Grammar and Vocabulary Choose one word or phrase that best completes each sentence.
Reading Comprehension In this section there are four passages followed by questions or unfinished statements, each with four suggested answers marked A, B, C and D. Choose the one that you think is the best answer.
Apple Inc. has agreed to pay $60 million to Proview Technology (Shenzhen) to settle their dispute over the iPad trademark in the Chinese mainland, the high people's court of Guangdong province announced Monday.
Apple has transferred the money to the account designated by the Guangdong higher court, and the Intermediate Court of Shenzhen on Monday notified the State Administration for Industry and Commerce to transfer the iPad trademark to Apple, the higher court said. The court said the settlement agreement went into effect on June 25.
"All parties involved have agreed on the settlement. Proview and Apple now no longer have a dispute over the iPad trademark," said Xie Xianghui, a lawyer for Proview Shenzhen, a debt-ridden manufacturer of computer screens and LED lights based in Shenzhen.
Proview Shenzhen had previously claimed that the Taipei subsidiary of its Hong Kong-based parent company, Proview International Holdings Ltd, registered the iPad trademark in a number of countries and regions as early as 2000. Though Apple bought the rights to use the iPad trademark from Proview Taipei in 2009, Proview Shenzhen said it reserved the right to use the trademark it registered on the Chinese mainland in 2001. The two sides have since been entangled in a drawn-out legal battle.
Guangdong's higher court heard the case in February, as Apple and its proxy for the trademark purchase appealed a previous court ruling by the Shenzhen intermediate court in favor of Proview Shenzhen.
In June, Proview Shenzhen was brought to court in a bankruptcy case. Its creditors demanded that the court have the company liquidated, as it took a tumble in the 2008 global financial crisis and allegedly owed more than $400 million to eight Chinese banks, according to media reports.
The sum in the Apple settlement is not enough for Proview Shenzhen to repay its debts, but experts say the trademark case settlement can help Apple seize huge market opportunities in China. Otherwise, the US tech giant might not have been able to sell its popular tablet computers in the Chinese mainland.
China is Apple's second-largest market after the United States. China contributed $7.9 billion, or about 20 percent of Apples' revenues, during its second fiscal quarter in 2012, the company said. Apple's iPads have become so popular among the country's younger generation that parents worry that kids growing up with iPads glued to their hands will be more likely to become near-sighted, physically weak and socially inactive.
Market observers predict that when Apple's latest version of the iPad hits the Chinese mainland market, fans will snatch up the product so fast that it will be out-of-stock for most of the year. Meanwhile, more units of the iPad 2 will be sold when the more recent version is launched, forcing a price-cut. Tourism chiefs in Hong Kong have dismissed suggestions that the intermittent conflicts that have sprung up between residents and mainland travelers in recent years will deter visitors from the mainland.
Last year, 28.1 million mainland tourists visited Hong Kong—67 percent of the total number of visitors, said Greg So, secretary for commerce and economic development for the special administrative region's government. The mainland has become the largest source of tourists for Hong Kong, and the number of tourists to the city is growing. "With the opening of our harbor for cruise ships next year, we expect to offer more choices for mainland tourists," he said.
Joseph Tung, executive director of the Hong Kong Travel Industry Council, said he believes the city's flourishing tourism industry should thank the central government's rescue moves in 2003 when Hong Kong was "nearly dead" because of the SARS outbreak. "Nobody came to visit Hong Kong then. Other countries were also afraid that Hong Kong tourists going out would spread the disease. We were really worried," he said.
When the central government decided to allow mainland tourists from some cities to visit Hong Kong without joining tour groups in July 2003, it immediately boosted tourism. In August 2003, more than 946,000 mainland tourists visited Hong Kong, an increase of 43 percent over the same period of the previous year, according to the council.
The influence of mainland tourists on the city has been overwhelming. More people in the city's travel and retail industries have learned to speak Mandarin. "Even when we go shopping, the salesperson, unable to tell us from mainland tourists, would speak to us in Mandarin, instead of Cantonese," said Greg So, joking that he learned Mandarin partly during shopping.
But along with the growing number of tourists, there are also a growing number of conflicts.
In 2010, Chen Youming, 65, former player of the national ping-pong team, had a heart attack and died when he was forced to shop by an unlicensed tour guide in Hong Kong. Last year, another tour guide got involved in verbal and physical conflicts with three mainland tourists. Reports said that the tour guide led the 33-member group to a jewelry store, but none of the group bought anything during the two-hour .stay. The tour guide began snarling at them. Also last year, a video showing a mainland woman and a few Hong Kong residents arguing on the subway went viral online. The woman had let her child eat on the subway, which is not allowed in Hong Kong. The video triggered a heated discussion online.
Media comments said that the rising number of conflicts is a new trend. But Tung said these incidents are just isolated cases.
The council is doing its best to regulate the industry and tour guides to prevent incidents such as these from tarnishing Hong Kong's image, he said.
At least seven tour guides have had their licenses suspended, he said. The travel agency that hired the unlicensed tour guide who forced Chen Youming to shop lost its business license.
Hotlines have been opened to record tourists' complaints. The number of complaints has dropped by 40 percent in the first five months of this year compared with the same period last year.
Tung said he hopes the central government will allow citizens of more mainland cities to visit Hong Kong without joining tour groups. Currently, citizens of 49 mainland cities can go to Hong Kong without joining tour groups. Elaine Fox, a psychologist at the University of Essex in England and author of an informative new book on the science of optimism, Rainy Brain, Sunny Brain, says positive thinking is not the main thing about optimism. "What really makes the difference is action," she told me. "If you sit back passively, you won't get the job you want."
Her book includes the story of Madam C, J. Walker (1867-1919), born to former slaves, orphaned by age 7, married at 14 and divorced at 20. Undeterred by racism and sexism, she became perhaps America's first black millionaire by founding a company that made hair-care products.
"Madam Walker's rags-to-riches story was fueled primarily by her irrepressible can-do attitude," Dr Fox wrote. "Setbacks were tackled head on with tireless energy."
After Thomas Edison unsuccessfully tried more than 10,000 different ways to develop an electric lamp, Dr Fox wrote, "he famously proclaimed: 'I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.'"
In an interview, Dr Fox said: "The important thing is having a sense of control over your life, your destiny. When you have a setback, you feel you can do something about it."
Or, as she wrote: "Optimism is not so much about feeling happy, nor necessarily a belief that everything will be fine, but about how we respond when times get tough. Optimists tend to keep going, even when it seems as if the whole world is against them."
Many people trying to enter (or re-enter) the job market have found that it helps to put yourself where you want to be, even if it involves a monetary sacrifice.
Robin Seligman-Schmidt of Manhattan was 52 when she decided to look for work in the fields she had studied in school: art and interior design.
She started by volunteering at the Leo Baeck Institute, a research library in New York that houses German-Jewish archives and art. "I worked with an art curator cataloging and doing odds and ends," she said, and that led to a paid position as consultant for "Destination Shanghai"—an exhibition of work by and about German and Austrian Jews who escaped to China during World War II, now on display at the institute.
"Through volunteering you might find something totally different that you'd never done before or even thought of before," was Ms. Seligman-Schmidt's advice to job seekers of all ages. "Do something to keep your mind going, and you might find something that really interests you."
Dr Fox has shown that while brain circuits vary from person to person, it is possible to strengthen what she calls the "sunny" brain and weaken the "rainy" brain.
Among the science-based "retraining" methods she describes in her book are these:
Face your fears head on. Step outside your comfort zone to help eliminate fear, anxiety and negative thoughts that can stand in the way of success.
Re-evaluate events in your everyday life. Tell yourself that maybe things aren't so bad.
Practice mindful meditation. Allow feelings and thoughts to pass through your mind without judging or reacting to them; that helps create a sense of detachment from negative experiences.
Take control over how you feel instead of letting feelings control you. A sense that you control your destiny can help you bounce back from setbacks and maximize your enjoyment of life.
Laugh. Use positive feelings to counter negative ones.
Be fully engaged. Get involved in activities that are meaningful to you, whether it's a career, hobby, sport or volunteering. Do it. Then learn how. Some asset managers bill themselves as "emerging market specialists", but a manager who knows a lot about one country may not have much expertise in another.
Karine Him, co-founder of one such emerging market specialist, East Capital, has been finding out the hard way how transferable her emerging market knowledge is.
'I'll be very frank with you. When I came to China, that's when I realised how much I knew about Russia. Because I realised how little I knew about China," Ms Hirn says. Ms Hirn moved to Shanghai in 2010 and set up an office there for East Capital in September of that year. The move followed East Capital's decision to expand its provision from funds offering exposure to Russia and eastern Europe to funds covering China.
Rather than start from scratch, in June 2010, the group purchased Asia Growth Investors (AGI)—a small Swedish asset manager focused on China that already had 
240m of assets under management. There are two funds: the East Capital China East Asia fund, launched in 2005 and the East Capital China fund launched in 2007. AGI had been managing them from Sweden. But for Stockholm-based East Capital, having a senior person on the ground was seen as a must. "For us, the right way is actually being on the ground and meeting the companies and getting an understanding," Ms Hirn says.
The learning curve has been steep, she acknowledges, and China has not been as easy to penetrate as Russia, which she first visited as a student in 1991. "I had to learn Russian, otherwise I would have been starving. It was to get food. The integration was very total, very quick," says Ms Hirn. It also meant that by the time East Capital set up its flagship Russia fund, in 1998, she had a depth of knowledge about the country. On this occasion, although Ms Hirn is learning Mandarin, she says she does not have so much time.
However, one thing she thinks that is transferable from her experiences in Russia and eastern Europe is caution.
"The main thing is just double-, triple-, quadruple-checking on everything. So you're getting information from somewhere or someone; you don't go just on that. You check with the broker, you check with another analyst, you check with a company that you know has been dealing with the one in question. And this is part of my role to be able to have this level of contacts," she says.
That level of due diligence brings certain limitations. The funds were invested in only about 30 Chinese companies at the point when East Capital made the AGI acquisition and that number is still only just above 40. While holdings might increase it is not an objective. "It's a conviction kind of investment strategy, where .you need to be convinced of the investment case or the sector or the theme, and very certain about the company you're investing in," says Ms Him. That conviction has led East Capital into investments that some China observers have begun to question in recent months.
For example, Ms Hirn says, despite the question marks hanging over the property market, about 5 percent of the China portfolio, across both funds, is in property.
Also questionable to some is the dominance of financials. The East Capital China Fund, which had 13m of assets at the end of December 2011, holds more than 30 percent in financials. The fund is benchmarked against the MSCI China Free index and is 85 percent invested in the mainland of China with the remainder in Hong Kong and Taiwan.
The East Capital China East Asia Fund, which had 194m under management at the end of December across 47 holdings, is 60 percent invested in the mainland of China with about 25 percent in financials.
Despite East Capital's confidence in its on-the-spot approach, Ms Hirn has been finding it a hard sell. 
7m of assets in financials.
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