A young consultant"s life is tiring. A typical week starts before dawn on Monday, with a rush to the airport and a flight to wherever the client is based. A typical brain-for-hire can expect to stay in hotels at least three nights a week, texting a distant lover. " It"s quite normal to spend a year living out of a suitcase," sighs one London-based consultant. An ex-McKinseyite in New York adds that 15 to 18-hour weekdays are normal and six to eight-hour Saturdays and Sundays common. It can be draining, she admits. So the job appeals to "insecure over-achievers"—a phrase widely used in the industry—"who are always worried that they haven"t done enough work," jokes a former employee of Bain & Company. Some 60—65% of consultants are recent college-leavers. Most drop out within a few years and take more settled jobs elsewhere in the business world, where their experience and contacts allow them to do better than their less-travelled counterparts. The elite consultancies have offices in big cities, which is where ambitious young people want to live. The best-paid jobs are in places like London, New York and Shanghai. Such cities are also where the culture and dating opportunities are richest. "Everything that happens, happens in London," says Una Paulauskaite of the Young Management Consultancies Association, speaking of Britain. Other countries are less unipolar, but all have a divide between the big city and the remote areas. Companies based outside the big cities also need " clever people doing clever stuff" , as one consultant puts it. "But" , he adds, citing a litany of dull suburban towns in which he has managed projects, " there is no way in hell I"d have taken a permanent job in one of those places. " A recent graduate working at a rival firm agrees: " I wouldn"t have considered working for a firm outside London. " Such attitudes are frustrating for firms in Portsmouth or Peoria. But consultancies benefit from remote areas. They recruit bright young things in the metropolis and then hire out their brains to firms in the sticks. This is one reason why consultants have to travel so much. The system works, more or less, for everyone. Firms in the provinces get to borrow talent they could not easily hire. And young consultants get to experience life in the real world before returning to the capital to party with their friends at the weekend. They have it all; except enough sleep. The last two paragraphs tell us that______.

A. the present system is to some degree favorable to both firms and consultants
B. consultancies outside big cities need clever people
C. consultants like travelling because they want to become successful
D. consultancies prefer to run their business in remote areas