新托福阅读材料：Shanghai’s2010Expo:the’EconomicOlympics’（2）

　　National pavilions are like student exhibits at a science fair. At the expo, they say a lot about a country's economic prowess. China's towering pavilion certainly makes a statement. More than 200 countries and groups have one – but the US may be a no-show. The State Department won't fund a pavilion; it hasn't for any recent expo. A private group is cleared to host one, but it will be hard to raise funds in this recession. America's absence would be too bad – especially given how much our first fairs meant to some US cities.

　　4. Ties to the Beijing Olympics

　　The cutesy "Fuwa" Olympic mascots have their companion in "Haibao," the expo's Gumby-like symbol. Haibao's lead designer explained that the character's blueness "symbolizes many things: the earth, dreams, the oceans, life, future, and technology." Shanghai 2010 is being touted as an "Economic Olympics." And there's an expo educational drive going on that mirrors, on a more local scale, the Olympic one of a few years back. So schoolchildren in Shanghai are learning that one sign of America's rise to global power in the late 1800s was that it became the first non-European country to host world's fairs, and one sign of China's lowly status was that it was viewed as too backward to hold such events.

　　5. The Olympic-expo combo

　　China's use of back-to-back mega-events calls to mind what regional rival Japan did successfully a few decades ago amid its economic ascent. Japan's first Olympics (Tokyo in 1964) and its first world's fair (Osaka in 1970) imprinted a new image of the nation as a thoroughly modern country, light years removed from the exotic land whose pavilions at old fairs were, like China's, showcases for quaint objects, not state-of-the-art technologies. This is just the sort of two-part rebranding move that China's leaders began in Beijing last August and hope to carry forward in Shanghai a year from now.