单选题 How did a peddler of cheap shirts and fishing rods become the mightiest corporation in America? The short version of Wal-Mart"s rise to glory goes something like this: in 1979 it racked up a billion dollars in sales; by 1993 it did that much business in a week; by 2001 it could do it in a day. It"s a shocking tale—one that propelled Wal-Mart from rural Arkansas, where it was founded in 1962, to the top of the Fortune 500. Sam Walton, Wal-Mart"s founder pushed sales growth continuously while squeezing costs with sophisticated information technology. He exhorted employees to sell better with the "ten-foot rule"(greet customers if they are that close). He was, in other words, an early evangelist for the first commandment of today"s economy: service rules. Wal-Mart, in fact, is the first service company to rise to the top of Fortune 500. When Fortune first published its list of the largest companies in America in 1995, Wal-Mart didn"t even exist. That year General Motors was America"s biggest company, and in every year that followed, either GM or another mighty industrial, Exxon, was No. 1. Wal-Mart"s achievement caps a bigger economic shift—from producing goods to providing services. Manufacturing"s share of U. S. employment peaked in 1953, at 35%. It has been declining steadily since. In the decade that will end in 2010, the Bureau of Labor Statistics figures that goods-producing industries will create 1. 3 million new jobs, compared to 20 million for service industries. To look at it another way, today there are about four times as many people working in service jobs as in other kinds of jobs. And even within manufacturing, services are an increasingly large share of operations. As America got richer, consumption got more complicated. With more income to throw around, people started spending more on services—movies and travel, mortgages to buy houses, insurance to protect those houses, the occasional weekends at a luxury hotel; Fortune calls this a shift in the demand pattern. Over the few years, only three of the ten fastest-growing occupations(software engineers, nurses, and computer support)pay middle-class salaries. The rest could be called Wal-Mart kinds of jobs—cashiers, retail assistants, food service, and so on. In short, the service economy is delivering more good jobs than ever before.

【正确答案】 A

【答案解析】解析：这也是一道细节题。根据题干定位文章第三段倒数第二句话“today there areabout four times as many people working in service jobs as in other kinds of jobs”，意思是“今天在服务业中工作的人数大约是其他行业的4倍。”换句话说，有五分之四的人从事服务行业。因此选A。C项是利用文中第三段第四句话“In the decade that will end in 2010，…compared to 20 million for service industries”进行干扰，这句话是说在未来的10年里，会有2 000万人从事服务业，而不是说现在，因此可排除C。