A history of long and effortless success can be a dreadful handicap, but, if properly handled, it may become a driving force. Wh

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问题     A history of long and effortless success can be a dreadful handicap, but, if properly handled, it may become a driving force. When the United States entered just such a glowing period after the end of the Second World War, it had a market eight times larger than any competitor, giving its industrial unparalleled economies of scale. Its scientists were the world’s best, its workers the most skilled. America and Americans were prosperous beyond the dreams of the Europeans and Asians whose economies the war had destroyed.
    It was inevitable that this primacy should have narrowed as other countries grew richer. Just as inevitably, the retreat from predominance proved painful. By the mid -1980s, Americans had found themselves at a loss over their fading industrial competitiveness. Some huge American industries, such as consumer electronics, had shrunk or vanished in the face of foreign competition. By 1987 there was only one American television maker left, Zenith.(Now there is none: Zenith was bought by South Korea’s LG electronics in July.)Foreign-made cars and textiles were sweeping into the domestic market. America’s machine-tool industry was on the ropes. For a while it looked as though the making of semiconductors, which America had invented and which sat at the heart of the new computer age, was going to be the next casualty.
    All of this caused a crisis of confidence. Americans stopped taking prosperity for granted. They began to believe that their way of doing business was failing and that their incomes would therefore shortly begin to fall as well. The mid-1980s brought one inquiry after another into the cause of America’s industrial decline. Their sometimes sensational findings were filled with warnings about the growing competition from overseas.
    How things have changed! In 1995 the United States can look back on five years of solid growth while Japan has been struggling. Few Americans attribute this solely to such obvious causes as devalued dollar or the turning of the business cycle. Self-doubt has yield to blind pride. "American industry has changed its structure, has gone on a diet, has learned to be more quick-witted."according to Richard Ca-vanagh, executive dean of Harvard’ s Kennedy School of Government. "It makes me proud to be an American just to see how our business are improving their productivity."says Stephen Moore of the Cato Institute, a think-tank in Washington, DC. And William Sahlman of the Harvard Business School believes that people will look back on this period as"a golden age of business management in the United States."
The loss of U.S. predominance in the world economy in the 1980s is manifested in the fact that American______.

选项 A、TV industry had withdrawn to its domestic market
B、semiconductor industry had been taken over by foreign enterprises
C、machine-tool industry had collapsed after suicidal actions
D、auto industry had lost part of its domestic market

答案D

解析 细节题。本题问美国80年代在世界经济中失去优势表现在哪一点。参看第二段倒数第三句:“国外生产的轿车和纺织品正在神气十足地涌人美国国内市场。”这和D项“汽车工业已失去部分国内市场”意思一致。故正确答案为D。A项“电视工业已退缩到国内市场”与第二段第五句“到1987年只剩下一家电视制造商”不一致。B项“半导体工业已被外国企业所取代”与第二段倒数第一句“美国所发明的且对计算机新时代举足轻重的半导体制造业,有段时期似乎也要濒临崩溃”不一致。C项“机床工业在采取灾难性措施后已完全崩溃”与第二段倒数第二句“美国机床工业处于困境之中”内容不符。
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