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Recent years have brought minority-owned businesses in the United States unprecedented opportunities-as well as new and significant risks. Civil rights activists have long argued that one of the principal reasons why Blacks, Hispanics and the other minority groups have difficulty establishing themselves in business is that they lack access to the sizable orders and subcontracts that are generated by large companies. Now congress, in apparent agreement, has required by law that businesses awarded federal contracts of more than $500,000 do their best to find minority subcontractors and record their efforts to do so on forms field with the government. Indeed, some federal and local agencies have gone so far as to set specific percentage goals for apportioning parts of public works contracts to minority enterprises.Corporate response appears to have been substantial. According to figures collected in 1977, the total of corporate contracts with minority business rose from $77 to $1. 1 billion in 1977. The projected total of corporate contracts with minority business for the early 1980s is estimated to be over $3 billion per year with no letup anticipated in the next decade. Promising as it is for minority businesses, this increased patronage poses dangers for them, too. First, minority firms risk expanding too fast and overextending themselves financially, since most are small concerns and, unlike large businesses they often need to make substantial investments in new plants, staff, equipment, and the like in order to perform work subcontracted to them. If, thereafter, their subcontracts are for some reason reduced, such firms can face potentially crippling fixed expenses. The world of corporate purchasing can be frustrating for small entrepreneurs who get requests for elaborate formal estimates and bids. Both consume valuable time and resources and a small companys efforts must soon result in orders, or both the morale and the financial health of the business will suffer.A second risk is that White-owned companies may-seek to cash inon the increasing apportionments through formation of joint ventures with minority-owned concerns, of course, in many instances there are legitimate reasons for joint ventures; clearly, white and minority enterprises can team up to acquire business that neither could Third, a minority enterprise that secures the business of one large corporate customer often runs the danger of becoming and remaining dependent. Even in the best of circumstances, fierce competition from larger, more established companies makes it difficult for small concerns to broaden their customer bases; when such firms have nearly guaranteed orders from a single corporate benefactor, they may truly have to struggle against complacency arising from their current success.The passage supplies information that would answer which of the following questions?

Despite their many differences of temperament and of literary perspective, Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, and Whitman share certain beliefs. Common to all these writers is their humanistic perspective. Its basic premises are that humans are the spiritual center of the universe and that in them alone is the clue of the nature, history and ultimately the cosmos itself. Without denying outright the existenced either of a deity or of brute matter, this perspective nevertheless rejects them as exclusive principles of interpretation and prefers to explain humans and the world in terms of humanity itself. This preference is expressed most clearly in the Transcendentalist principle that the structure of the universe literally duplicates the structure of the individual self: therefore, all knowledge begins with self-knowledge.This common perspective is almost always universalized. Its emphasis is not upon the individual as a particular European or American, but upon the human as universal, freed from the accidents of time, space, birth and talent. Thus, for Emerson, the "American Scholar" turns out to be simply "Main Tinking"; while, forWhitman, the "Song of Myself" merges imperceptibly into a song of all the "children of Adam:," where "every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you." Also common to all five writers is the belief that individual virtue and happiness depends upon the self-realization, which, in turn, depend upon the harmonious reconciliation of two universal psychological tendencies: first, the self-asserting impulse of the individual to withdraw; to remain unique and separate, and to be responsible only to himself or herself, and second, the self-transcending impulse of the individual to embrace the whole world in the experience of a single moment and to know and become one with that world. These conflicting impulses can be seen in the democratic ethic. Democracy advocates individualism, he preservation of the individuals freedom and self-expression. But the democratic self is torn between the duty to self, which is implied by the concept of liberty, and the duty to society, which is implied by the concept of equality and fraternity.A third assumption common to the five writers is that intuition and imagination offer a surer road to truth than does abstract logic or scientific method. It is illustrated by their emphasis upon the introspection-their belief that the clue to external nature is to be found in the inner world of individual psychology and by their interpretation of experience as, in essence, symbolic. Both these stresses presume an organic relationship between the self and the cosmos of which only intuition and imagination can properly take account. These writers faith in the imagination and in themselves as practitioners of imagination led them conceive of the writer as a seer and enabled them to achieve supreme confidence in their own moral and metaphysical insights.The author's discussion of Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, and Whitman is primarily concerned with explaining.