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  3. What makes people shun the relative security of full-time employment and start up a business themselves? The European Union

What makes people shun the relative security of full-time employment and start up a business themselves? The European Union

admin2013-09-23  48
问题     What makes people shun the relative security of full-time employment and start up a business themselves?
    The European Union wants to know, because with entrepreneurship come job creation and growth. For the past five years, the Union’s head office has financed an annual poll of more than 21, 000 people on both sides of the Atlantic. The most recent of these studies, released this week, shows that despite efforts to make the Union more competitive, the majority of its citizens remain consistently less entrepreneurial and more risk-averse than their American counterparts. That’s not necessarily true of all Europeans: The word entrepreneur may be French, but the poll found that people from smaller countries like Portugal, Greece, Ireland and Latvia were much more enthusiastic about working for themselves. But putting regional variations aside, the bottom line for Europe was that fewer European respondents said they would choose self-employment—45 percent said it was their preference—than their American counterparts, at 61 percent. And the most striking part of the survey was the Europeans’ explanations of their responses.
    It has long been assumed here that red tape is holding back Europe’s entrepreneurial spirit. With shorter waiting times to register companies and easier procedures for hiring, the argument goes, new European businesses would sprout like tulips in a Dutch greenhouse. The survey told a different story. Europeans essentially said they couldn’t be bothered with the effort involved in starting a business: They wanted a regular, fixed income and a stable job. The upshot of this for Europe is that even if governments managed to cut red tape, their citizens might still prefer to have a comfortable job working for someone else. ’Only 5 percent of Europeans said fear of red tape or reluctance to battle bureaucracies was holding them back.
    A corollary to this is the fear of failure in Europe. Half of all European respondents agreed with the statement, "One should not start a business if there is a risk it might fail. Only one-third of Americans agreed. There were an estimated 20. 5 million people working in start-up companies in the United States in 2003 , the latest year for which data were available, according to the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, a London-based research organization. This is 23 times the number of those working at startups in France—far greater than the population differences between the two countries. The US number was also 9 times the number of those in Britain and more than 7 times that of Germany.
    If Europe can successfully diminish the stigma of failure, more people would be willing to start their own businesses. "There is a completely different attitude toward risk, " said Zourek of the European Commission, comparing Europe with the United States. In Europe, " once you try a venture and you don’t succeed, you don’t get a second chance, but you get a stigma, "he said. The European Union, he said, should make bankruptcy procedures less burdensome and make getting credit easier for risk-takers, even those who have failed before.
    In this survey, 55 percent of Europeans aged 15 to 24 said that it would be"desirable" for them to become self-employed in the next five years. Among those 55 and older, only 18 percent said the same. Young Europeans could be the motor of entrepreneurship. But with European countries having some of the lowest birth rates in the developed world, who will take their place?
Which one of the following is the best title for the passage?
选项 A、European and American Risk-Takers
B、European Fear to Start up Businesses
C、Hope of New European Enterprises
D、European Entrepreneurship
答案B
解析 主旨题。本题四个选项的内容都在文章中提到过，但是对全文进行分析可以看出，作者用最大篇幅阐述的是欧洲人为何惧怕自主创业，重点是在分析欧洲人的恐惧，因此[B]最能概括全文主要内容，为最佳标题。
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