Section Ⅱ Reading Comprehension
Part A
Directions:
Read the following four texts. Answer the questions below each text by choosing A, B, C or D. Mark your answers on ANSWER SHEET 1. (40 points)
Text 1
For every Chad Hurley or Mark Zuckerberg there are many Sathvik Krishnamurthys. The first two are the young entrepreneurs behind YouTube and Facebook, respectively, who are striking it rich in Silicon Valley’s current Web boom. Mr. Hurley last year sold video site YouTube to Google for more than $1.7 billion just 19 months after the company’s founding, netting him a personal fortune valued at more than $340 million. Mr. Zuckerberg has built social-networking site Facebook into a start-up valued at $15 billion in less than four years。
Then there is Mr. Krishnamurthy. Plenty of wannabe Silicon Valley entrepreneurs expect to land on a spectacular path to success, but most end up with stories akin to his. Mr. Krishnamurthy is the 39-year-old chief executive of Voltage Security, a start-up that makes security software. He will tell you that the real name of the entrepreneurial game is plain slogging it out。
Since March 2003, Mr. Krishnamurthy has burned the midnight oil at Voltage. He has had to cultivate a brand-new executive team, build a product line from scratch and travel the world to solicit wary customers. Along the way, he has weathered travails such as a hostile climate to tech start-ups and a six-month delay in the shipping of a key product。
At times, things got so tough that the CEO needed pep talks himself, says Ken Gullicksen, a Voltage board member and a venture capitalist at Morgenthaler Ventures. “We as a board have had to give Sath private encouragement,” says Mr. Gullicksen. “Even a guy like him feels the pain。”
Every industry has its superstars and its sloggers, of course. But the tech industry of the late 1990s and earlier this decade has seen an unusual number of speedy two-year cycles that end with a lucrative sale or initial public offering. And when that doesn’t happen, the process can get so grueling and so protracted that some venture capitalists say they’ve had to get creative to convince burned-out entrepreneurs to not bail。
21.The statistics in the first paragraph is enumerated to_____。
[A] demonstrate the capabilities of the ambitious entrepreneurs
[B] display the rapid growth of websites
[C] illustrate the fierce competition between Google and Facebook
[D] reveal the triumph attained by some CEOs。
22.The second paragraph is intended to convey_____。
[A] other tech CEOs struggle
[B] the mishaps of Mr. Krishnamurthy
[C] the coming contest of Silicon Valley
[D] the deficiency of security software
23.The phrase “slogging…out” in Line 5, paragraph 2 most probably denotes_____。
[A] record with details [B] work with difficulty
[C] obscure with pretext [D] set free commercial talents
24.The remarks by Mr. Gullicksen indicate_____。
[A] his apprehension of the tech start-ups
[B] the potential of pep talks
[C] the worst predicament a CEO may encounter
[D] the side-effects of private encouragement
25.It can be inferred from the last paragraph that the typical status in the market place is____。
[A] emergence of superstars and sloggers
[B] the limited number of short-term juicy transactions or dealings
[C] with draw of most burnt-out entrepreneurs
[D] the grueling and protracted asset evaluation by the federal government
Text 2
Even today in the modern, developed world, surveys show that parents still prefer to have a boy rather than a girl. One longstanding reason why boys have been seen as a greater blessing has been that they are expected to become better economic providers for their parents’ old age. Yet it is time for parents to think again. Girls may now be a better investment。
Girls get better grades at school than boys, and in most developed countries more women than men go to university. Women will thus be better equipped for the new jobs of the 21st century, in which brains count a lot more than brawn. In Britain far more women than men are now training to become doctors. And women are more likely to provide sound advice on investing their parents’ nest egg: surveys show that women consistently achieve higher financial returns than men do。
Furthermore, the increase in female employment in the rich world has been the main driving force of growth in the past couple of decades. Those women have contributed more to global GDP growth than have either new technology or the new giants. Add the value of housework and child-rearing, and women probably account for just over half of world output. It is true that women still get paid less and few make it to the top of companies, but, as prejudice fades over coming years, women will have great scope to boost their productivity—and incomes。
Governments, too, should embrace the potential of women. Women complain (rightly) of centuries of exploitation. Yet, to an economist, women are not exploited enough: they are the world’s most under-utilised resource; getting more of them into work is part of the solution to many economic woes, including shrinking populations and poverty。
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