3.
What does
the passage mainly discuss?
A. The use of the psychology of spending money in business.
B. A special psychology of bargaining.
C. A method to help compulsive spenders to solve the problem
of money.
D. The psychology of money spending habits.
B
In the past, young people in Japan
were expected to take on responsibilities to support their parents and grandparents.
Now they expect to be supported well into young adulthood. The "new
breed", born since the 1960s, have never known anything but richness.
Youth are seen as resistant to entering society as mature adults, to becoming
social citizens. Once the great objective of reconstruction after the Second
World War was accomplished, a new generation lost the motivating power that had
united the nation together.
Japan's birth rate has been failing
rapidly, partly because of economic decline, and the job and financial insecurity
that it has caused. In 1999, the figure was1.38 children per woman, the
lowest ever recorded. At the same time, youth crime, although still especially low
by western standards, rose to its highest level since record-keeping began 32
years ago. Likewise, the proportion of students dropping out before graduating,
at 2.5% also Very low by western
standards, has never-the-less been rising.
Entrepreneurial (企业家的) role models are few and
far between. Bill Gates is often mentioned, but a foreign model can only have
so much influence. The problem is that Japanese culture discourages people from
revealing details of personal life, including such difficult or painful experience
as starting a company. In the past, successful companies such as Honda or
Hitachi provided role models of a sort. But today they have been faded by the
downturn, and few others have risen to take their place.
By the same reason,
young people often feel isolated from their fathers, who worked too hard
at their jobs to establish much of a relationship with their children.
"The one thing they're sure of is that they don't want to be like their
fathers. And the girls don't want to be with boys who are like their fathers,
so the boys are sure not to be," says Professor Morishima.