单选题

Some pioneering work that began as an attempt to discover ways to increase production efficiency led to the founding of the human relations movement in industry and to the development of motivational skills and tools for managers. In 1927 researchers were involved in determining the {{U}}optimum{{/U}} amount of lighting, temperature, and humidity (with lighting being considered the most important) for the assembly of electronic components at Western Electric. The researchers found that lighting had no consistent effect on production. In fact, production sometimes increased when lighting was reduced to the level of ordinary moonlight! The important part of this experiment began when two Harvard researchers, Elton Mayo and Fritz Roethlisberger, were brought in to investigate these unexpected results further. They found that workers were responding not to the level of lighting but to the fact that they were being observed by the experimenters.
This phenomenon came to be known as the Hawthorne effect since the experiments were conducted at the Western Electric Hawthorne Plant. This was the first documented and widely published evidence of the psychological effects on doing work, and {{U}}it{{/U}} led to the first serious effort aimed at examining psychological and social factors in the workplace. Further experiments were continued for five years. Generally, the researchers concluded from their experiments that economic motivation (pay) was not the sole source of productivity and, in some cases, not even the most important source. Through interviews and test results, the researchers focused on the effects of work attitudes, supervision, and the peer group and other social forces, on productivity.
Their findings laid the groundwork for modem motivation theory, and the study of human factors on the job, which continues to this day in such common practices as selection and training, establishing favorable work conditions, counseling, and personnel operations. The contributions of this experiment shifted the focus of human motivation from economics to a {{U}}multifaceted{{/U}} approach including psychological and social forces.

单选题 What is the passage primarily about?

【正确答案】 D

【答案解析】[分析] 主旨题型通读全文可见，文章一开始就提出了：始于一种试图去发现一些增加生产效率的开创性工作导致了产业中人事关系发展的建立以及管理人员对技巧和手段内在要求的提高；由此引出了下面的试验和研究及其研究结果；本文的大部分篇幅放在了来自于哈佛大学的两个研究人员Elton Mayo and Fritz Roethlisberger在the Western Electric Hawthorne Plant所做的试验及由此产生的霍桑效应(the Hawthorne effect)和此试验带来的贡献。因此选项D为答案。

单选题 The word "optimum" underlined in Paragraph 1 most probably means ______.

单选题 The most significant finding of the original research was ______.

单选题 Why does the author say that the important part of this research began when two Harvard researchers were brought in?

【正确答案】 B

【答案解析】[分析] 推断题型见第一段最后两句：当来自哈佛的两个研究人员Elton Mayo and Fritz Roethlisberger被引进来进一步研究这些未预料的结果时，他们发现了这一试验的重要部分，即工人们对照明水平并没什么反应，而对被实施研究者关注却有很大的反应。因为这个发现推翻了原有的假设(照明是最为重要的)，而有了一个新的发现(即后面所说的“霍桑效应”)，因此作者认为这两个人的引进使得这一研究不局限在原来设想的照明、温度、湿度等方面，而是多方面地进行了研究，使得研究的重要部分出现了；所以答案为B。