
     In contrast are the unusual, chronic, or exceptionally severe pains that require attention from a doctor, who can determine whether or not they require special care. Angina pectoris(pain of the chest) is a heart pain that lasts from two or three minutes to ten or fifteen. Identification is extremely important, because special drugs are needed for relief and the doctor’s understanding and advice may prevent recurrence of the condition.
     Only a doctor can recognize what are called referred pains. These originate at one point, but are felt at another to which they have been carried by the nerves. A person with continuous pain becomes irritated, tired easily, has difficulty in sleeping, loses appetite, and may even become the victim of what has been called an anxiety state or nervous breakdown. Few diseases develop without pain at some state, and many involve so characteristic a pain as to make diagnosis certain. Whenever a pain is so severe, so prolonged, and so unusual as to arouse alarm, a doctor should be consulted.

Reading Comprehension
Directions: Read the following passage. Choose the best answer from the four choices marked A, B, C and D for each question. 

(1) More and more Japanese want to work for the gaijin. They have stood up to be counted, and they are just over a million strong. That is how many Japanese now work for foreign firms operating in their country, according to the Japan External Trade Organization (JETRO), which released its first survey of foreign firms’ employment on October 22nd. By the standards of rich economies, that is still a small number: roughly 2.3% of the workforce, compared with well over 5% in the United States and Germany. But given the insularity and inflexibility that still hobble too many Japanese firms, this small source of alternative jobs offers an outlet for those who are getting a raw deal in corporate Japan.
(2) In general, foreign firms in Japan attract people whose talents are either under-rewarded or allowed to waste away in local companies. That applies especially to women, who despite high education levels are in much less rewarding white-collar jobs than their western counterparts. Indeed, bright Japanese women lose out to slower and lazier men so frequently in office jobs that even being a flight attendant is considered a high-flying career for more than the obvious reason. Of the Japanese firms that female graduates most want to work for, two are airlines and one is NHK, a large broadcaster.
(3) In such an environment, foreign companies are only too happy to recruit female talent. JETRO, which like most Japanese organizations seems uninterested in whether such talent is being wasted, did not bother to count how many of those million workers were women. But judging by the number of overqualified female MBAs and law-school graduates who are queuing for even a basic job as a secretary, it is a high percentage.
(4) Men who want to be paid for their performance –i. e. , those who are clever and productive-are also increasingly drawn towards foreign firms. This is not surprising, since many Japanese companies continue to reward conformity and seniority over cleverness and talent. Jesper Koll, chief economist at Merrill Lynch in Tokyo, points out that the spread between salaries in Japan has begun to rise over the past few years, though it is still much lower than in Britain or the United States. One reason for this, he says, is that pay-for-performance is increasing in Japan. Foreign firms appear to be leading this trend, which started with foreign investment banks.
(5) To some extent, however, bright young Japanese college graduates are still drawn towards Japanese companies that are considered safe and prestigious. Unsurprisingly, the three most popular places for male university graduates are Sony, Honda and Toyota. And IBM Japan, which young Japanese say is ninth on their list of favorite employers, is now considered to be practically a Japanese company by many locals.
(6) However, if Japanese firms learn to tap Japanese talents, some may recruit professionals who have worked for a foreign firm, as some Japanese banks have tentatively begun to do. Might that tiny 2.3% of the workforce contain a bigger share of Japan’s future business leaders?

Reading Comprehension

Directions: Read the following passage. Choose the best answer from the four choices marked A, B, C and D for each question.

(1) The whole world seemed to be black, black nothingness. The sky was black with bright, shining stars that never twinkled. The sun, a white, burning disk, seemed to hang in the black velvet of the surrounding heavens. This was the scene that spread before the eyes of the first astronaut who left his spaceship to walk in outer space. The name of the Russian astronaut who performed this feat was Leonov, and the date of his walk in space was March 18, 1965. Several months later a similar feat was performed by the first American astronaut to walk in space. Both of these“space walkers”had spent months previous to their flight learning how to control their movements under the strange conditions which exist in space. Wearing their thick space suits, they learned to deal with an environment where there is neither weight nor gravity, neither“up”nor“down”.
(2) We do not realize how much we depend on the earth’s gravity until we are deprived of it. Then our feet no longer stay on the ground, we float around in the air, and the slightest touch may send us drifting off in the opposite direction.
(3) In the laboratories where astronauts are trained for their journeys, they are subjected to conditions that resemble those of flight. It takes time for them to prepare for the great changes that occur in space. When the spaceship leaves the earth at tremendous speed, the astronauts feel as if they are being crushed against the spaceship floor. Later, when they leave the zone of the earth’s gravitation, they are unable to stay in one place, Simple actions, such as eating and drinking, become very difficult to perform. You may get an inkling of what the astronauts have to deal with if you try to drink a glass of water while standing on your head or while just lying down.
(4) The beginnings of man’s conquest of space took place in 1958, seven years before Leonov’s trip. The first successful launching of“Sputnik”demonstrated that it was indeed possible to send objects far enough out of range of earth’s gravity so that they would not fall back to earth. Rather, such objects could be forced to revolve about the earth, just as the moon does. However, while the moon is so far from earth that it takes it a month to revolve around the earth, manmade satellites, which are closer to earth, can make a complete revolution in a few hours.
(5) It was three years after the first satellite launching that a spaceship containing a man made a successful flight. The flight lasted less than two hours, but it pointed the way to future developments.
(6) Other planets are so far away that spaceships must attain tremendous speeds to reach them in a reasonable time. If spaceships were launched from space or from the moon, the absence of weight would permit the ships to be launched with great speed at reduced pressures. A relatively small explosion would be enough to send a ship off at a very fast rate. And, since there is no atmosphere in space as there is on earth, the spaceship would meet with no resistance. To illustrate this point, remember how strong the wind feels if we are traveling fast in a car; then imagine a car traveling through an area where there is no wind. The windless condition is comparable to the condition in outer space.
(7) The first astronaut to walk in space, Leonov, and his companion, Beliaiev, began making preparations for the walk as soon as their spaceship was launched. The spaceship was equipped with a double door, which was fitted with a bellows between the ship and the outside. This made it possible for the astronaut, in his space suit with oxygen supply, to go first from the air-filled ship to the bellows. Then the air was let out of the bellows, and, while the man stepped outside, the air inside the ship remained at normal pressure. If the door had opened directly into space, the air in the ship would have rushed out and been lost when the door opened.
(8) Leonov and Beliaiev practiced testing the doors several times after they had begun revolving around the earth. When the time came for Leonov to go out, his companion helped him attach the cable that was to keep him from floating away from the ship. Then Leonov entered the bellows, and the door closed behind him. As the air was let out of the bellows, he felt his suit swell up because of the air pressure inside. When there was no air left in the bellows, the outer door opened, and Leonov could see, simultaneously, the blackness of space and the blinding light of the sun.
(9) If the sky appears blue to us on earth, it is because the earth’s atmosphere absorbs a certain number of blue rays of sunlight. Out where there is no air, this phenomenon does not take place. On the earth, our atmosphere diffuses light so that, when the sun is up, light seems to be everywhere. However, in the airless realms of outer space, strong lights, such as the sun, exist side by side with a dark similar to the dark of the blackest night. The absence of air also explains why the stars do not seem to twinkle in space, as they do from the earth.
(10) Leonov reported that the earth appeared as a huge, round disk, filling a large part of the sky. He found that the relief of hills and mountains was more easily observed from that distance than from a plane flying at a few thousand feet.
(11) While Leonov was outside the ship, he kept in touch by telephone with his companion and with the earth. He opened the shutter of the movie camera, which made a record of what he did and saw. When the signal was given for him to return to the ship, he was enjoying the cosmos so much that he was disappointed to have to stop his wanderings so soon.

Reading Comprehension
Directions: Read the following passage. Choose the best answer from the four choices marked A, B, C and D for each question.

     Everybody loves a fat pay rise. Yet pleasure at your own can vanish if you learn that a colleague has been given a bigger one. Indeed, if he has a reputation for slacking, you might even be outraged. Such behavior is regarded as “all too human”, with the underlying assumption that other animals would not be capable of this finely developed sense of grievance. But a study by Sarah Brosnan and Frans de Waal of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, which has just been published in Nature, suggests that it is all too monkey, as well.
     The researchers studied the behavior of female brown capuchin monkeys. They look cute. They are good-natured, co-operative creatures, and they share their food tardily. Above all, like their female human counterparts, they tend to pay much closer attention to the value of “goods and services” than males. Such characteristics make them perfect candidates for Dr. Brosnan’s and Dr. de Waal’s study. The researchers spent two years teaching their monkeys to exchange tokens for food. Normally, the monkeys were happy enough to exchange pieces of rock for slices of cucumber. However, when two monkeys were placed in separate but adjoining chambers, so that each could observe what the other was getting in return for its rock, their behavior became markedly different.
     In the world of capuchins grapes are luxury goods (and much preferable to cucumbers). So when one monkey was handed a grape in exchange for her token, the second was reluctant to hand hers over for a mere piece of cucumber. And if one received a grape without having to provide her token in exchange at all, the other either tossed her own token at the researcher or out of the chamber, or refused to accept the slice of cucumber. Indeed, the mere presence of a grape in the other chamber (without an actual monkey to eat it ) was enough to reduce resentment in a female capuchin.
     The researches suggest that capuchin monkeys, like humans, are guided by social emotions. In the wild, they are a co-operative, group living species. Such co-operation is likely to be stable only when each animal feels it is not being cheated. Feelings of righteous indignation, it seems, are not the preserve of people alone, and refusing a lesser reward completely makes these feelings abundantly clear to other members of the group. However, whether such a sense of fairness evolved independently in capuchins and humans, or whether it stems from the common ancestor that the species had 35 million years ago, is, as yet, an unanswered question. 

Reading Comprehension
Directions: Read the following passage. Choose the best answer from the four choices marked A, B, C and D for each question. 

1. When Jules Verne wrote Journey to the Center of the Earth in 1864, there were many conflicting theories about the nature of the earth’s interior. Some geologists though that it contained a highly compressed ball of incandescent gas, while others suspected that it consisted of separate graphite shells, each made of a different material. Today well over a century later, there is still little direct evidence of what lies beneath our feet. Most of our knowledge of the earth’s interior comes not from mines or bore holes, but from the study of seismic waves—powerful pulses of energy released by earthquakes.
2. The way that seismic waves travel shows that the earth’s interior is far from uniform. The continents and the seabed are formed by the crust—a thin sphere of relatively light, solid rock. Beneath the crust lies the mantle, a very different layer that extends approximately halfway to the earth’s center. There the rock is the subject of a battle between increasing heat and growing pressure.
3. In its high levels, the mantle is relatively cool; at greater depths, high temperatures make the rock behave more like a liquid than a solid. Deeper still, the pressure is even more intense, preventing the rock from melting in spite of a higher temperature.
4. Beyond a depth of around 2,900 kilometers, a great change takes place and the mantle gives way to the core. Some seismic waves cannot pass through the core and others are bent by it. From this and other evidence, geologists conclude that the outer core is probably liquid, with a solid center. It is almost certainly made of iron, mixed with smaller amount of other elements such as nickel.
5. The conditions in the earth’s core make it a far more alien world than space. Its solid iron heart is subjected to unimaginable pressure and has a temperature of about 9,000° F. Although scientists can speculate about its nature, neither humans nor machines will ever be able to visit it.