Part II Reading comprehension (35 minutes)
Passage One
It’s a brand new world --- a world built around brands. Hard-charging, noise-making, culture-shaping brands are everywhere. They’re on supermarket shelves, of course, but also in business plans for .com startups and in the names of sports complexes. Brands are infiltrating (滲透)people’s everyday lives --- by sticking their logoes (商標(biāo)) on clothes, in concert programs, on subway –station walls, even in elementary school classrooms .
We live in an age in which CBS newscasters wear Nike jackets on the air, in which Burger King and McDonald’s open kiosks(小亭) in elementary school lunchrooms, in which schools like Stanford University are endowed with a Yahoo! Founders Chair. But as brands reach (and then overreach) into every aspects of our lives, the companies behind them invite more questions, deeper scrutiny—and an inevitable backlash(強(qiáng)烈反應(yīng)) by consumers.
“Our intellectual lives and our public spaces are being taken over by marketing ---and that has real implications for citizenship,” says author and activists Naomi Klien. “It’s important for any healthy culture to have public space--- a place where people are treated as citizens instead of as consumers. We’ve completely lost that space.
Since the mid-1980s ,as more and more companies have shifted from being about products to being about ideas – Starbucks isn’t selling coffee; It’s selling community!----those companies have poured more and more resources into marketing campaigns.
To pay for those campaigns, those same companies figured out ways to cut costs elsewhere, for example, by using contract labor at home and low-wage labor in developing countries. Contract laborers are hired on a temporary, per-assignment basis, and employers have no obligation to provide any benefits (such as health insurance) or long-term job security. This saves companies money but obviously puts workers in vulnerable situations. In the United States, contract labor has given rise to so-called McJobs, which employers and workers alike pretend are temporary----even though these jobs are usually held by adults who are trying to support families.
The massive expansion of marketing campaigns in the 1980s coincided with the reduction of government spending for schools and for museums. This made those institutions much too willing, even eager, to partner with private companies. But companies took advantage of the needs of those institutions, reaching too far, and overwhelming the civic space with their marketing agendas.
21. Which of the following does the author state as a factor in the increasing presence of brands in people’s lives?
A the aggressive nature of corporate marketing
B the lack of government funding for schools and museums
C the lack of government regulations of marketing methods
D the corporate funding of public spaces
22. Naomi Klein’s attitude towards the infiltration of brands into spaces is one of .
A concern B ambivalence (矛盾心理) C outrage D acceptance
23. The passage suggests that most contract laborers in the U.S. .
A pretend to be temporary workers
B may have trouble supporting their families financially
C have work conditions comparable to those of low-wage workers overseas .
D are likely to receive health benefits from their employers
24. This passage is mainly about .
A the problems with current corporate practices
B the nature of current marketing campaigns and strategies
C the importance of brands in American culture
D the excessive presence of brand and marketing in people’s lives.
25. The last paragraph tells us that .
A inadequate federal funding facilitated the privatization of schools and museums
B public institutions were too quick to accept corporate marketing as a source of funding
C companies manipulated schools through sophisticated ad campaigns
D by the 1980s ,very few public institutions were not funding by corporations
Passage two
