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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  36
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?
What can we learn from the passage?
选项 A、The population of America is more than 23 times of France.
B、There are more self-employed people in Britain than in Germany.
C、Most old Europeans are unwilling to meet risk.
D、All hope of European entrepreneurship lies in young people.
答案C
解析 推理题。[A]提到美国和法国的人口问题，在文中第四段后部分作者写到“This is 23 times the number of those working at startups in France—far greater than the population differences between the two countries．”美国自主创业的人数是法国的23倍，而这一比例远远高于两国的人口比例，由此可判断[A]错误；随后作者提到“The US number was also 9 times the number of those in Britain and more than 7 times that of Germany．”美国自主创业的人数是英国的9倍，德国的7倍多。由此可知，英国自主创业的人数少于德国，故[B]错误；文中第六段提到创业精神与年龄的调查，[C]与文中意思相符，为正确答案。虽然文中提到年轻人可能是欧洲人创业精神的推动力，但紧接着作者又写到：现在欧洲的人口出生率越来越低，我们又能指望谁呢?故[D]也不正确。
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