单选题 Nothing succeeds in business books like the study of success. The current business-book boom was launched in 1982 by Tom Peters and Robert Waterman with In Search of Excellence. The trend has continued with a succession of experts and would-be experts who promise to distil the essence of excellence into three(or five or seven)simple rules.
The Three Rules is a self-conscious contribution to this type of writing; it even includes a bibliography of 'success studies'. Michael Raynor and Mumtaz Ahmed work for a consultancy, Deloitte, that is determined to turn itself into more of a thought-leader and less a corporate repairman. They employ all the tricks of the success books. They insist that their conclusions are 'measurable and actionable'—guides to behaviour rather than analysis for its own sake. Success authors usually serve up vivid stories about how exceptional businesspeople stamped their personalities on a company or rescued it from a life-threatening crisis. Messrs Raynor and Ahmed are happier chewing the numbers: they provide detailed appendices on 'calculating the elements of advantage' and 'detailed analysis'.
The authors spent five years studying the behaviour of their 344 'exceptional companies', only to come up at first with nothing. Every hunch(直觉)led to a blind alley and every hypothesis to a dead end. It was only when they shifted their attention from how companies behave to how they think that they began to make sense of their voluminous material.
Management is all about making difficult tradeoffs in conditions that are always uncertain and often fast-changing. But exceptional companies approach these tradeoffs with two simple rules in mind, sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously. First: better before cheaper. Companies are more likely to succeed in the long run if they compete on quality or performance than on price. Second: revenue before cost. Companies have more to gain in the long run from driving up revenue than by driving down costs.
Most success studies suffer from two faults. There is 'the halo(光环)effect', whereby good performance leads commentators to attribute all manner of virtues to anything and everything the company does. These virtues then suddenly become vices when the company fails. Messrs Raynor and Ahmed work hard to avoid these mistakes by studying large bodies of data over several decades. But they end up embracing a different error: stating the obvious. Most businesspeople will not be surprised to learn that it is better to find a profitable niche (隙缝市场) and focus on boosting your revenues than to compete on price and cut your way to success. The difficult question is how to find that profitable niche and protect it. There, The Three Rules is less useful.

单选题 What kind of business books are most likely to sell well?

单选题 What does the author imply about books on success so far?

【正确答案】 C

【答案解析】本题询问作者对当前成功学书籍的看法。第2段所举例说明的“The Three Rules”一书即为成功学书籍中的一员。第3句指出其作者采用了成功学书籍中的所有诀窍(tricks)。第5句又提到成功学书籍的作者们的惯常做法(usually)，即“在书中提供了大量生动故事，讲述那些卓越的企业家如何将公司刻上自己的人格烙印，或者如何将公司拯救于危难之时”。usually一词暗示这是大多数作者所采用的写作手法，即有雷同之处。因此选C项“他们或多或少陷入了同样的思维定势”。

单选题 How does The Three Rules differ from other success books according to the passage?

【正确答案】 B

【答案解析】本题询问《三大原则》一书与其他成功学书籍有何不同。第2段第5句中的Success authors usually...和第6句Messrs Raynor and Ahmed are happier...形成对比，后句明确说明Messrs Raynor和Ahmed更乐于仔细研究数据(chewing the numbers)，句中冒号后的内容对numbers一词进一步解释，两个detailed以及下一段首句的数据344和voluminous material都说明他们的数据非常庞大，因此B项“其详尽分析基于大量数据之上”为正确答案。

单选题 What does the passage say contributes to the success of exceptional companies?

单选题 What is the author's comment on The Three Rules?

【正确答案】 D

【答案解析】本题询问作者对“the Three Rules”一书的评价。最后一段倒数第2、3句指出，对于企业而言，找到能盈利的隙缝市场并专注于增加收益才是更好的办法，而难题是如何找到这个有利可图的隙缝市场并且保护它。最后一句指出这正是“The Three Rules”不尽如人意之处(less useful)，可见作者认为“The Three Rules”一书缺乏说明如何找到有利可图的隙缝市场并且保护它。D项“没能找出成功的关键”的表述与其相吻合。