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  3. When the American economy was running full tilt two years ago, few places were as breathlessly delighted as Seattle. Its port wa

When the American economy was running full tilt two years ago, few places were as breathlessly delighted as Seattle. Its port wa

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问题     When the American economy was running full tilt two years ago, few places were as breathlessly delighted as Seattle. Its port was thronged with ships bringing goods from Asia. The Boeing Company could barely keep up with demand for its airliners. Microsoft was hiring hordes of software engineers. After each rain shower, another Internet millionaire sprang up. Here was a city that had it all — old economy, new economy, not-yet-invented economy.
    Now it has all gone sour. The past 12 months have been a non-stop succession of disappointments. Boeing’s headquarters decamped to Chicago. The Internet economy popped alike a balloon in a nail factory, taking with it once promising local ventures such as Homegrocer.com and leaving can’t-possibly-miss companies such as Drugstore.com barely hanging on. And an already troubled Boeing was hit even harder after September 11th both by a steep drop in airliner orders and by losing a $ 200 billion Joint Strike Fighter contract to Lockheed Martin.
    Washington State, battered by what is happening in Seattle, now has the highest unemployment rate in the United States— 6.6% compared with 5.4% in the country as a whole. Right behind it is next-door Oregon, another former boom state, with 6.5% of its workforce out of a job, the country’s second worst figure. In Oregon, manufacturing’s collapse has caused the loss of nearly 30,000 jobs in a year, those hit range from Freightliner, a maker of heavy lorries, to high-tech companies such as Intel and Fujitsu.
    What makes the current plunge so painful is that every part of the economy seems to have stepped into an open manhole at the same time. Three years ago, when Boeing began to remove more than 20,000 people that Boeing expects to lay off by the middle of 2002 have to compete with unemployed workers not just from the high-tech industry but from construction work and even the retail sector. Portland now has more jobless than the other parts of Oregon: the opposite of how things were years ago.
    Even worse, the Pacific northwest’s downturn, as well as being deeper than the rest of the country, may also last longer. One reason for fearing this is Boeing’s continuing woes. Nowadays Boeing accounts for less than 5% of employment in the Seattle area, down from 9% two decades ago. But it remains the foundation on which the rest is built. Its network of suppliers and subcontractors gives it a far stronger multiplier effect than, say, Microsoft, which is more an island of prosperity than a center of web. The chances are that Boeing will not really bounce back until the assumed revival in air travel persuades airline companies to start buying plenty of aircraft again. And that may not be until 2003.
We can learn from the last paragraph that______.
选项 A、Microsoft has a strong multiplier effect on the economy
B、Boeing is crucial for the survival of other companies
C、Seattle area’s employment rate has fallen considerably
D、the economic foundation of Seattle is Boeing’s continuing prosperity
答案B
解析 这是一道归纳题。题干中的信号词为the last paragraph，也就是文章的最后一段。文章最后一段指出：如今，波音公司在西雅图的就业率从20年前的9％降到现在的不足5％：但是，波音公司仍然是其他产业依赖的基础，它的供应商和分销商网络使得它比其他产业更具乘数效应。这说明，其他产业非常依赖波音公司。B说“波音对其他公司的生存至关重要”，这与文章的意思符合。A与最后一段的意思相反：文中是说波音公司在西雅图的就业率大幅度降低，并不是说西雅图的就业率大幅度降低，所以C不对；文中没有提到D。
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