It's no secret: high-tech careers pay well, and there are lots of jobs that go begging.
But are you right for a career in the computer world？ Can someone with a history degree get a computer job？
The answer is "yes", but it may be tough for you to break into the world of high-tech at first, and anything you have done relating to computers in addition to your studies will be to your advantage.
First of all, keep in mind that the "computer" field today is vast. There are people from virtually every imaginable educational background working in high technology today.
You'll find those with degrees in languages, communications, and education working in training departments, on website teams, and on documentation.
Software programmers can come from virtually any background from art to history to philosophy to mechanical engineering. And there are more than a few well-known technology managers who have a background in psychology.
But the beauty of the computer world is that experience matters as much as, if not more than your formal education. It helps, of course, if your degrees can act as confirmation of the skills you're trying to sell, but clearly if you have developed a verifiable skill in a hot area, you'll find work.
The main message of the passage is that______.
A．the computer world is also open to people with other degrees.
B．the computer world is a tough and highly specialized one.
C．people with non-computer degrees are unable to get good jobs.
D．software programmers usually have degrees in computer science.
Companies have embarked on what looks like the beg...
Companies have embarked on what looks like the beginnings of a re-run of the mergers and acquisitions (M&A) wave that defined the second bubbly half of the 1990s. That period, readers might recall, was characterized by a collective splurge that saw the creation of some of the most indebted companies in history, many of which later went bankrupt or were themselves broken up. Wild bidding for telecoms, internet and media assets, not to mention the madness that was Daimler's $40 billion motoring takeover in 1998—1999 of Chrysler or the Time-Warner/AOL megs-merger in 2000, helped to give mergers a thoroughly bad name. A consensus emerged that M&A was a great way for investment banks to reap rich fees, and a sure way for ambitious managers to betray investors by trashing the value of their shares.
Now M&A is back. Its return is a global phenomenon, but it is perhaps most striking in Europe, where so far this year there has been a stream of deals worth more than $600 billion in total, around 40% higher than in the same period of 2004. The latest effort came this week when France's Saint-Gobain, a building-materials firm, unveiled the details of its 3.6 billion ($6.5 billion) hostile bid for BPB, a British rival. In the first half of the year, cross-border activity was up threefold over the same period last year. Even France Telecom, which was left almost bankrupt at the end of the last merger wave, recently bought Amena, a Spanish mobile operator.
Shareholder's approval of all these deals raises an interesting question for companies everywhere: are investors right to think that these mergers are more likely to succeed than earlier ones.'？ There are two answers. The first is that past mergers may have been judged too harshly. The second is that the present rash of European deals does look more rational, but—and the caveat is crucial—only so far. The pattern may not hold.
M&A's poor reputation stems not only from the string of spectacular failures in the 1990s, but also from studies that showed value destruction for acquiring shareholders in 8.0% of deals. But more recent studies by economists have introduced a note of caution. Investors should look at the number of deals that succeed or fail (typically measured by the impact on the share price), rather than (as you might think) weighing them by size. For example, no one doubts that the Daimler-Chrysler merger destroyed value. The combined market value of the two firms is still below that of Daimler alone before the deal. This single deal accounted for half of all German M&A activity by value in 1998 and 1999, and probably dominated people's thinking about mergers to the same degree. Throw in a few other such monsters and it is no wonder that broad studies have tended to find that mergers are a bad idea. The true picture is more complicated.
According to the text, a collective opinion on the mergers and acquisitions also concentrates on______.
A．economic recession
B．value destruction
C．potential hazards
D．asset proposition
