1.[阅读理解] What Is a Foreign Language Worth? Even with conservative estimates, speaking another language translates into a big earning boost. My oldest daughter is a college freshman, and not only have I paid for her to study Spanish for the last four or five years — they even do it in grade school now! — but her college is requiring her to study EVEN MORE! What on earth is going on? How did it ever get this far? ... Or to put it in economics terms, where is the ROI1 ? There are pros and cons to language-learning. The pros are that working in a foreign language can make people make better decisions and that bilingualism helps with executive function in children and dementia in older people. The cons: one study finds that the earnings bonus for an American who learns a foreign language is just 2%. If you make $30 000 a year, that’s $600.But for the sake of provocation, this figure seems to have been low-balled. We should know the power of lifetime earnings and compound interest. First, instead of $30 000, assume a university graduate, who in America is likelier to use a foreign language than someone without university degree. The average starting salary is almost $45 000. Assuming just a 1% real salary increase per year and a 2% average real return over 40 years, a 2% language bonus turns into an extra $67 000 (at 2014 value) in your retirement account. Let’s take the American context. The more important factor is probably supply, not demand, of speakers of a given language. Non-Latin Americans might study Spanish because they hear and see so much of it spoken in their country. But that might be the best reason not to study the language, from a purely economic point of view. A non-native learner of Spanish will have a hard time competing with a fluent native bilingual for a job requiring both languages. Indeed, worse returns for Spanish study were found in states with a larger share of Hispanics. Better to learn a language in high demand, but short supply — one reason, no doubt, ambitious American parents are steering their children towards Mandarin. The drop-off in recent years in the American study of German might be another reason for young people to hit the Bücher. Of course changes in educational structures can have dynamic effects on entire economies. A list of the richest countries in the world is dominated by open, trade-driven economies. Oil economies aside, the top ten includes countries where trilingualism is typical, like Luxembourg, Switzerland and Singapore, and small countries like the Scandinavian ones, where English knowledge is excellent. There are of course many reasons that such countries are rich. But a willingness to learn about export markets, and their languages, is a plausible candidate. One study, led by James Foreman-Peck of Cardiff Business School, has estimated that lack of foreign-language proficiency in Britain costs the economy £48 billion ($80 billion), or 3.5% of GDP, each year. Even if that number is high, the cost of assuming that foreign customers will learn your language, and never bothering to learn theirs, is certainly a lot greater than zero. So if a language premium study had been done against a parallel universe America, in which the last half- century had been a golden age of language learning, we might have found a bigger foreign- language bonus (and a bigger GDP pie to divide) in that more open and export-oriented fantasy America. And of course greater investment in foreign-language teaching would have other dynamic effects: more and better teachers and materials, plus a cultural premium on multilingualism, means more people will actually master a language, rather than wasting several years never getting past la plume de ma tante2 , as happens in Britain and America. To be sure, everything has an opportunity cost3 . An hour spent learning French is an hour spent not learning something else. But it isn’t hard to think of school subjects that provide less return — economically, anyway — than a foreign language. What is the return on investment for history, literature or art? Of course schools are intended to do more than create little GDP- producing machines. (And there are also great non-economic benefits to learning a foreign language.) But if it is GDP you’re after, the world isn’t learning English as fast as some people think. One optimistic estimate is that half the world’s population might speak English by 2050. That leaves billions who will not, and billions of others who remain happier (and more willing to spend money) in their own language.