发布时间 : 星期二 文章2000-2001年英语历年考研真题阅读翻译更新完毕开始阅读cb50b89bbed5b9f3f90f1ce0
放其多样化项目（这个项目现在还只单纯考虑招收不同种族和性别的员工），进一步寻找那些世界观、价值观、教育水平和社会阶层各不相同的各种记者。
2001 Passage 4
The world is going through the biggest wave of mergers and acquisitions ever witnessed. The process sweeps from hyperactive America to Europe and reaches the emerging countries with unsurpassed might. Many in these countries are looking at this process and worrying: \wave of business concentration turn into an uncontrollable anti-competitive force?\
There's no question that the big are getting bigger and more powerful. Multinational corporations accounted for less than 20% of international trade in 1982. Today the figure is more than 25% and growing rapidly. International affiliates account for a fast-growing segment of production in economies that open up and welcome foreign investment. In Argentina, for instance, after the reforms of the early 1990s, multinationals went from 43% to almost 70% of the industrial production of the 200 largest firms. This phenomenon has created serious concerns over the role of smaller economic firms, of national businessmen and over the ultimate stability of the world economy.
I believe that the most important forces behind the massive M&A wave are the same that underlie the globalization process: falling transportation and communication costs, lower trade and investment barriers and enlarged markets that require enlarged operations capable of meeting customers' demands. All these are beneficial, not detrimental, to consumers. As productivity grows, the world's wealth increases.
Examples of benefits or costs of the current concentration wave are scanty. Yet it is hard to imagine that the merger of a few oil firms today could re-create the same threats to competition that were feared nearly a century ago in the US, when the Standard Oil trust was broken up. The mergers of telecom companies, such as World Com, hardly seem to bring higher prices for consumers or a reduction in the pace of technical progress. On the contrary, the price of communications is coming down fast. In cars, too, concentration is increasing — witness Daimler and Chrysler, Renault and Nissan — but it does not appear that consumers are being hurt.
Yet the fact remains that the merger movement must be watched. A few weeks ago, Alan Greenspan warned against the megamergers in the banking industry. Who is going to supervise, regulate and operate as lender of last resort with the gigantic banks that are being created? Won't multinationals shift production from one place to another when a nation gets too strict about infringements to fair competition? And should one country take upon itself the role of \affect many other nations, as in the U.S. vs. Microsoft case?
世界正在经历一场前所未有的巨大的并购浪潮。这个浪潮从异常活跃的美国席卷到欧洲，并以不可比拟的威力影响到正在崛起的国家。这些国家的许多人面对这个浪潮开始忧虑：“企业合并的浪潮会不会变成一股不可控制的反竞争的力量？”
无疑，大企业正在变得更大、更强。跨国公司在1982年只占有国际贸易不
到20％的份额。而现在，这个数字上升到25％强，并且还在迅速上升。在那些对外开放并鼓励外资的国家的经济中国际分公司在国民生产中成为一个快速增长的部门。比如，在阿根廷，经过90年代初的改革之后，跨国公司在200家大型企业的工业生产中从43％增加到几乎70％。这个现象造成了人们对小型企业和民族资本的作用以及世界经济的最终稳定的严重忧虑。
我认为，推动这股巨大的并购浪潮的最主要的力量，也是推动全球化进程的力量，包括日趋下降的运输与通讯费用，较低的贸易与投资壁垒，以及市场的扩大和为满足市场需求而进行的扩大生产。所有这些对消费者来说都有益而无害的。随着生产力的提高，世界的财富也在增长。
目前证明这股合并浪潮是带来利还是弊的实例并不多。但是很难想像当今的几个石油公司的合并是否会重新造成约100年前美国标准石油公司对竞争造成的同样的威胁，那时由于人们对该公司的这种担心而导致了它最终的解散。像世界通讯这样的通讯公司合并似乎没有给消费者带来更高的价格，或者降低技术进步的速度。相反，通信的价格在迅速下降。在汽车行业，合并也同样在增加——比如戴姆勒与克莱斯勒，雷诺与尼桑的合并——但消费者看起来并未受到伤害。
但是合并运动必须受到严密监视这个事实仍然存在。就在几星期以前，格林斯潘对银行业的巨大合并发出了警告。如果合并后如此巨大的银行出现，谁来充当最终的借贷者，发挥监督、规范和运作的作用呢？当一个国家对破坏公平竞争的行为的处理过于严厉时，跨国公司会不会把它们的生产从一地转到另一地呢？在那些将会影响许多其他国家的事情中，如美国政府与微软公司的诉讼案，一个国家是否应该担负起“保护竞争”的责任呢？
2001 Passage 5
When I decided to quit my full time employment it never occurred to me that I might become a part of a new international trend. A lateral move that hurt my pride and blocked my professional progress prompted me to abandon my relatively high profile career although, in the manner of a disgraced government minister, I covered my exit by claiming \
Curiously, some two-and-a-half years and two novels later, my experiment in what the Americans term \downshifting\reality. I have been transformed from a passionate advocate of the philosophy of \preached by Linda Kelsey for the past seven years in the pages of she magazine, into a woman who is happy to settle for a bit of everything.
I have discovered, as perhaps Kelsey will after her much-publicized resignation from the editorship of She after a build-up of stress, that abandoning the doctrine of \juggling your life\it far greater rewards than financial success and social status. Nothing could persuade me to return to the kind of life Kelsey used to advocate and I once enjoyed: 12-hour working days, pressured deadlines, the fearful strain of office politics and the limitations of being a parent on \
In America, the move away from juggling to a simpler, less materialistic lifestyle is a well-established trend. Downshifting — also known in America as \simplicity\— has, ironically, even bred a new area of what might be termed anti-consumerism. There are a number of bestselling downshifting self-help books for
people who want to simplify their lives; there are newsletters, such as The Tightwad Gazette, that give hundreds of thousands of Americans useful tips on anything from recycling their cling-film to making their own soap; there are even support groups for those who want to achieve the mid-'90s equivalent of dropping out.
While in America the trend started as a reaction to the economic decline — after the mass redundancies caused by downsizing in the late '80s — and is still linked to the politics of thrift, in Britain, at least among the middle class downshifters of my acquaintance, we have different reasons for seeking to simplify our lives.
For the women of my generation who were urged to keep juggling through the '80s, downshifting in the mid-'90s is not so much a search for the mythical good life — growing your own organic vegetables, and risking turning into one — as a personal recognition of your limitations.
当我决定辞去自己的全日制工作时决没有想到，自己竟成了一种新的国际性潮流的一分子。一次平级的人事调动伤了我的自尊心，并阻断了我的事业发展，这促使我放弃自己地位较高的职业，当然，就像面子扫尽的政府部长那样，我也掩饰说“我只想与家人更多的呆在一起”。
奇怪的是，大约两年半的时间我写完两部小说后，我这个被美国人称为“放慢生活节奏”的试验，却使我老掉牙的借口变成了现实。我已从一个“获得一切”哲学（琳达·凯茜过去七年中在《她》这本杂志所宣扬的）的狂热支持者，变成了一个乐于接受任何东西只要一丁点的女人。
我已经发现（由于压力过大，凯茜已多次公开宣称要辞去《她》杂志编辑的职务，在这之后她也许会有同样发现），放弃“忙忙碌碌”的生活哲学，转而过一种“放慢生活节奏”的生活所带来的回报，比经济成功和社会地位更有价值。什么也说服不了我回到过去那种凯茜所宣扬的、我也曾自得其乐的生活中去：每天12小时的工作日，压得人喘不过气来的最后期限，可怕而紧张的办公室的争权夺利，以及因为时间有限连做母亲也得“高效率”所造成的种种限制。
在美国，摆脱忙碌，转而过一种简单、不大物质化的生活已成明确趋势。具有讽刺意味的是，“放慢生活节奏”——在美国也称“自愿简单化”——
甚至孕育了一个崭新的、可称之为反消费主义的生活方式。对于那些想简单生活的人来说，有许多很畅销的帮你轻松生活的自助书籍；有各种简讯，例如省钱简报，会给美国人提供成千上万条有用的点子去做事，从回收保鲜腊到自制肥皂；甚至还有一些帮助团体，帮人按90年代中期脱离传统社会的人的生活方式去生活。
在美国，这种趋势一开始是对经济衰落所做出的一种反应——出现于80年代后期缩小经济规模所引起的大量人员冗余之后——在英国，至少在我所认识的中产阶级的简化生活者中，这种趋势仍被认为与节俭政治有关联，虽然如此，然而我们有着不同的缘由去寻求使自己的生活简单化。
对我们这一代女性来说，整个80年代我们曾被迫忙碌地生活，90年代中期的简化生活与其说是寻求神话般的好生活——自己种有机蔬菜以及冒险制造有机蔬菜——倒不如说我们都认识了自身的局限。
2000 Passage 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. \has gone on a diet, has learnt to be more quick-witted,\according to Richard Cavanaugh, executive dean of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. \me proud to be an American just to see how our businesses are improving their productivity,\think-tank in Washington, D.C. And William Sahlman of the Harvard Business School believes that people will look back on this period as \golden age of business management in the United States.\
一段长时间并且不费力而成功的历史可能成为一种可怕的不利因素，但若处理得当，这种不利因素也有可能转化为一种积极的推动力。二战结束后，美国恰好进入了这样的一个辉煌时期，当时，它拥有比任何竞争者大8倍的市场，这使其工业经济具有前所未有的规模经济。美国的科学家是世上最优秀的，它的工人是最富于技术的。美国的国富民强是那些经济遭到战争破坏的欧亚诸国做梦也无法达不到的。
随着其他国家日益强盛，美国的这一优势地位逐渐下降是不可避免的。从优