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  3. Companies have embarked on what looks like the beginnings of a re-run of the mergers and acquisitions (M&A) wave that defined th

Companies have embarked on what looks like the beginnings of a re-run of the mergers and acquisitions (M&A) wave that defined th

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问题     Companies have embarked on what looks like the beginnings of a re-run of the mergers and acquisitions (M&A) wave that defined the second bubbly half of the 1990s. That period was characterized by a collective splurge that saw the creation of some of the most indebted companies in history. Many of them later went bankrupt or were themselves broken up. Wild bidding for telecoms, internet and media assets, not to mention the madness that was Daimler’s $40 billion motoring takeover in 1998-1999 of Chrysler or the Time-Warner/AOL mega-merger in 2000, helped to give mergers a thoroughly bad name. A consensus emerged that M&A was a great way for investment banks to reap rich fees, and a sure way for ambitious managers to betray investors by trashing the value of their shares.
    Now M&A is back. Its return is a global phenomenon, but it is probably most striking in Europe, where so far this year there has been a stream of deals worth more than $600 billion in total, around 40% higher than in the same period of 2004. The latest effort came this week when France’s Saint-Gobain, a building-materials firm, unveiled the details of its ￡3.6 billion hostile bid for BPB, a British rival. In the first half of the year, cross-border activity was up threefold over the same period last year. Even France Telecom, which was left almost bankrupt at the end of the last merger wave, recently bought Amena, a Spanish mobile operator.
    Shareholder’s approval of all these deals raises an interesting question for companies everywhere: are investors right to think that these mergers are more likely to succeed than earlier ones? There are two answers. The first is that past mergers may have been judged too harshly. The second is that the present rash of European deals does look more rational, but—and the caveat is crucial—only so far. The pattern may not hold.
    M&A’s poor reputation stems not only from the string of spectacular failures in the 1990s, but also from studies which showed value destruction for acquiring shareholders in 80% of deals. But more recent studies by economists have introduced a note of caution. Investors should look at the number of deals that succeed or fail (typically measured by the impact on the share price), rather than (as you might think) weighing them by size. For instance, no one doubts that the Daimler-Chrysler merger destroyed value. The combined market value of the two firms is still below that of Daimler alone before the deal. This single deal accounted for half of all German M&A activity by value in 1998 and 1999, and probably dominated people’s thinking about mergers to the same degree. Throw in a few other such monsters and it is no wonder that broad studies have tended to find that mergers are a bad idea. The true picture is more complicated.
"The pattern" in the third paragraph most probably denotes
选项 A、the complicated documents combined markets.
B、the global phenomenon of the craze of wild bidding for media assets.
C、the seeming rationality of the latest cycle of European mergers.
D、the striking necessity of European caveat.
答案C
解析 这是一道细节推导题。测试考生准确识别和理解原文相关信息的能力。本题的答案信息来源在第三段的倒数第一、二句。第三段倒数第一句是本题题干核心词语在原文中出现的位置；第三段倒数第二句则是“the pattern”(形式)所指代的具体内容。第三段倒数第二句的大意是：“第二种答案是：目前欧洲合并和收购的大量涌现看起来的确更理性，但是只是就目前而言”。第三段尾句的大意是：“这种貌似理性的合并和收购的说法也许站不住脚。”由此可以推断本题的正确选项应该是C“the seeming rationality of the latest cycle of European mergers”(最近欧洲合并的表面合理性)。考生在阅读时一定要注意原文中上下句之间的关系，以免造成误解。
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