单选题 What makes people shun the relative security of full-time employment and start up a business themselves?
The European Union wants to know, because with entrepreneurship come job creation and growth. For the past five years, the Union's head office has financed an annual poll of more than 21,000 people on both sides of the Atlantic. The most recent of these studies, released this week, shows that despite efforts to make the Union more competitive, the majority of its citizens remain consistently less entrepreneurial and more risk-averse than their American counterparts. That's not necessarily true of all Europeans: The word entrepreneur may be French, but the poll found that people from smaller countries like Portugal, Greece, Ireland and Latvia were much more enthusiastic about working for themselves. But putting regional variations aside, the bottom line for Europe was that fewer European respondents said they would choose self-employment—45 percent said it was their preference—than their American counterparts, at 61 percent. And the most striking part of the survey was the Europeans' explanations of their responses.
It has long been assumed here that red tape is holding back Europe's entrepreneurial spirit. With shorter waiting times to register companies and easier procedures for hiring, the argument goes, new European businesses would sprout like tulips in a Dutch greenhouse. The survey told a different story. Europeans essentially said they couldn't be bothered with the effort involved in starting a business: They wanted a regular, fixed income and a stable job. The upshot of this for Europe is that even if governments managed to cut red tape, their citizens might still prefer to have a comfortable job working for someone else. Only 5 percent of Europeans said fear of red tape or reluctance to battle bureaucracies was holding them back.
A corollary to this is the fear of failure in Europe. Half of all European respondents agreed with the statement, "One should not start a business if there is a risk it might fail. "Only one-third of Americans agreed. There were an estimated 20.5 million people working in start-up companies in the United States in 2003, the latest year for which data were available, according to the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, a London-based research organization. This is 23 times the number of those working at startups in France—far greater than the population differences between the two countries. The US number was also 9 times the number of those in Britain and more than 7 times that of Germany.
If Europe can successfully diminish the stigma of failure, more people would be willing to start their own businesses. "There is a completely different attitude toward risk," said Zourek of the European Commission, comparing Europe with the United States. In Europe," once you try a venture and you don't succeed, you don't get a second chance, but you get a stigma," he said. The European Union, he said, should make bankruptcy procedures less burdensome and make getting credit easier for risk-takers, even those who have failed before.
In this survey,55 percent of Europeans aged 15 to 24 said that it would be "desirable" for them to become self-employed in the next five years. Among those 55 and older, only 18 percent said the same. Young Europeans could be the motor of entrepreneurship. But with European countries having some of the lowest birth rates in the developed world, who will take their place?

单选题 What can we learn from the EU's poll?
A. Some smaller European countries show stronger desire to run their own enterprises.
B. Less than half Americans are risk-oriented.
C. The great majority of people in European countries prefer stable incomes.
D. Europeans are afraid of complicated policies of registering new companies.
【正确答案】 A
【答案解析】推理题。本文全文内容都是围绕欧盟的民意调查展开的，因此回答此题需要对全文内容进行综合考虑。A与第二段中“the poll tbund that people from smaller countries like Portugal, Greece, Ireland and Latvia were much more enthusiastic about working for themselyes.”内容一致，故为正确答案。B与文中所说“61%的美国人选择自主创业”不符；C“欧洲国家绝大多数人倾向于稳定的工资”过于绝对，与文意不符；D与文中第三段所说“欧洲人不是因为办事程序繁杂而放弃创业”的说法不一致。
单选题 What does the word "corollary" in Paragraph 4 mean?
A. An important reason. B. A potential reason.
C. An obvious result. D. A deductive result.
【正确答案】 D
【答案解析】语义题。前文对欧洲人不愿意自主创业的原因进行了猜测，然后根据调查结果否认了这一猜测。接下来的这一段讲到了另一个猜测：因为欧洲人害怕失败，之后分析了欧洲人为何害怕失败以及与美国人的对比等，确定这一猜测即为欧洲人不愿创业的真实原因。由上文可知，文中的结论是排除了其他猜测以及经过相应的分析而推导出来的，故D“推理出的结论”正确。
单选题 Which of the following is NOT the reason why Europeans and Americans regard" risk" differently?
A. According to related policies, Europeans only have one chance to run new companies.
B. Failure to try a venture leads to more serious result in Europe than in the US.
C. European tradition is more conservative than that of America.
D. The EU doesn't give enough support to European people to open their own companies.
【正确答案】 C
【答案解析】细节题。本题问欧洲人与美国人看待风险的不同态度，可对应到原文第四、五段。根据文中内容：欧洲人如果尝试一次创业而失败后就很难东山再起，各种政策都不支持创业。而美国人创业失败后压力就小得多，可以重新来过。文中并没有提到关于两地的人是否保守的问题，因此C不是欧洲人与美国人态度不同的原因。
单选题 What can we learn from the passage?
A. The population of America is more than 23 times of France.
B. There are more self-employed people in Britain than in Germany.
C. Most old Europeans are unwilling to meet risk.
D. All hope of European entrepreneurship lies in young people.
【正确答案】 C
【答案解析】推理题。A提到美国和法国的人口问题，在文中第四段后部分作者写到“This is 23 times the number of those working at startups in France—far greater than the population differences between the two countries.”美国自主创业的人数是法国的23倍，而这一比例远远高于两国的人口比例，由此可判断A错误；随后作者提到“The US number was also 9 times the number of those in Britain and more than 7 times that of Germany.”美国自主创业的人数是英国的9倍，德国的7倍多。由此可知，英国自主创业的人数少于德国，故B错误；文中第六段提到创业精神与年龄的调查，C与文中意思相符，为正确答案。虽然文中提到年轻人可能是欧洲人创业精神的推动力，但紧接着作者又写到：现在欧洲的人口出生率越来越低，我们又能指望谁呢?故排除D。
单选题 Which of the following is the best title for the passage?
A. European and American Risk-Takers B. European Fear to Start up Businesses
C. Hope of New European Enterprises D. European Entrepreneurship
【正确答案】 B
【答案解析】主旨题。本题四个选项的内容都在文章中提到过，但是对全文进行分析可以看出，作者用最大篇幅阐述的是欧洲人为何惧怕自主创业，重点是在分析欧洲人的恐惧，因此B最能概括全文主要内容，为最佳标题。