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  3. Well, no gain without pain, they say. But what about pain without gain? Everywhere you go in America, you hear tales of corporat

Well, no gain without pain, they say. But what about pain without gain? Everywhere you go in America, you hear tales of corporat

admin2011-10-20  85
问题     Well, no gain without pain, they say. But what about pain without gain? Everywhere you go in America, you hear tales of corporate revival. What is harder to establish is whether the productivity revolution that businessmen assume they are presiding over is for real.
    The official statistics are mildly discouraging. They show that, if you lump manufacturing and services together, productivity has grown on average by 1.2% since 1987. That is somewhat faster than the average during the previous decade. And since 1991, productivity has in creased by about 2% a year, which are more than twice the 1978-1987 averages. The trouble is that part of the recent acceleration is due to the usual rebound that occurs at the point in a business cycle, and so is not conclusive evidence of a revival in the underlying trend. There is, as Robert Rubin, the treasury secretary, says, a "disjunction" between the mass of business anecdote that points to a leap in productivity and the picture reflected by the statistics.
    Some of this can be easily explained. New ways of organizing the workplace all that reengineering and downsizing—are only one contribution to the overall productivity of an economy, Which is driven by many other factors such as joint investment in equipment and machinery, new technology, and investment in education and training. Moreover, most of the changes that companies make are intended to keep them profitable, and this need not always mean increasing productivity: switching to new markets or improving quality can matter just as much.
    Two other explanations are more speculative. First, some of the business restructuring of recent years may have been ineptly done. Second, even if it wag well done, it may have spread much less widely than people suppose.
    Leonard Schlesinger, a Harvard academic and former chief executive of Au Bong Pain, a rapidly growing chain of bakery cafes, says that much "reengineering" has been crude. In many cases, he believes, the loss of revenue has been greater than the reductions in cost. His colleague, Michael Beer, says that far too many companies have applied reengineering in a mechanistic fashion, chopping out costs without giving sufficient thought to long-term profitability. B.B.D.O.’s A1 Rosen shine is blunter. He dismisses a lot of the work of re engineering consultants as mere rubbish—"the worst sort of ambulance cashing."
选项 A、not as good as it seems
B、at its turning point
C、much better than it seems
D、near to complete recovery
答案A
解析 这是一道中心大意概括题。作者如何看待美国的经济形势?首先，作者在第一段中对美国经济复苏的传闻提出了质疑：商家认为他们为提高生产效益所进行的改革是否真的产生了效果?接着在第二段中，作者又通过官方的统计数字对美国的经济形势进行了分析：尽管从表面上看生产率有了很大提高，但其部分原因是由于在每个商业循环的同一阶段通常都会出现的反弹(usual rebound)所造成的。因此还不能以此作为结论性的证据来说明美国经济已呈现出复苏的态势。选项"不如表面看上去的那么好"恰恰反映了作者的上述观点，其它各项均属于商业家的乐观估计。
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