单项选择题

A history of long and effortless success can be a dreadful handicap, but, if properly handled, it may become a driving force. When the United States entered just such a glowing period after the end of the Second World War, it had a market eight times larger than any competitor, giving its industries unparalleled economies of scale. Its scientists were the world’’s best, its workers were the most skilled. America and Americans were prosperous beyond the dreams of the Europeans and Asians whose economies the war had destroyed.   It was inevitable that this primacy should have narrowed as other countries grew richer. Just as inevitably, the retreat from predominance proved painful. By the mid-1980s Americans had found themselves at a loss over their fading industrial competitiveness. Some huge American industries, such as consumer electronics ,had shrunk or vanished in the face of foreign competition. By 1987 there was only one American television maker left, Zenith. (Now there is none: Zenith was bought by South Korea’’s LG Electronics in July.)Foreign-made cars and textiles were sweeping into the domestic market. America’’s machine-tool industry was on the ropes. For a while it looked as though the making of semiconductors, which America had invented and which sat at the heart of the new computer age, was going to be the next casualty.   All of this caused a crisis of confidence. Americans stopped taking prosperity for granted. They began to believe that their way of doing business was failing, and that their incomes would therefore shortly begin to fall as well. The mid-1980s brought one inquiry after another into the causes of America’’s industrial decline. Their sometimes sensational findings were filled with warnings about the growing competition from overseas.   How things have changed! In 1995 the United States can look back on five years of solid growth while Japan has been struggling. Few Americans attribute this solely to such obvious causes as a devalued dollar or the turning of the business cycle. Self-doubt has yielded to blind pride. "American industry has changed its structure, has gone on a diet, has learnt to be more quick-witted, "according to Richard Cavanagh, executive dean of Harvard’’s Kennedy School of Government. "It makes me proud to be an American just to see how our businesses are improving their productivity," says Stephen Moore of the Cato Institute, a think-tank in Washington D. C. And William Sahlman of the Harvard Business School believes that people will look back on this period as "a golden age of business management in the United States." The U. S. achieved its predominance after World War Ⅱ because__________.

A. it had made painstaking efforts towards this goal
B.its domestic market was eight times larger than before
C.the war had destroyed the economies of most potential competitors
D.the unparalleled size of its workforce had given an impetus to its economy
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The human brain can do a lot of wonderful things; many of them include 1 mastery of complex feedback systems with long 2 For example, consider how difficult raising a child truly is. Many factors are 3 , including the nutritional, physical, emotional and mental condition of the child, and the feedback of these factors 4 the behavior of those involved in raising the child. To 5 matters, many of the responses of the child parent system take years to 6 themselves. Yet billions of parents have somehow 7 to feed, clothe, protect, nurture, heal, teach, and love their children 8 successful adulthood.9 all our intuitive sophistication in dealing with complicated situations, it’’s a 10 to see how poorly we deal with some newer systems, most of 11 brought about by technology.Both raising children and protecting Earth’’s life-support systems are 12 of life and death; in the long term, they are equally important. But 13 our brains seem fairly well prepared for the long-term process of raising kids, we seem to have 14 built-in skill for taking care of the environment that supports us, any children we might have, and all other 15 . It seems that the thinking parts of our brains can’’t deal with complicated systems and their long- term 16 ,and the 17 parts of our brains that can deal with complex systems don’’t help us much outside of their 18 areas. One of the goals of systems science is to use math and computers to help people get better 19 taking care of Earth’’s life-support systems. The task involves teaching our thinking brains about 20 complicated systems work.