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  3. It would be all too easy to say that Facebook’s market meltdown is coming to an end. After all, Mark Zuckerberg’s social network

It would be all too easy to say that Facebook’s market meltdown is coming to an end. After all, Mark Zuckerberg’s social network

admin2021-08-17  1
问题     It would be all too easy to say that Facebook’s market meltdown is coming to an end. After all, Mark Zuckerberg’s social network burned as much as $50 billion of shareholders’ wealth in just a couple of months. To put that in context, since its debut on NASDAQ in May, Facebook has lost value nearly equal to Yahoo, AOL, Zynga, Yelp, Pandora, OpenTable, Groupon, Linkedln, and Angie’s List combined, plus that of the bulk of the publicly traded newspaper industry.
    As shocking as this utter failure may be to the nearly 1 billion faithful Facebook users around the world, it’s no surprise to anyone who read the initial public offering (IPO) prospectus. Worse still, all the crises that emerged when the company debuted—overpriced shares, poor corporate governance, huge challenges to the core business, and a damaged brand—remain today. Facebook looks like a prime example of what Wall Street calls a falling knife—that is, one that can cost investors their fingers if they try to catch it.
    Start with the valuation. To justify a stock price close to the lower end of the projected range in the IPO, say $28 a share, Facebook’s future growth would have needed to match that of Google seven years earlier. That would have required increasing revenue by some 80 percent annually and maintaining high profit margins all the while.
    That’s not happening. In the first half of 2012, Facebook reported revenue of $2. 24 billion, up 38 percent from the same period in 2011. At the same time, the company’s costs surged to $2. 6 billion in the six-month period.
    This so-so performance reflects the Achilles’ heel of Facebook’s business model, which the company clearly stated in a list of risk factors associated with its IPO: it hasn’t yet figured out how to advertise effectively on mobile devices. The number of Facebook users accessing the site on their phones surged by 67 percent to 543million in the last quarter, or more than half of its customer base.
    Numbers are only part of the problem. The mounting pile of failure creates a negative feedback loop that threatens Facebook’s future in other ways. Indeed, the more Facebook’s disappointment in the market is catalogued, the worse Facebook’s image becomes. Not only does that threaten to rub off on users, it’s bad for retention and recruitment of talented hackers, who are the lifeblood of Zuckerberg’s creation.
    Yet the brilliant CEO can ignore the sadness and complaints of his shareholders thanks to the super-voting stock he holds. This arrangement also was fully disclosed at the time of the offering. It’s a pity so few investors apparently bothered to do their homework.
What can be inferred about Facebook from the first paragraph?
选项 A、Its market meltdown has been easily halted.
B、It has increased trade with the newspaper industry.
C、It has encountered utter failure since its stock debut.
D、Its shareholders have invested $50 billion in a social network.
答案C
解析 推理判断题。第一段第一句指出，脸书的市场崩溃即将结束这件事说起来容易，即真正结束脸书的市场崩溃并不容易，更谈不上已经结束脸书的市场崩溃，A项表述错误。最后一句提到，脸书损失的价值相当于众多公司以及大部分上市报纸行业的市值之和，并未提及脸书与报业增强贸易往来，B项表述错误。C项的utter failure可以从原文中burned，lost推出来，并且第二段中第一句话也提及了utter failure，符合题意。D项虽然由原文“Facebook在仅仅几个月之内让股东们的500亿美元付之一炬”可以推断出股东们至少给Facebook投资500亿美元，与D项不矛盾，但是D项中的“a social network”更像是陷阱，不一定指Facebook，指代不明。C、D两项属于疑难项，对比之下，C项更优。
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