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  3. Look at the statements below and the five extracts from an article about ’offshoring’, the shift of service jobs to other countr

Look at the statements below and the five extracts from an article about ’offshoring’, the shift of service jobs to other countr

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问题 Look at the statements below and the five extracts from an article about ’offshoring’, the shift of service jobs to other countries, on the opposite page.
Which extract (A, B, C, D or E) does each statement (1-8) refer to?
For each statement (1-8), mark one letter (A, B, C, D or E) on your Answer Sheet.
You will need to use some of these letters more than once.
There is an example at the beginning (0).
Example:
0 Offshore functions will not necessarily stay abroad as financial considerations change.
Off shoring
A
An article in McKinsey Quarterly says that some companies which have moved their back-office functions offshore have missed huge opportunities to reap efficiencies beyond those that come from just using cheaper labour. These companies often merely replicate what they do at home, where labour is expensive and capital is relatively cheap, in countries in which the reverse is true. They forget an additional benefit is that offshoring allows companies to work round-the-clock shifts, ferrying data back and forth from one place to another, and that it also allows them to rethink the way they solve IT problems. The most successful operators redesign business processes to take full advantage of the new environment’s potential.
B
There is no doubt that customers with complex queries requiring local understanding do not respond well to far-off operators repeating a series of specially learned responses. Convergys, one of the world’s biggest providers of ’contact-centre services’, advises companies to shift simple queries offshore while retaining the more complex ones on the same shore as the caller. It calls this process ’rightshoring’, and estimates that about 80% of the companies that it is working with in Britain are planning to split their call-centre operations in this way.
C
Harris Miller, president of the Information Technology Association of America, a lobby group, says that offshore locations have so far captured just 3-4% of all American companies’ outsourcing. The bulk remains onshore in the hands of big firms such as Accenture and IBM. In fact, 60% of major corporates are doing nothing, or are only just beginning to investigate the potential of offshoring. Nevertheless, some big companies have told him that up to 40% of their outsourced business could end up offshore. That suggests the industry still has a long way to grow.
D
One thing currently limiting the ability of companies to outsource tasks offshore is the inflexible architecture of modern business-information systems. It forces firms to perform tasks as a series of discrete steps. So a business wanting to outsource some of those steps (billing, for instance), but not others, gets involved in complicated flows of information that are prone to error. Newer software and hardware promise a future in which firms will be able to outsource smaller slivers of their business. They will not, as now, have to commit to outsourcing the whole of a department or nothing.
E
Many service jobs are in industries like hotels and restaurants, or in public services like education and health, most of which can never be moved abroad. There are also alternative pools of labour to be tapped at home. Citigroup, for instance, has hired about 100 college students in America to do programming for it. In addition, some of the tasks currently going to low-cost offshore centres may eventually return because their underlying technologies will evolve in such a way that it makes economic sense to put them back in the home country.
The structure of businesses can make offshoring problematic.
选项
答案D
解析
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