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  3. Iris Rossner has seen eastern Germany customers weep for joy when they drive away in shiny, new Mercedes-Benz sedans. "They have

Iris Rossner has seen eastern Germany customers weep for joy when they drive away in shiny, new Mercedes-Benz sedans. "They have

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问题     Iris Rossner has seen eastern Germany customers weep for joy when they drive away in shiny, new Mercedes-Benz sedans. "They have tears in their eyes and keep saying how lucky they are," says Rossner, the Mercedes employee responsible for post-delivery celebrations. Rossner has also seen the French pop corks on bottles of champagne as their national flag was hoisted above a purchase. And she has seen American business executives, Japanese tourists and Russian politicians travel thousands of miles to a Mercedes plant in southwestern Germany when a classic sedan with the trade mark three-pointed star was about to roll off the assembly line and into their lives. Those were the good economic miracle of the 1960s and ended in 1991.
    Times have changed. "Ten years ago, we had clear leadership in the market," says Mercedes spokesman Horst Krambeer. "But over this period, the market has changed drastically. We are now in a pitched battle. The Japanese are partly responsible, but Mercedes has had to learn the hard way that even German firms like BMW and Audi have made efforts to rise to our standards of technical proficiency."
    Mercedes experienced one of its worst years ever in 1992. The auto market’s worldwide car sales fell by 5 percent from the previous year, to a low of 527,500. Before the decline, in 1988, the company could sell close to 600,000 cars per year. In Germany alone, there were 30,000 fewer new Mercedes registrations last year than in 1991. As a result, production has plunged by almost 600,000 cars to 529,400 last year, a level well beneath the company’s potential capacity of 650,000,
    Mercedes’ competitors have been catching up in the United States, the world’s largest car market. In 1986, Mercedes sold 100,000 vehicles in America; by 1991, the number had declined to 59,000. Over the last two years, the struggling company has lost a slice of its US market share to BMW, Toyota and Nissan. And BMW outsold Mercedes in America last year for the first time in its history. Meanwhile, just as Mercedes began making some headway in Japan, a notoriously difficult market, the Japanese economy fell on hard times and the company saw its sales decline by 13 percent in that country.
    Revenues will hardly improve this year, and the time has come for getting down to business. At Mercedes, that means cutting payrolls, streamlining production and opening up to consumer needs—revolutionary steps for a company that once considered itself beyond improvement.
Mercedes is having a hard time because______.
选项 A、it is lagging behind in technology
B、Japan is turning to BMW for cars
C、its competitors are catching up
D、sales in America have dropped by 13%
答案C
解析 从第四段“Mercedes’ competitors have been catching up.”可知C项符合题意。
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