Passage 1
The role of the manager as merely an overseer of workers is an artifact（人工制品）of the Industrial Age paradigm, no longer appropriate to the Knowledge Age. Increasingly, middle managers' heads are on the chopping blocks of budget-tightening corporations, and those who fail to transform themselves into "player/coaches" will become obsolete（过时的）, suggests Thomas H. Davenport, director of the Accenture Institute for Strategic Change.
"There is still an important role, albeit（虽然）a different one, for management in the future," Davenport writes in The Future of Leadership. "The single most important factor driving the change in what management entails is the rise and prevalence of knowledge work."
Under the old model of management, managers were viewed as a separate part of the organization's workforce, mere link between the executives who make the decisions and the laborers who carry out the work. But in the new model, managers both make decisions and do work themselves.
In advanced economies, knowledge workers now make up more than 50% of workers－or more, depending on how you define "knowledge worker", Davenport reports. Davenport defines "knowledge workers" as those who create knowledge, such as product development engineers, or whose use of knowledge is a dominant aspect of their work, such as financial auditors（审计员）. One aspect of work that has changed is that users and creators of knowledge are more likely to be the same people.
"Workers have traditionally been viewed as users of ideas, not creators of them, and if they do create ideas they have generally been small ones," says Davenport. "My view, however, is that successful in the future will be those in which it's everyone's job to be creating and using ideas that are both big and small."
Passage 2
Picture a typical MBA lecture theatre twenty years ago. In it the majority of students will have conformed to the standard model of the time: male, middle class and Western. Walk into a class today, however, and you’ll get a completely different impression. For a start, you will now see plenty more women—the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, for example, boasts that 40% of its new enrolment is female. You will also see a wide range of ethnic groups and nationals of practically every country.
It might be tempting, therefore, to think that the old barriers have been broken down and equal opportunity achieved. But, increasingly, this apparent diversity is becoming a mask for a new type of conformity. Behind the differences in sex, skin tones and mother tongues, there are common attitudes, expectations and ambitions which risk creating a set of clones among the business leaders of the future.
Diversity, it seems, has not helped to address fundamental weaknesses in business leadership. So what can be done to create more effective managers of the commercial world? According to Valerie Gauthier, associate dean at HEC Paris, the key lies in the process by which MBA programs recruit their students. At the moment candidates are selected on a fairly narrow set of criteria such as prior academic and career performance, and analytical and problem solving abilities. This is then coupled to a school’s picture of what a diverse class should look like, with the result that passport, ethnic origin and sex can all become influencing factors. But schools rarely dig down to find out what really makes an applicant succeed, to create a class which also contains diversity of attitude and approach—arguably the only diversity that, in a business context, really matters.
Indeed, there does seem to be a demand for the more rounded leaders such diversity might create. A study by Mannaz, a leadership development company, suggests that, while the bully-boy chief executive of old may not have been eradicated completely, there is a definite shift in emphasis towards less tough styles of management—at least in America and Europe. Perhaps most significant, according to Mannaz, is the increasing interest large companies have in more collaborative management models, such as those prevalent in Scandinavia, which seek to integrate the hard and soft aspects of leadership and encourage delegated responsibility and accountability.
Passage 3
How good are you at saying "no"? For many, it's surprisingly difficult. This is especially true of editors, who by nature tend to be eager and engaged participants in everything they do. Consider these scenarios:
It's late in the day. That front-page package you've been working on is nearly complete; one last edit and it's finished. Enter the executive editor, who makes a suggestion requiring a more-than-modest rearrangement of the design and the addition of an information box. You want to scream: "No! It's done!" What do you do?
The first rule of saying no to the boss is don't say no. She probably has something in mind when she makes suggestions, and it's up to you to find out what. The second rule is don't raise the stakes by challenging her authority. That issue is already decided. The third rule is to be ready to cite options and consequences. The boss's suggestions might be appropriate, but there are always consequences. She might not know about the pages backing up that need attention, or about the designer who had to go home sick. Tell her she can have what she wants, but explain the consequences. Understand what she's trying to accomplish and propose a Plan B that will make it happen without destroying what you've done so far.
Here's another case. Your least-favorite reporter suggests a dumb story idea. This one should be easy, but it's not. If you say no, even politely, you risk inhibiting further ideas, not just from that reporter, but from others who heard that you turned down the idea. This scenario is common in newsrooms that lack a systematic way to filter story suggestions.
Two steps are necessary. First, you need a system for how stories are proposed and reviewed. Reporters can tolerate rejection of their ideas if they believe they were given a fair hearing. Your gut reaction (本能反应) and dismissive rejection, even of a worthless idea, might not qualify as systematic or fair.
Second, the people you work with need to negotiate a "What if ...?" agreement covering "What if my idea is turned down?" How are people expected to react? Is there an appeal process? Can they refine the idea and resubmit it? By anticipating "What if...?" situations before they happen, you can reach understanding that will help ease you out of confrontations.
Passage 4
British universities, groaning under the burden of a huge increase in student numbers, are warning that the tradition of a free education is at risk. The universities have threatened to impose an admission fee on students to plug a gap in revenue if the government does not act to improve their finances and scrap some public spending cutbacks.
The government responded to the universities’threat by setting up the most fundamental review of higher education for a generation, under a non-party troubleshooter (调停人)，Sir Ron Dearing.
One in three school-leavers enters higher education, five times the number when the last review took place thirty years ago.
Everyone agrees a system that is feeling the strain after rapid expansion needs a lot more money-but there is little hope of getting it from the taxpayer and not much scope for attracting more finance from business.
Most colleges believe students should contribute to tuition costs, something that is common elsewhere in the world but would mark a revolutionary change inBritain. Universities want the government to introduce a loan scheme for tuition fees and have suspended their own threatened action for now. They await Dearing’s advice, hoping it will not be too late-some are already reported to be in financial difficulty.
As the century nears its end, the whole concept of what a university should be is under the microscope. Experts ponder how much they can use computers instead of classrooms, talk of the need for lifelong learning and refer to students as“consumers.”
The Confederation (联盟) of British Industry, the key employers’organization, wants even more expansion in higher education to help fight competition on world markets from booming Asian economies. But the government has doubts about more expansion. The Times newspaper egress, complaining that quality has suffered as student numbers soared, with close tutorial supervision giving way to “mass production methods more typical of European universities.”
Passage 5
As the horizons of science have expanded, two main groups of scientists have emerged. One is the pure scientist; the other, the applied scientist.
The pure or theoretical scientist does original research in order to understand the basic laws of nature that govern our world. The applied scientist adapts this knowledge to practical problems. Neither is more important than the other, however, for the two groups are very much related.
Sometimes, however, the applied scientist finds the "problem" for the theoretical scientist to work on. Let's take a particular problem of the aircraft industry: heat-resistant metals. Many of the metals and alloys which perform satisfactorily in a car cannot be used in a jet-propelled plane. New alloys must be used, because the jet engine operates at a much higher temperature than an automobile engine. The turbine wheel in a turbojet must withstand temperatures as high as 1,600 degrees Fahrenheit, so aircraft designers had to turn to the research metallurgist（冶金学家）for the development of metals and alloys that would do the job in jet-propelled planes.
Dividing scientists into two groups is only one broad way of classifying them, however. When scientific knowledge was very limited, there was no need for men to specialize. Today, with the great body of scientific knowledge, scientists specialize in many different fields. Within each field, there is even further subdivision（细分）. And, with finer and finer subdivisions, the various sciences have become more and more interrelated until no one branch is entirely independent of the others. Many new specialties—geophysics（地球物理学）and biochemistry, for example--have resulted from combining the knowledge of two or more sciences.
Passage 6
Like most people，I’ve long understood that I will be judged by my occupation，that my profession is a gauge people use to see how smart or talented I am．Recently，however，I was disappointed to see that it also decides how I’m treated as a person．
Last year I left a professional position as a small－town reporter and took a job waiting tables．As someone paid to serve food to people．I had customers say and do things to me I suspect they’d never say or do to their most casual acquaintances．One night a man talking on his cell phone waved me away，then beckoned （示意）me back with his finger minute later，complaining he was ready to order and asking where I’d been．
I had waited tables during summers in college and was treated like a peon （勤杂工）plenty of people．But at 19 years old，I believed I deserved inferior treatment from professional adults．Besides，people responded to me differently after I told them I was in college．Customers would joke that one day I’d be sitting at their table，waiting to be served．
Once I graduated I took a job at a community newspaper．From my first day，I heard a respectful tone from everyone who called me．I assumed this was the way the professional world workedcordially．
I soon found out differently. I sat several feet away from an advertising sales representative with a similar name．Our calls would often get mixed up and someone asking for Kristen would be transferred to Christie．The mistake was immediately evident．Perhaps it was because money was involved，but people used a tone with Kristen that they never used with me．
My job title made people treat me with courtesy．So it was a shock to return to the restaurant industry．
It’s no secret that there’s a lot to put up with when waiting tables，and fortunately，much of it can be easily forgotten when you pocket the tips．The service industry，by definition，exists to cater to others’ needs．Still，it seemed that many of my customers didn’t get the difference between server and servant．
I’m now applying to graduated school，which means someday I’ll return to a profession where people need to be nice to me in order to get what they want，I think I’ll take them to dinner first，and see how they treat someone whose only job is to serve them．
Passage 7
"The world's environment is surprisingly healthy. Discuss." If that were ail examination topic, most students would tear it apart, offering a long list of complaints: from local smog (烟雾) to global climate change, from the felling (砍伐) of forests to the extinction of species. The list would largely be accurate, the concern legitimate. Yet the students who should be given the highest marks would actually be those who agreed with the statement. The surprise is how good things are, not how bad.
After all, the world's population has more than tripled during this century, and world output has risen hugely, so you would expect the earth itself to have been affected. Indeed, if people lived, consumed and produced things in the same way as they did in 1900 (or 1950, or indeed 1980), the world by now would be a pretty disgusting place: smelly, dirty, toxic and dangerous.
But they don't. The reasons why they don't, and why the environment has not been ruined, have to do with prices, technological innovation, social change and government regulation in response to popular pressure. That is why today's environmental problems in the poor countries ought, in principle, to be solvable.
Raw materials have not run out, and show no sign of doing so. Logically, one day they must: the planet is a finite place. Yet it is also very big, and man is very ingenious. What has happened is that every time a material seems to be running short, the price has risen and, in response, people have looked for new sources of supply, tried to find ways to use less of the material, or looked for a new substitute. For this reason prices for energy and for minerals have fallen in real terms during the century. The same is true for food. Prices fluctuate, in response to harvests, natural disasters and political instability; and when they rise, it takes some time before new sources of supply become available. But they always do, assisted by new farming and crop technology. The long-term trend has been downwards.
It is where prices and markets do not operate properly that this benign (良性的) trend begins to stumble, and the genuine problems arise. Markets cannot always keep the environment healthy. If no one owns the resource concerned, no one has an interest in conserving it or fostering it: fish is the best example of this.
Passage 8
Video games have become a pervasive(遍布的) form of entertainment in the 1990s. Today an estimated 69 percent of American families own or rent video and computer games. Most are harmless entertainment, but in far too many of the most popular ones, kids are acting out realistic violent experiences on their TV and computer screens. They are severing(割断) heads and snapping spines in Mortal Kombat IV. They are playing a go-go dancer to flash her breasts and then blowing her away in Duke Nukem 3D. They are scorching the high school band with a flamethrower until they burn to death in Postal.
“These are not just games anymore,” says Rick Dyer, president of the San Diego-based Virtual Image Productions and an outspoken critic of titles with violent and sexual content. “These are learning machines. We’re teaching kids in the most incredible manner what it’s like to pull the trigger. The focus is on the trill, enjoyment and reward. What they’re not learning are the real-life consequences.”
Interactive video games introduce kids to a fantasy world that features amazingly lifelike characters, detailed images of brutality, and an audio mix of heart-pounding music, macabre(恐怖的) sound effects and authentic voices. Unlike movies and televisions, where you watch the violence, the game lets you feel the sensation of committing violent acts. When you’re into the game, you’re in the game.
“The technology is becoming more engaging for kids,” says David Walsh, president of the National Institute on Media and the Family (NIMF), a watchdog group in Minneapolis, “and a segment of games features antisocial themes of violence, sex and crude language. Unfortunately, it’s a segment that seems particularly popular with kids ages 8 to 15.”
Passage 9
We all have an instinctive(本能的) need for personal space. Besides attempts to retain privacy which are efforts to withdraw physically or psychologically from the social world into a private world, city dwellers have had to adapt and make changes to their personal space. Personal space is a psychological construct referring to the physical distance or boundary we all attempt to maintain between ourselves and the people around us. In general, this space is roughly circular but with a larger space in front of us than behind ourselves being comfortable with a particular distance between ourselves and others around us and will move to regulate this distance. The exact distance is dependent upon a number of individual, social and, particularly in the city, situational factors. In the city we find it difficult to keep people out of our space bubbles and to escape.