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Text 3 Most firms’ annual general meetings (AGMs) owe more to North Korea than ancient Greece. By long-standing tradition, bosses make platitudinous speeches, listen to lone dissidents with the air of psychiatric nurses towards patients and wait for their own proposals to be rubber-stamped by the proxy votes of obedient institutional investors. According to Manifest, a shareholder-advice firm, 97% of votes cast across Europe last year backed management. So should corporate democrats be cheered by the rebellion over pay at Royal Dutch Shell At the oil giant’s AGM on May 19th, 59% of voting shareholders sided against pay packages for top executives. In particular they disliked 4.2 million ($ 5.8 million) in shares dished out to five executives, which comprised about 12% of their total pay for 2008.Under the firm’s rules, such awards should be granted only if Shell’s total return in the year is in the top three of its peer group. In 2007 and 2008, Shell came a very close fourth, so the firm decided to pay out anyway. Shell is hardly a poster child for malfeasance: it is performing well, its pay is similar to that at other big oil firms and its shareholders previously gave directors discretion to bend the rules. They have used it to cut pay in the past. Still, although the vote is not binding, it is seriously embarrassing. The turnout was decent, at about 50%, and several big fund managers were clearly furious. The payouts have already been made and probably cannot be reversed, but Shell will be in disgrace for a while. Jorma Ollila, its chairman, said he took the vote "very seriously" and promised to "reflect carefully". After GSK, a British drugs firm, had a rebellion on pay in 2003, it completely redrew its pay policy. It is not just Shell that is facing unrest. Rough markets and a wider political uproar over pay have fuelled discontent across corporate Europe. Almost half of the voting shareholders at BP, another oil giant, failed to support its pay policies in April. At Rio Tinto, a mining firm with a habit of digging holes for itself, a fifth of voting shareholders rejected its remuneration policy. So far this year 15% of votes cast on pay in Britain have dissented, compared with 7% last year. In continental Europe owners are grumpy, too: in February almost a third of voting shareholders at Novartis, a Swiss drugs firm, demanded the right to approve its remuneration policy each year. But taking bosses to task for their ever-escalating salaries is not a substitute for keen oversight of performance and strategy. At Royal Bank of Scotland, which had to be rescued by taxpayers last year, 90% of voting shareholders rejected its pay policies last month. Yet back in August 2007, 95% of them ticked the box in support of the acquisition of ABN AMRO, the deal that brought the bank to its knees. What can we infer from "most firms’ annual general meetings (AGMs) owe more to North Korea than ancient Greece" in the first paragraph

A. In the AGM there are some Greek traditions to be followed.
B. In the AGM, most of the time investors will vote in favour of the company’s proposals without proposing any objections.
C. AGM was first created by North Korea and then accepted by European countries.
D. In the AGM it is always the case that any proposal will encounter severe debate, as Greeks are in strong favour of rhetoric.

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Directions: Read the following text. Choose the best word(s) for each numbered blank. Women often (1) that dating is like a cattle (2) , and a paper just published in Biology Letters by Thomas Pollet and Daniel Nettle of Newcastle University, in England, suggests they are (3) . They have little cause for complaint, however, because the paper also suggests that in this particular market, it is (4) who are the buyers. Mr. Pollet and Dr. Nettle were looking for (5) to support the contention that women choose men of (6) status and resources, as well as good looks. That may sound common sense, but it was often (7) by social scientists until a group of researchers who called themselves evolutionary psychologists started investigating the matter two decades ago. Since then, a series of experiments in laboratories have supported the contention. But as all zoologists know, (8) can only tell you so much. Eventually, you have to look at (9) populations. And that is what Mr. Pollet and Dr. Nettle have done. They have examined data from the 19t0 census of the United States of America and discovered that marriage is, indeed, a market. Moreover, as in any market, a (10) of buyers means the sellers have to have particularly attractive goods on (11) if they are to make the exchange. The advantage of picking 1910 was that America had not yet settled down, demographically speaking. Though the long-colonized eastern states had a sex (12) of one man to one woman, or thereabouts, in the rest of the country the old adage "go west, young man" had resulted in a (13) of males. Mr. Pollet and Dr Nettle were thus able to see just how picky women are, (14) the chance. (15) looking at the whole census, the two researchers relied on a sample of one person in 250. They then (16) the men in the sample a socioeconomic status score between zero and 96, on a scale drawn up in 1950 (which was as close to 1910 as they could get). They showed that in states where the sexes were equal in number, 56% of low status men were married by the age of 30, (17) 60% of high status men were. Even in this case, then, there are women who would prefer to remain (18) rather than marry a deadbeat. When there were 110 men for every 100 women (as, for example, in Arizona), the women got really (19) . In that case only 24% of low-status men were married by 30 compared with 46% of high-status men. As the men went west, then, so did their (20) opportunities.

A. right
B. wrong
C. insane
D. happy

Directions: Read the following text. Choose the best word(s) for each numbered blank. Women often (1) that dating is like a cattle (2) , and a paper just published in Biology Letters by Thomas Pollet and Daniel Nettle of Newcastle University, in England, suggests they are (3) . They have little cause for complaint, however, because the paper also suggests that in this particular market, it is (4) who are the buyers. Mr. Pollet and Dr. Nettle were looking for (5) to support the contention that women choose men of (6) status and resources, as well as good looks. That may sound common sense, but it was often (7) by social scientists until a group of researchers who called themselves evolutionary psychologists started investigating the matter two decades ago. Since then, a series of experiments in laboratories have supported the contention. But as all zoologists know, (8) can only tell you so much. Eventually, you have to look at (9) populations. And that is what Mr. Pollet and Dr. Nettle have done. They have examined data from the 19t0 census of the United States of America and discovered that marriage is, indeed, a market. Moreover, as in any market, a (10) of buyers means the sellers have to have particularly attractive goods on (11) if they are to make the exchange. The advantage of picking 1910 was that America had not yet settled down, demographically speaking. Though the long-colonized eastern states had a sex (12) of one man to one woman, or thereabouts, in the rest of the country the old adage "go west, young man" had resulted in a (13) of males. Mr. Pollet and Dr Nettle were thus able to see just how picky women are, (14) the chance. (15) looking at the whole census, the two researchers relied on a sample of one person in 250. They then (16) the men in the sample a socioeconomic status score between zero and 96, on a scale drawn up in 1950 (which was as close to 1910 as they could get). They showed that in states where the sexes were equal in number, 56% of low status men were married by the age of 30, (17) 60% of high status men were. Even in this case, then, there are women who would prefer to remain (18) rather than marry a deadbeat. When there were 110 men for every 100 women (as, for example, in Arizona), the women got really (19) . In that case only 24% of low-status men were married by 30 compared with 46% of high-status men. As the men went west, then, so did their (20) opportunities.

A. right
B. low
C. high
D. appropriate

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