Passage 1
John T. Chambers, Chief Executive of Cisco Systems, talks about the merger of Cisco with a larger company:
A merger of equals had a lot of appeal. If you combine the Number 1 and Number 2 players in an industry, by definition you’re Number 1 in terms of size. By combining two companies with good management teams, you automatically build up the strength of your management. You can also widen your customer base and have more distribution channels.
In addition, the merger automatically makes your remaining competition second level. As a result, your competition must rethink its strategy. In the end, you force a period of mergers and acquisitions on your competition.
When we looked more closely, our concerns were raised. For example, 50 percent of large-scale mergers fail. Mergers can fail on a number of levels. They can fail in terms of their benefit to the shareholders, customers, employees and business partners. A decision has to be right with each of those groups, or we would not go forward with it.
If you merge two companies that are growing at 80 percent rates, you stand a very good chance of stopping both of them. That’s a fact. For a period of time, no matter how smoothly they operate, you lose momentum.
Our industry is not like the banking industry, where you are acquiring branch banks and customers. In our industry, you are acquiring people. And if you don’t keep those people, you have made a terrible, terrible investment. We pay between $500,000 and $2 million per person in an acqusition. So you can understand that if you don’t keep the people, you’ve done a tremendous disservice to your shareholders. So we focus first on the people and how we incorporate them into our company, and then we focus on how to drive the business.
43.The word “competition” in this passage means “rivals”.
A、True
B、False
【正确答案】：A
【名师解析】:在这段文字中，John T. Chambers 讨论了思科系统公司与一个更大的公司合并的可能性。他提到，通过合并行业里的第一名和第二名，可以自动成为行业规模上的第一名。此外，合并还能加强管理团队的实力，扩大客户基础，并拥有更多的分销渠道。合并还会导致剩余的竞争对手变成第二梯队，迫使他们重新考虑自己的战略，并可能引发竞争对手的一系列并购活动。
在文中，Chambers 还提到了合并可能带来的风险，例如，大型合并有50%失败的可能性。合并可能在对股东、客户、员工和业务伙伴的利益方面失败。如果合并决策不能满足这些群体的需求，思科就不会继续进行。他还指出，如果两个以80%的速度增长的公司合并，很可能会停止它们的成长势头。在他们的行业中，收购的是人才，如果无法留住这些人，对股东来说就是巨大的损失。因此，思科首先关注如何将人才融入公司，然后才是如何推动业务发展。
根据上述内容，文中将"competition"一词用在了描述合并后剩余竞争对手的情况，意味着他们需要重新考虑自己的战略，这与"rivals"（竞争对手）的含义相符。因此，选项A（True）是正确的。
