Most people would describe a dollar millionaire as rich, yet many millionaires would disagree. They do not compare themselves wi

admin2012-07-22  42

问题     Most people would describe a dollar millionaire as rich, yet many millionaires would disagree. They do not compare themselves with teachers or shop assistants but with the other parents at their children’s private schools. To count the number of rich people in the world, however, an arbitrary cut-off point is needed, and $lm is as good as any. Capgemini, a consultancy, defines anyone with investable assets of $lm or more (excluding their home) as a high-net-worth individual" , consultant-speak for rich. By this conservative measure the planet has about 10m millionaires, according to Capgemini and Merrill Lynch, a bank.
    Credit Suisse, another bank, uses a less stringent (and more obvious) definition: a millionaire is anyone whose net assets exceed $lm. That includes everything: a home, an art collection, even the value of an as-yet-inaccessible pension scheme. The Credit Suisse "Global Wealth Report" estimates that there were 24. 2m such people in mid-2010, about 0. 5% of the world’s adult population. By this measure, there are more millionaires than there are Australians. They control $69. 2 trillion in assets, more than a third of the global total.
    How did these people grow rich? Mostly through their own efforts. Only 16% of high-net-worth individuals inherited their stash, according to Capgemini. The most common way to get rich is to start a business: nearly half (47%) of the world’s wealthy people are entrepreneurs.
    You do not have to be a genius to build a million-dollar business, but it helps if you are intelligent and extremely hard-working. In their book The Millionaire Next Door, Thomas Stanley and William Danko observed that a typical American millionaire is surprisingly ordinary. He has spent his life patiently saving and ploughing his money into a business he founded. He does not live in the fanciest part of town—why waste money that you can invest? And his tastes are so plain that you can barely tell him apart from his neighbours. He buys $40 shoes, and his car of choice is a Ford.
    Another 23% of the world’s millionaires got rich through paid work, estimates Capgemini. A few vault easily over the million-dollar bar. Gregory Maffei, the boss of Liberty Media, an American cable-television firm, earned $87,095,882 in 2010. The median pay for chief executives at the 456 largest publicly quoted firms in America was $7. 23m, according to the Hay Group, a consultancy. But the vast majority are skilled professionals or managers who have been careful with their money. An orthodontist in America makes about $200,000 a year. He may leave medical school heavily in debt, but after a lifetime of earning, saving and investing, he can probably amass $lm.
The word "stringent" in Paragraph Two probably means

选项 A、convincing.
B、puzzling.
C、accurate.
D、strict.

答案D

解析 语义题。第二段首句指出“Credit Suisse,another bank,uses a less stringent(and moreobvious)definition:a millionaire is anyone whose net assets exceed $1 m.”,对比第二句以及首段倒数第二句可以看出第二段中给出的定义范围更宽,即不那么严格,D符合文意。
转载请注明原文地址:https://kaotiyun.com/show/OSmK777K
0

随机试题
最新回复(0)