文/   北京新东方学校 北美部GMAT项目组 李昊 周帆

　　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.