Questions 23 to 25 are based on the recording you have just heard.

Recording Three
Welcome to the third lecture in our series on the future of small businesses in Europe. (23) The purpose of today's lecture, as you have seen from the title and the abstract, is to examine in more detail the problems facing small- and medium-sized enterprises which arise at least in part from having to adapt to rapid advances in technology. And I want to look at these both from a financial and from a personnel point of view and to offer a few hopefully effective solutions.
Here we have three of the most important problems facing small businesses that I want to look at today.First, keeping up with the pace of technological change, recruiting high quality staff in a time of skills shortages in IT as a whole and in a highly competitive market, and the issue of retaining staff once they've been recruited and trained. Now, all of these problems involve significant costs for all businesses. But there are particularly challenging issues for small- and medium-sized enterprises. And those costs would vary depending on the size and scale of the businesses.
So let's come to the first issue on our list which is keeping pace with developments in technology. (24) Now we all know that the technology industry is intensely competitive with new products being launched all year round as the various companies strive to compete with each other, rather than, say once a year or every couple of years. And this is a real headache for smaller businesses. So, let's imagine we have a small company which is doing OK. It's just about making a profit and it spends most of its income on overheads. So for a company in this situation, keeping up to date with the latest technology, even if it's only for the benefit of key staff, this can be hugely expensive.
So in my view, some creative thinking needs to come in here to fred ways to help companies in this situation to stay ahead in the game, but at the same time, to remain technologically competitive.
(25) Well, there's a possibility that small groups of companies with similar requirements but not directly competing with each other, they could share the cost of upgrading in much the same way as, let's say, an intranet operates within larger organizations. In fact, cost-sharing could be a very practical solution, especially in times of financial difficulty. If there's downward pressure on costs, because of a need for investment in other areas, I would argue that this is a perfectly feasible solution.
Questions 23 to 25 are based on the recording you have just heard.
预览三道题各选项，由arise，examined，solve，entrepreneurs，companies等词可以推测，讲座与企业发展有关，内容可能涉及企业发展所面临的问题及解决方法等。
What does the speaker say about the problems facing small-and medium—sized enterprises?
A。讲座开头，讲话者提到，本讲座的目的是深入探讨中小企业因不得不适应科技进步而面临的问题。由此可知，中小企业面临的问题是由科技进步引起的，故答案为A。