试题出自试卷《南京师范大学2007年考博英语真题》

The value of a business increasingly lies not in physical and financial assets that are on the balance sheet, but in intangibles: brands, patents, franchises, software, research programs, ideas and expertise. Few firms try to measure returns on these assets, let alone publish information on them. Yet they are often what underlies a firm's success. “Our primary assets, which are our software and our software-development skills, do not show up on the balance sheet at all,” says Microsoft’s boss, Bill Gates. “This is probably not very enlightening from a purely accounting point of view.”
A sign that companies do not measure their assets properly may be the growing gap between their stock-market value and the book value of their assets. Between 1973 and 1993, the median ratio of market values to book values of American public companies doubles; the difference has grown with a boom in high-tech shares. The gap is biggest for companies that have most rapidly boosted spending on research and development （R&D）. Even within industries, the divergence（分歧）between stock-market returns and reported earnings has increased.
You might think this would present a problem for investors, who no longer have a good way of telling whether the market value of a company is soundly based. Yet investors seem to know instinctively that knowledge is valuable. A study has found that the share price of American multinationals that spend heavily on R&D rises when they buy foreign subsidiaries, but it falls when a multinational with low R&D spending buys abroad. Presumably investors understand that companies in knowledge-based businesses can exploit the magic of rising returns to scale. Once a pill or a software program is developed, each extra sale brings in more money at little extra cost: the bigger the market, the greater the profits.
In fact, the absence of good measures may bother those who run firms more than those who invest in them. For managers, the big problem is how to judge rates of return. With building a factory, there are time-honored methods for calculating the payback. But what if you are investing in R&D or software, or deciding whether to buy better people or to train more? There aren’t tools for making such decisions.
1. The intangibles of a company are reflected in（ ）.
2. What can we infer about Microsoft?
3. Why does the share price of American multinationals rise?
4. An investor who buys stocks of a company in knowledge-based businesses bases his ecision on（ ）.
5. The phrase “such decisionsn（Para.4） refers to（ ）.