Text 1 For as long as multinational companies have existed—and some historians trace them back to banking under the Knights Templar in 1135—they have been derided by their critics as greedy rich-world beasts. If there was ever any truth to that accusation, it is fast disappearing. While globalisation has opened new markets to rich-world companies, it has also given birth to a pack of fast-moving, sharp-toothed new multinationals that is emerging from the poor world. The newcomers have some big advantages over the old firms. They are not restricted by the accumulated legacies of their rivals. Infosys, an Indian IT-service company, rightly sees itself as more energetic than IBM, because when it makes a decision it does not have to weigh the opinions of thousands of highly paid careerists in Armonk, New York. That, in turn, can make a difference in the competition for talent. Western multinationals often find that the best local people leave for a local rival as soon as they have been trained, because the prospects of rising to the top can seem better at the local firm. But the newcomers' advantages are not overwhelming. Take the difference in company ethics, for instance, which worries plenty of rich-world managers. They fear that they will engage in a race to the bottom with rivals unencumbered by the fine feelings of shareholders and domestic customers, and so are bound to lose. Yet the evidence is that companies harmonise up, not down. In developing countries multinationals tend to spread better working practices and environmental conditions; but when emerging-country multinationals operate in rich countries they tend to adopt local mores. So as those companies globalise, the differences are likely to narrow. Nor is cost as big an advantage to emerging-country multinationals as it might seem. They compete against the old guard on value for money, which depends on both price and quality. A firm like Tata Steel, from low-cost India, would never have bought expensive, Anglo-Dutch Corus were it not for its expertise in making fancy steel. This points to an enduring source of advantage for the wealthy companies under attack. A world that is not governed by cost alone suits them, because they already possess a formidable array of skills, such as managing relations with customers, polishing brands, building up know-how and fostering innovation. Nobody said that coping with a new brood of competitors was going to be easy. Some of today's established multinational companies will not be up to the task. But others will emerge from the encounter stronger than ever. And consumers, wherever they are, will gain from the contest.
1. What do we learn from the second sentence of the first paragraph?
A.The banking under the Knights Templar is now going out of operation.
B.The number of Western multinational companies is on the decline.
C.Much greedier multinationals from the poor world are emerging.
D.Most Western multinationals are changing their image as ruthless beasts.
A B C D
C
[解析] 实际上,第一段第二句话的意思在下一句中有具体的解释。
2. One of the advantages the new multinationals over the old is ______
A.their efficient decision-making process
B.their ability to accumulate sizeable wealth
C.their employment of local people for their service
Text 2 Though not the ideal shape for a Christmas stocking, this slim little volume could nevertheless make a welcome seasonal gift. Launched in Britain at the end of October, and covering just under 100 pages, it is not much more than an extended essay. But it presents an interesting idea eloquently and clearly, offering digestible brain food in the middle of excessive turkey and television. The author of Hierarchy Is Not the Only Way, Gerard Fairtlough, was a senior executive with Shell for many years before he left in 1980 to found a new biotechnology company called Celltech—recently bought by UCB, a Belgian group, for over $2 billion. He knows how businesses are run—both well-established organisations, such as Shell, in which it can be hard to see an alternative to the "way things are done around here", and new firms, where the founders' enthusiasm can evaporate if it has to be organized into an organogram. The author's thesis is that we are all addicted to hierarchy—partly because that is how we are hardwired, as are our simian cousins, but also because we do not realise there are other ways to run organisations. "The powerful status of hierarchy," writes Mr. Fairtlough, "makes us think the only alternative is disorganisation...we only compare hierarchy with anarchy or chaos." There are, he says, two alternatives to hierarchy. One is heterarchy; the other, "responsible autonomy." Heterarchy is the form of structure commonly found in professional-service firms, the partnerships of accountants or lawyers in which key decisions are taken by all the partners jointly. With responsible autonomy "an individual or a group has autonomy to decide what to do, but is accountable for the outcome of the decision." "Accountability," says Mr. Fairtlough, "is what makes responsible autonomy different from anarchy." The author says that hierarchy is so deeply rooted that it will take years before there is any significant change. But he perhaps gives too little credit to the many companies that have moved along the spectrum from hierarchy to responsible autonomy. BP, for example, a huge multinational, has managed to split authority into much smaller units in recent years and has reduced the staff in its headquarters. Toyota, likewise, evolved towards greater autonomy as it discovered that the only effective way to carry out its famous "just-in-time" system of stock control was by delegating responsibility for ordering stock to the person closest to the coal face. The fact that these are among the most successful companies in the world today strengthens Mr. Fairtlough's case.
1. What is the idea presented in Fairtlough's book?
A.There are other ways of running businesses than hierarchy.
B.Responsible autonomy is the only way for running new businesses.
C.Well established organizations should be run differently from new businesses.
D.Hierarchy is not the only way of running well-established organizations.
Text 3 Faced with rising costs, decreased funding and laws in many states designed to keep public universities from raising tuition, many state school systems are making up for budget inadequacy by adding fees for everything from "technology" to "energy". Meanwhile, the average cost to attend a public school increased 47% between 2000 and 2007 (adjusted for inflation) according to the College Board, a non-profit that studies education costs and owns the SAT. State politicians are so eager to advocate low-cost higher education that "tuition" has become a dirty word. The F-word, on the other hand fees—has become a go-to charge for public universities strapped for cash. The 2006—2007 school year marked the first time fee increases outpaced tuition hikes, according to the College Board. Fees were up 8% and tuition 6% in 2007—2008 compared to the previous year. Why the fee frenzy? State legislatures across the country have instituted strict limits on tuition increases and require arduous bureaucratic and political procedures to change them. With financing for public universities on the decline since the 1980s, "everybody got very interested in what they could do to affect revenues, and fees Undoubtedly turned out to be one of the measures they could control," says David Brenaman, an economics professor at the University of Virginia who studies college financing. In Oregon, so many extras had been tacked on over the years that in 2007, fees added as much as 40% to the cost of tuition. When campuses saw their energy bills go up, students were charged a fee. When classrooms had to be wired for new technologies, students were charged a fee. "There were some that were one-time things that ended up staying a little bit longer," concedes Diane Saunders, director of communications for the Oregon University System. These covert tuition hikes did not go unnoticed. The Oregon Student Association, which represents pupils at the state's seven public colleges, protested the enormous fees, arguing that they decreased transparency in the system and penalized students whose financial aid packages only covered tuition. In June, the system announced that mandatory fees would be rolled into tuition. "So families know what they're facing up front and so students know what they're facing up front," says Saunders, who credits the students for being "co-advocates" with the Oregon University System that is constantly lobbying the state legislature for more funding. With no state politician likely to campaign on a platform of dramatically increasing school tuitions, fees will continue to fill in the gaps. And as high oil prices continue to drive up the cost of energy and transportation—to name just two expensive items in any university budget—students are advised to read their bills carefully. And don't forget to factor in the F-word.
1. Why do universities choose to increase fees rather than tuition?
A.Because they will not make much profit by raising tuition.
B.Because universities are supposed to be non-profit organizations.
C.Because there are great varieties of things that can be charged fees.
D.Because they face legal and political pressures raising tuition.
5. In response to the students' complaint, the authority promises ______
A.to make various fees more transparent
B.not to increase school tuition any more
C.not to charge more fees
D.to punish those who punished students
A B C D
A
[解析] 参阅上一小题题解。
Text 4 Nationally, the unemployment rate sits at 9.5 percent. But in the El Centro metropolitan area, it's an incredible 27.6 percent. And as workers across the country struggle to navigate the lifeless labor market, El Centro has emerged as a case study about just how fragile the economic recovery can be. In recent years, California's multibillion-dollar budget shortfall and its painful cutbacks have gotten plenty of attention. But even by California standards, El Centro's situation is unusually dire. Since the recession hit, the area's housing market has fallen apart, its wages have remained anemic, and its unemployment rate has soared. In El Centro, the position of mayor rotates between the members of the city council. Viegas-Walker has sat on the council for 13 years and is currently serving a third term as mayor. He attributes the city's sky-high unemployment rate to its agricultural economy. Laborers in El Centro grow and harvest broccoli, lettuce, wheat, and just about everything in between. All told, agriculture in the area is a billion-dollar-a-year industry. But agricultural work is often temporary by nature, and seasonal job losses take a toll on the city's overall unemployment rate. Meanwhile, competition from workers from nearby Mexico makes agricultural jobs harder to come by. In El Centro, unemployment has always been a concern. Notably, in the past decade, the area's jobless rate has never dropped below 12 percent. But when the economy soured during the recession, El Centro's unemployment rate surged, rising from 15.3 percent at the beginning of 2007 to 31.3 percent by the middle of last year as the housing market collapsed. "We had a large construction boom going on," says Sam Couchman, director of workforce development and veteran services. "So those construction workers being unemployed when the construction boom ended and everything kind of came to a standstill—that's why you continue to have a high unemployment rate. They had overbuilt; they weren't selling the homes that they had, so why would they build more?" But it's not just housing. The retail and manufacturing sectors also got squeezed, applying further pressure to an already struggling economy. Currently, the government is one of the few reliable employers left. Another potential bright spot is the hope that El Centro will be able to expand its renewable-energy industry. Already, El Centro residents are awaiting the planned arrival of the company Tessera Solar. If all goes as planned, Tessera could be a major employer for El Centro residents. Cecilia Garcia, an adult development specialist at Imperial Valley College, says El Centro workers have already begun accepting renewable-energy internships with Tessera in Arizona in hopes of positioning themselves for eventual employment at the new location. "When the company comes, they're going to be prepared so they can be hired," she says. The way Couchman sees it, El Centro is currently in the middle of a waiting game—just like much of the rest of the country. "We see a little bit of recovery on the horizon," he says. "It's happening very slowly, but as the country recovers, we will recover."
1. The reason why the author mentions California is that ______
A.El Centro is a city in the state of California
B.California leads the country in its unemployment rate
C.El Centro's problem is caused by California's policies
D.a comparison is made to illustrate El Centro's dire situation
Text 5 Might war games deserve a greater role in business? Military analogies abound in the corporate world. In business, as in war, outcomes depend on what others do, as well as one's own actions. Yet many firms fail to think systematically about how rivals will react to their plans—and traditional planning does a poor job of taking competitors' responses into account, says John McDermott, head of strategy at Xerox, an office-equipment company. Corporate war games, which simulate the interactions of multiple actors in a market, provide a better way to do so. Such games have two chief characteristics. First, players break into teams and take on the roles of fierce competitors (and sometimes other statuses, such as customers). Second, the games involve several turns, allowing competitors not just to draw up their own strategies but to respond to the choices of others. Their popularity is rising. Booz Allen Hamilton (BAH), a consultancy, is running 100 war games a year, up from around 50 three years ago. Games can vary greatly in sophistication. Fuld & Company, a consultancy, recently ran a simple public game devoted to social-networking websites at the London Business School. Student teams took on the roles of YouTube, MySpace, Second Life and Facebook, and devised strategies that were judged by a panel of outside experts. Halfway through, organisers spiced things up with the announcement that Apple had entered the market with iTown, a fictitious online community for users of its iTunes music service. (If the game is an accurate guide to the future, MySpace is sitting pretty and Facebook is in trouble.) BAH introduces a quantitative element into its games, calculating the effect of each team's strategy on their company's profits and stockmarket value at the end of each turn. Open Options takes the number-processing further still. To help Xerox understand the market dynamics of the print and copy industry, it ran a one-day workshop in which teams from Xerox took the roles of the big companies in the market, itself included. Each team identified the things "their" company could do to change its strategy and drew up a list of its desired outcomes; these "preference trees" were shared with the other teams and fine-tuned. The results were then pumped into Open Options' proprietary software tools, which played out interactions between the companies and produced a range of possible outcomes. Mr. McDermott says the game's predictive power was astonishing: one forecast, that a company would start to acquire a certain group of assets within the industry, came true within six months. By shedding light on areas where companies have different priorities, the concept of preference trees helps to highlight potential trade-offs, as well as competition. Open Options charges North American clients roughly $100,000 for an engagement. "The bang for buck was outstanding," says Mr. McDermott.
1. The author insists that playing corporate war games can ______
A.give companies new perspective on complex problems
B.help computer game companies produced better games
C.help companies in trouble to overcome their problems
D.teach companies to adopt a military style of operation