六级快速快速阅读训练.doc

六级快速阅读 Reading Comprehension (Skimming and Scanning) (15 minutes) Passage1: The Next Society The new economy may or may not materialize, but there is no doubt that the next society will be with us shortly. In the developed world, and probably in the emerging countries as well, this new society will be a good deal more important than the new economy (if any). It will be quite different from the society of the late 20th century, and also different from what most people expect. Much of it will be unprecedented. And most of it is already here, or is rapidly emerging. In the developed countries, the dominant factor in the next society will be something to which most people are only just beginning to pay attention: the rapid growth in the older population and the rapid shrinking of the younger generation. Politicians everywhere still promise to save the existing pension system, but they--and their constituents--know perfectly well that in another 25 years people will have to keep working until their mid-70s, health permitting. What has not yet sunk in is that a growing number of older people--say those over 50--will not keep on working as traditional full time nine-to-five employees, but will participate in the labor force in many new and different ways: as temporaries, as part-timers, as consultants on special assignments, and so on. What used to be personnel and are now known as human resources departments still assume that those who work for an organization are full-time employees. Employment laws and regulations are based on the same assumption. Within 20 or 25 years, however, perhaps as many as half the people who work for an organization will not be employed by it, certainly not on a full-time basis. This will be especially true for older people. New ways of working with people at arm's length will increasingly become the central managerial issue of employing organizations, and not just of businesses. The shrinking of the younger population will cause an even greater upheaval, if only because nothing like this has happened since the dying centuries of the Roman Empire. In every single developed country, but also in China and Brazil, the birth rate is now well below the replacement rate of 2.2 live births per woman of reproductive age. Politically, this means that immigration will become an important and highly divisive issue in all rich countries. It will cut across all traditional political alignments. Economically, the decline in the young population will change markets in fundamental ways. Growth in family formation has been the driving force of all domestic markets in the developed world, but the rate of family formation is certain to fall steadily unless bolstered by large-scale immigration of younger people. The homogeneous mass market that emerged in all rich countries after the Second World War has been youth-determined from the start. It will now become middle-age-determined, or perhaps more likely it will split into two: a middle-age-determined mass market and a much smaller youth-determined one. And because the supply of young people will shrink, creating new employment patterns to attract and hold the growing number of older people (especially older educated people) will become increasingly important. Knowledge is all The next society will be a knowledge society. Knowledge will be its key resource, and knowledge workers will be the dominant group in its workforce. Its three main characteristics will be: · Borderlessness, because knowledge travels even more effortlessly than money. · Upward mobility, available to everyone through easily acquired formal education. · The potential for failure as well as success. Anyone can acquire the "means of production", i. e, the knowledge required for the job, but not everyone can win. Together, those three characteristics will make the knowledge society a highly competitive one, for organizations and individuals alike. Information technology, although only one of many new features of the next society, is already having one hugely important effect: it is allowing knowledge to spread near-instantly, and making it accessible to everyone. Given the ease and speed at which information travels, every institution in the knowledge society--not only businesses, but also schools, universities, hospitals and increasingly government agencies too-- has to be globally competitive, even though most organizations will continue to be local in their activities and in their markets. This is because the Internet will keep customers everywhere informed on what is available anywhere in the world, and at what price. This new knowledge economy will rely heavily on knowledge workers. At present, this term is widely used to describe people with considerable theoretical knowledge and learning: doctors, lawyers, teachers, accountants, chemical engineers. But the most striking growth will be in "knowledge technologists" ~ computer technicians, software designers, analysts in clinical labs, manufacturing technologists, paralegals. These people are as much manual workers as they are knowledge workers; in fact, they usually spend far more time working with their hands than with their brains. But their manual work is based on a substantial amount of theoretical knowledge which can be acquired only through formal education, not through an apprenticeship. They are not, as a rule, much better paid than traditional skilled workers, but they see themselves as "professionals" . Just as unskilled manual workers in manufacturing were the dominant social and political force in the 20th century, knowledge technologists are likely to become the dominant social--and perhaps also political--force over the next decades. The new protectionism Structurally, too, the next society is already diverging from the society almost all of us still live in. The 20th century saw the rapid decline 'of the sector that had dominated society for 10,000 years: agriculture. In volume terms, farm production now is at least four or five times what it was before the First World War. But in 1913 farm products accounted for 70% of world trade, whereas now their share is at most 17%. In the early years of the 20th century, agriculture in most developed countries was the largest single contributor to GDP; now in rich countries its contribution has dwindled to the point of becoming marginal. And the farm population is down to a tiny proportion of the total. Manufacturing has traveled a long way down the same road. Since the Second World War, manufacturing output in the developed world has probably tripled in volume, but inflation adjusted manufacturing prices have fallen steadily, whereas the cost of prime knowledge products-health care and education-has tripled, again adjusted for inflation. The relative purchasing power of manufactured goods against knowledge products is now only one-fifth or one-sixth of what it was 50 years ago. Manufacturing employment in America has fallen from 35% of the workforce in the 1950s to less than half that now, without causing much social disruption. But it may be too much to hope for an equally easy transition in countries such as Japan or Germany, where blue-collar manufacturing workers still make up 25--30% of the labor force. The decline of farming as a producer of wealth and of livelihoods has allowed farm protectionism to spread to a degree that would have been unthinkable before the Second World War. In the same way, the decline of manufacturing will trigger an explosion of manufacturing protectionism-even as lip service continues to be paid to free trade. This protectionism may not necessarily take the form of traditional tariffs, but of subsidies, quotas and regulations of all kinds. Even more likely, regional blocks will emerge that trade freely internally but are highly protectionist externally. The European Union, NAFFA and Mercosur already point in that direction. The future of the corporation Statistically, multinational companies play much the same part in the world economy as they did in 1913. But they have become very different animals. Multinationals in 1913 were domestic firms with subsidiaries abroad, each of them self-contained, in charge of a politically defined territory, and highly autonomous. Multinationals now tend to be organized globally along product or service lines. But like the multinationals of 1913, they are held together and controlled by ownership. By contrast, the multinationals of 2025 are likely to be held together and controlled by strategy. There will still be ownership, of course. But alliances, joint ventures, minority stakes, know-how agreements contracts will increasingly be the building blocks of a confederation. This kind of organization will need a new kind of top management. In most countries, and even in a good many large and complex companies, top management is still seen as an extension of operating management. Tomorrow's top management, however, is likely to be a distinct and separate organ: it will stand for the company. One of the most important jobs ahead for the top management of {he big company of tomorrow, and especially of the multinational, will be to balance the conflicting demands on business being made by the need for both short-term and long-term results, and by the corporation's various constituencies: customers, shareholders, knowledge employees and communities. 1. The new society will be much more important than the new economy only in the developed countries. 2. In another 25 years people will have to keep working as full-time employees until their mid- 70s if health permits. 3. Nowadays in China, because of the population policy, the birth rate has decreased. 4. In developed countries, the issue of immigration will become important politically. 5. The dominant part in the next society's work force is 6. ______ makes knowledge spread rapidly and available to everyone. 7. ______ had dominated society for 10,000 years but declined rapidly in the 20th century. 8. In order to adjust for inflation, the cost of ______ which are the main knowledge products was tripled. 9. Multinationals in 1913 were composed of a domestic firms and its self-contained and autonomous 10. Top management in the Next society will be a ______ organ. Passage2: Rain forests Tropical rainforests are the most diverse ecosystem (生态系统) on Earth, and also the oldest. Today, tropical rainforests cover only 6 percent of the Earth's ground surface, but they are home to over half of the planet’s plant and animal species. What Is a Rainforest? Generally speaking, a rainforest is an environment that receives high rainfall and is dominated by tall trees. A wide range of ecosystems fall into this category, of course. But most of the time when people talk about rainforests, they mean the tropical rainforests located near the equator. These forests receive between 160 and 400 inches of rain per year. The total annual rainfall is spread pretty evenly throughout the year, and the temperature rarely dips below 60 degrees Fahrenheit. This steady climate is due to the position of rainforests on the globe. Because of the orientation of the Earth's axis, the Northern and Southern hemispheres each spend part of the year tilted away from the sun. Since rainforests are at the middle of the globe, located near the equator, they arc not especially affected by this change. They receive nearly the same amount of sunlight, and therefore heat, all year. Consequently, the weather in these regions remains fairly constant. The consistently wet, warm weather and ample sunlight give plant life everything it needs to thrive. Trees have the resources to grow to tremendous heights, and they live for hundreds, even thousands, of years. These giants, which reach 60 to 150 ft in the air, form the basic structure of the rainforest. Their top branches spread wide in order to capture maximum sunlight. This creates a thick canopy (树冠) level at the top of the forest, with thinner greenery levels underneath. Some large trees grow so tall that they even tower over the canopy layer. As you go lower, down into the rainforest, you find less and less greenery. The forest floor is made up of moss, fungi, and decaying plant matter that has fallen from the upper layers. The reason for this decrease in greenery is very simple the overabundance of plants gathering sunlight at the top of the forest blocks most sunlight from reaching the bottom of the forest, making it difficult for robust plants to thrive. The, Forest for the Trees The ample sunlight and extremely wet climate of many tropical areas encourage the growth of towering trees with wide canopies. This thick top layer of the rainforest dictates the lives of all other plants in the forest. New tree seedlings rarely survive to make it to the top unless some older trees die, creating a "hole" in the canopy. When this happens, all of the seedlings on the ground level compete intensely to reach the sunlight. Many plant species reach the top of the forest by climbing the tall trees. It is much easier to ascend this way, because the plant doesn't have to form its own supporting structure. Some plant species, called epiphytes, grow directly on the surface of the giant trees. These plants, which include a variety of orchids and ferns, make up much of the understory, the layer of the rainforest right below the canopy. Epiphytes are close enough to the top to receive adequate light, and the runoff from the canopy layer provides all the water and nutrients(养分)they need, which is important since they don't have access to the nutrients in the ground. Stranglers and Buttresses Some epiphytes eventually develop into stranglers. They grow long, thick roots that extend down the tree trunk into the ground. As they continue to grow, the roots form a sort of web structure all around the tree. At the same time, the strangler plant's branches extend upward, spreading out into the canopy. Eventually, the strangler may block so much light from above, and absorb such a high percentage of nutrients from the ground below, that the host tree dies. Competition over nutrients is almost as intense as competition for light. The excessive rainfall rapidly dissolves nutrients in the soil making it relatively infertile except at the top layers. For this reason, rainforest tree roots grow outward to cover a wider area, rather than downward to lower levels. This makes rainforest trees somewhat unstable, since they don't have very strong anchors in the ground. Some trees compensate for this by growing natural buttresses. These buttresses are basically tree trunks that extend out from the side of the tree and clown to the ground, giving the tree additional support. Rainforest trees are dependent on ba