歷年考研英語(yǔ)閱讀理解2000年01

[00:03.48]2000 Passage1 [00:11.14]A history of long and effortless success [00:14.27]can be a dreadful handicap, [00:16.59]but, if properly handled, it may become a driving force. [00:22.35]When the United States entered just such a glowing period [00:25.77]after the end of the Second World War, [00:28.80]it had a market eight times larger than any competitor, [00:33.03]giving its industries unparalleled economies of scale. [00:37.96]Its scientists were the world's best, [00:41.43]its workers the most skilled. [00:44.45]America and Americans were prosperous [00:47.88]beyond the dreams of the Europeans [00:49.99]and Asians whose economies the war had destroyed. [00:55.04]It was inevitable that this primacy [00:57.65]should have narrowed as other countries grew richer. [01:01.49]Just as inevitably, the retreat [01:03.91]from predominance proved painful. [01:07.15]By the mid-1980s Americans had found themselves [01:11.08]at a loss over their fading industrial competitiveness. [01:15.98]Some huge American industries, [01:18.61]such as consumer electronics, [01:20.83]had shrunk or vanished [01:22.64]in the face of foreign competition. [01:25.67]By 1987 there was only one American television [01:30.10]maker left, Zenith. [01:32.73](Now there is none: Zenith was bought by [01:36.75]South Korea's LG Electronics in July.) [01:41.20]Foreign-made cars and textiles were sweeping into [01:44.64]the domestic market. [01:46.56]America's machine-tool industry was on the ropes. [01:50.76]For a while it looked as though [01:53.58]the making of semiconductors, [01:55.29]which America had invented [01:57.21]and which sat at the heart of the new computer age, [02:00.34]was going to be the next casualty. [02:03.77]All of this caused a crisis of confidence. [02:07.90]Americans stopped taking prosperity for granted. [02:12.13]They began to believe [02:13.63]that their way of doing business was failing, [02:16.85]and that their incomes [02:18.32]would therefore shortly begin to fall as well. [02:22.24]The mid-1980s brought one inquiry after another into [02:26.79]the causes of America's industrial decline. [02:30.73]Their sometimes sensational findings [02:33.45]were filled with warnings [02:34.87]about the growing competition from overseas. [02:38.80]How things have changed! [02:41.32]In 1995 the United States [02:44.35]can look back on five years of solid growth [02:47.77]while Japan has been struggling. [02:50.80]Few Americans attribute this solely to such obvious causes [02:55.23]as a devalued dollar or the turning of the business cycle. [02:59.77]Self-doubt has yielded to blind pride. [03:03.43]"American industry has changed its structure, [03:06.45]has gone on a diet, [03:08.16]has learnt to be more quick-witted," [03:10.48]according to Richard Cavanagh, [03:12.50]executive dean of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. [03:16.53]"It makes me proud to be an American just to see [03:20.16]how our businesses are improving their productivity," [03:23.59]says Stephen Moore of the Cato Institute, [03:26.21]a think-tank in Washington, DC. [03:28.93]And William Sahlman of [03:31.46]the Harvard Business School believes [03:33.59]that people will look back on this period as [03:36.61]"a golden age of business management in the United States."

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