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感觉241和248的答案自相矛盾啊 大家怎么看呢/？
Passage 39
The modern multinational corporation is described as having originated when the owner-managers
of nineteenth-century British firms carrying on international trade were replaced by teams of
salaried managers organized into hierarchies. Increases in the volume of transactions in such firms
are commonly believed to have necessitated this structural change. Nineteenth-century inventions
like the steamship and the telegraph, by facilitating coordination of managerial activities, are
described as key factors. Sixteenth-and seventeenth-century chartered trading companies, despite
the international scope of their activities, are usually considered irrelevant to this discussion: the
volume of their transactions is assumed to have been too low and the communications and
transport of their day too primitive to make comparisons with modern multinationals interesting.
In reality, however, early trading companies successfully purchased and outfitted ships, built and
operated offices and warehouses, manufactured trade goods for use abroad, maintained trading
posts and production facilities overseas, procured goods for import, and sold those goods both at
home and in other countries. The large volume of transactions associated with these activities
seems to have necessitated hierarchical management structures well before the advent of modern
communications and transportation. For example, in the Hudson’s Bay Company, each far-flung
trading outpost was managed by a salaried agent, who carried out the trade with the Native
Americans, managed day-to-day operations, and oversaw the post’s workers and servants. One
chief agent, answerable to the Court of Directors in London through the correspondence
committee, was appointed with control over all of the agents on the bay.
The early trading companies did differ strikingly from modern multinationals in many respects.
They depended heavily on the national governments of their home countries and thus
characteristically acted abroad to promote national interests. Their top managers were typically
owners with a substantial minority share, whereas senior managers’ holdings in modern
multinationals are usually insignificant. They operated in a pre-industrial world, grafting a system
of capitalist international trade onto a pre-modern system of artisan and peasant production.
Despite these differences, however, early trading companies organized effectively in remarkably
modern ways and merit further study as analogues of more modern structures.
241. The author’s main point is that
(A) modern multinationals originated in the sixtenth and seventeenth centuries with the establishment of chartered trading companies
(B) the success of early chartered trading companies, like that of modern multinationals, depended primarily on their ability to carry out complex opertions
(C) early chartered trading companies should be more seriously considered by scholars studying the origins of modern multinationals
(D) scholars are quite mistaken concerning the origins of modern multinationals (C)
(E) the management structures of early chartered trading companies are fundamentally the same as those of modern multinationals
248. The passage suggests that one of the reasons that early chartered trading companies deserve
comparison with early modern multinationals is
(A) the degree to which they both depended on new technology
(B) the similar nature of their management structures
(C) similarities in their top managemnts’ degree of ownership in the company
(D) their common dependence on polical stability abroad in order to carry on foreign operations (B)
(E) their common tendency to revolutionize systems of production
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发表于 2005-12-20 14:24:00
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