教甄◆英文科題庫下載題庫

[A]

　　What could go wrong for the ascending Chinese dragon? There are at least four different hypotheses proposed by those who expect it to stumble. The first is similar _____1_____ of inexorable ascent used to be made for Japan. It too was supposed to overtake the United States and to become the number one global economic superpower. So, the argument goes, China could one day suffer the fate of Japan after 1989, precisely because the economic and political systems are not truly competitive, a real-estate or stock-market bubble and bust could ____2____ the country with zombie banks, flat growth and deflation – the plight of Japan for the better part of two decades now. 

　　 A second possibility is that China might succumb to social unrest, as has so often happened in its past. After all, China remains a poor country, ranked eighty-sixth in the world in terms of per-capita income, with 150 million of its citizens– nearly one in ten –living on the ____3____ of $1.50 a day or less. Inequality has risen steeply since the introduction of economic reforms, so that the income distribution is now essentially American (though not quite Brazilian). An estimated 0.4 percent of Chinese households currently own around 70 percent of the country’s wealth. Add to these economic ______4____ chronic problems of air, water and ground pollution, and it is not surprising that the poorer parts of the Chinese rural hinterland are prone to outbreak of protest. 

　　 A third plausible scenario is that a rising middle class could, as so often in Western history, demand a bigger political say than they currently have. China was once a rural society. In 1990 three out of four Chinese lived in the countryside. Today 45 percent of people are ___5___ and by 2030 it could be as high as 70 percent. Not only is a middle class rapidly growing in urban China; the spread of mobile telephony and the internet means that they can form their own spontaneous ____6____ networks as never before. The challenge this represents is personified not by the jailed dissident Liu Xiaobo, awarded the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize, who belongs to an earlier generation of activists, but by the burly, bearded artist Ai Weiwei, who has used his public ____7____ to agitate on behalf of the victims of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. 

　　 The fourth and final pitfall is that China may so antagonize its neighbors that they gravitate toward a balancing coalition led by an increasingly realist United Sates. There is certainly no shortage of ___8___ in the rest of Asia about the way China throws its weight about these days. Chinese plans to ____9____ the water resources of the Quinghai-Tibetan plateau have troubling implications for Bangladesh, India and Kazakhstan. Relations with Japan took such a turn for the worse in a dispute over the tiny Senkaku/ Diaoyu Islands that China imposed an embargo on rare-earth exports, in _____10____ for the arrest of a stray Chinese fisherman.

 

(AB) disparities (AC) resentment (AD) horizontal (AE) equivalent (BC) divert (BD) aptitude (BE) projections (CD) expenditure (CE) saddle (DE) retaliation (ABC) city-dwellers (ABD) prominence