【每日阅读训练第四期——速度越障6系列】【6-4】经管

猫咪团团

[Speed]

[Section 1]

A New China-Taiwan Agreement Protects Investors
09 August, 2012

China and Taiwan may disagree on political issues. But on Thursday they reached an agreement to protect investors. The agreement is important because China and Taiwan do not have diplomatic relations. China claims Taiwan as its territory. But Taiwan has been self-governing since nineteen forty-nine.

The sides agreed to open new industries to investment and to inform the other within twenty-four hours if an investor is arrested. Talks on the deal have lasted two years. But they have been slowed because of the different legal systems in the two areas.

Chinese negotiator Chen Yunlin and Chiang Pin-kung of Taiwan signed the agreements in Taipei. They set up a way to negotiate, or an arbitration mechanism. The deal also will open new areas of business and industry to investment.

Chinese interests had held back investment because of fears of a change in Taiwan's government.

Market experts expect Chinese investors to buy shares of Taiwanese companies listed on Taiwan's stock exchange. Experts think high-technology and travel industries will receive a lot of investment over the short term.

Taiwanese share prices are considered undervalued although companies are doing well. Jack Huang is a lawyer in Taipei. He says China will buy stocks and seek partnerships with Taiwanese companies, especially in technology.

JACK HUANG ACT IN ENGLISH: "Quite a bit of the investment dollars, either from the Chinese companies or from the Chinese government wealth fund, they will find a decent percentage of that include Taiwan stocks. All things considered, Taiwan stocks are undervalued, Taiwan companies are fundamentally sound."

Taiwan's economy is over four hundred thirty billion dollars. Taiwan permits Chinese investors to buy directly into Taiwanese companies in two hundred forty-seven industries. They can also buy up to a ten percent share in most companies.

Experts in Taiwan say China wants to invest in the island to support efforts at political reunification. The Nationalist Party, or KMT, of Chiang Kai-shek went to Taiwan at the end of the country's civil war in the nineteen forties.

Today, Taiwan has several political parties. The main opposition party held power for eight years starting in two thousand. President Ma Ying-jeou of the KMT has sought closer economic ties with the mainland. In twenty-ten, China invested one billion dollars in Taiwan in 2010 after a deal that year reduced tax rates.

[384 words]

[Section 2]

The college-cost calamity
Many American universities are in financial trouble
Aug 4th 2012 | CHICAGO | from the print edition

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WITH its leafy avenues and Gothic buildings, the University of Chicago seems a sober, solid sort of place. John D. Rockefeller, whose money built it, said it was the “best investment I ever made”. Yet Chicago and other not-for-profit American universities have been piling on the debt as if they were high-tech start-ups.

Long-term debt at not-for-profit universities in America has been growing at 12% a year, estimate Bain & Company, a consultancy, and Sterling Partners, a private-equity firm (see chart 1). A new report looked at the balance-sheets and cashflow statements of 1,692 universities and colleges between 2006 and 2010, and found that one-third were significantly weaker than they had been several years previously.

[attachimg=290,227]104784[/attachimg]

A crisis in higher education has been brewing for years. Universities have been spending like students in a bar who think a Rockefeller will pick up the tab. In the past two years the University of Chicago has built a spiffy new library (where the books are cleverly retrieved by robots), a new arts centre and a ten-storey hospital building. It has also opened a new campus in Beijing.

And it is not alone. Universities hope that vast investments will help them attract the best staff and students, draw in research grants and donations, and ultimately boost their ranking in league tables, drawing in yet more talent and money. They have also increased the proportion of outlays gobbled up by administrators (see chart 2).
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[239 words]

[Section 3]

To pay for all this, universities have been enrolling more students and jacking up their fees. The average cost of college per student has risen by three times the rate of inflation since 1983. The cost of tuition alone has soared from 23% of median annual earnings in 2001 to 38% in 2010. Such increases plainly cannot continue.
Student debt has reportedly reached a record $1 trillion. Before the financial crisis, some private lenders stoked the frenzy by securitising risky student loans—rather like subprime mortgages. This practice has been stopped but at its peak in 2008, private lenders disbursed $20 billion. Last year they shelled out only $6 billion.
Federal support for higher education remains at historically high levels, but states have cut back. To make matters worse, endowments (and their returns) have shrunk, money from philanthropy has dried up and those universities that provide need-based aid have suddenly found their students are needier.
All this suggests that colleges have good cause to worry about their debts. Unlike grades, they cannot be inflated away. Even Harvard, Yale, Cornell and Georgetown have been on an unsustainable path in recent years, says Bain, though all have big endowments to cushion themselves.
Glenn Reynolds, the author of “The Higher Education Bubble”, predicts that the bubble will burst “messily”. People have long believed that “whatever the cost, a college education is a necessary ticket to future prosperity.” Easy credit has allowed them to pay ever more, and colleges have raised fees to absorb the extra cash. However, this cannot go on forever, says Mr Reynolds, especially when people start asking whether a degree in religious and women’s studies is worth the $100,000 debt incurred to pay for it.
[285 words]

[Section 4]

Jeff Denneen, a Bain consultant, puts it more cautiously. Higher education has not delivered extra value to match the extra costs, he says. Indeed, the average student is studying for fewer hours and learning less than in the past. Grade inflation only partially masks these trends. Mr Denneen agrees that the bubble will burst, though he does not say “messily”.
Some universities are addressing their financial problems. Cornell began in 2009: Kent Fuchs, the provost, offered to cut the costs of administration by $70m, if the faculty would concentrate on excelling at a limited number of important things, rather than trying to do everything. Mr Fuchs says that a university can become too broad; a financial squeeze is an opportunity to become more focused.
Since 2010, many endowments have recovered their value, and data from 823 institutions show a return of 19% for 2011. The University of Chicago is one of many whose finances have improved since 2010. Brand-name institutions are unlikely to go bust, says Mr Denneen, but they may have to curb needs-blind admission, or hire fewer star professors.
Lesser-known colleges, which lack big endowments, will have to cut deeper. Timidly trimming a bit from every department each year, in the hope that good times return, will not work. Departments and courses must be shed and whole campuses merged or shuttered.
[223 words]

[Section 5]

Public universities, with more centralised leadership, find it easier to consolidate. New Jersey is merging its medical college into Rutgers University, and there are four sets of mergers in Georgia alone. One will combine Augusta State and Georgia Health Sciences universities, and will strip administrative costs and overheads.
For-profit universities have proved to be the exception to the rule: most are in good financial health. However, they face pressure from lawmakers who think they fail to deliver value for the $32 billion in subsidies they receive. A new report from Senator Tom Harkin decries the for-profit sector’s aggressive recruiting, poor academic results and excessive fees.
College-boosters have several retorts to all this doom-mongering. Surely, they say, as technology advances, the demand for education will continue to grow? Cynics add that Bain’s recommendations should be taken warily, since it stands to win fat consulting contracts if lots of American universities decide to restructure.
Still, the doomsayers may be onto something. Four-year residential colleges cannot keep on forever raising their fees faster than the public’s capacity to pay them, especially when online degrees are so much cheaper. Universities that fail to prepare for the hurricane ahead are likely to be flattened by it.

[201 words]




[Obstacle]

Higher education in California
One state, two systems
As public universities struggle, some private ones thrive
Aug 11th 2012 | LOS ANGELES | from the print edition

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CALIFORNIA’S public universities were once the envy of the world. Under the state’s pioneering “master plan” for higher education, signed into law in 1960, the top 12.5% of graduating high-school students in the state are guaranteed entry to the well-respected University of California (UC) system; the California State University (CSU) system is open to the top third. Community colleges accept all-comers, including adults. The plan hugely expanded higher education in California, and led also to the emergence of world-class establishments like Berkeley and UCLA.
Yet it tied the universities’ fortunes to those of the state. In good times that was fine. But more recently public universities in California have been hit hard by the state’s fiscal woes. Declining state support has forced the UC system to slash costs and to raise average tuition fees by 50% in just three years. CSU fees have risen by 47% in the same period. “The historical model has broken down,” says Mark Yudof, the UC president.
The proportion of high-school graduates progressing to UC or CSU has fallen from 22% to 18% in the past five years, according to Hans Johnson at the Public Policy Institute of California. The extra fee revenue is not enough to compensate for the decline in state funding, and so both UC and CSU have aimed to reduce enrolment numbers. UC must still offer places to all eligible students, but uses ruses such as restricting access to popular campuses, such as UCLA or Berkeley, in favour of out-of-the-way campuses in places like Merced.
It is an altogether different story for some of California’s private institutions, which tend to charge far higher tuition fees. Stanford University, under its president, John Hennessy, who sits on the boards of Google and Cisco, has strengthened links with the go-getters of Silicon Valley and raised a record-breaking $6.2 billion in five years. The Los Angeles-based University of Southern California (USC), once mocked by detractors as the University of Spoiled Children, is also thriving. It is aiming to raise $6 billion by 2018, and already has some chunky gifts in the bag. It has more international students on its books than any other American university, and, after the recent launch of the USC Schwarzenegger Institute for State and Global Policy, one particularly notable foreign-born professor.
With 22,000 people on its payroll, USC is the biggest private-sector employer in Los Angeles. A proposal to redevelop the Village, a shabby retail area next to the main campus, into a shiny complex with student housing and new shops, should create 12,000 more jobs in USC’s poorish district in south Los Angeles, if the university gets its way (the city council is due to issue a planning verdict soon). “We have taken on a broader role,” says Thomas Sayles, senior vice-president for university relations. “We want to be a civic leader.”
Yet private institutions like USC cannot simply pick up the slack left by the public ones. First, even with generous aid packages, they cannot hope to match the public universities on access for students from poor or what are sometimes called “non-traditional” backgrounds. Second, even taken collectively, private universities do not operate on the same scale. A big majority of enrolled students attend public institutions. “There is no private solution to this issue,” says Patrick Callan, president of the Higher Education Policy Institute. “There must be a public solution.”
The problem, though, is growing, Mr Johnson points out that, for the first time in the history of modern California, the state’s best-educated citizens are the 50-somethings rather than the 20- or 30-somethings. And previous waves of immigration raise demographic challenges as a bulge of Latinos reaches college age.
UC’s decline can be exaggerated. Some of its campuses continue to perform well in national rankings, it has significant non-state revenue sources, and it has a strong research record. “We’re hardly at death’s door,” says Mr Yudof. A big moment will come in November, when Californians vote on a tax measure. If it is approved (the polls are tight), UC and CSU will freeze tuition fees for the first time in years. If it fails, they will have to cope with a sudden drop of $250m in state support. Mr Yudof calls it a “defining moment” for California.

[735 words]

xjbb

沙发！版面真漂亮，谢谢团团～

Speed:
2'43
China mainland and Taiwan assigned an agreement to protect investors.
The two parties had no diplomatic relation before and have different law system. This agreement helps to make sure that inland investors can buy stocks of Taiwan companies, vice versa.
1'49
Many universities in the U.S. are facing financial problem as their debts have been increasing during the recent years. They've been spending too much on facilities to make their ranks increase, in order to attract high quality students and faculties, thus gain more profits.
1'52
To pay their debts, universities are engaged in raising tuition, causing a high average student debts. Since the financial environment is getting worse after 2008 financial crisis, it's not a good idea to owe huge debt just for a certificate.
1'30
Some universities are trying to relieve the pressure from the financial problem by cutting costs.
1'34
It's easier for public universities with more centralized leadership to consolidate. meanwhile, for-profit universities show a common financial healthy.

Obstacle:
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Main idea: concerning the higher education of California, public universities are struggling, while private universities are thriving.
1) Public universities, once experienced a flourishing period, are suffering from financial problems in the past three years due to a cutoff of government support. They have to cut cost and increase tuition.
2) Private universities, which have multi sources of investment together with their originally high tuition, are leading happy lives.
3) However, privates can not play a saver's role of California high education system, because they're not common students oriented. Students who are living in poverty are not likely to be enrolled.
4) California is considering to raise tax rates, the outcome will decide public universities' fortune.

Fighting小虾米

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yqhpsyche

偷了两天懒....今天终于回来了！
谢谢团团~~ 材料超赞的

速度
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1'01  两天不做.....速度就慢下来了= =  以后不偷懒了

越障  4'41
1/California's public univesities are under the pioneering "master plan" for high education
2/Encountered with the state's fiscal woes, universities are forced to slash costs and to raise the tuition fees, and even doing these can not compensate the declining state funding
3/Some other private universities wer cited to figure out that both public and private universities have been deeply influenced by financial problems
4/There is no private way to deal with the issue, so that a public solution should be raised
5/UC's decline might be exaggerated, because it is still receiving significant non-state revenue and it performs well in national rankings

这篇不长不难可是不知道为啥记不住多少东西.....看完又回读了一下才记住一些的

莽莽要上7

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Obstacle 6'27
先说加州是个教育圣地，但是今年来的financial woes使加州大学们不是那么好过。加州公立大学们面对政府不景气而减少的支持得开始裁员来维持balance；而私立大学有增加学费的倾向。
中间那里说私立大学那里提到valley 是为什么我怎么get 到。再看看。
最后一段说的是大学们这么惨可能夸张了。加州要新出台一个tax政策，如果政策是blabla的话，大学就好过点。如果政策恶心的话，大学就会难过了。 政策具体内容忘了==
先记下来呆会再读读=。=

谢谢发帖！

evlily8783

谢谢楼主！

铁板神猴

-Public university system was good one time, but now fails.
1. it only works in good times
2. when in bad times, the declined state financial support and rapidly increased tuition fee make the P-U system work hard.(then an UC example)

-Meanwhile, the private colleges work well.
but it still can not compensate for the public colleges' lost

-The public colleges still get hopes, and now some kind of proposal might be the "defining moment".

铁板神猴

The US-university-system topic is quite helpful~ Thanks a lot!

spencerX

谢谢lz！
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清影claire