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  3. (1)The recession came home to Price Waterhouse’s consultancy practice in the middle of 1990. Annual growth rate of 25%-30% start

(1)The recession came home to Price Waterhouse’s consultancy practice in the middle of 1990. Annual growth rate of 25%-30% start

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问题     (1)The recession came home to Price Waterhouse’s consultancy practice in the middle of 1990. Annual growth rate of 25%-30% started to dive, and the practice began reorganizing to survive the slump.
    (2)Management consultancies, ironically, have complex and disparate bodies to manage. PW is an international outfit run by partners through a network of offices.
    Like most professions, management consultants tend to be content to let others take the lead in office technology and put off any major investment to another day. In 1990, PW’s UK consultancy practice could muster only one personal computer for every three or four staff.
    (3)The solution PW chose was remarkable on two fronts. It involved a form of technology that remains foreign, if not downright outlandish, to most big companies; and the decision to embrace that technology was taken not as a result of a detailed cost justification, but as a simple "leap of faith".
    (4)Mark Austin, the UK partner leading the program of change, says: "On pure cost grounds we would never have gone ahead, but our American practice had found that there were enormous qualitative benefits. We are finding the same."
    (5)Three years on, that leap is still difficult to qualify in hard business terms, but nobody within PW doubts the value of the move. The solution chosen by PW is groupware, which is likely to become the IT industry’s most hyped product of the decade, or show its greatest contribution to business efficiency since the invention of the PC.
    (6)There are several groupware products but the market is increasingly being dominated by Lotus Notes, which is used by PW and runs on a variety of desktop computers. Of the 20,000 Notes users worldwide, PW is one of the biggest groupware followers there is, but firms such as General Motors and Unilever are also investing heavily in the technology.
    (7)The recession has left many big companies with leaner, overstretched management teams, often working at different locations, and with a frayed corporate culture. Groupware aims to be the glue that binds these threads together.
    (8)The problem for groupware suppliers is that the software hopes to be all things to all men. The sets of discs that come out of the software box do very little on their own; it is how you tailor them that matters. PW’s groupware operations are among the most sophisticated ever set up, but in operation they look deceptively simple and cover growing panoply of applications. For example, staffs fill in on-screen forms logging the potential clients they are talking to, the value of the contract under discussion, and how they assess the likely outcome.
    (9)Other applications cover the management of current jobs. The databases behind the groupware network men correlate me information input in different ways.
    (10)Once me groupware application is created, updating happens automatically, unseen by the user. It could even incorporate stories from electronic wire feeds, so a manager whose client is involved in a takeover bid can cull electronic "clippings" about a subject simply by asking, once, for all stories on a subject to be "clipped".
    (11)One effect is that the workings of the firm become more open and the common, corporate store of knowledge gained from previous jobs can be accessed easily. Subject to confidentiality considerations, people can see what others are doing and tap into that information.
    (12)Thus, if a PW consultant in Aberdeen has a client who needs advice on something to do with the oil industry and program writing in a specific computer language, he can easily discover whether any other PW project has touched upon that area at any other office, even in Europe or America. If somebody is leaving the firm, the system will note the fact and, the day before he or she leaves, ask for the return of all outstanding confidential documents and the individual’s laptop computer.
What does the word "slump" in the first paragraph mean?
选项
答案Economic crisis．
解析 首先可以确定recession影响了practice，而后又有“增长率出现下降”的情况，因此即使不认识slump，也可以推测它指的是“经济危机”，故答案为Economic crisis。
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