六级阅读资料.docxVIP

一 Questions 61 to 65 are based on the following passage. It would be all too easy to say that Facebooks market meltdown is coming to an end. Afterall, Mark Zuckerbergs social network burned as much as $ 50 billion of shareholders wealth injust a couple months. To put that in context, since its debut(初次登台) on NASDAQ in May,Facebook has lost value nearly equal to Yahoo, AOL, Zynga, Yelp, Pandora, OpenTable,Groupon, LinkedIn, and Angies List combined, plus that of the bulk of the publicly tradednewspaper industry: As shocking as this utter failure may be to the nearly 1 billion faithful Facebook usersaround the world, its no surprise to anyone who read the initial public offering (IPO)prospectus (首次公开募股说明书). Worse still, all the crises that emerged when the companydebuted-overpriced shares, poor corporate governance, huge challenges to the core business,and a damaged brand-remain today. Facebook looks like a prime example of what Wall Streetcalls a falling knife-that is, one that can cost investors their fingers if they try to catch it. Start with the valuation(估值). To justify a stock price close to the lower end of theprojected range in the IPO, say $ 28 a share, Facebooks future growth would have needed tomatch that of Google seven years earlier. That would have required increasing revenue by some80 percent annually and maintaining high profit margins all the while. Thats not happening. In the first half of 2012, Facebook reported revenue of $ 2.24 billion, up38 percent from the same period in 2011. At the same time, the companys costs surged to $ 2.6 billion in the six-month period. This so-so performance reflects the Achilles heel of Facebooks business model, which thecompany clearly stated in a list of risk factors associated with its IPO: it hasnt yet figured outhow to advertise effectively on mobile devices, The number of Facebook users accessing thesite on their phones surged by67 percent to 543 million in the last quarter, or more than half itscustomer base. N