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  3. Ruth Simmons joined Goldman Sachs’s board as an outside director in January 2000; a year later she became president of Brown Uni

Ruth Simmons joined Goldman Sachs’s board as an outside director in January 2000; a year later she became president of Brown Uni

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问题     Ruth Simmons joined Goldman Sachs’s board as an outside director in January 2000; a year later she became president of Brown University. For the rest of the decade she apparently managed both roles without attracting much criticism. But by the end of 2009 Ms. Simmons was under fire for having sat on Goldman ’ s compensation committee; how could she have let those enormous bonus payouts pass unremarked? By February the next year Ms. Simmons had left the board. The position was just taking up too much time, she said.
    Outside directors are supposed to serve as helpful, yet less biased, advisers on a firm’s board. Having made their wealth and their reputations elsewhere, they presumably have enough independence to disagree with the chief executive’ s proposals. If the sky, and the share price, is falling, outside directors should be able to give advice based on having weathered their own crises.
    The researchers from Ohio University used a database that covered more than 10,000 firms and more than 64,000 different directors between 1989 and 2004. Then they simply checked which directors stayed from one proxy statement to the next. The most likely reason for departing a board was age, so the researchers concentrated on those "surprise" disappearances by directors under the age of 70. They found that after a surprise departure, the probability that the company will subsequently have to restate earnings increases by nearly 20%. The likelihood of being named in a federal class-action lawsuit also increases, and the stock is likely to perform worse. The effect tended to be larger for larger firms. Although a correlation between them leaving and subsequent bad performance at the firm is suggestive, it does not mean that such directors are always jumping off a sinking ship. Often they "trade up", leaving riskier, smaller firms for larger and more stable firms.
    But the researchers believe that outside directors have an easier time of avoiding a blow to their reputations if they leave a firm before bad news breaks, even if a review of history shows they were on the board at the time any wrongdoing occurred. Firms who want to keep their outside directors through tough times may have to create incentives. Otherwise outside directors will follow the example of Ms. Simmons, once again very popular on campus.
According to Paragraph 1, Ms. Simmons was criticized for
选项 A、gaining excessive profits.
B、failing to fulfill her duty.
C、refusing to make compromises.
D、leaving the board in tough times.
答案B
解析 细节题。文章第一段指出Simmons女士担任Goldman公司董事会的外部董事以及布朗大学的校长．近十年内她身兼两职而没有遭到非议．但是2009年年底由于她对Goldman公司巨额的奖金支出没有提出任何质疑而饱受批评．为此，她也表达了自己即将辞去该公司外部董事一职的想法。本题正是考查受批评的原因，根据本段第三句But…under fire(遭到攻击)便可得知她受到批评的原因在于她没有履行自己作为公司外部董事的职责，因此正确答案应该是B项。A项“获取过高利益”，C项“拒绝妥协”，这在文章第一段中都没有出现；D项“在艰难处境中离开董事会”虽然提到但不是遭到批评的原因。
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