English: Cloze Test Set 15

Directions (1-5): Fill in the blanks with appropriate words:
 
FOR weeks now, pundits and politicians have been talking excitedly about the coming Shanghai Free Trade Zone (SFTZ). Li Keqiang, China’s prime minister, has personally championed this initiative, which he has indicated will kickstart his new government’s broader plans to liberalise China’s economy.
Li Ka-shing, a Hong Kong tycoon who is Asia’s richest man, claimed that the SFTZ could propel Shanghai (1)____ Hong Kong to become the country’s chief financial centre. Punters gobbled up shares of any Chinese firms with the word “Shanghai” in their name (absurdly including underwear makers) confident that the zone would boost their fortunes. Netizens were positively aflutter when rumours surfaced that the Great Firewall, which blocks access to the unfettered internet, would be (2)_____ in the promised land.
The wait is (3)_____. Chinese authorities have at last launched the SFTZ formally, and issued a set of guidelines. They continue to insist that this is a landmark event, on par with the creation of the Shenzhen special economic zone over three decades ago—a (4)______ that helped usher in liberal economic reforms and three decades of spectacular growth. At a press event held in Shanghai on September 29th, officials used the word “innovation” 43 times as they (5)_____ about how this experiment would help China. The new government wants to transform the economy from the sweatshop to the world into a global innovation powerhouse.

1. A) to
   B) over
   C) past
   D) unlike
   E) further
   
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   Option C
   
   Past- at a point more further than another
   
2. A) activated
   B) suspended
   C) broken
   D) installed
   E) reinitiated
   
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   Option B
   Netizens would be affluttered (excited) when firewall is removed (i.e suspended)
   
3. A) never ending
   B) new
   C) old
   D) over
   E) unbearable
   
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   Option D
   
   
4. A) criteria
   B) beginning
   C) memorial
   D) discovery
   E) breakthrough
   
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   Option E
   
   
5. A) inspired
   B) dictated
   C) gushed
   D) proposed
   E) wrote
   
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   Option C
   
   

Directions (6-10): Fill in the blanks with appropriate words:
 
Western political economy since the Industrial Revolution has been a vibrant world of rapid growth and development, at least for countries in the industrial “core.” But it has also been a world of continuing and sometimes enormous fluctuations in economic activity. Business cycles — expansions and contractions across most sectors of an economy — have come to be taken as a fact of life. But modern economies operate (6)____ than nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century industrial economies.
Changes in technology, ideology, employment, and finance, along with the globalization of production and consumption, have (7)_____ the volatility of economic activity in the industrialized world. For both empirical and theoretical reasons, in advanced industrial economies the waves of the business cycle may be becoming more like ripples. The dampening of the business cycle will change the global economy and (8)______ assumptions and arguments that political economists use to understand it. “History counsels caution,” Alan Greenspan warned the Senate banking committee in February 1997, about “visions of such ‘new eras’ that, in the end, have proven to be a mirage.” Greenspan is surely right to warn against too easily accepting that the present is (9)______ different from the past, but a growing body of evidence suggests that the world may indeed be witnessing important (10)______ in how business cycles work.

6. A) similar
   B) differently
   C) opposite
   D) better
   E) lower
   
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   Option B
   
   In the next line, changes is being talked about, hence differently is the best suited word.
   
7. A) reduced
   B) increased
   C) burdened
   D) suffered
   E) focused
   
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   Option A
   
   Due to industrialization volatility is reduced.
   
8. A) determine
   B) formulate
   C) determine
   D) undermine
   E) berate
   
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   Option D
   
   Undermine – to make less powerful
   
9. A) fundamentally
   B) frankly
   C) similarly
   D) only
   E) kindly
   
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   Option A
   
   
10. A) evidence
    B) situation
    C) changes
    D) practicality
    E) factors
    
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    Option C
    Last line tells that present business is different from past, hence change should be used to maintain the meaning.