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About American A history of long and effortless success can be a dreadful handicap,but,if properly handled,it may become a driving force.When the United States entered just such a glowing period after the end of the Second World War,it had a market eight times larger than any competitor ,giving its industries unparalleled economies of scale.Its scientists were the world's best,its workers the most skilled.American and Americans were prosperous beyongd the dreams of the Europeans and Asians whose economeics the war had destroyed. It was inevitable that this primacy should have narrowed as other countries grew richer.Just as inevitably,the retreat from predominace proved painful.By the mid 1980s Americans had found themselves at a losss over their fading industrial competitiveness.Some huge American industries,such as consumer electronics,hand shrunk or vanished in the face of foreign competitiong.By 1987 there was only one American television maker left,Zenith.(Now there is none :Zenith was bought by SouthKorea'sLGElectronics in July.)Foreign made cars and textiles were sweeeping into the domestic market.America's machine-tool industry was on the ropes.For a while it looked as though the makeing of semiconductors,whidh America had invented and which sat at the heart of the new computer age,was going to be the next caualty. All of this caused a crisis of confidenc.Americans stopped taking prosperity ofr granted .They began to believe that their way of doing business was failing,and that their incomes would therefore shourtly begin to fall as well .The mind -1980s brought one inquiry after another into the causes ofAmerica's in dustrial decline.Thir sometimes sensational findings were filled with warnings about the growing competitiong from overseas. How things have changed!I1995 the United States can look back on five years of solid growth while Japan has been struggling.Few Americans attribute this Self doubt has yielded to blind pride."American industry has changed its structure ,has gone on a diet ,has learnt to be more quik witted,"according to Richard Cavanagh,executive dean of Harvard"s Kennedy School of Government.'It makes me proud to be an American just to see how our businesses are improving theirproductivity,"says Stephen Moore of the Cato Institute ,a think tank in Washington,DC,And William Sahlman of the Harvard Business School believes that people will look back on this perido as "a golden age of business management in the United States."
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North America, bordering both the North Atlantic Ocean and the North Pacific Ocean, between Canada and Mexico Area: 9,629,091 sq km Climate: mostly temperate, but tropical in Hawaii and Florida, arctic in Alaska, semiarid in the great plains west of the Mississippi River, and arid in the Great Basin of the southwest; low winter temperatures in the northwest are ameliorated occasionally in January and February by warm chinook winds from the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains Terrain: vast central plain, mountains in west, hills and low mountains in east; rugged mountains and broad river valleys in Alaska; rugged, volcanic topography in Hawaii Population: 272,639,608 (July 1999 est.) Religions: Protestant 56%, Roman Catholic 28%, Jewish 2%, other 4%, none 10% (1989) Languages: English, Spanish (spoken by a sizable minority) Capital: Washington, DC
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