The increasing pressure on American businesses to pursue cost-cutting measures will eventually lead to an increase in the outsourcing of business processes to venues with lower overhead, such as India. However, this shift may not provide the dramatic gains for American business that might have been expected by an enterprise with an ethos for change that is oriented to preserving bottom-line profits. The difficulty is that a significant portion of American society remains uncomfortable with shifting business tasks overseas. Therefore, American businesses will predominantly opt for outsourcing opportunities for repetitive tasks that can easily be brought back to the United States if necessary. Nevertheless, opportunities for Indian firms to get a larger piece of the pie seem certain to arise. The growing emphasis on bringing down the cost of back-office operations is bound to offer increasing scope for Indian firms to become involved in novel types of ever more complex business processes.

Select the sentence in which the author specifies a characteristic of jobs likely to be outsourced.





The primary purpose of the passage is to

A. present an overview of the different types of business opportunities available to Indian firms
B. present a reasoned prognosis of the business opportunities that may become available to Indian firms
C. present the trend toward outsourcing business operations as a model case of business operations in action
D. analyze how opportunities available to Indian firms were necessitated by an increasing number of American firms
E. analyze the use of cost-cutting measures as a substitute for outsourcing in the new American business climate

Consider each of the following answer choices separately and select all that apply.

According the passage, despite the increasing pressure on American businesses to pursue cost-cutting measures, certain other factors preclude

A. Indian firms’ performing all of the business processes currently being performed onshore by American businesses.
B. American businesses committing to outsourcing jobs overseas.
C. Indian firms’ outsourcing more complex tasks to American firms in order to create an interconnected hierarchy of business needs.