问答题 题目要求：In recent years

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问答题《复合题被拆开情况》Current Challenges Confronting U.S. Higher EducationThe first challenge: force of the marketplace• Current situation : —presence of the marketplace as【T1】________external force —government

问答题《复合题被拆开情况》 Misery may love company, but this was ridiculous. More than a million IBM stockholders last week took a nightmare ride on a stockthey had long trusted. IBM had been sliding all year, recent

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问答题 According to a recent survey

问答题《复合题被拆开情况》 Metaphors in SpeakingDefinitionMetaphor: a way of 【L1】 ________before a way of wordsExamples of metaphors All Shook Up by Elvis Presley —reason for metaphors; to explain【L2】________ —Aristo

问答题《复合题被拆开情况》 Bill Gates may be one of the smartest guys in the country, but even he’s annoyed at having to remember a lot of personal passwords for activities like withdrawing money and going online. He

问答题. SECTION A MULTIPLE-CHOICE QUESTIONS In this section there are four passages followed by fourteen multiple choice questions. For each multiple choice question, there are four suggested answers marked .4, B, C and D. Choose the one that you think is the best answer and mark your answers on ANSWER SHEET TWO. PASSAGE ONE (1)Cheating in sport is as old as sport itself. The athletes of ancient Greece used potions to fortify themselves before a contest, and their modern counterparts have everything from anabolic steroids and growth hormones to doses of extra red blood cells with which to invigorate theft bodies. These days, however, such stimulants are frowned on, and those athletes must therefore run the gauntlet of organizations such as the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), which would rather that athletes competed without resorting to them. (2)The agencies have had remarkable success. Testing for anabolic steroids (in other words, artficial testosterone) was introduced in the 1970s, and the incidence of cheating seems to have fallen dramatically as a result. The tests, however, are not foolproof. And a study just published in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology Metabolism by Jenny Jakobsson Schulze and her colleagues at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden suggests that an individual's genetic make-up could confound them in two different ways. One genotype, to use the jargon, may allow athletes who use anabolic steroids to escape detection altogether. Another may actually be convicting the innocent. (3)The test usually employed for testosterone abuse relies on measuring the ratio of two chemicals found in the urine: testosterone glucuronide (TG) and epitestosterone glucuronide (EG). The former is produced when testosterone is broken down, while the latter is unrelated to testosterone metabolism, and can thus serve as a reference point for the test. Any ratio above four of the former to one of the latter is, according to official Olympic policy, considered suspicious and leads to more tests. (4)However, the production of TG is controlled by an enzyme that is, in turn, encoded by a gene called UGT2B17. This gene comes in two varieties, one of which has a part missing and therefore does not work properly. A person may thus have none, one or two working copies of UGT2B17, since he inherits one copy from each parent. Dr. Schulze guessed that different numbers of working copies would produce different test results. She therefore gave healthy male volunteers whose genes had been examined a single 360mg shot of testosterone (the standard dose for legitimate medical use) and checked their urine to see whether the shot could be detected. (5)The result was remarkable. Nearly half of the men who carried no functional copies of UGT2B17 would have gone undetected in the standard doping test. By contrast, 14% of those with two functional copies of the gene were over the detection threshold before they had even received an injection. The researchers estimate this would give a false-positive testing rate of 9% in a random population of young men. (6)Dr. Schulze also says there is substantial ethnic variation in UGT2B17 genotypes. Two-thirds of Asians have no functional copies of the gene (which means they have a naturally low ratio of TG to EG), compared with under a tenth of Caucasians—something the anti-doping bodies may wish to take into account. (7)In the meantime, Dr. Schulze's study does seem to offer innocents a way of defending themselves. Athletes traveling to Beijing for the Olympic games may be wise to travel armed not only with courage and the "spirit of Olympianism", but also with a copy of their genetic profile, just in case. PASSAGE TWO (1)Asked what job they would take if they could have any, people unleash their imaginations and dream of exotic places, powerful positions or work that involves alcohol and a paycheck at the same time. Or so you'd think. (2)None of those appeals to Lori Miller who, as a lead word processor, has to do things that don't seem so dreamy, which include proofreading, spell checking and formatting. But she loves it. "I like and respect nearly all my co-workers, and most of them feel the same way about me," she says. "Just a few things would make it a little better," she says, including a shorter commute and the return of some great people who used to work there. And one more thing: She'd appreciate if everyone would put their dishes in the dishwasher. (3)It's not a lot to ask for and, it turns out, a surprising number of people dreaming up their dream job don't ask for much. One could attribute it to lack of imagination, setting the bar low or "anchoring," the term referring to the place people start and never move far from. One could chalk it up to rationalizing your plight. (4)But maybe people simply like what they do and aren't, as some management would have you believe, asking for too much—just the elimination of a small but disproportionately powerful amount of office inanity. That may be one reason why two-thirds of Americans would take the same job again "without hesitation" and why 90% of Americans are at least somewhat satisfied with their jobs, according to a Gallup Poll. (5)The matters that routinely rank high on a satisfaction scale don't relate to money but "work as a means for demonstrating some sort of responsibility and achievement," says Barry Staw, professor of leadership and communication at University of California, Berkeley's Haas School of Business. "Pay—even when it's important, it's not for what you can buy, it's a validation of your work and approval." (6)So, money doesn't interest Elizabeth Gray as much as a level playing field. "I like what I do," says the city project manager who once witnessed former colleagues award a contractor, paid for work he never completed, with the title of "Contractor of the Year". (7)Thus: "My dream job would be one free of politics," she says. "All advancement would be based on merit. The people who really did the work would be the ones who received the credit." (8)Frank Gastner has a similar ideal: "VP in charge of destroying inane policies." Over the years, he's had to hassle with the simplest of design flaws that would cost virtually nothing to fix were it not for the bureaucracies that entrenched them. So, the retired manufacturer's representative says he would address product and process problems with the attitude, "It's not right; let's fix it now without a committee meeting." (9)Monique Huston actually has her dream job—and many tell her it's theirs, too. She's general manager of a pub in Omaha, the Dundee Dell, which boasts 650 single-malt scotches on its menu. She visits bars, country clubs, people's homes and Scotland for whiskey tasting. "I stumbled on my passion in life," she says. (10)Still, some nights she doesn't feel like drinking—or smiling. "Your face hurts," she complains. And when you have your dream job you wonder what in the world you'll do next. (11)One of the big appeals of a dream job is dreaming about it. Last year, George Reinhart saw an ad for a managing director of the privately owned island of Mustique in the West Indies. (12)He was lured by the salary ($1 million) and a climate that beat the one enjoyed by his Boston suburb. A documentary he saw about Mustique chronicled the posh playground for the likes of Mick Jagger and Princess Margaret. He reread Herman Wouk's "Don't Stop the Carnival," about a publicity agent who leaves his New York job and buys an island hotel. In April of last year, he applied for the job. (13)He heard nothing. So last May, he wrote another letter: "I wanted to thank you for providing the impetus for so much thought and fun." He didn't get the job but, he says, he takes comfort that the job hasn't been filled. "So, I can still dream," he adds. (14)I told him the job had been filled by someone—but only after he said, "I need to know, because then I can begin to dream of his failure." PASSAGE THREE (1)Israel is a "powerhouse of agricultural technology", says Abraham Goren of Elbit Imaging (EI), an Israeli multinational. The country's cows can produce as much as 37 liters of milk a day. In India, by contrast, cows yield just seven liters. Spotting an opportunity, EI is going into the Indian dairy business. It will import 10,000 cows and supply fortified and flavored milk to supermarkets and other buyers. (2)So will EI lap up India's milk market? Not necessarily. As the Times of India points out, its cows will ruminate less than 100 miles from the headquarters of a formidable local producer—the Gujarat Co-operative Milk Marketing Federation, otherwise known as Amul. This Farmers' Co-operative spans 2.6m members, collects 6.5m liters of milk a day, and boasts one of the longest-running and best-loved advertising campaigns in India. It has already shown "immense resilience" in the face of multinational competition, says Arindam Bhattacharya of the Boston Consulting Group (BCG). Its ice-cream business survived the arrival of Unilever; its chocolate milk has thrived despite Nestlé. (3)Indeed, Amul is one of 50 firms—from China, India, Brazil, Russia and six other emerging economies— that BCG has anointed as "local dynamos". They are prospering in their home market, are fending off multinational rivals, and are not focused on expanding abroad. BCG discovered many of these firms while drawing up its "global challengers" list of multinationals from the developing world. The companies that were venturing abroad most eagerly, it discovered, were not necessarily the most successful at home. (4)Emerging economies are still prey to what Harvard's Dani Rodrik has called "export fetishism". International success remains a firm's proudest boast, and with good reason: economists have shown that exporters are typically bigger, more efficient and pay better than their more parochial rivals. "Exporters are better" was the crisp verdict of a recent review of the data. (5)Countries like India and Brazil were, after all, once secluded backwaters fenced off by high tariffs. Prominent firms idled along on government favors and captive markets. In that era, exporting was a truer test of a company's worth. But as such countries have opened up, their home markets have become more trying places. Withstanding the onslaught of foreign firms on home soil may be as impressive a feat as beating them in global markets. (6)BCG describes some of the ways that feat has been accomplished. Of its 50 dynamos, 41 are in consumer businesses, where they can exploit a more intimate understanding of their compatriots' tastes. It gives the example of Gol, a Brazilian budget airline, which bet that its cash-strapped customers would sacrifice convenience and speed for price. Many Gol planes therefore depart at odd hours and make several hops to out-of-the-way locations, rather than flying directly. (7)Similarly astute was India's Titan Industries, which has increased its share of India's wristwatch market despite the entry of foreign brands such as Timex and Swatch. It understood that Indians, who expect a good price even for old newspapers, do not throw their watches away lightly, and has over 700 after-sales centers that will replace straps and batteries. (8)Exporters tend to be more capital-intensive than their home-bound peers; they also rely more on skilled labor. Many local dynamos, conversely, take full advantage of the cheap workforce at their disposal. Focus Media, China's biggest "out of home" advertising company, gets messages out on flat-panel displays in 85,000 locations around the country. Those displays could be linked and reprogrammed electronically, but that might fall foul of broadcast regulations. So instead the firm's fleet of workers on bicycles replaces the displays' discs and flash-cards by hand. (9)The list of multinationals resisted or repelled by these dynamos includes some of the world's biggest names: eBay and Google in China; Wal-Mart in Mexico; SAP in Brazil. But Mr. Goren of EI is not too worried about Amul. The market is big enough for everybody, he insists. Nothing, then, is for either company to cry about. PASSAGE FOUR (1)It is hard for modern people to imagine the life one hundred years ago. No television, no plastic, no ATMs, no DVDs. Illnesses like tuberculosis, diphtheria, pneumonia meant only death. Of course, cloning appeared only in science fiction. Not to mention, computer and Internet. (2)Today, our workplace are equipped with assembly lines, fax machines, computers. Our daily life is cushioned by air conditioners, cell phones. Antibiotics helped created a long list of miracle drugs. The by-pass operation saved millions. The discovery of DNA has revolutionized the way scientists think about new therapies. Man finally stepped on the magical and mysterious Moon. With the rapid changes we have been experiencing, the anticipation for the future is higher than ever. (3)A revolutionary manufacturing process made it possible for anyone to own a car. Henry Ford is the man who put the world on wheels. (4)When it comes to singling out those who have made a difference in all our lives, you cannot over-look Henry Ford. A historian a century from now might well conclude that it was Henry Ford who most influenced all manufacturing everywhere, even to this day, by introducing a new way to make cars—one, strange to say, that originated in slaughter houses. (5)Back in the early 1900s, slaughter houses used what could have been called a "disassembly line." That is, the carcass of a slain steer or a pig was moved past various meat-cutters, each of whom cut off only a certain portion. Ford reversed this process to see if it would speed up production of a part of an automobile engine called a magneto. Rather than have each worker completely assemble a magneto, one of its elements was placed on a conveyer, and each worker, as it passed, added another component to it, the same one each time. Professor David Hounshell, of The University of Delaware, an expert on industrial development tells what happened: "The previous day, workers carrying out the entire process had averaged one magneto every 20 minutes. But on that day, on the line, the assembly team averaged one every 13 minutes and 10 seconds per person." (6)Within a year, the time had been reduced to five minutes. In 1913, Ford went all the way. Hooked together by ropes, partially assembled vehicles were towed past workers who completed them one piece at a time. It wasn't long before Ford was turning out several hundred thousand cars a year, a remarkable achievement then. And so efficient and economical was this new system that he cut the price of his cars in half, to $260, putting them within reach of all those who, up until that time, could not afford them. Soon, auto makers over the world copied him. In fact, he encouraged them to do so by writing a book about all of his innovations, entitled Today and Tomorrow. The Age of the Automobile had arrived. Today, aided by robots and other forms of automation, everything from toasters to perfumes is made on assembly lines. (7)Edsel Ford, Henry's great-grandson, and a Ford vice president: "I think that my great-grandfather would just be amazed at how far technology has come." (8)Many of today's innovations come from Japan. Norman Bodek, who publishes books about manufacturing processes, finds this ironic. On a recent trip to Japan he talked to two of the top officials of Toyota. "When I asked them where these secrets came from, where their ideas came from to manufacture in a totally different way, they laughed, and they said. 'Well. We just read it in Henry Ford's book from 1926: Today and Tomorrow.'"1. The second paragraph implies that testing for anabolic steroids ______.(PASSAGE ONE)

问答题 我怀想着故乡的雷声和雨声。那隆隆的有力的搏击，从山谷返响到山谷，仿佛春之芽就从冻土里震动，惊醒

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问答题《复合题被拆开情况》 The study of a foreign language affects academic areas as well. Research has shown that children who have studied a foreign language in elementary school achieve lower scores on standardize

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问答题《复合题被拆开情况》Current Challenges Confronting U.S. Higher EducationThe first challenge: force of the marketplace• Current situation : —presence of the marketplace as【T1】________external force —government

问答题. SECTION A MULTIPLE-CHOICE QUESTIONS PASSAGE ONE (1)Adopted at birth by a family of Jehovah's Witnesses, I was asked from an early age to behave as much like an adult as possible. Three times a week in the Kingdom Hall in Miami, my brother and I strove to sit perfectly still in our chairs. Our mother carried a wooden spoon in her purse and was quick to take us outside for beatings if we fidgeted. (2)At 5, I sat onstage in the Kingdom Hall in Surrey, England, where my father's job had taken us. Nervously pushing my memorized lines into the microphone, I faced my mother, who was seated across from me. We were demonstrating for the congregation exactly how a Bible study with a "worldly" person, or non-Witness, should go. (3)I had played the householder before—the person who answered the door. That was easy: you just asked questions that showed you didn't know the Truth. Portraying the Witness was harder: you had to produce the right Scripture to answer any questions the householder might ask. (4)But we had written our parts on index cards and rehearsed repeatedly at home. I was well dressed and shining clean. I said my lines flawlessly and gave looks of concern at the right times. Finally, the householder agreed with everything I had said: her way of life was wicked, and the Bible clearly proved that Jehovah's Witnesses were the only true Christians who would be saved at Armageddon. Her look was grateful. Then she smiled, becoming my mother again. Everyone clapped, and she glowed with pride. At last I could go out in service. (5)From the age of 5 until I was 14, I knocked on the doors of strangers each week with memorized lines that urged them to repent. I didn't play with other children. I didn't have birthday parties or Christmas mornings. What I did was pray a lot. I knew the books of the Bible in order, by heart, and could recite various verses. My loneliness was nourished by rich, beautiful fantasies of eternal life in a paradise of peace, justice, racial harmony and environmental purity, a recompense for the rigor and social isolation of our lives. (6)This bliss wasn't a future we had to work for. Witnesses wouldn't vote, didn't involve themselves in temporal matters, weren't activists. Jehovah would do it all for us, destroying everyone who wasn't a Witness and restoring the earth to harmony. All we had to do was to obey and wait. (7)Shortly after our return to the States, my father was disfellowshipped for being an unrepentant smoker—smoking violated God's temple, the body, much like fornication and drunkenness. Three years later, my parents' marriage dissolved. My mother's second husband had served at Bethel, the Watchtower's headquarters in Brooklyn. Our doctrines, based on Paul's letters in the New Testament, gave him complete control as the new head of the household; my mother's role was to submit. My stepfather happened to be the kind of person who took advantage of this authority, physically abusing us and forcing us to shun our father completely. (8)After two years, I ran away to live with my father. My brother joined me a tumultuous six months later. We continued to attend the Kingdom Hall and preach door to door; the Witnesses had been our only community. Leaving was a gradual process that took months of questioning. I respected all faiths deeply, but at 15 I decided that I could no longer be part of a religion that overlooked inequality. (9)After she finally divorced my stepfather, my mother moved out of state and married another Witness. Our occasional correspondence skates over the surface of our strained relationship. I feel for her struggles. A smart, capable woman, she subjected her will and judgment, as the Witnesses teach, to her husbands'. If she damaged my brother and me or failed to protect us, she did so out of fear and belief. She wanted to save us from certain destruction at Armageddon, from a corrupt and dirty world. She wanted nothing less for us than paradise. (10)I love my mother, but I also love my modern life, the multitude of ideas I was once forbidden to entertain, the rich friendships and the joyous love of my family. By choosing to live in the world she scorned—to teach in a college, to spare the rod entirely, to believe in the goodness of all kinds of people—I have, in her eyes, turned my back not only on Jehovah but also on her. PASSAGE TWO (1)Think of the solitude felt by Marie Smith before she died earlier this year in her native Alaska, at 89. She was the last person who knew the language of the Eyak people as a mother-tongue. Or imagine Ned Mandrell, who died in 1974—he was the last native speaker of Manx, similar to Irish and Scots Gaelic. Both these people had the comfort of being surrounded, some of the time, by enthusiasts who knew something precious was vanishing and tried to record and learn whatever they could of a vanishing tongue. In remote parts of the world, dozens more people are on the point of taking to their graves a system of communication that will never be recorded or reconstructed. (2)Does it matter? Plenty of languages—among them Akkadian, Etruscan, Tangut and Chibcha—have gone the way of the dodo, without causing much trouble to the descendants. Should anyone lose sleep over the fact that many tongues—from Manchu (spoken in China) to Hua (Botswana) and Gwich'in (Alaska)—are in danger of suffering a similar fate? (3)Compared with groups who lobby to save animals or trees, campaigners who lobby to preserve languages are themselves a rare breed. But they are trying both to mitigate and publicize an alarming acceleration in the rate at which languages are vanishing. Of some 6,900 tongues spoken in the world today, some 50% to 90% could be gone by the end of the century. In Africa, at least 300 languages are in near-term danger, and 200 more have died recently or are on the verge of death. Some 145 languages are threatened in East and South-east Asia. (4)Some languages, even robust ones, face an obvious threat in the shape of a political power bent on imposing a majority tongue. A youngster in any part of the Soviet Union soon realised that whatever you spoke at home, mastering Russian was the key to success. (5)Nor did English reach its present global status without ruthless tactics. In years past, Americans, Canadians and Australians took native children away from their families to be raised at boarding schools where English rules. In all the Celtic fringes of the British Isles there are bitter memories of children being punished for speaking the wrong language. (6)But in an age of mass communications, the threats to linguistic diversity are less ruthless and more spontaneous. Parents stop using traditional tongues, thinking it will be better for their children to grow up using a dominant language (such as Swahili in East Africa) or a global one (such as English, Mandarin or Spanish). And even if parents try to keep the old speech alive, their efforts can be doomed by films and computer games. (7)The result is a growing list of tongues spoken only by white-haired elders. A book edited by Peter Austin, an Australian linguist, gives some examples: Njerep, one of 31 endangered languages counted in Cameroon, reportedly has only four speakers left, all over 60. The valleys of the Caucasus used to be a paradise for linguists in search of unusual syntax, but Ubykh, one of the region's baffling tongues, officially expired in 1992. PASSAGE THREE (1)London is steeped in Dickensian history. Every place he visited, every person he met, would be drawn into his imagination and reappear in a novel. There really are such places as Hanging Sword Alley in Whitefriars Street, EC1 (Where Jerry Cruncher lived in A Tale of Two Cities) and Bleeding Heart Yard off Greville Street, EC1 (Where the Plornish family lived in Little Dorrit); they are just the sort of places Dickens would have visited on his frequent night-time walks. (2)He first came to London as a young boy, and lived at a number of addresses throughout his life, moving as his income and his issue (he had ten children) increased. Of these homes only one remains, at 48 Doughty Street, WC1, now the Dickens House Museum, and as good a place as any to start your tour of Dickens's London. (3)The Dickens family lived here for only two years—1837-1839—but during this brief period, Charles Dickens first achieved great fame as a novelist, finishing Pickwick Papers, and working on Oliver Twist, Barnaby Rudge and Nicholas Nickleby. If you want a house full of atmosphere, you may be a little disappointed, for it is more a collection of Dickensiana than a recreation of a home. Don't let this deter you, however, for this is the place to see manuscripts, first editions, letters, original drawings, as well as furniture, pictures and artifacts from different periods of his life. Just one room, the Drawing Room, has been reconstructed to look as it would have done in 1839, but elsewhere in the house you can see the grandfather lock which belonged to Moses Pickwick and gave the name to Pickwick Papers, the writing table from Gad's Hill, Rochester, on which he wrote his last words of fiction, and the sideboard he bought in 1839. (4)1t was in the back room on the first floor that Dickens's sister-in-law Mary Hogarth died when she was only 17. He loved Mary deeply, probably more than his wife, her sister. The tragedy haunted him for years, and is supposed to have inspired the famous death scene of Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop. (5)1f you walk through Lincoln's Inn Fields, you will come across Portsmouth Street, and a building which, since Dickens's death, has claimed to be the Old Curiosity Shop itself. It is thought to date from 1567, and is the oldest shop in London, but it seems more likely that the real Curiosity Shop was off Leicester Square. Whatever the truth, the shop makes a pleasant change from the many modem buildings which line the street. (6)1f you know Dickens's work well, you may like to make your own way around this area, or you may prefer to rely on the experts and join a guided walk. (7)"City Walks" organize a tour around a part of London which features strongly both in Dickens's early life and his books. This is Southwark, SE1, an area not normally renowned as tourist attraction, but one which is historically fascinating. When the Dickens family first arrived in London, John Dickens, Charles's father, was working in Whitehall. He was the model for Mr. Micawber in David Copperfield, so it is not surprising to learn that within a few months he was thrown into the Marshalsea Prison, off Borough High Street, for debt (Micawber was imprisoned in King's Bench Prison which stood on the corner of the Borough Road). The Marshalsea Prison has long gone, but you can stand by the high walls and recall the time that Dickens would go into prison for supper each evening, after a hard and humiliating day sticking labels on pots at the Blacking Warehouse at Hungerford Stairs. (8)Off Borough High Street are several small alleys called Yards. These mark the sites of the old coaching inns where passengers would catch a cart to destinations around the country. In one, White Hart Yard, stood the White Hart Inn, a tavern that Dickens knew well and in which he decided to introduce one of his best-loved characters, Sam Weller, of Pickwick Papers. Mr. Pickwick's meeting with Sam ensured the popularity of the novel which was then serialized in monthly installments, and made Dickens a famous name. PASSAGE FOUR (1)When Arsenal, an English football club, took on Reading in 2007, the cover of the official program featured Theo Walcott, a young football player known for his speed. A copy is on display near the town of Bhigwan in the Indian state of Maharashtra, in a factory belonging to Ballarpur Industries Limited (BILT). It is India's biggest maker of writing and printing paper, including the glossy stock that Arsenal supporters browse before kick-off. (2)BILT is part of the Avantha Group, a corporation headed by Gautam Thapar that spans agribusiness, power and manufacturing, among other things. The group has grown at a pace that would shame Mr. Walcott, earning revenues of about $4 billion in 2009, compared with $1 billion in 2003. It provides one example of how corporate India might evolve, as it globalizes its operations, professionalizes its management and modernizes its technologies, while remaining a family corporation. (3)The group was founded in the 1920s by Karam Chand Thapar, who passed it on to his son, Lalit Mohan. Like many family corporations, it split in its third generation. But it split amicably, leaving Mr. Thapar with the lion's share of the businesses. Other corporate siblings squabble over the family name. Mr. Thapar dropped it, rebranding the group "Avantha" in 2007. (4)Mr. Thapar cites a European tradition, where the heirs to family businesses first go off to try their luck elsewhere, before returning to the family fold. By accident, if not by design, he enjoyed a similar upbringing. As the second son of Lalit Mohan's brother, Gautam grew up "twice removed from any position of inheritance." (5)That was probably just as well. Sudhir Trehan, who runs Crompton Greaves, Avantha's electrical equipment-maker, jokes that when he joined as a trainee in 1972, the management would not drink tea unless it were served with white gloves from a silver pot. That complacent culture could not survive the less sheltered economy of the 1990s. Mr. Thapar became boss of BILT after steering it clear of bankruptcy in the latter half of that decade. Thereafter his uncle left him free to get on with it. Mr. Thapar cultivates a similar relationship with those who work for him, giving promising young executives responsibility for smaller units early on, so they can make their mistakes before the stakes get too big. "You actually believe it's your company," says Vineet Chhabra, head of Global Green, a subsidiary which exports foods to 50 countries. (6)One advantage of a corporation is that it allows the ambitious to graduate from one company to another without leaving the group. When Mr. Chhabra began to feel irritated by Global Green's small scale, he was given that option. But instead he chose to turn Global Green into the bigger company he wanted to run. With the group's backing, it acquired Intergarden, a Belgian company three times its size. The purchase illustrates another advantage of the corporation: it gives units access to finance they could not raise on their own. (7)1ndian companies typically buy firms abroad to secure materials, markets, or technologies. Avantha has gone in search of all three. Intergarden, for example, gave Global Green valuable customer relationships. BILT bought a Malaysian firm to gain access to its timber. Crompton Greaves wanted Pauwels, a Belgian company, mainly for its know-how. (8)Mr. Thapar is unusual among Indian businessmen in seeking inspiration (as well as acquisitions and markets) in continental Europe. In both Europe and India, he points out, the state remains a big owner of enterprise, the capital markets have yet to supersede banks as a source of corporate finance, and share ownership is often concentrated in family hands. Even the group's new name is an unlikely mix of Indian and European. It evokes both the Sanskrit for "strong foundations" and the French for "advance"—a combination worth trading the family name for.1. The author's mother can be described as the following EXCEPT ______PASSAGE ONE