Exercise 2. Complete the text with missing words

America's leadership in ___________ has been almost imperceptibly eroding for years. More and more U.S.

executives have awakened to the fact that they are ________ in a __________ struggle. They are

___________ their companies upside down to give quality specialists more _____________. Vendors are

being told to ____________ better parts or lose the business. In hundreds of factories, small groups of

workers are sitting down periodically to search for ways of ___________ quality and ______________.

While U.S. companies have steadily ____________ quality, they are coming under ____________ largely

because the Japanese have advanced by ___________. Building assiduously for 30 years on a foundation

of theories developed in the U.S., the Japanese have made quality the weapon that ____________ the

world's markets. There's no question that the Japanese have set new world ___________.

Among U.S. companies, it's often hard to identify the special characteristics that divide those that

___________ in quality from those that have __________ behind. Certainly the ____________ are run by

people who insist on excellence, often by an individual or family with a ___________ to protect.

_____________ that, though, none of the usual ___________ on industrial ______________―unionization,

___________ intensity, the number of _______________―seems to explain quality ______________

among companies or industries. Nor is there reason to suspect that today's makers of even the best U.S.

products―farm equipment, aircraft, machine tools, large appliances―will be immune to future

_______________.

One thing that complicates thinking about quality is that the word can mean just about whatever a

_____________ thinks it means. A working definition of the quality most sought today might be "fitness for

use, plus _____________, delivered at a _______________ price."

In 1950, the Japanese invited W. Edwards Deming, a Census Bureau statistician, to lecture on methods he

had developed for ____________ analysis of quality. The Deming prize for quality ____________, now in its

30th year, became so important in Japan that the annual award is broadcast on national TV.

In fact, the statistical controls that Deming taught the Japanese are ____________ simple, at least in their

__________. You __________ defects, analyze them, ____________ them to the source, make corrections,

and then keep a record of what happens afterward.

But a few fixes on the ____________ floor are rarely enough. Effective quality control—or "quality

____________" in the phrase favored by specialists today—involves the whole industrial _____________,

beginning with _____________ design and continuing on to the ___________. In the past, American

companies usually controlled quality by putting enough inspectors in the plant to ___________ defects down

to an ___________ level.

In popular imagination, the American loss of "work ethic" is to blame for poor quality, but specialists disagree.

Under proper _____________, the U.S. worker is as good as anyone.

Bringing design and quality engineers, blue-collar workers, vendors, and sales and service forces into a

cooperative effort to improve quality is management's ___________. Deming holds that only 15% of all

quality problems are related to a particular worker or tool. The other 85% arise from ___________ in the

company's system and will continue until that system is changed.

Because the ____________ of quality assurance are hard to measure, American businessmen have been

slow to ______________ them. MB As looking at estimates of discounted ____________ flow don't like

improvements that take a long time to pay off―even though the payoff can ______________ be enormous,

as the Japanese have proved. ______________ are impatient too. Japanese and German companies are

financed more by debt than _____________, and the banks do not press as hard as ____________ for

inexorable quarterly ______________ gains. If U.S. corporations are to become basically quality oriented,

they will need, perhaps more than anything else, ____________ money. They will need to rearrange the

____________ that motivate managers.