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1、第四十一篇:(Unit 11,Passage 1)In the last 12 years total employment in the United States grew faster than at any time in the peacetime history of any country – from 82 to 110 million between 1973 and 1985 – that is, by a full one third. The entire growth, however, was in manufac
2、turing, and especially in no – blue-collar jobs…This trend is the same in all developed countries, and is, indeed, even more pronounced in Japan. It is therefore highly probable that in 25 years developed countries such as the United States and Japan will employ no larger a
3、 proportion of the labor force I n manufacturing than developed countries now employ in farming – at most, 10 percent. Today the United States employs around 18 million people in blue-collar jobs in manufacturing industries. By 2010, the number is likely to be no more than
4、12 million. In some major industries the drop will be even sharper. It is quite unrealistic, for instance, to expect that the American automobile industry will employ more than one –third of its present blue-collar force 25 years hence, even though production might be 50 pe
5、rcent higher.If a company, an industry or a country does not in the next quarter century sharply increase manufacturing production and at the same time sharply reduce the blue-collar work force, it cannot hope to remain competitive – or even to remain “developed.” The attem
6、pt to preserve such blue – collar jobs is actually a prescription for unemployment…This is not a conclusion that American politicians, labor leaders or indeed the general public can easily understand or accept. What confuses the issue even more it that the United States is
7、experiencing several separate and different shifts in the manufacturing economy. One is the acceleration of the substitution of knowledge and capital for manual labor. Where we spoke of mechanization a few decades ago, we now speak of “robotization “ or “automation.” This i
8、s actually more a change in terminology than a change in reality. When Henry Ford