单选题Directions:Read the following four passages. Answer the
questions below by choosing A, B, C or D. Thanks to
closed doors and fierce gatekeepers, bosses are tricky to observe in their
natural habitat. Yet it might be useful to know what they do all day, and
whether any of it benefits shareholders. A new Harvard Business School working
paper sheds some light. Researchers asked the chief executives
of 94 Italian firms to have their assistants record their activities for a week.
You may take this with a grain of salt. Is the boss's assistant a neutral
observer? If the boss spends his lunch hour drinking a lot, or in a motel with
his assistant, will she record this truthfully? Nonetheless, here are the
results. The average Italian boss works for 48 hours a week and
spends 60% of that time in meetings. The most diligent put in another 20 hours.
And the longer they work, the better the company does. Less
diligent chief executives are more likely to have one-to-one meetings with
people from outside the company. The authors speculate that such people are
trying to raise their own profile, perhaps to secure a better job. Bosses who
work longer hours, by contrast, spend more of them meeting their own
employees. Bosses often complain that they get bogged down in
day-to-day operations, says Rajesh Chandy, a professor at the London Business
School. Regulations that make them legally responsible for their underlings'
wrongdoings are partly to blame. The prospect of jail is a powerful
attention-grabber. Many bosses also feel they must dash around the world
pitching to clients. Mr Chandy thinks bosses should spend less time with clients
and more time thinking about the future. How much time they
spend thinking about anything is hard to measure. But in an experiment, Mr
Chandy measured how often bosses use forward-looking words like "will" and
"shall" in their public statements. He concluded that bosses spend only 3%～4% of
their day thinking about long-term strategy. Brian Sullivan,
the chief executive of CTPartners, a headhunting firm, says the most difficult
part of his job is saying no to people who want a piece of his time. Mr Sullivan
says the only time he gets for blue-sky thinking is when he is in the
sky. Bill Gates took regular "think weeks", when he would sit
alone in a cabin for 18 hours a day reading and contemplating. This, it is said,
led to such strategic masterstrokes as "the Internet tidal wave memo" in 1995,
which shifted Microsofrs focus to the web. But not every boss thinks he needs
more time for thinking. "You can hire McKinsey to do that for you," says
one.
单选题
The author estimates that people's attitude towards the working paper
of Harvard Business School might be ______.
A. critical
B. suspicious
C. interested
D. neutral
【正确答案】
B
【答案解析】[考点] 观点态度题
[解析] 文章第二段第一句具体介绍了调查研究的对象以及方法，接下来作者就说了“you may take this with a grain of salt”，其中with a grain of salt意为“持保留意见；大打折扣”可知人们可能会对此持怀疑态度。然后第三句和第四句又说明了人们的疑虑之处，由此可知B为正确答案。
单选题
The bosses spend more time meeting people outside the company because
they plan to ______.
A. develop more business with other companies
B. get more information of other companies
C. improve their own public impression
D. recruit more talented employees from other companies
【正确答案】
C
【答案解析】[考点] 事实细节题
[解析] 第四段第一句提到了工作不勤奋的首席执行官更可能与公司以外的人员进行一对一的会面，第二句给出原因：“...such people are trying to raise their own profile”，可知这些人是在试图提高他们自己的公众形象，所以C为正确答案。A、B在文中并未提及，故排除；第二句后半句“perhaps to secure a better job”表明这些人提高自己的形象的目的是为了获得更好的工作，而不是D所表述的内容，故排除。
单选题
According to Paragraph 5, which of the following statement is NOT true?
A. Bosses always feel annoyed at the endless routine work
B. Some bosses might be put into prison due to their employees'
misconduct
C. Many bosses think they need to market their products all over the
world
D. Bosses are supposed to spend more time talking with their
customers
【正确答案】
D
【答案解析】[考点] 事实细节题
[解析] 由第五段最后一句“Mr. Chandy thinks bosses should spend less time with clients and more time thinking about the future”可知，老板应该少花时间应酬客户，多花时间思考公司的未来，由此可推知，D项陈述错误，为正确答案。由本段第一句“Bosses often complain that they get stuck in day-to-day operations”可知，老板们经常抱怨他们深陷日常事务的运作中，所以A正确，排除。第二句和第三句提到一些法规规定老板要为其下属的违法行为负责，因此蹲监狱的可能性牢牢地牵绊了老板们的注意力，所以B正确，排除；第四句提到许多老板还认为他们应该满世界奔波把产品推销给客户，C选项也正确，排除。
单选题
What kind of company McKinsey might be?
A. A strategy consulting corporation
B. A headhunting firm
C. A software design company
D. An employment agency
【正确答案】
A
【答案解析】[考点] 推理判断题
[解析] 最后一段通过比尔·盖茨的例子说明老板花时间思考公司长期战略的重要性，倒数第二句“But not every boss thinks he needs more time for thinking. ”表明，并不是每个老板都认为有必要思考公司的未来，接着说“You can hire McKinsey to do that for you', says one. ”可知，其中一位老板认为可以雇佣麦肯锡做这件事，综合上文，这里指的就是上一句中的“思考公司的未来战略”，可推知，麦肯锡能帮助公司规划长期战略，所以A“战略咨询公司”为正确答案。
单选题
The most appropriate title for the text could be ______.