单选题 Our country has become a society of employees. A hundred years or so ago only one out of every five Americans at work was employed, i.e., worked for somebody else. Today only one out of five is not employed but working for himself. And when fifty years ago "being employed" meant working as a factory laborer or as a farmhand, the employee of today is increasingly a middle-class person with a substantial formal education, holding a professional or management job requiring intellectual and technical skills. Indeed, two things have characterized American society during these last fifty years: middle-class employees have been the fastest-growing groups in our working population-growing so fast that the industrial worker, the oldest child of the Industrial Revolution, has been losing in numerical importance despite the expansion of industrial production.
Yet you will find little on what it is to be an employee. You can find a great deal of very {{U}}dubious{{/U}} advice on how to get a job or how to get a promotion. You can also find a good deal of work in a chosen field, whether it be the mechanist's trade or book keeping. Every one of these trades requires different skills, sets different standards, and requires a different preparation. Yet they all have employeeship in common.
And increasingly, especially in the large business or in the government, employeeship is more important to success than the special professional knowledge or skill. Certainly more people fail because they do not know the requirements of being an employee than because they do not adequately possess the skills of their trade; the higher you climb the ladder, the more you get into administrative or executive work, the greater the emphasis on ability to work within the organization rather than on technical abilities or professional knowledge.

单选题 It is implied that fifty years ago ______.

A. eighty percent of American working people were employed in factories
B. twenty percent of American intellectuals were employees
C. the status of employees was pretty high
D. the employees were not as skilled and qualified as that of today

【正确答案】 D

【答案解析】[解析] 由文中第一段得知，五十年前的雇员基本上在工厂或农田里工作，而今天的雇员都是接受正式教育并且具备专业技能的。

单选题 According to the passage, with the development of modern industry, ______.

A. factory laborers will overtake intellectual employees in number
B. there are as many middle-class employees as factory laborers
C. employers have attached great importance to factory laborers
D. the proportion of factory laborers in the total employee population has decreased.

【正确答案】 D

【答案解析】[解析] 由文中第一段最后一句话得知，由于中产阶级的雇员的增加，工厂的工人已经在数量上失去了其优势。

单选题 The underlined word dubious in paragraph 2 most probably means ______.

A. valuable
B. useful
C. doubtful
D. helpful

【正确答案】 C

【答案解析】[解析] dubious意为“可疑的”，与doubtful为同义词。

单选题 According to the writer, professional knowledge or skill is ______.

A. less important than awareness of being a good employee
B. as important as the ability to deal with public relations
C. more important than employer-employee relations
D. as important as the ability to co-operate with others

【正确答案】 A

【答案解析】[解析] 参见文中第三段第一句话。

单选题 From the passage it can be seen that employeeship helps one ______.

A. to be more successful in his career
B. to be more specialized in his field
C. to gain professional ability
D. to develop his professional skill

【正确答案】 A

【答案解析】[解析] 由文中第三段Certainly more people fail because they do not know the requirements of being an employee...得知，处理好雇佣关系比专业技能更使人取得成功。