ОБРАЗЦЫ ЗАДАНИЙ ВСТУПИТЕЛЬНОГО ЭКЗАМЕНА
Задание 1 (40 минут, со словарём)
Using a dictionary study and present analysis the text. Pass your judgement on the content.
Funding the dream; Big Society Capital
The Economist The government's plan to make Britain a leader in social investment
THE Big Society was once David Cameron's warmest and fuzziest idea--that community spirit can solve social problems better than the state. Ministers rarely mention it now. Yet in early April the slogan is being backed with cold, hard cash, via the launch of Big Society Capital (BSC), a social investment bank that will eventually be capitalised with about Pounds 600m ($955m), two-thirds of it harvested from dormant bank accounts and the rest injected by the four biggest high-street banks.
The goal of BSC, which will be run independently from government, is to create a market for "social finance", a hybrid investment class that delivers a mixture of social and financial returns. The idea is not new. Britain is already home to the world's first "social-impact bond", a Pounds 5m instrument that funds a prisoner-rehabilitation programme in Peterborough and only delivers returns to investors if recidivism rates hit certain targets. Plans are afoot to use other social-impact bonds to fund therapeutic work with troubled families.
HCT Group, a transportation firm, also blends commercial and social aims. It reinvests a third of its profits into social schemes such as training for unemployed people. Dai Powell, HCT's chief executive, attributes part of its success to the fact it does not have shareholders to satisfy, which means it can accept lower margins on tenders. As well as bank loans and asset-backed financing, it has an equity-like loan whose interest rate is based on turnover: investors get paid more when HCT earns more.
But such examples are rare. There is a particular shortage of "risk capital"--the sort that gets wiped out when things go wrong--for social enterprises. Charitable donations and the state are alternative sources of funding, but one is unpredictable and the other is stingy. Big Society Capital aims to plug the gap, not by investing in social enterprises directly but by funding intermediaries that will.
Nick O'Donohoe, the institution's boss, gives the example of BSC leading a team of investors to capitalise a "payment-by-results" fund designed to invest in social impact bonds. Among other things, an interim investment pot has already put money into a project called the Social Stock Exchange, which plans to provide a platform for social enterprises to raise capital. Seeding these kinds of initiatives should enable BSC to multiply the overall amount of money being pumped into the sector. Mr O'Donohoe says his long-term aim is to attract Pounds 4 for every Pounds 1 BSC spends, to create a market worth Pounds 3 billion.
That is ambitious. A study by the Boston Consulting Group and the Young Foundation, a think-tank, found that the social-investment market was worth just Pounds 165m in 2010-11. There is a risk that BSC will have so much cash (perhaps Pounds 100m in its first year) and so few decent places to invest that money will be wasted. That would be hugely damaging. There is a big idea here--one that, by muddying commercial incentives and social objectives, is unsettling and appealing to left and right in equal measure. The best way for BSC to prove the worth of social investment will be to make money on its own deals.
Задание 2 (20 минут, без словаря)
Read the text and the statements following the text. If the statement agrees with the text, write “True” against it. If the statement contradicts the text, write “False” against it. If there is no information on this, write “Not Given”.
DELIVERING THE GOODS
International trade is growing at a startling pace. While the global economy has been expanding at a bit over 3% a year, the volume of trade has been rising at a compound annual rate of about twice that. Foreign products, from meat to machinery, play a more important role in almost every economy in the world, and foreign markets now tempt businesses that never much worried about sales beyond their nation’s borders.
What lies behind this explosion in international commerce? The general worldwide decline in trade barriers, such as customs duties and import quotas, is surely one explanation. The economic opening of countries that have traditionally been minor players is another. But one force behind the import-export boom has passed all but unnoticed: the rapidly falling cost of getting goods to market. Theoretically ,in the world of trade, shipping costs do not matter. Goods, once they have been made, are assumed to move instantly and at no cost from place to place. The real world, however, is full of frictions. Cheap labour may make Chinese clothing competitive in America, but if delays in shipment tie up working capital and cause winter coats to arrive in spring, trade may lose its advantages.
At the turn of the 20th century, agriculture and manufacturing were the two most important sectors almost everywhere, accounting for about 70% of total output in Germany, Italy and France, and 40-50% in America, Britain and Japan. International commerce was therefore dominated by raw materials, such as wheat, wood and iron ore, or processed commodities, such as meat and steal. But these sorts of product are heavy and bulky and the cost of transporting them relatively high.
Over time, however, world output has shifted into goods whose worth is unrelated to their size and weight. Today it is finished manufactured products, that dominate the flow of trade, and, thanks to technological advances such as lightweight components, manufactured goods themselves have tended to become lighter and less bulky. As a result, less transportation is required for every dollar’s worth of imports or exports.
To see how this influences trade, consider the business of making disk drives for computers. Most of the world’s disk-drive manufacturing is concentrated in South-East Asia. This is possible only because disk drives, while valuable, are small and light and so cost little to ship. Computer manufactures in Japan or Texas will not face hugely bigger freight bills if they import drives from Singapore rather than purchasing them on the domestic market. Distance therefore poses no obstacle to the globalization of the disk-drive industry.
Statements:
1. International trade is increasing at a greater rate than the world economy.
2. Cheap labour guarantees effective trade conditions.
3. Japan imports more meat and steal than France.
4. It is cheaper for the Japanese computer manufactures to buy the disk drives on the domestic market rather than import them from Singapore. 5. Small computer components are manufactured in Germany
Key: 1 – True; 2- False; 3 – Not Given; 4 – True; 5 – Not Given