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浙江工商大学 2013 年硕士研究生入学考试试卷（B）卷
考试科目：257 英语（二外） 总分：100 分 考试时间：3 小时
Part I. Reading Comprehension (每小题 1.5 分，共 45 分)
Directions: There are 6 passages in this section. Each passage is followed by some questions. For
each of them there are four choices marked A), B), C), and D). You should decide on the best
choice and write the corresponding letter on the Answer Sheet.
Passage 1
The Japan of old was known as the country of “lifetime employment”, a somewhat
exaggerated but still important notion that in return for loyalty and flexibility big employers
typically offered a lifetime commitment to their workers, with associated company unions,
generous fringe benefits(附加福利) and pay rising according to age and seniority. That also made
for a fairly equal society. Shock therapy would have shattered the lifetime notion, producing a big
rise in unemployment. So it never happened: most big companies chose to maintain their
commitment, asking workers to take pay cuts and waive bonuses rather than lose their jobs, but
ceased to hire new graduates. Less than half as many new graduates were hired in 2003 as in 1997.
But also, helped by changes to employment law, firms found flexibility in another way: by
hiring part-timers and others on temporary contracts, both at far lower cost than for regular
workers. In 1990 such “non-regular” workers made up 18.8% of the labour force. Earlier this year,
that figure reached 30%, which in Japan’s 65m-strong labour force means roughly 20m people.
Those workers are predominantly women, the young and the fairly low-skilled. Since 2003, the
law has allowed contracts to be counted as temporary, and thus cheap, for up to three years. The
use of contract workers remains forbidden in some sectors that employ lots of people, including
health care and construction, but has gradually become permitted almost everywhere else. Canon,
for example, a successful electronics firm that still firmly maintains a lifetime commitment for its
“core” workers, employs fully 70% of its Japanese factory staff on such “non-regular” terms, up
from 50% five years ago and 10% a decade ago, according to Fujio Mitarai, Canon's president.
This new labour flexibility has contributed to a boom in company profits and to the paying
down of debt. In 1998 workers' pay equalled about 73% of corporate earnings. By 2004 the
proportion had dropped to 64%. Other factors helped too, most notably a big rise in exports to
China in 2002-04, which revived manufacturers of all kinds, whether metal-bashers or precision
engineers, and a series of bank nationalizations and mergers(合并) in 1998-2004 during which bad
loans worth trillions of yen came good or were written off.
As a result, the gigantic pile of dud corporate debt for which Japan became notorious in the
late 1990s is now a lot smaller: from a peak of more than ￥43 trillion in 2001, non-performing
loans held by banks have more than halved to less than ￥20 trillion. The number is now also
thought to be more or less accurate, whereas until 2001 or so official figures for non-performing
loans were appallingly and deliberately underestimated.
1. In the Japan, big companies offered life-time employment so that _______.
A) everyone can enjoy a stable job in the companies
B) everyone can get equal opportunities in daily life
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