2009年12月大学英语六级真题试卷

Bosses Say “Yes” to Home Work

Rising costs of office space, time lost to stressful commuting, and a slow recognition that workers have lives beyond the office—all are strong arguments for letting staff work from home.

For the small business, there are additional benefits too—staff are more productive, and happier, enabling firms to keep their headcounts(员工数) and their recruitment costs to a minimum. It can also provide a competitive advantage, especially when small businesses want to attract new staff but don’t have the budget to offer huge salaries.

While company managers have known about the benefits for a long time, many have done little about it, skeptical of whether they could trust their employees to work to full capacity without supervision, or concerned about the additional expenses teleworking policies might incur as staff start charging their home phone bills to the business.

Yet this is now changing. When communications provider Inter-Tel researched the use of remote working solutions among small- and medium-sized UK businesses in April this year, it found that 28% more companies claimed to have introduced flexible working practices than a year ago.

The UK network of Business Links confirms that it too has seen a growing interest in remote working solutions from small businesses seeking its advice, and claims that as many as 60—70% of the businesses that come through its doors now offer some form of remote working support to their workforces.

Technology advances, including the widespread availability of broadband, are making the introduction of remote working a piece of cake.

“If systems are set up properly, staff can have access to all the resources they have in the office wherever they have an internet connection”, says Andy Poulton, e-business advisor at Business Link for Berkshire and Wiltshire. “There are some very exciting developments which have enabled this”.

One is the availability of broadband, which now covers almost all of the country (BT claims that, by July, 99. 8% of its exchanges will be broadband enabled, with alternative plans in place for even the most remote exchanges). “This is the enabler”, Poulton says.

Yet while broadband has come down in price too, those service providers targeting the business market warn against consumer services masquerading(伪装) as business-friendly broadband.

“Broadband is available for as little as £l5 a month, but many businesses fail to appreciate the hidden costs of such a service”, says Neil Stephenson, sales and marketing director at Onyx Internet, an internet service provider based in the north-east of England. “Providers offering broadband for rock-bottom prices are notorious for poor service, with regular breakdowns and heavily congested(拥堵的) networks. It is always advisable for businesses to look beyond the price tag and look for a business-only provider that can offer more reliability, with good support”. Such services needn’t cost too much—quality services can be found for upwards of £30 a month.

The benefits of broadband to the occasional home worker are that they can access email in real time, and take full advantage of services such as internet-based backup or even internet-based phone services.

Internet-based telecoms, or VoIP (Voice over IP) to give it its technical title, is an interesting tool to any business supporting remote working. Not necessarily because of the promise of free or reduced price phone calls (which experts point out is misleading for the average business), but because of the sophisticated voice services that can be exploited by the remote worker—facilities such as voicemail and call forwarding, which provide a continuity of the company-image for customers and business; partners.

By law, companies must “consider seriously” requests to work flexibly made by a parent with a child under the age of six, or a disabled child under 18. It was the need to accommodate employees with young children that motivated accountancy firm Wright Vigar to begin promoting teleworking recently. The company, which needed to upgrade its IT infrastructure to provide connectivity with a new, second office, decided to introduce support for remote working at the same time.

Marketing director Jack O’Hern explains that the company has a relatively young workforce, many of whom are parents; “One of the triggers was when one of our tax managers returned from maternity leave. She was intending to work part time, but could only manage one day a week in the office due to childcare. By offering her the ability to work from home, we have doubled her capacity—now she works a day a week from home, and a day in the office. This is great for her, and for us as we retain someone highly qualified”.

For Wright Vigar, which has now equipped all of its free-earners to be able to work at maximum productivity when away from the offices (whether that’s from home, or while on the road), this strategy is not just about saving on commute time or cutting them loose from the office, but enabling them to work more flexible hours that fit around their home life.

O’Hern says: “Although most of our work is client-based and must fit around this, we can’t see any reason why a parent can’t be on hand to deal with something important at home, if they have the ability to complete a project later in the day”.

Supporting this new way of working came with a price, though. Although the firm was updating its systems anyway, the company spent 10—15% more per user to equip them with a laptop rather than a PC, and about the same to upgrade to a server that would enable remote staff to connect to the company networks and access all their usual resources.

Although Wright Vigar hasn’t yet quantified the business benefits, it claims that, in addition to being able to retain key staff with young families, it is able to save free-earners a substantial amount of “dead” time in their working days.

That staff can do this without needing a fixed telephone line provides even more efficiency savings. “With Wi-Fi (fast, wireless internet connections) popping up all over the place, even on trains, our free-earners can be productive as they travel, and between meetings, instead of having to kill time at the shops”, he adds.

The company will also be able to avoid the expense of having to relocate staff to temporary offices for several weeks when it begins disruptive office renovations(翻新) soon.

Financial recruitment specialist Lynne Hargreaves knows exactly how much her firm has saved by adopting a teleworking strategy, which has involved handing her company’s data management over to a remote hosting company, Datanet, so it can be accessible by all the company’s consultants over broadband internet connections.

It has enabled the company to dispense with its business premises altogether, following the realisation that it just didn’t need them any more. “The main motivation behind adopting home working was to increase my own productivity, as a single mum to an 11-year-old”, says Hargreaves. “But I soon realised that, as most of our business is done on the phone, email and at off-site meetings, we didn’t need our offices at all. We’re now saving £16,000 a year on rent, plus the cost of utilities, not to mention what would have been spent on commuting”.

The ancient Greeks developed basic memory systems called Mnemonics. The name is 【B1】______ from their Goddess of Memory, Mnemosene. In the ancient world, a trained memory was an 【B2】______ asset, particularly in public life. There were no 【B3】______ devices for taking notes and early Greek orators (演说家) delivered long speeches with great 【B4】______ because they learned their speeches using Mnemonic systems.

The Greeks discovered that human memory is 【B5】______ an associative process—that it works by linking things together. For example, think of an apple. The 【B6】______ your brain registers the word “apple”, it 【B7】______ the shape, color, taste, smell and 【B8】______ of that fruit. All these things are associated in your memory with the word “apple”.

【B9】__________________. An example could be when you think about a

lecture you have had. This could trigger a memory about what you were talking about through that lecture, which can then trigger another memory.

【B10】_______________. An example given on a website I was looking at follows: Do you remember the shape of Austria, Canada, Belgium or Germany? Probably not. What about Italy, though? 【B11】_______________. You made an association with something already known—the shape of a boot. And Italy’s shape could not be forgotten once you’ve made the association.

There is nothing like the suggestion of a cancer risk to scare a parent, especially one of the hyper-educated, eco-conscious type. So you can imagine the reaction when a recent USA Today investigation of air quality around the nation’s schools singled out those in the smugly(自鸣得意地) green village of Berkeley, Calif., as being among the worst in the country; The city’s public high school, as well as a number of daycare centers, preschools, elementary and middle schools, fell in the lowest 10 percent. Industrial pollution in our town had supposedly turned students into living science experiments breathing in a laboratory’s worth of manganese, chromium and nickel each day. This is a city that requires school cafeterias to serve organic meals. Great, I thought, organic lunch, toxic campus.

Since December, when the report came out, the mayor, neighborhood activists(活跃分子) and various parent-teacher associations have engaged in a fierce battle over its validity: over the guilt of the steel-casting factory on the western edge of town, over union jobs versus children’s health and over what, if anything, ought to be done. With all sides presenting their own experts armed with conflicting scientific studies, whom should parents believe? Is there truly a threat here, we asked one another as we dropped off our kids, and if so, how great is it? And how does it compare with the other, seemingly perpetual health scares we confront, like panic over lead in synthetic athletic fields? Rather than just another weird episode in the town that brought you protesting environmentalists, this latest drama is a trial for how today’s parents perceive risk, how we try to keep our kids safe— whether it’s possible to keep them safe—in what feels like an increasingly threatening world. It raises the question of what, in our time, “safe” could even mean.

“There’s no way around the uncertainty”, says Kimberly Thompson, president of Kid Risk, a nonprofit group that studies children’s health. “That means your choices can matter, but it also means you aren’t going to know if they do”. A 2004 report in the journal Pediatrics explained that nervous parents have more to fear from fire, car accidents and drowning than from toxic chemical exposure. To which I say: well, obviously. But such concrete hazards are beside the point. It’s the dangers parents can’t—and may never—quantify that occur all of a sudden. That’s why I’ve rid my cupboard of microwave food packed in bags coated with a potential cancer-causing substance, but although I’ve lived blocks from a major fault line(抵制断层) for more than 12 years, I still haven’t bolted our bookcases to the living room wall.

McDonald’s, Greggs, KFC and Subway are today named as the most littered brands in England as Keep Britain Tidy called on fast-food companies to do more to tackle customers who drop their wrappers and drinks cartons(盒子) in the streets.

Phil Barton, chief executive of Keep Britain Tidy, 【C1】______ its new Dirty Pig campaign, said it was the first time it had investigated which 【C2】______ made up “littered England” and the same names appeared again and again. “We 【C3】______ litterers for dropping this fast food litter 【C4】______ the first place but also believe the results have pertinent (相关的) messages for the fast food 【C5】______ McDonald’s, Greggs, KFC and Subway need to do more to 【C6】______ littering by their customers”.

He recognised efforts made by McDonald’s, 【C7】______ placing litter bins and increasing litter patrols, but its litter remained “all too prevalent”. All fast food chains should reduce 【C8】______ packaging, he added. Companies could also, reduce prices 【C9】______ those who stayed to eat food on their premises, offer money-off vouchers(代金券) or other 【C10】______ for those who returned packaging and put more bins at 【C11】______ points in local streets, not just outside their premises. A 【C12】______ for McDonald’s said: “We do our best. Obviously we ask all our customers to dispose of litter responsibly”, Trials of more extensive, all-day litter patrols were 【C13】______ in Manchester and Birmingham. KFC said it took its 【C14】______ for litter management “very seriously”, and would introduce a programme to reduce packaging 【C15】______ many products. Subway said that it worked hard to 【C16】______ the impact of litter on communities, 【C17】______ it was “still down to the 【C18】______ customer to dispose of their litter responsibly”. Greggs said it recognised the “continuing challenge for us all”, 【C19】______ having already taken measures to help 【C20】______ the issue.

Many countries have made it illegal to chat into a hand-held mobile phone while driving. But the latest research further confirms that the danger lies less in what a motorist’s hands do when he takes a call than in what the conversation does to his brain. Even using a “hands-free” device can divert a driver’s attention to an alarming extent.

Melina Kunar of the University of Warwick, and Todd Horowitz of the Harvard Medical School ran a series of experiments in which two groups of volunteers had to pay attention and respond to a series of moving tasks on a computer screen that were reckoned equivalent m difficulty to driving. One group was left undistracted while the other had to engage in a conversation about their hobbies and interests using a speakerphone. As Kunar and Horowitz report, those who were making the equivalent of a hands-free call had an average reaction tirme 212 milliseconds slower than those who were not. That, they calculate, would add 5.7 metres to the braking distance of a car travelling at 100kph. They also found that the group using the hands-free kit made 83% more errors in their tasks than those who were not talking.

To try to understand more about why this was, they tried two further tests. In one, members of a group were asked simply to repeat words spoken by the caller. In the other, they had to think of a word that began with the last letter of the word they had just heard. Those only repeating words performed the same as those with no distraction, but those with the more complicated task showed even worse reaction times—an average of 480 milliseconds extra delay. This shows that when people have to consider the information they hear carefully, it can impair their driving ability significantly.

Punishing people for using hand-held gadgets while driving is difficult enough, even though they can be seen from outside the car. Persuading people to switch their phones off altogether when they get behind the wheel might be the only answer. Who knows, they might even come to enjoy not having to take calls.