In the 1960s pop was a young person’s business. But today age is no barrier to success. The Rolling Stones are still touring in

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问题     In the 1960s pop was a young person’s business. But today age is no barrier to success. The Rolling Stones are still touring in their 60s. Bob Dylan’s songwriting skills have survived intact. Sir Paul McCartney warbles on.
    It is time to do for enterprise what such ageing rockers have done for pop music: explode the myth that it is a monopoly of the young. This idea has been powerfully reinforced by the latest tech boom: Facebook, Google and Groupon were all founded by people in their 20s or teens. Mark Zuckerberg, aged 27, will soon be able to count his years on earth in billions of dollars.
    Research suggests that age may in fact be an advantage for entrepreneurs. Vivek Wadhwa of Singularity University in California studied more than 500 American high-tech and engineering companies with more than $ lm in sales. He discovered that the average age of the founders of successful American technology businesses is 39. There were twice as many successful founders over 50 as under 25, and twice as many over 60 as under 20.
    Experience continues to count for a great deal, in business as in other walks of life—or, to borrow a phrase from P. J. O’Rourke, age and guile can still beat "youth, innocence and a bad haircut". It is one thing to invent a clever new product but quite another to hire employees or build a sales machine.
    And even when it comes to breakthrough ideas, age may still be an asset. Benjamin Jones of Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management and Bruce Weinberg of Ohio State University examined the careers of Nobel Prizewinners in chemistry, physics and medicine. They found that the average age at which these stars made their greatest innovations is now higher than it was a century ago.
    This is not to say that the rise of young entrepreneurs like Mr. Zuckerberg is insignificant. The barriers that once discouraged enterprise among the young are collapsing. Social networks make it easier to build contacts. Knowledge-intensive industries require relatively little capital. But the fact that barriers are collapsing for the young does not mean that they are being erected for greybeards. The point is that the creation of fast-growing businesses is now open to everybody regardless of age.
    The evidence that older people are if anything becoming more enterprising should help to calm two of the biggest worries that hang over the West. One is that the greying of the population will inevitably produce economic sluggishness. The second is that older people will face hard times as companies shed older workers in the name of efficiency and welfare states cut back on their pensions.
The author introduces his topic by______.

选项 A、posing a contrast
B、justifying an assumption
C、explaining a phenomenon
D、making a comparison

答案D

解析 本题的题型比较特殊,对文章的写作方法提问。文章主要讨论的是老年人,尤其是在商业领域老年人的创造力。作者开篇通过依旧活跃在音乐界的几位常青树的例子引入话题。音乐行业一直以来被看做是年轻人的天下,但是纵观当今乐坛,音乐诗人鲍勃·迪伦依旧创作力旺盛,而原披头士成员保罗·麦卡特尼爵士依旧是潮流音乐的先锋。通过音乐界的例子,作者自然过渡到了商业领域,“不仅是在流行音乐领域,商业领域也不再是年轻人一统天下。”因此,本文开篇作者是通过对两个相似领域进行比较的方式引入话题,[D]选项正确。[A]选项容易与[D]选项形成混淆,主要区别在于contrast一词强调两者差异,而comparison强调两者相似点,这里音乐行业和商业领域有共同的相似点,放在一起是作比较,而不是形成对照。
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