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. The money they do invest is also more highly concentrated on professional and managerial employees. And the limited investments t hat 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. If American workers for example, take much longer to learn how to operate new flexible m anufacturing 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. 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. The result is a slower pace of technological change. 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.
26. Which of the following applies to the management of human resources in American companies?
A) They hire people at the lowest cost regardless of their skills.
B) They see the gaining of skills as their employees' own business.
C) They attach more importance to workers than equipment.
D) They only hire skilled workers because of keen competition.
27. What is the position of the head of humanresource management in an American firm?
A) He is one of the most important executives in the firms.
B) His post is likely to disappear when new technologies are introduced.
C) He is directly under the chief financial executive.
D) He has no say in making important decisions in the firm.
28. The money most American firms put in training mainly goes to _____.
A) workers who can operate new equipment
B) technological and managerial staff
C) workers who lack basic background skills
D) top executives
29. According to the passage, the decisive factor in maintaining a firm's competitive
advantage is __________.
A) the introduction of new technologies
B) the improvement of worker's basic skills
C) the rational composition of professional and managerial employees
D) the attachment of importance to the bottom half of the employees
30. What is the main idea of the passage?
A) American firms are different from Japanese and German firms in humanresource
management.
B) Extensive retraining is indispensable to effective humanresource management .
C) The head of humanresource management must be in the central position in a
firm's hierarchy.
D) The humanresource management strategies of American firms affect their
competitive capacity.
Questions 31 to 35 are based on the following passage:
The biographer has to dance between two shaky positions with respect to the subject(研究对象). Too close a relation, and the writer may lose objectivity. Not close enough, and the writer may lack the sympathy necessary to any effort to port ray a mind, a soulthe quality of life. Who should writer the biography of a family, for example? Because of their closeness to the subject, family members may have special information, but by the same token, they may not have the distance that would allow them to be fair. Similarly, a king's servant might not be the best one to write a biography of that king, But a foreigner might not have the knowledge and sympathy necessary to write the king's biography-not for a readership from within the kingdom, at any rate.
There is no ideal position for such a task. The biographer has to work with the position he or she has in the world, adjusting that position as necessary to deal with the subject. Every position has strengths and weaknesses: to thrive, a writer must try to become aware of these, evaluate them in terms of the subject. and select a position accordingly.
When their subjects are heroes or famous figures, biographies often reveal a democratic motive: they attempt to show that their subjects are only human, no better than anyone else. Other biographies are meant to change us, to invite us to become better than we are. The biographies of Jesus(耶稣) found in the Bible are in this class.
Biographers may claim that their account is the "authentic" one. In advancing this claim, they are helped if the biography is "authorized" by the subject; this presumably allows the biographer special access to private information. "Un authorized" biographies also have their appeal, however, since they can suggest an independence of mind in the biographer. In book promotions, the "unauthoriz ed" characterization usually suggests the prospect of juicy gossip that the subject had hoped to suppress. A subject might have several biographies, even sever al "authentic" ones. We sense intuitively that no one is in a position to tell "the" story of a life, perhaps not even the subject, and this has been proved by the history of biography.
31. According to the author, an ideal biographer would be one who ________.
A) knows the subject very well and yet maintains a proper distance from him
B) is close to the subject and knows the techniques of biography writing
C) is independent and treats the subject with fairness and objectivity
D) possesses special private information and is sympathetic toward the subject
32. The author cites the biographies of Jesus in the Bible in order to show that______.
A) the best biogrphies are meant to transform their readers
B) biographies are authentic accounts of their subjects' lives
C) the best biographies are those of heroes and famous figures
D) biographies can serve different purposes
33. Which of the following statements is true, according to the passage?
A) An authentic biography seldom appeals to its readers.
B) An authentic biography is one authorized by the subject.
C) No one can write a perfect biography.
D) Authorized biographies have a wider readership.
34. An unauthorized biography is likely to attract more readers because __________.
A) it portrays the subject both faithfully and vividly
B) it contains interesting information about the subject's private life
C) it reveals a lot of accurate details unknown to outsiders
D) it usually gives a sympathetic description of the subject's character
35. In this passage, the author focuses on __________.
A) the difficulty of a biographer in finding the proper perspective to do his job
B) the secret of a biographer to win more readers
C) the techniques required of a biographer to write a good biography
D) the characteristics of different kinds of biographies
Questions 36 to 40 are based on the following passage:
Whether the eyes are "the windows of the soul" is debatable; that they are intensely important in interpersonal communication is a fact. During the first two months of a baby's life, the stimulus that produces a smile is a pair of eyes. T he eyes need not be real: a mask with two dots will produce a smile. Significantly, a real human face with eyes covered will not motivate a smile, nor will the sight of only one eye when the face is presented in profile. This attraction to eyes as opposed to the nose or mouth continues as the baby matures. In one study , when American fouryearolds were asked to draw people, 75 percent of them d re w people with mouths, but 99 percent of them drew people with eyes. In Japan, however, where babies are carried on their mother's back, infants do not acquire a s much attachment to eyes as they do in other cultures. As a result, Japanese adults make little use of the face either to encode(把…编码) or decode(理解) meaning. In fact, Argyle reveals that the "proper place to focus one's gaze during a conversation in Japan is on the neck of one's conversation partner."
The role of eye contact in a conversational exchange between two Americans is well defined; speakers make contact with the eyes of their listener for about one second, then glance away as they talk; in a few moments they reestablish e y e contact with the listener or reassure the selves that their audience is still a ttentive, then shift their gaze away once more. Listeners, meanwhile, keep their eyes on the face of the speaker, allowing themselves to glance away only briefly. It is important that they be looking at the speaker at the precise moment when the speaker reestablishes eye contact: if they are not looking, the speaker assumes that they are disinterested and either will pause until eye contact is resumed or will terminate the conversation. Just how critical this eye maneuvering is to the maintenance of conversational flow becomes evident when two speakers are wearing dark glasses: there may be a sort of traffic jam of words caused by interruption, false starts, and unpredictable pauses.
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