Your firm will shortly be sending to Japan a party of businessmen none of whom has been there before. Using the material in the following extract, prepare a short document which could be distributed among the businessmen giving them an idea of what modern Japan is like. The document is to be headed.'Fact-sheet on Modern Japan', and it should not exceed 200 words at the most.

Look out of the living-room window of even the most comfortable middle-class house in Japan and the next house is never more than a few feet away. Or the next factory. And beside the bamboo fence of the last house on the outskirts, beside the wall of the last factory, the rice paddy commences.

Four-fifths of Japan is uninhabitable mountain, so that 108 million people have to live, manufacture and grow their food in an area about the size of the Insh Republic. This dense civilisation must have thickened almost in front of the eyes during the last 120 years, ever since japan - then an impoverished feudal society with a population limited by famine, of some 30 millions - was forcibly reopened to the world by the great imperial Powers And not only thickened, but changed, and changed again. Working in timber rather than stone or brick, the Japanese have never built to last. Then nearly half of Tokyo was reduced to ashes in the great earthquake of 1923 and well over half of it destroyed again by the Americans in 1945. My friend Ishiguro, who had been back to Japan for only two short visits in the last five years, was constantly astonished as she showed me round Tokyo by the sight of new buildings, and baffled by the miles of new subway line.
It has been difficult to build upwards for fear of earthquakes, though clumps of high-rise buildings are now appearing in Tokyo which are designed to resonate freely in time with the shock waves. In Osaka they have escaped downwards and have dug out a huge underground shopping centre two floors deep, with its own decorative subterranean river. (An earthquake expert I talked to was very gloomy about what would happen down there when a big quake shattered the exits and extinguished the lights.) The dense, low urban sprawl on the surface is dominated by towering wire cages like gigantic aviaries, inside which you can take out your frustrations on a golf-ball, to keep you sane while you work to become rich enough to hit it out in the open. (I saw advertisement offering up to £27,000 for membership of a real golf club.)
The roads are clogged with the nation's products; the rivers and seas with its waste products. Miss Ishiguro begged me to make great efforts not to write another article about pollution, but the subject was not possible to avoid. Entire pages of the English language papers were full of nothing but pollution news; conversation returned to it again and again (430 words).
(From 'Frayn's Japan' by Michael Frayn in the Observer)
(LCC Private Secretary's Certificate)