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  3. Disruption may be the buzzword in boardrooms, but the most striking feature of business today is not the overturning of the esta

Disruption may be the buzzword in boardrooms, but the most striking feature of business today is not the overturning of the esta

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问题         Disruption may be the buzzword in boardrooms, but the most striking feature of business today is not the overturning of the established order. It is the entrenchment of a group of superstar companies at the heart of the global economy. Some of these are old firms, like GE, that have reinvented themselves. Some are emerging-market champions, like Samsung, which have seized the opportunities provided by globalisation. The elite of the elite are high-tech wizards—Google, Apple, Facebook and the rest—that have conjured up corporate empires from bits and bytes.
    The superstars are admirable in many ways.【B1】___________But they have two big faults. They are squashing competition, and they are using the darker arts of management to stay ahead. Neither is easy to solve. But failing to do so risks a backlash which will be bad for everyone.
    The heft of the superstars also reflects their excellence at less productive activities.【B2】_________________The giants also deploy huge armies of lobbyists, bringing the same techniques to Brussels, where 30,000 lobbyists now walk the corridors, that they perfected in Washington, DC. Laws such as Sarbanes-Oxley and Dodd-Frank, to say nothing of America’s tax code, penalise small firms more than large ones.
    None of this helps the image of big business. Paying tax seems to be unavoidable for individuals but optional for firms. Rules are unbending for citizens, and up for negotiation when it comes to companies. Nor do profits translate into jobs as once they did.【B3】_______________
    Concentration is an even harder problem. America in particular has got into the habit of giving the
    benefit of the doubt to big business.【B4】__________________
    It is less defensible now that superstar firms are gaining control of entire markets and finding new ways to entrench themselves.
    Prudent policymakers must reinvent antitrust for the digital age. That means being more alert to the long-term consequences of large firms acquiring promising startups.【B5】_______________And  it means making sure that people have a choice of ways of authenticating their identity online.
    So, by all means celebrate the astonishing achievements of today’s superstar companies. But also watch them. The world needs a healthy dose of competition to keep today’s giants on their toes and to give those in their shadow a chance to grow.
    [A]   About 30% of global foreign direct investment (FDI) flows through tax havens; big companies routinely use "transfer pricing" to pretend that profits generated in one part of the world are in fact made in another.
    [B]   That means a tough-but-considered approach to issues such as tax avoidance. The OECD countries have already made progress in drawing up common rules to prevent companies from parking money in tax havens, for example.
    [C]  It means making it easier for consumers to move their data from one company to another, and pre-venting tech firms from unfairly privileging their own services on platforms they control.
    [D]  They churn out products that improve consumers’ lives, from smarter smartphones to sharper televisions. They provide Americans and Europeans with an estimated $280 billion-worth of "free" ser-vices—such as search or directions—a year.
    [E]  They have more to do, not least to address the convenient fiction that different units of multinationals are really separate companies.
    [F]  In 1990 the top three carmakers in Detroit had a market capitalisation of $36 billion and 1.2m employees. In 2014 the top three firms in Silicon Valley, with a market capitalisation of over $1 trillion, had only 137,000 employees.
    [G]  This made some sense in the 1980s and 1990s when giant companies such as General Motors and IBM were being threatened by foreign rivals or domestic upstarts.
【B2】
选项
答案A
解析 空格前指出超级明星企业的分量也反映了它们擅长非生产类活动(less productive activities)，属于较为概括性的表述。空格后是具体的例子，讲巨头公司的说客正在游说欧盟，试图左右其决策。游说活动与生产没有直接的联系，印证了空格前说的“擅长非生产类活动”。从这两处内容看，本段应为总一分结构，再结合空格后的also，可知空格处应该同样也是对空格前的概述的具体例证，而且也应该是不良的行为做法。A提到大公司避税和掩盖利润来源地的不当行为，这些都是非生产类活动。由此可见，A与上述分析相符，故为本题答案。
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