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As Toyota and Hummer have learned, growing too fast can be a dangerous thing

游客2024-05-03  9
问题     As Toyota and Hummer have learned, growing too fast can be a dangerous thing.
    From its origins, success in the auto industry has been about scale. In the early decades of the 20th century, Henry Ford was able to democratize the car and dominate the early auto industry because he built, and then continually improved, an assembly line that could make huge numbers of cars in a short amount of time. Bigger was always better.
    But two items from yesterday’s dispatch in the ongoing car dramas indicate why that’s not always true.
    Item No. 1: The Toyota debacle(失败). The mass failings of Toyota’s legendary quality-control efforts are now on full display in the hearings that have subjected CEO Akio Toyoda to a ritualized set of apologies and humiliations(羞辱). In recent years Toyota rode its efficiency and better financial management — it didn’t have to contend with the burdensome pension and healthcare benefits that sandbagged the Big Three(i.e. General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler)— to large gains in market share and significant growth. In 2007 Toyota surpassed GM as the largest carmaker in the world.
    But something got lost in the process. As Toyoda acknowledged on Wednesday: "I fear the pace at which we have grown may have been too quick. I would like to point out here that Toyota’s priority has traditionally been: first, safety; second, quality; and third, volume. These priorities became confused." In other words, Toyoda seemed to admit, the company went wrong by moving size — i.e., volume — to the front of the line.
    Item No. 2: After a series of failed efforts to sell it, GM announced that its Hummer brand would be wound down. Hummer had a different problem with bigness than Toyota has. It wasn’t that its production volumes were too high. In 2008 only 2,710 Hummers were sold. Rather, the outsize Hummer was simply too big — too inefficient, too out of step with the times — to succeed in a marketplace in which oil spiked to $150 per barrel and seems to have settled at a plateau above $70 a barrel. As the economy tanked, energy prices rose, and the spirit of the time shifted in favor of conservation, the gas-guzzling Hummer faced a double whammy(厄运): consumers had difficulty affording the vehicle’s high list price as well as difficulty affording its high operating price.
    Size does matter when it comes to auto production. But not always in the way manufacturers think. [br] According to the passage, whether purchasing or operating a Hummer, consumers found it hard to______.
选项
答案 afford the high prices
解析 由固定句式“found+it(形式宾语)+to do sth．”可知，本空应填一原形动词(短语)。根据题干中的operating，Hummer和consumers定位到倒数第二段末句。题干主句中的found it hard是对文中had difficulty的同义转述，其后省略的介词in的宾语affording the vehicle’s high list price as well as…affording its high operating price是本空答案的出处。题干将其中的purchasing or operating…两种情况单列出来，且to为不定式小品词，后接原形动词，故afford the high prices为答案。注意不要漏写price后的复数标志字母s。
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