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Directions: In this section, you are going to read a passage with 10 statements attached to it. Each statement contains information given in one of the paragraphs. Identify the paragraph from which the information is derived. You may choose a paragraph more than once. Each paragraph is marked with a letter. Answer the questions by marking the corresponding letter on Answer Sheet 2. Welcome, Freshmen. Have an iPod. A) Taking a step that many professors may view as a bit counterproductive, some colleges and universities are doling out Apple iPhones and Internet-capable iPods to their students. The always-on Internet devices raise some novel possibilities, like tracking where students gather together. With far less controversy, colleges could send messages about canceled classes, delayed buses, campus crises or just the cafeteria menu. B) While schools emphasize its usefulness—online research in class and instant polling of students, for example—a big part of the attraction is, undoubtedly, that the iPhone is cool and a hit with students. Being equipped with one of the most recent cutting-edge IT products could just help a college or university foster a cutting-edge reputation. Apple stands to win as well, hooking more young consumers with decades of technology purchases ahead of them. The lone losers, some fear, could be professors. C) Students already have laptops and cell phones, of course, but the newest devices can take class distractions to a new level. They practically beg a user to ignore the long-suffering professor struggling to pass on accumulated wisdom from the front of the room—a prospect that teachers find most irritating and students view as, well, inevitable. "When it gets a little boring, I might pull it out," acknowledged Naomi Pugh, a first-year student at Freed- Hardeman University in Henderson, Tenn., referring to her new iPod Touch, which can connect to the Internet over a campus wireless network. She speculated that professors might try even harder to make classes interesting if they were to compete with the devices. D) Experts see a movement toward the use of mobile technology in education, though they say it is in its infancy as professors try to come up with useful applications. Providing powerful hand-held devices is sure to fuel debates over the role of technology in higher education. E) "We think this is the way the future is going to work," said Kyle Dickson, co-director of research and the mobile learning initiative at Abilene Christian University in Texas, which has bought more than 600 iPhones and 300 iPods for students entering this fall. Although plenty of students take their laptops to class, they don’t take them everywhere and would prefer something lighter. Abilene Christian settled on the devices after surveying students and finding that they did not like hauling around their laptops, but that most of them always carried a cell phone, Dr. Dickson said. F) It is not clear how many colleges and universities plan to give out iPhones and iPods this fall; officials at Apple were unwilling to talk about the subject and said that they would not leak any institution’s plans. "We can’t announce other people’s news," said Greg Joswiak, vice president of iPod and iPhone marketing at Apple. He also said that he could not discuss discounts to universities for bulk purchases. At least four institutions—the University of Maryland, Oklahoma Christian University, Abilene Christian and Freed-Hardeman—have announced that they will give the devices to some or all of their students this fall. G) Other universities are exploring their options. Stanford University has hired a student-run company to design applications like a campus map and directory for the iPhone. It is considering whether to issue iPhones but not sure it’s necessary, noting that more than 700 iPhones were registered on the university’s network last year. H) At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, iPhones might already have been everywhere, if AT&T, the wireless carrier offering the iPhone in the United States, had a more reliable network, said Andrew Yu, mobile devices platform project manager at M. I. T. "We would have probably gone ahead with this, maybe just getting a thousand iPhones and giving them out," Mr. Yu said. I) The University of Maryland at College Park is proceeding cautiously, giving the iPhone or iPod Touch to 150 students, said Jeffrey Huskamp, vice president and chief information officer at the university. "We don’t think that we have all the answers," Mr. Huskamp said. By observing how students use the gadgets, he said, "We’re trying to get answers from the students." J) At each college, the students who choose to get an iPhone must pay for mobile phone service. Those service contracts include unlimited data use. Both the iPhones and the iPod Touch devices can connect to the Internet through campus wireless networks. With the iPhone, those networks may provide faster connections and longer battery life than AT&T’s data network. Many cell phones allow users to surf the Web, but only some newer ones are capable of wireless connection to the local area computer network. K) University officials say that they have no plans to track their students (and Apple said it would not be possible unless students give their permission). They say that they are drawn to the prospect of learning applications outside the classroom, though such lesson plans have yet to surface. L) "My colleagues and I are studying something called augmented reality (a field of computer research dealing with the combination of real-world and virtual reality)," said Christopher Dede, professor in learning technologies at Harvard University, "Alien Contact," for example, is an exercise developed for middle-school students who use hand-held devices that can determine their location. As they walk around a playground or other area, text, video or audio pops up at various points to help them try to figure out why aliens were in the schoolyard. "You can imagine similar kinds of interactive activities along historical lines," like following the Freedom Trail in Boston, Professor Dede said. "It’s important that we do research so that we know how well something like this works." M) The rush to distribute the devices worries some professors, who say that students are less likely to participate in class if they are multi-tasking. "I’m not someone who’s anti-technology, but I’m always worried that technology becomes an end in and of itself, and it replaces teaching or it replaces analysis," said Ellen Millender, associate professor of classics at Reed College in Portland, Ore. (She added that she hoped to buy an iPhone for herself once prices fall.) N) Robert Summers, who has taught at Cornell Law School for about 40 years, announced this week—in a detailed, footnoted memorandum—that he would ban laptop computers from his class on contract law. "I would ban that too if I knew the students were using it in class," Professor Summers said of the iPhone, after the device and its capabilities were explained to him. "What we want to encourage in these students is an active intellectual experience, in which they develop the wide range of complex reasoning abilities required of good lawyers." O) The experience at Duke University may ease some concerns. A few years ago, Duke began giving iPods to students with the idea that they might use them to record lectures (these older models could not access the Internet). "We had assumed that the biggest focus of these devices would be consuming the content," said Tracy Futhey, vice president for information technology and chief information officer at Duke. But that is not all that the students did. They began using the iPods to create their own "content," making audio recordings of themselves and presenting them. The students turned what could have been a passive interaction into an active one, Ms. Futhey said. The iPods could be used to create an active educational experience, as demonstrated in one university that gave iPods to students a few years ago.
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Google’s Plan for World’s Biggest Online Library: Philanthropy or Act of Piracy A) In recent years, teams of workers dispatched by Google have been working hard to make digital copies of books. So far, Google has scanned more than 10 million titles from libraries in America and Europe—including half a million volumes held by the Bodleian in Oxford. The exact method it uses is unclear; the company does not allow outsiders to observe the process. Why is Google undertaking such a venture B) Why is it even interested in all those out-of-print library books, most of which have been gathering dust on forgotten shelves for decades The company claims its motives are essentially public-spirited. Its overall mission, after all, is to "organise the world’s information," so it would be odd if that information did not include books. The company likes to present itself as having lofty aspirations. "This really isn’t about making money. We are doing this for the good of society." As Santiago de la Morn, head of Google Books for Europe, puts it: "By making it possible to search the millions of books that exist today, we hope to expand the frontiers of human knowledge." C) Dan Clancy, the chief architect of Google Books, does seem genuine in his conviction that this is primarily a philanthropic (慈善的) exercise. "Google’s core business is search and find, so obviously what helps improve Google’s search engine is good for Google," he says. "But we have never built a spreadsheet (电子数据表) outlining the financial benefits of this, and I have never had to justify the amount I am spending to the company’s founders." D) It is easy, talking to Clancy and his colleagues, to be swept along by their missionary passion. But Google’s book-scanning project is proving controversial. Several opponents have recently emerged, ranging from rival tech giants such as Microsoft and Amazon to small bodies representing authors and publishers across the world. In broad terms, these opponents have levelled two sets of criticisms at Google. E) First, they have questioned whether the primary responsibility for digitally archiving the world’s books should be allowed to fall to a commercial company, in a recent essay in the New York Review of Books, Robert Darnton, the head of Harvard University’s library, argued that because such books are a common resource—the possession of us all—only public, not-for-profit bodies should be given the power to control them. F) The second related criticism is that Google’s scanning of books is actually illegal. This allegation has led to Google becoming mired in (陷入) a legal battle whose scope and complexity makes the Jarndyce and Jarndyce case in Charles Dickens’ Bleak House look straightforward. At its centre, however, is one simple issue: that of copyright. The inconvenient fact about most books, to which Google has arguably paid insufficient attention, is that they are protected by copyright. Copyright laws differ from country to country, but in general protection extends for the duration of an author’s life and for a substantial period afterwards, thus allowing the author’s heirs to benefit. (In Britain and America, this post-death period is 70 years.) This means, of course, that almost all of the books published in the 20th century are still under copyright—and the last century saw more books published than in all previous centuries combined. Of the roughly 40 million books in US libraries, for example, an estimated 32 million are in copyright. Of these, some 27 million are out of print. G) Outside the US, Google has made sure only to scan books that are out of copyright and thus in the "public domain" (works such as the Bodleian’s first edition of Middlemarch, which anyone can read for free on Google Books Search). H) But, within the US, the company has scanned both in-copyright and out-of-copyright works. In its defence, Google points out that it displays only small segments of books that are in copyright—arguing that such displays are "fair use." But critics allege that by making electronic copies of these books without first seeking the permission of copyright holders, Google has committed piracy. "The key principle of copyright law has always been that works can be copied only once authors have expressly given their permission," says Piers Blofeld, of the Sheil Land literary agency in London. "Google has reversed this—it has simply copied all these works without bothering to ask." I) In 2005, the Authors Guild of America, together with a group of US publishers, launched a class action suit (集团诉讼) against Google that, after more than two years of negotiation, ended with an announcement last October that Google and the claimants had reached an out-of-court settlement. The full details are complicated—the text alone runs to 385 pages—and trying to summarise it is no easy task. "Part of the problem is that it is basically incomprehensible," says Blofeld, one of the settlement’s most vocal British critics. J) Broadly, the deal provides a mechanism for Google to compensate authors and publishers whose rights it has breached (including giving them a share of any future revenue it generates from their works). In exchange for this, the rights holders agree not to sue Google in future. K) This settlement hands Google the power—but only with the agreement of individual rights holders—to exploit its database of out-of-print books. It can include them in subscription deals sold to libraries or sell them individually under a consumer licence. It is these commercial provisions that are proving the settlement’s most controversial aspect. L) Critics point out that, by giving Google the right to commercially exploit its database, the settlement paves the way for a subtle shift in the company’s role from provider of information to seller. "Google’s business model has always been to provide information for free, and sell advertising on the basis of the traffic this generates," points out James Grimmelmann, associate professor at New York Law School. Now, he says, because of the settlement’s provisions, Google could become a significant force in bookselling. M) Interest in this aspect of the settlement has focused on "orphan" works, where there is no known copyright holder—these make up an estimated 5%-10% of the books Google has scanned. Under the settlement, when no rights holders come forward and register their interest in a work, commercial control automatically reverts to Google. Google will be able to display up to 20% of orphan works for free, include them in its subscription deals to libraries and sell them to individual buyers under the consumer licence. N) It is by no means certain that the settlement will be enacted (执行)—it is the subject of a fairness hearing in the US courts. But if it is enacted, Google will in effect be off the hook as far as copyright violations in the US are concerned. Many people are seriously concerned by this—and the company is likely to face challenges in other courts around the world. O) No one knows the precise use Google will make of the intellectual property it has gained by scanning the world’s library books, and the truth, as Gleick, an American science writer and member of the Authors Guild, points out, is that the company probably doesn’t even know itself. But what is certain is that, in some way or other, Google’s entrance into digital bookselling will have a significant impact on the book world in years to come. Google claims its plan for the world’s biggest online library is to serve the interest of the general public.
The Three-Year Solution A) Hartwick College, a small liberal-arts school in upstate New York, makes this offer to well-prepared students: earn your undergraduate degree in three years instead of four, and save about $43,000—the amount of one year’s tuition and fees. A number of innovative colleges are making the same offer to students anxious about saving time and money. That’s both an opportunity and a warning for the best higher-education system in the world. B) The United States has almost all of the world’s best universities. A recent Chinese survey ranks 35 American universities among the top 50, eight among the top 10. Our research universities have been the key to developing the competitive advantages that help Americans produce 25% of all the world’s wealth. In 2007, 623,805 of the world’s brightest students were attracted to American universities. C) Yet, there are signs of peril (危险) within American higher education. US colleges have to compete in the marketplace. Students may choose among 6,000 public, private, nonprofit, for-profit, or religious institutions of higher learning. In addition, almost all of the $32 billion the federal government provides for university research is awarded competitively. D) But many colleges and universities are stuck in the past. For instance, the idea of the fall-to-spring "school year" hasn’t changed much since before the American Revolution, when we were a nation of farmers and students put their books away to work the soil during the summer. That long summer stretch no longer makes sense. Former George Washington University president Stephen Trachtenberg estimates that a typical college uses its facilities for academic purposes a little more than half the calendar year. "While college facilities sit idle, they continue to generate maintenance expenses that contribute to the high cost of running a college," he has written. E) Within academic departments, tenure (终身职位), combined with age-discrimination laws, makes faculty turnover—critical for a university to remain current in changing times—difficult. Instead of protecting speech and encouraging diversity and innovative thinking, the tenure system often stifles (压制) them: younger professors must win the approval of established colleagues for tenure, encouraging likemindedness and sometimes inhibiting the free flow of ideas. F) Meanwhile, tuition has soared, leaving graduating students with unprecedented loan debt. Strong campus presidents to manage these problems are becoming harder to find, and to keep. In fact, students now stay on campus almost as long as their presidents. The average amount of time students now take to complete an undergraduate degree has stretched to six years and seven months as students interrupted by work, inconvenienced by unavailable classes, or lured by one more football season find it hard to graduate. Congress has tried to help students with college costs through Pell Grants and other forms of tuition support. But some of their fixes have made the problem worse. The stack of congressional regulations governing federal student grants and loans now stands twice as tall as I do. Filling out these forms consumes 7% of every tuition dollar. G) For all of these reasons, some colleges like Hartwick are rethinking the old way of doing things and questioning decades-old assumptions about what a college degree means. For instance, why does it have to take four years to earn a diploma This fall, 16 first-year students and four second-year students at Hartwick enrolled in the school’s new three-year degree program. According to the college, the plan is designed for high-ability, highly motivated students who wish to save money or to move along more rapidly toward advanced degrees. H) By eliminating that extra year, three-year degree students save 25% in costs. Instead of taking 30 credits a year, these students take 40. During January, Hartwick runs a four-week course during which students may earn three to four credits on or off campus, including a number of international sites. Summer courses are not required, but a student may enroll in them—and pay extra. Three-year students get first crack at course registration. There are no changes in the number of courses professors teach or in their pay. I) The three-year degree isn’t a new idea. Geniuses have always breezed through. Judson College, a 350-student institution in Alabama, has offered students a three-year option for 40 years. Students attend "short terms" in May and June to earn the credits required for graduation. Bates College in Maine and Ball State University in Indiana are among other colleges offering three-year options. J) Changes at the high-school level are also helping to make it easier for many students to earn their undergraduate degrees in less time. One of five students arrives at college today with Advanced Placement (AP) credits amounting to a semester or more of college-level work. Many universities, including large schools like the University of Texas, make it easy for these AP students to graduate faster. K) For students who don’t plan to stop with an undergraduate degree, the three-year plan may have an even greater appeal. Dr. John Sergent, head of Vanderbilt University Medical School’s residency (住院医生) program, enrolled in Vanderbilt’s undergraduate college in 1959. He entered medical school after only three years as did four or five of his classmates. "My first year of medical school counted as my senior year, which meant I had to take three to four labs a week to get all my sciences in. I basically skipped my senior year," says Sergent. He still had time to be a student senator and meet his wife. L) There are, however, drawbacks to moving through school at such a brisk pace. For one, it deprives students of the luxury of time to roam (遨游) intellectually. Compressing everything into three years also leaves less time for growing up, engaging in extracurricular activities, and studying abroad. On crowded campuses it could mean fewer opportunities to get into a prized professor’s class. Iowa’s Waldorf College has graduated several hundred students in its three-year degree programs, but is now phasing out the option. Most Waldorf students wanted the full four-year experience—academically, socially, and athletically. And faculty members will be wary of any change that threatens the core curriculum in the name of moving students into the workforce. M) "Most high governmental officials seem to conceive of education in this light—as a way to ensure economic competitiveness and continued economic growth," Derek Bok, former president of Harvard, told The Washington Post. "I strongly disagree with this approach." Another risk: the new campus schedules might eventually produce less revenue for the institution and longer working hours for faculty members. N) Adopting a three-year option will not come easily to most schools. Those that wish to tackle tradition and make American campuses more cost-conscious may find it easier to take Trachtenberg’s advice: open campuses year-round. "You could run two complete colleges, with two complete faculties," he says. "That’s without cutting the length of students’ vacations, increasing class sizes, or requiring faculty to teach more." O) Whether they experiment with three-year degrees, offer year-round classes, challenge the tenure system—or all of the above—universities are slowly realizing that to stay competitive and relevant they must adapt to a rapidly changing world. Expanding the three-year option may be difficult, but it may be less difficult than asking Congress for additional financial help, asking legislators for more state support, or asking students for even higher tuition payments. Campuses willing to adopt convenient schedules along with more-focused, less-expensive degrees may find that they have a competitive advantage in attracting bright, motivated students. These sorts of innovations can help American universities avoid the perils of success. College faculty members are afraid that the pretext of moving students into the workforce might pose a threat to the core curriculum.
Thirst Grows for Living Unplugged More people are taking breaks from the connected life amid the stillness and quiet of retreats like the Jesuit Centre in Wernersville, Pennsylvania. A) About a year ago, I flew to Singapore to join the writer Malcolm Gladwell, the fashion designer Marc Ecko and the graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister in addressing a group of advertising people on "Marketing to the Child of Tomorrow." Soon after I arrived, the chief executive of the agency that had invited us took me aside. What he was most interested in, he began, was stillness and quiet. B) A few months later, I read an interview with the well-known cutting-edge designer Philippe Starck. What allowed him to remain so consistently ahead of the curve "I never read any magazines or watch TV," he said, perhaps with a little exaggeration. "Nor do I go to cocktail parties, dinners or anything like that." He lived outside conventional ideas, he implied, because "I live alone mostly, in the middle of nowhere." C) Around the same time, I noticed that those who part with $2,285 a night to stay in a cliff-top room at the Post Ranch Inn in Big Sur, California, pay partly for the privilege of not having a TV in their rooms; the future of travel, I’m reliably told, lies in "black-hole resorts", which charge high prices precisely because you can’t get online in their rooms. D) Has it really come to this The more ways we have to connect, the more many of us seem desperate to unplug, Internet rescue camps in Republic of Korea and China try to save kids addicted to the screen. Writer friends of mine pay good money to get the Freedom software that enables them to disable the very Internet connections that seemed so emancipating not long ago. Even Intel experimented in 2007 with conferring four uninterrupted hours of quiet time (no phone or e-mail) every Tuesday morning on 300 engineers and managers. Workers were not allowed to use the phone or send e-mail, but simply had the chance to clear their heads and to hear themselves think. E) The average American spends at least eight and a half hours a day in front of a screen. Nicholas Carr notes in his book The Shallows. The average American teenager sends or receives 75 text messages a day, though one girl managed to handle an average of 10,000 every 24 hours for a month. Since luxury is a function of scarcity, the children of tomorrow will long for nothing more than intervals of freedom from all the blinking machines, streaming videos and scrolling headlines that leave them feeling empty and too full all at once. F) The urgency of slowing down—to find the time and space to think—is nothing new, of course, and wiser sods have always reminded us that the more attention we pay to the moment, the less time and energy we have to place it in some larger context. "Distraction is the only thing that consoles us for our miseries," the French philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote in the 17th century, "and yet it is itself the greatest of our miseries." He also famously remarked that all of man’s problems come from his inability to sit quietly in a room alone. G) When telegraphs and trains brought in the idea that convenience was more important than content, Henry David Thoreau reminded us that "the man whose horse trots (奔跑) a mile in a minute does not carry the most important messages." Marshall McLuhan, who came closer than most to seeing what was coming, warned, "When things come at you very fast, naturally you lose touch with yourself." We have more and more ways to communicate, but less and less to say. Partly because we are so busy communicating. And we are rushing to meet so many deadlines that we hardly register that what we need most are lifelines. H) So what to do More and more people I know seem to be turning to yoga, or meditation (沉思), or tai chi (太极); these aren’t New Age fads (时尚事物) so much as ways to connect with what could be called the wisdom of old age. Two friends of mine observe an "Internet sabbath (安息日)" every week, turning off their online connections from Friday night to Monday morning. Other friends take walks and "forget" their cellphones at home. I) A series of tests in recent years has shown, Mr. Carr points out, that after spending time in quiet rural settings, subjects "exhibit greater attentiveness, stronger memory and generally improved cognition. Their brains become both calmer and sharper." More than that, empathy (同感，共鸣), as well as deep thought, depends (as neuroscientists like Antonio Damasio have found) on neural processes that are "inherently slow." J) I turn to eccentric measures to try to keep my mind sober and ensure that I have time to do nothing at all (which is the only time when I can see what I should be doing the rest of the time). I have yet to use a cellphone and I have never Twittered or entered Facebook. I try not to go online till my day’s writing is finished, and I moved from Manhattan to rural Japan in part so I could more easily survive for long stretches entirely on foot. None of this is a matter of asceticism (苦行主义); it is just pure selfishness. Nothing makes me feel better than being in one place, absorbed in a book, a conversation, or music. It is actually something deeper than mere happiness: it is joy, which the monk (僧侣) David Steindl-Rast describes as "that kind of happiness that doesn’t depend on what happens." K) It is vital, of course, to stay in touch with the world. But it is only by having some distance from the world that you can see it whole, and understand what you should be doing with it. For more than 20 years, therefore, I have been going several times a year—often for no longer than three days—to a Benedictine hermitage (修道院), 40 minutes down the road, as it happens, from the Post Ranch Inn. I don’t attend services when I am there, and I have never meditated, there or anywhere; I just take walks and read and lose myself in the stillness, recalling that it is only by stepping briefly away from my wife and bosses and friends that I will have anything useful to bring to them. The last time I was in the hermitage, three months ago, I happened to meet with a youngish-looking man with a 3-year-old boy around his shoulders. L) "You’re Pico, aren’t you" the man said, and introduced himself as Larry; we had met, I gathered, 19 years before, when he had been living in the hermitage as an assistant to one of the monks. "What are you doing now" I asked. We smiled. No words were necessary. "I try to bring my kids here as often as I can," he went on. The child of tomorrow, I realized, may actually be ahead of us, in terms of sensing not what is new, but what is essential. In the author’s opinion. the youngish-looking man takes his little boy to the hermitage frequently so that the boy will know what is essential when he grows up.
Rates Are Low, but Consumers Won’t Borrow With heavy debt loads and high joblessness, Americans are cautious. A) The US Federal Reserve (Fed)’s announcement last week that it intended to keep credit cheap for at least two more years was a clear invitation to Americans: Go out and borrow. B) But many economists say it will take more than low interest rates to persuade consumers to take on more debt. There are already signs that the recent stock market fluctuations, turbulence in Europe and the US deficit have scared consumers. On Friday, preliminary data showed that the Thomson Reuters/University of Michigan consumer sentiment index had fallen this month to lower than it was in November 2008, when the United States was deep in recession. Under normal circumstances, the Fed’s announcement might have attracted new home and car buyers and prompted credit card holders to rack up fresh charges. But with unemployment high and those with jobs worried about keeping them, consumers are more concerned about paying off the loans they already have than adding more debt. And by showing its hand for the next two years, the Fed may have thoughtlessly invited prospective borrowers to put off large purchases. C) Lenders, meanwhile, are still dealing with the effects of the boom-gone-bust and are forcing prospective borrowers to go to extraordinary lengths to prove their creditworthiness. D) "I don’t think lenders are going to be interested in extending a lot of debt in this environment," said Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Analytics, a macroeconomic consulting firm. "Nor do I think households are going to be interested in taking on a lot of debt." In housing, consumers have already shown a slow response to low rates. Applications for new mortgages have decreased this year to a 10-year low, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association. Sales of furniture and furnishings remain 22% below their pre-recession peak, according to SpendingPulse, a research report by Master Card Advisors. Credit card rates have actually gone up slightly in the past year. The one bright spot in lending is the number of auto loans, which is up from last year. But some economists say that confidence among car buyers is hitting new lows. E) For Xavier Walter, a former mortgage banker who with his wife, Danielle, accumulated $20,000 in credit card debt, low rates will not change his spending habits. As the housing market topped out five years ago, he lost his six-figure income. He and his wife were able to modify the mortgage on their four-bedroom house in Medford, New Jersey, as well as negotiate lower credit card payments. Two years ago, Mr. Walter, a 34-year-old father of three, started an energy business. He has sworn off credit. "I’m not going to go back in debt ever again," he said. "If I can’t pay for it in cash, I don’t want it." F) Until now, one of the biggest restraints on consumer spending has been a debt aftereffect. Since August 2008, when household debt peaked at $12.41 trillion, it has declined by about $1.2 trillion, according to an analysis by Moody’s Analytics of data from the Federal Reserve and Equifax, the credit agency. A large portion of that, though, was simply written off by lenders as borrowers defaulted on loans. By other measures, households have improved their position. The proportion of after-tax income that households spend to remain current on loan payments has fallen. G) Still, household debt remains high. That presents a paradox: many economists argue that the economy cannot achieve true health until debt levels decline. But credit, made attractive by low rates, is a time-tested way to increase consumer spending. With new risks of another downturn, economists worry that it will take years for debt to return to manageable levels. If the economy contracts again, said George Magnus, senior adviser at UBS, then "you could find a lot of households in a debt trap which they probably can never get out of" H) Mortgage lenders, meanwhile, burned by the housing crash, are extra careful about approving new loans. In June, for instance, Fannie Mac, the largest mortgage buyer in the United States, said that borrowers whose existing debt exceeded 45 to 50% of their income would be required to have stronger "compensating" factors, which might include higher savings. Even those borrowers in strong financial positions are asked to provide unusual amounts of paperwork. Bobby and Katie Smith have an extremely good credit record, tiny student debt and a combined six-figure income. For part of their down payment, they planned to use about $5,000 they had received as wedding gifts in February. But the lender would not accept that money unless the Smiths provided a certified letter from each of 14 guests, stating that the money was a gift, rather than a loan. "We laughed for a good 15 or 20 minutes," recalled Mr. Smith, 34. Mr. Smith, a program director for a radio station in Orlando, Florida, said they ended up using other savings for their down payment to buy a $300,000 four-bedroom house in April. I) For those not as creditworthy as the Smiths, low rates are irrelevant because they no longer qualify for mortgages. That leaves the eligible pool of loan applicants wealthier, "older and whiter," said Guy Cecala, publisher of Inside Mortgage Finance. "It’s creating much more of a divide," he said, "between the haves and the have-nots." "Car shoppers with the highest credit ratings can also get loans more easily, and at lower rates," said Paul C. Taylor, chief economist of the National Automobile Dealers Association. J) During the recession, inability to obtain credit severely cut auto buying as lenders rejected even those with good credit ratings. Now automakers are increasing their subprime (次级债的) lending again as well, but remain hesitant to approve large numbers of risky customers. K) The number of new auto loans was up by 16% in the second quarter compared with the previous year, said Melinda Zabritski, director of automotive credit at Experian, the information services company. But some economists warn that consumer confidence is falling. According to CNW Marketing Research, confidence among those who intend to buy a car this year is at its lowest since it began collecting data on this measure in 2000. L) On credit cards, rates have actually inched higher this year, largely because of new rules that curb the issuer’s ability to charge fees or raise certain interest rates at will. M) At the end of the second quarter, rates averaged 14.01% on new card offers, up from 13.75% a year earlier, according to Mail Monitor, which tracks credit cards for Synovate, a market research firm. According to data from the Federal Reserve, total outstanding debt on revolving credit cards was down by 4.6% during the first half of tile year compared with the same period a year earlier. N) Even if the Fed’s announcement helps keep rates steady, or pushes them down, businesses do not expect customers to suddenly charge up a storm. O) "It’s not like, ’Oh, credit is so cheap, let’s go back to the heydays (鼎盛时期),’" said Elizabeth Crowell, who owns Sterling Place, two high-end home furnishing and gift stores in New York. "People still fear for their jobs. So I think where maybe after other recessions they might return to previous spending habits, the pendulum hasn’t swung back the same way." The economists’ concern regarding the current economy is the unmanageable debt levels.
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