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  3. Picture a typical MBA lecture theatre twenty years ago. In it the majority of students will have conformed to the standard model

Picture a typical MBA lecture theatre twenty years ago. In it the majority of students will have conformed to the standard model

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问题     Picture a typical MBA lecture theatre twenty years ago. In it the majority of students will have conformed to the standard model of the time: male, middle class and Western. Walk into a class today, however, and you’ll get a completely different impression. For a start, you will now see plenty more women—the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, for example, boasts that 40% of its new enrolment is female. You will also see a wide range of ethnic groups and nationals of practically every country.
    It might be tempting, therefore, to think that the old barriers have been broken down and equal opportunity achieved. But, increasingly, this apparent diversity is becoming a mask for a new type of conformity. Behind the differences in sex, skin tones and mother tongues, there are common attitudes, expectations and ambitions which risk creating a set of clones among the business leaders of the future.
    Diversity, it seems, has not helped to address fundamental weaknesses in business leadership. So what can be done to create more effective managers of the commercial world? According to Valerie Gauthier, associate dean at HEC Paris, the key lies in the process by which MBA programmes recruit their students. At the moment candidates are selected on a fairly narrow set of criteria such as prior academic and career performance, and analytical and problem solving abilities. This is then coupled to a school’s picture of what a diverse class should look like, with the result that passport, ethnic origin and sex can all become influencing factors. But schools rarely dig down to find out what really makes an applicant succeed, to create a class which also contains diversity of attitude and approach—arguably the only diversity that, in a business context, really matters.
    Professor Gauthier believes schools should not just be selecting candidates from traditional sectors such as banking, consultancy and industry. They should also be seeking individuals who have backgrounds in areas such as political science, the creative arts, history or philosophy, which will allow them to put business decisions into a wider context.
    Indeed, there does seem to be a demand for the more rounded leaders such diversity might create. A study by Mannaz, a leadership development company, suggests that, while the bully-boy chief executive of old may not have been eradicated completely, there is a definite shift in emphasis towards less tough styles of management—at least in America and Europe. Perhaps most significant, according to Mannaz, is the increasing interest large companies have in more collaborative management models, such as those prevalent in Scandinavia, which seek to integrate the hard and soft aspects of leadership and encourage delegated responsibility and accountability.
What aspect of diversity does Valerie Gauthier think is most important?
选项 A、Attitude and approach to business.
B、Social and professional experience.
C、Age and educational background.
D、Ethnic origin and gender.
答案A
解析 根据题干中的Valerie Gauthier将本题出处定位于第3段第3句。该句开始提到ValerieGauthier的观点，末句提到，学校很少致办于……去创造一个包含态度和方法多样性的课堂——这是唯一的最重要的多样性。由the only diversity that…really matters中的the only diversity指代的是破折号前提到的diversity of attitude and approach“态度和方法的多样性”可知，只有态度和方法的多样性才是最重要的(really matters)，故答案为A)。really matters对应题干中的most important。文中未提到年龄问题，而对于教育背景Gauthier是不赞成关注的，故排除C)。D)与Valerie Gauthier的观点相反，他反对筛选学位申请人时考虑种族和性别问题。
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