DAY67

¡¡¡¡Reading comprehension

¡¡¡¡Direction: In this part, there are four passages followed by questions or unfinished statements, each with four suggested answers marked A, B, C and D. Choose the on
e that you think is the correct answer.

¡¡¡¡Passage 1

¡¡¡¡David Landes, author of The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor, credits the world¬ðs economic and social progress over the last thousand years to ¡°western civilization and its dissemination.¡± The reason, he believes, is that Europeans invented systematic economic development. Landes adds that three unique aspects of European culture were crucial ingredients in Europe¬ðs economic growth. First, science developed as an autonomous method of intellectual inquiry that successfully disengaged itself from the social constraints of organized religion and from the political constraints of centralized from the use of a single vehicle of communication: Latin. This common tongue facilitated the spread of new ideas.

¡¡¡¡Second, Landes holds that the values of work, initiative, and investment made the difference for Europe. Despite his emphasis on science, Landes does not stress the notion of rationality as such. In his view, ¡°what counts are work, thrift, honesty, patience, and tenacity.¡± The only route to economic success for individuals of states is working hard, spending less than you earn, and investing the rest in productive capacity. This is the fundamental explanation of the problem posed by his book¬ðs subtitle: ¡°Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor.¡± For historical reasons, Europeans have, on balance, followed those practices and therefore have prospered.

¡¡¡¡Third, and perhaps most important, Europeans were learners. They ¡°learned rather greedily.¡± Even if Europeans possessed indigenous technologies that gave them an advantage, their most vital asset was the ability to assimilate knowledge from around the world and put it to use as in borrowing the concept of zero and taking paper and gunpowder from the Chinese via the Muslim world. Landes argues that a systematic resistance to learning from other cultures had become the greatest handicap of the Chinese by the eighteenth century.

¡¡¡¡Although his analysis of European expansion is almost nonexistent, Landes does not argue that Europeans were beneficent bearers of civilization to a benighted world. Rather, he relies on his own commonsense law: ¡°when one group is strong enough to push another around and stands to gain by it, it will do so.¡± He believes that specific cultural values enabled technological advances that in turn made some Europeans strong enough to dominate people in other parts of the world. Europeans therefore proceeded to do so with great viciousness and cruelty. By focusing on their victimization in this process, Landes advices to the postcolonial states to ¡°stop whining and get to work.¡± This is particularly important, he argues, because success is not per

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