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(1) "The elephant chart" began life in 2012, hidden in the middle of a World

游客2023-10-21  28
问题     (1) "The elephant chart" began life in 2012, hidden in the middle of a World Bank working paper by Branko Milanovic, an authority on global inequality. It turned a few heads in the New York Times in 2014, then graced Mr. Milanovic’s well-received book on global inequality earlier this year. Somewhere along the way it acquired its name, which helped it stampede across social media, brokers’ notes and even a ministerial speech this spring and summer. "I’m about to bring an elephant into the room. A wild, angry, and dangerous elephant, " joked Lilianne Ploumen, the Dutch trade minister, last month, before unveiling the chart to her audience. Now, its critics are trying to shoot it.
    (2) The distinctively shaped chart summarized the results of a huge number of household surveys across the world. It was created by ranking the world’s population, from the poorest 10％ to the richest 1％, in 1988 and again in 2008. At each rank, the chart showed the growth in income between these two years, an era of "high globalization" from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the fall of Lehman Brothers.
    (3) When drawn for individual countries, charts of this kind tend to slant upwards (the rich gain more than the poor) or downwards. The global chart was unusual in sloping up, down, then upwards again, like an inverted S on its back, or an elephant raising its trunk. The chart showed big income gains at the middle and very top. But the era of globalization seemed to offer little for the people in between: households in the 75th to 85th percentile of the income distribution seemed scarcely better off in 2008 than they had been 20 years before. They constituted a decile of discontent, squeezed between their own countries’ plutocrats and Asia’s middle class. This dramatic dip in the chart seemed to explain a lot.
    (4) But who exactly occupies this dangerous decile? A report this week by Adam Corlett of the Resolution Foundation, a British think-tank, examines this group more closely, taking aim at some simplistic interpretations of the chart. Many people assume the chart shows how people in this controversial income bracket back in 1988 fared over the subsequent 20 years. But that is not quite the case. Instead it compares the people in this bracket in 1988 with people in the same bracket 20 years later. They may not be the same people. They may not belong to the same class. They may not even belong to the same country.
    (5) What accounts for the changing constituents of each income bracket? Fast growth will, of course, carry people up the income ranks. Data, dissolution and demography also play a part. The countries included in the 1988 and 2008 rankings differ because data did not exist for both years or because the country did not. In addition, faster population growth among people in the lower reaches of the income distribution will automatically shunt everyone above them further up the income ranks, even without any improvement in their fortunes.
    (6) To see why, imagine a simple world populated by 750m poor Southerners and 250m rich Northerners. Imagine that incomes do not change over the next 20 years, but the South’s population doubles. That would increase its share of mankind from 75％ to over 85％. For that simple reason, in the 75th to 85th percentiles of the global income distribution poor Southerners would replace rich Northerners. Any comparison of this income bracket with the same bracket 20 years before would thus show a big decline in fortunes, even though no one is worse off.
    (7) This will not be new to readers of Mr. Milanovic’s academic work. He and his co-author, Christoph Lakner, were quite clear about the shifting composition of the troublesome deciles. Their journal article also included an alternative chart, which does what many people assumed the elephant chart had done: it illustrates how each income group in each country in 1988 fared over the subsequent 20 years. In its shape, the chart looks recognizably elephantine. But the top 1％ do markedly less well in this alternative chart than in the more famous one, and even the worst performing groups boast income growth of 20％ or more over 20 years.
    (8) Both charts show that the world’s rich has gained handsomely in the era of globalization. It also remains true that the lower middle classes in rich countries have fared less well. The elephant shape remains, even if its dimensions are different. But it clarified a misunderstanding shared by many of the pundits and drumbeaters who made such a noise about the rampaging chart. Like the elephant George Orwell described in a famous essay about his time as a colonial policeman in Burma, this one was shot chiefly to silence a crowd. (本文选自 The Economist) [br] The author has written this passage to________.
选项 A、discuss an academic theme
B、testify the inaccuracy of a theory
C、attack some so-called authorities
D、reveal the influence of globalization
答案 A
解析 主旨题。从全文的整体内容考虑，作者在开篇时直接引入“象形图表”这一话题，指出它在全球声名鹊起，并在首段最后一句提示说专家们正在对它提出批判，随后作者对这个图表所反映的全球财寓排行情况以及相关的影响因素等进行了分析和解释，并在文末总结了作者对这一图表及人们对其反应的看法。文章主要段落都围绕这一图表所说明的问题进行学术性的探讨，因此答案为A。文章并没有从头到尾介绍一个完整的理论，因此也不可能证明某个理论不正确，故排除B；作者只是在探讨一个图表及其所反映的世界经济情况，并没有攻击权威，故排除C；虽然提到了全球化的影响，但是文章所讨论的主题并不是全球化，D不符合文义，故排除。
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