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

admin2015-05-10  33

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 author seems to believe the revival of the U.S. economy in the 1990s can be attributed to the

选项 A、turning of the business cycle
B、restructuring of industry
C、improved business management
D、success in education

答案A

解析 细节题。本题问作者似乎相信90年代美国经济的复苏归因于什么。关键词为revival…at—tribute to…,根据最后一段第三句“没有几个美国人把这一变化完全归因于美元贬值及商业周期的循环这些显而易见的原因。”很容易判断这是作者的观点。故选项A正确。B项“工业重建”和C项“改进的企业管理”均为他人所言,而且,在作者看来均属于盲目的骄傲之列;D项文章没提。
转载请注明原文地址:https://kaotiyun.com/show/XMgc777K
0

最新回复(0)