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  3. A history of long and effortless success can be a dreadful handicap, but, if

A history of long and effortless success can be a dreadful handicap, but, if

游客2025-04-02  28
问题     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. Its scientists were the world’s best, its workers the most skilled. 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. Some huge American industries, such as consumer electronics, had shrunk or vanished in the face of foreign competition. 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. For a while it looked as though the making of semiconductors, which America had invented and which sat at the heart of the new computer age, was going to be the next casualty.
    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. The mid-1980s brought one inquiry after another into the causes of America’s industrial decline. Their sometimes sensational findings were filled with warnings about the growing competition from overseas.
    How things have changed! 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 Management. "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. 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". [br] The loss of U.S. predominance in the world economy in the 1980s is manifested in the fact that the American ______.
选项 A、TV industry had withdrawn to its domestic market
B、semiconductor industry had been taken over by foreign enterprises
C、machine-tool industry had collapsed after suicidal actions
D、auto industry had lost part of its domestic market
答案 D
解析 本题可参照文章的第2段。从中可知，但随着其他国家日趋富强，(美国)的领先地位不可避免地被削弱了。优势渐少的感觉让人痛苦也是必然的。到80年代中期，美国人对日趋衰退的工业竞争能力迷惑不解。一些像消费电子产品之类的大工业在面对国外的竞争时已经萎缩或逐渐消失。到1987年，仅剩下Zenith一家电视制造商。(而如今一家也没有了，Zenith于当年7月被韩国的LG电器公司收购)。外国制造的轿车和纺织品正蜂拥进入美国国内市场。美国机床工业处于艰难发展时期。美国发明的在计算机新时代占主要地位的半导体制造业，有段时间也好像一度濒临破产。据此可知，20世纪80年代，美国失去了在世界经济中的领先地位，许多企业受到影响，外国制造的汽车和纺织品涌入美国国内市场，使其失去了部分国内市场。D项与文章意思相符，因此D项为正确答案。
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