短文

Passage 1

Changing technology and markets have stimulated the team approach to management. Inflation, resource scarcity, reduced personnel levels and budget cuts have all underscore the need for better coordination in organizations. Team management provides for this coordination. Team management calls for new skills if personnel potential is to be fully realized. Although a team may be composed of knowledgeable people, they must learn new ways of relating and working together to solve cross-functional problems. When teams consist to be experienced employees from hierarchical organizations, who have been condition to traditional organizational culture. Cooperation may not occur naturally, it mainly to be created. Furthermore, the issue is not just how the team can function more effectively, but how it integrates with the overall organization, all society that it supposes it serves. A group of individuals is not automatically a team. Therefore, team building may be necessary in order to improve the group’s performance. Casey, an expert in this field, suggests that the cooperation process within teams must be organized, promoted and managed. He believes the team corporation results when members go beyond their individual capabilities, beyond what each is used to being and doing. Together, the team may then produce something new, unique and superior to that of any one member. For this to happen, he suggests the multi-cultural managers exhibit understanding of their own and others’ cultural influences and limitations. They should also cultivate such skills as toleration of ambiguity, persistence and patience, as well as assertedness. If a team manager exemplifies such qualities, then the team as a whole would be better able to realize their potential and achieve their objectives.

Q 16: What should team members do to fully realize their potential?

Q 17: What needs to be considered for effective team management?

Q 18: What conclusion can we draw from what Casey says?

Passage 2

In early 1994, when Mark Andreessen was just 23 years old, he arrived in Silicon Valley with an idea that would change the world. As a student at the University of Illinois, he and his friends had developed a program called Mosaic, which allowed people to share information on the worldwide web. Before Mosaic, the web had been used mainly by scientists and other technical people, who were happy just to send and receive text. But with Mosaic, Andreessen and his friends had developed a program, which could send images over the web as well. Mosaic was an overnight success. It was put on the university’s network at the beginning of 1993. And by the end of the year, it had over a million users. Soon after, Andreessen went to seek his fortune in Silicon Valley. Once he got there, he started to have meetings with a man called Jim Clark, who was one of the Valley’s most famous entrepreneurs. In 1994, nobody was making any real money from the Internet, which was still very slow and hard to use. But Andreessen had seen an opportunity that would make him and Clark rich within two years. He suggested they should create a new computer program that would do the same job as Mosaic but would be much easier to use. Clark listened carefully to Andreessen, whose ideas and enthusiasm impressed him greatly. Eventually, Clark agreed to invest three million dollars of his own money in the project, and to raise an extra fifteen million from venture capitalists, who were always keen to listen to Clark’s new ideas.

Q 19 What do we learn about Mosaic?

Q 20 What did Andreessen do upon arriving in Silicon Valley?

Q 21Why were venture capitalists willing to join in Clark’s investment?

Passage 3

Advertising informs consumers about the existence and benefits of products and services and attempts to persuade them to buy them. The best form of advertising is probably word of mouth advertising which occurs when people tell their friends about the benefits of products or services that they have purchased. Yet virtually no providers of goods or services relay on this alone, which using paid advertising instead. Indeed many organizations also use institutional or prestige advertising which is designed to build up their reputation rather than to sell particular products. Although large companies could easily set up their own advertising departments, write their own advertisements and by media space themselves. They tend to use the services of large advertising agencies. These are likely to have more resources and more knowledge about all aspects of advertising and advertising media than single company. It is also easier for a dissatisfy company to give its account to another agency. And it would be to fire their own advertising staff. The company generally give the advertising agency and agreed budget. A statement of the objective of the advertising campaign know as brief and overall advertising strategy concerning the message to be communicated to the target customers. The agency creates advertisements and develops a media prime, specifying which media will be used and in which proportions. Agencies often produce alternative ads or commercials that pretested in newspapers, television stations etc. in different parts of the country. Before a final choices was made prior to a national campaign.

Q22 What is probably the best form of advertising according to the speaker?

Q23 What does the speaker say is the proposes of many organization using prestige advertising ?

Q24 How did large companies generally handle their advertising?

Q25 What would advertising agencies often do before a national campaign?