题目内容
Ricci's "Operation Columbus"
1 Ricci, 45, is now striking out on perhaps his boldest venture yet. He plans to market an English-language edition of his elegant monthly art magazine, FMR, in the United States. Once again the skeptics are murmuring that the successful Ricci has headed for a big fall. And once again Ricci intends to prove them wrong.
2 Ricci is so confident that he has christen quest "Operation Columbus" and has set his sights on discovering an American readership of 300,000. That goal may not be too far-fetched. The Italian edition of FMR — the initials, of course, stand for Franco Maria Ricci— is only 18 months old. But it is already the second largest art magazine in the world, with a circulation of 65,000 and a profit margin of US $ 500,000. The American edition will be patterned after the Italian version, with each 160-page issue carrying only 40 pages of ads and no more than five articles. But the contents will often differ. The English-language edition will include more American works, Ricci says, to help Americans get over "an inferiority complex about their art". He also hopes that the magazine will become a vehicle for a two-way cultural exchange — what he likes to think of as a marriage of brains, culture and taste from both sides of the Atlantic.
3 To realize this version, Ricci is mounting one of the most lavish, enterprising — and expensive promotional campaigns in magazine-publishing history. Between November and January, eight jumbo jets will fly 8 million copies of a sample 16-page edition of FMR across the Atlantic. From a warehouse in Michigan, 6.5 million copies will be mailed to American subscribers of various cultural, art and business magazines. Some of the remaining copies will circulate as a special Sunday supplement in the New York Times. The cost of launching Operation Columbus is a staggering US $ 5 million, but Ricci is hoping that 600% of the price tag will be financed by Italian corporations. "To land in America Columbus had to use Spanish sponsors," reads one sentence in his promotional pamphlet. "We would like Italians."
4 Like Columbus, Ricci cannot know what his reception, will be on foreign shores. In Italy he gambled — and won — on a simple concept: it is more important to show art than to write about it. Hence, one issue of FMR might feature 32 full-colour pages of 17th-century tapestries, followed by 14 pages of outrageous eyeglasses. He is gambling that the concept is exportable. "I don't expect that more than 30% of my readers.., will actually read FMR," he says. "The magazine is such a visual delight that they don't have to. "Still, he is lining up an impressive stable of writers and professors for the American edition, including Noam Chomsky, Anthony Burgess, Eric Jong and Norman Mailer. In addition, he seems to be pursuing his own eclectic vision without giving a moment's thought to such established competitors as Connosisseur and Horizon. "The Americans can do almost everything better than we can, "says Ricci," But we (the Italians) have a 2,000 year edge on them in art."
Ricci intends his American edition of FMR to carry more American art works in order to
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听力原文：W: Paul, we haven't gone out for over a month. Let's go somewhere this evening.
M: Fine. Where would you like to go？ Look in the newspaper to get information about the movies or the theater.
Q: What does the man ask the woman to do？
(13)
According to the talk, workers in "zones of quiet" can
听力原文：W: First of all, when do people start work in American offices？
M: Right, well, the official workdays start at 9 a. m.. It should really mean 9 o'clock, not ten past or half past nine.
W: Would you say that people work very hard in offices in America？
M: Well, I don't know about the employees in your country, but some nations have a philosophy that you only work when the boss is around. And any time he is not there, one can relax by reading the newspaper or whatever one likes doing in a personal way.
W: And things are different in the States, you are saying？
M: Well, in America, one is being paid for one's time. So employees are expected to find other work if their own desks are clear, or to help someone else with his or her work. But you never sit idle doing nothing.
W: Yes, as the saying goes, time is money.
M: Exactly. Your employer owns your time while he is paying you for it. That is precisely what "time is money" means. And anyway the boss does not ask more of you than he is doing himself. He will probably work to the lunch hour himself or even take work until night.
W: Talking about lunch hours. What about them？ Do you take them seriously？
M: Oh, yes, sure, of course. The employee's lunch hour should be taken within the period allowed unless you are officially discussing company business, say, on a business lunch. It's the same, too, with the end of the day. I mean, work until the day officially ends at five o'clock unless you are in the office work, where flextime, is, is accepted practice.
W: Oh, so you have the flextime system, do you？ I wasn't sure about that.
M: Oh, yes, sure. Flexible working hours, that is, starting or ending work earlier or later. I know, it is still relatively new. However there are more and more Americans on the system today. Well, for the same reasons as in Europe to keep traffic and commuting problems down. And as more women now work, it gives more family time.
W: Urn. Could you say something about contract of hiring in America, please？
M: Well, it's different in America from, say, European countries like Germany or France, perhaps Japan, too. I'm not sure. I know that in some countries, people relax when they have once got a job because they know they will almost never be fired unless they do something wrong.
W: Do you mean that your employer can just fire you in America？
M: No, no, no. There are of course legal protections in the US. So employees cannot be unjustly fired without good reasons. Workers must do a good job, produce well and get along with their colleagues, or they can be let go, as it is called.
W: So one day to the next, you mean.
M: Well, it's really done without warning. But it is important to remember that in the US you are a member of a business firm and not a family. It makes a difference.
W: I wonder, are the physical or external appearances of office life different from European offices？
M: Well, I have heard people comment on the informality found in American offices. And this is certainly a little difficult for people who are more used to hierarchical system, of course. There are some very formal offices, too, say, big banks, law firms, and major corporations. But in many establishments with fewer employees, the atmosphere is loose and easy with a lot of joking and teasing and wandering in and out of the offices among all levels of employees.
W: Well, that sounds quite interesting. I think that's all I want to know really. Thank you very much.
M: My pleasure.
Employees in the US are paid for their time. This means that they are supposed to
SECTION B INTERVIEW
Directions: In this section you will hear everything ONCE ONLY. Listen carefully and then answer the questions that follow. Questions 1 to 5 are based on an interview. At the end of the interview you will be given 10 seconds to answer each of the following five questions.
Now listen to the interview.
听力原文： As we all know, when machines work they give off a lot of noise. And the noise can sometimes be very unpleasant or annoying. As a result, people have been trying to find ways to reduce noise. Although it may sound a little bit strange to you all, one of the best ways to make machines quieter, in cars, for example, may be to make them noisier. The source of this paradox is electronic anti-noise, which creates sound waves to cancel out unwanted noise, such as rattles, blares, etc. Now although the idea dates back to the 1930s, it's only recently that the advances in computer technology have made anti-noise a commercial possibility. Take France for example. Here industry spends a fortune to get rid of noise. We all know how unpleasant it is, for people working in factories and ordinary people at home enjoying their leisure can be affected by noise. Delicate machines are affected by noise as well. The government has passed a lot of regulations concerning acceptable levels of noise.
Noise is costly to industry. In the first place, just following a single regulation can cost one to two billion US dollars in the textile industry, they say. Then secondly, of course, vibration can cause damage to machinery. Even very small vibrations can cause parts to wear out and equipment to fail. And naturally enough this gets onto the price of the product. About 5-15% of the price of a product comes from noise and vibration cost, as estimated. At present, methods used to dampen down noise and vibration rely on techniques that are thirty or forty years old. These usually involve wrapping the noisy or vibrating component in anything from cotton to concrete. But it is often expensive and inefficient. The modern electronic anti-noise devices don't reduce sound. Instead, sound is used to attack sound. The trick is to hit this sound wave with other waves in a carefully controlled way. It may not be possible to eliminate the noise completely. But engineers can build systems to eliminate specific kinds of noise and vibration. The new systems can deal with repetitive noise. This unfortunately means that there is not much that can be done about one of the noise, like someone trying to learn to play trumpet, but they can handle fairly regular things, like engine noise.
A French company has developed a technique which uses microphone and the micro- processor. The processor measures the sound and directs the speaker to broadcast sound waves that are out of phase with the engine noise. The company claimed that it would make the car engine quieter, if not completely 100% silent. There are a number of other areas of application in the noisy industrial environment of today. One system which the company is developing is to minimize the noise of aircraft engines and helicopter vibrations. Now anti-noise systems will be able to reduce noise in a cabin of an airplane to more acceptable levels. Another area which affects ordinary household nowadays concerns the noise which electricity and gas fires create. The electricity companies spend a lot of money each year cutting the harm of transformers, trying to quiet the noise and maintaining the equipment that is constantly affected by vibrations.
If they can get rid of or even stop the vibrations, manufactures can increase the production speed. But of course people working in noisy work places are perhaps more affected than anything by the effects of noise. Anti-noise can also create zones that are quiet in noisy work places. To create such a zone, you do two things. First, microphones are suspended around the work place.
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