【正文】 itain and America. Economists have been particularly surprised by favorable inflation figures in Britain and the United States, since conventional measures suggest that both economies, and especially America?s, have little productive slack. America?s capacity utilization, for example, hit historically high levels earlier this year, and its jobless rate (% in August) has fallen bellow most estimates of the natural rate of unemployment the rate below which inflation has taken off in the past. Why has inflation proved so mild? The most thrilling explanation is, unfortunately, a little defective. Some economists argue that powerful structural changes in the world have upended the old economic models that were based upon the historical link between growth and inflation. 1998 年全國碩士研究生入學(xué)統(tǒng) 一考試英語試題 Text 1 Few creations of big technology capture the imagination like giant dams. Perhaps it is humankind?s long suffering at the mercy of flood and drought that makes the ideal of forcing the waters to do our bidding so fascinating. But to be fascinated is 考研英語真題 5 also, sometimes, to be blind. Several giant dam projects threaten to do more harm than good. The lesson from dams is that big is not always beautiful. It doesn?t help that building a big, powerful dam has bee a symbol of achievement for nations and people striving to assert themselves. Egypt?s leadership in the Arab world was cemented by the Aswan High Dam. Turkey?s bid for First World status includes the giant Ataturk Dam. But big dams tend not to work as intended. The Aswan Dam, for example, stopped the Nile flooding but deprived Egypt of the fertile silt that floods left all in return for a giant reservoir of disease which is now so full of silt that it barely generates electricity. And yet, the myth of controlling the waters persists. This week, in the heart of civilized Europe, Slovaks and Hungarians stopped just short of sending in the troops in their contention over a dam on the Danube. The huge plex will probably have all the usual problems of big dams. But Slovakia is bidding for independence from the Czechs, and now needs a dam to prove itself. Meanwhile, in India, the World Bank has given the goahead to the even more wrongheaded Narmada Dam. And the bank has done this even though its advisors say the dam will cause hardship for the powerless and environmental destruction. The benefits are for the powerful, but they are far from guaranteed. Proper, scientific study of the impacts of dams and of the cost and benefits of controlling water can help to resolve these conflicts. Hydroelectric power and flood control and irrigation are possible without building monster dams. But when you are dealing with myths, it is hard to be either proper, or scientific. It is time that the world learned the lessons of Aswan. You don?t need a dam to be saved. Text 2 Well, no gain without pain, they say. But what about pain without gain? Everywhere you go in America, you hear tales of corporate revival. What is harder to establish is whether the productivity revolution that businessmen assume they are presiding over is for real. The official statistics are mildly discouraging. They show that, if you lump manufacturing and services together, productivity has grown on average by % since 1987. That is somewhat faster than the average during the previous decade. And since 1991, productivity has increased by about 2% a year, which is more than twice the 19781987 average. The trouble is that part of the recent acceleration is due to the usual rebound that occurs at this point in a business cycle, and so is not conclusive evidence of a revival in the underlying trend. There is, as Robert Rubin, the treasury secretary, says, a “disjunction” between the mass of business anecdote that points to a leap in productivity and the picture reflected by the statistics. Some of this can be easily explained. New ways of anizing the workplace all that reengineering and downsizing are only one contribution to the overall productivity of an economy, which is driven by many other factors such as