A couple of years ago a group of management scholars from Yale and the University of Pittsburgh tried to discover if there was a link between a company’s success and the personality of its boss. (46)To work out what that personality was, they asked senior managers to score their bosses for such traits as an ability to communicate an exciting vision of the future or to stand as a good model for others to follow. When the data were analyzed, the researchers found no evidence of a connection between how well a firm was doing and what its boss was like. As far as they could tell, a company could not be judged by its chief executive any better than a book could be judged by its cover.
(47)A few years before this, however, a team of psychologists from Tufts University, led by Nalini Ambady, discovered that when people watched two-second-long film-clips of professors lecturing, they were pretty good at determining how able a teacher each professor actually was.
Now, Dr Ambady and her colleague, Nicholas Rule, have taken things a step further. (48)They have shown that even a still photograph can convey a lot of information about competence—and that it can do so in a way which suggests the assessments of all those senior managers were nonsense.
Dr Ambady and Mr. Rule showed 100 undergraduates the faces of the chief executives of the top 25 and the bottom 25 companies in the Fortune 1,000 list. Half the students were asked how good they thought the person they were looking at would be at leading a company and half were asked to rate five personality traits on the basis of the photograph. (49) These traits were competence, dominance, likability, facial maturity (in other words, did the individual have an adult-looking face or a baby-face) and trustworthiness.
And Dr Ambady and Mr. Rule were surprised by just how accurate the students’ observations were. The results of their study, which are about to be published in Psychological Science, show that both the students’ assessments of the leadership potential of the bosses and their ratings for the traits of competence, dominance and facial maturity were significantly related to a company’s profits.
(50)Sadly, the characteristics of likability and trustworthiness appear to have no link to company profits, suggesting that when it comes to business success, being warm and fuzzy does not matter much (though these traits are not harmful).
参考答案：[译文]为了知道那是种怎样的性格，他们让高层管理人对他们老板的品质方面打分，诸如是否具有展示振奋人心的公司前景的能力或能否成为员工所遵循的楷模。
解析： 本题考点主要是不定式的翻译。前面句子开头To work out what that personality was后面有逗号，所以是不定式做状语表示目的，其中还含有一个what引导的宾语从句。后面不定式to score their b(posses做宾语的补语。然后出现一个由or引导的平行不定式结构，to communicate an exciting vision of the future or to stand as a good moclel for others to follow都是做定语来修饰前面的名词ability。
[词汇] personality考研真题出现了多次，此处考查本义。senior是个一词多义的词汇，根据上下文搭配关系，要翻译为高级经理人。traits也需要加以重视，是“特性，品质”的意思。
| 可接受的翻译 | 不可接受的翻译 |
| work out：想出；搞清楚；弄懂；知道 | 锻炼，训练；使筋疲力尽；耗尽；工作 |
| senior：高级的，资深的 | 年长者；毕业班学生 |
| to communicate...vision：展现愿景 | 沟通视线；交流景色 |
| model：楷模；模范；表率 | 模特 |
例1：为了搞清楚那种性格是怎样的，他们让高级经理人为他们的老板的品质方面打分：诸如是否有能力展现未来的愿景或者是否成为其他人楷模。
例2：为了理解那种人格是什么，他们让高级经理为老板的能力打分：是否能沟通令人兴奋的远景，以及能不能做好表率作用。
例3：为了搞懂那种人格，他们让高级经理为老板的诸如是否有能力展现未来的愿景或者是否成为其他人楷模的品质打分。
例4：为了搞清楚那个人是谁，他们让大四的经理们给老板打分。他们有能力去沟通未来，以及站起来让别人跟随。
例5：那个人去工作，他们问经理，老板作为一种能力在未来兴奋，或者有模特在跟随。