题目内容
Section B
Directions: There are 2 passages in this section. Each passage is followed by some questions or unfinished statements. For each of them there are four choices marked A, B, C and D. You should decide on the best choice.
Charlie Bell became chief executive of McDonald's in April. Within a month doctors told him that he had colorectal cancer. After stock market hours on November 22nd, the fast-food firm said he had resigned; it would need a third boss in under a year. Yet when the market opened, its share price barely dipped then edged higher. After all, McDonald's had, again, shown how to act swiftly and decisively in appointing a new boss.
Mr. Bell himself got the top job when Jim Cantaloupe died of a heart attack hours before he was due to address a convention of McDonald's franchisees. Mr. Cantaloupe was a McDonald's veteran brought out of retirement in January 2003 to help remodel the firm after sales began falling because of dirty restaurants, indifferent service and growing concern about junk food. He devised a recovery plan, backed by massive marketing, and promoted Mr. Bell to chief operating officer. When Mr. Cantaloupe died, a rapidly convened board confirmed Mr. Bell, a 44-year-old Australian already widely seen as his heir apparent, in the top job. The convention got its promised chief executive's address, from the firm's first non-American leader.
Yet within weeks executives had to think about what to do if Mr. Bell became too ill to continue. Perhaps Mr. Bell had the same thing on his mind: he usually introduced Jim Skinner, the 60-year- old vice-chairman, to visitors as the "steady hand at the wheel". Now Mr. Skinner, an expert on the firm's overseas operations, becomes chief executive, and Mike Roberts, head of its American operations, joins the board as chief operating officer.
Is Mr. Roberts now the new heir apparent？ Maybe. McDonald's has brought in supposedly healthier choices such as salads and toasted sandwiches worldwide and, instead of relying for most of its growth on opening new restaurants, has turned to upgrading its 31,000 existing ones. America has done best at this; under Mr. Roberts, like-for-like sales there were up by 7.5% in October on a year earlier.
The new team's task is to keep the revitalization plan on course, especially overseas, where some American brands are said to face political hostility from consumers. This is a big challenge. Is an in house succession the best way to tackle it？ Mr. Skinner and Mr. Roberts are both company veterans, having joined in the 1970s. Some recent academic studies find that the planned succession of a new boss groomed from within, such as Mr. Bell and now (arguably) Mr. Roberts, produces better results than looking hastily, or outside, for one. McDonald's smooth handling of its serial misfortunes at the top certainly seems to prove the point. Even so, everyone at McDonald's must be hoping that it will be a long time before the firm faces yet another such emergency.
The main reason for the constant change at the top of McDonald is ______.
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A．Something you don't understandB．Something oldC．Something mysteriousD．The Egyptian la
听力原文：W: What does the report say about the car accident？
M: If the policeman hadn't stopped his car in time, the man might have ended up killing himself and injuring several other people walking on the street. He should not have drunk so much.
Q: What do we learn from the conversation？
(16)
听力原文：W: Hi Frank. What are you up to？ Is that really a French grammar book？
M: Well, I'm trying to teach myself some French. When I go to Montreal next semester, I don't want to sound like just another tourist. Most of the people there are bilingual.
W: Leave Boston to go to Montreal？ I didn't know this university had a program in Canada.
M: It doesn't. I'm planning to take a short leave of absence from school so I can go there on my own,
W: What's the reason for this sudden interest in Canada？
M: Well, actually I've been thinking about going for some time. Now I know someone there who's been wanting me to visit.
W: A relative？
M: An old friend of my uncle's runs a chemical engineering department up there. So I'm hoping he can help me enroll in some interesting courses.
W: If you want those credits transferred back here later on, you'd better arrange for it before you leave. Don't forget what happened to Susan after she came back from Rome.
M: Yeah. But her situation was different. I already have all the credits I need to graduate.
W: So you'll be taking courses just for the sake of learning.
M: That will be a nice change of pace, won't it？
(20)
M: Well, you've asked a rather strange person a pretty standard question. I happened to be doing language for my A level at school, and I decided that I didn't think there was a great deal of future in the study of languages, so I decided that I'd change over to some scientific subject that I felt might be useful. And after a great deal of difficulty, got accepted at a medical school, found it very difficult to get going, but eventually succeeded and perfectly happy.
W: So you mean eventually you went into... er... medical school or university without any A levels in scientific subjects.
M: That's right. The first morning the lecturer wrote up some chemical formula on the board, which was the first chemistry lecture I had ever been to. As far as I was concerned, she might have been putting it up in Egyptian hieroglyphics. It didn't mean a thing. So that was a long time ago.
W: So you had a lot of... sort of... personal individual work to do to catch up with everyone else then.
M: Yes, it was very hard, but the university I was at, which was Sheffield, had a kind of special class for what you might call "lame ducks" such as myself. And there was a retired watchmaker. There was a dentist. There were a couple of nurses -- people who had come to do medicine in later life having taken up other things. So I think they looked after themselves well and most of us in the end managed to get through.
W: And you eventually qualified？
M: Yes, when I qualified in Sheffield way back in 1960, I was then actually so interested in the general aspects of medicine that I joined a special practice at the University of Manchester that was teaching medical students, and being involved very closely with the academic side of medical practice, and from then on went on to student health service work back in my former University of Sheffield and then came down here to Reading twelve years ago.
(23)
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