中科院考博英语模拟试卷（附答案）

　　Section B ( 20 minutes, 10 points)

　　Direction: In each of the following passages, five sentences have been removed from the original text. They are listed from A to F and put below the passage. Choose the most suitable sentence from the list to fill in each of the blanks (numbered 66 to 75). For each passage, there is one sentence that does not fit in any of the blanks. Mark your answers on your machine scoring Answer Sheet.

　　Passage 1

　　A history of long and effortless success can be a dreadful handicap, but, if properly handled, it may become a driving force. When the United States entered just such a glowing period after the end of the Second World War, it had a market eight times larger than any competitor, giving its industries unparalleled economies of scale. --- 66 --- America and Americans were prosperous beyond the dreams of the Europeans and Asians whose economies the war had destroyed.

　　It was inevitable that this primacy should have narrowed as other countries grew richer. Just as inevitably, the retreat from predominance proved painful. By the mid-1980s Americans had found themselves at a loss over their fading industrial competitiveness. --- 67 --- By 1987 there was only one American television maker left, Zenith. (Now there is none: Zenith was bought by South Korea's LG Electronics in July.) Foreign-made cars and textiles were sweeping into the domestic market. America's machine tool industry was on the ropes. --- 68 ---

　　All of this caused a crisis of confidence. Americans stopped taking prosperity for granted. They began to believe that their way of doing business was failing, and that their incomes would therefore shortly begin to fall as well. --- 69 ---Their sometimes-sensational findings were filled with warnings about the growing competition from overseas.

　　--- 70 ---In 1995 the United States can look back on five years of solid growth while Japan has been struggling. Few Americans attribute this solely to such obvious causes as a devalued dollar or the turning of the business cycle. Self-doubt has yielded to blind pride." American industry has changed its structure, has gone on a diet, has learnt to be more quick-witted," according to Richard Cavanagh, executive dean of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. “It makes me proud to be an American just to see how our businesses are improving their productivity,” says Stephen Moore of the Cato Institute, a think-tank in Washington, DC. And William Sahlman of the Harvard Business School believes that people will look back on this period as" a golden age of business management in the United States."

　　A. For a while it looked as though the making of semiconductors, which America had invested and which sat at the heart of the new computer age, was going to be the next casualty.

　　B. Its scientists were the world's best, its workers the most skilled.

　　C. How things have changed!

　　D. The mid-1980s brought one inquiry after another into the causes of America's industrial decline.

　　E. Some huge American industries, such as consumer electronics, had shrunk or vanished in the face of foreign competition.

　　F. Some of the nation's largest businesses shrink in size when they appear on the government's database of federal contractors.

　　Passage 2

　　If sustainable competitive advantage depends on work force skills, American firms have a problem. ---71--- Skill acquisition is considered an individual responsibility. Labor is simply another factor of production to be hired-rented at the lowest possible cost-much as one buys raw materials or equipment.

　　The lack of importance attached to human resource management can be seen in the corporate hierarchy. In an American firm the chief financial officer is almost always second in command. ---72--- The executive who holds it is never consulted on major strategic decisions and has no chance to move up to Chief Executive Officer (CEO). By way of contrast, in Japan the head of human resource management is central-usually the second most important executive, after the CEO, in the firm's hierarchy.

　　While American firms often talk about the vast amounts spent on training their work forces, in fact they invest less in the skills of their employees than do either Japanese or German firms. ---73---And the limited investments that are made in training workers are also much more narrowly focused on the specific skills necessary to do the next job rather than on the basic background skills that make it possible to absorb new technologies.

　　As a result, problems emerge when new breakthrough technologies arrive. ---74---More time is required before equipment is up and running at capacity, and the need for extensive retraining generates costs and creates bottlenecks that limit the speed with which new equipment can be employed. ---75--- And in the end the skills of the population affect the wages of the top half. If the bottom half can't effectively staff the processes that have to be operated, the management and professional jobs that go with these processes will disappear.

　　A. If American workers for example, take much longer to learn how to operate new flexible manufacturing stations than workers in Germany (as they do), the effective cost of those stations is lower in Germany than it is in the United Stated.

　　B. The head of human resource management is one of the most important executives in the firm.

　　C. The money they do invest is also more highly concentrated on professional and managerial employees.

　　D. Human resource management is not traditionally seen as central to the competitive survival of the firm in the United States.

　　E. The post of head of human resource management is usually a specialized job, off at the edge of the corporate hierarchy.

　　F. The result is a slower pace of technological change.

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