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

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

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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 industries 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 causes 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 a devalued dollar or the turning of the business cycle. Self-doubt has yielded to blind pride. "American industry has changed its structure, has gone on a diet, has learnt to be more quick-witted," according to Richard Cavanagh, executive dean of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Management. "It makes me proud to be an American just to see how our businesses are improving their productivity," says Stephen Moore of the Cato Institute, a think-tank in Washington. 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 U.S. achieved its predominance after World War II because ______.
选项 A、it had made painstaking efforts towards this goal
B、its domestic market was eight times larger than before
C、the war had destroyed the economies of most potential competitors
D、the unparalleled size of its workforce had given an impetus to its economy
答案C
解析 本题可参照文章的第1段。从中可知，二战结束后，美国刚好进入了这样一段辉煌时期，其市场是任何竞争者的8倍，这使得美国的经济达到了一个空前的规模；美国科学家是世界上最优秀的，美国的工人是世界上技术最熟练的；美国的繁荣和美国人的富有达到了那些经济被战争摧毁的欧亚诸国做梦也没有想到的程度。据此可知，第二次世界大战结束后，美国之所以取得领先地位，是因为战争摧毁了其竞争对手的经济。C项与文章意思相符，因此C项为正确答案。
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