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When a company unexpectedly finds itself losing market share and taking a beating at the hands of its competitors, it’s a clear signal that a change is needed. For a variety of reasons, any company can suddenly lose the competitive advantage that it previously enjoyed. (36) The mark of a strong business, however, is its ability to overcome such setbacks and reclaim its positions as the front runner in its field.One of the greatest variables in the process, however, is technology, which on one hand makes business more efficient and thus profitable than previously thought possible, but changes at such a rapid pace that few businesses utilize it to its full potential. Those companies that invest heavily in the latest technology of the day may find their machines out dated and obsolete the next year, thus losing the advantage that they hoped to gain, and also a substantial amount of investment money as well. (37) Those who are more cautious and buy less of the latest machine may learn that technology changes more slowly, and their competitors who invested more heavily now hold the upper hand. It’s a game of hit or miss.Because of the uneven and unpredictable pace of progress between technological fields, (38) companies are devoting more and more resources to not only acquiring more of the latest developments, but researching the factors that determine their production so as to position themselves better to adapt to the next change. This strategy has been producing positive results for those who employ it, but it is a massively expensive one, limiting its viability to only the largest companies, who are already enjoying many advantages in the market.Such dynamics make it increasingly difficult for new setup companies to break into established markets, lacking the funding and cash reserves necessary to play the game way as the big boy do. The same technology that keeps the large companies on top, however, can still topple them. (39) New and smaller companies have less to lose and thus can afford to gamble on new technologies that larger companies consider too risky to devote themselves to. (40) In the rare occurrences when these risky endeavors bear fruit, providing themselves with the way of future, the rewards to those daring enough, or small enough, to invest in them prove well worth the effort.

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In the 20th century, all the nightmare-novels of the future imagined that books would be burnt. In the 21th century, our dystopias imagine a world where books are forgotten. To pluck just one, Gary Steynghart’s novel Super Sad True Love Story describes a world where everybody is obsessed with their electronic apparatus—an even more omnivorous iPhone with a flickering stream of shopping and reality shows and porn—and have somehow come to believe that the few remaining unread paper books let off a rank smell. The book on the book, it suggests, is closing.The book—the physical paper book—is being circled by a shoal of sharks, with sales down 9 percent this year alone. It’s being chewed by the e-book. It’s being gored by the death of the bookshop and the library. And most importantly, the mental space it occupied is being eroded by the thousand Weapons of Mass Destruction that surround us all. It’s hard to admit, but we all sense it: it is becoming almost physically harder to read books.In his gorgeous little book The Lost Art of Reading—Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time, the critic David Ulin admits to a strange feeling. All his life, he had taken reading as for granted as eating—but then, a few years ago, he “become aware, in an apartment full of books, that I could no longer find within myself the quiet necessary to read”. He would sit down to do it at night, as he always had, and read a few paragraphs, then find his mind was wandering, imploring him to check his email, or Twitter, or Facebook. “What I’m struggling with,” he writes, “is the encroachment of the buzz, the sense that there’s something out there that merits my attention.”I think most of us have this sense today, if we are honest. If you read a book with your laptop thrumming on the other side of the room, it can be like trying to read in the middle of a party, where everybody is shouting to each other. To read, you need to slow down. You need mental silence except for the words. That’s getting harder to find.No, don’t misunderstand me. I adore the web, and they will have to wrench my Twitter feed from my cold dead hands. This isn’t going to turn into an antediluvian rant against the glories of our wired world. But there’s a reason why that word—“wired”—means both “connected to the internet” and “high, frantic, unable to concentrate”.In the age of the internet, physical paper books are a technology we need more, not less. In the 1950s, the novelist Herman Hesse wrote: “The more the need for entertainment and mainstream education can be met by new inventions, the more the book will recover its dignity and authority. We have not yet quite reached the point where young competitors, such as radio, cinema, etc, have taken over the functions from the book it can’t afford to lose.”31. By mentioning the work of Gary Steynghart, the author intends to ________.32. The most significant reason for the falling sales of paper books is that ________.33. According to paragraph 3, we can infer that ________.34. The explanation of the word “wired” probably indicates that ________.35. Which of the following will the author most probably agree on?

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So much data indicate the world’s progress towards meeting the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), a set of targets adopted by world leaders at the UN more than ten years ago. But the goal-setting exercise has further pitfalls. Too often, the goals are reduced to working out how much money is needed to meet a particular target. Yet the countries that have made most progress in cutting poverty have largely done so not by spending public money, but by encouraging faster economic growth. As Shanta Devarajan, the World Bank’s chief economist for Africa, points out, growth does not just make more money available for social spending. It also increases the demand for such things as schooling, and thus helps meet other development goals. Yet the goals, as drawn up, made no mention of economic growth.Of course growth by itself does not solve all the problems of the poor. It is also clear that while money helps, how it is spent and what it is spent on are enormously important. For instances, campaigners often ask for more to be spent on primary education. But throughout the developing world teachers on the public payroll are often absent from school. Teacher-absenteeism rates are around 20% in rural Kenya, 27% in Uganda and 14% in Ecuador.In any case, money that is allocated for such services rarely reaches its intended recipients. A study found that 70% of the money allocated for drugs and supplies by the Uganda government in 2000 was lost; in Ghana, 80% was siphoned off. Money needs to be spent, therefore, not merely on building more schools or hiring more teachers, but on getting them to do what they are paid for, and preventing resources from disappearing somewhere between the central government and their supposed destination.The good news is that policy experiments carried out by governments, NGOs, academics and international institutions are slowly building up a body of evidence about methods that work. A large-scale evaluation in Andhra Pradesh in southern India was shown, for example, that performance pay for teachers is three times as effective at raising pupil’s test scores as the equivalent amount spent on school supplies.And in Uganda the government, appalled that money meant for schools was not reaching them, took to publicizing how much was being allotted, using radio and newspaper. Money wastage was dramatically reduced. The World Bank hopes to bring such innovations to the notice of other governments during the summit, if it can. For if the drive against poverty succeed, it will owe more to such ideas and wider use than to targets set at UN-sponsored summits.26. According to the text, which of the following merits can’t we derive from economic growth?27. Teacher-absenteeism is cited as example ________.28. According to the author, we should ________ when dealing with allocated money.29. On which of the following would the author most probably agree?30. We may infer from the last paragraph that ________.

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Man and women do think differently, at least where the anatomy of the brain is concerned, according to a new study. The brain is made primarily of two different types of tissue, called gray matter and white matter. This new research reveals that men think more with their gray matter, and women think more with white. Researchers stressed that just because the two sexes think differently, this does not affect intellectual performance.Psychology professor Richard Haier of the University of California, Irvine led the research along with colleagues from the University of New Mexico. Their findings show that in general, men have nearly 6.5 times the amount of gray matter related to intelligence compared with women, whereas women have nearly 10 times the amount of white matter related to intelligence compared with men. “These findings suggested that human evolution has created two different types of brains designed for equally intelligent behavior,” said Haier, adding that, “by pinpointing these gender-based intelligence areas, the study has the potential to aid research on dementia and other cognitive-impairment diseases in the brain.”The results are detailed in the online version of the journal NeuroImage. In human brains, gray matter represents information processing centers, whereas white matter works to network these processing centers. The results from this study may help explain why men and women excel at different types of tasks, said co-author and neuropsychologist Rex Jung of the University of New Mexico. For example, men tend to do better with tasks requiring more localized processing, such as mathematics, Jung said, while women are better at integrating and assimilating information from distributed gray-matter regions of the brain, which aids language skills. Scientists find it very interesting that while men and women use two very different activity centers and neurological pathways, men and women perform equally well on broad measures of cognitive ability, such as intelligence tests.This research also gives insight to why different types of head injuries are more disastrous to one sex or the other. For example, in women 84 percent of gray matter regions and 86 percent of white matter regions involved in intellectual performance were located in the frontal lobes, whereas the percentages of these regions in a man’s frontal lobes are 45 percent and zero respectively. This matches up well with clinical data that shows frontal lobe damage in women to be much more destructive than the same type of damage in men. Both Haier and Jung hope that this research will someday help doctors diagnose brain disorders in men and women earlier, as well as provide help designing more effective and precise treatments for brain damage.21. Which of the following statements is true, according to paragraph 1?22. According to paragraph 2, this discovery is significant because ________.23. Which of the following statements is true about gray brain matter?24. Which of the following statements is false about white brain matter?25. The final paragraph suggests that ________.

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The good news made headlines nationwide: Deaths from several kinds of cancer have declined significantly in recent years. But the news has to be bittersweet for many cancer patients and their families. Every year, more than 500,000 people in the United States still die of cancer. In fact, more than half of all patients diagnosed with cancer will die of their disease within a few years. And while its true survival is longer today than in the past, the quality of life for these patients is often greatly diminished. Cancer—and many of the treatments used to fight it—causes pain, nausea, fatigue, and anxiety that routinely go undertreated or untreated.In the nation’s single-minded focus on curing cancer, we have inadvertently devalued the critical need for palliative care, which focuses on alleviating physical and psychological symptoms over the course of the disease. Nothing would have a greater impact on the daily lives of cancer patients and their families than good symptom control and supportive therapy. Yet the National Cancer Institute (NCI), the federal government’s leader in cancer research and training, spent less than one percent of its 1999 budget on any aspect of research or training in palliative care.The nation needs to get serious about reducing needless suffering. NCI should commit to and fund research aimed at improving symptom control and palliative care. NCI also could designate “centers of excellence” among the cancer centers it recognizes. To get that designation, centers would deliver innovative, top-quality palliative care to all segments of the populations the centers serve; train professionals in medicine, nursing, psychology, social work, and other disciplines to provide palliative care; and conduct research.Insurance coverage for palliative and hospice care also contributes to the problem by forcing people to choose between treatment or hospice care. This “either/or” approach does not readily allow these two types of essential care to be integrated. The Medicare hospice benefit is designed specifically for people in the final stages of illness and allows enrollment only if patients are expected to survive six months or less. The benefit excludes patients from seeking both palliative care and potentially life-extending treatment.That makes hospice enrollment an obvious deterrent for many patients. And hospices, which may have the most skilled practitioners and the most experience in administering palliative care, cannot offer their services to people who could really benefit but still are pursuing active treatment.It is innately human to comfort and provide care to those suffering from cancer, particularly those close to death. Yet what seems self-evident at an individual, personal level has not guided policy at the level of institutions in this country. Death is inevitable, but severe suffering is not. To offer hope for a long life of the highest possible quality and to deliver the best quality cancer care from diagnoses to death, our public institutions need to move toward policies that value and promote palliative care.16. Palliative care is concerned with improving patients’ ________.17. According to the author, research on palliative care ________.18. The main problem of insurance coverage for hospice care and active treatment is that ________.19. Hospices offer cancer patients ________.20. This text is mainly about ________.

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