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  3. As many office workers adapt to remote work, cities may undergo fundamental change if offices remain under-utilized. Who will be

As many office workers adapt to remote work, cities may undergo fundamental change if offices remain under-utilized. Who will be

admin2022-03-23  144
问题     As many office workers adapt to remote work, cities may undergo fundamental change if offices remain under-utilized. Who will benefit if working from home becomes the norm?
    Employers argue they make considerable savings on real estate when workers shift from office to home work. However, these savings result from passing costs on to workers.
    Unless employees are fully compensated, this could become a variant of parasitic (寄生的) capitalism, whereby corporate profits increasingly rely on extracting value from the public—and now personal—realm, rather than on generating new value.
    Though employers are backed by a chorus of remote work advocates, others note the loneliness, reduced productivity and inefficiencies of extended remote work.
    If working from home becomes permanent, employees will have to dedicate part of their private space to work. This requires purchasing desks, chairs and office equipment.
    It also means having private space dedicated to work: the space must be heated, cleaned, maintained and paid for. That depends on many things, but for purposes of illustration, I have run some estimates for Montreal. The exercise is simple but important, since it brings these costs out of the realm of speculation into the realm of meaningful discussion.
    Rough calculations show that the savings made by employers when their staff works from home are of similar value to the compensation workers should receive for setting up offices at home.
    What does this mean for offices in cities? One of two things may happen: Employers pass these costs onto employees. This would be a form of expropriation (侵占), with employees absorbing production costs that have traditionally been paid by the employer. This represents a considerable transfer of value from employees to employers.
    When employees are properly compensated, employers’ real estate savings will be modest. If savings are modest, then the many advantages of working in offices—such as lively atmosphere, rapidity of communication, team-building and acclimatization (适应环境) of new employees—will encourage employers to shelve the idea of remote work and, like Yahoo in 2013, encourage employees to work most of the time from corporate office space.
Why did the author run the estimates for Montreal?
选项 A、To provide convincing data for serious discussion.
B、To illustrate the ongoing change in working patterns.
C、To show the impact of remote working on productivity.
D、To exemplify how remote working affects the economy.
答案A
解析 由题干中的the author run the estimates for Montreal定位到第六段最后一句。细节辨认题。定位句指出，这项工作很简单但很重要，因为它将这些成本从推测领域带到了有意义的讨论领域。由此可见，作者之所以对蒙特利尔进行估算，是为有意义的讨论提供真实的数据，故答案为A)。文章第六段第一句提到，远程工作意味着要有专门用于工作的私人空间：空间需要供暖、清扫、维护和支付费用，由此可见，这里只是提到工作模式的转变，对于是否持续改变，尚无定论，B)的表述错误，故排除；第四段提到远程工作模式对生产力的影响，但这并不是作者对蒙特利尔进行估算的原因，故排除C)；文中未提及D)“为了举例说明远程工作对经济的影响”，故排除。
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