工程管理专业英语课后翻译-TheNatureoftheConstructionIndustry.docx

Reading MaterialThe Nature of the Construction IndustryThe construction industry is a paradox in many ways. In its roughly 8.3 percent, $418 billion-plus share of the United States’ gross national product（1988）, it is the largest industry, but the vast majority of its hundreds of thousands of participants are small business. There are over half a million construction firms in the United States alone. These firms are intensively competitive among themselves in the best traditions of the free enterprise system, yet, compared with other industries, construction’s technological advances sometimes appear trivial.Construction has many characteristics common to both manufacturing andservice industries. Certainly, as in other manufacturing, there are physical products, and often these are of mind-boggling size, cost, and complexity. But in other ways, construction is more like a service industry becausesuch as steel, transportation, petroleum, and mining. Onesees this in comparative financial surveys,such as the Forbes andFortune magazines’ listings of the “top 500” businesses. Although several ofconstruction’s the largest firms ate listed each year on the basis of sales （cumulative annual contract awards or revenues）, and sometimes on the basis of profits, few, if any, are even near the “top 500” on the basis of assets. Also, as in other service industries, success or failure in construction is by farmore dependent on the qualities of its people than it is on technologies protected by patents or on thesheer availability of capital facilities, though the latter, in particular, is often also very important.Construction is highly fragmented and sometimes divisive, yet in response to pressing nationalneeds, such as a major war effort, few industries can mobilize resources more quickly. Each of its elements-designers, constructors, regulators, consumers, suppliers, crafts can be highly skilled in its ownarea, yet there is little general perspective on how all the pieces fit tog