Passage B Directions You are going to read a passage with 10 statements attached to it. Each statement contains information given in one of the paragraphs. Identify the paragraph from which the information is derived. You may choose a paragraph more than once. Each paragraph is marked with a letter. The hothouse of entrepreneurship A In 2010, a group of students at Aalto University, just outside Helsinki (the capital of Finland) started the most constructive piece of student activism in the history of the genre. They had been fascinated by the power of entrepreneurialism during a visit to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. When they got home they organized a "summer of start-ups" to spread the word that Finland's future lay with new companies, not old giants. The summer of start-ups turned into a season of innovation. B The Start-Up Sauna—a business accelerator that is still run by young enthusiasts but now funded by government, business, and academia—occupies a shabby warehouse next to the university. It offers a wide range of services: working space, coaching for budding entrepreneurs, study trips to Silicon Valley, and plenty of networking opportunities. C The Sauna-masters have an understanding of entrepreneurship in advance of their years. They recognize that there is more to innovation than high tech: The Sauna also has design and knitting factories. They understand the importance of bridging the gap between engineering and design. They realize that promoting entrepreneurship is a matter of changing culture as much as providing money. They look to Russia and the Baltic states as well as to Boston and San Francisco. D The student revolution was part of a wider reconsideration of the proper relationship between government and business. This had started in 2008, when the Finnish government shook up ( 改组 ) the universities in an attempt to spur innovation. But it was speeded up by Nokia's problems. Finland had become dangerously dependent on this one company: In 2000, Nokia accounted for four percent of the country's GDP. The government wanted to make the mobile phone giant's decline as painless as possible and ensure that Finland would never again become so dependent on a single company. E The Finns created an innovation and technology agency, Tekes, with an annual budget of €600 million and a staff of 360. They also established a venture-capital fund to find early-stage companies and help them get established. The centerpiece of their innovation system is a collection of business accelerators, partly funded by the government and partly by private enterprises, that operate in every significant area of business and provide potential high-growth companies with advice and support from experienced businesspeople and angel investors. F As a result, Finland has become much more market and entrepreneur-friendly. It has produced an impressive number of start-ups, including 300 founded by former Nokia employees. The fashionable argument now is that Nokia's decline is "the best thing that ever happened to this country." G The new Finland is particularly proud of its booming video-games industry, including successful companies such as Rovio Entertainment, the maker of Angry Birds and a leading supporter of the Start-Up Sauna. H The mood reflected in the summer of start-ups can be found across the region: Investors everywhere are looking for new opportunities and bright young things are running companies in converted warehouses. Hjalmar Winbladh, one of Sweden's leading entrepreneurs, says that the atmosphere has changed completely since he started out in business in the early 1990s. Back then people like him were oddities ( 怪人 ). Today fashionable young people worship successful tech entrepreneurs such as Niklas Zennström, the co-founder of Skype, and Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon, the co-founders of Spotify. Mr. Winbladh says that his biggest problem is to attract young talent from other start-ups. They all shudder at the thought of spending their lives in big organizations. I Northern European governments recognize that they need to encourage more entrepreneurs if they are to provide their people with high-quality jobs, and that they can no longer rely on large companies to generate business ecosystems on their own. They are creating government agencies to promote start-ups. They are encouraging universities to commercialize their ideas and generate start-ups. They are telling their schools to sing the praises of entrepreneurship. J Many of the region's most interesting entrepreneurs operate at the low end of the technology range, often to help parents deal with a practical problems of combining full-time work and family. Niklas Aronsson, co-founder of a company called Linas Matkasse, has applied IKEA's do-it-yourself model to family dinners. He delivers bags containing all the ingredients needed for a meal, chopped up, and ready to cook. Monica Lindstedt, founder of Hemfrid, is also in the business of selling time. She has turned her company into a house-cleaning giant, applying professional management to domestic cleaning and turning it into an employment perk. Hemfrid has persuaded the government to treat house-cleaning as a tax-deductible benefit, like a company car. It has also convinced companies that this is a great way to reward their employees and free them from domestic distraction. K Northern European entrepreneurs are also reinventing retirement homes for baby-boomers. A Finnish private housing association has built a housing community in the suburbs of Helsinki that is dedicated to the idea of helping people help themselves. The residents took an active part in designing both the buildings' common areas (which include saunas and exercise rooms) and their individual flats. Most of them own shares in the company. It tries to offer a balance between independent living and community involvement. The members eat together once a week and tend a communal allotment whenever they feel like it. L Despite all this entrepreneurial energy, the Northern European region still finds it hard to turn start-ups into enduring companies. There are too many examples of successful entrepreneurs who have upped sticks and gone elsewhere. These include not just members of the post-war generation such as Ingvar Kamprad, the founder of giant IKEA (who lives in Switzerland), and Hans Rausing, the founder of Tetra Pak, a huge packaging company (who went to live in England), but also members of the up-and-coming generation. Mr. Zennström, along with many of the brightest Swedish investors and entrepreneurs in his age group, lives in London. Too many successful start-ups still choose to sell themselves to foreign (mainly American) multinationals rather than becoming local champions. M Still, there is reason to hope that the entrepreneurial boom will also produce a new generation of global champions. The region's lifestyle entrepreneurs have a chance of becoming global entrepreneurs for the same reason that Mr. Kamprad did: because they are riding the wave of demographic change. And the region's high-tech entrepreneurs have a chance of founding enduring companies because they are building up businesses as well as mastering technology. N One example is Rovio Entertainment, which struck gold with Angry Birds, a game that was downloaded more than 600 million times in 2011. Having produced one big hit, most games companies would have started looking for the next one, but instead Rovio set about turning Angry Birds into a brand and extending its reach. It struck licensing agreements with a range of companies to make Angry Birds-branded products, from toys to chocolate to theme parks. It raised capital from outside investors such as Microsoft, which chipped in $42 million. Rovio now has 50 employees in Finland and had a turnover of $100 million in 2011. Michael Hed, the company's CEO, has a traditional corner office, but it is full of stuffed birds and pigs. (1,213 words) _____ 1 Governments in Northern Europe have been adopting a variety of means to promote entrepreneurship and develop new companies. _____ 2 The promotion of entrepreneurship in Finland requires not only economic support, but also the change of culture. _____ 3 Some entrepreneurs in Northern Europe are building homes for retired people in a new way. _____ 4 A large number of successful Northern European entrepreneurs of new companies would rather sell their companies to other countries than develop them locally. _____ 5 There are opportunities for entrepreneurs of lifestyle and high-tech to build long-lasting companies and become successful across the world. _____ 6 Some Finnish college students believed that new companies rather than old large ones were the foundation of Finland's future development. _____ 7 The core of the innovation system in new companies is the result of joint-funds by the Finnish government and private companies, which can be applied in every business area. _____ 8 Many entrepreneurs in Northern Europe offer services to balance work with family without relying on high technology. _____ 9 It is difficult for new Northern European companies to develop into long-lasting companies as successful entrepreneurs tend to move to other countries. _____ 10 The Finnish government intended to minimize the negative effects of Nokia's decline and never rely on just one company.