Reading Comprehension - 12

In the first and last paras, the author mentions ‘lean’ production. What is meant by that?

Directions: Read the passage and answer the question that follows.

Thirty years ago the bosses of America’s car industry were shocked to learn that Japan had overtaken America to become the world’s leading car producer. They were even more shocked when they visited Japan to find out what was going on. They found that the secret of Japan’s success did not lie in cheap labour or government subsidies (their preferred explanations) but in what was rapidly dubbed “lean manufacturing”. While Detroit slept, Japan had transformed itself from a low wage economy into a hotbed of business innovation. Soon every factory around the world was lean, or a ruin.
Management gurus are always glibly proclaiming revolutions. What happened in Japan qualified, as did the advent of mass production in America a century ago. Now something comparable is taking place in the developing world.
It is hardly news that the world’s centre of economic gravity is shifting towards emerging markets. Buy a mobile phone and it will almost certainly have been made in China. Use it to phone a customer helpline and your call may well be answered by an Indian. Over the past five years China’s annual growth rate has been more than 10%, and India’s more than 8%. Yet even these figures understate the change that is taking place. Emerging countries are no longer content to be sources of cheap hands and low - cost brains. Instead they too are becoming hotbeds of innovation, producing breakthroughs in everything from telecoms to car making to health care. They are redesigning products to reduce costs not just by 10%, but by up to 90%. They are redesigning entire business processes to do things better and faster than their rivals in the West. Forget about flat, the world of business is turning upside down.
As our special report argues, the rich world is losing its leadership in the sort of breakthrough ideas that transform industries. This is partly because rich - world companies are doing more research and development in emerging markets. Fortune 500 companies now have 98 R&D facilities in China and 63 in India. IBM employs more people in developing countries than in America. But it is also because emerging - market firms and consumers are both moving upmarket. Huawei, a Chinese telecoms giant, applied for more international patents than any other firm did in 2008. Chinese 20 - somethings spend even more time on the internet than their American peers.
Even more striking is the emerging world’s growing ability to make established products for dramatically lower costs: no - frills $3,000 cars and $300 laptops may not seem as exciting as a new iPad but they promise to change far more people’s lives. This sort of advance, dubbed “frugal innovation” by some, is not just a matter of exploiting cheap labour (though cheap labour helps). It is a matter of redesigning products and processes to cut out unnecessary costs. In India Tata created the world’s cheapest car, the Nano, by combining dozens of cost - saving tricks. Bharti Airtel has slashed the cost of providing mobile phone services by radically rethinking its relationship with its competitors and suppliers. It shares radio towers with rivals and contracts out network construction, operations and support to specialists such as Ericsson and IBM. Just as Henry Ford and Toyota both helped change other industries, entrepreneurs in the developing world are applying the classic principles of division of labour and economies of scale to surprising areas such as heart operations and cataract surgery, reducing costs without sacrificing quality. They are using new technologies such as mobile phones to bring sophisticated services, in everything from health care to banking, to rural communities. And they are combining technological and business - model innovation to produce entirely new categories of services: Kenya leads the world in money transfer by mobile phone, for example.
All this is obviously good news for the billions of people who live in the BRICS (see article) and other developing countries. More consumers will have access to goods and services that were once confined to the elite. More than 90% of Indians and Chinese tell pollsters that they are optimistic about the future. Anand Mahindra, an Indian business leader, has described his dreams about the future as “not just colourful, but steroidal”.
What about the slow - growth rich world? Emerging firms are advancing on a greater number of fronts than the Japanese did 30 years ago and also advancing much faster, gobbling up Western rivals. Their charge will upset many established Western firms, which will face increasingly savage price competition, and also overturn many assumptions about the rich world’s competitive advantage. Many of globalisation’s most vocal supporters have justified the loss of manufacturing jobs in the West on the ground that the rich world will maintain an edge in innovation; the clever jobs will stay at home. Emerging economies are not merely challenging that lead in innovation. They are unleashing a wave of low - cost, disruptive innovations that will, as they spread to the rich world, shake many industries to their foundations. All sorts of chief executives will scream for protection.
Change will indeed be painful for incumbents, as disruptive innovation always is. But cheaper goods and services will be a blessing for Western consumers, who are likely to face years of slow income growth. It could also be good news for rich - world governments, which are plagued with deficits even before the baby - boomers begin to retire. Frugal innovation may well prevent America’s health - care system (which already consumes 17% of its GDP) from swamping the rest of the economy. Clever ways of applying economies of scale and scope in new ways could boost public-sector productivity.
Moreover, it is in the nature of innovation to feed upon itself. Innovation in the emerging world will encourage, rather than undermine, innovation in the rich world. Western carmakers learned the techniques of lean production from their Japanese rivals, just as the Japanese had earlier learned the techniques of mass production from the Americans. This great insurrection, like its predecessors, will make us all richer.

Which theory/ies are put forward to explain the retrograde flow of information?

Directions: Read the passage and answer the question that follows.

The word “premonition” literally means a “forewarning,” which hints at the importance of these experiences. They often warn us of something unpleasant - a health challenge, physical disasters and impending dangers of all sorts. These are haphazardly mixed with all sorts of other premonitions, such as neutral or pleasant things - who is going to call on the phone, who I’ll meet at the party, when I’ll get a job promotion, when and where I’ll meet my soul mate, and so on.
Premonitions are a huge gift. They serve a survival function. They probably arose early in our evolutionary development in the predator - prey relationship, because any organism that knew when danger would happen in the future, could take measures to avoid it. This meant they would be more likely to remain alive and procreate, passing this ability to future generations. By now, the capacity to know the future is probably engrained in our genes and is widely distributed in the human race. Recent computerbased studies - the presentiment experiments by Dean Radin and others - suggest the capacity to know the future is indeed extremely common and is present in some degree in just about everybody.
I regard premonitions as a form of preventive medicine, because they so often warn us of threats to our health. For instance, one woman reported a dream premonition of a breast cancer before it appeared on breast exam or on a mammogram, when there was no lump or symptom of any kind. She even saw the specific location. A breast biopsy confirmed her premonition, and minor surgery completely cured her.
Information seems to be coming from the future into the present. There are several theories how this might happen, such as “closed, time - like loops” in which time might curve back on itself, bringing information from the future into the present, which we might experience as a premonition. An old idea called the “block universe” is also occasionally put forward by physicists to explain knowledge of the future. In this hypothesis, everything that has happened or will happen is already a given; the mind could theoretically gain access to any of this information under certain conditions (dreaming, meditating, impending danger, etc.).
Nearly all the current hypotheses rely on redefining the mind as a non - local phenomenon that is spread throughout space and time. This means that the mind is not confined to specific points in space, such as the brain, or to specific points in time, such as the present. It is infinite in space and time. This view fully permits premonitions, a kind of knowing that is non-local with respect to time. I have long favored this image of consciousness, and in 1989 introduced the term “non - local mind” in print in my book Recovering the Soul.
Non - local mind is unbounded, which means that at some point minds come together and form a single, unitary mind. Some of the greatest physicists of the twentieth century have held this view, such as Schrodinger, Margenau, Bohm and Eddington. The idea of One Mind clearly permits telepathy and clairvoyance, and the sort of person-to-person contact we often see in premonitions, such as when one individual has a premonition that another individual is in danger.

What is/are the advantage/s that diversified conglomerates have?
(a) They never suffer from paucity of resources, financial or human.
(b) They are better suited to tackling a risk - laden market situation.
(c) Western multinationals can use them to gain access to difficult markets, thereby gaining them foreign exchange.
(d) They can better market new products, based on brand value of existing ones.

Directions: Read the passage and answer the question that follows.

IN DECEMBER 1872 HMS Challenger sailed from Portsmouth to conduct the most ambitious survey of the oceans ever. During the ship’s four year journey the crew discovered over 4,000 unknown species and provided invaluable material for the raging debate about evolution. Business travellers in today’s emerging markets often feel a bit like the Challenger’s crew. They constantly come across what to Western eyes look like exotic corporate species and new, unfamiliar kinds of business which raise profound questions about the evolution of companies and business models.
Most emerging countries have a penchant for highly diversified conglomerates. India’s Tata Group, which accounts for almost 6% of the country’s GDP, has subsidiaries in car making, agricultural chemicals, hotels, telecommunications and consulting. Reliance Industries’ range sprawls from petrol products and clothes to fresh food. But such diversifi cation is not confined to giant organisations. China is full of small and medium - sized companies that have fingers in many pies, taking advantage of opportunities as they arise.
Many emerging countries also rely heavily on state owned enterprises. These organisations are peculiar hybrids that have never been seen before; the closest relatives are the European trading companies of the 16th - 19th centuries, such as Britain’s East India Company. They are neither old - fashioned nationalised companies run by the government and designed to control chunks of the national economy, nor are they classic private-sector companies that sink or swim. Instead they are amphibious creatures that flit between sea and land, borrowing money from governments at subsidised rates one moment, plunging into the global market the next.
China and Russia are the main exponents. Thousands of Chinese companies have convoluted ties to central or local government. Russia has created a large class of state companies that enjoy various legal privileges. But countries in Latin America and the Middle East are jumping onto the hybrid bandwagon.
Hybrid organisations are particularly prominent in the energy sector. The world’s 13 largest oil companies, as measured by reserves, are all controlled by governments, and three - quarters of the world’s crude oil reserves are in the hands of state - backed companies. Many of China’s best high - tech companies, such as China Telecom and Lenovo, are also state - backed. But such organisations are active in lots of other areas too. Like the developing world’s private giants, they are often diversified.
In their different ways both of these corporate forms are creative responses to their circumstances, much like the exotic ocean creatures that the Challenger’s crew dredged up from the depths. Diversified conglomerates can adapt to environments rife with political and financial risks. Tarun Khanna, of the Harvard Business School, argues that they are also good at dealing with shortages of vital resources such as capital and talent. The Tata Group can use capital from established businesses to support growth in new ones, and has the resources to attract and train the best people. It can also use its brand name to sell all sorts of products. Indians who have grown up enjoying Tata tea might be more inclined to buy the latest Tata electric car.
State owned companies also draw on long traditions. Authoritarian governments can use them to direct economic activity (and also to preserve their economic power). Local entrepreneurs can use them to seize business opportunities. And even Western multinationals can use them to gain access to difficult markets. Looked at one way, a huge organisation such as China Mobile is a throwback to an earlier era; looked at another way, it is an attempt by those in charge to embrace a more dynamic economy, an evolutionary change.
How are these companies likely to fare as they compete in a global marketplace? Most Westerners have little time for diversified conglomerates; they expect a “conglomerate discount” when they buy such shares on the stockmarket, and regard them as a primitive corporate form that tends to disappear as local stockmarkets improve and investors rather than companies get to do the diversifying. But the inefficiency of capital markets is only one of the reasons for diversification. Two of the others, talent shortages and brand-building, are likely to be around for a long time yet. Conglomerates may have an enduring advantage in attracting and training talent in rapidly growing markets, and in building brands in regions where brand recognition is low and potential consumers are numbered in their billions rather than millions. The Tata Group reckons that its brand is worth about 100 billion rupees ($2.2 billion).
The case for state - owned companies is less robust. Hybrid companies are inherently confused organisations: unclear whether they are responsible to the state or the marketplace, and buffeted by contradictory pressures. They are subject to political meddling, often called upon to save “strategic” jobs and regularly used to oil the state patronage machine. Outsiders often find it hard to know whether to treat them as a business or an arm of government. And the OECD says that state - owned enterprises have significantly lower levels of productivity than private firms. But the road to real privatisation will be a long one, and the recent financial meltdown has hardly made emerging - market governments more favourably disposed towards the Anglo - Saxon model.
It would be foolish for Western companies to dismiss these new corporate life forms as evolutionary dead ends, but there is little scope for emulating them. The same is not true of many of the business models that the emerging world has come up with. They are not only important innovations in their own right but have serious implications for the way Western companies run their affairs.
Three of them are particularly powerful. The first concerns rethinking economies of scale, which usually involves scaling up. Companies reduce unit costs by centralising their manufacturing and producing long runs of standardised items. But centralised production adds expensive layers of bureaucracy, and it is hard to make it work in emerging markets where populations are often widely scattered and distribution systems abysmal. The Boston Consulting Group notes that a growing number of entrepreneurs in the emerging world are replacing scaling up with scaling out, which means involving a wider range of people in the process of production and distribution, something that has been made much easier by mobile phones and the internet. The most successful examples of this are clinics on wheels, but there are plenty of others. Nutriset, a French manufacturer of fortified food for malnourished children, has outsourced production to local franchises in Africa. The company maintains quality control and the franchises are close enough to the children to make distribution quick and easy. Kenya’s Child and Family Wellness Shops offer shares in the company to the nurses who operate the clinics, which encourages them to serve more children and helps stem the brain drain from rural areas.
A second business model takes an equally contrarian approach to production. John Hagel and John Seely Brown, who run Deloitte’s Centre for Edge Innovation, argue that Western companies have spent the past century perfecting “push” models of production that allocate resources to areas of expected demand. But in emerging markets, particularly those where the Chinese have a strong influence, a very different “pull” model often prevails, designed to help companies mobilise resources when the need arises. Hong Kong’s Li & Fung or China’s Chingquing Lifan Group can use their huge supply chains to produce fashion items or motorcycles in response to demand. Taiwan’s Quanta and Compel can produce cheap computers and digital cameras for a fashion-conscious digital marketplace.
These pull models fundamentally change the nature of companies. Instead of fixed armies looking for opportunities, firms become loose networks that are forever reconfiguring themselves in response to a rapidly shifting landscape. Such models are not peculiar to emerging markets: Dell builds computers to its Western customers’ specifications, and Western management gurus have been advocating networks for decades. But according to Messrs Hagel and Seely Brown they are far more widespread in emerging countries.
The developing world’s most innovative business model may be the application of mass - production techniques to sophisticated services. This started with India’s outsourcing firms, which demonstrated that economies of scale and scope could be reaped from services that used to be highly fragmented and geographically rooted. These outsourcers are still expanding and moving upmarket. Indian consultancies are now challenging Western ones in complex services, not just dealing with customer complaints.
Emerging - market entrepreneurs want to apply these techniques beyond IT and the back office. For example, they see a huge market for legal services requiring a high level of expertise. Dr Shetty is only one of many Indians who are applying Henry Ford’s principles to health care. LifeSpring has reduced the cost of giving birth in a private hospital to $40 by looking after many more mothers. Aravind, the world’s biggest eye - hospital chain, performs some 200,000 eye operations a year. It takes the assembly - line principle literally: four operating tables are laid side by side and two doctors operate on adjacent tables. When the first operation is done, the second patient is already in place.

What parallel has been drawn between the ship’s crew and business people, in the first paragraph?

Directions: Read the passage and answer the question that follows.

IN DECEMBER 1872 HMS Challenger sailed from Portsmouth to conduct the most ambitious survey of the oceans ever. During the ship’s four year journey the crew discovered over 4,000 unknown species and provided invaluable material for the raging debate about evolution. Business travellers in today’s emerging markets often feel a bit like the Challenger’s crew. They constantly come across what to Western eyes look like exotic corporate species and new, unfamiliar kinds of business which raise profound questions about the evolution of companies and business models.
Most emerging countries have a penchant for highly diversified conglomerates. India’s Tata Group, which accounts for almost 6% of the country’s GDP, has subsidiaries in car making, agricultural chemicals, hotels, telecommunications and consulting. Reliance Industries’ range sprawls from petrol products and clothes to fresh food. But such diversifi cation is not confined to giant organisations. China is full of small and medium - sized companies that have fingers in many pies, taking advantage of opportunities as they arise.
Many emerging countries also rely heavily on state owned enterprises. These organisations are peculiar hybrids that have never been seen before; the closest relatives are the European trading companies of the 16th - 19th centuries, such as Britain’s East India Company. They are neither old - fashioned nationalised companies run by the government and designed to control chunks of the national economy, nor are they classic private-sector companies that sink or swim. Instead they are amphibious creatures that flit between sea and land, borrowing money from governments at subsidised rates one moment, plunging into the global market the next.
China and Russia are the main exponents. Thousands of Chinese companies have convoluted ties to central or local government. Russia has created a large class of state companies that enjoy various legal privileges. But countries in Latin America and the Middle East are jumping onto the hybrid bandwagon.
Hybrid organisations are particularly prominent in the energy sector. The world’s 13 largest oil companies, as measured by reserves, are all controlled by governments, and three - quarters of the world’s crude oil reserves are in the hands of state - backed companies. Many of China’s best high - tech companies, such as China Telecom and Lenovo, are also state - backed. But such organisations are active in lots of other areas too. Like the developing world’s private giants, they are often diversified.
In their different ways both of these corporate forms are creative responses to their circumstances, much like the exotic ocean creatures that the Challenger’s crew dredged up from the depths. Diversified conglomerates can adapt to environments rife with political and financial risks. Tarun Khanna, of the Harvard Business School, argues that they are also good at dealing with shortages of vital resources such as capital and talent. The Tata Group can use capital from established businesses to support growth in new ones, and has the resources to attract and train the best people. It can also use its brand name to sell all sorts of products. Indians who have grown up enjoying Tata tea might be more inclined to buy the latest Tata electric car.
State owned companies also draw on long traditions. Authoritarian governments can use them to direct economic activity (and also to preserve their economic power). Local entrepreneurs can use them to seize business opportunities. And even Western multinationals can use them to gain access to difficult markets. Looked at one way, a huge organisation such as China Mobile is a throwback to an earlier era; looked at another way, it is an attempt by those in charge to embrace a more dynamic economy, an evolutionary change.
How are these companies likely to fare as they compete in a global marketplace? Most Westerners have little time for diversified conglomerates; they expect a “conglomerate discount” when they buy such shares on the stockmarket, and regard them as a primitive corporate form that tends to disappear as local stockmarkets improve and investors rather than companies get to do the diversifying. But the inefficiency of capital markets is only one of the reasons for diversification. Two of the others, talent shortages and brand-building, are likely to be around for a long time yet. Conglomerates may have an enduring advantage in attracting and training talent in rapidly growing markets, and in building brands in regions where brand recognition is low and potential consumers are numbered in their billions rather than millions. The Tata Group reckons that its brand is worth about 100 billion rupees ($2.2 billion).
The case for state - owned companies is less robust. Hybrid companies are inherently confused organisations: unclear whether they are responsible to the state or the marketplace, and buffeted by contradictory pressures. They are subject to political meddling, often called upon to save “strategic” jobs and regularly used to oil the state patronage machine. Outsiders often find it hard to know whether to treat them as a business or an arm of government. And the OECD says that state - owned enterprises have significantly lower levels of productivity than private firms. But the road to real privatisation will be a long one, and the recent financial meltdown has hardly made emerging - market governments more favourably disposed towards the Anglo - Saxon model.
It would be foolish for Western companies to dismiss these new corporate life forms as evolutionary dead ends, but there is little scope for emulating them. The same is not true of many of the business models that the emerging world has come up with. They are not only important innovations in their own right but have serious implications for the way Western companies run their affairs.
Three of them are particularly powerful. The first concerns rethinking economies of scale, which usually involves scaling up. Companies reduce unit costs by centralising their manufacturing and producing long runs of standardised items. But centralised production adds expensive layers of bureaucracy, and it is hard to make it work in emerging markets where populations are often widely scattered and distribution systems abysmal. The Boston Consulting Group notes that a growing number of entrepreneurs in the emerging world are replacing scaling up with scaling out, which means involving a wider range of people in the process of production and distribution, something that has been made much easier by mobile phones and the internet. The most successful examples of this are clinics on wheels, but there are plenty of others. Nutriset, a French manufacturer of fortified food for malnourished children, has outsourced production to local franchises in Africa. The company maintains quality control and the franchises are close enough to the children to make distribution quick and easy. Kenya’s Child and Family Wellness Shops offer shares in the company to the nurses who operate the clinics, which encourages them to serve more children and helps stem the brain drain from rural areas.
A second business model takes an equally contrarian approach to production. John Hagel and John Seely Brown, who run Deloitte’s Centre for Edge Innovation, argue that Western companies have spent the past century perfecting “push” models of production that allocate resources to areas of expected demand. But in emerging markets, particularly those where the Chinese have a strong influence, a very different “pull” model often prevails, designed to help companies mobilise resources when the need arises. Hong Kong’s Li & Fung or China’s Chingquing Lifan Group can use their huge supply chains to produce fashion items or motorcycles in response to demand. Taiwan’s Quanta and Compel can produce cheap computers and digital cameras for a fashion-conscious digital marketplace.
These pull models fundamentally change the nature of companies. Instead of fixed armies looking for opportunities, firms become loose networks that are forever reconfiguring themselves in response to a rapidly shifting landscape. Such models are not peculiar to emerging markets: Dell builds computers to its Western customers’ specifications, and Western management gurus have been advocating networks for decades. But according to Messrs Hagel and Seely Brown they are far more widespread in emerging countries.
The developing world’s most innovative business model may be the application of mass - production techniques to sophisticated services. This started with India’s outsourcing firms, which demonstrated that economies of scale and scope could be reaped from services that used to be highly fragmented and geographically rooted. These outsourcers are still expanding and moving upmarket. Indian consultancies are now challenging Western ones in complex services, not just dealing with customer complaints.
Emerging - market entrepreneurs want to apply these techniques beyond IT and the back office. For example, they see a huge market for legal services requiring a high level of expertise. Dr Shetty is only one of many Indians who are applying Henry Ford’s principles to health care. LifeSpring has reduced the cost of giving birth in a private hospital to $40 by looking after many more mothers. Aravind, the world’s biggest eye - hospital chain, performs some 200,000 eye operations a year. It takes the assembly - line principle literally: four operating tables are laid side by side and two doctors operate on adjacent tables. When the first operation is done, the second patient is already in place.

What is the contemporary view of historians on the benefits of time capsules?

Directions: Read the passage and answer the question that follows.

In the basement of Phoebe Hearst Hall at Oglethorpe University in Georgia, there is a stainless steel vault door which was welded shut over sixty five years ago. Behind this door lies a 20¢ ¥ 10¢ waterproofed room containing a menagerie of once modern artifacts and microfilm records, placed there by men and women in the years between 1937 and 1940. If their goal is realized, the contents of this vault will remain unseen and undisturbed for the next 6,107 years. This ambitious project, which began in the dawn of the Second World War, is known as the Crypt of Civilisation; it represents the first concerted effort to collect and preserve a snapshot of human civilisation and technology. Though the term had not yet been coined at its inception, it was the first modern time capsule.
The whole concept crept from the brain of Dr. Thornwell Jacobs in 1936, at which time he was the president of Oglethorpe University. While teaching and researching ancient history he was struck by the scarcity of information on ancient civilisations, so he conceived an idea to prevent the problem from occurring to those who might study our civilisation in the future. His “crypt” was to contain a comprehensive record of civilisation up to that time, as well as the accumulated knowledge of mankind. He recruited the assistance of Thomas Kimmwood Peters, and put him to the monumental task of recording the corpus of humankind upon a new medium known as “microfilm.” Peters was singularly qualified for this task, given that he was the inventor of the first microfilm camera.
The fickle public seemed simultaneously inspired and troubled by the project. The scale of idea and its far-reaching scope were unlike anything attempted in modern history. The crypt was featured in publications and radio broadcasts worldwide, and Jacobs was thrilled by the attention the project had drawn. He described the crypt as his generation’s “archaeological duty.”
The target year for the crypt’s future opening – 8113 A.D. was arrived at by considering 1936 to be the halfway point to the future. 6,177 years had passed since the Egyptian calendar had been established in 4241 B.C., so Dr. Jacobs projected forward the same number of years from the date of his idea’s birth. The fact that the inhabitants of 1936 thought of their time as a great pivot point in history speaks to the technological optimism of the generation, which is understandable considering that some of the greatest inventions in history began to make their early, high - profile appearances around that time.
Actual preparation of the crypt began at the University in 1937. The site chosen was a basement room which had previously held a swimming pool, which meant that its foundation was already designed to be impervious to moisture. The room was a ten-foot by twenty - foot subterranean cavity in the solid granite bedrock, about seven feet beneath the surface. The chamber was further prepared by raising its floor with concrete and covering the walls with porcelain enamel plates embedded in waterproof pitch. For three years, Peters and a staff of student assistants captured and stored over 640,000 pages of documents onto microfilm, including religious texts such as the Bible and the Koran, and works of literature such as the Iliad and Dante’s Inferno. In addition to the microfilm, Peters compiled photographs, motion pictures, and voice recordings of political leaders such as Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Chamberlain, and Roosevelt. In order to make these materials accessible to the people of the future, there are glass magnifiers, as well as electrical projectors and players which can be powered with the included windmilldriven generator. Numerous “artifacts” from daily life and technology were also amassed and arranged in the chamber, including sewing machines, an early television, a telephone, mechanical watches, artwork, plant seeds, and much more.
Jacobs and Peters consulted with the U.S. Bureau of Standards for the best means of preserving the microfilm and artifacts for such an enormous span of time, and ultimately they opted to encase the sensitive items in sealed stainless steel receptacles with glass linings. Before they were sealed, all of the air was removed from these containers and replaced with nitrogen to prevent oxidation of the contents. As an added precaution, duplicates of the microfilm were made on metal film.
By 1940, the crypt was complete, and filled with stacks of sealed containers and objects representative of the time. On May 25 of that year, the crypt door was ceremoniously sealed in the presence of the city Mayor, the state Governor, and the U.S. Postmaster General among many others. The event was broadcast on the radio, and recordings were made of some of the profound things being uttered at the ceremony, to be used as some of the crypt’s final additions. Also contributed in the closing moments was a steel plate from the Atlanta Journal, which headlined themes of the war in Europe. The stainless steel door was then closed and welded shut, giving the interior of the vault its last taste of light until 8113… if all goes according to plan.
Lacking the budget for poison darts and giant stone spheres, the builders of this crypt instead used a different deterrent against would-be early intruders: Guilt. A stainless steel plaque is mounted above the crypt’s sealed entrance, begging any who encounter the crypt to leave its contents undisturbed until the year 8113.
The plaque reads: This Crypt contains memorials of the civilisation which existed in the United States and the world at large during the first half of the twentieth century. In receptacles of stainless steel, in which the air has been replaced by inert gasses, are encyclopedias, histories, scientific works, special editions of newspapers, travelogues, travel talks, cinema reels, models, phonograph records, and similar materials from which an idea of the state and nature of the civilisation which existed from 1900 to 1950 can be ascertained. No jewels or precious metals are included.
We depend upon the laws of the county of DeKalb, the State of Georgia, and the government of the United States and their heirs, assigns, and successors, and upon the sense of sportsmanship of posterity for the continued preservation of this vault until the year 8113, at which time we direct that it shall be opened by authorities representing the above governmental agencies and the administration of Oglethorpe University. Until that time we beg of all persons that this door and the contents of the crypt within may remain inviolate.
Of course, if an archaeologist today found a buried tomb whose inscription enjoined the finder not to open the door until some distant future date, it is doubtful that the wishes of the tomb’s makers would be respected.
In the event that the Crypt of Civilisation is opened by people who do not speak English as we know it, the room includes numerous pictographic representations of information, perhaps the most important of which describing the operation of the vault’s “language integrator”– the first piece of technology that one should encounter upon entering this technology tomb. Ironically, it seems that much of the information regarding this machine has been lost to the eroding effects of time, but it is said that this hand - powered English teaching device was inspired by the Rosetta stone, yet based on the “Nickelodeon principle.” It’s vocabulary consists of only 1,500 words, a subset of our language called “Basic English” which was used in cryptographic codes in the first World War.
The usefulness of such time capsules has long been called into question by archaeologists and historians, because wild optimism was long ago supplanted by skepticism as the fashionable attitude. Time capsules’ crippling fault lies not only in their questionable ability to weather the vast acres of time, but also in the fact that those responsible for the contents are presenting only what they want its openers to see. While gadgetry and documents are not completely lacking in historical value, their pristine condition says little about their role in everyday use. Be that as it may, the value to future historians is potentially incalculable.
Given the Crypt of Civilisation’s waterproofed underground location and surrounding granite terrain, it is probable that the vault will reach the year 8113 A.D. relatively intact. The area is not subject to much seismic activity, and though earthquakes there are not unknown, they are not anywhere near as frequent or as powerful as those in many other parts of the world.

The author’s opinion on the current state of Japan - Korea relations is:

Directions: Read the passage and answer the question that follows.

In South Korea August 29th is a date of national humiliation. On that day 100 years ago, the nation fell under the cosh of Japanese colonisers whose coercive annexation treaty stated bluntly: “His Majesty the Emperor of Korea makes the complete and permanent cession to His Majesty the Emperor of Japan of all rights of sovereignty over the whole of Korea.” Japan’s heavy hand was lifted in 1945 and it has since made occasional gestures of contrition. Yet it took a century for a Japanese leader to admit that colonial rule was imposed against the will of Koreans.
Japan seems to be trying a bit harder to improve relations with its closest neighbour. Its prime minister, Naoto Kan, offered a “heartfelt apology” for Japan’s actions, a few weeks ago, as part of a broad summer effort to show it is both genuinely remorseful and keen on a “future oriented” relationship. For the first time in 45 years, Japan has offered to send some precious imperial loot back to Seoul. And on August 15th none of Mr Kan’s cabinet joined an annual pilgrimage to the Yasukuni shrine honouring Japan’s war dead, the first time since the 1980s that there has been such a show of sensitivity about Japan’s war crimes.
Some reports (mostly in South Korea) even suggest that Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, a big Japanese firm, may discuss compensating 300 Koreans who were forced, as girls, to work unpaid in an aircraft factory in Japan during the war. That may go nowhere, but even mention of individual payouts for forced labour has been taboo since a bilateral reparations treaty in 1965.
These gestures have taken place amid strong diplomatic Japanese backing for South Korea’s tough stance towards North Korea over the sinking of the Cheonan, one of its naval frigates, in March. In a rare act of security cooperation in July, Japan also sent military observers on joint American-South Korean naval exercises.
South Korea has reacted cautiously. Its business minded president, Lee Myung-bak, also wants closer bilateral ties, and saw Mr Kan’s apology as helpful. But historical grievances still matter hugely to South Koreans. It was not lost on them that Mr Kan pointedly failed to direct his apology to North Korea, which suggests some political expediency. Nor has Japan conceded any claim to sovereignty over an island claimed by it and South Korea alike. An editorial in the Korea Herald has urged South Koreans to keep their humiliation “etched in stone”. Yet it also called for more co-operation with Japan.
The best prospects may be over trade. Since 2004 free trade talks between Japan and South Korea have been blocked by domestic concerns in each country over heavily protected rice industries and car markets. Yet bilateral trade has doubled in the past decade, and business lobbies are urging their governments to resume talks.
Cutting a trade deal could eventually help the countries put the tortured past behind them, especially if the governments could include China, which has its own deep historical grievance with Japan. But that would require strong Japanese leaders, able both to defy nationalists and protectionist farmers at home and to offer evidence of repentance abroad. South Korea’s government, too, would have to persuade its people that they should focus on an enterprising future rather than the past’s tragic victims.

Why has Korea been receptive to Japan’s moves towards it?

Directions: Read the passage and answer the question that follows.

In South Korea August 29th is a date of national humiliation. On that day 100 years ago, the nation fell under the cosh of Japanese colonisers whose coercive annexation treaty stated bluntly: “His Majesty the Emperor of Korea makes the complete and permanent cession to His Majesty the Emperor of Japan of all rights of sovereignty over the whole of Korea.” Japan’s heavy hand was lifted in 1945 and it has since made occasional gestures of contrition. Yet it took a century for a Japanese leader to admit that colonial rule was imposed against the will of Koreans.
Japan seems to be trying a bit harder to improve relations with its closest neighbour. Its prime minister, Naoto Kan, offered a “heartfelt apology” for Japan’s actions, a few weeks ago, as part of a broad summer effort to show it is both genuinely remorseful and keen on a “future oriented” relationship. For the first time in 45 years, Japan has offered to send some precious imperial loot back to Seoul. And on August 15th none of Mr Kan’s cabinet joined an annual pilgrimage to the Yasukuni shrine honouring Japan’s war dead, the first time since the 1980s that there has been such a show of sensitivity about Japan’s war crimes.
Some reports (mostly in South Korea) even suggest that Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, a big Japanese firm, may discuss compensating 300 Koreans who were forced, as girls, to work unpaid in an aircraft factory in Japan during the war. That may go nowhere, but even mention of individual payouts for forced labour has been taboo since a bilateral reparations treaty in 1965.
These gestures have taken place amid strong diplomatic Japanese backing for South Korea’s tough stance towards North Korea over the sinking of the Cheonan, one of its naval frigates, in March. In a rare act of security cooperation in July, Japan also sent military observers on joint American-South Korean naval exercises.
South Korea has reacted cautiously. Its business minded president, Lee Myung-bak, also wants closer bilateral ties, and saw Mr Kan’s apology as helpful. But historical grievances still matter hugely to South Koreans. It was not lost on them that Mr Kan pointedly failed to direct his apology to North Korea, which suggests some political expediency. Nor has Japan conceded any claim to sovereignty over an island claimed by it and South Korea alike. An editorial in the Korea Herald has urged South Koreans to keep their humiliation “etched in stone”. Yet it also called for more co-operation with Japan.
The best prospects may be over trade. Since 2004 free trade talks between Japan and South Korea have been blocked by domestic concerns in each country over heavily protected rice industries and car markets. Yet bilateral trade has doubled in the past decade, and business lobbies are urging their governments to resume talks.
Cutting a trade deal could eventually help the countries put the tortured past behind them, especially if the governments could include China, which has its own deep historical grievance with Japan. But that would require strong Japanese leaders, able both to defy nationalists and protectionist farmers at home and to offer evidence of repentance abroad. South Korea’s government, too, would have to persuade its people that they should focus on an enterprising future rather than the past’s tragic victims.

What does the author regard ‘premonitions’ as?

Directions: Read the passage and answer the question that follows.

The word “premonition” literally means a “forewarning,” which hints at the importance of these experiences. They often warn us of something unpleasant - a health challenge, physical disasters and impending dangers of all sorts. These are haphazardly mixed with all sorts of other premonitions, such as neutral or pleasant things - who is going to call on the phone, who I’ll meet at the party, when I’ll get a job promotion, when and where I’ll meet my soul mate, and so on.
Premonitions are a huge gift. They serve a survival function. They probably arose early in our evolutionary development in the predator - prey relationship, because any organism that knew when danger would happen in the future, could take measures to avoid it. This meant they would be more likely to remain alive and procreate, passing this ability to future generations. By now, the capacity to know the future is probably engrained in our genes and is widely distributed in the human race. Recent computerbased studies - the presentiment experiments by Dean Radin and others - suggest the capacity to know the future is indeed extremely common and is present in some degree in just about everybody.
I regard premonitions as a form of preventive medicine, because they so often warn us of threats to our health. For instance, one woman reported a dream premonition of a breast cancer before it appeared on breast exam or on a mammogram, when there was no lump or symptom of any kind. She even saw the specific location. A breast biopsy confirmed her premonition, and minor surgery completely cured her.
Information seems to be coming from the future into the present. There are several theories how this might happen, such as “closed, time - like loops” in which time might curve back on itself, bringing information from the future into the present, which we might experience as a premonition. An old idea called the “block universe” is also occasionally put forward by physicists to explain knowledge of the future. In this hypothesis, everything that has happened or will happen is already a given; the mind could theoretically gain access to any of this information under certain conditions (dreaming, meditating, impending danger, etc.).
Nearly all the current hypotheses rely on redefining the mind as a non - local phenomenon that is spread throughout space and time. This means that the mind is not confined to specific points in space, such as the brain, or to specific points in time, such as the present. It is infinite in space and time. This view fully permits premonitions, a kind of knowing that is non-local with respect to time. I have long favored this image of consciousness, and in 1989 introduced the term “non - local mind” in print in my book Recovering the Soul.
Non - local mind is unbounded, which means that at some point minds come together and form a single, unitary mind. Some of the greatest physicists of the twentieth century have held this view, such as Schrodinger, Margenau, Bohm and Eddington. The idea of One Mind clearly permits telepathy and clairvoyance, and the sort of person-to-person contact we often see in premonitions, such as when one individual has a premonition that another individual is in danger.

How is the ‘pull’ model different from the ‘push’ model?

Directions: Read the passage and answer the question that follows.

IN DECEMBER 1872 HMS Challenger sailed from Portsmouth to conduct the most ambitious survey of the oceans ever. During the ship’s four year journey the crew discovered over 4,000 unknown species and provided invaluable material for the raging debate about evolution. Business travellers in today’s emerging markets often feel a bit like the Challenger’s crew. They constantly come across what to Western eyes look like exotic corporate species and new, unfamiliar kinds of business which raise profound questions about the evolution of companies and business models.
Most emerging countries have a penchant for highly diversified conglomerates. India’s Tata Group, which accounts for almost 6% of the country’s GDP, has subsidiaries in car making, agricultural chemicals, hotels, telecommunications and consulting. Reliance Industries’ range sprawls from petrol products and clothes to fresh food. But such diversifi cation is not confined to giant organisations. China is full of small and medium - sized companies that have fingers in many pies, taking advantage of opportunities as they arise.
Many emerging countries also rely heavily on state owned enterprises. These organisations are peculiar hybrids that have never been seen before; the closest relatives are the European trading companies of the 16th - 19th centuries, such as Britain’s East India Company. They are neither old - fashioned nationalised companies run by the government and designed to control chunks of the national economy, nor are they classic private-sector companies that sink or swim. Instead they are amphibious creatures that flit between sea and land, borrowing money from governments at subsidised rates one moment, plunging into the global market the next.
China and Russia are the main exponents. Thousands of Chinese companies have convoluted ties to central or local government. Russia has created a large class of state companies that enjoy various legal privileges. But countries in Latin America and the Middle East are jumping onto the hybrid bandwagon.
Hybrid organisations are particularly prominent in the energy sector. The world’s 13 largest oil companies, as measured by reserves, are all controlled by governments, and three - quarters of the world’s crude oil reserves are in the hands of state - backed companies. Many of China’s best high - tech companies, such as China Telecom and Lenovo, are also state - backed. But such organisations are active in lots of other areas too. Like the developing world’s private giants, they are often diversified.
In their different ways both of these corporate forms are creative responses to their circumstances, much like the exotic ocean creatures that the Challenger’s crew dredged up from the depths. Diversified conglomerates can adapt to environments rife with political and financial risks. Tarun Khanna, of the Harvard Business School, argues that they are also good at dealing with shortages of vital resources such as capital and talent. The Tata Group can use capital from established businesses to support growth in new ones, and has the resources to attract and train the best people. It can also use its brand name to sell all sorts of products. Indians who have grown up enjoying Tata tea might be more inclined to buy the latest Tata electric car.
State owned companies also draw on long traditions. Authoritarian governments can use them to direct economic activity (and also to preserve their economic power). Local entrepreneurs can use them to seize business opportunities. And even Western multinationals can use them to gain access to difficult markets. Looked at one way, a huge organisation such as China Mobile is a throwback to an earlier era; looked at another way, it is an attempt by those in charge to embrace a more dynamic economy, an evolutionary change.
How are these companies likely to fare as they compete in a global marketplace? Most Westerners have little time for diversified conglomerates; they expect a “conglomerate discount” when they buy such shares on the stockmarket, and regard them as a primitive corporate form that tends to disappear as local stockmarkets improve and investors rather than companies get to do the diversifying. But the inefficiency of capital markets is only one of the reasons for diversification. Two of the others, talent shortages and brand-building, are likely to be around for a long time yet. Conglomerates may have an enduring advantage in attracting and training talent in rapidly growing markets, and in building brands in regions where brand recognition is low and potential consumers are numbered in their billions rather than millions. The Tata Group reckons that its brand is worth about 100 billion rupees ($2.2 billion).
The case for state - owned companies is less robust. Hybrid companies are inherently confused organisations: unclear whether they are responsible to the state or the marketplace, and buffeted by contradictory pressures. They are subject to political meddling, often called upon to save “strategic” jobs and regularly used to oil the state patronage machine. Outsiders often find it hard to know whether to treat them as a business or an arm of government. And the OECD says that state - owned enterprises have significantly lower levels of productivity than private firms. But the road to real privatisation will be a long one, and the recent financial meltdown has hardly made emerging - market governments more favourably disposed towards the Anglo - Saxon model.
It would be foolish for Western companies to dismiss these new corporate life forms as evolutionary dead ends, but there is little scope for emulating them. The same is not true of many of the business models that the emerging world has come up with. They are not only important innovations in their own right but have serious implications for the way Western companies run their affairs.
Three of them are particularly powerful. The first concerns rethinking economies of scale, which usually involves scaling up. Companies reduce unit costs by centralising their manufacturing and producing long runs of standardised items. But centralised production adds expensive layers of bureaucracy, and it is hard to make it work in emerging markets where populations are often widely scattered and distribution systems abysmal. The Boston Consulting Group notes that a growing number of entrepreneurs in the emerging world are replacing scaling up with scaling out, which means involving a wider range of people in the process of production and distribution, something that has been made much easier by mobile phones and the internet. The most successful examples of this are clinics on wheels, but there are plenty of others. Nutriset, a French manufacturer of fortified food for malnourished children, has outsourced production to local franchises in Africa. The company maintains quality control and the franchises are close enough to the children to make distribution quick and easy. Kenya’s Child and Family Wellness Shops offer shares in the company to the nurses who operate the clinics, which encourages them to serve more children and helps stem the brain drain from rural areas.
A second business model takes an equally contrarian approach to production. John Hagel and John Seely Brown, who run Deloitte’s Centre for Edge Innovation, argue that Western companies have spent the past century perfecting “push” models of production that allocate resources to areas of expected demand. But in emerging markets, particularly those where the Chinese have a strong influence, a very different “pull” model often prevails, designed to help companies mobilise resources when the need arises. Hong Kong’s Li & Fung or China’s Chingquing Lifan Group can use their huge supply chains to produce fashion items or motorcycles in response to demand. Taiwan’s Quanta and Compel can produce cheap computers and digital cameras for a fashion-conscious digital marketplace.
These pull models fundamentally change the nature of companies. Instead of fixed armies looking for opportunities, firms become loose networks that are forever reconfiguring themselves in response to a rapidly shifting landscape. Such models are not peculiar to emerging markets: Dell builds computers to its Western customers’ specifications, and Western management gurus have been advocating networks for decades. But according to Messrs Hagel and Seely Brown they are far more widespread in emerging countries.
The developing world’s most innovative business model may be the application of mass - production techniques to sophisticated services. This started with India’s outsourcing firms, which demonstrated that economies of scale and scope could be reaped from services that used to be highly fragmented and geographically rooted. These outsourcers are still expanding and moving upmarket. Indian consultancies are now challenging Western ones in complex services, not just dealing with customer complaints.
Emerging - market entrepreneurs want to apply these techniques beyond IT and the back office. For example, they see a huge market for legal services requiring a high level of expertise. Dr Shetty is only one of many Indians who are applying Henry Ford’s principles to health care. LifeSpring has reduced the cost of giving birth in a private hospital to $40 by looking after many more mothers. Aravind, the world’s biggest eye - hospital chain, performs some 200,000 eye operations a year. It takes the assembly - line principle literally: four operating tables are laid side by side and two doctors operate on adjacent tables. When the first operation is done, the second patient is already in place.

What was the motivation behind building the ‘time capsule’?

Directions: Read the passage and answer the question that follows.

In the basement of Phoebe Hearst Hall at Oglethorpe University in Georgia, there is a stainless steel vault door which was welded shut over sixty five years ago. Behind this door lies a 20¢ ¥ 10¢ waterproofed room containing a menagerie of once modern artifacts and microfilm records, placed there by men and women in the years between 1937 and 1940. If their goal is realized, the contents of this vault will remain unseen and undisturbed for the next 6,107 years. This ambitious project, which began in the dawn of the Second World War, is known as the Crypt of Civilisation; it represents the first concerted effort to collect and preserve a snapshot of human civilisation and technology. Though the term had not yet been coined at its inception, it was the first modern time capsule.
The whole concept crept from the brain of Dr. Thornwell Jacobs in 1936, at which time he was the president of Oglethorpe University. While teaching and researching ancient history he was struck by the scarcity of information on ancient civilisations, so he conceived an idea to prevent the problem from occurring to those who might study our civilisation in the future. His “crypt” was to contain a comprehensive record of civilisation up to that time, as well as the accumulated knowledge of mankind. He recruited the assistance of Thomas Kimmwood Peters, and put him to the monumental task of recording the corpus of humankind upon a new medium known as “microfilm.” Peters was singularly qualified for this task, given that he was the inventor of the first microfilm camera.
The fickle public seemed simultaneously inspired and troubled by the project. The scale of idea and its far-reaching scope were unlike anything attempted in modern history. The crypt was featured in publications and radio broadcasts worldwide, and Jacobs was thrilled by the attention the project had drawn. He described the crypt as his generation’s “archaeological duty.”
The target year for the crypt’s future opening – 8113 A.D. was arrived at by considering 1936 to be the halfway point to the future. 6,177 years had passed since the Egyptian calendar had been established in 4241 B.C., so Dr. Jacobs projected forward the same number of years from the date of his idea’s birth. The fact that the inhabitants of 1936 thought of their time as a great pivot point in history speaks to the technological optimism of the generation, which is understandable considering that some of the greatest inventions in history began to make their early, high - profile appearances around that time.
Actual preparation of the crypt began at the University in 1937. The site chosen was a basement room which had previously held a swimming pool, which meant that its foundation was already designed to be impervious to moisture. The room was a ten-foot by twenty - foot subterranean cavity in the solid granite bedrock, about seven feet beneath the surface. The chamber was further prepared by raising its floor with concrete and covering the walls with porcelain enamel plates embedded in waterproof pitch. For three years, Peters and a staff of student assistants captured and stored over 640,000 pages of documents onto microfilm, including religious texts such as the Bible and the Koran, and works of literature such as the Iliad and Dante’s Inferno. In addition to the microfilm, Peters compiled photographs, motion pictures, and voice recordings of political leaders such as Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Chamberlain, and Roosevelt. In order to make these materials accessible to the people of the future, there are glass magnifiers, as well as electrical projectors and players which can be powered with the included windmilldriven generator. Numerous “artifacts” from daily life and technology were also amassed and arranged in the chamber, including sewing machines, an early television, a telephone, mechanical watches, artwork, plant seeds, and much more.
Jacobs and Peters consulted with the U.S. Bureau of Standards for the best means of preserving the microfilm and artifacts for such an enormous span of time, and ultimately they opted to encase the sensitive items in sealed stainless steel receptacles with glass linings. Before they were sealed, all of the air was removed from these containers and replaced with nitrogen to prevent oxidation of the contents. As an added precaution, duplicates of the microfilm were made on metal film.
By 1940, the crypt was complete, and filled with stacks of sealed containers and objects representative of the time. On May 25 of that year, the crypt door was ceremoniously sealed in the presence of the city Mayor, the state Governor, and the U.S. Postmaster General among many others. The event was broadcast on the radio, and recordings were made of some of the profound things being uttered at the ceremony, to be used as some of the crypt’s final additions. Also contributed in the closing moments was a steel plate from the Atlanta Journal, which headlined themes of the war in Europe. The stainless steel door was then closed and welded shut, giving the interior of the vault its last taste of light until 8113… if all goes according to plan.
Lacking the budget for poison darts and giant stone spheres, the builders of this crypt instead used a different deterrent against would-be early intruders: Guilt. A stainless steel plaque is mounted above the crypt’s sealed entrance, begging any who encounter the crypt to leave its contents undisturbed until the year 8113.
The plaque reads: This Crypt contains memorials of the civilisation which existed in the United States and the world at large during the first half of the twentieth century. In receptacles of stainless steel, in which the air has been replaced by inert gasses, are encyclopedias, histories, scientific works, special editions of newspapers, travelogues, travel talks, cinema reels, models, phonograph records, and similar materials from which an idea of the state and nature of the civilisation which existed from 1900 to 1950 can be ascertained. No jewels or precious metals are included.
We depend upon the laws of the county of DeKalb, the State of Georgia, and the government of the United States and their heirs, assigns, and successors, and upon the sense of sportsmanship of posterity for the continued preservation of this vault until the year 8113, at which time we direct that it shall be opened by authorities representing the above governmental agencies and the administration of Oglethorpe University. Until that time we beg of all persons that this door and the contents of the crypt within may remain inviolate.
Of course, if an archaeologist today found a buried tomb whose inscription enjoined the finder not to open the door until some distant future date, it is doubtful that the wishes of the tomb’s makers would be respected.
In the event that the Crypt of Civilisation is opened by people who do not speak English as we know it, the room includes numerous pictographic representations of information, perhaps the most important of which describing the operation of the vault’s “language integrator”– the first piece of technology that one should encounter upon entering this technology tomb. Ironically, it seems that much of the information regarding this machine has been lost to the eroding effects of time, but it is said that this hand - powered English teaching device was inspired by the Rosetta stone, yet based on the “Nickelodeon principle.” It’s vocabulary consists of only 1,500 words, a subset of our language called “Basic English” which was used in cryptographic codes in the first World War.
The usefulness of such time capsules has long been called into question by archaeologists and historians, because wild optimism was long ago supplanted by skepticism as the fashionable attitude. Time capsules’ crippling fault lies not only in their questionable ability to weather the vast acres of time, but also in the fact that those responsible for the contents are presenting only what they want its openers to see. While gadgetry and documents are not completely lacking in historical value, their pristine condition says little about their role in everyday use. Be that as it may, the value to future historians is potentially incalculable.
Given the Crypt of Civilisation’s waterproofed underground location and surrounding granite terrain, it is probable that the vault will reach the year 8113 A.D. relatively intact. The area is not subject to much seismic activity, and though earthquakes there are not unknown, they are not anywhere near as frequent or as powerful as those in many other parts of the world.

What is the main factor that stands to challenge the hegemony of the ‘rich nations’ in terms of manufacturing?

Directions: Read the passage and answer the question that follows.

Thirty years ago the bosses of America’s car industry were shocked to learn that Japan had overtaken America to become the world’s leading car producer. They were even more shocked when they visited Japan to find out what was going on. They found that the secret of Japan’s success did not lie in cheap labour or government subsidies (their preferred explanations) but in what was rapidly dubbed “lean manufacturing”. While Detroit slept, Japan had transformed itself from a low wage economy into a hotbed of business innovation. Soon every factory around the world was lean, or a ruin.
Management gurus are always glibly proclaiming revolutions. What happened in Japan qualified, as did the advent of mass production in America a century ago. Now something comparable is taking place in the developing world.
It is hardly news that the world’s centre of economic gravity is shifting towards emerging markets. Buy a mobile phone and it will almost certainly have been made in China. Use it to phone a customer helpline and your call may well be answered by an Indian. Over the past five years China’s annual growth rate has been more than 10%, and India’s more than 8%. Yet even these figures understate the change that is taking place. Emerging countries are no longer content to be sources of cheap hands and low - cost brains. Instead they too are becoming hotbeds of innovation, producing breakthroughs in everything from telecoms to car making to health care. They are redesigning products to reduce costs not just by 10%, but by up to 90%. They are redesigning entire business processes to do things better and faster than their rivals in the West. Forget about flat, the world of business is turning upside down.
As our special report argues, the rich world is losing its leadership in the sort of breakthrough ideas that transform industries. This is partly because rich - world companies are doing more research and development in emerging markets. Fortune 500 companies now have 98 R&D facilities in China and 63 in India. IBM employs more people in developing countries than in America. But it is also because emerging - market firms and consumers are both moving upmarket. Huawei, a Chinese telecoms giant, applied for more international patents than any other firm did in 2008. Chinese 20 - somethings spend even more time on the internet than their American peers.
Even more striking is the emerging world’s growing ability to make established products for dramatically lower costs: no - frills $3,000 cars and $300 laptops may not seem as exciting as a new iPad but they promise to change far more people’s lives. This sort of advance, dubbed “frugal innovation” by some, is not just a matter of exploiting cheap labour (though cheap labour helps). It is a matter of redesigning products and processes to cut out unnecessary costs. In India Tata created the world’s cheapest car, the Nano, by combining dozens of cost - saving tricks. Bharti Airtel has slashed the cost of providing mobile phone services by radically rethinking its relationship with its competitors and suppliers. It shares radio towers with rivals and contracts out network construction, operations and support to specialists such as Ericsson and IBM. Just as Henry Ford and Toyota both helped change other industries, entrepreneurs in the developing world are applying the classic principles of division of labour and economies of scale to surprising areas such as heart operations and cataract surgery, reducing costs without sacrificing quality. They are using new technologies such as mobile phones to bring sophisticated services, in everything from health care to banking, to rural communities. And they are combining technological and business - model innovation to produce entirely new categories of services: Kenya leads the world in money transfer by mobile phone, for example.
All this is obviously good news for the billions of people who live in the BRICS (see article) and other developing countries. More consumers will have access to goods and services that were once confined to the elite. More than 90% of Indians and Chinese tell pollsters that they are optimistic about the future. Anand Mahindra, an Indian business leader, has described his dreams about the future as “not just colourful, but steroidal”.
What about the slow - growth rich world? Emerging firms are advancing on a greater number of fronts than the Japanese did 30 years ago and also advancing much faster, gobbling up Western rivals. Their charge will upset many established Western firms, which will face increasingly savage price competition, and also overturn many assumptions about the rich world’s competitive advantage. Many of globalisation’s most vocal supporters have justified the loss of manufacturing jobs in the West on the ground that the rich world will maintain an edge in innovation; the clever jobs will stay at home. Emerging economies are not merely challenging that lead in innovation. They are unleashing a wave of low - cost, disruptive innovations that will, as they spread to the rich world, shake many industries to their foundations. All sorts of chief executives will scream for protection.
Change will indeed be painful for incumbents, as disruptive innovation always is. But cheaper goods and services will be a blessing for Western consumers, who are likely to face years of slow income growth. It could also be good news for rich - world governments, which are plagued with deficits even before the baby - boomers begin to retire. Frugal innovation may well prevent America’s health - care system (which already consumes 17% of its GDP) from swamping the rest of the economy. Clever ways of applying economies of scale and scope in new ways could boost public-sector productivity.
Moreover, it is in the nature of innovation to feed upon itself. Innovation in the emerging world will encourage, rather than undermine, innovation in the rich world. Western carmakers learned the techniques of lean production from their Japanese rivals, just as the Japanese had earlier learned the techniques of mass production from the Americans. This great insurrection, like its predecessors, will make us all richer.

Why has trade been lesser than desirable between Korea and Japan, upto now?

Directions: Read the passage and answer the question that follows.

In South Korea August 29th is a date of national humiliation. On that day 100 years ago, the nation fell under the cosh of Japanese colonisers whose coercive annexation treaty stated bluntly: “His Majesty the Emperor of Korea makes the complete and permanent cession to His Majesty the Emperor of Japan of all rights of sovereignty over the whole of Korea.” Japan’s heavy hand was lifted in 1945 and it has since made occasional gestures of contrition. Yet it took a century for a Japanese leader to admit that colonial rule was imposed against the will of Koreans.
Japan seems to be trying a bit harder to improve relations with its closest neighbour. Its prime minister, Naoto Kan, offered a “heartfelt apology” for Japan’s actions, a few weeks ago, as part of a broad summer effort to show it is both genuinely remorseful and keen on a “future oriented” relationship. For the first time in 45 years, Japan has offered to send some precious imperial loot back to Seoul. And on August 15th none of Mr Kan’s cabinet joined an annual pilgrimage to the Yasukuni shrine honouring Japan’s war dead, the first time since the 1980s that there has been such a show of sensitivity about Japan’s war crimes.
Some reports (mostly in South Korea) even suggest that Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, a big Japanese firm, may discuss compensating 300 Koreans who were forced, as girls, to work unpaid in an aircraft factory in Japan during the war. That may go nowhere, but even mention of individual payouts for forced labour has been taboo since a bilateral reparations treaty in 1965.
These gestures have taken place amid strong diplomatic Japanese backing for South Korea’s tough stance towards North Korea over the sinking of the Cheonan, one of its naval frigates, in March. In a rare act of security cooperation in July, Japan also sent military observers on joint American-South Korean naval exercises.
South Korea has reacted cautiously. Its business minded president, Lee Myung-bak, also wants closer bilateral ties, and saw Mr Kan’s apology as helpful. But historical grievances still matter hugely to South Koreans. It was not lost on them that Mr Kan pointedly failed to direct his apology to North Korea, which suggests some political expediency. Nor has Japan conceded any claim to sovereignty over an island claimed by it and South Korea alike. An editorial in the Korea Herald has urged South Koreans to keep their humiliation “etched in stone”. Yet it also called for more co-operation with Japan.
The best prospects may be over trade. Since 2004 free trade talks between Japan and South Korea have been blocked by domestic concerns in each country over heavily protected rice industries and car markets. Yet bilateral trade has doubled in the past decade, and business lobbies are urging their governments to resume talks.
Cutting a trade deal could eventually help the countries put the tortured past behind them, especially if the governments could include China, which has its own deep historical grievance with Japan. But that would require strong Japanese leaders, able both to defy nationalists and protectionist farmers at home and to offer evidence of repentance abroad. South Korea’s government, too, would have to persuade its people that they should focus on an enterprising future rather than the past’s tragic victims.

What forms the basis of premonitions, according to the passage?

Directions: Read the passage and answer the question that follows.

The word “premonition” literally means a “forewarning,” which hints at the importance of these experiences. They often warn us of something unpleasant - a health challenge, physical disasters and impending dangers of all sorts. These are haphazardly mixed with all sorts of other premonitions, such as neutral or pleasant things - who is going to call on the phone, who I’ll meet at the party, when I’ll get a job promotion, when and where I’ll meet my soul mate, and so on.
Premonitions are a huge gift. They serve a survival function. They probably arose early in our evolutionary development in the predator - prey relationship, because any organism that knew when danger would happen in the future, could take measures to avoid it. This meant they would be more likely to remain alive and procreate, passing this ability to future generations. By now, the capacity to know the future is probably engrained in our genes and is widely distributed in the human race. Recent computerbased studies - the presentiment experiments by Dean Radin and others - suggest the capacity to know the future is indeed extremely common and is present in some degree in just about everybody.
I regard premonitions as a form of preventive medicine, because they so often warn us of threats to our health. For instance, one woman reported a dream premonition of a breast cancer before it appeared on breast exam or on a mammogram, when there was no lump or symptom of any kind. She even saw the specific location. A breast biopsy confirmed her premonition, and minor surgery completely cured her.
Information seems to be coming from the future into the present. There are several theories how this might happen, such as “closed, time - like loops” in which time might curve back on itself, bringing information from the future into the present, which we might experience as a premonition. An old idea called the “block universe” is also occasionally put forward by physicists to explain knowledge of the future. In this hypothesis, everything that has happened or will happen is already a given; the mind could theoretically gain access to any of this information under certain conditions (dreaming, meditating, impending danger, etc.).
Nearly all the current hypotheses rely on redefining the mind as a non - local phenomenon that is spread throughout space and time. This means that the mind is not confined to specific points in space, such as the brain, or to specific points in time, such as the present. It is infinite in space and time. This view fully permits premonitions, a kind of knowing that is non-local with respect to time. I have long favored this image of consciousness, and in 1989 introduced the term “non - local mind” in print in my book Recovering the Soul.
Non - local mind is unbounded, which means that at some point minds come together and form a single, unitary mind. Some of the greatest physicists of the twentieth century have held this view, such as Schrodinger, Margenau, Bohm and Eddington. The idea of One Mind clearly permits telepathy and clairvoyance, and the sort of person-to-person contact we often see in premonitions, such as when one individual has a premonition that another individual is in danger.

Why was 8113 A.D. decided upon as the year of the ‘crypt’ opening?

Directions: Read the passage and answer the question that follows.

In the basement of Phoebe Hearst Hall at Oglethorpe University in Georgia, there is a stainless steel vault door which was welded shut over sixty five years ago. Behind this door lies a 20¢ ¥ 10¢ waterproofed room containing a menagerie of once modern artifacts and microfilm records, placed there by men and women in the years between 1937 and 1940. If their goal is realized, the contents of this vault will remain unseen and undisturbed for the next 6,107 years. This ambitious project, which began in the dawn of the Second World War, is known as the Crypt of Civilisation; it represents the first concerted effort to collect and preserve a snapshot of human civilisation and technology. Though the term had not yet been coined at its inception, it was the first modern time capsule.
The whole concept crept from the brain of Dr. Thornwell Jacobs in 1936, at which time he was the president of Oglethorpe University. While teaching and researching ancient history he was struck by the scarcity of information on ancient civilisations, so he conceived an idea to prevent the problem from occurring to those who might study our civilisation in the future. His “crypt” was to contain a comprehensive record of civilisation up to that time, as well as the accumulated knowledge of mankind. He recruited the assistance of Thomas Kimmwood Peters, and put him to the monumental task of recording the corpus of humankind upon a new medium known as “microfilm.” Peters was singularly qualified for this task, given that he was the inventor of the first microfilm camera.
The fickle public seemed simultaneously inspired and troubled by the project. The scale of idea and its far-reaching scope were unlike anything attempted in modern history. The crypt was featured in publications and radio broadcasts worldwide, and Jacobs was thrilled by the attention the project had drawn. He described the crypt as his generation’s “archaeological duty.”
The target year for the crypt’s future opening – 8113 A.D. was arrived at by considering 1936 to be the halfway point to the future. 6,177 years had passed since the Egyptian calendar had been established in 4241 B.C., so Dr. Jacobs projected forward the same number of years from the date of his idea’s birth. The fact that the inhabitants of 1936 thought of their time as a great pivot point in history speaks to the technological optimism of the generation, which is understandable considering that some of the greatest inventions in history began to make their early, high - profile appearances around that time.
Actual preparation of the crypt began at the University in 1937. The site chosen was a basement room which had previously held a swimming pool, which meant that its foundation was already designed to be impervious to moisture. The room was a ten-foot by twenty - foot subterranean cavity in the solid granite bedrock, about seven feet beneath the surface. The chamber was further prepared by raising its floor with concrete and covering the walls with porcelain enamel plates embedded in waterproof pitch. For three years, Peters and a staff of student assistants captured and stored over 640,000 pages of documents onto microfilm, including religious texts such as the Bible and the Koran, and works of literature such as the Iliad and Dante’s Inferno. In addition to the microfilm, Peters compiled photographs, motion pictures, and voice recordings of political leaders such as Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Chamberlain, and Roosevelt. In order to make these materials accessible to the people of the future, there are glass magnifiers, as well as electrical projectors and players which can be powered with the included windmilldriven generator. Numerous “artifacts” from daily life and technology were also amassed and arranged in the chamber, including sewing machines, an early television, a telephone, mechanical watches, artwork, plant seeds, and much more.
Jacobs and Peters consulted with the U.S. Bureau of Standards for the best means of preserving the microfilm and artifacts for such an enormous span of time, and ultimately they opted to encase the sensitive items in sealed stainless steel receptacles with glass linings. Before they were sealed, all of the air was removed from these containers and replaced with nitrogen to prevent oxidation of the contents. As an added precaution, duplicates of the microfilm were made on metal film.
By 1940, the crypt was complete, and filled with stacks of sealed containers and objects representative of the time. On May 25 of that year, the crypt door was ceremoniously sealed in the presence of the city Mayor, the state Governor, and the U.S. Postmaster General among many others. The event was broadcast on the radio, and recordings were made of some of the profound things being uttered at the ceremony, to be used as some of the crypt’s final additions. Also contributed in the closing moments was a steel plate from the Atlanta Journal, which headlined themes of the war in Europe. The stainless steel door was then closed and welded shut, giving the interior of the vault its last taste of light until 8113… if all goes according to plan.
Lacking the budget for poison darts and giant stone spheres, the builders of this crypt instead used a different deterrent against would-be early intruders: Guilt. A stainless steel plaque is mounted above the crypt’s sealed entrance, begging any who encounter the crypt to leave its contents undisturbed until the year 8113.
The plaque reads: This Crypt contains memorials of the civilisation which existed in the United States and the world at large during the first half of the twentieth century. In receptacles of stainless steel, in which the air has been replaced by inert gasses, are encyclopedias, histories, scientific works, special editions of newspapers, travelogues, travel talks, cinema reels, models, phonograph records, and similar materials from which an idea of the state and nature of the civilisation which existed from 1900 to 1950 can be ascertained. No jewels or precious metals are included.
We depend upon the laws of the county of DeKalb, the State of Georgia, and the government of the United States and their heirs, assigns, and successors, and upon the sense of sportsmanship of posterity for the continued preservation of this vault until the year 8113, at which time we direct that it shall be opened by authorities representing the above governmental agencies and the administration of Oglethorpe University. Until that time we beg of all persons that this door and the contents of the crypt within may remain inviolate.
Of course, if an archaeologist today found a buried tomb whose inscription enjoined the finder not to open the door until some distant future date, it is doubtful that the wishes of the tomb’s makers would be respected.
In the event that the Crypt of Civilisation is opened by people who do not speak English as we know it, the room includes numerous pictographic representations of information, perhaps the most important of which describing the operation of the vault’s “language integrator”– the first piece of technology that one should encounter upon entering this technology tomb. Ironically, it seems that much of the information regarding this machine has been lost to the eroding effects of time, but it is said that this hand - powered English teaching device was inspired by the Rosetta stone, yet based on the “Nickelodeon principle.” It’s vocabulary consists of only 1,500 words, a subset of our language called “Basic English” which was used in cryptographic codes in the first World War.
The usefulness of such time capsules has long been called into question by archaeologists and historians, because wild optimism was long ago supplanted by skepticism as the fashionable attitude. Time capsules’ crippling fault lies not only in their questionable ability to weather the vast acres of time, but also in the fact that those responsible for the contents are presenting only what they want its openers to see. While gadgetry and documents are not completely lacking in historical value, their pristine condition says little about their role in everyday use. Be that as it may, the value to future historians is potentially incalculable.
Given the Crypt of Civilisation’s waterproofed underground location and surrounding granite terrain, it is probable that the vault will reach the year 8113 A.D. relatively intact. The area is not subject to much seismic activity, and though earthquakes there are not unknown, they are not anywhere near as frequent or as powerful as those in many other parts of the world.

On what note does the author end the passage?

Directions: Read the passage and answer the question that follows.

Thirty years ago the bosses of America’s car industry were shocked to learn that Japan had overtaken America to become the world’s leading car producer. They were even more shocked when they visited Japan to find out what was going on. They found that the secret of Japan’s success did not lie in cheap labour or government subsidies (their preferred explanations) but in what was rapidly dubbed “lean manufacturing”. While Detroit slept, Japan had transformed itself from a low wage economy into a hotbed of business innovation. Soon every factory around the world was lean, or a ruin.
Management gurus are always glibly proclaiming revolutions. What happened in Japan qualified, as did the advent of mass production in America a century ago. Now something comparable is taking place in the developing world.
It is hardly news that the world’s centre of economic gravity is shifting towards emerging markets. Buy a mobile phone and it will almost certainly have been made in China. Use it to phone a customer helpline and your call may well be answered by an Indian. Over the past five years China’s annual growth rate has been more than 10%, and India’s more than 8%. Yet even these figures understate the change that is taking place. Emerging countries are no longer content to be sources of cheap hands and low - cost brains. Instead they too are becoming hotbeds of innovation, producing breakthroughs in everything from telecoms to car making to health care. They are redesigning products to reduce costs not just by 10%, but by up to 90%. They are redesigning entire business processes to do things better and faster than their rivals in the West. Forget about flat, the world of business is turning upside down.
As our special report argues, the rich world is losing its leadership in the sort of breakthrough ideas that transform industries. This is partly because rich - world companies are doing more research and development in emerging markets. Fortune 500 companies now have 98 R&D facilities in China and 63 in India. IBM employs more people in developing countries than in America. But it is also because emerging - market firms and consumers are both moving upmarket. Huawei, a Chinese telecoms giant, applied for more international patents than any other firm did in 2008. Chinese 20 - somethings spend even more time on the internet than their American peers.
Even more striking is the emerging world’s growing ability to make established products for dramatically lower costs: no - frills $3,000 cars and $300 laptops may not seem as exciting as a new iPad but they promise to change far more people’s lives. This sort of advance, dubbed “frugal innovation” by some, is not just a matter of exploiting cheap labour (though cheap labour helps). It is a matter of redesigning products and processes to cut out unnecessary costs. In India Tata created the world’s cheapest car, the Nano, by combining dozens of cost - saving tricks. Bharti Airtel has slashed the cost of providing mobile phone services by radically rethinking its relationship with its competitors and suppliers. It shares radio towers with rivals and contracts out network construction, operations and support to specialists such as Ericsson and IBM. Just as Henry Ford and Toyota both helped change other industries, entrepreneurs in the developing world are applying the classic principles of division of labour and economies of scale to surprising areas such as heart operations and cataract surgery, reducing costs without sacrificing quality. They are using new technologies such as mobile phones to bring sophisticated services, in everything from health care to banking, to rural communities. And they are combining technological and business - model innovation to produce entirely new categories of services: Kenya leads the world in money transfer by mobile phone, for example.
All this is obviously good news for the billions of people who live in the BRICS (see article) and other developing countries. More consumers will have access to goods and services that were once confined to the elite. More than 90% of Indians and Chinese tell pollsters that they are optimistic about the future. Anand Mahindra, an Indian business leader, has described his dreams about the future as “not just colourful, but steroidal”.
What about the slow - growth rich world? Emerging firms are advancing on a greater number of fronts than the Japanese did 30 years ago and also advancing much faster, gobbling up Western rivals. Their charge will upset many established Western firms, which will face increasingly savage price competition, and also overturn many assumptions about the rich world’s competitive advantage. Many of globalisation’s most vocal supporters have justified the loss of manufacturing jobs in the West on the ground that the rich world will maintain an edge in innovation; the clever jobs will stay at home. Emerging economies are not merely challenging that lead in innovation. They are unleashing a wave of low - cost, disruptive innovations that will, as they spread to the rich world, shake many industries to their foundations. All sorts of chief executives will scream for protection.
Change will indeed be painful for incumbents, as disruptive innovation always is. But cheaper goods and services will be a blessing for Western consumers, who are likely to face years of slow income growth. It could also be good news for rich - world governments, which are plagued with deficits even before the baby - boomers begin to retire. Frugal innovation may well prevent America’s health - care system (which already consumes 17% of its GDP) from swamping the rest of the economy. Clever ways of applying economies of scale and scope in new ways could boost public-sector productivity.
Moreover, it is in the nature of innovation to feed upon itself. Innovation in the emerging world will encourage, rather than undermine, innovation in the rich world. Western carmakers learned the techniques of lean production from their Japanese rivals, just as the Japanese had earlier learned the techniques of mass production from the Americans. This great insurrection, like its predecessors, will make us all richer.