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  3. Globalisation is the more or less simultaneous marketing and sale of identic

Globalisation is the more or less simultaneous marketing and sale of identic

游客2024-11-30  26
问题     Globalisation is the more or less simultaneous marketing and sale of identical goods and services around the world. So widespread has the phenomenon become over the past two decades that no one is surprised any more to find Coca-Cola in rural Vietnam, Accenture in Tashkent and Nike shoes in Nigeria. The statistic that perhaps best reflects the growth of globalization is the value of cross-border world trade expressed as a percentage of total global GDP: it was around 15% in 1990, is some 20% today and is expected by McKinsey & Company, a consulting firm, to rise to 30% by 2015.
    Use of the word in this business context is alleged to go back at least as far as 1944, but its first very visible appearance was in the writings of Theodore Levitt, a professor of marketing whose article published by Harvard Business Review in 1983 was entitled "The Globalization of Markets". In it he foresaw "the emergence of global markets for standardised products on a previously unimagined scale of magnitude".
    In "Can We Sustain Globalization?", a report published in 2007 by SustainAbility, a consulting firm, the authors wrote: Frustratingly Levitt did not provide a compelling definition of globalization in his article — and the void has subsequently encouraged a dizzying proliferation of competing definitions.
    The report claims to have come across more than 5,000 of them. SustainAbility’s favourite is one provided by two Economist journalists. Globalization, they wrote, "is the freer movement of goods, services, ideas and people around the world".
    The concept was popularised by an American journalist, Thomas Friedman, in his book The World is Flat. Published in 2005, it reached the top of several bestseller lists with its headline message that the world is now just one big integrated market.
    Globalization has been encouraged by: the growing liberalization of markets around the world, giving western multinationals access to customers they never thought they would reach; easy internet access and cheap international telecommunications, the most obvious manifestation of which is call centres in India that are servicing customers and corporations in Europe and the United States; the rapid growth of large developing countries such as China, India and Brazil, and their growing demand not only for western consumer goods and technologies but also for goods and services from other developing countries. Trade between China and Africa, for instance, rose from $3 billion in 1995 to over $32 billion in 2005.
    Companies have approached globalization in two distinct ways. On the one hand are those such as Gillette and Heineken that have made little concession to local tastes and manufacture their goods in a few centralized production facilities that follow strictly uniform standards. "The product must be the same everywhere," wrote a Heineken chairman recently. "To ensure quality, every 14 days our breweries send samples to professional tasters in the Netherlands."
    On the other hand are companies that tailor their products or services for each local market. Among them are Japanese carmakers such as Toyota, which now has plants in several countries producing for local markets, and Coca-Cola, which never tastes quite the same from one country to the next. A former chief executive of Coca-Cola admitted that the company had once upon a time changed its globalization strategy. "We used to be an American company with a large international business," he said. "Now we’re a large international company with a sizeable American business." [br] According to SustainAbility, what is the reason for the appearance of so many different definitions for globalization?
选项 A、There’s no authoritative definition for globalization.
B、Others’ definitions are more convincing than professor Levitt’s.
C、Different people have different ideas on globalization.
D、Things are different after two decades’ time.
答案 A
解析 事实细节题。Sustain Ability对于globalization定义多样化给出的解释位于第三段，本段中冒号后表示的意思是：因为Levitt没能在其文章中对全球化给出令人信服的定义， 这个空缺正是造成后来出现大量定义的原因， 即[A]， 而不是[B]“别人的定义更令人信服”， 也不是[C]“不同的人对此看法不同”。从]983年Levitt发表文章预测到这一现象到2007年Sustain Ability指出市场全球化缺乏统一定义， 虽然时间经历了二十年之久， 但这并不是出现大量不同定义的原因，排除[D]。
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