READING PASSAGE 1 

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13, which are based on
Reading Passage 1 below. 

A WHEN the word water appears in print these days, crisis is rarely far behind.
Water, as is said, is the new oil: a resource long squandered, now growing
expensive and soon to be overwhelmed by insatiable demands. Aquifers are
falling, glaciers vanishing, reservoirs drying up and rivers no longer flowing to the
sea. Climate change threatens to make the problems worse. Everyone must use less
water if famine, pestilence and mass migration are not to sweep the globe. As it is,
wars are about to break out between countries squabbling over dams and rivers.
The language is often overblown and the remedies are sometimes ill conceived, but
the basic message is not wrong. Water is indeed scarce in many places, and will
grow scarcer. Bringing supply and demand into equilibrium will be painful, and
political disputes may increase in number and intensify in their capacity to cause
trouble. To carry on with present practices would indeed be to invite disaster. 
B The troubles start with the number of people using the stuff. When, 50 years ago,
the world's population was about 2.5 billion, worries about water supply affected
relatively few people. Both drought and hunger existed, as they have throughout
history, but most people could be fed without irrigated farming. Then the green
revolution, in an inspired combination of new crop breeds, fertilisers and water,
made possible a huge rise in the population. The number of people on Earth rose to
6 billion in 2000 and is heading for 9 billion in 2050. The area under irrigation has
doubled and the amount of water drawn for farming has tripled. The proportion of
people living in countries chronically short of water, which stood at 8% (500m) at
the turn of the 21st century, is set to rise to 45% (4 billion) by 2050. And about 1
billion people go to bed hungry each night, partly for lack of water to grow food.
C People in temperate climates where the rain falls moderately all the year round
may not realise how much water is needed for farming. In Britain farming takes
only 3% of all water withdrawals. In the United States, by contrast, 41% goes for
agriculture irrigation. For the world as a whole, agriculture accounts for almost
70%. Farmers' increasing demand for water is caused not only by the growing
number of mouths to be fed but also by people's desire for better-tasting, more
interesting food. Unfortunately, it takes nearly twice as much water to grow a kilo
of peanuts as a kilo of soya beans, nearly four times as much to produce a kilo of
beef as a kilo of chicken, and nearly five times as much to produce a glass of
orange juice as a cup of tea. With 2 billion people around the world about to enter
the middle class, the agricultural demands on water would increase even if the
population stood still.
D Most of the Earth's surface is sea, and the water below it – over 97% of the total
on Earth – is salty. In principle the salt can be removed to increase the supply of
fresh water, but at present desalination is expensive and uses lots of energy.
Although costs have come down, no one expects it to provide wide-scale irrigation
soon.
E Of the 2.5% of water that is not salty, about 70% is frozen, either at the poles, in
glaciers or in permafrost. All living things, except those in the sea, have about
0.75% of the total to survive on. Most of this available water is underground, in
aquifers or similar formations. The rest is falling as rain, sitting in lakes and
reservoirs or flowing in rivers where it is, with luck, replaced by rainfall and
melting snow and ice. There is also, to take note, water vapour in the atmosphere. 
F Many of these conceptual difficulties arise from other unusual aspects of water.
It is a commodity whose value varies according to locality, purpose and
circumstance. Take locality first. Water is not evenly distributed – just nine
countries account for 60% of all available fresh supplies - and among them only
Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Congo, Indonesia and Russia have an abundance.
America is relatively well off, but China and India, with over a third of the world's
population between them, have less than 10% of its water.
G Even within countries the variations may be huge. The average annual rainfall in
India's northeast is 110 times that in its western desert. And many places have
plenty of water, or even far too much, at some times of the year, but not nearly
enough at others. Most of India's crucial rain is brought by the summer monsoon,
which falls, with luck, in just a few weeks between June and September. Flooding
is routine, and may become more frequent and damaging with climate change. 
H The water underground, once largely ignored, has come to be seen as especially
valuable as the demands of farmers have outgrown their supplies of rain and
surface water. Groundwater has come to the rescue as a miraculous solution: drill a
borehole, pump the stuff up from below and in due course it will be replaced. In
some places it is replenished if rain or surface water is available. In many places,
however, the quantities being withdrawn exceed the annual recharge. This is
serious for millions of people in many cities, who often depend on them for their
drinking water.
I All humans, however, need a basic minimum of two litres of water in food or
drink each day, and for this there is no substitute. No one survived in the ruins after
a heavy earthquake unless they had access to some water-based food or drink.
Many people believe water to be a human right, a necessity more basic than bread
or a roof over the head. There is a widespread belief that no one should have to pay
for water. Water often has a sacred or mystical quality. Throughout history, man's
dependence on water has made him live near it. 
J Water has provided not just life and food but also a means of transport, a way of
keeping clean, a mechanism for removing sewage, a home for fish and other
animals, a medium with which to cook, in which to swim, on which to skate and
sail, a thing of beauty to provide inspiration, to gaze upon and to enjoy. No wonder
a commodity with so many qualities, uses and associations has proved so difficult
to organise. 

Questions 1-5
Reading Passage 1 has ten paragraphs, A-J.
Which paragraph contains the following information?
Write the correct letter, A-J, in boxes 1-5 on your answer sheet. 

1 The aquifers are overdrawn in some areas.

2 Water is essential for our daily life.
3 More delicious and processed food contributes to the increasing consumption of
water.
4 Negative effects on water consumption owe much to the demographic changes.
5 The precipitation is unevenly distributed in one nation state or area. 
Questions 6-12
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage
1? In boxes 6-12 on your answer sheet, write 
YES if the statement agrees with the claims of the writer
NO if the statement contradicts the claims of the writer
NOT GIVEN if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this 

6 The supply of water is finite and the situation is getting worse.

7 Most farmers were vexed by the problems caused by the deficiency of water
nearly half a century ago.
8 The water consumption in farming may climb up while matching against static
population.
9 Desalination has experienced a series of great breakthroughs in technology.
10 Most global freshwater resources are in liquid state.
11 Brazil has more available water than Russia.
12 More important than our daily food and domestic dwellings, water is seen as a
human right and a totally free source for everyone. 

Question 13
Choose the correct letter A, B, C or D.
Write the correct letter in box 13 on your answer sheet. 
13 The writer's aim in this passage is
A to warn that most Western governments have underestimated their chronic
shortage of water.
B to prove that water is a commodity that is too difficult to manage.
C to make us believe that water is another kind of the new oil.
D to show that water is finite, vital but little understood and looks unmanageable. 
READING PASSAGE 2 
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14-27, which are based on
Reading Passage 2 on the following pages. 

Questions 14-20
Reading Passage 2 has nine paragraphs, A-I.
Choose the correct heading for some of the paragraphs from the list of headings
below.
Write the correct number, i-x, in boxes 14-20 on your answer sheet. 
List of Headings
i The opportunities are equally extraordinary.
ii Clever programs allow computers to recognize handwriting or turn photographs
into cartoons.
iii Old assumptions about innovation in the developed countries are also being
challenged.
iv In some cases the traditional global trend is even being reversed.
v Japan became the world's leading carmaker for business innovations.
vi The emerging world is making a growing contribution to innovations.
vii The emerging world is undergoing changes at home and abroad.
viii The multinationals neglect the emerging markets. 
ix Western multinationals are investing more R&D in emerging markets.
x It is really not easy for Westerners to prosper in these booming markets. 

14 Paragraph A 
15 Paragraph B 
16 Paragraph C 
17 Paragraph D 
18 Paragraph E 
19 Paragraph F 
20 Paragraph G 
 
A Developing countries, the emerging world, are becoming hotbeds of business
innovation. They are coming up with new products and services that are
dramatically cheaper than their Western equivalents: $3,000 cars, $300 computers
and $30 mobile phones. They are reinventing systems of production and
distribution, and they are experimenting with entirely new business models. All the
elements of modem business, from supply-chain management to recruitment, are
being reinvented in this emerging market. Emerging-market champions have not
only proved highly competitive in their own backyards, they are also going global
themselves.
B Western multinationals now regard these emerging developing countries as
sources of economic growth and high-quality brainpower, both of which they
desperately need. Multinationals expect about 70% of the world's growth over the
next few years to come from emerging markets. They have also noted that China
has been pouring resources into education over the past couple of decades. China
produces 75,000 people with higher degrees in engineering or computer science
every year. The world's biggest multinationals are becoming increasingly happy to
do their research and development in emerging markets. Companies in the Fortune
500 list have 98 R&D facilities in China and 63 in India. Some have more than
one. Knowledge-intensive companies such as IT specialists and consultancies have
hugely stepped up the number of people they employ in developing countries. 
C Both Western and emerging-country companies have also realised that they need
to try harder if they are to prosper in these markets. That means rethinking
everything from products to distribution systems. Anil Gupta, of the University of
Maryland at College Park, points out that these markets are among the toughest in
the world. Distribution systems can be hopeless. Income streams can be
unpredictable. Pollution can be lung-searing. Governments sometimes failed to
provide basic services. Pirating can squeeze profit margins. And poverty is
ubiquitous. The islands of success are surrounded by a sea of problems, which
have defeated some doughty companies. EBay retreated from China, and Google
too has recently backed out from the mainland of China and moved to Hong Kong.
Black & Decker, America's biggest tool maker, is almost invisible in India and
China, the world's two biggest construction sites. 
D However, the potential market is huge. The populations are already much bigger
than in the developed world and growing much faster, and in both China and India
hundreds of millions of people will enter the middle class in the coming decades.
The economies are set to grow faster too. Brainpower is relatively cheap and
abundant: in China over 5m people graduate every year and in India about 3m,
respectively four times and three times the numbers a decade ago. No visitor to the
emerging world can fail to be struck by its prevailing optimism. Large majorities in
China and India say their country's current economic situation is good and think
their children will be better off than they are. This is a region that, to echo
Churchill's phrase, sees opportunities in every difficulty rather than difficulties in
every opportunity. 
E Until now it had been widely assumed that globalisation was driven by the West
and imposed on the rest. Bosses in New York, London and Paris would control the
process from their glass towers, and Western consumers would reap most of the
benefits. This is changing fast. Embraer buys many of its component parts from the
West and does the assembly work in Brazil. The emerging-market brainy ones are
taking over office work. Consumers in developing countries are getting richer
faster than their equivalents in the West.
F People in the West like to believe that their companies cook up new ideas in
their laboratories at home and then export them to the developing world, which
makes it easier to accept job losses in manufacturing. But this is proving less true
by the day. Western companies are embracing "polycentric innovation" as they
spread their R&D centres around the world. And non-Western companies are
becoming powerhouses of innovation in everything from telecoms to computers. 
G The very nature of innovation has to be rethought. Most people in the West
equate it with technological breakthroughs, embodied in revolutionary new
products that are taken up by the elites and eventually trickle down to the masses.
The emerging developing countries are offering us many breakthrough
innovations. For instance, it has already leapfrogged ahead of the West in areas
such as mobile money (using mobile phones to make payments) and online
games. Microsoft's research laboratory in Beijing has produced clever programs
that allow computers to recognise handwriting or turn photographs into cartoons.
But the most exciting innovations are of the Wal-Mart and Dell variety: smarter
ways of designing products and organising processes to reach the billions of
consumers who are just entering the global market.
H In the past, emerging economic giants have tended to embrace new management
systems as they tried to consolidate their progress. America adopted Henry Ford's
production line in the 1960s. In 1980 American car executives were so shaken to
find that Japan had replaced the United States as the world's leading carmaker that
they began to visit Japan to find out what was going on. The visitors discovered
that the answer was not industrial policy or state subsidies, as they had expected,
but business innovation.
I The Japanese had invented a new system of making things that was quickly
dubbed "lean manufacturing", which almost destroyed the American car and
electronics industries. Now the emerging markets are developing their own
distinctive management ideas, and Western companies will increasingly find
themselves learning from their rivals. People who used to think of the emerging
world as a source of cheap labour must now recognise that it can be a source of
disruptive innovation as well. 

Questions 21-23 
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage
2? In boxes 21-23 on your answer sheet, write 
YES if the statement agrees with the claims of the writer
NO if the statement contradicts the claims of the writer
NOT GIVEN if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this 

21 The emerging markets and their populations are growing much faster. 
22 The Western countries are focusing on many breakthrough innovations. 
23 The emerging world, a source of cheap labour before, now rivals the
rich countries for business innovation. 
Questions 24-27
Complete the summary below.
Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 24-27 on your answer sheet. 

In 1960s, the 24 _____ invented by Henry Ford became popular in United States.
In the auto industrial history, the US manufacturers were once surpassed by their
Japanese counterparts. Later they figured it out and realized that their Japanese
rivals applied a novel management approach known as 25 _____ . It is gradually
accepted that the emerging world are the origins of both 26 _____ and 27 _____
READING PASSAGE 3 
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 28-40, which are based on
Reading Passage 3 below. 

Television is adapting better to technological change than any other media

business.
A ONE evening Steve Purdham noticed something odd. The flow of data into and
out of We7, a British music-streaming website he runs, had abruptly slowed. An
hour later it returned to normal. Such a sharp fluctuation usually means a server is
malfunctioning – a potentially ruinous problem. But when engineers checked the
computer system they found nothing wrong. So what could have happened
between 8pm and 9pm on a Saturday night to cause such a sudden drop in use?
Suddenly it dawned on Mr Purdham: "Britain's Got Talent" was on television. 
B There are now hundreds of channels. A channel-surf through a basic cable-TV
package in America turns up a history of the civil war, a melodrama, a college
basketball game, a Hispanic talent show, European football and a documentary.
Many more options are available on demand with a few clicks of the remote
control. The offerings are decidedly mixed, but there is always something on.
"There are not many genres that are not addressed anymore," says Philippe
Dauman, CEO of Viacom, a media company. "We try to think of new ones all the
time." Japan is a country that leads many technological trends. Last year Tokyo
residents spent an average of 60 minutes a day at home consuming media on the
internet or a mobile phone, up from just six minutes in 2000. But they also spent
more time in front of the television: an average of 216 minutes. Among young
women, the group that advertisers most want to reach, television-watching went up
more steeply. Admittedly their attention was not always fixed on the box. Many
teenage girls send text messages on their mobile phones while watching television. 
C Distinctions between television sets, computers and mobile phones are gradually
disappearing. Televisions' monitors have double-sized and recently they became
digital wireless connected with the internet. Now high-end televisions can obtain
all sorts of things, from stock quotes to weather forecasts. At the same time TV is
moving beyond the living room. Many programmes can be viewed on computers,
mobile phones and so on. Video-streaming websites are becoming more
professional, meaning they are both better designed and contain more proper
television programmes. Every media business that the internet has touched so far
has come off badly. Recorded music sales have fallen steeply in value since
Napster, a file-sharing website, appeared in 1999. The internet has drawn classified
advertising away from local newspapers. Book publishers have watched helplessly
as online retailers and e-readers have driven down prices.
D The internet tends to decompose media products, breaking music albums into
tracks and splitting magazines into their constituent articles. It also brings content
directly to consumers, sometimes by means of piracy. Online, people can pick and
choose the content that interests them without paying much for it. One of the most
harmful things about the internet as it has evolved in the past few years, says Jeff
Bewkes, the boss of Time Warner, is the assumption that charging for content is
hostile to the consumer. As the saying goes, content wants to be free - or, at least,
paid for only by advertising.
E In 1961 America had three broadcast networks, which operated on the principle
that the least objectionable shows would draw the biggest audiences and the most
advertising revenue. However competition improved matters. In the 1970s cable
and satellite television began to spread. The result, beginning in the late 1990s and
continuing today, has been a golden age for television. It can be argued that
Hollywood makes less impressive films these days than it did in the 1970s (or the
1930s), but that is not true of television. Modern TV shows are so superior to what
went before – so much better written, better acted and better shot – that they almost
seem to belong to a different medium.
F Howard Stringer, Sony's boss, fears television will return to the wasteland. The
danger is not lack of choice but a surfeit of choice. So much content will be
available on so many digital platforms that audiences will become too small to pay
for good TV programmes. The internet already competes strongly for advertising.
In Britain more money is now spent online than on television, although some of
this can be blamed on artificial restrictions on TV advertising rates. 
G Television is not about to suffer the fate of music or newspapers, yet the next
few years will be dangerous nonetheless. A handful of upstart websites, with
audiences smaller than many channels at the bottom of the programme guides,
have already rattled the giant TV industry. In 1990 George Gilder, an American
writer, claimed that by the end of the 20th century traditional television would be
extinct because technology would enable consumers to track down programmes
that catered to their particular interests. Even the technological futurists found it
hard to imagine the explosion of websites, social networking and mobile phones
that was to come. Yet these things have not displaced television. 
H The TV set has also evolved. Televisions used to be seen as squat cubes.
Gradually they have flattened and turned into panels, and their screens have
become sharper and brighter. They have spread to bedrooms, kitchens and even
bathrooms (with heated screens to ward off condensation). The latest devices are as
thin as laptop computers. Television has gone online and become mobile. Much
sooner it will expand into the three dimensions. 

Questions 28-31 
Choose FOUR letters, A-H.
Write your answers in boxes 28-31 on your answer sheet.
NB Your answers may be given in any order.
Which FOUR of the following statements are true of the Reading Passage 3? 

A There are surveys on the amount of time spending on the internet or in watching
TV. 
B The internet has drawn all advertising completely. 
C There is a great variety of offerings on TV programmes. 
D At present TV programmes are limited within the living room. 
E The explosion of websites is displacing the television. 
F TV industry makes more impressive works these days. 
G The gap between television sets and computers are gradually expanding. 
H A few emergent internet businesses have threatened the TV industry. 

Questions 32-36 
Look at the following people and the list of statements below.
Match each person with the correct statement.
Write the correct letter, A-H, in boxes 32-36 on your answer sheet. 

32 Steve Purdham 
33 Philippe Dauman 
34 Jeff Bewkes 
35 Howard Stringer 
36 George Gilder 
List of Statements
A supported the idea that consumers should denounce the means of piracy 
B there are already too many channels on TV 
C predicts the shrinkage on investment in the TV programmes when more people
turn to internet 
D believed that the conventional TV would die out 
E confused by the unstable flow of data 
F thinks that the readers are dislike to pay for the contents online 
G TV industry is developing and soaring quickly 
H figured out that a server was malfunctioning 

Questions 37-40 
Complete the summary of the LAST paragraph of Reading Passage 3.
Write the correct letter, A-H, in boxes 37-40 on your answer sheet. 
Following the 37 ______ of the TV set, the 38 ______ televisions have emerged
with 39 ______ screens. The up-to-date TV set is getting much thinner and more
mobile. It is predicted that 40 ______ . TV will come into our life in the near
future. 
A. three dimension B. degrade C. development D. drab 
E. fresher F. cube G. more vivid H. panel