Passage One

 

Questions 21 to 25 are based on the following passage.

 

      Bill Gates, the billionaire Microsoft chairman without a single earned university degree, is by his success raising new doubts about the worth of the business world’s favorite academic title: the MBA (Master of Business Administration).

      The MBA, a 20th-century product, always has borne the mark of lowly commerce and greed (

贪婪) on the tree-lined campuses ruled by purer disciplines such as philosophy and literature.

      But even with the recession apparently cutting into the hiring of business school graduates, about 79,000 people are expected to receive MBAs in 1993. This is nearly 16 times the number of business graduates in 1960, a testimony to the widespread assumption that the MBA is vital for young men and women who want to run companies some day.

      “If you are going into the corporate world it is still a disadvantage not to have one,” said Donald Morrison, professor of marketing and management science. “But in the last five years or so, when someone says, ‘Should I attempt to get an MBA,’ the answer a lot more is: It depends.”

      The success of Bill Gates and other non-MBAs, such as the late Sam Walton of Wal-Mart Stores Inc., has helped inspire self-conscious debates on business school campuses over the worth of a business degree and whether management skills can be taught.

      The Harvard Business Review printed a lively, fictional exchange of letters to dramatize complaints about business degree holders.

      The article called MBA hires “extremely disappointing” and said “MBAs want to move up too fast, they don’t understand politics and people, and they aren’t able to function as part of a team until their third year. But by then, they’re out looking for other jobs.”

      The problem, most participants in the debate acknowledge, is that the MBA has acquired an aura (

光环) of future riches and power far beyond its actual importance and usefulness.

      Enrollment in business schools exploded in the 1970s and 1980s and created the assumption that no one who pursued a business career could do without one. The growth was fueled by a backlash (

反冲) against the anti-business values of the 1960s and by the women’s movement.

      Business people who have hired or worked with MBAs say those with the degrees often know how to analyze systems but are not so skillful at motivating people. “They don’t get a lot of grounding in the people side of the business,” said James Shaffer, vice-president and principal of the Towers Perrin management consulting firm.

Passage Two

 

Questions 26 to 30 are based on the following passage.

 

 

       When school officials in Kalkaska, Michigan, closed classes last week, the media flocked to the story, portraying the town’s 2,305 students as victims of stingy (

吝啬的) taxpayers. There is some truth to that; the property-tax rate here is one-third lower than the state average. But shutting their schools also allowed Kalkaska’s educators and the state’s largest teachers’ union, the Michigan Education Association, to make a political point. Their aim was to spur passage of legislation Michigan lawmakers are debating to increase the state’s share of school funding.

       It was no coincidence that Kalkaska shut its schools two weeks after residents rejected a 28 percent property-tax increase. The school board argued that without the increase it lacked the $1.5 million needed to keep schools open.

       But the school system had not done all it could to keep the schools open. Officials declined to borrow against next year’s state aid, they refused to trim extracurricular activities and they did not consider seeking a smaller—perhaps more acceptable—tax increase. In fact, closing early is costing Kalkaska a significant amount, including $600,000 in unemployment payments to teachers and staff and $250,000 in

lost state aid. In February, the school system promised teachers and staff two months of retirement payments in case schools closed early, a deal that will cost the district $275,000 more.

       Other signs suggest school authorities were at least as eager to make a political statement as to keep schools open. The Michigan Education Association hired a public relations firm to stage a rally marking the school closings, which attracted 14 local and national television stations and networks. The president of the National Education Association, the MEA’s parent organization, flew from Washington, D. C., for the event. And the union tutored school officials in the art of television interviews. School supervisor Doyle Disbrow acknowledges the district could have kept schools open by cutting programs but denies the moves were politically motivated.

       Michigan

lawmakers have reacted angrily to the closings. The state Senate has already voted to put the system into receivership (破产管理) and reopen schools immediately; the Michigan House plans to consider the bill this week.

Passage Three

 

Questions 31 to 35 are based on the following passage.

 

 

       German Chancellor (

首相) Otto Von Bismarck may be most famous for his military and diplomatic talent, but his legacy (遗产) includes many of today’s social insurance programs. During the middle of the 19th century, Germany, along with other European nations, experienced an unprecedented rash of workplace deaths and accidents as a result of growing industrialization. Motivated in part by Christian compassion (怜悯) for the helpless as well as a practical political impulse to undercut the support of the socialist labor movement, Chancellor Bismarck created the world’s first workers’ compensation law in 1884.

       By 1908, the United States

was the only industrial nation in the world that lacked workers’ compensation insurance. America’s injured workers could sue for damages in a court of law, but they still faced a number of tough legal barriers. For example, employees had to prove that their injuries directly resulted from employer negligence and that they themselves were ignorant about potential hazards in the workplace. The first state workers’ compensation law in this country passed in 1911, and the program soon spread throughout the nation.

       After World War II, benefit payments to American workers did not keep up with the cost of living. In fact, real benefit levels were lower in the 1970s than they were in the 1940s, and in most states the maximum benefit was below the poverty level for a family of four. In 1970, President Richard Nixon set up a national commission to study the problems of workers’ compensation. Two years later, the commission issued 19 key recommendations, including one that called for increasing compensation benefit levels to 100 percent of the states’ average weekly wages.

       In fact, the average compensation benefit in America

has climbed from 55 percent of the states’ average weekly wages in 1972 to 97 percent today. But, as most studies show, every 10 percent increase in compensation benefits results in a 5 percent increase in the numbers of workers who file for claims. And with so much more money floating in the workers’ compensation system, it’s not surprising that doctors and lawyers have helped themselves to a large slice of the growing pie.

Passage Four

 

Questions 36 to 40 are based on the following passage.

 

 

       Early in the age of affluence (

富裕) that followed World War II, an American retailing analyst named Victor Lebow proclaimed, “Our enormously productive economy ... demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction, in consumption. ... We need things consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced and discarded at an ever increasing rate.”

       Americans have responded to Lebow’s call, and much of the world has followed.

       Consumption has become a central pillar of life in industrial lands and is even embedded in social values. Opinion surveys in the world’s two largest economies—Japan and the United Sates—show consumerist definitions of success becoming ever more prevalent.

       Overconsumption by the world’s fortunate is an environmental problem unmatched in severity by anything but perhaps population growth. Their surging exploitation of resources threatens to exhaust or unalterably spoil forests, soils, water, air and climate.

       Ironically, high consumption may be a mixed blessing in human terms, too. The time-honored values of integrity of character, good work, friendship, family and community have often been sacrificed in the rush to riches.

       Thus many in the industrial lands have a sense that their world of plenty is somehow hollow—that, misled by a consumerist culture, they have been fruitlessly attempting to satisfy what are essentially social, psychological and spiritual needs with material things.

       Of course, the opposite of overconsumption—poverty—is no solution to either environmental or human problems. It is infinitely worse for people and bad for the natural world too. Dispossessed (

被剥夺得一无所有的) peasants slash-and-burn their way into the rain forests of Latin America, and hungry nomads (游牧民族) turn their herds out onto fragile African grassland, reducing it to desert.

       If environmental destruction results when people have either too little or too much, we are left to wonder how much is enough. What level of consumption can the earth support? When does having more cease to add noticeably to human satisfaction?