单选题Brown, Smith and Robinson are

单选题 At the Museum of Sex in New York City, artificial-intelligence researcher David Levy projected a mock image on a screen of a smiling bride in a wedding dress holding hands with a short robot groom. "Why not marry a robot? Look at this happy couple," he said to a laughing crowd. When Levy was then asked whether anyone who would want to marry a robot was deceived, his face grew serious. "If the alternative is that you are lonely and sad and miserable, is it not better to find a robot that claims to love you and acts like it loves you?" Levy responded. "Does it really matter, if you're a happier person?" In his 2007 book, Love and Sex with Robots, Levy contends that sex, love and even marriage between humans and robots are coming soon and, perhaps, are even desirable. "I know some people think the idea is totally peculiar," he says. "But I am totally convinced it's inevitable." The 62-year-old London native has not reached this conclusion on a whim. Levy's academic love affair with computing began in his last year of university, during the vacuum-tube era. That is when he broadened his horizons beyond his passion for chess. "Back then people wrote chess programs to simulate human thought processes," he recalls. He later became engrossed in writing programs to carry on intelligent conversations with people, and then he explored the way humans interact with computers, a topic for which he earned his doctorate last year from the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands. Over the decades, Levy notes, interactions between humans and robots have become increasingly personal. Whereas robots initially found work, say, building cars in a factory, they have now moved into the home in the form of Roomba the robotic vacuum cleaner and digital pets such as Tamagotchis and the Sony Aibo. Science-fiction fans have witnessed plenty of action between humans and characters portraying artificial life-forms, such as with Data from the Star Trek franchise or the Cylons from the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica. And Levy is betting that a lot of people will fall in love with such devices. Programmers can tailor the machines to match a person's interests or render them some what disagreeable to create a desirable level of friction in a relationship. "It's not that people will fall in love with an algorithm but that people will fall in love with a convincing simulation of a human being, and convincing simulations can have a remarkable effect on people," he says.

单选题 Ten years ago, I got a call from a reporter at a big-city daily paper. "I'm writing a story on communication skills," she said. "Are communication skills important in business?" I assumed I had misheard her question, and after she repeated it for me I still didn't know how to respond. Are communication skills important? "Er, they are very important," I managed to squeak out. My brain said: Are breathing skills important? The reporter explained: "The people I've spoken with so far have been mixed on the subject." Ten years ago, we were trapped even deeper in the Age of Left-Brain Business. We were way into Six Sigma and ISO 9000 and spreadsheets and regulations and policies. We thought we could line-item budget our way to greatness, create shareholder value by tracking our employees' every keystroke, and employ a dress-code policy to win in the marketplace. And lots of us believed that order and uniformity could save the world-the business world, anyway. We had to go pretty far down that path before we caught onto the limits of process, technology, and linear thinking. The right brain is coming back into style in the business world, and {{U}}not a moment too soon{{/U}}. Smart salespeople say, "We've got compelling story that meshes with our customer's values and history." Strong leaders say, "We're creating a context for our team members that weaves their passions into ours." Consultants get big money for providing perspective on the "user experience." That's not a linear, analytical process. These days, we're talking about emotion again, and context and meaning. Thank goodness we are. I was about to choke on the death-by-spreadsheet diet, and I wasn't the only one. Job seekers get great jobs today by avoiding the Black Hole of Keyword-Searching Algorithms and going straight to a human decision-maker to share a story that links the job seeker's powerful history with the decision-maker's present pain. Leadership teams spend their off-site weekends talking about not the next 400 strategic initiatives on somebody's list but rather a story-type road map to keep the troops philosophically on board while they take the next hill. The right brain's return is coming just at the right time, when employees are sick of not only their jobs but also the cynical, hypocritical, and obsessively left-brain behaviors they see all around them in corporate life. Smart employers will grab this opportunity to lose the three-inch-thick policy manuals and enforcement mentality. There's no leverage in those, no spark, and no aha. We've seen where the left- brain mentality has gotten us: to the land of spreadsheets, with PowerPoints and burned-out shells where our workforce used to be.

单选题{{B}}Text 2{{/B}} President Bush has once again started speaking out for comprehensive immigration reform, and a draft plan to rally Republican senators on the issue is circulating just as Congressional hearings on the issue approach. Members of Congress recognize that voters are looking for real reform that rests on resolute, effective enforcement of our immigration laws. The only serious legislative proposal on the table offers such enforcement, because it focuses on making employers accountable for their hiring practices. To that end, the bill incorporates lessons learned from the largest immigration enforcement operation ever undertaken. Last December, Department of Homeland Security agents descended on meat processing plants run by Swirl & Company in six states, arresting more than 1,200 unauthorized workers. The arrests were astonishing because Swift participates in Basic Pilot, a voluntary Department of Homeland Security program that allows employers to electronically verify the work eligibility of newly hired workers against department and Social Security databases. The program is seen as the precursor for a verification system that would become mandatory with comprehensive immigration reform. Since Swirl was using the department's system, how did it end up with illegal workers? The Basic Pilot program has a fatal flaw, which is that it requires only electronic verification of employment qualification. An effective program should also insist on tamper-proof identification documents for job-seekers, incorporating biometrics like digital photographs and fingerprints to prove identity. Only then would it be possible to establish not only that job applicants are authorized to work, but also that they are who they say they are. Otherwise, valid Social Security numbers can be presented to employers, and Basic Pilot will verify them, but the numbers may not belong to the workers who present them. To insist on secure documents with biometric identifiers is not a call for a national ID. Green cards, temporary work permits and passports are secure and reliable for hiring purposes. Adding Social Security cards to this list, establishing a single standard for their security features, and replacing old cards over a designated period would resolve the problem on a national scale. Only then would employers be able to comply reliably with verification requirements as the basis for sound enforcement and, by extension, border control. Legal immigrants and American citizens could prove their identities and qualifications to work without facing discrimination based on appearance or language. Scarce enforcement resources could be spent on apprehending real criminals and addressing national security threats. And a new system of enforcement would at last have a chance to win back public confidence in the nation's immigration policies. After more than 20 years of failed efforts, Congress must not bake half a loaf. Secure biometric Social Security cards are an essential ingredient in any comprehensive immigration reform.

单选题The evolutionary process culminating in man was finally completed about 35,000 years ago with the appearance of Homo Sapiens, or "thinking man." (1) in broadest perspective, this represents the second major turning (2) in the course of (3) on this planet. The first occurred when life (4) out of inorganic matter. After that momentous (5) , all living forms evolved by adapting (6) their environment, as was evident during the climate turmoil of the Pleistocene. But with the (7) of man, the evolutionary process was (8) . No longer did genes adapt to environment. Instead, man adapted by changing the environment to (9) his genes. Today, a third (10) turning point appears (11) , as man's growing knowledge of the structure and function of genes may soon enable him to (12) his genes as well as his environment. Man, and only man, has been able to create a made-to-order environment, or culture, as it is called. The reason is (13) only man can symbolize, or (14) things and concepts divorced from here-and-now reality. Only he laughs, and only he knows that he will die. Only he has wondered (15) the universe and its origins, about his place in it and in the hereafter. With these unique and revolutionizing abilities, man has been able to (16) with his environment without alteration. His culture in the new no biological way of having fur in the Arctic, water storage in the desert, and fins in the water. More concretely, culture (17) tools, clothing, ornaments, institutions, language, art forms, and religious beliefs and (18) . All these have served to adapt man to his physical environment and to his fellowman. Indeed, story of man is simply the story of a (19) of cultures that he has created, form his Paleolithic (20) to the present day.

单选题For the moment, mind-reading is still science fiction. But that may not be true for much longer. Several lines of inquiry are converging on the idea that the neurological activity of the brain can be decoded directly, and people's thoughts revealed without being spoken. Just imagine the potential benefits. Such a development would allow both the fit and the disabled to operate machines merely by choosing what they want those machines to do. It would permit the profoundly handicapped to communicate more easily than is now possible even with the text-based speech engines used by the likes of Stephen Hawking. It might unlock the mental prisons of people apparently in comas, who nevertheless show some signs of neural activity. For the able-bodied, it could allow workers to dictate documents silently to computers simply by thinking about what they want to say. The most profound implication, however, is that it would abolish the ability to lie. Who could object to that? You will not bear false witness. Tell the truth, and shame the Devil. Transparency, which speaks for honesty in management, is put forward as the answer to most of today's evils. But honestly speaking, the truth of the matter is that this would lead to disaster, for lying is at the heart of civilization. People are not the only creatures who lie. Species from squids to chimpanzees have been caught doing it from time to time. But only human beings have turned lying into an art. Call it diplomacy, public relations or simple good manners: lying is one of the things that make the world go round. The occasional untruth makes domestic life possible, is essential in the office and forms a crucial part of parenting. Politics might be more entertaining without lies—"The prime minister has my full support" would be translated as, "If that half-wit persists in this insane course we'll all be out on our ears"—but a party system would be hard to sustain without the semblance of loyalty that dishonesty permits. The truly scary prospect, however, is the effect mind-reading would have on relations between the state and the individual. In a world in which the authorities could peep at people's thoughts, speaking truth to power would no longer be brave: it would be unavoidable. Information technology already means that physical privacy has become a scarce commodity. Websites track your interests and purchases. Mobile phones give away your location. Video cameras record what you are up to. Lose mental privacy as well, and there really will be nowhere. (423 words)

单选题In the dimly lit cyber-café at Sciences-Po, hot-house of the French elite, no Gauloise smoke fills the air, no dog-eared copies of Sartre lie on the tables. French students are doing what all students do: surfing the web via Google. Now President Jacques Chirac wants to stop this American cultural invasion by setting up a rival French search-engine. The idea was prompted by Google's plan to put online millions of texts from American and British university libraries. If English books are threatening to swamp cyberspace, Mr Chirac will not stand idly by. He asked his culture minister, Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres, and Jean-Noel Jeanneney, head of France's Bibliothèque Nationale, to do the same for French texts--and create a home-grown search-engine to browse them. Why not let Google do the job? Its French version is used for 74% of interuet searches in France. The answer is the vulgar criteria it uses to rank results. "I do not believe", wrote Mr Donnedieu de Vabres in Le Monde, "that the only key to access our culture should be the automatic ranking by popularity, which has been behind Google's success. " This is not the first time Google has met French resistance. A court has upheld a ruling against it, in a lawsuit brought by two firms that claimed its display of rival sponsored links (Google's chief source of revenues) constituted trademark counterfeiting. The French state news agency, Agence France-Presse, has also filed suit against Google for copyright infringement. Googlephobia is spreading. Mr Jeanneney has talked of the "risk of crushing domination by America in defining the view that future generations have of the world. " "I have nothing in particular against Google," he told L' Express, a magazine. "I simply note that this commercial company is the expression of the American system, in which the law of the market is king. " Advertising muscle and consumer demand should not triumph over good taste and cultural sophistication. The flaws in the French plan are obvious. If popularity cannot arbitrate, what will? Mr Jeanneney wants a "committee of experts". He appears to be serious, though the supply of French-speaking experts, or experts speaking any language for that matter, would seem to be insufficient. And if advertising is not to pay, will the taxpayer? The plan mirrors another of Mr Chirac's pet projects : a CNNà la franeaise. Over a year ago, stung by the power of English- speaking television news channels in the Iraq war, Mr Chirac promised to set up a French rival by the end of 2004. The project is bogged down by infighting. France's desire to combat English, on the web or the airwaves, is understandable. Protecting France's tongue from its citizens' inclination to adopt English words is an ancient hobby of the ruling elite. The Académie Francaise was set up in 1635 to that end. Linguists devise translations of cyber-terms, such as arrosage (spam) or bogue (bug). Laws limit the use of English on TV--" Super Nanny" and "Star Academy" are current pests--and impose translations of English slogans in advertising. Treating the invasion of English as a market failure that must be corrected by the state may look clumsy. In France it is just business as usual.

单选题The author mentioned Rinaldi's death in the text in order to

单选题It is not just Indian software and "business-process outsourcing" firms that are benefiting from the rise of the internet. Indian modern art is also on an upward spiral, driven by the aspirations of newly rich Indians, especially those living abroad, who use the internet to spot paintings and track prices at hundreds of gallery and auction websites. Prices have risen around 20-fold since 2000. particularly for prized names such as Tyeb Mehta and F.N. Souza. There would have been "no chance" of that happening so fast without the internet, says Arun Vadehra, who runs a gallery in Delhi and is an adviser to Christie's, an international auction house. He expects worldwide sales of Indian art, worth $ 200million last year, to double in 2006. It is still a tiny fraction of the $ 30 billion global art market, but is sizeable for an emerging market. For newly rich--often very rich--non-resident Indians, expensive art is a badge of success in a foreign land." Who you are, and what you have, are on your walls," says Lavesh Jagasia, an art dealer in Mumbai. Indian art may also beat other forms of investment. A painting by Mr. Mehta that fetched $ 1.58 million last September would have gone for little more than $ 100 000 just four years ago. And a $ 22million art-investment fund launched in July by Osian's, a big Indian auction house, has grown by 4.1% in its first two months. Scant attention was paid to modern Indian art until the end of the 1990s. Then wealthy Indians, particularly those living abroad, began to take an interest. Dinesh Vazirani, who runs Saffronart, a leading Indian auction site, says 60% of his sales go to buyers overseas. The focus now is on six auctions this month. Two took place in India last week; work by younger artists such as Surendran Naif and Shibu Natesan beat estimates by more than 70%. Sotheby's and Christie's have auctions in New York next week, each with a Tyeb Mehta that is expected to fetch more than $ 1 million. The real question is the fate of other works, including some by Mr. Souza with estimates of up to $ 600 000. If they do well, it will demonstrate that there is strong demand and will pull up prices across the board. This looks like a market with a long way to run.

单选题{{B}}Text 2{{/B}} The consequences of heavy drinking are well documented: failing health, broken marriages, regrettable late-night phone calls. But according to Gregory Luzaich's calculations, there can be a downside to modest drinking, too—though one that damages the wallet, not the liver. The Pek Wine Steward prevents wine from spoiling by injecting argon, an inert gas, into the bottle before sealing it airtight with silicon. Mr. Luzaich. a mechanical engineer in Windsor, Calif.—in the Sonoma County wine country—first tallied the costs of his reasonable consumption in October 2001. "I'd like to come home in the evening and have a glass of wine with dinner," he said. "My wife doesn't drink very much. so the bottle wouldn't get consumed. And maybe I would forget about it the next day, and I'd check back a day or two later, and the wine would be spoiled." That meant he was wasting most of a $15 to $20 bottle of wine. dozens of times a year. A cheek of the wine-preservation gadgets on the market left Mr. Luzaich dissatisfied High-end wine cabinets cost thousands of dollars—a huge investment for a glass-a-day drinker. Affordable preservers, meanwhile, didn't quite perform to Mr. Luzaich's liking; be thought they allowed too much oxidation, which degrades the taste of a wine. The solution, he decided, was a better gas. Many preservers pumped nitrogen into an opened bottle to slow a wine's decline, even though oenological literature suggested that argon was more effective. So when he began designing the Pek Wine Steward. a metal cone into which a wine bottle is inserted, Mr. Luzaich found that his main challenge was to figure out how best to introduce the argon. He spent months fine-tuning a gas injection system. "We used computational fluid dynamics to model the gas flow," Mr. Luzaich said. referring to a computer-analysis technique that measures how smoothly particles are flowing. The goal was to create an injector that could swap a bottle's oxygen atoms for argon atoms; argon is an inert gas, and thus unlikely to harm a nice Chianti. Mr. Luzaich, who had previously designed medical and telecommunications products, also worked on creating an airtight seal, to secure the bottle after the argon was injected. He experimented with several substances, from neoprene to a visco-elastic polymer (which he dismissed as "too gooey"), before settling on a food-grade silicon. To save wine, a bottle is placed inside the Pek Wine Steward, the top is closed, and a trigger is pulled for 5 to 10 seconds, depending on how much wine remains. When the trigger is released, the bottle is sealed automatically, preserving the wine for a week or more. the company says. "We wanted to make it very easy for the consumer," Mr. Luzaich said. "It's basically mindless." The device, which resembles a high-tech thermos, first became available to consumers in March 2004, and 8,000 to 10.000 have been sold, primarily through catalogs like those of The Wine Enthusiast and Hammacher Schlemmer The base model sells for $99; a deluxe model, which also includes a thermoelectric cooler, is $199

单选题{{B}}Text 4{{/B}} It has been a wretched few weeks for America's. celebrity bosses. AIG's Maurice Greenberg has been dramatically ousted from the firm through which he dominated global insurance for decades. At Morgan Stanley a mutiny is forcing Philip Purcell, a boss used to getting his own way, into an increasingly desperate campaign to save his skin. At Boeing, Harry Stonecipher was called out of retirement to lead the scandal-hit firm and raise ethical standards, only to commit a lapse of his own, being sacked for sending e-mails to a lover who was also an employee. Carly Fiorina was the most powerful woman in corporate America until a few weeks ago, when Hewlett-Packard (HP) sacked her for poor performance. The fate of Bernie Ebbers is much grimmer. The once high-profile boss of WorldCom could well spend the rest of his life behind bars following his conviction last month on fraud charges. In different ways, each of these examples appears to point to the same welcome conclusion: that the imbalance in corporate power of the late 1990s, when many bosses were allowed to behave like absolute monarchs, has been corrected. Alas, appearances can be deceptive. While each of these recent tales of chief-executive woo is a sis of progress, none provides much evidence that the crisis in American corporate governance is yet over. In fact, each of these cases is an example of failed, not successful, governance. At the very least, the beards of both Morgan Stanley and HP were far too slow to address their bosses' inadequacies. The record of the Boeing beard in picking chiefs prone to ethical lapses is too long to be dismissed as mere bad luck. The fall of Messrs Greenberg and Ebbers, meanwhile, highlights the growing role of government-and in particular, of criminal prosecutors in holding bosses to account: a development that is, at best, a mixed blessing. The Sarbanes-Oxley act, passed in haste following the Enron and WorldCom scandals, is imposing heavy costs on American companies; whether these are exceeded by any benefits is the subject of fierce debate and may not be known for years. Eliot Spitzer, New York's attorney-general, is the leading advocate and practitioner of an energetic "law enforcement" approach. He may be right that the recent burst of punitive actions has been good for the economy, even if some of his own decisions have been open to question. Where he is undoubtedly right is in arguing that corporate America has done a lamentable job of governing itself. As he says in an article in the Wall Street Journal this week: "The hour cede among CEOs didn't work. Board oversight didn't work. Ser-regulation was a complete failure." AIG's board, for example, did nothing about Mr Greenberg's use of murky accounting, or the conflicts posed by his use of offshore vehicles, or his constant bullying of his critics let alone the firm's alleged participation in bid-rigging--until Mr Spitzer threatened a criminal prosecution that might have destroyed the firm.

单选题In recent years American society has become increasingly dependent on its universities to find solutions to its major problems. It is the universities that have been charged with the principal responsibility for developing the expertise to place men on the moon; for dealing with our urban problems, and with our deteriorating environment; for developing the means to feed the world's rapidly increasing population. The effort involved in meeting these demands presents its own problems. In addition, this concentration on the creation of new knowledge significantly impinges on the universities' efforts to perform their other principal functions, the transmission and interpretation of knowledge -- the imparting of the heritage of the past and the preparing of the next generation to carry it forward. With regard to this, perhaps their most traditionally sanctioned task, colleges and universities today find themselves in a serious bind generally. On the one hand, there is the American commitment, entered into especially since World War II, to provide higher education for all young people who can profit from it. The result of the commitment has been a dramatic rise in enrollments in our universities, coupled with a radical shift from the private to the public sector of higher education. On the other hand, there are serious and continuing limitations on the resources available for higher education. While higher education has become a great "growth industry", it is also simultaneously a tremendous drain on the resources of the nation. With the vast increase in enrollment and the shift in priorities away from education in state and federal budgets, there is in most of our public institutions a significant decrease in per capita outlay for their students. One crucial aspect of this drain on resources lies in the persistent shortage of trained faculty, which has led, in turn, to a declining standard of competence in instruction. Intensifying these difficulties is, as indicated above, the concern with research, with its competing claims on resources and the attention of the faculty. In addition, there is a strong tendency for the institutions' organization and functioning to conform to the demands of research rather thorn those of teaching.

单选题{{B}}Text 3{{/B}} A pair of dice, rolled again and again, will eventually produce two sixes. Similarly, the virus that causes influenza is constantly changing at random and, one day, will mutate in a way that will enable it to infect billions of people, and to kill millions. Many experts now believe a global outbreak of pandemic flu is overdue, and that the next one could be as bad as the one in 1918, which killed somewhere between 25m and 50m people. Today however, advances in medicine offer real hope that another such outbreak can be contained-if governments start preparing now. New research published this week suggests that a relatively small stockpile of an antiviral drug-as little as 3m doses--could be enough to limit sharply a flu pandemic if the drugs were deployed quickly to people in the area surrounding the initial outbreak. The drug's manufacturer, Roche, is talking to the World Health Organisation about donating such a stockpile. This is good news. But much more needs to be done, especially with a nasty strain of avian flu spreading in Asia which could mutate into a threat to humans. Since the SARS outbreak in 2003 a few countries have developed plans in preparation for similar episodes. But progress has been shamefully patchy, and there is still far too little international coordination. A global stockpile of drugs alone would not be much use without an adequate system of surveillance to identify early cases and a way of delivering treatment quickly, If an outbreak occurred in a border region, for example, a swift response would most likely depend on prior agreements between different countries about quarantine and containment. Reaching such agreements is rarely easy, but that makes the task all the more urgent, Rich countries tend to be better prepared than poor ones, but this should be no consolation to them. Flu does not respect borders. It is in everyone's interest to make sure that developing countries, especially in Asia, are also well prepared. Many may bridle at interference from outside. But if richer nations were willing to donate anti-viral drugs and guarantee a supply of any vaccine that becomes available, poorer nations might be willing to reach agreements over surveillance and preparedness. Simply sorting out a few details now will have lives (and recriminations) later. Will there be enough ventilators, makes and drugs? Where will people be treated if the hospitals overflow? Will food be delivered as normal? Too many countries have no answers to these questions.

单选题Aimee Hunter, a research psychologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, has long studied individual responses to antidepressants. Being skeptical of the true effectiveness of the drugs, she says she was originally interested in researching the impact of placebos. But over the years, her own data began convincing her otherwise. "I've come to see now, by doing the research myself and spending hours looking at numbers, that the medication is absolutely doing something," Hunter says. In an earlier study that Hunter published in 2009, she and her team used the same QEEG technique on 58 patients, who were given a placebo daily for one week before being randomized to take either placebo or an active drug. Researchers found distinct patterns of brain activity in the patients; not everyone responded to the placebo the same way. "We found that changes in brain function occurring during the first week of placebo predicted who will do well on medication," she says. The region where changes were recorded—in the prefrontal lobe—is thought to be involved in generating expectations. A common explanation for the placebo effect is that the mere anticipation of improvement begets real benefit. But in the case of Hunter's patients, the changes in brain activity predicted actual response to the antidepressant , not to placebo. Intriguingly, in patients who showed the specific brain response associated with antidepressant-related recovery, the most significant improvement was seen in what psychologists call interpersonal sensitivity how people respond to either positive or negative social events. When suffering from depression, patients tend to become inured to positive social cues and oversensitized to negative ones. They may interpret a passerby's frown as being directed at them, for instance, and some research has found that depressed people are more likely to misidentify smiling faces as conveying neutral or negative emotions. The patients who improved with medication in Hunter's study "were less sensitive to rejection and more comfortable with others," she says. Reducing emotional sensitivity—not treating depression per se—is what medications like Prozac, which affect the levels of serotonin in the brain, do best, according to Healy. If that entire class of drugs had been studied and marketed as pills to reduce emotional reactivity rather than depression, he says, "the placebo response would be very small compared to the drug. " Still, treating a patient's oversensitivity does not necessarily help depression. For some people whose illness is marked by social dread and misperceived rejections, reducing that anxiety could be critical. But for someone whose depression is primarily experienced as deep sadness and inability to feel pleasure, blunting emotional sensitivity may do little good. These differences further explain why the drugs may produce such varied individual responses. Evidence suggests that about 80% of people with depression can be helped by drugs, talk therapy or a combination of the two, so although it is critical to figure out which treatments work for which patients, the larger question remains: Why aren't most patients getting good care, and why do we continue to insist that so many of those taking antidepressants don't really need them?

单选题{{B}}Text 2{{/B}} Large, multinational corporations may be the companies whose ups and downs seize headlines. But to a far greater extent than most Americans realize, the economy' s vitality depends on the fortunes of tiny shops and restaurants, neighborhood services and factories. Small businesses, defined as those with fewer than 100 workers, now employ nearly 60 percent of the work force and are expected to generate half of ail new jobs between now and the year 2000. Some 1.2 million small firms have opened their doors over the past six years of economic growth, and 1989 will see an additional 200,000 entrepreneurs striking off on their own. Too many of these pioneers, however, will blaze ahead unprepared. Idealists will overestimate the clamor for their products or fail to factor in the competition. Nearly everyone will underestimate, often fatally, the capital that success requires. Midcareer executives, forced by a takeover or a restructuring to quit the corporation and find another way to support themselves, may savor the idea of being their own boss but may forget that entrepreneurs must also, at least for a while, be bookkeeper and receptionist, too. According to Small Business Administration data,24 of every 100 businesses starting out today are likely to have disappeared in two years, and 27 more will have shut their doors four years from now. By 1995, more than 60 of those 100 start-ups will have folded. A new study of 3,000 small businesses, sponsored by American Express and the National Federation of Independent Business, suggests slightly better odds: Three years after start-up ,77 percent of the companies surveyed were still alive. Most credited their success in large part to having picked a business they already were comfortable in. Eighty percent had worked with the same product or service in their last jobs. Thinking through an enterprise before the launch is obviously critical. But many entrepreneurs forget that a firm' s health in its infancy may be little indication of how well it will age. You mast tenderly monitor its pulse. In their zeal to expand, small-business owners often ignore early warning signs of a stagnant market or of decaying profitability. They hopefully pour more and more money into the enterprise, preferring not to acknowledge eroding profit margins that mean the market for their ingenious service or product has evaporated, or that they must cut the payroll or vacate their lavish offices. Only when the financial well runs dry do they see the seriousness of the illness, and by then the patient is usually too far gone to save. Frequent checks of your firm's vital signs will also guide you to a sensible rate of growth. To snatch opportunity, you must spot the signals that it is time to conquer new markets, add products or perhaps franchise your hot idea.

单选题It can be inferred from the passage that which of the following presents the greatest danger to diver?