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  3. It would be all too easy to say that Facebook’s market meltdown is coming to an end. After all, Mark Zuckerberg’s social network

It would be all too easy to say that Facebook’s market meltdown is coming to an end. After all, Mark Zuckerberg’s social network

admin2019-08-17  33
问题     It would be all too easy to say that Facebook’s market meltdown is coming to an end. After all, Mark Zuckerberg’s social network burned as much as $50 billion of shareholders’ wealth in just a couple months. As shocking as this utter failure may be to the nearly 1 billion faithful Facebook users around the world. It’s no surprise to anyone who read the initial public offering (IPO) prospectus. Worse still, all the crises that emerged when the company debuted—overpriced shares, poor corporate governance, huge challenges to the core business, and a damaged brand—remain today. Facebook looks like a prime example of what Wall Street calls a falling knife—that is, one that can cost investors their fingers if they try to catch it.
    To justify a stock price close to the lower end of the project range in the IPO, say $28 a share, Facebook’s future growth would have needed to match that of Google seven years earlier. That would have required increasing revenue by some 80 percent annually and maintaining high profit margins all the while.
    But in the first half of 2012, Facebook reported revenue of $2. 24 billion, up 38 percent from the same period in 2011. At the same time, the company’s costs surged to $2. 6 billion in the six-month period.
    This so-so performance reflects the Achilles’ heel of Facebook’s business model, which the company clearly stated in a list of risk factors associated with its IPO: it hasn’t yet figured out how to advertise effectively on mobile devices. The number of Facebook users accessing the site on their phones surged by 67 percent to 543 million in the last quarter, or more than half its customer base.
    Numbers are only part of the problem. The mounting pile of failure creates a negative feedback loop that threatens Facebook’s future in other ways. Indeed, the more Facebook’s disappointment in the market is cataloged, the worse Facebook’s image becomes. Not only does that threaten to rub off on users, it’s bad for recruitment and retention of talented hackers, who are the lifeblood of Zuckerberg’s creation.
    Yet the brilliant CEO can ignore the sadness and complaints of his shareholders thanks to the super-voting stock he holds. This arrangement also was fully disclosed at the time of the offering, It’s a pity so few investors apparently bothered to do their homework.
What’s the meaning of "the Achilles’ heel" in Paragraph 4?
选项 A、A fatal flaw.
B、A hard problem.
C、A bad performance.
D、An undoubted truth.
答案A
解析 词义理解题。根据the Achilles’ heel定位到第四段首句，其中which引导的定语从句修饰the Achilles’ heel of Facebook’s business model。逗号之后的句子讲到，该公司明确指出它还没有解决怎样在移动设备上进行有效广告宣传的问题。由此可知，脸书的商业模式存在缺陷、弱点，A项表述正确，故为答案。the Achilles’ heel是英语俚语，意为“致命弱点”。
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