Passage One It used to be that a corporation's capital consisted of tangible assets such as buildings, machines, and finished goods. But, in the information economy, value has shifted rapidly from tangible to intangible assets, such as management skills and customer loyalty. But how do you measure intangible assets? Karl Erik Sveiby began trying to answer that question as a magazine publisher in Sweden and went to become Scandinavia's leading authority on knowledge-based businesses. In his latest book, The New Organizational Wealth, he offers insights into valuing and managing intangible assets. Noting that Microsoft Corporation, the world's largest software firm, once traded at an average share price of $70 at a time when its book value was $7, Sveiby asks: "What is it about Microsoft that makes it worth 10 times the value of its recorded assets? What is the nature of that additional value that is perceived by the market but not recorded by the company?" Sveiby's answer is intangible assets, which he defines as employee competence, internal structures (systems, patents, etc.), and external structures (customer and supplier relationships and the organization's image). Because of these factors, it follows that owners hold a kind of intangible equity in the company, in addition to tangible assets such as cash and accounts receivable. Since knowledge is a key intangible asset, the ability to transfer knowledge from one employee to another, or from outside sources to employees, is a key business capacity, in Sveiby's view. The greater the transfer of knowledge, the more overall employee competence improves. The best method for transferring knowledge, says Sveiby, is through direct experience with a subject rather than simply listening to someone or reading about it. Experience enables learning more than overt teaching because people acquire knowledge tacitly, by observation and listening in an unstructured environment. And, he adds, people will more readily learn from an activity if they enjoy it. Once the flow of information within an organization is managed properly, the competence of the organization increases, and the relations with customers improve. But Sveiby also points out that knowledge and information are not the same thing. Information has no value until it becomes integrated knowledge and therefore useful.
1. In the information economy, it is a challenge ______.
A.to place a high value on intangible assets
B.to transfer tangible into intangible assets
C.to change the concept of assets
D.to quantify intangible assets
A B C D
D
[解析] 参考第一段第三句,题意为:信息经济时代最大的挑战在于量化无形资产。
2. Microsoft Corporation, in Sveiby's view, ______.
A.is skillful at managing intangible assets
B.creates most intangible assets in the world
C.does not hold any tangible, but much intangible assets
D.possesses much additional intangible assets recognized by the market
A B C D
D
[解析] 参考第四段。在Sveiby的调查中,微软拥有被市场认可的更多的无形资产,故选D。
3. The transfer of knowledge which is a key intangible asset, according to Sveiby, ______.
Passage Two Charles Paul and his wife, Hazel, stopped using the motor home they bought several years ago; it sits idle behind their house in Richardson, Texas. Travel is just one sacrifice they made to pay for the cost of their prescriptions, more than a dozen medications for the two of them. They found relief by switching drugstores, to one in nearby McKinney. A prescription for Paul's diabetes had cost $89.88 when he got it from a national chain but dropped down to $58 from McKinney's Smith Drug. Smith, which claims to be the oldest drugstore in Texas, has been getting a lot of attention since a Dallas newspaper touted its astoundingly low prices. The overwhelming response from the public has been "a little scary," says co-owner Kaylei Mosier. She says the store simply marks each prescription up enough to cover its costs, but for many prescriptions that's a lot lower than at other stores. The Smith Drug story has highlighted a little-known fact: prescription prices vary from city to city and block to block, and a little research can save consumers hundreds or thousands of dollars. Insurance copays can make these differences invisible, but they're a huge deal to the 45 million uninsured Americans. Why the price swings? Howard Schiff, executive director of the Maryland Pharmacists Association, explains that pharmacies generally buy their drugs from a wholesaler, who doesn't sell to every drugstore at the same price. Once the drug is in the pharmacy, each owner chooses how much to mark it up. Because fewer than 10 percent of consumers comparison-shop for prescriptions the way they might for a quart of milk—and drug prices generally are not advertised—pharmacies don't worry that higher prices will drive people away, says Stanford economist Alan Scorensen. There is a downside to hopping from drugstore to drugstore. If people price-shop, they're going to lose some protection that comes from having one pharmacy track all your medications. Going to many pharmacies keeps one pharmacist from noticing potentially harmful interactions between prescriptions. Comparison-shopping is further complicated because pharmacies that have the best price on one drug don't usually have the lowest prices across the board, so finding a good price on one drug at a pharmacy does not guarantee a cheaper total bill.
1. Charles and his wife haven't traveled for long because ______.
A.their motor home was not in good condition
B.they wanted to save for medicines
C.they have been too weak to do so
D.they didn't get their doctor's permission
A B C D
B
[解析] 根据首段第二句Travel is just one sacrifice they made to pay for the cost of their prescriptions,more than a dozen medications for the two of them可知,他们很久不去旅行的原因是需要省钱用于支付他们两人的药费,故答案为B项。
2. We learn that the oldest drugstore in Texas, Smith, ______.
A.surprises people when its low prices are reported
B.sells prescriptions at prices below their costs
C.is an unprofitable business
D.had many scared customers after a news report
A B C D
A
[解析] 第二段第一句提到Smith,which claims to be the oldest drugstore in Texas, has been getting a lot of attention since a Dallas newspaper touted its astoundingly low prices,由此可知,该药店因为价格低廉被报道后,让大家吃惊,故答案为A项。
3. Who may care LEAST about the varied prices?
A.Those who are uninsured.
B.Those who are insured.
C.Those who comparison-shop for drugs.
D.Those doing research in drugstores.
A B C D
B
[解析] 文章第三段最后一句Insurance copays can make these differences invisible, but they're a huge deal to the 45 million uninsured Americans指出,保险赔付使药价差别不明显,但对于没人保险的却是一大笔数目。所以,对药价差别在意最少的应为选项B。
4. Some drugstores can sell drugs at a higher price than others because ______.
A.people may have more choices over the same product
B.not many people know the price differences
C.some drugstores spend more on ads than others
D.drugs were bought from different wholesalers
A B C D
B
[解析] 倒数第二段提到fewer than 10 percent of consumers comparison-shop for prescriptions和drug prices generally are not advertised,即不到10%的人在买药时经过比较后才买,而且药的价格并没有广告,可推断出顾客是因为不知道价格差别才会在买药时多花钱。所以答案为选项B。
5. The word "downside" used in the last paragraph refers to ______.
A.the poor service in tracking medications
B.the trend of reducing drug prices
C.the popularity of comparison-shopping
D.the drawback of switching drugstores
A B C D
D
[解析] 根据最后一段内容,downside所对应的内容为lose some protection that comes from having one pharmacy track all your medications和keep one pharmacist from noticing potentially harmful interactions between prescriptions以及finding a good price on one drug at a pharmacy does not guarantee a cheaper total bill,这些均为换药店的缺点,答案为选项D。
Passage Three People are extraordinarily skilled at spotting cheats—much better than they are at detecting rule-breaking that does not involve cheating. A study showing that just how good we are at this adds weight to the theory that our exceptional brainpower arose through evolutionary pressures to acquire specific cognitive skills. The still-controversial idea that humans have specialized decision systems in addition to generalized reasoning ability has been around for decades. Its advocates point out that the ability to identify untrustworthy people should be favored evolutionally since cheats risk undermining the social interactions in which people trade goods or services for mutual benefit. To test whether we have a special ability to reason about cheating, Leda Cosmides, an evolutionary psychological test called the Wason selection test, which tests volunteers' ability to reason about "if/then" statements. The researchers set up scenarios in which they asked undergraduate volunteers to imagine they were supervising workers sorting applications for admission to two schools: a good one in a district where school taxes are high, and a poor one on an equally wealthy, but lightly taxed district. The hypothetical workers were supposed to follow a rule that specified "if a student is admitted to the good school, they must live in the highly taxed district". Half the time, the test subjects are told that the workers had children of their own applying to the schools, thus having a motive to cheat; the rest of the time they were told the workers were merely absent-minded and sometimes made innocent errors. Then the test subjects were asked how they would verify that the workers were not breaking the rule. Cosmides found that when the "supervisors" thought they were checking for innocent errors, just 9 of 33, or 27 percent, got the right answer—looking for a student admitted to the good school who did not live in the highly-taxed district. In contrast, when the supervisors thought they were watching for cheats, they did much better with 23 of 34, or 68 percent getting the right answer. This suggests that people are, indeed more adept at spotting cheat than at detecting mere rule-breaking. Cosmides says, "Any cues that it's just an innocent mistake actually inactivate the detection mechanism." The result is what you would expect if natural selection had favored this specific ability in early, pro-social humans—and is not at all what would happen under selection for generalized intelligence, Cosmides says. "My claim is that there is nothing domain-general in the mind, just that that can't be the only thing going on in the mind." Other psychologists remain skeptical of this conclusion. "If you want to conclude that therefore there's a module in the mind for detecting cheater, I see zero evidence for that," says Steven Sloman, a cognitive scientist at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. "It's certainly possible that it's something we learned through experience. There is no evidence that it's anything innate."
1. The findings of the study were in favor of ______.
A.the highly-advocated skills of cheating at school
3. When she says "...that can't be the only thing going on in the mind", Cosmides most probably implies that ______.
A.cheating is highly motivated in the social interactions
B.our specific cognitive skills can serve an evolutionary purpose
C.there is no such a mental thing as a specialized decision-making system
D.the ability to identify untrustworthy people should be favored evolutionarily
A B C D
B
[解析] 推理题。当说到“that can't be the only thing going on in the mind”时,Cosmides最可能暗示说______。从倒数第二段和第三段我们可知,人们发现作弊行为的正确率比普通的行为检测要高得多,接着指出进化(自然选择)促进了特定的认知能力。故本题正确答案为B。D选项过于片面,识别不可信的人只是认知能力的一种(specific cognitive power)。
4. In response to Cosmides' claim, Sloman would say that ______.
Passage Four ATIME columnist bears witness to an operation to help triplets with cerebral palsy walk like other boys. Cindy Hickman nearly bled to death the day she gave birth—three months prematurely—to her triplet sons. Weighing less than 2 lbs. each, her babies were alive, but barely. They clung so tenuously to life that her doctors recommended she name them A, B and C. Then, after a year of heroic interventions—brain shunts, tracheotomies, skull remodeling—often requiring emergency helicopter rides to the hospital nearest their rural Tennessee home, the Hickmans learned that their triplets had cerebral palsy. Fifteen years ago there wasn't much that could be done about cerebral palsy, a disorder caused by damage to the motor centers of the brain. But pediatric medicine has come a long way since then, both in intervention before birth, with better prenatal care and various techniques to postpone delivery, and surgical interventions after birth to correct physical deficiencies. So although the incidence of cerebral palsy seems to be increasing (because the odds of preemies surviving are so much better), so too are the number of success stories. This is one of them. Lane, Codie and Wyatt (as the Hickman boys are called) have spastic cerebral palsy, the most common form, accounting for nearly 80% of cases. "We first noticed that they weren't walking when they should," Cindy recalls. "Instead they were only doing the combat crawl." Their brains seemed to be developing age appropriately, but their muscles were unnaturally stiff, making walking difficult if not impossible. Happily, spastic cerebral palsy is also the most treatable form of CP, largely thanks to a procedure known as selective dorsal rhizotomy, in which the nerve roots that are causing the problem are isolated and severed. Among the first to champion SDR in the U.S. in the late 1980s was Dr. T.S. Park, a Korean-born pediatric neurosurgeon at Washington University in St. Louis, Mo., who has preformed more than 800 of these operations and hopes to do an additional 1,000 before he retires. Peering through a microscope and guided by an electric probe, we were able to distinguish between the two groups of nerve roots leaving the spinal cord. The ventral roots send information to the muscle; the dorsal roots send information back to the spinal cord. The dorsal roots cause spasticity, and if just the right ones are severed, the symptoms can be greatly reduced. Nearly half a million Americans suffer from cerebral palsy. Not all are candidates for SDR, but Park estimates that as many as half may be. He gets the best results with children between ages 2 and 6 who were born prematurely and have stiffness only in their legs. He is known for performing the operation very high up in the spine, right where the nerve roots exit the spinal cord. It's riskier that way, but the recovery is faster, and in Park's skilled hands, the success rate is higher. Cindy and Jeremy Hickman will testify to that. Just a few weeks after the procedure, two of their sons are walking almost normally and the third is rapidly improving.
1. When the triplets were born, ______.
A.both the triplets and their mother nearly died
B.they didn't have cerebral palsy
C.doctors didn't believe they were going to survive
D.they received medical intervention like brain shunts
A B C D
A
[解析] 细节题。从第一段的首句得知:Cindy差点流血致死(bled to death),三个孩子也是奄奄一息(alive,but barely)。这和选项A是一致的。D选项(接受一些医疗干预手段)是混淆项,文中并未提及三胞胎在出生的时候所受的治疗。故答案为A。
2. Cerebral palsy is ______.
A.deadly disease
B.a kind of brain disorder
C.not treatable for children who are over 6 and have stiffness in their legs
D.to be cured by isolating and cutting off the right nerve roots
Passage Five You are what you eat notwithstanding, it is only recently that most consumers have become interested in the technical details of their food's composition, production and transport. With obesity and climate change now major concerns, and "localvore" and "food miles" entering the lexicon, shoppers are clamoring for information. And many food companies are happy to supply it, resulting in a dizzying array of multicolored labels and claims. But not everyone is happy. A proposed law in Indiana is the latest attempt in the United States to ban milk labels proclaiming that the cows from whence the milk came were not treated with recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH, also called recombinant bovine somatotropin or rbST). This hormone, produced by engineered bacteria, is virtually identical to the cow's own and can increase milk production by 10-15%. There are two bad arguments for banning such labels. The first—that it is impossible to determine from the milk whether the cow was injected with rBGH—is the reason cited in the bill language. The second—that proliferation of "no rBGH" labels will train consumers to distrust the product—is the real motivation. The first argument can be disposed of easily: it is already illegal to make false claims about a product. The second argument may seem more convincing. There is no firm scientific evidence that injecting cows with rBGH affects human health in any way, but prevalent labeling touting the absence of rBGH would suggest to consumers that there are some differences. The mandating (颁布) of an additional phrase such as that agreed last month in Pennsylvania—"No significant difference has been shown between milk derived from rbST-treated and non-rbST-treated cows"—ameliorates (减轻) this problem. There are good reasons not to ban accurate labels. More information means that consumers can be more discerning, and not just about their own health. They can vote with their purchases for farming practices they prefer. And if a company wants to use a technology with a bad reputation, it is the firm's responsibility to educate the consumer about why it is beneficial. If consumers choose irrationally to reject it, that is their prerogative (特权). Capitalism thrives on the irrationality of consumers, from their noted fear of smelling bad, to their preference for redness in apples, farmed salmon and fast-food signage (标记). Indeed, if consumers were suddenly to become rational, an economic cataclysm (大灾难) would result, as households in all the rich nations would cut their consumption to only what they really needed. Such a crash would no doubt make the current economic doldrums (萧条) look like the mildest hiccup (打嗝)。
1. Nowadays, consumers can know more about food ______.
A.from the internet
B.by means of law weapons
C.from labels and claims
D.with the dictionary
A B C D
C
[解析] 本题为细节题。从第一段的最后一句可以找到答案。现在的购物者对食物的成分、运输、生产开始感兴趣,“localvore”和“food miles”也进入到词汇(lexicon)中。商家也很乐于提供这些信息,最后就导致(resulting in)了花花绿绿的商标和申明(label and claim)。故本题选C。
2. According to the proposed law in Indiana, ______.
A.there will be no milk labels of "No rBGH"
B.cows are banned from being treated with rBGH
C.food products are now allowed to carry labels and claims
D.milk production cannot be increased with growth hormones
3. The real intention behind the ban as we can learn from the passage is ______.
A.to convince consumers of confusion due to labels and claims
B.to get rid of the milk manufacturer's bad reputation
C.to prove the safety of rbST-treated cows' milk
D.to safeguard the sale of milk in the market
A B C D
A
[解析] 本题考查细节。第三段有答案:The second—that proliferation of "no rBGH" labels will train consumers to distrust the product—is the real motivation,大意为“‘no rBGH’标签的泛滥会使顾客变得不信任这些产品,这才是真正的目的。”为了解决顾客对产品的怀疑,需要禁止这些标签。故本题选A最合适。
4. As the author implies, a food label reflects ______.
A.customers' preferences and farming practices
B.customers' rationality and irrationality as well
C.a relationship between capitalism and irrationality
D.both the company's responsibility and the customer' prerogative
A.what will happen following an economic cataclysm
B.what consumers' irrationality means to capitalism
C.why customers can be irrational in consumption
D.how the market economy runs
A B C D
B
[解析] 本题考查细节。本段主要讨论了经济的繁荣依赖消费者的非理性,本题答案为B。
Passage Six Everyone has seen it happen. A colleague who has been excited involved, and productive slowly begins to pull back, lose energy and interest, and becomes a shadow of his or her former self. Or, a person who has been a beacon of vision and idealism retreats into despair or cynicism. What happened? How does someone who is capable and committed become a person who functions minimally and does not seem to care for the job or the people that work there? Burnout is a chronic state of depleted energy, lack of commitment and involvement, and continual frustration, often accompanied at work by physical symptoms, disability claims and performance problem. Job burnout is a crisis of spirit, when work that was once exciting and meaningful becomes deadening. An organization's most valuable resource—the energy, dedication, and creativity of its employees is often squandered by a climate that limits or frustrates the pool of talent and energy available. Milder forms of burnout are a problem at every level in every type of work. The burned-out manager comes to work, but he brings a shell rather than a person. He experiences little satisfaction, and feels uninvolved, detached, and uncommitted to his work and co-workers. While he may be effective by external standards, he works far below his own level of productivity. The people around him are deeply affected by his attitude and energy level, and the whole community begins to suffer. Burnout is a crisis of the spirit because people who burn out were once on fire. It's especially scary and consequential because it strikes some of the most talented. If they can't maintain their fire, others ask, who can? Are these people lost forever, or can the inner flame be rekindled? People often feel that burnout just comes upon them and that they are helpless victims of it. Actually, the evidence is growing that there were ways for individuals to safeguard and renew their spirit, and, more important, there are ways for organization to change conditions that lead to burnout.