If U. S. software companies don’t pay more attention to quality, they could kiss their business good-bye. Both India and Brazil

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问题       If U. S. software companies don’t pay more attention to quality, they could kiss their business good-bye. Both India and Brazil are developing a world-class software industry. Their weapon is quality and one of their jobs is to attract the top U. S. quality specialists whose voices are not listened to in their country.
      Already, of the world’s 12 software houses that have earned the highest rating in the world, seven are in India. That’s largely because they have used new methodologies (方法论) rejected by American software specialists. For example, for decades, quality specialists, W. Edwards Deming and J. M. Juran had urged U. S. software companies to change their attitudes to quality. But their quality call mainly fell on deaf ears in the U. S., but not in Japan. By the 1970s and 1980s, Japan was grabbing market share with better, cheaper products. They used Deming’s and Juran’s ideas to bring down the cost of good quality to as little as 5% of total production costs. In U. S. factories, the cost of quality then was 10 times as high: 50%. In software, it still is.
      Watts S. Humphrey spent 27 years at IBM heading up software production and then quality assurance. But his advice was seldom paid attention to. He retired from IBM in 1986. In 1987, he worked out a system for assessing (评估) and improving software quality. It has proved its value time and again. For example, in 1990 the cost of quality at Raytheon Electronics Systems was almost 60% of total software production costs. It fell to 15% in 1996 and has since further dropped to below 10%. So, like Deming and Juran, Humphrey seems to be winning more praises overseas than at home.
     Let’s hope that U.S. lead in software will not be eaten up by its quality problems.  
What does the writer imply about software competition in the future?

选项 A、Brazil may reduce their production costs.
B、Japan may employ more quality specialists than other countries.
C、India may take the lead in the competition.
D、US will surely beat other countries and win the competition.

答案C

解析 文章第一段有一句话:“……印度和巴西都在发展世界一流的软件业,他们的杀手锏就是质量……”第二段中又说,“事实上,世界上排名前十二位的软件公司中已经有七家在印度……”这些都说明:印度很有可能在未来的软件行业竞争中获胜。
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