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

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

游客2024-05-21  12
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] CEO Akio Toyoda seemed to admit that Toyota betrayed its tradition of putting ______at top priority.
选项
答案 safety
解析 题干中的及物动词putting表明，本空应填一名词(短语)。根据题干中的Toyoda、seemed to admit和priority定位到第五段。其中引言中的第二句提到，丰田汽车的首要任务传统上一直是：第一，安全；第二，品质；第三才是数量。由此可见，safety即是传统意义上首要任务中最为重要的一项。题干中的putting at top priority是对文中first的同义转述，故其后的safety为答案。
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