　Twoyearsago,RupertMurdoch’sda-考网

　Two years ago, Rupert Murdoch’s daughter, Elisabeth, spoke at the “unsettling dearth of integrity across so many of our institutions”. Integrity had collapsed, she argued, because of a collective acceptance that the only “sorting mechanism” in society should be profit and the market. But “it’s us, human beings, we the people who create the society we want, not profit”.

　Driving her point home, she continued: “It’s increasingly apparent that the absence of purpose, of a moral language within government, media or business could become one of the most dangerous goals for capitalism and freedom.” This same absence of moral purpose was wounding companies such as News International, she thought, making it more likely that it would lose its way as it had with widespread illegal telephone hacking.

　As the hacking trial concludes—finding guilty one ex-editor of the News of the World, Andy Coulson, for conspiring to hack phones, and finding his predecessor, Rebekah Brooks, innocent of the same charge—the wider issue of dearth of integrity still stands. Journalists are known to have hacked the phones of up to 5,500 people. This is hacking on an industrial scale, as was acknowledged by Glenn Mulcaire, the man hired by the News of the World in 2001 to be the point person for phone hacking. Others await trial. This long story still unfolds.

　In many respects, the dearth of moral purpose frames not only the fact of such widespread phone hacking but the terms on which the trial took place. One of the astonishing revelations was how little Rebekah Brooks knew of what went on in her newsroom, how little she thought to ask and the fact that she never inquired how the stories arrived. The core of her successful defence was that she knew nothing.

　In today’s world, it has become normal that well-paid executives should not be accountable for what happens in the organizations that they run. Perhaps we should not be so surprised. For a generation, the collective doctrine has been that the sorting mechanism of society should be profit. The words that have mattered are efficiency, flexibility, shareholder value, business-friendly, wealth generation, sales, impact and, in newspapers, circulation. Words degraded to the margin have been justice, fairness, tolerance, proportionality and accountability.

　The purpose of editing the News of the World was not to promote reader understanding to be fair in what was written or to betray any common humanity. It was to ruin lives in the quest for circulation and impact. Ms Brooks may or may not have had suspicions about how her journalists got their stories, but she asked no questions, gave no instructions—nor received traceable, recorded answers.

According to the first two paragraphs, Elisabeth was upset by ______.

A.the consequences of the current sorting mechanism
B.companies’ financial loss due to immoral practices
C.governmental ineffectiveness on moral issues
D.the wide misuse of integrity among institutions

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答案： A

本题解析：

事实细节题。由题干可定位到原文第一段第一句及第二句“unsettling dearth…Integrity had collapsed…because of the only ‘sorting mechanism’ in society should be profit and the market.”。由此可知伊丽莎白担忧的是正直道德的沦丧，而她认为这种道德品质的沦丧是因为人们共同认为社会中唯一的分类机制就是利润和市场。第一句中的“unsetting”与题干中的“upset”相对应，第二句中的sorting mechanism在选项A中得到复现。A项符合原文文意。原文第二段只是说“伊丽莎白认为缺乏道德目标正在损害新闻国际这类企业的利润”，但她担忧的是企业中正直感的缺失，而不是它的经济损失，B项错误。原文中提到的“政府内部缺乏道德语言”与“针对道德问题政府的不作为”不是同义关系。C项与原文不符。D项在这两段中未提及。