BEST IELTS Academic Reading Test 574

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IELTS ACADEMIC READING TEST 574 – PASSAGE – 2

IELTS ACADEMIC READING TEST – 574

READING PASSAGE – 2

THE WORLD TURNED UPSIDE DOWN

A. Developing countries, the emerging world, are becoming hotbeds of business innovation. They are coming up with new products and services that are dramatically cheaper than their Western equivalents: $3,000 cars, $300 computers and $30 mobile phones. They are reinventing systems of production and distribution, and they are experimenting with entirely new business models. All the elements of modem business, from supply-chain management to recruitment, are being reinvented in this emerging market. Emerging-market champions have not only proved highly competitive in their own backyards, they are also going global themselves.

B. Western multinationals now regard these emerging developing countries as sources of economic growth and high-quality brainpower, both of which they desperately need. Multinationals expect about 70% of the world’s growth over the next few years to come from emerging markets. They have also noted that China have been pouring resources into education over the past couple of decades. China produces 75,000 people with higher degrees in engineering or computer science every year.

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The world’s biggest multinationals are becoming increasingly happy to do their research and development in emerging markets. Companies in the Fortune 500 list have 98 R&D facilities in China and 63 in India. Some have more than one. Knowledge-intensive companies such as IT specialists and consultancies have hugely stepped up the number of people they employ in developing countries.

C. Both Western and emerging-country companies have also realised that they need to try harder if they are to prosper in these markets. That means rethinking everything from products to distribution systems. Anil Gupta, of the University of Maryland at College Park, points out that these markets are among the toughest in the world. Distribution systems can be hopeless. Income streams can be unpredictable. Pollution can be lung-searing. Governments sometimes failed to provide basic services. Pirating can squeeze profit margins.

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And poverty is ubiquitous. The islands of success are surrounded by a sea of problems, which have defeated some doughty companies. E-Bay retreated from China, and Google too has recently backed out from the mainland of China and moved to Hong Kong. Black & Decker, America’s biggest tool maker, is almost invisible in India and China, the world’s two biggest construction sites.

D. However, the potential market is huge. The populations are already much bigger than in the developed world and growing much faster, and in both China and India hundreds of millions of people will enter the middle class in the coming decades. The economies are set to grow faster too. Brainpower is relatively cheap and abundant: in China over 5m people graduate every year and in India about 3m, respectively four times and three times the numbers a decade ago. No visitor to the emerging world can fail to be struck by its prevailing optimism.

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Large majorities in China and India say their country’s current economic situation is good and think their children will be better off than they are. This is a region that, to echo Churchill’s phrase, sees opportunities in every difficulty rather than difficulties in every opportunity.

E. Until now it had been widely assumed that globalisation was driven by the West and imposed on the rest. Bosses in New York, London and Paris would control the process from their glass towers, and Western consumers would reap most of the benefits. This is changing fast. Embraer buys many of its component parts from the West and does the assembly work in Brazil. The emerging-market brainy ones are taking over office work. Consumers in developing countries are getting richer faster than their equivalents in the West.

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F. People in the West like to believe that their companies cook up new ideas in their laboratories at home and then export them to the developing world, which makes it easier to accept job losses in manufacturing. But this is proving less true by the day. Western companies are embracing “polycentric innovation” as they spread their R&D centres around the world. And non-Western companies are becoming powerhouses of innovation in everything from telecoms to computers.

G. The very nature of innovation has to be rethought. Most people in the West equate it with technological breakthroughs, embodied in revolutionary new products that are taken up by the elites and eventually trickle down to the masses. The emerging developing countries are offering us many breakthrough innovations. For instance, it has already leapfrogged ahead of the West in areas such as mobile money (using mobile phones to make payments) and online games.

Microsoft’s research laboratory in Beijing has produced clever programs that allow computers to recognise handwriting or turn photographs into cartoons. But the most exciting innovations are of the Wal-Mart and Dell variety: smarter ways of designing products and organising processes to reach the billions of consumers who are just entering the global market.

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H. In the past, emerging economic giants have tended to embrace new management systems as they tried to consolidate their progress. America adopted Henry Ford’s production line in the 1960s. In 1980 American car executives were so shaken to find that Japan had replaced the United States as the world’s leading carmaker that they began to visit Japan to find out what was going on. The visitors discovered that the answer was not industrial policy or state subsidies, as they had expected, but business innovation.

I. The Japanese had invented a new system of making things that was quickly dubbed “lean manufacturing”, which almost destroyed the American car and electronics industries. Now the emerging markets are developing their own distinctive management ideas, and Western companies will increasingly find themselves learning from their rivals. People who used to think of the emerging world as a source of cheap labour must now recognise that it can be a source of disruptive innovation as well.

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Questions 14-20

Reading Passage 2 has nine paragraphs, A-I.

Choose the correct heading for some of paragraphs from the list of headings below.

Write the correct number, i-x, in boxes 14-20 on your answer sheet.

List of Headings

i. The opportunities are equally extraordinary.

ii. Clever programs allow computers to recognize handwriting or turn photographs into cartoons.

iii. Old assumptions about innovation in the developed countries are also being challenged.

iv. In some cases the traditional global trend is even being reversed.

v. Japan became the world’s leading carmaker for business innovations.

vi. The emerging world is making a growing contribution to innovations.

vii. The emerging world is undergoing changes at home and abroad.

viii. The multinationals neglect the emerging markets.

ix. Western multinationals are investing more R&D in emerging markets.

x. It is really not easy for Westerners to prosper in these booming markets.

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14. Paragraph A

15. Paragraph B

16. Paragraph C

17. Paragraph D

18. Paragraph E

19. Paragraph F

20. Paragraph G

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Questions 21-23

Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 2? In boxes 21-23 on your answer sheet, write

YES – if the statement agrees with the claims of the writer

NO if the statement contradicts the claims of the writer

NOT GIVEN if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this

21. The emerging markets and their populations are growing much faster.

22. The Western countries are focusing on many breakthrough innovations.

23. The emerging world, a source of cheap labour before, now rivals the rich countries for business innovation.

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Questions 24-27

Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS for each answer.

In 1960s, the 24………………. invented by Henry Ford became popular in United States. In the auto industrial history, the US manufacturers were once surpassed by their Japanese counterparts. Later they figured it out and realized that their Japanese rivals applied a novel management approach known as 25………………. . It is gradually accepted that the emerging world are the origins of both 26………………. And 27……………….

IELTS Academic Reading Test

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