【每日阅读训练第二期——速度越障2系列】【3-5】

很邻家

这几天各种考试接踵而至，gmat扔下好几天了，心情极其烦躁，各种不淡定啊！！
大家加油复习，希望能有个好心情~~~
计时一
Indian retail
Wholesale reform
Nov 25th 2011, 16:31 by V. v. B.
THE chief executive of a large European retailer was still sceptical at lunchtime on November 24th when news started trickling through that India’s government was finally letting international companies do business in the subcontinent’s vast retail market. “I will believe it when I see it,” he said. A few hours later it was official. After procrastinating for two decades, India is opening up its underdeveloped and fragmented retail market to foreign direct investment.
Foreign multibrand retailers will be allowed to own 51% of operations in India, with the rest owned by a local partner. Until now, supermarket-chains such as Walmart, Carrefour and Tesco could only establish wholesale joint-ventures. IKEA, Apple, Nike and other single-brand retailers will be allowed to own 100% of their stores. Previously, they could own just 51% of their stores, which meant that IKEA and others have stayed out of the country altogether.
All this is progress, but it comes with several strings attached. Foreign retailers will be obliged to invest $100m over five years. And at least half has to be spent to develop rural infrastructure and to establish a cold-chain system. Firms will also have to commit to sourcing 30% of their wares from small and medium-sized suppliers. Finally, foreign retailers will only be allowed to set up shop in cities with a population of over a million.
(223)
计时二
At the moment “organised retail” accounts for a mere 7% of the country’s $470 billion retailing business—a far lower share than in other countries. Most Indians do their shopping at the millions of kirana shops, small independent outfits that are often not much more than a hole in the wall, or buy from handcart hawkers and street vendors. These microbusinesses only sell a limited range of goods, and in tiny quantities. They are far too small to negotiate good deals with wholesalers. But the majority of Indians, especially in rural areas, shop with them because kiranas give credit and are prepared to deliver even the smallest orders.
Supporters of the government’s decision say it will increase competition and quality while reducing prices. (Inflation is close to the double digits.) They predict that kiranas will continue to exist alongside foreign-owned supermarkets, because for many Indians they will remain the most accessible and most convenient place to shop. Kirana owners and their dependents, who are an important electoral constituency of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, see it differently. They worry that the multi-nationals will squeeze them out of business.
The retail reform, India’s government hopes, will help it to get through a rough patch. It has been hit by a series of corruption scandals and is perceived as having stalled on its reform programme. What is more, foreign direct investment dropped 28% to $29.4 billion in the twelve months to March. Predictions for economic growth have been revised down  from 9% earlier this year to 7.5%. To boot, the Indian rupee has recently reached record lows against the dollar.
（269）
计时三
South Africa and secrecy
Don’t blow the whistle
A law may be enacted that would make it harder to expose corruption
Nov 26th 2011 | JOHANNESBURG | from the print edition
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AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL has called the approval of South Africa’s so-called secrecy bill on November 22nd a “dark day for freedom of expression”. Archbishop Desmond Tutu, an anti-apartheid hero, says the bill will “outlaw whistle-blowing and investigative journalism”. The Confederation of South African Trade Unions fears it will be used to cover up government corruption and other wrongdoing. Nadine Gordimer, a South African Nobel prize-winner for literature, says it will take the country back to the apartheid era. Business Day, the country’s most respected daily, dubs it an “abomination”.
All this may be a bit over the top. When the Orwellian-sounding Protection of Information Bill was first introduced in March 2010, it did indeed sound dire. Any “organ of state”—there are over 1,000 of them—was to be allowed to classify documents, including commercial information, if it were deemed to be in an undefined “national interest”. Anyone unlawfully disclosing classified information could face up to 25 years in jail even if disclosure were shown to be in the public interest. But since then the bill has been subjected to over 100 amendments. Even its critics admit that it has been vastly improved.
In its new form, only the police, intelligence and security services would be allowed to classify information, and then only for reasons of national security. Obligatory minimum sentences have been abolished for all but the most serious offence of passing secrets to a foreign power. Passing them to a hostile non-state organisation, such as a terrorist group, carries a maximum sentence of 20 years, while any other unlawful disclosure or mere possession of classified information would be punishable by up to five years.
（275）
计时四
It is this last offence that could hamper journalists and whistle-blowers. The bill still contains no public-interest defence. South African journalists have been doing a good job at exposing the increasing corruption, nepotism and maladministration in the ruling African National Congress (ANC). They fear the new law, which still has to pass muster in the second parliamentary chamber, would curb their ability to bring to light high-level shenanigans, such as those allegedly involving President Jacob Zuma’s spokesman, Mac Maharaj.
Two newspapers have published articles claiming that Mr Maharaj, one of South Africa’s most respected public figures, took bribes at the end of the 1990s from Thales, a French arms manufacturer involved in a 1999 multi-billion dollar arms deal, in return for a juicy contract with the ministry of transport, then headed by Mr Maharaj. The Mail & Guardian, South Africa’s leading weekly, claims also to have evidence that Mr Maharaj lied under oath during police questioning about the arms deal. The matter is particularly sensitive now, as Mr Zuma has just launched the first independent inquiry into the scandal.
A visibly angry Mr Maharaj insists he has not broken any law. He is refusing to comment further, saying he will not subject himself to “trial by media”. He is seeking charges against the Mail & Guardian and two of its senior reporters for publishing confidential evidence given to prosecutors in camera, an offence punishable by up to 15 years in jail. This, says the newspaper’s editor, is precisely what will happen, only more so, if the secrecy bill becomes law. Critics vow to challenge the bill, if passed, in the Constitutional Court.
（272）
越障
Schumpeter
The French way of work
Managers must shoulder some of the blame for France’s troubled relationship with work
Nov 19th 2011 | from the print edition
EVERY year, Sophie de Menthon, a French entrepreneur, holds an event called J’aime ma boîte (I love my firm) in Paris. The idea is to counter the notion that the French don’t like work. Employees are enticed to make lip dubs (a video of them lip-synching to music, if you need to ask), massage each other, vote for the nicest colleague, arrange for the accountant to swap jobs with the secretary and other stunts to celebrate their firm.
The much-mocked campaign has not had much luck. In 2007 a national strike interrupted the festivities, and in 2009 a series of suicides at France Télécom spoilt the atmosphere. This year employees showed less love for their boîte than ever before. Only 64% of those polled liked their company, down from 79% in 2005.
A truer reflection of work attitudes came this summer when French workers covered office windows with huge pictures made up of Post-it notes. Employees at GDF-Suez, a utility, stuck thousands of them to the windows of its HQ near Paris to represent Tintin, a comic-strip hero. Société Générale’s bankers responded with a picture of Asterix and Obelix across six storeys. A few employers cracked down on the time-wasting, but most did not dare.
Many outsiders conclude that French workers are simply lazy. “Absolument Dé-bor-dée!” (“Absolutely Snowed Under”), a book which came out last year, described how state employees compete to do nothing at work. Another title in this bestselling genre on avoiding toil, “Bonjour Paresse” (“Hello Laziness”) by Corinne Maier, an economist, explained how she got away with doing nothing at EDF, another utility.
In fact studies suggest that the problem with French employees is less that they are work-shy, than that they are poorly managed. According to a report on national competitiveness by the World Economic Forum, the French rank and file has a much stronger work ethic than American, British or Dutch employees. They find great satisfaction in their work, but register profound discontent with the way their firms are run.
Two-fifths of employees, according to a 2010 study by BVA, a polling firm, actively dislike their firm’s top managers. France ranks last out of ten countries for workers’ opinion of company management, according to a report from 2007. Whereas two-thirds of American, British and German employees say they have friendly relations with their line manager, fewer than a third of French workers say the same. Many employees, in short, agree with Ms Maier, who recommends that chief executives be guillotined to the tune of “La Carmagnole”, a revolutionary song.
If French work attitudes are out of the ordinary, French management methods are also unusual. The vast majority of chief executives of big firms hail from one of a handful of grandes écoles, such as École Polytechnique, an elite science school. Through what is known as parachutage, they can arrive suddenly from the top ranks of the civil service. Air France KLM, for example, announced unexpectedly last month that its new chief executive would be Alexandre de Juniac, formerly chief of staff to Christine Lagarde when she was France’s finance minister.
Although the grandes écoles are superbly meritocratic—candidates compete against each other in a series of gruelling exams—their dominance of corporate hierarchies makes workplaces much less so. At a big French bank recently, a manager promoted an executive, only to be reproached by a furious rival who said he should have been given the job because he had done better in the final exams at the same grande école.
As Thomas Philippon, a French economist, pointed out in “Le Capitalisme d’Héritiers”, a 2007 book, too many big French companies rely on educational and governmental elites rather than promoting internally according to performance on the job. In the country’s many family firms, too, opportunity for promotion is limited for non-family members. This overall lack of upward mobility, argues Mr Philippon, contributes largely to ordinary French cadres’ dissatisfaction with corporate life. A study of seven leading economies by TNS Sofres in 2007 showed that France is unique in that middle management as well as the lower-level workforce is largely disengaged from their companies.
For those farther down the ladder, French companies are hierarchical, holding no truck with Anglo-Saxon notions of “empowerment”. And bosses are more distant than ever. A big change in French management, says Jean-Pierre Basilien of Entreprise & Personnel, a Paris research centre, is that industrial managers now seldom rise through the ranks. Fifteen years ago a leading graduate would have worked in factories before moving to headquarters. Now many come up via finance or strategy.
From the ranks
There are important exceptions. Danone, a food-products firm, is one. It has made a big effort to promote people solely on competence, says Charles-Henri Besseyre des Horts, a professor at HEC, a business school which is one of the elite grandes écoles. The 2006 merger of Alcatel, a French telecoms-equipment firm, and Lucent, an American one, created a less hierarchical group. Alcatel-Lucent even encourages teleworking, uncommon in France because it means trusting workers not to goof off. Jean-Pascal Tricoire, chief executive of Schneider Electric, an ambitious energy-management firm, came up from the ranks.
French companies have particular reason to worry now about their bad boss-worker relations. An important factor in the growing gap in industrial competitiveness between France and Germany, said a recent study by Coe-Rexecode, an economic-research centre, is that German bosses and employees are better than French ones at working together. French bosses badly need to follow in the footsteps of Danone and other modernisers. If they try and fail, then at least they can blame the workers.
（935）
Passage 54 (54/63)(OG-21)

Two modes of argumentation have been used on behalf of women’s emancipation in Western societies. Arguments in what could be called the “relational” feminist tradition maintain the doctrine of “equality in difference,” or equity as distinct for equality. They posit that biological distinctions between the sexes result in a necessary sexual division of labor in the family and throughout society and that women’s procreative labor is currently undervalued by society, to the disadvantage of women. By contrast, the individualist feminist tradition emphasizes individual human rights and celebrates women’s quest for personal autonomy, while downplaying the importance of gender roles and minimizing discussion of childbearing and its attendant responsibilities.
Before the late nineteenth century, these views coexisted within the feminist movement, often within the writings of the same individual. Between 1890 and 1920, however, relational feminism, which had been the dominant strain in feminist thought, and which still predominates among European and non-Western feminists, lost ground in England and the United States. Because the concept of individual rights was already well established in the Anglo-Saxon legal and political tradition, individualist feminism came to predominate in English-speaking countries. At the same time, the goals of the two approaches began to seem increasingly irreconcilable. Individualist feminists began to advocate a totally gender-blind system with equal rights for all. Relational feminists, while agreeing that equal educational and economic opportunities outside the home should be available for all women, continued to emphasize women’s special contributions to society as homemakers and mothers; they demanded special treatment including protective legislation for women workers, state-sponsored maternity benefits, and paid compensation for housework.
Relational arguments have a major pitfall: because they underline women’s physiological and psychological distinctiveness, they are often appropriated by political adversaries and used to endorse male privilege. But the individualist approach, by attacking gender roles, denying the significance of physiological difference, and condemning existing familial institutions as hopelessly patriarchal, has often simply treated as irrelevant the family roles important to many women. If the individualist framework, with its claim for women’s autonomy, could be harmonized with the family-oriented concerns of relational feminists, a more fruitful model for contemporary feminist politics could emerge.
1.    The author of the passage alludes to the well-established nature of the concept of individual rights in the Anglo-Saxon legal and political tradition in order to
(A) illustrate the influence of individualist feminist thought on more general intellectual trends in English history
(B) argue that feminism was already a part of the larger Anglo-Saxon intellectual tradition, even though this has often gone unnoticed by critics of women’s emancipation
(C) explain the decline in individualist thinking among feminists in non-English-speaking countries
(D) help account for an increasing shift toward individualist feminism among feminists in English-speaking countries
(E) account for the philosophical differences between individualist and relational feminists in English-speaking countries
2.    The passage suggests that the author of the passage believes which of the following?
(A) The predominance of individualist feminism in English-speaking countries is a historical phenomenon, the causes of which have not yet been investigated.
(B) The individualist and relational feminist views are irreconcilable, given their theoretical differences concerning the foundations of society.
(C) A consensus concerning the direction of future feminist politics will probably soon emerge, given the awareness among feminists of the need for cooperation among women.
(D) Political adversaries of feminism often misuse arguments predicated on differences between the sexes to argue that the existing social system should be maintained.
(E) Relational feminism provides the best theoretical framework for contemporary feminist politics, but individualist feminism could contribute much toward refining and strengthening modern feminist thought.
3.    It can be inferred from the passage that the individualist feminist tradition denies the validity of which of the following causal statements?
(A) A division of labor in a social group can result in increased efficiency with regard to the performance of group tasks.
(B) A division of labor in a social group causes inequities in the distribution of opportunities and benefits among group members.
(C) A division of labor on the basis of gender in a social group is necessitated by the existence of sex-linked biological differences between male and female members of the group.
(D) Culturally determined distinctions based on gender in a social group foster the existence of differing attitudes and opinions among group members.
(E) Educational programs aimed at reducing inequalities based on gender among members of a social group can result in a sense of greater well-being for all members of the group.
4.    According to the passage, relational feminists and individualist feminists agree that
(A) individual human rights take precedence over most other social claims
(B) the gender-based division of labor in society should be eliminated
(C) laws guaranteeing equal treatment for all citizens regardless of gender should be passed
(D) a greater degree of social awareness concerning the importance of motherhood would be beneficial to society
(E) the same educational and economic opportunities should be available to both sexes
5.    According to the author, which of the following was true of feminist thought in Western societies before 1890?
(A) Individualist feminist arguments were not found in the thought or writing of non-English-speaking feminists.
(B) Individualist feminism was a strain in feminist thought, but another strain, relational feminism, predominated.
(C) Relational and individualist approaches were equally prevalent in feminist thought and writing.
(D) The predominant view among feminists held that the welfare of women was ultimately less important than the welfare of children.
(E) The predominant view among feminists held that the sexes should receive equal treatment under the law.
6.    The author implies that which of the following was true of most feminist thinkers in England and the United States after 1920?
(A) They were less concerned with politics than with intellectual issues.
(B) They began to reach a broader audience and their programs began to be adopted by mainstream political parties.
(C) They called repeatedly for international cooperation among women’s groups to achieve their goals.
(D) They moderated their initial criticism of the economic systems that characterized their societies.
(E) They did not attempt to unite the two different feminist approaches in their thought.
答案拖拽1.D2.D3.C4.E5.B6.E

xeyyxzty

1'02''1'16''
1'16''
1'05''
呃...为什么什么文章看起来我都是一个速度......这次看的不太明白呀

4'29''
it is said French don't like work.
for example, the strikes in 2007 and 2009
public criticizes workers
but according to surveys, French workers are efficient. what they don't like it the way companies run.
promoting system in French companies is different from that in the US.
法国公司不凭绩效promote people~instead, 凭学历...
in some companies, 还看血统~是不是family members
bosses-employees relationship is very bad.
各阶层的管理者和雇员完全隔离~
German does better

fox0923

又被熊熊领先了~~
我板凳~
1'26"
1'29"
1'27"
1'11"
为什么速度五没了？

joelee1991

好久不练回归好慢！
1：18
1：35
1：54
1：32

南瓜0729

占座

fox0923

木有心情读阿~基本上开编了~~

- The worker-employee relationship in French companies is terrible.
- The report shows that there's 2/3 German, American workers are satisfied with their employees, while there is only 1/3 of French employees agree with this satisfaction.
- The reasons:
1. The French employees are poorly managed, while not work-shy.
2. Most French companies only offer limited opportunities to non-family members, so these employees won't be able to take these jobs.
3. The managerial level executives and head managers are promoted via. finance and banks, while they were promoted from the base level such as factories before getting into the managerial level.
- However, there are also some other companies such as food company, Danone, promote their employees from the rank level. Also, another company encourages its employees work via. teleworking so that their workers could build up the trust among themselves and worker-employers.
- This worker-employer relationship is worthy to pay attention to. Many workers do believe that the employers will blame on them if anything wrong happened at work.
-

Jane412

占~

zz42050524

2011/11/29
1'21
1'35
1'51
1'30
5'53
1. French have a celebration about their company, but it wasn’t held favorably in the last few years.
2. This year, a high percentage of employees didn’t like their companies, it reflect some problems.
3. Outsiders thought French are lazy, actually they are just work shy.
4. A great deal of percentage of French don’t have a good relationship with their managers.
5. French’s attitude towards work is unusual and their management methods are also unusual.
6. French companies are inherited.
7. French have reason to worry about their boss-work relationship.

monalisa0421

我想借这个帖子表达一下对阅读小分队的感谢。
五个礼拜前我一战verbal部分错的嗒嗒滴，总分只有530.
之后每天跟着小分队做阅读，后来对着三四百字的阅读感觉简直就是小case~~
昨天二战，虽然verbal没有很牛，但是我的整体成绩因为verbal的提高而达到了650。。哎~得过且过啊我这人~
呜哇，感动，打算期末考试结束后继续跟着小分队做阅读。。。怕如果650申到太后面的学校还要再考~嘻嘻

hexiaomu77

越障：
1problem：法国employees对work不积极
2、原因：他们很lazy···被否定；
3、提出alternative：management不好，同美国等比较了一下，给出一些例子：  
BVA的worker不喜欢高层，École Polytechnique的高层多是空降的，人们升值机会不多；即使有内部的竞争上岗，也是hierarchy使得这一切变得不那么容易，并且他们多依赖政府精英和教育，而非工作的performance，这个hierarchy阻碍了与员工的沟通交流，人们多是不喜欢的。
4、建议：公司自身的relationship和management的improve，若之后还是不好，那才有理去blame workers
------------------好乱啊·····555