2000年研究生考试英语阅读真题分篇 text-1

2021年1月16日发(作者：刘卫伟)
2000年全国硕士研究生入学统一考试英语试题
Text 1
A history of long and effortless success can be a dreadful handicap, but, if properly handled, it
may become a driving force. When the United States entered just such a glowing period after the
end of the Second World War, it had a market eight times larger than any competitor, giving its
industries unparalleled economies of scale. Its scientists were the world’s best, its workers the most
skilled. America and Americans were prosperous beyond the dreams of the Europeans and Asians
whose economies the war had destroyed.
It was inevitable that this primacy should have narrowed as other countries grew richer. Just as
inevitably, the retreat from predominance proved painful. By the mid-1980s Americans had found
themselves at a loss over their fading industrial competitiveness. Some huge American industries,
such as consumer electronics, had shrunk or vanished in the face of foreign competition. By 1987
there was only one American television maker left, Zenith. (Now there is none: Zenith was bought
by South Korea’s LG Electronics in July.) Foreign-made cars and textiles were sweeping into the
domestic market. America’s machine-tool industry was on the ropes. For a while it looked as though
the making of semiconductors, which America had invented and which sat at the heart of the new
computer age, was going to be the next casualty.
All of this caused a crisis of confidence. Americans stopped taking prosperity for granted. They
began to believe that their way of doing business was failing, and that their incomes would therefore
shortly begin to fall as well. The mid-1980s brought one inquiry after another into the causes of
America’s industrial decline. Their sometimes sensational findings were filled with warnings about
the growing competition from overseas.
How things have changed! In 1995 the United States can look back on five years of solid
growth while Japan has been struggling. Few Americans attribute this solely to such obvious causes
as a devalued dollar or the turning of the business cycle. Self- doubt has yielded to blind pride.
“American industry has changed its structure, has gone on a diet, has learnt to be more
quick-witted,” according to Richard Cavanagh, executive dean of Harvard’s Kennedy School of
Government. “It makes me proud to be an American just to see how our businesses are improving
their productivity,” says Stephen Moore of the Cato Institute, a think-tank in Washington, DC. And
William Sahlman of the Harvard Business School believes that people will look back on this period
as “a golden age of business management in the United States.”