Passage One Money may not be flowing much in Thailand’s capital these days, but something more unlikely is traffic. Motorists like to joke that it took the International Monetary Fund to unclog Bangkok’s notoriously jammed thoroughfares. Before the economy crashed last summer, Bangkok was famous for its round-the-clock gridlock. Stories of how people coped became urban lore. Thais bought custom-made vans equipped with TVs and microwave ovens. On the endless trips home after school and work, parents would serve family dinners, then the kids would do their homework and change into pajamas before finally arriving. One company did a booming business in plastic disposable toilets. Consumers could get just about anything, from McDonald’s hamburgers to prescription medicine, delivered via motorbike. The solution for easing congestion turned out to be simple: economic catastrophe. Rising fuel costs, coupled with lost jobs and declining incomes, mean people are making fewer trips. About 20,000 cars have been repossessed, while new-car buying has dwindled from about 900 a day a year ago to just 300 now. Bus rider ship is up; taxi trips are down. So many cabbies are having trouble making enough fares to cover gas and car rental that hundreds of taxis are sitting idle every day. Thinner wallets also mean people are spending less time in bars, restaurants, movie theaters and shopping malls. Instead, they’re staying home. The government, much maligned in the past for botching up mass transit construction, deserves credit as well. New expressways have opened, and some of the construction that has blocked traffic lanes for years has been cleared. The good times may not last, however, at least for motorists. If traffic flow is in fact a reliable economic indicator, Thailand may be on the rebound. "The last few days," says taxi driver Boonlarb Srikam, "I’ve noticed the traffic getting busy again." Bring out those portable toilets. According to the passage, they can do all of the following in their vans EXCEPT______.
A. watching TV
B. having meals
C. doing homework
D. taking showers
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Passage One Did your mum and dad go to university, or did they leave school and go straight to the Job Centre The educational experience of parents is still important when it comes to how today’s students choose an area of study and what to do after graduation, according to The Future-track research in the UK. The research was done by the Higher Education Careers Service Unit. It plans to follow university applicants for six years from 2006 through their early careers. The first year’s findings come from a study of 130,000 university applicants. They show significant differences in prospective students’ approach to higher education, depending on whether their parents got degrees (second-generation applicants) or didn’t (first-generation applicants). First-generation applicants were more likely to say that their career and employment prospects were uppermost in their minds in deciding to go to university. About one-fifth of this group gave "to enable me to get a good job" as their main reason for choosing HE. And 37 percent said that a degree was "part of my career plan". A young person coming from a non-professional household where finances are stretched may find the idea of learning for its own sake to be a luxury. This explains the explosion in vocational courses. At Portsmouth University, first-year student Kim Burnett, 19, says that she specifically chose her degree in health research management and psychology to get a secure, well-paid job. Harriet Edge, 20, studying medicine at Manchester University, also wanted job security. Her parents lacked college degrees, though the fact that her uncle is a doctor appears to have influenced her choice. "Medicine is one of those fields where it’s pretty likely you’ll get a job at the end. That’s a big plus, as the debt levels after five years of study are going to be frightening," she says. Many experts believe that this situation affects those with no family tradition of higher education far more keenly. The fact that 26 percent of respondents said that they needed more advice implies that some students may end up feeling that their higher education investment was not worthwhile. For those with graduate parents, this lack of guidance may, the researchers suggest, be less of a problem. "But, for those without the advantages, lack of access to career guidance before applying for higher education leaves them exposed to making poorer choices," the survey concludes. A young person coming from a non-professional household
A. is less likely to get financial aid to go to university
B. is more likely to choose vocational education
C. may think learning for pleasure is a good idea
D. may choose to study for a professional degree
Passage One Did your mum and dad go to university, or did they leave school and go straight to the Job Centre The educational experience of parents is still important when it comes to how today’s students choose an area of study and what to do after graduation, according to The Future-track research in the UK. The research was done by the Higher Education Careers Service Unit. It plans to follow university applicants for six years from 2006 through their early careers. The first year’s findings come from a study of 130,000 university applicants. They show significant differences in prospective students’ approach to higher education, depending on whether their parents got degrees (second-generation applicants) or didn’t (first-generation applicants). First-generation applicants were more likely to say that their career and employment prospects were uppermost in their minds in deciding to go to university. About one-fifth of this group gave "to enable me to get a good job" as their main reason for choosing HE. And 37 percent said that a degree was "part of my career plan". A young person coming from a non-professional household where finances are stretched may find the idea of learning for its own sake to be a luxury. This explains the explosion in vocational courses. At Portsmouth University, first-year student Kim Burnett, 19, says that she specifically chose her degree in health research management and psychology to get a secure, well-paid job. Harriet Edge, 20, studying medicine at Manchester University, also wanted job security. Her parents lacked college degrees, though the fact that her uncle is a doctor appears to have influenced her choice. "Medicine is one of those fields where it’s pretty likely you’ll get a job at the end. That’s a big plus, as the debt levels after five years of study are going to be frightening," she says. Many experts believe that this situation affects those with no family tradition of higher education far more keenly. The fact that 26 percent of respondents said that they needed more advice implies that some students may end up feeling that their higher education investment was not worthwhile. For those with graduate parents, this lack of guidance may, the researchers suggest, be less of a problem. "But, for those without the advantages, lack of access to career guidance before applying for higher education leaves them exposed to making poorer choices," the survey concludes. The main idea of the passage is that______.
A. parents’ experiences are more important for their children’s education
B. parents’ careers are vitally important for their children’s degrees
C. students’ approach to higher education correlates with their parents’ educational experience
D. students’ career and employment prospects are decided by their parents
Passage One Money may not be flowing much in Thailand’s capital these days, but something more unlikely is traffic. Motorists like to joke that it took the International Monetary Fund to unclog Bangkok’s notoriously jammed thoroughfares. Before the economy crashed last summer, Bangkok was famous for its round-the-clock gridlock. Stories of how people coped became urban lore. Thais bought custom-made vans equipped with TVs and microwave ovens. On the endless trips home after school and work, parents would serve family dinners, then the kids would do their homework and change into pajamas before finally arriving. One company did a booming business in plastic disposable toilets. Consumers could get just about anything, from McDonald’s hamburgers to prescription medicine, delivered via motorbike. The solution for easing congestion turned out to be simple: economic catastrophe. Rising fuel costs, coupled with lost jobs and declining incomes, mean people are making fewer trips. About 20,000 cars have been repossessed, while new-car buying has dwindled from about 900 a day a year ago to just 300 now. Bus rider ship is up; taxi trips are down. So many cabbies are having trouble making enough fares to cover gas and car rental that hundreds of taxis are sitting idle every day. Thinner wallets also mean people are spending less time in bars, restaurants, movie theaters and shopping malls. Instead, they’re staying home. The government, much maligned in the past for botching up mass transit construction, deserves credit as well. New expressways have opened, and some of the construction that has blocked traffic lanes for years has been cleared. The good times may not last, however, at least for motorists. If traffic flow is in fact a reliable economic indicator, Thailand may be on the rebound. "The last few days," says taxi driver Boonlarb Srikam, "I’ve noticed the traffic getting busy again." Bring out those portable toilets. By saying that the good times may not last "at least for motorists," the author suggests that______.
A. good times for traffic are not necessarily good times for the economy
B. traffic flow is not a reliable economic indicator
C. new expressways may soon deteriorate
D. drives do not want the economy to improve
The potential of computers for increasing the control of organizations or society over their members and for invading the privacy of those members has caused considerable concern. The privacy issue has been raised most insistently with respect to the creation and maintenance of data files that assemble information about persons from a multitude of sources. Files of this kind would be highly valuable for many kinds of economic and social research, but they are bought at too high a price if they endanger human freedom or seriously enhance their opportunities of blackmailers. While such dangers should not be ignored, it should be noted that the lack of comprehensive data files has never before been the limiting barrier to the suppression of human freedom. Making the computer the villain in the invasion of privacy or encroachment on civil liberties simply divers attention from the real dangers. Computer data bank files can and must be given the highest degree of protection from abuse. But we must be careful also, that we do not employ such crude methods of protection as to deprive our society of important data it needs to understand its down social processes and to analyze its problems. Perhaps the most important question of all about the computer is what it has come and will do to man’s view of himself and his place in the universe. The most heated attacks on the computer are not focused on its possible economic effects, its presumed destruction of job satisfaction, or its threat to privacy and liberty, but upon the claim that it causes people to be viewed, and to view themselves, as machines. What the computer and progress in artificial intelligence challenge are an ethic that rests on man’s apartness from the rest of nature. An alternative ethic, of course, views man as a part of nature, governed by nature law, subject to the forces of gravity and the demands of his body. The debate about artificial intelligence and the simulation of man’s thinking is, in considerable part, a confrontation of these two views of man’s place in the universe. What lessons can be learned from the past in this decade
A. Private issue has always been associated with data collection.
B. Attacks on freedom are new.
C. The accumulation of data encourages oppression.
D. Privacy has been a neglected issue.