English Quiz 120

English Quiz 120

1. The International Monetary Fund recently increased its prediction for global GDP growth in 2007 to 4.9% from 4.7%. If that turns out to be correct, this year will be the fourth in a row with an economic expansion rate above or close to 5%, the best performance since the early 1970s. China continues to race ahead at the astonishing pace of 10% growth or more, pulling much of Asia with it. Japan's economy, the world's second largest, is again expanding and the deflation that has racked the country for years is coming to an end. And in Europe, where the economy has been sluggish for most of this decade, there's fresh evidence that Germany—after four years of almost no growth—is finally rebounding.
Q: 試翻 "And in Europe, ... is finally rebounding."
[iBT]: sluggish <> rebounding = resilence

2. Such resilience highlights the degree to which the structure of the world's economy has been profoundly reshaped by globalization. The increasingly free flow of goods and capital has brought about greater integration of national economies, while at the same time broadly dispersing economic power. The old industrialized-world triad of the U.S., Japan and Western Europe no longer dominates to the degree it once did. China is close to snatching the No. 3 slot on the list of the world's biggest economies away from Germany, while India and South Korea are set to join the top 10 within a decade. India's GDP has expanded by a total of $350 billion over the past six years, an amount equivalent to the entire economy of the Netherlands in 2000. Once moribund countries such as Argentina and Russia are booming, too. Indeed, developing economies are doing much of the heavy lifting today. According to the World Bank, they collectively grew about 7% last year—more than twice as fast as high-income countries—and developing nations now account for 49% of world economic output, up from 39% in 1990. "For the first time in many decades, the global economy enjoys multiple sources of economic growth, of which the U.S. is not the most important," says Gail Fosler, chief economist at the Conference Board, a business-research outfit in New York.
Q: 試翻 "Once moribund countries ... heavy lifting today."
[iBT]: moribund <> booming

3. Still, even the biggest optimists concede that nobody would escape unscathed if the U.S. economy were to hit a wall. Its immediate neighbors, Mexico and Canada, would probably be hurt the most as they are particularly dependent on trade with the U.S., but the reverberations would be felt worldwide. The key bone of contention is the extent of the suffering. Those who dispute the decoupling theory point to the seemingly insatiable appetite of American consumers for imported goods, which has been a critical driver of the world's economic expansion. There are still relatively few signs that German, Japanese or Chinese consumers are ready to step up to replace them. For example, while China's imports are way up, those gains are due less to a free-spending middle class than to increasing demand for raw materials and components to feed the country's manufacturing sector, which turns the material into a mountain of finished products to ship to the U.S. "If you just look at the numbers, it looks like Asia's exports to China are larger than they are to the U.S.," says Rob Subbaraman, senior Asia economist for Lehman Brothers in Hong Kong. "But people aren't taking into account where the end demand is coming from."
Q: 試翻 "For example, ... ship to the U.S."