阅读建议：
1) 建议读者先按自己的节奏阅读文章并做完题目，再看文章分析及题目讲解。
文章及题目：
(line) In 1988 services moved ahead of
manufacturing as the main product of the United
States economy. But what is meant by “services”?
Some economists define a service as something
(5) that is produced and consumed simultaneously, for
example, a haircut. The broader, classical definition
is that a service is an intangible something that
cannot be touched or stored. Yet electric utilities
can store energy, and computer programmers save
(10) information electronically. Thus, the classical
definition is hard to sustain.
The United States government’s definition is
more practical: services are the residual category
that includes everything that is not agriculture or
(15) industry. Under this definition, services includes
activities as diverse as engineering and driving a
bus. However, besides lacking a strong conceptual
framework, this definition fails to recognize the
distinction between service industries and service
(20) occupations. It categorizes workers based on their
company’s final product rather than on the actual
work the employees perform. Thus, the many
service workers employed by manufacturers —
bookkeepers or janitors, for example—would fall
(25) under the industrial rather than the services
category. Such ambiguities reveal the arbitrariness
of this definition and suggest that, although
practical for government purposes, it does not
accurately reflect the composition of the
Current United States’ economy.
