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

游客2023-12-05  19

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] Which of the following can best reflect the trend of globalization?

选项 A、The value of cross-border world trade.
B、The globalized markets for standardized products.
C、The ratio of the value of cross-border world trade to that of global GDP.
D、The sales volume of identical goods and services around the world.

答案 C

解析 推理判断题。 由题干关键词reflect和globalisation将问题定位于第一段最后一句话;最能反映全球化进程的是跨境贸易总额占整个GDP总值的百分比, 即[C], 同时排除[A]跨境贸易总额。第二段虽然提到Theodore Levitt预测到一个产品高度标准化的全球性市场,但这段只是为了说明全球化市场的起源,并不能反映市场全球化的趋势, 排除[B]。 文章第一句虽然也提到相同商品和服务全球性售卖, 但这是市场全球化现象,并非其衡量标准,排除[D]。
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