小站备考
托福
托福听力
Official48听力真题

托福official48听力lecture4 how business leaders get political power in 19th原文解析+翻译音频

展开
Tip:单击查看句义;划选/双击查生词

[00:00.00]NARRATOR: Listen to part of a lecture in an American history class.
[00:04.60]FEMALE PROFESSOR: We've been talking about the transformation... the industrialization of the United States economy in the nineteenth century. [00:12.28]As the country shifted from an agricultural to an industrial base, political power shifted, too. [00:20.22]Businesses became...a lot of power went, went, went, went from the government into, into the hands of business leaders.
[00:29.00]So, why did this happen? How did an elite group, a few business giants, how did they end up dominating, controlling a number of important national industries in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. [00:45.20]How did they get to be so dominant? [00:48.00]How did they figure out... [00:51.00]how did they take advantage of the new industrialization of American society?
[00:57.00]Well consider the example of Andrew Carnegie and the steel industry.
[01:03.79]We've already discussed the development of a national network, a, a national system of railroads. [01:09.69]Well, this growth created a tremendous demand for steel; [01:15.44]a national railroad system needs a lot of railroad tracks, right?[01:19.93] And Carnegie seized the opportunity. [1:22.86]He built the world's most modern steel mill. [01:26.00]And he came up with a system of business or-organization called vertical integration.
[01:33.99]Vertical integration just means that all... every single activity of a particular industry's processing is performed by a single company. [01:45.85]In the case of the steel industry, this means the mining of iron ore, the transportation used to get ore from the mine to the mill, turning the ore into the steel, the manufacturing process, and sales. [02:00.37]Carnegie controlled all of these; [02:03.00]he practiced vertical integration on such a large scale that he practically owned the whole steel industry. [02:11.66]This of course gave him a lot of political clout. [2:15.89]Just a quick sketch, but you get the idea, right? [2:18.79]Here’s another example—John D. Rockefeller.
[02:23.18]Rockefeller owned an oil refinery, but he wanted to expand his business. [02:29.34]Since there was lots of competition in the industry, he thought the smart way to go about it would be to buy his competitors' businesses. [02:38.12]But, at the time, it was illegal for one corporation to control another. [02:43.71]So, what he did was, he created an organizational structure called a trust.  [2:50.71]A trust is—oh, well, I don't have to go into that now.
[02:54.50]What matters is that a trust created a single, central management team, [03:01.80]and that team directed the activities of what otherwise still appeared to be independent companies. [03:10.41]This new, ah, legal entity worked so well that at one point, Rockefeller controlled 90 percent of the country's oil refineries, which again gave him lots of political power.
[03:27.00]So you've got two different approaches to expanding a business, and both were quite effective. [3:33.20]Of course, these weren't the only two examples; [03:37.00]a number of big businesses run by powerful individuals developed across, oh, a wide range of industries, like railroads, food processing, electricity [03:47.87]but what they all had in common was... the government let them operate pretty much how they wanted to.
[03:58.00]So why did they do that? [3:59.83]Why did the government keep such a low profile and allow individuals to gain so much control of the industries? [04:08.87]Well, obviously, they had the wealth and the power to influence political leaders.
[04:16.00]But also, the truth is that these industry leaders made a significant contribution. [04:23.29]Their investments in technologies led to the development of many new production techniques, which strengthened the economy. [04:32.80]And, many of them gave lots of money to charity; Andrew Carnegie was particularly admired for his generosity.
[04:41.42]But there was one thing in particular that gave them power, [04:45.39]and that's . . . they were beneficiaries, probably the biggest beneficiaries of, of, of, uh, a theory, a dominant political theory in the nineteenth century, something called laissez-faire doctrine. Laissez-faire roughly means “let it alone,” [05:05.50]and that pretty much summarized the theory's philosophy. [05:10.00]The idea was that government should leave business alone, allow it to operate unregulated. [05:17.99]Legislatures weren't supposed to pass a lot of laws, or worry about regulating business practices. [05:25.20]When people did challenge a company's business conduct, I mean, I mean in court cases, well, the few laws that did exist were usually interpreted in favor of business interests.
[05:38.63]But, over time, it started becoming increasingly obvious, and troubling to the public, that some of these big companies simply had too much control. [05:49.00]There were criticisms that owners had too much opportunity to exploit workers, workers and consumers, because they could control prices and wages. [06:00.67]And small business owners and small farmers couldn't compete.
[06:05.22]So there was bad press, bad publicity. Enough that the government eventually felt it had to do something. [06:13.06]So it passed two key pieces of legislation. [06:17.42]One law was designed to regulate the prices set by the railroads. Another made it illegal for trusts to be used to limit competition. [06:27.63]Both were aimed squarely at reducing the exclusive control that existed in some industries.

1.What is the lecture mainly about?

你的答案:
正确答案:C
题目解析:
 后才能查看题目解析,还没有账号? 马上注册
全文首先介绍19世纪美国,权利从政客转向商人,然后举例说明垂直整合和垄断控制让两位商人大获成功,接着介绍当时的政治环境相对宽松让企业自由发展,说明全文都在介绍为什么十九世纪的商人可以获得更多的政治权力,对应选项C中:Reasons … business … political power … late nineteenth-century United States。

学习页面

Medi

terr

anean

加强 + 政府 + 名词后缀

加强的政府——管理

原文例句

加入生词

本文生词 0

色块区域是你收藏过的生词;

查询次数越多,颜色越深哦~

显示文中生词

登录后才能收藏生词哦,现在登录注册>

本文重点词 45

文中加粗单词为本文重点词;

根据词频与核心词范围精心挑选,托福考试必掌握词汇。

显示文中重点词
学习本文词汇

文中划选/双击的生词、加粗重点词已收纳至词盒

可随时点击词盒查看哦~

只有在词句精学模式下才能开启词盒功能哦~

我知道了

词盒
收藏
笔记
我的笔记
5000
保存
反馈