题目内容
Large, multinational, corporations may be the companies whose ups and downs seize headlines. But to a far greater extent than most Americans realize, the economy's vitality depends on the fortunes of tiny shops and restaurants, neighborhood services and factories. Snell businesses, defined as those with fewer than 100 workers, now employ nearly 60 percent of the work force and are expected to generate half of all new jobs between now and the year 2000. Some 1.2 million small firms have opened their doors over the past six years of economic growth, and 189 will see an additional 200,000 entrepreneurs striking off on their own.
Too many of these pioneers, however, will blaze ahead unprepared. Idealism will overestimate the clamor for their products or fail to factor in the competition. Nearly everyone will underestimate, often fatally, the capital that success requires. Midcareer executives, forced by a takeover or a restructuring to quit the corporation and find another way to support themselves, may savor the idea of being their own boss but may forget that entrepreneurs must also, at least for a while, be bookkeeper and receptionist, too. According to Small Business Administration data, 24 of every 100 businesses starting out today are likely to have disappeared in two years, and 27 more will have shut their doors four years from now. By 1995, more than 60 of those 100 start-ups will have folded. A new study of 3,000 small businesses, sponsored by American Express and the National Federation of Independent Business, suggests slightly better odds: Three years after start-up, 77 percent of the companies surveyed were still alive. Most credited their success in large part to having picked a business they already were comfortable in. Eighty percent had worked with the same product or service in their last jobs.
Thinking through an enterprise before the haunch is obviously critical. But many entrepreneurs forget that a firm's health in its infancy may be little indication of how well it will age. You must tenderly monitor its pulse. In their zeal to expand, small-business owners often ignore early warning signs of a stagnant market or of decaying profitability. They hopefully pour more and more money into the enterprise, preferring not to acknowledge eroding profit margins that mean the market for their ingenious service or product has evaporated, or that they must cut the payroll or vacate their lavish offices. Only when the financial well runs dry do they see the seriousness of the illness, and by then the patient is usually too far gone to save.
Frequent checks of your firm's vital signs will also guide you to a sensible rate of growth. To snatch opportunity, you must spot the signals that it is time to conquer new markets, add products or perhaps franchise your hot idea.
According to the passage, a country is probably decided by ______.
查看答案
搜索结果不匹配？点我反馈
更多问题
There are four small desks in our classroom.
听力原文：Do you like swimming？
(8)
The next time the men were taken up onto the deck, Kunta made a point of looking at the man behind him in line, the one who lay beside him to the left when they were below. He was a Serer tribesman much older than Kunta, and his body, front and back, was creased with whip cuts, some of them so deep and festering that Kunta, felt badly for having wished sometimes that he might strike the man in the darkness for moaning se steadily in his pain. Staring back at Kunta, the Serer's dark eyes were full of fury and defiance. A whip lashed out even as they stood looking at each other—this time at Kunta, spurring him to move ahead. Trying to roll away, Kunta was kicked heavily in his ribs. But somehow he and the gasping Wolof managed to stagger back up among the other men from their shelf who were shambling toward their dousing with bucked of seawater.
A moment later, the stinging saltiness of it was burning in Kunta's wounds, and his screams joined those of others over the sound of the drum and the wheezing thing that had again begun marking time for the chained men to jump and dance for the toubob. Kunta and the Wolof were so weak from their new beating that twice they stumbled, but whip blows and kicks sent them hem hopping clumsily up and down in their chains. So great was his fury that Kunta was barely aware of the women singing "Toubob fa!" And when he had finally been chained hack down in his place in the dark hold, his heart throbbed with a lust to murder toubob.
Every few days the eight naked toubob would again come into the stinking darkness and scrape their tubs full of the excrement that had accumulated on the shelves where the chained men lay. Kunta would lie still with his eyes staring balefully in hatred, following the bobbing orange lights, listening to the toubob cursing and sometimes slipping and tailing into the slickness underfoot—so plentiful now, because of the increasing looseness of the men's bowels, that the filth had begun to drop off the edges of the shelves down into the aisleway.
The last time they were on deck, Kunta had noticed a man limping on a badly infected leg. This time the man was kept up on deck when the rest were taken back below. A few days later, the women told the other prisoners in their singing that the man's leg had been cut off and that one of the women had been brought to tend him, but that the man had died that ,fight and been thrown over the side. Starting then, when the toubob came to clean the shelves, they also dropped red-hot pieces of metal into pails of strong vinegar. The clouds of acrid steam left the hold smelling better, but soon it would again be overwhelmed by the choking stink. It was a smell that Kunta felt would never leave his lungs and skin.
The steady murmuring that went on in the hold whenever the toubob were gone kept growing in volume and intensity as the men began to communicate better and better with one another. Words not understood were whispered from mouth to ear along the shelves until someone who knew more then one tongue would send back their meaning. In the process, all of the men along each shelf learned new words in tongues they had not spoken before. Sometimes men jerked upward, bumping their heads, in the double excitement of communicating with each other and the fact that it was being done without the toubeb's knowledge. Muttering among themselves for hours, the men developed a deepening sense of intrigue and of brotherhood. Though they were of different villages and tribes, the feeling grew that they were not from different peoples or places.
The living conditions for the Blacks in the salve ship were ______.
听力原文：Are you OK？
(10)
微信支付 
支付宝支付