Directions: There are 4 passages in this part. Each passage is followed by some questions or unfinished statements. For each of them there are four choices marked A., B., C. and D.. You should deicide the best choice and mark the corresponding letter on the Answer Sheet with a single line through the center.

Passage Three

The typical American worker with a four-year college degree earns a lot more money than a similar worker who didn’t go beyond high school—45% more.

Education does pay. But in today’s economy, getting a bachelor’s degree is no longer a guarantee of raises big enough to beat inflation.

Although the best-paid college grads are doing well, wages of college grads have fallen on average in the past five years. The only group that enjoyed rising wages between 2000 and 2005 were the small slice with graduate degrees.

Even though the economy has been growing smartly, lots of workers who played by the rules and went the distance to get a four-year college degree aren’t getting ahead.

How come? Labor’s slice of the apples is smaller and corporate profits’ slice is larger. Moreover, labor’s share has been sliced increasingly unevenly. The very best-paid workers are getting the bulk of the raises.

Wage inequality has been widening for a couple of decades. But in the past decade, the gap between the bottom and the middle hasn’t widened much while wages at the top have pulled away. The top 1% in the U.S. got 16% of all income in 2014, compared with 9% in 1984.

The question isn’t whether the gap between winners and losers in the labor market is widening; it’s why. And it’s no longer as simple as saying. The more education one gets, the more one earns. Something more complicated is driving up pay at the top.

There are three explanations, all of which have some merit. One, it’s more socially acceptable than it was a generation ago for the top-tier chief executive, hedge-fund manager or baseball players to make an enormous amount of money. Two, the world has changed in ways that make No.1 or No.2— whether a trial lawyer or a rock star—much more valuable than No.19 and 20. And, three, there’s the influence on supply and demand of globalization and technology. At the high end, sharply rising wages suggest demand for the most-educated workers is growing faster than the supply. It’s changes in demand; combined with the fact that it’s very hard to replicate a lot of that talent, and we haven’t expanded the ranks of those professors as fast as we could.