TOEFL-Reading-Comprehension – Test of English as a Foreign Language - Reading Comprehension

How many really suffer as a result of labor market problems? This is one of the most critical yet contentious social policy questions. In many ways, our social statistics exaggerate the degree of hardship. Unemployment does not have the same dire consequences today as it did in the 1930’s when most of the unemployed were primary bread-winners, when income and earnings were usually much closer to the margin of subsistence, and when there were no countervailing social programs for those failing in the labor market. Increasing affluence, the rise of families with more than one wage earner, the growing predominance of secondary earners among the unemployed, and improved social welfare protection have unquestionably mitigated the consequences of joblessness. Earnings and income data also overstate the dimensions of hard-ship. Among the millions with hourly earnings at or below the minimum wage level, the overwhelming majority are from multiple-earner, relatively affluent families. Most of those counted by the poverty statistics are elderly or handicapped or have family responsibilities which keep them out of the labor force, so the poverty statistics are by no means an accurate indicator of labor market pathologies.

Yet there are also many ways our social statistics underestimate the degree of labour-marketrelated hardship. The unemployment counts exclude the millions of fully employed workers whose wages are so low that their families remain in poverty. Low wages and repeated or prolonged unemployment frequently interact to undermine the capacity for self-support. Since the number experiencing job-lessness at some time during the year is several times the number unemployed in any month, those who suffers a result of forced idleness can equal or exceed average annual unemployment, even though only a minority of the jobless in any month really suffer. For every person counted in the month unemployment tallies, there is another working part-time because of the inability to find full-time work, or else outside the labor force but wanting a job. Finally, income transfers in our country have always focused on the elderly, disabled, and dependent, neglecting the needs of the working poor, so that the dramatic expansion of cash and in kind transfers does not necessarily mean that those failing in the labor market are adequately protected.

As a result of such contradictory evidence, it is uncertain whether those suffering seriously as a result of labor market problems number in the hundreds of thousands or the tens of millions, and hence, whether high levels of joblessness can be tolerated or must be countered by job creation and economic stimulus. There is only one area of agreement in this debate-that the existing poverty, employment, and earnings statistics are inadequate for one of their primary applications, measuring the consequences of labor market problems.

Which of the following is the principle topic of the passage?

Those examples of poetic justice that occur in medieval and Elizabethan literature, and that seem so satisfying, have encouraged a whole school of twentieth-century scholars to “find” further examples. In fact, these scholars have merely forced victimized character into a moral framework by which the injustices inflicted on them are, somehow or other, justified. Such scholars deny that the sufferers in a tragedy are innocent; they blame the victims themselves for their tragic fates. Any misdoing is enough to subject a character to critical whips. Thus, there are long essays about the misdemeanors of Webster’s Duchess of Malfi, who defined her brothers, and he behavior of Shakespeare’s Desdemona, who disobeyed her father.

Yet it should be remembered that the Renaissance writer Matteo Bandello strongly protests the injustice of the severe penalties issued to women for acts of disobedience that men could, and did, commit with virtual impunity. And Shakespeare, Chaucer, and Webster often enlist their readers on the side of their tragic heroines by describing injustices so cruel that readers cannot but join in protest. By portraying Griselda, in the Clerk’s Tale, as a meek, gentle victim who does not criticize, much less rebel against the prosecutor, her husband Walter, Chaucer incites readers to espouse Griselda’s cause against Walter’s oppression. Thus, efforts to supply historical and theological rationalization for Walter’s persecutions tend to turn Chaucer’s fable upside down, to deny its most obvious effect on reader’s sympathies. Similarly, to assert that Webster’s Duchess deserved torture and death because she chose to marry the man she loved and to bear their children is, in effect to join forces with her tyrannical brothers, and so to confound the operation of poetic justice, of which readers should approve, with precisely those examples of social injustice that Webster does everything in his power to make readers condemn. Indeed. Webster has his heroin so heroically lead the resistance to tyranny that she may well in spire members of the audience to imaginatively join forces with her against the cruelty and hypocritical morality of her brothers.

Thus Chaucer and Webster, in their different ways, attack injustice, argue on behalf of the victims, and prosecute the persecutors. Their readers serve them as a court of appeal that remains free to rule, as the evidence requires, and as common humanity requires, in favour of the innocent and injured parties. For, to paraphrase the noted eighteenth-century scholar, Samuel Johnson, despite all the refinements of subtlety and the dogmatism of learning, it is by the common sense and compassion of readers who are uncorrupted by the characters and situations in mereval and Elizabethan literature, as in any other literature, can best be judged.

As described in the passage, the process by which some twentieth-century scholars have reached their conclusions about the blameworthiness of victims in medieval and Elizabethan literary works is mot similar to which off the following?

Most economists in the United States seem captivated by spell of the free market. Consequently, nothing seems good or normal that does not accord with the requirements of the free market.

A price that is determined by the seller or for that matter, established by anyone other than the aggregate of consumers seems pernicious, accordingly, it requires a major act of will to think of price – fixing (the determination of prices by the seller) as both “normal” and having a valuable economic function. In fact, price-fixing is normal in all industrialized societies because the industrial system itself provides, as an effortless consequence of its own development, the pricefixing that requires, Modern industrial planning requires and rewards great size. Hence a comparatively small number of large firms will be competing for the same group of consumers. That each large firm will act with consideration of its own needs and thus avoid selling its products for more than its competitors charge is commonly recognized by advocates of free-markets economic theories. But each large firm will also act with full consideration of the needs that it has in common with the other large firms competing for the same customers. Each large firm will thus avoid significant price cutting, because price cutting would be prejudicial to the common interest in a stable demand for products. Most economists do not see price-fixing when it occurs because they expect it to be brought about by a number of explicit agreements among large firms; it is not.

More over those economists who argue that allowing the free market to operate without interference is the most efficient method of establishing prices have not considered the economies of non socialist countries other than the United States. These economies employ intentional pricefixing usually in an overt fashion. Formal price fixing by cartel and informal price fixing by agreements covering the members of an industry are common place. Were there something peculiarly efficient about the free market and inefficient about price fixing, the countries that have avoided the first and used the second would have suffered drastically in their economic development. There is no indication that they have.

Socialist industry also works within a frame work of controlled prices. In early 1970’s, the Soviet Union began to give firms and industries some of the flexibility in adjusting prices that a more informal evolution has accorded the capitalist system. Economists in the United States have hailed the change as a return to the free market. But Soviet firms are no more subject to prices established by free market over which they exercise little influenced than are capitalist firms.

The passage provides information that would answer which of the following questions about pricefixing?

I. What are some of the ways in which prices can be fixed?

II. For what products is price-fixing likely to be more profitable than the operation of the freemarket?

III. Is price-fixing more common in socialist industrialized societies or in no socialist industrializedsocieties?