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  3. The good news about America’s economy is that jobs are plentiful despite slower growth and the housing blues. Some 180,000 new j

The good news about America’s economy is that jobs are plentiful despite slower growth and the housing blues. Some 180,000 new j

admin2016-10-15  10
问题     The good news about America’s economy is that jobs are plentiful despite slower growth and the housing blues. Some 180,000 new jobs were created in March and the unemployment rate fell to 4. 4% , three-tenths of a percentage point lower than a year ago. With employment and wage growth strong, consumers are unlikely to stop spending and throw the economy into recession.
    That is not all cause for celebration, however. The drop in the jobless rate at the same time as the economy is slowing implies that the growth in productivity—the amount workers produce in an hour—is waning. If this proves to be a permanent shift, slower productivity growth bodes ill for inflation and living standards.
    Few associate America with limping productivity. Central to its success over the past decade has been its "productivity miracle", the sudden acceleration in workers’ efficiency in 1995. After advancing at a measly 1.5% per year for more than two decades, productivity growth soared to an average of 2. o% a year in the late 1990s and over 3% a year between 2002 and 2004.
    This spurt set America apart from other rich countries. But between mid-2004 and the end of 2006, the growth in business output per hour outside agriculture, the most common gauge of worker efficiency, slowed to an annual rate of just 1. 5% , on average. Judging by the recent jobs figures, its growth in the first few months of 2007 may be lower still.
    Deciding how worrying this is depends on what lies behind the sluggishness. Productivity growth has two components: a long-term trend(set by the quality of the workforce, the pace of capital investment and the speed of innovation)and more volatile short-term fluctuations driven by the business cycle.
    Early in an expansion, for instance, productivity takes off temporarily as firms squeeze their existing staff harder before hiring new workers. As an economy slows, it tails off, because firms are loth to sack workers immediately.
    This time, temporary factors are almost certainly playing the biggest role. Not only has the business cycle reached the point at which productivity growth usually slows, it also has several characteristics that may have exacerbated temporary productivity swings.
    Unusually savage company cost-cutting early in this cycle is another reason why recent productivity swings have been so extreme.
    An odd business cycle makes it hard to gauge what has happened to America’ s underlying rate of productivity growth. So too do shifts in the sources of productivity growth. In the late 1990s workers’ efficiency rose thanks both to rapid investment, particularly in information technology(IT), and to innovation, again mainly in IT. Hence the conventional view that America’s productivity miracle was based on its ability to harness the power of computers.
It is true of the text that ______.
选项 A、slower economic growth used to result in housing blues
B、new jobs are created more in March than in other months
C、higher unemployment rate is a sign of economic recession
D、consumers are unlikely to stop spending no matter what happens
答案C
解析 根据第一段最后一句“With employment and wage growth strong，consumers are unlikely tostop spending and throw the economy into recession”可知，就业率增高时不会发生经济不景气。这意味着，失业率增高是经济不景气的标志。所以，C应为答案。
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