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  3. The annual meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, was well under way when it officially commenced, ear

The annual meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, was well under way when it officially commenced, ear

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问题    The annual meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, was well under way when it officially commenced, early on a Wednesday evening in January, with an address, in the Congress Hall of the Congress Center, by Angela Merkel, the Chancellor of Germany. She had a lot to say about Europe. Some of it—"Do we dare more Europe? Yes, we do dare?"—made the news. But outside the hall many Davos participants paid her no mind. They loitered in various lounges carrying on conversations with each other. They talked and talked—as though they hadn’t been talking all day. They had talked while sitting on panels or while skipping panels that others were sitting on. "Historic Complexity: How Did We Get Here?" "The Compensation Question" "Global Risks 2012: The Seeds of Dystopia": over the course of five days, a man could skip more than two hundred and fifty such sessions.
   Davos is, fundamentally, an exercise in corporate speed-dating. "Everyone comes because everyone else comes, " Larry Summers told me. A hedge-fund manager or a CEO can pack into a few days the dozens of meetings—with other executives, with heads of state or their deputies, with non-governmental organizations whose phone calls might otherwise have been ignored—that it would normally take months to arrange and tens of thousands of Gulfstream miles to attend. They conduct these compressed and occasionally fruitful couplings, the so-called bilateral meetings, either in private rooms that the WEF has set aside for this purpose or in hotel rooms, restaurants, and hallways. All that’s missing is the hourly rate.
   Many Davos participants rarely, if ever, attend even one. Instead, they float around in the slack spaces, sitting down to one arranged meeting after another, or else making themselves available for chance encounters, either with friends or with strangers whom they will ever after be able to refer to as friends. The Congress Center, the daytime hub, is a warren of interconnected lounges, cafes, lobbies, and lecture halls, with espresso bars, juice stations, and stacks of apples scattered about. The participants have their preferred hovering areas. Wandering the center in search of people to talk to was like fishing a stretch of river; one could observe, over time, which pools held which fish, and what times of day they liked to feed. Jamie Dimon, running shoes in hand, near the espresso stand by the Global Leadership Fellows Program, in the late afternoon. Fareed Zakaria, happily besieged, in the Industry Partners Lounge, just before lunch. The lunkers would very occasionally emerge from their deep holes (there were rumors of secret passageways) and glide through the crowd, with aides alongside, like pilot fish. (The WEF says that Davos is an entourage-free zone, but this doesn’t seem to apply to the biggest of the big wheels, like heads of state.) It is said that the faster you walk the more important you are.
   It is a name-dropper’s paradise. Central bankers, industrial chiefs, hedge-fund titans, gloomy forecasters, astrophysicists, monks, rabbis, tech wizards, museum curators, university presidents, financial bloggers, virtuous heirs. I found myself in conversation with a newspaper columnist and an executive from McKinsey & Company, the management-consulting firm. This was serendipitous, as so many conversations in Davos turn out to be, because, at the urging of many, I was supposed to be angling for an invitation to the McKinsey party, at the Belvedere Hotel. A must, people said, with a glint. I was suspicious, owing to an incongruity between the words "party" and "management consulting". But this was Davos. The executive cheerfully added me to the list. A McKinsey for a Merkel: a fair trade.
   The newcomer hears repeated bits of Davos advice. Ride the shuttle: you might meet someone. Go to a session that deals with a subject you know nothing about: you might learn something. Come next year, and the one after, if they invite you back: you might begin to understand. Everyone says that you can’t get the hang of Davos until you’ve been three or four times. So many things are going on at once that it is impossible to do even a tenth of them. You could spend the week in your hotel room, puzzling over a plan, wrestling with your doubts and regrets, but a person who would do this is not the kind who would be invited to Davos.
   Another admonition: no matter how much you do, you will always have the sense that something else, something better, is going on elsewhere. On the outskirts of town, three men are hunched in the candlelit corner of a pine-panelled Gaststube, discussing matters of grave importance. You may think you don’t care about such things, but the inkling burrows like a tapeworm. The appetite for admittance can become insatiable. Whenever I passed through town, I noticed men in good suits and sturdy boots, walking with intent in the opposite direction. Where were they going? They ducked into tea shops or into Mercedes sedans with darkened passenger windows. "Wheels within wheels?" One woman whispered to me. "What happens in Davos stays in Davos, " many people said, but even when you’re there it’s hard to know what is happening in Davos. Yossi Vardi, an Israeli tech investor and an eighteen-year Davos veteran, said, "What you see here, in the Congress Center, is just twenty percent of the action."
   There are as many Davoses as there are perceptions of Davos. Schwab might use the term "stakeholders", and the stakeholders may be partial to the word "silos", but another term that springs to mind when you are there is "cliques". A certain ferment occurs where the cliques overlap, but as often as not they pass in the night.
"Entourage-free zone" is a very important characteristic of the WEF because______.
选项 A、participants are free from company
B、participants are free to exchange confidential business information
C、there are zones in the WEF where everyone can freely attend to make business contacts
D、none of the above
答案D
解析 本题为细节理解题。定位至文章第三段，每位参会者都有自己喜欢停留的区域，他们在会议中心徘徊，寻找与之交谈的对象，就像在河边钓鱼一样。随着时间的推移，人们可以观察到哪些鱼池有鱼，以及他们想要喂鱼的时间。从文中可以推出，人们在会议中心可以遇到很多大人物，可以自由地选择自己想要与之交谈的对象。A项“参会者没有陪伴”与题意不符；B项“交换机密的商业信息”，文中并未提及；C项“每个人能自由参加的区域”错误。因此本题选D。
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