2011年6月大学英语六级考试真题试卷(9)

C) They have a harder time getting a job with decent pay.

D) They are no match for illegal immigrants in labor skills.

55. What is the chief concern of native high-skilled, better-educated employees about the inflow of immigrants?

A) It may change the existing social structure.

B) It may pose a threat to their economic status.

C) It may lead to social instability in the country.

D) It may place a great strain on the state budget.

56. What is the irony about the debate over immigration?

A) Even economists can't reach a consensus about its impact.

B) Those who are opposed to it turn out to benefit most from it.

C) People are making too big a fuss about somethi ng of small impact.

D) There is no essential difference between seemingly opposite opinions.

Passage Two

Questions 57 to 61 are based on the following passage.

Picture a typical MB A lecture theatre twenty years ago. In it the majority of students will have conformed to the standard model of the time: male, middle class and Western. Walk into a class today, however, and you'll get a completely different impression. For a start, you will now see plenty more women – the University of Pennsyl vania's Wharton School, for example, boasts that 40% of its new enrolment is female. You will also see a wide range of ethnic groups and national s of practically every country.

It might be tempti ng, therefore, to think that the ol d barriers have been broken down and equal opportunity achieved. But, increasingly, this apparent diversity is becoming a mask for a new type of conformity. Behind the differences in sex, skin tones and mother tongues, there are common attitudes, expectations and ambitions which risk creating a set of clones among the business leaders of the future.

Diversity, it seems, has not helped to address fundamental weaknesses in business leadership. So what can be done to create more effective managers of the commercial world? According to Valerie Gauthier, associate dean at HEC Paris, the key lies in the process by which MBA programmes recruit their students. At the moment candidates are selected on a fairly narrow set of criteria such as prior academic and career performance, and analytical and problem solving abilities. This i s then coupled to a school's picture of what a diverse class should look like, with the result that passport, ethnic origin and sex can all become

influenci ng factors. But school s rarely dig down to find out what really makes an applicant succeed, to create a class which also contains diversity of attitude and approach – arguably the onl y diversity that, in a business context, really matters.

Professor Gauthier believes school s should not just be selecting candidates from traditional sectors such as banking, consultancy and industry. They should al so be seeking individual s who have backgrounds in areas such as political science, the creative arts, history or philosophy, which will allow them to put busi ness

deci sions into a wider context.

Indeed, there does seem to be a demand for the more rounded leaders such diversity might create. A study by Mannaz, a leadership development company, suggests that, while the bully-boy chief executive of old may not have been eradicated completely, there i s a definite shift in emphasi s towards less tough styles of management – at least in America and Europe. Perhaps most significant, according to Mannaz, is the increasing interest large companies have in more collaborati ve management models, such as those prevalent in Scandinavia, which seek to integrate the hard and soft aspects of leadership and encourage delegated responsibility and accountability.