Text 2
Well, no gain without pain, they say. But what about pain without gain.’ Everywhere you go in America, you hear tales of corporate revival. What is harder to establish is whether the productivity revolution that businessmen assume they are presiding over is for real.
The official statistics are mildly discouraging. They show that, .if you lump manufacturing and services together, productivity has grown on average by 1.2% since 1987. That is somewhat faster than the average during the previous decade. And since 1991, productivity has in creased by about 2% a year, which are more than twice the 1978 - 1987 averages. The trouble is that part of the recent acceleration is due to the usual rebound that occurs at the point in a business cycle, and so is not conclusive evidence of a revival in the underlying trend. There is, as Robert Rubin, the treasury secretary, says, a "disjunction" between the mass of business anecdote that points to a
A. not as good as it seems
B. at its turning point
C. much better than it seems
D. near to complete recovery
Text 4
Historians may well look back on the 1980s in the United States as a time of rising affluence side by side with rising poverty. The growth in affluence is attributable to an increase in professional and technical jobs, along with more two career couples whose combined incomes provide a" comfortable living". Yet simultaneously, the nation’ s poverty rate rose between 1973 and 1983 from 11.1 percent of the population to 15.2, or by well over a third. Although the poverty rate declined somewhat after 1983, it was still held at 13.5 percent in 1987, comprising a population of 32:5 million Americans.
The definition of poverty is a matter of debate. In 1795, a group of English magistrates decided that a minimum in come should be "the cost of a gallon loaf of bread, multiplied by three, plus an allowance for each dependent". Today the Census Bureau defines the threshold of poverty in the United States as the minimum amount of money
A. 1973.
B. 1987.
C. 1969.
D. 1983.
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