GMAT阅读文章《服务业的定义》深度解析

2022-06-06 15:18:41

  阅读建议:

  1) 建议读者先按自己的节奏阅读文章并做完题目,再看文章分析及题目讲解。

  文章及题目:

  (line) In 1988 services moved ahead of

  manufacturing as the main product of the United

  States economy. But what is meant by “services”?

  Some economists define a service as something

  (5) that is produced and consumed simultaneously, for

  example, a haircut. The broader, classical definition

  is that a service is an intangible something that

  cannot be touched or stored. Yet electric utilities

  can store energy, and computer programmers save

  (10) information electronically. Thus, the classical

  definition is hard to sustain.

  The United States government’s definition is

  more practical: services are the residual category

  that includes everything that is not agriculture or

  (15) industry. Under this definition, services includes

  activities as diverse as engineering and driving a

  bus. However, besides lacking a strong conceptual

  framework, this definition fails to recognize the

  distinction between service industries and service

  (20) occupations. It categorizes workers based on their

  company’s final product rather than on the actual

  work the employees perform. Thus, the many

  service workers employed by manufacturers —

  bookkeepers or janitors, for example—would fall

  (25) under the industrial rather than the services

  category. Such ambiguities reveal the arbitrariness

  of this definition and suggest that, although

  practical for government purposes, it does not

  accurately reflect the composition of the

  Current United States’ economy.

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