单项选择题

(1) When the brash British raider Sir James Goldsmith calculated that U. S. timberland was a tempting prize, he launched a $500-million bid to take over San Francisco’s Crown Zellerbach paper company in order to grab the corporation’s vast forests. As a result, Goldsmith owns 1.9 million acres of forests in Washington State, Oregon, Mississippi and Louisiana. The United States seems to have become a country for sale. Foreign ownership in the United States, including everything from real estate to securities, rose to a remarkable $ 1.33 trillion last year, up 25.5 percent from the previous year. Foreign investors now own 46 percent of the commercial real estate in downtown Los Angeles, 39 percent in downtown Houston, 32 percent in downtown Minneapolis and 21 percent in downtown Manhattan. Esteemed U. S. corporate nameplates have been changing citizenship at a rapid clip. Smith & Wesson handguns have gone to the British. General Electric television sets have been bought by the French, Carnation foods by the Swiss, General Tire by the West Germans. In fact, the question of what is truly America has become befuddling. The British, who burned Washington in 1814, have built or bought an estimated $773 million in District of Columbia property, including ownership of the famed Watergate complex. And what about breakfast (or a diamond ring) at Tiffany, or drinks in the cultured atmosphere of Manhattan’s Algonquin Hotel Those vintage landmark buildings are now Japanese possessions. The reasons for the rush to buy are abundantly clear. The U. S. dollar has plunged more than 50 percent in value during the past three years against such major foreign currencies as the Japanese yen, the West German mark and the British pound. The result is that everything with a dollar-denominated price tag has looked like a tremendous steal to holders of stronger currencies. Japanese bargain shoppers increasingly cover neglected American gambling casinos. In April last year, Ginji Yasuda, a Korean-born Japanese, bought the 1100-room Aladdin Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas for $ 54 million and reopened it after spending another $30 million to restore its glitzy décor. Says Yasuda: “You have a lot of dreams still available in this country that you don’t have in Japan.” He plans to shuttle customers from Japan in a posh jet equipped with sleeping cabins. Wile the Japanese have largely shied away from takeovers of major U. S. industrial corporations, at least partly in fear of a public relations backlash, the least inhibited bidders have been the British. They committed more than $27 billions last year to U. S. takeovers. Judging from the context the phrase “a tremendous steal” in Paragraph 5 means________.