Section B
Mohammud Yunus, a banker from Bangladesh, is a bona fide visionary. His dream is the total eradication of poverty from the world. What he has invented is called a micro-credit. It is both terribly simple and completely revolutionary. Yunus’ bank gives loans as little as $30 to the destitute. A typical borrower would be a Bangladeshi women (96% of the bank’s borrowers are women) who has never touched money before. All her life, her father and husband will have told her she is useless and is a burden to the family; finally, widowed or divorced, she will have been forced to beg to feed her children. Yunus’ bank lends her money—and doesn’t regret it. She uses the loan to buy an asset that can immediately start paying income—such as cotton to weave, or raw materials for bracelets to sell, or a cow she can milk. She repays the loan in tiny installments until she becomes self-sufficient. Then if she wants, she can take out a new, larger loan. Either way, she is no longer poor.
The Grameen Bank (“rural bank” in Bengali), which Yunus has built over the last 30 years, has more than 3.7 million borrowers in 46,000 villages throughout Bangladesh. In 2004, it made loans of more than $473.78 million. The bank actively seeks out the most deprived of Bangladesh society: beggars, illiterates, and widows. Yet, it claims a loan repayment rate of 99 percent. Most western banks would be delighted with such a small ratio of bad debts.
Born in Chittagong, Yunus studied at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, before becoming head of the Economics Department at Chittagong University. The terrible manmade famine of 1974, which killed 1.5 million Bangladeshis, changed his life forever. “While people were dying of hunger on the streets, I was teaching elegant theories of economics. I started hating myself for the arrogance of pretending I had the answers. Why did people who worked 12 hours a day, seven days a week, not have enough to eat? I decided that the poor themselves would be my teachers. I began to study them and question them on their lives.
Then he made his big discovery. One day, when he was interviewing a woman who made bamboo stools, he learned that, because she had no capital of her own, she had to borrow the equivalent of 23 cents to buy raw bamboo for each stool made. After repaying the middleman, she kept only 1.5 cents in profit. With the help of graduate students, Yunus discovered that there were 42 other villagers facing the same predicament.
“Their poverty was not a personal problem due to laziness or lack of intelligence, but a structural one: lack of capital. The existing system made it certain that the poor could not save a penny and could not invest in bettering themselves.”
Borrowers who are not destitute are excluded, and so, usually, are men. Yunus soon discovered that lending to women was much more beneficial to whole families—and that women were more careful about their debts. To be eligible for a loan, a person must prove she understands how Grameen works. Borrowers promise to abide by “the 16 decisions,” a set of personal commitments. The most important is to join with four fellow borrowers, none of whom can be a family member, to form a group. The group provides a borrower with self-discipline and courage. Peer pressure and peer support effectively replace collateral.
Studies of the Grameen method suggest that after a wife joins the bank, her husband is likely to show her more tenderness and respect. Divorce rates drop among Grameen borrowers, as do birth rates.
Yunus’ method works well wherever the social life of the poor is tightly knit. But in many urban settings, the lack of community has been the greatest stumbling block. However, Yunus does not pretend to have solution to all problems.
“People say I am crazy, but no one can achieve anything without a dream,” he says. “If one is going to make headway against poverty, one cannot do business as usual. One must be revolutionary and think the unthinkable.”
16. What had Yunus invented?
17. To whom does the bank lend money?
18. What doesn’t the bank require of borrowers?
19. What must borrowers promise to do?
20. What is the repayment rate?
III. Writing (30%)
Directions: In this part you are supposed to write an essay of about 400 words within 60 minutes on the topic of online shopping in China.
Online shopping or online retailing is a form of electronic commerce whereby consumers directly buy goods or services from a seller over the Internet without an intermediary service. Nowadays, there are more and more shopping websites in China and many Chinese people tend to go shopping online. What do you think about it? You should clearly state your main argument and support it with appropriate details.
专硕的题型复杂多样,内容范围广,想要在专硕考试中突出重围,不仅需要灵活掌握答题技巧,同时,跟平时的积累也是不可分的,为了方便大家学习,中公考研特为广大学子推出2017考研OL乐学、年集训、精品网课系列备考专题,所有你不明白的都会一一帮你搞定。同时,中公考研一直为大家推出考研直播课堂,足不出户就可以轻松学习!
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