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Section A There is one passage in this section with 7 questions. For each question, there are four choices marked A, B, C and D. You should decide on the best choice. Then mark the corresponding letter on the Answer Sheet with a single line through the centre. Questions 51 -57 are based on the following passage. When Ruth Redding, an account manager, was sent on a management training course to improve her relationships with her colleagues by learning how to communicate with them more effectively, instead of being asked to address her boss or her peers, she found herself talking to a horse. In fact, during the course, which is organised by Manchester University Business School, Redding found herself standing in a pen whispering to an animal and communicating in a non-aggressive way. This form of communication, which is the subject of the best-selling novel The Horse Whisperer, later filmed with Robert Redford in the starring role, might appear bizarre on a stud farm, let alone a management training course. But horse whispering is among a number of unusual activities now being used to teach staff about every aspect of working life, from self-confidence to communication. In the 1980s and 1990s, it became fashionable to dump executives on a remote mountainside, or windswept Scottish isle, and leave them to survive a weekend in order to develop initiative, build team spirit and promote leadership skills. An alternative to the classic "chalk and talk" format, with the lecturer and obedient staff seated round a table, it all seemed wild and rather outlandish. Today, by comparison, it looks increasingly tame. A new generation of management training gurus are adopting a different approach. In Italy, stressed executives have been dressing up as gladiators to confront each other as their ancient forebears did, and in America, sales-people are herding cattle, while in Britain, one supermarket reportedly put its executives in Native American teepees for a weekend to develop a spirit of co-operation. Naturally, the originators of these new courses claim to have respectable psychological theories to back them up. Tudor Rickards, a professor at Manchester, was intrigued when he heard about the work done by the famous horse whisperer, Monty Roberts. "The idea is that instead of ’breaking’ the horse, you co-operate with it. Traditionally, you would coax a horse into a box and then reward it by slamming the door shut. Monty leads the horse in and out of the box and offers it a reward," explains Professor Rickards. "Monty’s approach is founded on the recognition of a foal’s instinctive desire to be part of the herd. " He matched this with research from the Industrial Society, which revealed that often the difference between a successful and unsuccessful leader is trust. "As they observe the way horses react to certain behavior, participants think about how they themselves or other colleagues react to different management styles," explains Professor Rickards. "The discussion often leads to one about experiences of bullying and abusive behavior, a discussion that might not otherwise surface in a leadership course. We’vefound this helps the participants draw fine distinctions between being tough, being assertive, being supportive and being soft. " Team building is also the aim of murder mystery days run by a company called Corporate Pursuits. Actors mingle with participants and play out a scene until someone is found "murdered" Clues, such as photographs, personal items or a cryptic message, are arranged around the room, and small teams, often pitted against each other, will work to solve the mystery under the gaze of trained observers. Although fun and a sense of release is important, managing director Mandie Chester Bristow admits that this type of corporate clue do occasionally meets with skepticism among clients. "On one occasion, people were messing around and not taking it seriously at all, so I had to say to them, ’You’re behaving like a bunch of school children. ’ " Another challenge can be reporting the observers’ findings. "We would never say, ’You’ve failed, ’ if they didn’t identify the murderer correctly. Instead, we would praise them for the progress they made and how they worked together as a team. " "There are lots of gimmicks in training and headline-grabbing courses at the moment, but what they deliver is often variable," says Nick Isles of the Industrial Society. "People often say afterwards that they enjoyed the event, but it’s very difficult to measure how much they’ve actually learned from it. " He argues that ongoing training in the work place, or courses that last months, are a better way of improving aspects of business such as productivity and customer service. Questions: What is Nick Isles’s opinion of the new-style training courses
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Section B In this section, there is one passage followed by 7 statements. Go over the passage quickly and mark the answers on the Answer Sheet. For questions 58-64, mark Y (for Yes) if the statement agrees with the information given in the passage; N (for No) if the statement contradicts the information given in the passage; NG (for Not Given) if the information is not given in the passage. Questions 58-64 are based on the following passage. For the first century or so of the industrial revolution, increased productivity led to decreases in working hours. Employees who had been putting in 12-hour days, six days a week, found their time on the job shrinking to 10 hours daily, then, finally, to eight hours, five days a week. Only a generation ago social planners worried about what people would do with all this new-found free time. In the U. S. , at least, it seems they need not have bothered. Although the output per hour of work has more than doubled since 1945, leisure seems reserved largely for the unemployed and underemployed. Those who work full-time spend as much time on the job as they did at the end of World War II. In fact, working hours have increased noticeably since 1970--perhaps because real wages have stagnated since that year. Bookstores now abound with manuals describing how to manage time and cope with stress. There are several reasons for lost leisure. Since 1979, companies have responded to improvements in the business climate by having employees work overtime rather than by hiring extra personnel, says economist Juliet B. Schor of Harvard University. Indeed, the current economic recovery has gained a certain amount of notoriety for its "jobless" nature: increased production has been almost entirely decoupled from employment. Some firms are even downsizing as their profits climb. "All things being equal, we’d be better off spreading around the work, " observes labour economist Ronald G. Ehrenberg of Cornell University. Yet a host of factors pushes employers to hire fewer workers for more hours and, at the same time, compels workers to spend more time on the job. Most of those incentives involve what Ehrenberg calls the structure of compensation: quirks in the way salaries and benefits are organised that make it more profitable to ask 40 employees to labour an extra hour each than to hire one more worker to do the same 40-hour job. Professional and managerial employees supply the most obvious lesson along these lines. Once people are on salary, their cost to a firm is the same whether they spend 35 hours a week in the office or 70. Diminishing returns may eventually set in as overworked employees lose efficiency or leave for more arable pastures. But in the short run, the employer’s incentive is clear. Even hourly employees receive benefits--such as pension contributions and medical insurance-that are not tied to the number of hours they work. Therefore, it is more profitable for employers to work their existing employees harder. For all that employees complain about long hours, they, too, have reasons not to trade money for leisure. "People who work reduced hours pay a huge penalty in career terms," Schor maintains. "It’s taken as a negative signal about their commitment to the firm. " [Lotte] Bailyn [of Massachusetts Institute of Technology] adds that many corporate managers find it difficult to measure the contribution of their underlings to a firm’s wellbeing, so they use the number of hours worked as a proxy for output. "Employees know this," she says, and they adjust their behavior accordingly. "Although the image of the good worker is the one whose life belongs to the company," Bailyn says, "it doesn’t fit the facts. " She cites both quantitative and qualitative studies that show increased productivity for part-time workers: they make better use of the time they have, and they are less likely to succumb to fatigue in stressful jobs. Companies that employ more workers for less time also gain from the resulting redundancy, she asserts. "The extra people can cover the contingencies that you know are going to happen, such as when crises take people away from the workplace. " Positive experiences with reduced hours have begun to change the more-is-better culture at some companies, Schor reports. Larger firms, in particular, appear to be more willing to experiment with flexible working arrangements... It may take even more than changes in the financial and cultural structures of employment for workers successfully to trade increased productivity and money for leisure time, Schor contends. She says the U. S. market for goods has become skewed by the assumption of full-time, two-career households. Automobile makers no longer manufacture cheap models, and developers do not build the tiny bungalows that served the first postwar generation of home buyers. Not even the humblest household object is made without a microprocessor. As Schor notes, the situation is a curious inversion of the "appropriate technology" vision that designers have had for developing countries: U. S. goods are appropriate only for high incomes and long hours. Statements: Today, employees are facing a reduction in working hours.
Section B In this section, there is one passage followed by 7 statements. Go over the passage quickly and mark the answers on the Answer Sheet. For questions 58-64, mark Y (for Yes) if the statement agrees with the information given in the passage; N (for No) if the statement contradicts the information given in the passage; NG (for Not Given) if the information is not given in the passage. Questions 58-64 are based on the following passage. For the first century or so of the industrial revolution, increased productivity led to decreases in working hours. Employees who had been putting in 12-hour days, six days a week, found their time on the job shrinking to 10 hours daily, then, finally, to eight hours, five days a week. Only a generation ago social planners worried about what people would do with all this new-found free time. In the U. S. , at least, it seems they need not have bothered. Although the output per hour of work has more than doubled since 1945, leisure seems reserved largely for the unemployed and underemployed. Those who work full-time spend as much time on the job as they did at the end of World War II. In fact, working hours have increased noticeably since 1970--perhaps because real wages have stagnated since that year. Bookstores now abound with manuals describing how to manage time and cope with stress. There are several reasons for lost leisure. Since 1979, companies have responded to improvements in the business climate by having employees work overtime rather than by hiring extra personnel, says economist Juliet B. Schor of Harvard University. Indeed, the current economic recovery has gained a certain amount of notoriety for its "jobless" nature: increased production has been almost entirely decoupled from employment. Some firms are even downsizing as their profits climb. "All things being equal, we’d be better off spreading around the work, " observes labour economist Ronald G. Ehrenberg of Cornell University. Yet a host of factors pushes employers to hire fewer workers for more hours and, at the same time, compels workers to spend more time on the job. Most of those incentives involve what Ehrenberg calls the structure of compensation: quirks in the way salaries and benefits are organised that make it more profitable to ask 40 employees to labour an extra hour each than to hire one more worker to do the same 40-hour job. Professional and managerial employees supply the most obvious lesson along these lines. Once people are on salary, their cost to a firm is the same whether they spend 35 hours a week in the office or 70. Diminishing returns may eventually set in as overworked employees lose efficiency or leave for more arable pastures. But in the short run, the employer’s incentive is clear. Even hourly employees receive benefits--such as pension contributions and medical insurance-that are not tied to the number of hours they work. Therefore, it is more profitable for employers to work their existing employees harder. For all that employees complain about long hours, they, too, have reasons not to trade money for leisure. "People who work reduced hours pay a huge penalty in career terms," Schor maintains. "It’s taken as a negative signal about their commitment to the firm. " [Lotte] Bailyn [of Massachusetts Institute of Technology] adds that many corporate managers find it difficult to measure the contribution of their underlings to a firm’s wellbeing, so they use the number of hours worked as a proxy for output. "Employees know this," she says, and they adjust their behavior accordingly. "Although the image of the good worker is the one whose life belongs to the company," Bailyn says, "it doesn’t fit the facts. " She cites both quantitative and qualitative studies that show increased productivity for part-time workers: they make better use of the time they have, and they are less likely to succumb to fatigue in stressful jobs. Companies that employ more workers for less time also gain from the resulting redundancy, she asserts. "The extra people can cover the contingencies that you know are going to happen, such as when crises take people away from the workplace. " Positive experiences with reduced hours have begun to change the more-is-better culture at some companies, Schor reports. Larger firms, in particular, appear to be more willing to experiment with flexible working arrangements... It may take even more than changes in the financial and cultural structures of employment for workers successfully to trade increased productivity and money for leisure time, Schor contends. She says the U. S. market for goods has become skewed by the assumption of full-time, two-career households. Automobile makers no longer manufacture cheap models, and developers do not build the tiny bungalows that served the first postwar generation of home buyers. Not even the humblest household object is made without a microprocessor. As Schor notes, the situation is a curious inversion of the "appropriate technology" vision that designers have had for developing countries: U. S. goods are appropriate only for high incomes and long hours. Statements: The economic recovery created more jobs.
Section A There is one passage in this section with 7 questions. For each question, there are four choices marked A, B, C and D. You should decide on the best choice. Then mark the corresponding letter on the Answer Sheet with a single line through the centre. Questions 51 -57 are based on the following passage. When Ruth Redding, an account manager, was sent on a management training course to improve her relationships with her colleagues by learning how to communicate with them more effectively, instead of being asked to address her boss or her peers, she found herself talking to a horse. In fact, during the course, which is organised by Manchester University Business School, Redding found herself standing in a pen whispering to an animal and communicating in a non-aggressive way. This form of communication, which is the subject of the best-selling novel The Horse Whisperer, later filmed with Robert Redford in the starring role, might appear bizarre on a stud farm, let alone a management training course. But horse whispering is among a number of unusual activities now being used to teach staff about every aspect of working life, from self-confidence to communication. In the 1980s and 1990s, it became fashionable to dump executives on a remote mountainside, or windswept Scottish isle, and leave them to survive a weekend in order to develop initiative, build team spirit and promote leadership skills. An alternative to the classic "chalk and talk" format, with the lecturer and obedient staff seated round a table, it all seemed wild and rather outlandish. Today, by comparison, it looks increasingly tame. A new generation of management training gurus are adopting a different approach. In Italy, stressed executives have been dressing up as gladiators to confront each other as their ancient forebears did, and in America, sales-people are herding cattle, while in Britain, one supermarket reportedly put its executives in Native American teepees for a weekend to develop a spirit of co-operation. Naturally, the originators of these new courses claim to have respectable psychological theories to back them up. Tudor Rickards, a professor at Manchester, was intrigued when he heard about the work done by the famous horse whisperer, Monty Roberts. "The idea is that instead of ’breaking’ the horse, you co-operate with it. Traditionally, you would coax a horse into a box and then reward it by slamming the door shut. Monty leads the horse in and out of the box and offers it a reward," explains Professor Rickards. "Monty’s approach is founded on the recognition of a foal’s instinctive desire to be part of the herd. " He matched this with research from the Industrial Society, which revealed that often the difference between a successful and unsuccessful leader is trust. "As they observe the way horses react to certain behavior, participants think about how they themselves or other colleagues react to different management styles," explains Professor Rickards. "The discussion often leads to one about experiences of bullying and abusive behavior, a discussion that might not otherwise surface in a leadership course. We’vefound this helps the participants draw fine distinctions between being tough, being assertive, being supportive and being soft. " Team building is also the aim of murder mystery days run by a company called Corporate Pursuits. Actors mingle with participants and play out a scene until someone is found "murdered" Clues, such as photographs, personal items or a cryptic message, are arranged around the room, and small teams, often pitted against each other, will work to solve the mystery under the gaze of trained observers. Although fun and a sense of release is important, managing director Mandie Chester Bristow admits that this type of corporate clue do occasionally meets with skepticism among clients. "On one occasion, people were messing around and not taking it seriously at all, so I had to say to them, ’You’re behaving like a bunch of school children. ’ " Another challenge can be reporting the observers’ findings. "We would never say, ’You’ve failed, ’ if they didn’t identify the murderer correctly. Instead, we would praise them for the progress they made and how they worked together as a team. " "There are lots of gimmicks in training and headline-grabbing courses at the moment, but what they deliver is often variable," says Nick Isles of the Industrial Society. "People often say afterwards that they enjoyed the event, but it’s very difficult to measure how much they’ve actually learned from it. " He argues that ongoing training in the work place, or courses that last months, are a better way of improving aspects of business such as productivity and customer service. Questions: In the first paragraph, what does the writer say about the technique Ruth Redding found herself practising.9
销售成本率是反映销售收入与成本之间关系的一个指标，该指标越低越好，比率越低，说明企业销售毛利率越高。
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