2007年大学英语六级冲刺模拟题（试卷2） - 快速阅读

What Will We Do For Work

I believe that 90% of white-collar jobs in the U.S. will be either destroyed or altered beyond
recognition in the next 10 to 15 years. That's a catastrophic prediction, given that 90% of us are engaged in white-collar work of one sort or another. Even most manufacturing jobs these days are connected to such white-collar services as finance, human resources and engineering.

I talked to an old London loader some time back. He allowed that in 1970 it took 108 guys about five days to unload a timber ship. Then came containerization. The comparable task today takes eight folks one day. That is. a 98.5% reduction in man-days, from 540 total to just eight.

This time the productivity aims to reconstruct—make that deconstruct—the white-collar world. In fact. I see a five-sided movement that will bring to my apparently fantastic "90% in 10 years" prediction.

FIRST The destructive nature of the current flavor of competition, dotcom company.

Sure, most will fail. But the sunivors will exert enormous pressure—fast!—on the Big Guys. When an Amazon or a Charles Schwab moves into your neighborhood, you've got moments to react. Or take king entrepreneur Jim Clark of Netscape fame. His latest venture. Healtheon AVebMD. intends to squeeze hundreds of billions of dollars of waste out of the health-care system. These new firms aim to create
nothing less than havoc in the theaters in which they operate.

SECOND Enterprise software.
It's a name for the tools that will hook up every aspect of a business's innards internal organs—personnel, production, sales, accounting—and then hook up all that hooked-up stuff to the rest of the "family" of suppliers and the suppliers' suppliers and wholesalers and retailers and end users.
They are your nightmare, these "white-collar robots." The complex products from German software giant SAP will do to your company's internal organs exactly what robots and containerization did to the blue-collar world in 1960. Installing these tools is not easy. The technical part is distressing; the politics are dreadful. When the blue-collar robots arrived, the against it. This time it's management official who are opposing technological change. Why? These tools threaten their comfortable status.

carefully crafted over several generations.But the robots did come. And they triumphed.

THIRD Outsourcing

M.I.T.'s No. 1 computer professor. Michael Dertouzos. said India could easily boost its GDP by atrillion dollars in the next few years performing secret white-collar tasks for Western companies. He guessed that 50 million jobs from the white-collar West could go south to India, whose population hit 1
billion last week. The average annual salary for each of those 50 million new Indian workers: S20.000.

FOURTH The Web.

Ford. GM and DaimlerChrysler announce a rare combination. They will link all their tens of thousands of suppliers into a single. Internet-based network. This entity will include S250 biDion products (and perhaps an additional S500 billion of those suppliers' suppliers' products). In short, every penny of waste will be compressed from the huge procurement system. The order cycle will speed up dramatically. Medibuy aims for the same hat trick in medical supplies. DigitalThink in training.

CarStation in the auto-body-shop world. This is the white-hot world of B2B (business to business)
electronic commerce, which will soon encompass trillions of dollars in transactions.

FIFTH Time compression.

It took 37 years for the radio to get to 50 million homes. The Web got there in four. Hence my belief that while it took about a century to revohitionize bhie-collar job practices, mis brave new white-collar social system will be mostly installed in a tenth of that time—10 years.

Each of these five forces is fact, not image. Each influences the others multiplicatively. Therefore I am unwilling to withdraw my predictions about the power of the white-collar storm bearing down on us.

Upsetting madness is in process. These forces are liberating. Blue-collar robots work out of factor)' and wrarehouse. The same will happen to wrhite-collar work. My dad did it for 41 years at the Baltimore Gas & Electric Co. He was. sad to say. a white-collar indentured servant The world is going through more fundamental change than it has in hundreds, perhaps thousands of years. The head economist at Sandia National Laboratories. Arnold Baker, said it's the "biggest change since the cavemen began bartering." Do you want to be a player, a full-scale participant who embraces change? Here is the opportunity to participate in the lovely, messy playground called "Let's reinvent the world."

Here's a new role model I call Icon Woman:
She is turned on by her work!
The work is cool!
She is an adventurer!
She is the CEO of her life!
My Icon Woman, of course, embraces and exploits the Web.
She submits her resume on the Web and keeps it perpetually active mere.
She is recruited and negotiates and is hired on the Web.
She is trained on the Web.
She creates and conducts brilliant projects on the Web \ia a far-flung "virtual" stable of teammates
(most of whom she's never met).
She manages her career on the Web. And she has a personal website!
In approximately 2010. she will be at home, working—for the next several months—for Ford on a
cruel difficult engineering problem. Her 79-member project team, only one of whom she's met
face-to-face (she considers face-to-face as a quaint idea), comes from 14 nations. Her fully wired home is
her castle.
You maybe disprove. Is mis "be wild and crazy and Webby and CEO of your own life"
picture— anything other man New Age new economy?
I mink it is relevant and real rather man wild and crazy—on at least two important scores.
One is mat though my "house" is in Vermont. I've hung my professional license in Palo Alto since 1981. AH is breaking loose "out there here." These folks may sound weird, but they may also be redefining the world.

Two is back to the future! I constantly remind my middle-aged seminar participants that the quintessential Americans are changing..Who are? Ben Franklin (the father of self-help literature). Ralph Waldo Emerson (self-reliance was his trait). Walt Whitman, motivational leader Tony Robbins. and
Bentonvflle. Arkansas' Sam Walton... and Bill Gates.

WHAT IF?
Maybe the wild new-economy America is the old America. Truer to ourselves. We came here to break free, to make our records in our awkward ways.
Like Grandpa. I am facing extinction, only by mis new set of powerful forces. I make most of my Irving ghing live seminars and training programs and as a management consultant. It's all gravitating to the Web—gravitating. It's moving at the speed of light. I am scrambling to reinvent myself, to not just "cope"
but to exploit the new communication and connection media.

此部分请在答题卡1做：

1.In U.S.. the 90% of the jobs are white-collar jobs as finance, human resource and engineering.
2.Containerization makes a 98.5% reduction in man-days on unloading the ship.
3.Amazon wants to develop the Health eon web MD to save hundreds of billions of dollars.
4.The management official won't welcome the blue-collar robots that the unions revolt against.
5.The professor Michael Dertouzos guessed that India could increase GDP by a trillion dollars in the flowing few years by way of________________
6.The combination of Ford. GM and DaimlerChrysler aims to compress waste from___________________
7.According to the author, it will take about _________to reconstruct new white-collar world.
8.The head economist Arnold Baker believed that the world is going through the most fundamentalchange since________
9.The new role model Icon Woman deals with everything about work on_______________
10The author is changing himself to take full advantage of________

Part II Reading Comprehension (Skimming and Scanning)
I.KG
2Y
3.N
4.N
5performing secret white-collar tasks (for Western companies)
6.the huge procurement system
7.10 years
8.the cavemen began bartering.
9.the web
10. the new communication and connection media