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1、阅读排序题Passage1:No company likes to be told it is contributing to the moral decline of nation. Is this what you intended to accomplish with your careers? You have sold your souls, but must you corrupt our nation and threaten our children as well? At Time Warner, however, such questions are simply the
2、latest manifestation of the soul-searching that has involved the company ever since the company was born in 1990. On the financial front, Levin is under pressure to raise the stock price and reduce the companys mountainous debt, which will increase to $17.3 billion after two new cable deals close. H
3、e has promised to sell off some of the property and restructure the company, but investors are waiting impatiently. The flap over rap is not making life any easier for him. Levin has consistently defended the companys rap music on the grounds of expression. The test of any democratic society, he wro
4、te in a Wall Street Journal column, lies not in how well it can control expression but in whether it gives freedom of thought and expression the widest possible latitude, however disputable or irritating the results may sometimes be. We wont retreat in the face of any threats. But he talked as well
5、about the balanced struggle between creative freedom and social responsibility, and he announced that the company would launch a drive to develop standards for distribution and labeling of potentially objectionable music. .A) At the core of this debate is chairman Gerald Levin, 56, who took over for
6、 the late Steve Ross in 1992.B ) Senator Robert Dole asked Time Warner executives last week.C) Levin would not comment on the debate last week, but there were signs that the chairman was backing off his hard-line stand, at least to some extent. During the discussion of rock singing verses at last mo
7、nths stockholders meeting, Levin asserted that music is not the cause of societys ills and even cited his son, a teacher in the Bronx, New York, who uses rap to communicate with students.E) Some of us have known for many, many years that the freedoms under the First Amendment are not totally unlimit
8、ed, says Luce. I think it is perhaps the case that some people associated with the company have only recently come to realize this.D) Its a self-examination that has, at various times, involved issues of responsibility, creative freedom and the corporate bottom line.F) In 1992, when Time Warner was
9、under fire for releasing Ice-Ts violent rap song Cop Killer, Levin described rap as a lawful expression of street culture, which deserves an outlet.G) The 15-member Time Warner board is generally supportive of Levin and his corporate strategy. But insiders say several of them have shown their concer
10、ns in this matter.Passage2:But what about pain without gain? Everywhere you go in America, you hear tales of corporate revival. What is harder to establish is whether the productivity revolution that businessmen assume they are pre-siding over is for real. The official statistics are mildly discoura
11、ging. And since 1991, productivity has increased by about 2% a year, which is more than twice the 1978-1987 average. The trouble is that part of the recent acceleration is due to the usual rebound that occurs at this point in a business cycle, and so is not conclusive evidence of a revival in the un
12、derlying trend. Some of this can be easily explained. New ways of organizing the workplace all that re-engineering and downsizing are only one contribution to the overall productivity of an economy, which is driven by many other factors such as joint investment in equipment and machinery, new techno
13、logy, and investment in education and training. Two other explanations are more speculative. His colleague, Michael Beer, says that far too many companies have applied re-engineering in a mechanistic fashion, chopping out costs without giving sufficient thought to long-term profitability. A) Moreove
14、r, most of the changes that companies make are intended to keep them profitable, and this need not always mean increasing productivity: switching to new markets or improving quality can matter just as much.B) Leonard Schlesinger, a Harvard academic and former chief executive of Au Bon Pain, a rapidl
15、y growing chain of bakery cafes, says that much re-engineering has been crude. In many cases, he believes, the loss of revenue has been greater than the reductions in cost.C) There is, as Robert Rubin, the treasury secretary, says, a disjunction between the mass of business anecdote that points to a leap in productivity and the picture reflected by the statistics.D) They show that, if you lump manufacturing and services together, productivity has grown on average by 1.2% since 1987. That is somewhat faster than the average during the previous decade.
