1. American managers who want to get more out of their white-collar workforce will be in a shock if they seek advice from Frank

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问题     1. American managers who want to get more out of their white-collar workforce will be in a shock if they seek advice from Frank Becker, a professor at Cornell University who studies the pattern of office work. His advice: companies need to devote more office space to creating places like will-tended living rooms, where employees can sit around in comfort and chat.
    2. Mr. Becker is one of a group of academics and consultants trying to make companies more productive by linking new office technology to a better understanding of how employees work. The forecast of a decade ago — that computers would increase office productivity, reduce white-collar payrolls and help the remaining staff to work better — have proved much too hopeful. Mr. Becker predicts that the central office will become mainly a place where workers from satellite and home-based offices meet to discuss ideas and to reaffirm their loyalty to follow employees and the company. This will require new thoughts about the layout of office buildings. Now spaces for copying machines, coffee rooms, meetings and reception areas usually come second to the offices in which people spend most of the day working. Mr. Becker sees these common areas gradually becoming the heart of an office.
    3. Managers, says Mr. Becker, will also have to abandon their long-cherished notion that a productive employee is an employee who can be seen. Appearing on time and looking busy will soon become irrelevant. Technology and new patterns of office use will make companies judge people by what they do, not by where they spend their time.
    4. That does not mean the end of the office, just its transformation into to a social center. New ideas about offices are catching on elsewhere. Digital Equipment Corp’s subsidiary in Finland has equipped offices with reclining chairs and stuffed sofas to make them more comfortable and conductive to informal conversations and the swapping of ideas. Companies such as Apple and General Electric are experimenting along similar lines.
    5. Steelcase, a manufacturer of office furniture, is one of the firms keenest to experiment with new office layouts and designs. The company’s research center in Grand Rapids, Michigan, is an $11 million building completed in 1989. It is designed around a series of office "neighborhoods" that put marketing, manufacturing and design people close to each other so that they can find it easier to discuss ideas and solve problems. Employees on different floors can see one another through glass, and easily go from floor to floor via escalator. Top managers work in a cluster of offices that are wrapped around an atrium in the middle of the building, rather than occupying the usual suite of top-floor offices. They can see and be seen by the people they manage.     6. But sometimes even the most communicative employee just wants to be left alone.
    Questions 1-5
    Directions: For questions 1-5, choose the best title for each paragraph from below. For each numbered paragraph(1-5), mark one letter(A-G)on your Answer Sheet. Do not mark any letter twice.
    A. New office will bring out more profits
    B. Some companies have adopted new offices
    C. Old notions of office should be abandoned
    D. Computer will not be used in new office
    E. An example of new office building
    F. What the new office will look like
    G. The new idea of office shocks managers
Paragraph 4 ______

选项

答案B

解析 第4段讲述了一些大的知名公司已经开始采用新型的办公室。
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