《考研英語閱讀理解100篇 高分版》 Unit 8 - TEXT ONE

Apple has long been known for luring the best talent the tech world can offer to its sumptuous Cupertino headquarters. Thousands of bright-eyed programming and design stars have passed through the storied doors. But where do you go from the top? Some of today's most popular sites and gadgets were spearheaded by Apple brainpower. And it makes sense. A tendency for market-changing innovation along with a taste for aesthetics and simplicity are often apparent in the outgoing employee's product. Apple veterans are behind such impressive ventures as LinkedIn, Android, and Mozilla. Is there a secret Apple magical ingredient that contributes to this unprecedented success?
Apple's alumni are an all-star cast, populating the boards and presidencies of many of Silicon Valley's most impressive companies. Andy Rubin, an early Apple engineer, founded Android, which was later bought by Google. LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman was an Apple user experience architect in the nineties. Most recently, in 2010, iPod creator Tony Fadell launched Nest, a smart thermometer that adjusts to your living habits.
Leander Kahney, who runs the website Cult of Mac and has written three books about Apple, says there are strong hints of Fadell's background in his new creation. “People look at it and think it's just a thermometer, just a piece of hardware. But the lesson he's brought to it is that it's actually more software than hardware, and the same is true of the iPod.”
Evan Doll worked at Apple for six years as a software engineer before leaving to cofound the wildly popular news-aggregation app Flipboard. He says he owes a lot of the success he's had to his time spent at Apple, particularly the disciplined company mentality he adopted while there. “They manage to balance perfectionism with an extremely pragmatic attitude of ‘We've got to ship this out to the real world; we can't just sit here and polish it forever,’” he says. “Within startups there's no pressure telling you to finish it up and ship version 1.0. So you've got to have that discipline.”
Kahney compares the company's methodology to another industry giant—Google. At Google, he says, employees are encouraged to work on their own innovations within the company, while Apple employs more of a top-down structure. “Google has this internal entrepreneurial culture, wants its employees to act like entrepreneurs inside the company rather than leaving and doing it outside the company,” he says. The potential startup is kept under the Google banner, which benefits the company.
Doll sees the beneficial side of Apple's razor-sharp focus. “Folks at Apple understand that if everyone is marching at different levels all at once it's going to be very disjointed,” Doll says. “At a company like Google, that's almost overflowing with creativity; the downside is that there's new stuff coming out all the time and you're competing for a limited amount of attention on the part of your users.” That's not to say Apple employees are devoid of creativity. Quite the contrary, Doll says. No matter the department, everyone has some sort of artistic side. “You probably go to Burning Man or you built some sort of crazy art installations in your spare time,” he laughs.
Rather than let employees simply run with their own ideas, Apple has chosen a “less is better” attitude, constraint that proved a helpful lesson in discipline when Doll departed the company and encountered a challenge many startups face: a lack of resources. “Apple does a better job than most at saying no to ideas,” he says, which proved good training for his new venture. “If you say yes to every good idea that you have, you're going to fail.”
1. What does the word “veterans” (Line 5, Paragraph 1) mean in the text?
[A] founders
[B] freshmen
[C] soldiers
[D] stagers
2. The last two sentences of the fourth paragraph imply that _____.
[A] maybe we wouldn't see the success of Flipboard if Doll had no discipline
[B] Doll had no pressure during startups
[C] if Doll had no discipline, he might not have the impulsion to leave Apple and open a firm
[D] Doll could successfully create Flipboard because he had the discipline gained in Google
3. In Google, the most important feature that should be considered is most probably _____.
[A] creativity
[B] discipline
[C] competitiveness
[D] potentiality
4. Google's employees compete with others in order to _____.
[A] display their talents
[B] create more new stuffs
[C] draw the users' attention
[D] make people apply their creations
5. From Doll's statements, it can be inferred that he thinks _____.
[A] Apple's operation method is better than Google's
[B] for the benefit of Google, the internal startup should be kept under the Google banner
[C] the employees in Apple and Google all have some sort of artistic sides
[D] Apple doesn't always veto employees' ideas