Directions: Read the following text and choose the most suitable heading from the list A-F for each paragraph. There is one extra heading which you do not need.
F. The Decade of Great Imbalances The first decade of the new millennium has come to an end. It’s become a sort of habit to give a representative name to each decade, so, once again, an effort is under way to find a term to fit the years from 2000 to 2009. 80. __________ That shouldn’t be too hard a job for us here in China. First, no country has seen economic growth in the last decade like this. The economy quadrupled, with almost double-digit annual growth, and GDP went from No.6 to No.3. It’s now only slight below that of Japan, and many are saying that it will only be another year or two before we have the world’s second largest economy. In addition, in 2008, China was host to the Olympics, possibly the best organized and hosted Games over, and that impressed the world and boosted Chinese confidence. 81. _________ The economy developed at a breakneck pace, and personal wealth mushroomed--- for many, anyway. Salaries multiplied, stock market investment and real estate were a bubble, then burst, then became a bubble again. China now has one of the largest collections of millionaires and billionaires in the world, and has helped keep the world’s luxury products industry from going under. Meanwhile, the earnings gap has widened in an unprecedented way. Millions are still living near the poverty line and the urban poor has become an obvious problem. 82. _________ Yet, how could we think of the changes without including the Internet? If one thing can be credited with making the most changes in people’s lives, it should be the World Wide Web. We learned to use e-mail, chatrooms, and BBS at the beginning of the decade, and, after witnessing one dotcom burst, it’s time for the second Internet entrepreneurial wave. This time, however, it’s in the form of social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Kaixin, as well as video-sites like Youtube and Tudou. 83. __________ Oh, and who could forget the many misfortunes, and the tragedies, that befell China in the last 10 years: mining accidents that killed dozens at a time, a public health crisis like SARS, or the disastrous Wenchuan earthquake that destroyed towns and thousands of family. We seem to have a disproportionate share of tragic things happening here. At the same time, the Chinese, especially younger ones, have shown an amazing ability to recover from these disasters and be stronger and more unified. Millions of young volunteers poured into Sichuan to offer their help, as they did in other emergencies. 84. ___________ The West has a generally darker view of this past decade. One of The New York Times articles in mid-November said that, in thinking about a name from the American point of view, it seems difficult to find the right expression for so much upheaval, change, and worry: the Y2K millennium bug, which never caused much damage and chaos, the alleged weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, which were never found; and so on. The United State launched two wars after 9/11, but never realized that the real threat to American interests lay in its own economy and finances until the sub-prime crisis, erupted in 2007. Others find it an almost impossible job to name the decade, saying it will take many years to name the 2000s because it will take many years to figure out what we feel that we lost during that period. |