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(希思羅機場) 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.

【小題1】B

【小題2】D

【小題3】C

【小題4】B


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C
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A
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C
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