Some business books are like a CD recorded by a one-hit-wonder pop star. On the CD, the star's original hit is padded with dross hurriedly bundled together to cash in on the star's ephemeral fame. Consumers, at the end of the day, regret not having bought just the original hit song.
Work force Crisis grew out of an article by the same authors that appeared in the Harvard Business Review in March 200,1. Called It's Time to Retire Retirement, it achieved fame of a sort when it won the McKinsey Prize, an award granted annually to the "most significant" article to have appeared in the publication during the previous year. It gained even more fame by association, being joint winner that year with what turned out to be Peter Drucker's last article What Makes an Effective Executive for the publication.
Now here is the CD extension of that original hit. It takes the basic thesis of the article that the long-standing corporate practice of investing heavily in youth and pushing out older workers must change, "or companies will find themselves running off a demographic cliff as baby boomers age" and puffs it out to the 200-plus pages that hook publishers demand as a minimum.
The authors' original article was already on shaky ground in stating that, as baby-boomers retire (people born between 1946 and 1964, the oldest of whom are just now reaching 60), "there won't be nearly enough young people entering the workforce to compensate for the exodus". An article in the August 2003 issue of Organizational Dynamics, by Peter Cappelli of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, had already knocked that idea on the head. Mr. Cappelli took issue with the popular rumour that the retirement of baby boomers will bring about a shortage of labour. At least in America, there are all sorts of ways in which the labour market will compensate. Many baby-boomers, for instance, will work longer; and although the next generation is some 16% smaller than the baby boom generation? the generation after that is bigger than both of them. Then there is migration and offshoring to smooth the imbalance even further.
Curiously, both sides cited the US Bureau of Labor Statistics in support of their case: Mr. Cappelli quoting its estimate that the US labour force will rise from 153m in 2000 to 159m in 2010; Mr. Dychtwald and his colleagues saying that the bureau "projects a shortfall of 10m workers in the United States in 2010". First there are statistics; and then there is what you want them to say.
The debate has moved on from being about labour shortages to being about the waste of resources involved in allowing workers to retire at what is, given current life expectancy and standards of health, the relatively young age of 60 65. To give Work force Crisis its due, it dwells only briefly at the beginning on statistical pyrotechnics to prove that "a large and prolonged worker shortage could severely reduce our standard of living". It then eases into a discussion about ways in which companies can redesign work in order to bang on to the workers they want to hang on to, regardless of age, in an era when people hop from employer to employer like never before. But it is more like elevator muzak than the hit first recorded in the Harvard Business Review.
The word "ephemeral" in the first paragraph probably means ______.
A. well-known.
B. longlasting.
C. short-lived.
D. international.
Then the first students to take SAT: The Sequel were seen stumbling out of the testing centers as if they had just run a marathon, and all the happy talks ended. With the three hours and 45 minutes stretching to five hours with breaks and instructions, it got worse. Nobody is sure how, but moisture in some SAT answer sheets caused pencil marks to bleed or fade, producing more than 5,000 tests with the wrong scores. Even after that was fixed, several universities reported a sharp drop in their applicants' average scores, which many attributed to exhaustion, and more colleges told applicants they would no longer have to take the SAT.
All of which stoked interest in the ACT, the SAT's less famous and less feared rival based in Iowa City, Iowa. The shorter test is now becoming a welcome alternative for many high schoolers who no longer see a need to endure the usual SAT trauma. "I think the ACT is a true player in the college-admissions game these days," says Robyn Lady, until recently a college counselor at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology. Although most Jefferson students still take the SAT, the number of ACTs there has tripled in the last two years. It's a shift that, if it continues, could change the balance of entrance test power, since the Fairfax County, Va. , magnet sends more kids to the fry League than almost any other U.S. school.
The SAT, with a maximum 2,400 points, and the ACT, with a maximum 36 points, are scored differently, but otherwise are no more different from each other than American football differs from the Canadian version. Students usually do equally well on each. The SAT's new 25 minute essay is required, while the ACT's essay is optional. The SAT is three hours and 45 minutes long. The comparable ACT is three hours and 25 minutes. The SAT has three sections: critical reading, math and writing. The ACT has math, science, reading and English sections, plus optional writing. The ACT with the writing test costs $ 43, more than the SAT's $ 41.50, but the ACT is only $ 29 without the writing section.
Several high school guidance counselors say they assume the ACT, with 1.2 million test takers in the class of 2005 compared with 1.5 million for the SAT, will eventually catch up, in part because so many educators are advising their students to try both. Wendy Andreen, counselor at Memorial Senior High School in Houston--where the SAT has been supreme--says she tells students every year they should take both tests to be safe, and many are beginning to listen, with ACTs up 18 percent since 2002. Deb Shaver, director of admissions at Smith College, says counselors are steering students to the ACT "because there is less hysteria surrounding the ACTs, and students feel less stressed about taking the test."
The mistakes made in the scoring of the October 2005 SAT by Pearson Educational Measurement, the College Board's subcontractor, have no; been forgotten, counselors say. The SAT suffered from damaging news stories as details of the errors came out bit by bit. In the end, 4,411 students had scores reported to colleges that were lower than they actually earned and had to be corrected; 17 percent of the corrections were for more than 40 points. College Board president Caston Caperton apologized, saying the mishap "brings humility, and humility makes us more aware, empathetic and respectful of others."
But ma
A. the SAT is undesirable.
B. the SAT should be replaced.
C. the SAT's keepers are blamed.
D. the SAT's critics are praised.