Theword“litigants”mostnearlymeans______. A: jurymembers B: commentators C: partiesinalawsuit D: taxpayers

______ pay more attention to the sheerly musical plane. A: The professionals B: The music lovers C: The music commentators

A computer has many __________ and the most important one is the Central Processing Unit, which is where the brains of the machine are. A: compensations B: commentators C: combinations D: components

Which of the following statements is NOT people's attitude towards smart phones? A: Millions of people embrace them wholeheartedly. B: Watching videos on them is the most favorite activity for many. C: Celebrities publicize their activities on social media sites on them. D: Social commentators are worried about them.

①When I was a boy growing up off the grid in the Commonwealth of Virginia, the men I knew labored with their bodies from the first rooster crow in the morning to sundown. ②They were marginal farmers, shepherds, just scraping by, or welders, steelworkers, carpenters; ③they built cabinets, dug ditches, mined coal, or drove trucks, their forearms thick with muscle. ④They trained horses, stocked furnaces, made tires, stood on assembly lines, welding parts onto refrigerators or lubricating car engines. ⑤In the evenings and on weekends, they labored equally hard, working on their own small tract of land, fixing broken-down cars, repairing broken shutters and drafty windows. ⑥In their little free time, they drowned their livers in beer from cheap copper mugs at a bar near the local brewery or racecourse. (Para.1) ①The bodies of the men I knew were twisted and wounded in ways visible and invisible. ②Heavy lifting had given many of them spinal problems and appalling injuries. ③Some had broken ribs and lost fingers. ④Racing against conveyor belts had given some ulcers. ⑤Their ankles and knees ached from years of standing on concrete. ⑥Some had partial vision loss as the glow of the welding flame damaged their optic receptors. ⑦There were times, studying them, when I dreaded growing up. ⑧All around us, the fathers always seemed older than the mothers. ⑨Men wore out sooner, being martyrs of constant work. ⑩Only women lived into old age. (Para.2) ①There were also soldiers, and so far as I could tell, they scarcely worked at all. ②But when the shooting started, many of them would die for their patriotism in fields and forts of foreign outposts. ③This was what soldiers were for - they were tools like a wrench, a hammer or a screw. (Para.3) These weren't the only destinies of men, as I learned from having a few male teachers, from reading books and from watching television. But the men on television - the news commentators, the lawyers, the doctors, the politicians who levied the taxes and the bosses who gave orders - seemed as remote and unreal to me as the figures in old paintings. I could no more imagine growing up to become one of these sophisticated people than I could imagine becoming a sovereign prince. (Para.4)

Nothing succeeds in business books like the study of success. The current business-book boom was launched in 1982 by Tom Peters and Robert Waterman with In Search of Excellence. The trend has continued with a succession of experts and would-be experts who promise to distil the essence of excellence into three (or five or seven) simple rules.The Three Rules is a self-conscious contribution to this type of writing； it even includes a bibliography of “success studies”. Michael Raynor and Mumtaz Ahmed work for a consultancy, Deloitte, that is determined to turn itself into more of a thought-leader and less a corporate repairman. They employ all the tricks of the success books. They insist that their conclusions are “measurable and actionable”-guides to behaviour rather than analysis for its own sake. Success authors usually serve up vivid stories about how exceptional businesspeople stamped their personalities on a company or rescued it from a life-threatening crisis. Messrs Raynor and Ahmed are happier chewing the numbers： they provide detailed appendices on “calculating the elements of advantage” and “detailed analysis”.The authors spent five years studying the behaviour of their 344 “ exceptional companies” only to come up at first with nothing. Every hunch (直觉) led to a blind alley and every hypothesis to a dead end. It was only when they shifted their attention from how companies behave to how they think that they began to make sense of their voluminous material.Management is all about making difficult tradeoffs in conditions that are always uncertain and often fast-changing. But exceptional companies approach these tradeoffs with two simple rules in mind, sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously. First： better before cheaper. Companies are more likely to succeed in the long run if they compete on quality or performance than on price. Second： revenue before cost. Companies have more to gain in the long run from driving up revenue than by driving down costs.Most success studies suffer from two faults. There is “the halo (光环）effect”, whereby good performance leads commentators to attribute all manner of virtues to anything and everything the company does. These virtues then suddenly become vices when the company fails. Messrs Raynor and Ahmed work hard to avoid these mistakes by studying large bodies of data over several decades. But they end up embracing a different error： stating the obvious. Most businesspeople will not be surprised to learn that it is better to find a profitable niche(隙缝市场）and focus on boosting your revenues than to compete on price and cut your way to success. The difficult question is how to find that profitable niche and protect it. There, The Three Rules is less useful.