2024年招商银行秋季校园招聘笔试真题及答案解析
第一部分英语（1-15）
一、阅读理解 Text 1
It would be all too easy to say that Facebook’s market meltdown is coming to an end. After all, Mark Zuckerberg’s social network burned as much as $ 50 billion of shareholders’ wealth in just a couple months. To put that in context, since its debut(初次登台)on NASDAQ in May, Facebook has lost value nearly equal to Yahoo, AOL, Zynga, Yelp, Pandora, Open Table, Groupon, LinkedIn, and Angie’s List combined, plus that of the bulk of the publicly traded newspaper industry.
As shocking as this utter failure may be to the nearly 1 billion faithful Facebook users around the world, it’s no surprise to anyone who read the initial public offering (IPO) prospectus(首次公开募股说明书). Worse still, all the crises that emerged when the company debuted — overpriced shares, poor corporate governance, huge challenges to the core business, and a damaged brand — remain today. Facebook looks like a prime example of what Wall Street calls a falling knife — that is, one that can cost investors their fingers if they try to catch it.
Start with the valuation(估值). To justify a stock price close to the lower end of the projected range in the IPO, say $ 28 a share, Facebook’s future growth would have needed to match that of Google seven years earlier. That would have required increasing revenue by some 80 percent annually and maintaining high profit margins all the while.
That’s not happening. In the first half of 2012, Facebook reported revenue of $ 2.24 billion, up 38 percent from the same period in 2011. At the same time, the company’s costs surged to $ 2.6 billion in the six-month period.
This so-so performance reflects the Achilles’ heel of Facebook’s business model, which the company clearly stated in a list of risk factors associated with its IPO: it hasn’t yet figured out how to advertise effectively on mobile devices, the number of Facebook users accessing the site on their phones surged by 67 percent to 543 million in the last quarter, or more than half its customer base.
Numbers are only part of the problem. The mounting pile of failure creates a negative feedback loop that threatens Facebook’s future in other ways. Indeed, the more Facebook’s disappointment in the market is catalogued, the worse Facebook’s image
becomes. Not only does that threaten to rub off on users, it’s bad for recruitment and retention of talented hackers, who are the life blood of Zuckerberg’s creation. Yet the brilliant CEO can ignore the sadness and complaints of his shareholders thanks to the super-voting stock he holds. This arrangement also was fully disclosed at the time of the offering. It’s a pity so few investors apparently bothered to do their homework.
1. What can be inferred about Facebook from the first paragraph? A. Its market meltdown has been easily halted. B. It has increased trade with the newspaper industry. C. It has encountered utter failure since its stock debut.
D. Its shareholders have invested $ 50 billion in a social network.
2. The crises Facebook is facing _______________. A. have been disclosed in the IPO prospectus B. are the universal risks Wall Street confronts C. disappoint its faithful users D. have existed for a long time
3. To make its stock price reasonable, Facebook has to _______________. A. narrow the IPO price range B. cooperate with Google C. keep enormously profitable D. invest additional $ 2.6 billion
4. It can be inferred from the context that the “Achilles’ heel” (Line 1, Para. 5) refers to ______________. A. deadly weakness B. problem unsolved C. indisputable fact D. potential risk
5. What effect will Facebook’s failure in the market have? A. Its users’ benefits will be threatened. B. Talented hackers will take down the website.
C. The CEO will hold the super-voting stock.
D. The company’s innovation strength will be damaged. Text 2
I’ll admit I’ve never quite understood the obsession(难以破除的成见)surrounding genetically modified (GM) crops. To environmentalist opponents, GM foods are simply evil, an understudied, possibly harmful tool used by big agricultural businesses to control global seed markets and crush local farmers. They argue that GM foods have never delivered on their supposed promise, that money spent on GM crops would be better channeled to organic farming and that consumers should be protected with warning labels on any products that contain genetically modified ingredients. To supporters, GM crops are a key part of the effort to sustainably provide food to meet a growing global population. But more than that, supporters see the GM opposition of many environmentalists as fundamentally anti-science, no different than those who question the basics of man-made climate change.
For both sides, GM foods seem to act as a symbol: you’re pro-agricultural business or anti-science. But science is exactly what we need more of when it comes to GM foods, which is why I was happy to see Nature devote a special series of articles to the GM food controversy. The conclusion: while GM crops haven’t yet realized their initial promise and have been dominated by agricultural businesses, there is reason to continue to use and develop them to help meet the enormous challenge of sustainably feeding a growing planet.
That doesn’t mean GM crops are perfect, or a one-size-fits-all solution to global agriculture problems. But anything that can increase farming efficiency — the amount of crops we can produce per acre of land — will be extremely useful. GM crops can and almost certainly will be part of that suite of tools’ but so will traditional plant breeding, improved soil and crop management and perhaps most important of all, better storage and transport infrastructure(基础设施), especially in the developing world. (It doesn’t do much good for farmers in places like sub-Saharan Africa to produce more food if they can’t get it to hungry consumers.) I’d like to see more non-industry research done on GM crops — not just because we’d worry less about bias, but also because seed companies like Monsanto and Pioneer shouldn’t be the only entities working to harness genetic modification. I’d like to see GM research on less commercial crops, like corn. I don’t think it’s vital to label GM ingredients
in food, but I also wouldn’t be against if — and industry would be smart to go along with labeling, just as a way of removing fears about the technology. Most of all, though, I wish a tenth of the energy that’s spent endlessly debating GM crops was focused on those more pressing challenges for global agriculture. There are much bigger battles to fight.
6. How do environmentalist opponents view GM foods according to the passage? A. They will eventually ruin agriculture and the environment. B. They are used by big businesses to monopolize agriculture. C. They have proved potentially harmful to consumers’ health. D. They pose a tremendous threat to current farming practice.
7. What does the author say is vital to solve the controversy between the two sides of the debate?
A. Breaking the GM food monopoly. B. More friendly exchange of ideas. C. Regulating GM food production. D. More scientific research on GM crops.
8. What is the main point of the Nature articles?
A. Feeding the growing population makes it imperative to develop GM crops. B. Popularizing GM technology will help it to live up to its initial promises. C. Measures should be taken to ensure the safety of GM foods. D. Both supporters and opponents should make compromises.
9. What is the author’s view on the solution to agricultural problems? A. It has to depend more and more on GM technology.
B. It is vital to the sustainable development of human society. C. GM crops should be allowed until better alternatives are found. D. Whatever is useful to boost farming efficiency should be encouraged.
10. What does the author think of the ongoing debate around GM crops? A. It arises out of ignorance of and prejudice against new science. B. It distracts the public attention from other key issues of the world. C. Efforts spent on it should be turned to more urgent issues of agriculture.
D. Neither side is likely to give in until more convincing evidence is found. Text 3
There is a certain inevitability that e-book sales have now overtaken paperback sales on Amazon’s US site. Amazon’s Kindle 2 is so light and so cheap that it’s easy to see why people have rushed to buy it. Though I’m still not keen on the design of the Kindle, it is a vast improvement on its predecessor and certainly tolerable. Beyond the device itself, Amazon has done a great job of rolling out Kindle apps, ensuring that people like me — who have an iPad but not a Kindle — can still join in the fun. Once you’re into the Kindle ecosystem, Amazon locks you in tightly — just as Apple does with its iTunes / iPod ecosystem. It’s so easy to buy from Amazon’s store and the books are so cheap that it’s not worth the effort of going elsewhere. While I remain opposed to Amazon’s DRM(数字版权管理)— indeed, I’m opposed to DRM on any e-books — I have to admit that the implementation is so smooth that most Kindle users won’t care at all that their e-books can’t be moved to other devices. The e-book trend is nowhere near peaking. Over the next five years we can expect to see more and more readers move away from printed books and pick up e-books instead. But I don’t think that will mean the death of the printed book.
There are some who prefer printed books. They like having shelves filled with books they’ve read and books they plan to read; they like the feel of the book in their hands and the different weights and typefaces and layouts of different titles. In other words, they like the physical form of the book almost as much as the words it contains.
I can sympathize with those people. As I wrote earlier this week, my ideal situation would before publishers to bundle e-books with printed ones — in much the same way that film studio submit DVDs with digital copies of films. There’s no reason to think that lovers of printed books will change their minds. There will undoubtedly be fewer of them as time goes by because more people will grow up with e-books and spend little time with printed ones. However, just as there are people who love vinyl records(黑胶唱片), even if they were born well into the CD era, there will still be a dedicated minority who love physical books.
Since there are fewer of these people, that will mean fewer bookshops and higher prices for printed books but I don’t think the picture is entirely bleak. There is scope for smaller print runs of lavishly designed printed books and bookshops aimed at book lovers, rather than the Stieg Larsson-reading masses. With mainstream
2024年招商银行秋季校园招聘笔试真题及答案解析
