[9급 지방직 영어 2016년 7번]

Few words are tainted by so much subtle nonsense and confusion as profit. To my liberal friends the word connotes the proceeds of fundamentally unrespectable and unworthy behaviors: minimally, greed and selfishness; maximally, the royal screwing of millions of helpless victims. Profit is the incentive for the most unworthy performance. To my conservative friends, it is a term of highest endearment, connoting efficiency and good sense. To them, profit is the ultimate incentive for worthy performance. Both connotations have some small merit, of course, because profit may result from both greedy, selfish activities and from sensible, efficient ones. But overgeneralizations from either bias do not help us in the least in understanding the relationship between profit and human competence.