..9...people to reproduce the roles that produced them.
Questions 10-14
Some of the examples of behavior described below are typical of amae situations, while others are typical of non-amae situations. In boxes 10-14 on your answer sheet write A (amae) or NA (non-amae).
Example Answer
Lifelong bond between schoolmates A
10 Teaching a child to cope with strange situations
11 A child's clinging and serving behavior
12 A mother's guilt feelings about denying a child something
13 Readiness to punish a child
14 Approval of a child's immature conduct
Questions 15-16
Write either TRUE or FALSE in boxes 15 and 16 on your answer sheet.
15 The influence of amae is not unique to Japanese culture.
16 ACT stresses the striving to reproduce identity.
READING PASSAGE 2
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 15-25 which are based on Reading passage 2.
Welcoming the Third-Generation Mobile Phone
Telecom firms have introduced mobile phones with color screens and in-built cameras at the world's biggest technology fair. They are betting thatmillions of consumers will replace their old mobile phones with the third generation with additional high-tech features, to give the industry a desperately needed boost. If Nokia can't do it, then no one can—that has been the opinion of many in the mobile-telephone business looking desperately to the next stage in the evolution of the handset. While a number of companies at the giant Cebit technology trade fair in Hanover have unveiled new devices, it is Nokia's latest handsets that everyone was waiting for. With more than seven out of ten people in some countries already carrying mobile phones, new models with new features are needed to invigorate the saturated market. And because Nokia currently sells one in every three handsets, it sets the pace.
As far as products are concerned, Nokia did not disappoint. The Finnish company said it would start shipping later this year a long-awaited new handset with a color screen. The Nokia 7210 phone will also support multimedia messaging (MMS, which works like the popular text-messaging, but includes pictures.) The phone will also have an in-built stereo radio and the ability to work on five continents, provided the necessary networks are available.
While those specifications did not disappoint the 850,000 delegates who attended Cebit, the industry's financial problems remain worrying. In 2001, the telecom industry was hit by a global slowdown. Faced with growing debts, mobile service operators cut back on investment-especially in Europe where firms have splashed out billions of dollars to obtain licences to operate a “third generation” of mobile phones with even more appealing features.
While Nokia said it would meet or beat its first-quarter profits target, it also said sales would be slightly below its previous forecast of a decline of 6-10%, largely because of a big drop in sales of network equipment. That gave some investors the jitters. Even Japan's NTT DoCoMo, which is launching its successful i-mode service in Europe this month, gave a warning on March 15th that it may have to decrease its estimate of the value of some of its overseas investments.
Worldwide, sales of mobile phones have fallen to just below 400m in 2001, representing the first-ever decline in the industry, according to Gartner Dataquest, a research group. This means 2001 sales were down by 3.2% on the previous year, which compares with a 60%average growth rate between 1996 and 2000. According to Gartner Dataquest, Nokia increased its market share from 30.6% in 2000 to 35% last year. America's Motorola was in second place with 14.8%. Germany's Siemens, Sweden's Ericsson and South Korea's Samsung trailed behind.
The competition is growing harder, forcing some companies to join forces. Toshiba and Mitsubishi Electric announced that they would pool resources from April to developthird-generation phones. Ericsson, which has reported the largest loss ever recorded by a Swedish company, has merged its handset business with that of Sony, and is concentrating instead on the manufacture of network equipment. This partnership has revealed a range of new mobile phones, including some with color screens and one with a built-in camera.
Like Nokia, Sony Ericsson, as the London-based joint venture is called, hopes that color screens and digital pictures will persuade existing users to trade in their handsets for newer models. The new phones will allow users to take and receive pictures using updated software, and transmit them between similarly equipped handsets or to and from PCs as e-mail attachments.
Mobile operators are also hoping to sell more profitable services. On March 13th, Microsoft announced that it was joining forces with Deutsche Telekom to offer a service allowing corporate users to connect to their office networks with mobile phones and handheld devices. Microsoft wants to replicate the success it has had with its Windows operating system for PCs with something similar on mobile devices. But Nokia, and many of the other companies in the industry, are trying to keep the software giant at bay by offering their own “open” systems.
The really big leap forward will come with third-generation handsets. These will be able to provide high-speed access to networks, allowing images like video to be viewed on handsets. But much of the technology has been plagued with problems. Nokia gave a glimpse at Cebit of its third-generation handset, which it said would be launched on September 26th.
One reason that telecom firms and handset manufacturers are so optimistic about the prospects for third-generation services is the wild success in Japan of i-mode. Although it is not a full third-generation service, i-mode already offers some multimedia services and Internet access, which has helped it to gain 30 million customers in Japan in three years. A Dutch operator, KPN Mobile, which is partly owned by NTT DoCoMo, is launching i-mode in Germany, and hoping for at least half that number of customers there. Later, it will introduce i-mode to the Dutch market, where the number of customers will, however, only be one tenth that of Germany. But the debts are piling up. KPN Mobile said on March 14th that it would make euro13.7 billion ($12.1 billion) less on its German investments. By the time full-fledged third-generation services start, many of Europe's mobile service operators will have gone bust or merged.
Questions 17-19
Complete each sentence below with a MAXIMUM OF THREE WORDS from the reading passage. Write your answers in boxes 17-19 on your answer sheet.
Example Answer
Telecom firms are hoping that consumers will buy the third generation of mobile phones.
17 New handset models are considered necessary to revive the ?
18 MMS is different from text messaging, because ?
19 Nokia's new phone will be able to function ?
Questions 20-21
Choose which of the options best represents the information in the reading passage. Write the appropriate letter (A-D) for each question in boxes 20-21 on your answer sheet.
20. The telecom industry's financial problems are mainly due to?
A. a cutback in investment
B. expensive licenses
C. Nokia's domination of the market
D. a global slowdown
21. The significance of the sales figure for 2001 was that ?
A. fewer than 400 million phones were sold
B. it marked the first ever decline in the industry
C. it was down by 3.2% on the previous year
D. Motorola was in second place
Questions 22-29
The paragraph below is a summary of the reading passage. Complete the summary by choosing the appropriate word, phrase or clause from the list below to fill the spaces numbered 22-29. Write the corresponding letter (A-N) in boxes 22-29 on your answer sheet. There are more choices than spaces, so you will not need to use all of them. The first one has been done for you as an example.
Example Answer
Nokia leads the market because it sells I Handsets.
At the world's biggest technology fair, the world's biggest telecom firms are introducing new models of mobile phones with more...22...to induce users to abandon their old handsets, and thereby provide a much-needed...23...for the industry. Nokia is leading the way, with a new phone which boasts a...24...and...25...Beset by financial problems, telecom firms are...26...to produce and market third-generation phones. Meanwhile, mobile service operators are...27...The industry is optimistic because of the success of Japan's...28...over the past three years.
But there will be fewer...29...when the third generation of handsets makes its debut. AGartner Dataquest
Bdrop in sales
Cfollowing suit
DMMS
Ejoining forces
Fstart shipping
Gboost
Hmobile service operators
Ione in every three
JCebit
Khigh-tech features
Lin-built stereo radio
Mcolor screen
Ni-mode
Questions 30-31
Write one of the phrases in italics in box 30 on your answer sheet.
30. Will Sony Ericsson's new phones send pictures to other handsets by using updated software or as e-mail attachments?
31. Do Nokia and other companies want to limit the competition from Microsoft or exclude Microsoft from the mobile phone business?
Question 32
Write words or figures in box 32 on your answer sheet.
32. What is the size of the Dutch market for i-mode phones expected to be?
READING PASSAGE 3
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 26-40 which are based on Reading
Passage 3.
A Turnaround for U.S. Aid Policy?
U.S. President George W. Bush tried to avert a row over aid with his pledge of US$5 billion more help for poor countries before his arrival at this week's UN aid conference in Monterrey, Mexico. But has the American government really changed its mind about the effectiveness of aid-and will it now practice what Mr Bush
preaches?
“In Monterrey we have a tremendous opportunity to begin acting on a new vision of development.” This is not quite the line many of America's critics expected to hear from Bush. But his speech on foreign aid last week will have come as a pleasant surprise to the supporters of such aid, particularly James Wolfensohn, the boss of the World Bank, especially given the sweeping criticism of foreign aid recently expressed by Paul O'Neill, Mr Bush's treasury secretary.
In his speech last week, Mr Bush pledged an extra US$5 billion from America, spread over the next three financial years. On the face of it, this suggests that the president decided to override the objections of his treasury secretary. Mr O'Neill consistently pours cold water on the need for more aid, claiming that there is scant evidence that it has done any good. In particular, he directs his criticism at the World Bank. Mr O'Neill attacks the Bank on another flank when he complains about its insistence on lending money, rather than giving it, to these countries. But World Bank officials, and many European shareholders, claim that loans rather than grants impose discipline on a borrowing country. Their real reason for objecting to Mr O'Neill's proposal, though, is a concern that shifting from loans to grants would cut off an important source of future funding (the repayments from today's borrowers). Given America's general stinginess when it comes to foreign aid, their concern is understandable.
The Bush administration wants the Bank to give half of its help to the poorest countries as grants, something that Europeans, in particular, strongly oppose. Further, the administration wants any increase in American contributions to the Bank's soft-loan arm to depend on measurable evidence of success. Mr Bush's U-turn, if that is what it was, was timed to set the scene for his arrival at a gathering of dozens of heads of government and hundreds of ministers in Monterrey, Mexico, for a huge United Nations conference on financing development. Mr Wolfensohn sees Monterrey as an occasion for rich countries to pledge a doubling of their foreign aid. He wants them to boost their aid budgets by US$10 billion in each of the next five years, to US$100 billion a year. That, he reckons, is the amount of money needed to reach the ambitious development goals that 189 countries committed themselves to in 2000. These goals include cutting poverty in half, reducing child mortality by two-thirds and ensuring universal primary education. Achieving these goals, Mr Wolfensohn claims, is not only right from a moral point of view; it is also essential for the security of the rich world.
A new report on aid effectiveness tries to pull together the considerable evidence on whether aid works. True, it is hard to find a clear correlation between overall aid flows on the one hand, and economic growth or reductions in poverty on the other. Yet there is now a strong body of evidence, led by the research done by economists at the World Bank, that aid does boost growth when countries have rational economic policies. And the poorer the country, the more effective aid is at reducing poverty. The trouble is, foreign aid has rarely been allocated with these points in mind. In 1990, for instance, countries with inefficient policies and institutions got an average of US$44 per person in aid, while those with better policies got US$39.
Things have changed since then. By the late 1990s, countries with more efficient policies got US$29 of aid a person, while countries with the least efficient policies got US$16. And-contrary to Mr O'Neill's assertions-the World Bank is a particularly effective poverty alleviator, because its subsidised lending to the poorest countries depends more on good economic performance than that of many individual country donors. Even in 1990, the World Bank spent more than twice as much per head on poor countries with good policies than on those with bad policies. Now the ratio has risen further, with good performers getting US$6.50 per head in World Bank help, compared with US$2.30 for weaker countries. Overall, World Bank lending to the poorest is now 60% more effective than in 1990 and 50% more than general foreign aid.
More broadly, the academic research on the effectiveness of aid suggests that the emphasis should be on choosing the right countries and programs, rather than on quantity. A recent study suggests that, given current policies and aid levels, sub-Saharan Africa will reduce poverty by 11% by 2015, far short of the goals set in 2000. Even without any improvement in overall economic policies in Africa, a 50% increase in aid flows would double poverty reduction, to 22%-so long as it was coupled with efficient reallocation of aid towards poor countries with efficient policies.
The president emphasised the importance of sound economic policies and the encouragement of enterprise. He promised that countries which adopt the right policies will get more aid from America. Of course, Mr Bush was right to point out that alleviating poverty takes more than aid alone. Private capital flows, and trade, are at least as important-though Mr Bush had less to say about the obligations of rich countries to open their markets.
