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  3. Picture a typical MBA lecture theatre twenty years ago. In it the majority of students will have conformed to the standard model

Picture a typical MBA lecture theatre twenty years ago. In it the majority of students will have conformed to the standard model

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问题     Picture a typical MBA lecture theatre twenty years ago. In it the majority of students will have conformed to the standard model of the time: male, middle class and Western. Walk into a class today, however, and you’ll get a completely different impression. For a start, you will now see plenty more women—the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, for example, boasts that 40% of its new enrolment is female. You will also see a wide range of ethnic groups and nationals of practically every country.
    It might be tempting, therefore, to think that the old barriers have been broken down and equal opportunity achieved. But, increasingly, this apparent diversity is becoming a mask for a new type of conformity. Behind the differences in sex, skin tones and mother tongues, there are common attitudes, expectations and ambitions which risk creating a set of clones among the business leaders of the future.
    Diversity, it seems, has not helped to address fundamental weaknesses in business leadership. So what can be done to create more effective managers of the commercial world? According to Valerie Gauthier, associate dean at HEC Paris, the key lies in the process by which MBA programmes recruit their students. At the moment candidates are selected on a fairly narrow set of criteria such as prior academic and career performance, and analytical and problem solving abilities. This is then coupled to a school’s picture of what a diverse class should look like, with the result that passport, ethnic origin and sex can all become influencing factors. But schools rarely dig down to find out what really makes an applicant succeed, to create a class which also contains diversity of attitude and approach—arguably the only diversity that, in a business context, really matters.
    Professor Gauthier believes schools should not just be selecting candidates from traditional sectors such as banking, consultancy and industry. They should also be seeking individuals who have backgrounds in areas such as political science, the creative arts, history or philosophy, which will allow them to put business decisions into a wider context.
    Indeed, there does seem to be a demand for the more rounded leaders such diversity might create. A study by Mannaz, a leadership development company, suggests that, while the bully-boy chief executive of old may not have been eradicated completely, there is a definite shift in emphasis towards less tough styles of management—at least in America and Europe. Perhaps most significant, according to Mannaz, is the increasing interest large companies have in more collaborative management models, such as those prevalent in Scandinavia, which seek to integrate the hard and soft aspects of leadership and encourage delegated responsibility and accountability.
What characterises the business school student population of today?
选项 A、Greater diversity.
B、Intellectual maturity.
C、Exceptional diligence.
D、Higher ambition.
答案A
解析 根据题干中的today将本题出处定位于首段第3句。首段第3句首先说走入现在的课堂(即MBA课堂)你会有不同的印象。接下来的两句作进一步解释：你会看到更多的女士和来自不同民族和国家的学生。综合以上信息不难看出，今天的商学院的学生更加多样化，故答案为A)。第2段第2句中的this apparent diversity也有很强的提示作用。文中未提到现代商学院学生群体的特征是智慧成熟，故排除B)。文中未提到现代商学院学生群体的特征是特别勤奋，故排除C)。D)与第2段末句的there are common…ambitions“他们有着同样的雄心”不符。
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