Well, no gain without pain, they say. But what about pain without gain? Everywhere you go in America, you hear tales of corporat

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问题     Well, no gain without pain, they say. But what about pain without gain? Everywhere you go in America, you hear tales of corporate revival. What is harder to establish is whether the productivity revolution that businessmen assume they are presiding over is for real.
    The official statistics are mildly discouraging. They show that, if you lump manufacturing and services together, productivity has grown on average by 1.2% since 1987. That is somewhat faster than the average during the previous decade. And since 1991, productivity has increased by about 2% a year, which is more than twice the 1978-1987 average. The trouble is that part of the recent acceleration is due to the usual rebound that occurs at this point in a business cycle, and so is not conclusive evidence of a revival in the underlying trend. There is, as Robert Rubin, the treasury secretary, says, a "disjunction" between the mass of business anecdote that points to a leap in productivity and the picture reflected by the statistics.
    Some of this can be easily explained. New ways of organizing the workplace all that reengineering and downsizing—are only one contribution to the overall productivity of an economy, which is driven by many other factors such as joint investment in equipment and machinery, new technology, and investment in education and training. Moreover, most of the changes that companies make are intended to keep them profitable, and this need not always mean increasing productivity: switching to new markets or improving quality can matter just as much.
    Two other explanations are more speculative. First, some of the business restructuring of recent years may have been ineptly done. Second, even if it was well done, it may have spread much less widely than people suppose.
    Leonard Schlesinger, a Harvard academic and former chief executive of Au Bong Pain, a rapidly growing chain of bakery cafes, says that much "reengineering" has been crude. In many cases, he believes, the loss of revenue has been greater than the reductions in cost. His colleague, Michael Beer, says that far too many companies have applied reengineering in a mechanistic fashion, chopping out costs without giving sufficient thought to long term profitability. BBDO’s Al Rosenshine is blunter. He dismisses a lot of the work of reengineering consultants as mere rubbish—"the worst sort of ambulance cashing".
According to the author, the American economic situation is ______.

选项 A、not as good as it seems
B、at its turning point
C、much better than it seems
D、near to complete recovery

答案A

解析 从文章第1段的内容可知,在美国,无论你到什么地方,你都会听到有关公司复兴的故事;更难以证实的是企业家们自以为是他们在引领的这场生产力革命是否名副其实;从文章第2段的内容可知,官方的统计数字多少有些令人失望;统计表明,生产力平均每年增长1.2%,但近期的增长一定程度上是由于商业周期运行至这个时段所出现的常见反弹引发的,因此不能证实会出现经济复苏;正如财政部长Robert Rubin所说的那样,大量的商业神话似乎说明生产力剧增,这同官方的统计数字所反映出的情况“有分歧”;在随后的两段中,文章分析了造成这种现象的原因;从文章最后的内容可知,一些企业的重组没有达到预期目的。据此可知,美国目前的经济形势不如表现的那样好。A项与文章的意思相符,因此A项为正确答案。
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