Give rise to, rat race, a far cry from, at the expense of, for fear of, vigorous, the like-minded, mitigate, overheads, to reaffirm their loyalty to, to find a refuge from, less-than-startling, to idle time away, to spark the idea, substitute.
Match the following words from the article with their explanation.
| abandon | the problems of a difficult situation |
| transition | being used or available for a long time and considered a usual type |
| blissful | small |
| meager | nearness in distance or time |
| rigour | change |
| proximity | get rid of |
| conventional | happy |
The points below are discussed in the article. Look quickly through the article and decide what order they appear in.
new office designs
central and satellite offices
individual work and isolation
office productivity and automation
the central office as a meeting place
office layout and communication
Read the article and decide whether the statements below are true or false.
In the future more people will work at home.
The writer advocates a more comfortable working environment.
The writer suggests that land prices in urban areas will tend to decrease in the future.
Most present-day offices were designed with inter-staff communication in mind.
Common areas will be phased out in favour of more comfortable offices.
Increased communication between different groups is expected to result in a faster discovery rate.
Answer the following questions.
- What sort of workers is called open-collar? Why?
- What is the danger of working in a relaxed atmosphere of home office?
- How has automation affected office productivity over the last decade?
- What are the main drawbacks of traditional office layouts?
- What is likely to be the main function of the central office in the future?
- How are the new office designs likely to affect communication between workers?
For discussion.
● Do you think that many of the ideas promoted by the writer are likely to become commonplace in the future?
● Which do you find the most appealing?
● What do you dislike about your own working/studying environment? How could you improve it?
C. Watching and Listening
² Competition and Communication [20]
Jared Diamond is the author of Guns, Germs, and Steel: A Short History of Everybody for the last 13,000 Years, in which he investigates why human history evolved differently on different continents.
You will hear a short extract from a talk by Professor Diamond called “How to get rich”, in which, drawing on the history of human societies, he makes a suggestion concerning the best way to organize business.
Match the words with their definitions.
| 1. industrial belt | a. a company’s ways of working and thinking |
| 2. corporate ethos | b. alone, placed in a position away from others |
| 3. collaboration | c. an area with lots of industrial companies, around the edge of a city |
| 4. insulated or isolated | d. breaking something up into pieces |
| 5. fragmentation | e. working together and sharing ideas |
2. Which of these do the part sentences 1-8 refer to?
| Route 128 | Silicon valley | IBM | Microsoft | |
| 1. Has lots of companies that are secretive, and don’t communicate with each other | ||||
| 2. Has lots of companies that compete with each other but communicate ideas | ||||
| 3. Has always had lots of semi-independent units competing within the same company, while communicating with each other | ||||
| 4. is organized in an unusual but very effective way | ||||
| 5. Is currently the center of innovation | ||||
| 6. Used to have insulated groups that did not communicate with each other | ||||
| 7. Used to lead the industrial world in scientific creativity and imagination | ||||
| 8. Was very successful, and is now innovative again because it changed the way it was organized |
3. What is your idea of the best organization of business?
D. Vocabulary in Focus
