In the past 35 years, hundreds of millions of Chinese have found productive, if often exhausting, work in the country’s growing cities. This extraordinary mobilization of labour is the biggest economic event of the past half-century. The world has seen nothing on such scale before. Will it see anything like it again The answer lies across the Himalayas in India. India is an ancient civilization but a youthful country. Its working-age population is rising by about 12m people a year, even as China’s shrank last year by 3m. Within a decade India will have the biggest potential workforce in the world. Optimists look forward to a bumper "demographic dividend", the result of more workers per dependant and more saving out of income. This combination accounted for perhaps a third of the East Asian miracle. India "has time on its side, literally," boasted one prominent politician, Kamal Nath, in a 2008 book entitled "India’s Century". But although India’s dreamers have faith in its youth, the country’s youngest have growing reason to doubt India. The economy raised aspirations that it has subsequently failed to meet. From 2005 to 2007 it grew by about 9% a year. In 2010 it even grew faster than China (if the two economies are measured consistently). But growth has since halved. India’s impressive savings rate, the other side of the demographic dividend, has also slipped. Worryingly, a growing share of household saving is bypassing the financial system altogether, seeking refuge from inflation in gold, bricks and mortar. The last time a Congress-led government liberalized the economy in earnest—in 1991—over 40% of today’s Indians had yet to be born. Their anxieties must seem remote to India’s elderly politicians. The average age of cabinet minister is 65. The country has never had a prime minister born in independent India. One man who might buck that trend, Rahul Gandhi, is the son, grandson and the great-grandson of former prime ministers. India is run by gerontocrats (老年统治者) and epigones (子孙): grey hairs and groomed heirs. The apparent indifference of the police to the way young women in particular are treated has underlined the way that old India fails to protect new India. China is mentioned in order to ______.
A. show its scale of labour force
B. highlight its economic growth
C. introduce the topic of India
D. stress the importance of labour
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It’s 2:45 p.m. on a Wednesday, and Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti is in the backseat of a black Chevy Tahoe that’s inching its way to city hall along the 101 freeway. This stretch of the often clogged road is eight lanes, but there are so many cars on it that everyone is moving at about 30km/h, a single mass of steel and glass lurching toward downtown. Just a few hours earlier, Garcetti was traveling a lot faster. To get to an event in University City, about 16 km from his office, Garcetti took the city’s Red Line subway, which can reach speed of up to 110km/h—a pace L.A.’s rush-hour drivers can only dream about. Persuading more Angelenos to take the train could go a long way toward solving one of L.A’s most intractable problems. "We don’t need people to completely give up their cars," he says while holding onto a pole on the Red Line. "But right now, we average 1.1 people per car. If we could get that to 1.6, the traffic problem would go away." In L.A., cars are a source of smog, billions of dollars in lost productivity every year and endless frustration for residents. "Every working person plans their life around traffic in this town," says Zev Yaroslavsky, a Los Angeles County supervisor and longtime friend of Garcetti’s. "Building a transportation infrastructure is something that needs to be focused on, and Eric gets that." Should Garcetti, 43—who was elected in May as the youngest mayor of L. A. in more than a century—ever manage to get the freeways flowing, it would be a triumph. And it would only begin to cure what ails L.A. Los Angeles’ structural problems are daunting. The city has fewer jobs now than it did in 1990, with a regional unemployment rate that is more than 2 points higher than the national average. L.A. is also buckling under health care and pension costs and is scaling back public services to compensate. The 2014-2015 budget is projected to be $242 million in the red. As the Los Angeles 2020 Commission, a group of business, labor and public-sector leaders charged by the city council with diagnosing the region’s ills, put it in a December report, "Los Angeles is barely treading water while the rest of the world is moving forward." In the first paragraph, the descriptions are about ______.
A. traffic jam
B. social issue
C. political issue
D. population problem
在社会生活中,人们经常通过哪些途径来形成与认识自我