Word: boom
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Indeed, Japan and the Internet have gone together like sushi and ketchup. It's still surprising that tech-savvy, gadget-happy Japan sat on the sidelines during the boisterous dotcom boom. (Remember that?) Even today, in Japan, the world's second largest economy, only 625,000 homes have high-speed Internet access, out of a population of 126 million people. PCs never caught on, in part because the first models were ugly and bulky and used keyboards the Japanese aren't comfortable with. "We're keypad people," says DoCoMo's president, Keiji Tachikawa...
...building blitz. Across the muddy Huangpu river, a futuristic realm called Pudong materialized, filled with hubris and towering skyscrapers. Shanghai's suburbs expanded into the countryside, with pink-tiled apartment blocks promising a leisured lifestyle to the city's middle class. But in the late '90s, Shanghai's building boom went bust. With occupancy rates plummeting to a dismal 35% in some areas, real-estate developers panicked. So did the city government, which had counted on a buoyant real-estate sector. Desperate, city planners offered a raft of incentives for local companies and foreign banks to relocate to Pudong. Then...
...their square roots by the latest rebellion against SATs. In truth, they should hardly notice. Both companies rely less and less on the SAT for income each year, and while the industry is becoming more competitive, the testing business as a whole is in the midst of a boom. The standards-and-accountability movement has led states and schools to test American students more often than at any other time in history. And if President Bush has his way, states will be required to test all students in third through eighth grades - 22 million kids - every year in math...
...left out of the testing boom, the $400 million test-prep industry is also expanding. One might have expected John Katzman, founder and CEO of The Princeton Review, one of the two leading SAT-prep companies, to be at least a little concerned by University of California president Richard Atkinson's push to abolish the SAT. In fact, Katzman is ecstatic, calling the SAT "a vestige from another era" that "should be discarded at the first possible moment." It's a position he can afford to take, as his company, which is in the process of going public, recently launched...
...here's the key question: When historians look back on this moment in American education, will they see a) the beginning of the end of the SAT; b) a national frenzy over school testing in general; or c) the dawn of the testing industry's greatest boom? Try d) all of the above...