新航道

  上海新航道SAT培訓機構小編給大家帶來了SAT閱讀題目素材-二戰后布雷頓森林貨幣體系，希望幫助考生對照文本更好的研究真題，充分備考，爭取理想成績，實現留學夢想。

  SAT閱讀題目素材：

  On July 22, 1944, as allied troops were racing across Normandy to liberate Paris, representatives of 44 nations meeting at the Mount Washington resort in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, created a financial and monetary system for the postwar era. It had taken three weeks of exhausting diplomacy. At the closing banquet, the assembled delegates rose and sang “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.” The fellow in question was John Maynard Keynes, leader of the British delegation and intellectual inspiration of the Bretton Woods design.

  Lord Keynes, the world’s most celebrated economist, was playing a tricky dual role. He had proposed a radical new monetary system to free the world from the deflationary pressures that had caused and prolonged the Great Depression. Bretton Woods, he hoped, would be the international anchor for the suite of domestic measures that came to be known as Keynesian—the use of public spending to cure depression and the regulation of financial markets to prevent downturns caused by failed private financial speculation.

  Keynes was also hoping to restore Britain’s prewar position as a leading industrial and financial power. His two roles overlapped, but far from perfectly. The Americans shared the British desire to restore world growth, but not to preserve Britain’s empire or its protectionist system of preferential trade deals for nations that settled their accounts in pounds sterling.

  Writing to a colleague after the conference ended, Keynes professed to be pleased. He wrote that in the new International Monetary Fund, “we have in truth got both in substance and in phrasing all that we could reasonably hope for.” The new World Bank, Keynes declared, offered “grand possibilities. … The Americans are virtually pledging themselves to quite gigantic untied loans for reconstruction and development.”

  Yet in many respects, Bretton Woods was a rout for Keynes and the British. America today is often described as the sole surviving superpower, but in 1944 U.S. supremacy was towering. Germany and Japan were on the verge of ruin. Britain had gone massively into debt to prosecute the war, sacrificing more than a quarter of its national wealth. The Russians had lost tens of millions of soldiers and civilians. America was unscathed, its casualties were modest by comparison, it held most of the world’s financial reserves, and its industrial plant was mightier than ever.

  Though Keynes inspired Bretton Woods, the Americans won the day. As leverage, Keynes had only his own brilliance and a fast-fading appeal to Anglo-American wartime solidarity. In most matters, a rival design by Keynes’s American counterpart, Harry Dexter White, prevailed. White, a left-wing New Dealer serving as No. 2 man at the Treasury, shared Keynes’s basic views on money. But the White planprovided a far more modest fund and bank. Instead of the generous extension of wartime lend-lease aid that Keynes was promoting, the British had to settle for an American loan, to be repaid with interest.

  The Bretton Woods system was hailed as a vast improvement over both the rigid gold standard of pre-1914 and the monetary anarchy of the interwar period. For a quarter-century, Bretton Woods undergirded a rare period of steady growth, full employment, and financial stability. But in many respects, the vaunted role of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the Bretton Woods rules specifying fixed exchange rates was a convenient mirage. The system’s true anchor was the United States—the U.S. dollar as de facto global currency; the U.S. economy as the residual consumer market for other nations’ exports; and U.S. recovery aid in the form of the Marshall Plan, which dwarfed the outlays of the World Bank.

  In the early 1970s, the Bretton Woods system came crashing down when domestic inflation forced the United States to devalue its own currency and cease playing the hegemonic role. Monetary instability and slower growth followed. By the 1980s, laissez-faire was enjoying renewed prestige

  SAT閱讀題目解析：

  本篇社會科學類文章(Bretton Woods Revisited)是圍繞二戰后布雷頓森林貨幣體系(Bretton Woods system)以及其發展過程所展開的。

  在第二次世界大戰結束之后，為了構思設計戰后國際貨幣體系，英美兩國政府分別提出了凱恩斯計劃和懷特計劃。兩者的共同目的都是促進世界經濟發展，但運營方式不同， 凱恩斯計劃相對激進，且企圖恢復英國在資本主義世界的盟主地位。然而由于二戰后，美國憑借其強大的經濟及軍事實力， “懷特計劃”成為布雷頓森林會議最后通過決議的藍本，國際貨幣體系建立在以美元為中心的基礎之上。布雷頓森林體系的建立，促進了戰后世界經濟的恢復和發展，但最終由于美國經濟危機的頻繁爆發，該體系于20世紀70年代宣告結束。

  這篇經濟題材的文章要比這次歷史題材的文章容易，但背景知識非常重要，還有一些關鍵的詞匯也非常重要。同時這篇經濟的文章和歷史也有一定的聯系。

  在閱讀時間非常緊張的情況下，這些功底是需要學生平時長期積淀的，而不是突擊培訓出來的。讀懂是做對題目的保障。一般讀懂了，題目不應有太大的問題。

  通過這次考試，進一步看到了CB對于希望把學科教學(SAT2和AP)與SAT1結合起來的努力。

  以上就是SAT閱讀題目素材，更多SAT閱讀資料，請點擊：SAT閱讀頻道 。

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