Most people in business have a strong sense that meetings are demanding more and more of their time. Fifty years ago meetings were barely necessary – the boss decided what was going to happen and told employees in a brief office memo.

Now everything in business is discussed extensively in large meetings attended by anybody who has the remotest interest in the subject. The gradual erosion of formal systems of authority has increased the appetite for face-to-face meetings. Consultation and discussion has taken the place of direct instruction.

The amount of travel to get to these meetings is increasing. More than nine million people passed through Heathrow(希思罗机场) in 2005 on the way to internal company events. As a consequence, corporate travel is a growing part of UK carbon emissions(排放). It would be easy to say we must reverse the trend towards more meetings to reduce the climate-change impact of modern business. Unfortunately, it is not going to be easy. Some interesting recent research shows that most of the attendees at corporate meetings do complain about the waste of time involved. But when they were questioned in private, the picture changes. Only 15 per cent of people rated their most recent meeting adversely. Though most attendees saw room for improvement, meetings were valuable both in helping build plans for action and in making employees feel part of the organization.

But do these meetings have to be face-to-face? British Telecom recently presented some data on the success of its internal voice conferencing. In the most recent year, more than two million telephone conferences took place in the company. BT estimates a saving of over ??200m from the use of this technology and a cut of almost 100,000 tonnes of CO2. Of course BT has a clear interest in telling us that phone meetings are a good substitute for wasteful corporate get-togethers. So far, such conferencing has struggled to take off as people have tended to prefer to travel. It is, after all, rather more difficult to understand the boss's body language over the phone. Nevertheless, BT's research on the considerable benefits of conferencing is reasonable. Rather than try to get rid of apparently unproductive meetings, we need to find ways to make telephone and video conferences ever better substitutes for those traditional meetings.

Why are there more and more meetings according to the passage?

A. Because the formal systems of authority has been established.

B. Because people prefer to solve problems through discussion.

C. Because the organizations are getting more and more complex.

D. Because modern transportation has been developing rapidly.

The word “ adversely” in the third paragraph is closest in meaning to ______.

A. approvingly       B. enthusiastically         C. feasibly             D. unfavourably

British Telecom presented the figures to prove that voice conferencing _______.

A. stimulates the development of technology       B. plays a vital role in large organizations

C. may well replace conventional ones         D. brings large profit to the company

What can we learn from the passage?

       A. Traditional face-to-face meetings bring more benefits than harm.

       B. Corporate travel contributes a lot to environmental problems.

       C. The idea of telephone conference is well accepted by employees.

       D. Meetings should be abandoned because they are a waste of time.

I was brought up in the British, stiff upper lip style. Strong feelings aren’t something you display in public. So, you can imagine that I was unprepared for the outpouring of public grief(悲伤) at a Chinese funeral.

My editorial team leader died recently after a short illness. He was 31. The news was so unexpected that it left us all shocked and upset. A female colleague burst into tears and cried piteously at her desk. Somehow we got through the day's work. The next day was the funeral.

Our big boss stepped forward to deliver a eulogy(悼词) and was soon in tears. She carried on, in Chinese of course, but at the end said in English: "There will be no more deadlines for you in heaven." Next came a long-term colleague who also dissolved in tears but carried on with her speech despite being almost overcome by emotion. Then a close friend of the dead man paid tribute(哀悼), weeping openly as he spoke. Sorrow is spreading. Me and women were now sobbing uncontrollably. Finally, the man's mother, supported between two women, addressed her son in his coffin. At one point, the mother almost collapsed and had to be held up. We were invited to step forward to each lay a white rose on the casket. Our dead colleague looked as if he was taking a nap. At the end of the service I walked away from the funeral parlor stunned at the outpouring of emotion.

In the UK, families grieve privately and then try to hold it together and not break down at a funeral. Here in China it would seem that grieving is a public affair. It strikes me that it is more cathartic to cry your eyes out than try to keep it bottled up for fear of embarrassment, which is what many of us do in the West.

Afterwards, a Chinese colleague told me that the lamenting at the funeral had been restrained(克制) by Chinese standards. In some rural areas, she said, people used to be paid to mourn noisily. This struck me like something out of novel by Charles Dickens. But we have all seen on TV scenes of grief-stricken people in Gaza and the West Bank, in Afghanistan, Iraq and the relatives of victims of terrorist bombings around the world. Chinese grief is no different. I realized that it's the reserved British way of mourning that is out of step with the rest of the world.

It was our newspaper's production day. We were bussed back to the office to resume work. No more deadlines for our former colleague, but we had to pull together to put the newspaper to print. The boss invited the team to go out for dinner after work. We relaxed, smiled, joked. There was no mention of the funeral or our poor colleague. Enough sorrow had been shed already. We needed a break.

1.The underlined words “stiff upper lip style” in Paragraph 1 mean “________”.

A.cold-blooded      B.warm-hearted  C.light-hearted   D.self-controlled                 

2.At the funeral, ________.      

A. five individuals made speeches

B. the boss’s speech was best thought of

C. the writer was astonished by the scene

D. everyone was crying out loudly

3.According to the writer, people in the West ________.     

A. are not willing to be sad for the dead

B. cry their eyes out at the public funeral

C. prefer to control their sadness in public

D. have better way to express sadness

4.It is implied that ________.  

A. Chinese express their sadness quite unlike other peoples

B. the English might cry noisily for the dead in Dickens’ time

C. victims of terrorist bombings should be greatly honored

D. English funeral culture is more civilized than the others

5.This passage talks mainly about________.       

A. an editor’s death            B. bad funeral customs

C. cultural differences          D. western ways of grief               

 

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