The consumer buying behavior trends related to busy, active lifestyles explain why Nike’s

People are now buying everything over the Web--not just books and CDs. Online consumers are forking over cash to buy food, zooming out to sites for cars, and seeking and paying for expert advice in areas from law to medicine to questions about their pet's ear infection. Instantly, you can build tremendous demand for your products and services if you catch the e-business wave.

Many of you may be asking, "What does this mean to my company? Why should I even pay attention to this Internet hype?" It has everything to do with survival. That's right- survival. This is a fundamental change in global business, and there will be a point in the not-too-distant. future where. it will be impossible to catch up, or even stay in the game!

In the past, companies that achieved excellence also snatched up market share and competitive advantage. Companies who fell short of this standard received lower market share but could still survive. That was when the world of business was more forgiving.

Times have changed. On October 15,1995, the "Knowledge Age" arrived and ushered the Information Age out the door with the market capitalization of Microsoft surpassing that of IBM. Today, leveraging knowledge, relationships, and information around a well-defined business model distinguishes great companies from average ones. The great ones take advantage of their core competencies and outsource non-core competencies in order to achieve an agile business model that can respond quickly to e-business opportunities.

Let's look at the four cornerstones in e-business that should be a part of your business model.

Controls through the ERP dashboard. An integrated technology architecture allows you to distribute real-time information instantly across the enterprise. This fundamental foundation, known as the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, must become the "dashboard" that provides controls and status information to allow forward decision making. For example, discovery of an inventory problem a month after it occurs may enable use of this information to correct a problem. But a month is like dog years in e business! You need information to act on when the problem occurs, and that's why an integrated technology architecture must be in place to succeed in cyber commerce. A word of caution here: it takes years to realistically achieve this integrated infrastructure.Waiting for the newest wave of hardware or software can be the kiss of death. Relying on old legacy financial systems is like driving down the highway by looking in the rear-view mirror v. s. looking at the dashboard to understand performance NOW.

Get rid of waste. Once the fundamental infrastructure is in place, the concept of the "extended enterprise" comes into play. It's not just about integrated "lowest-cost" manufacturing and streamlined distribution processes, although both are key components. It involves taking waste out of the entire value chain through effectively implementing technology, along with building strong alliances and partnerships. Take General Electric (GE), who has informed its suppliers that it will conduct its entire procurement process on the Internet via electronic procurement communities. So if a company wants to do business with GE, it needs to do it GE's way-online.

Know the customers. Best-practice companies today have a deep understanding of their customer base and their levels of satisfaction with their products and services. E-business will have a dramatic impact on those companies who continue to market their products and services via the costly face-to-face direct selling model. Companies who foster online communities and communications with their customers will enjoy customer loyalty and market share.

Information is power. Finally, none of the other three cornerstones is very meaningful without accurate profit information. The streamlining process is impossible without cle

A．To tell why you should shift to e-business.

B．To inform. you of some steps to bring your business online.

C．To suggest that e-business will replace the conventional business model.

D．To advice you to regard the four cornerstones as your e-business model.

Bringing up children is a hard work, and you are often to blame for any bad behavior. of your children. If so, Judith Rich Harris has good news for you. Parents, she argues, have no important long -term effects on the development of the personality of their children. Far more important are their playground friends and neighborhood. Ms. Harris takes to hitting the assumption, which has dominated developmental psychology for almost half a century.

Ms. Harris' s attack on the developmentalists' "nature" argument looks likely to reinforce doubts that the profession was already having. If parents matter, why is it that two adopted children, reared in the same home, are no more similar in personality than two adopted children reared in separate homes? Or that a pair of identical twins, reared in the same home, are no more alike than a pair of identical twins reared in different homes?

Difficult as it is to track the precise effects of parental upbringing, it may be harder to measure the exact influence of the peer(同龄人) group in childhood and adolescence. Ms. Harris points to how children from immigrant homes soon learn not to speak at school in the way their parents speak. But acquiring a language is surely a skill, rather than a characteristic of the sort developmental psychologists hunt for. Certainly it is different from growing up tensely or relaxed, or from learning to be honest or hard -working or generous. Easy though it may be to prove that parents have little impact on those qualities, it will be hard to prove that peers have vastly more.

Moreover, mum and dad surely cannot be ditched completely. Young adults may, as Ms. Harris argues, be keen to appear like their peers. But even in those early years, parents have the power to open doors: they may initially choose the peers with whom their young associate, and pick that influential neighborhood. Moreover, most people suspect that they come to resemble their parents more in middle age, and that people' s child bearing habits may be formed partly by what their parents did. So the balance of influences is probably complicated, as most parents already suspected without being able to demonstrate it scientifically. Even if it turns out that the genes they pass on and the friends their children play with matter as much as affection, discipline and good example, parents are not completely off the hook.

According to Ms. Harris,______.

A．parents are to blame for any bad behavior. of their children

B．parents will affect greatly the children's life in the long run

C．nature rather than nurture has a significant effect on children' s personality development

D．children' s personality is shaped by their friends and neighbors

The News Industry in US

Why do so many Americans distrust what they read in their newspapers? The American Society of Newspaper Editors is trying to answer this painful question. The organization is deep into a long serf-analysis known as the journalism credibility project.

Sad to say, this project has turned out to be mostly low-level findings about factual errors and spelling and grammar mistakes, combined with lots of head-scratching puzzlement about what in the world those readers really want.

But the sources of distrust go way deeper. Most journalists learn to see the world through a set of standard templates (patterns) into which they plug each day's events. In other words, there is a conventional story line in the newsroom culture that provides a backbone and a ready-made narrative structure for otherwise confusing news.

There exists a social and cultural disconnect between journalists and their readers, which helps explain why the "standard templates" of the newsroom seem alien to many readers. In a recent survey, questionnaires were sent to reporters in five middle-size cities around the country, plus one large metropolitan area. Then residents in these communities were phoned at random and asked the same questions.

Replies show that compared with other Americans, journalists are more likely to live in upscale neighborhoods, have maids, own Mercedeses, and trade stocks, and they're less likely to go to church, do volunteer work, or put down roots in a community.

Reporters tend to be part of a broadly defined social and cultural elite, so their work tends to reflect the conventional values of this elite. The astonishing distrust of the news media isn't rooted in inaccuracy or poor reportorial skills but in the daily clash of world views between reporters and their readers.

This is an explosive situation for any industry, particularly a declining one. Here is a troubled business that keeps hiring employees whose attitudes vastly annoy the customers. Then it sponsors lots of symposiums and a credibility project dedicated to wondering why customers are annoyed and fleeing in large numbers. But it never seems to get around to noticing the cultural and class biases that so many former buyers are complaining about. If it did, it would open up its diversity program, now focused narrowly on race and gender, and look for reporters who differ broadly by outlook, values, education, and class.

What is the passage mainly about?

A．Needs of the readers all over the world.

B．Causes of the public disappointment about newspapers.

C．Origins of the declining newspaper industry.

D．Aims of a journalism credibility project.

Bringing up children is a hard work, and you are often to blame for any bad behavior. of your children, If so, Judith Rich Harris has good news for you. Parents, she argues, have no important long-term effects on the development of the personality of their children. Far more important are their playground friends and neighborhood. Ms. Harris takes to hitting the assumption, which has dominated developmental psychology for almost half a century.

Ms. Harris's attack on the developmentalists' "nature" argument looks likely to reinforce doubts that the profession was already having. If parents matter, why is it that two adopted children, reared in the same home, are no more similar in personality than two adopted children reared in separate homes? Or that a pair of identical twins, reared in the same home, are no more alike than a pair of identical twine reared in different homes?

Difficult as it is to track the precise effects of parental upbringing, it may be harder to measure the exact influence of the peer(同龄人) group in childhood and adolescence. Ms. Harris points to how children from immigrant homes soon learn not to speak at school in the way their parents speak. But acquiring a language is surely a skill, rather than a characteristic of the sort developmental psychologists hunt for. Certainly it is different from growing up tensely or relaxed, or from learning to be honest or hard-working or generous. Easy though it may be to prove that parents have little impact on those qualities, it will be hard to prove that peers have vastly more.

Moreover, mum and dad surely cannot be ditched completely. Young adults may, as Ms. Harris argues, be keen to appear like their peers. But even in those early years, parents have the power to open doors: they may initially choose the peers with whom their young associate, and pick that influential neighborhood. Moreover, most people suspect that they come to resemble their parents more in middle age, and that people's child bearing habits may be formed partly by what their parents did. So the balance of influences is probably complicated, as most parents already suspected without being able to demonstrate it scientifically. Even if it turns out that the genes they pass on and the friends their children play with matter as much as affection, discipline and good example, parents are not completely off the hook.

According to Ms. Harris, ______.

A．parents are to blame for any bad behavior. of their children

B．parents will affect greatly the children's life in the long run

C．nature rather than nurture has a significant effect on children's personality development

D．children's personality is shaped by their friends and neighbors

Why is it dangerous to burn too much wood?

A．The fire could burn you.

B．It's not healthy to be too warm.

C．Harmful chemicals are released in the soot.

D．The smoke is filled with unseeable tiny pieces.

Why does the man wait so long?

A．Because the waitress is too busy.

B．Because the duck takes quite a while to prepare.

C．Because he hasn't ordere

听力原文：Man: Why are you looking at the classified ads? Are you going to buy a car?

Woman: Hardly; you know I can't drive. My parents won't let me learn. Actually, I'm looking for a flat to rent. (8[B])I'm having trouble at home again.

Man: What's the trouble this time?

Woman: Oh, it's stupid really. It started with that barbecue weeks ago. They wouldn't even let me go to that!

Man: Why not?

Woman: Don't know. It's just their way. They mean well, I suppose, but they won't let me do anything by myself. Man: What about your brother?

Woman: Oh, they let him do anything he wants to.

Man: Doesn't sound fair. Hmm, but they let you choose your own job.

Woman: Big deal! But they make me hand over all my money at the end of every week. I get pocket money.

Man: Seems a bit tough.

Woman: Oh, that's not the only thing. Even at the weekends they make me go everywhere with them. They won't let me go anywhere with my friends.

Man: Do they want you to be an old maid? Are they scared you might meet someone nice and get married?

Woman: No. They want me to marry the son of a friend of theirs. I don't want to.

Man: Oh! So that's the real trouble, is it?

Woman: Yeah, I'm really scared my father will make me marry this guy.

Man: Look, don't be stupid. That's one thing no one can make you do.

Woman: Well, for my sake, I hope you're right.

What is the conversation mainly about?

A．Looking for a suitable flat to rent.

B．Problems the woman has with her family.

C．How the woman's parents intervene in her marriage.

D．How to get rid of the trouble with one's own family.

听力原文：W: It' s exciting to visit the home of Charles Dickens, now the Dickens Museum, in Doughty Street, London. Dr. Sanders, can you give us a brief introduction to the great writer?

M: Yeah. The novelist Charles Dickens has been a best selling author for a very long time, in fact since his work appeared a hundred and fifty years ago. It' s here in this house that he completed "The Pickwick Paper". It was here, too, that he wrote "Nicholas Nickleby" and "Oliver Twist". They followed on the success of "The Pickwick Papers" and established his reputation as a leading author.

W: Dickens really was the first great popular novelist, wash' t he?

M: Exactly. He and his publishers had discovered the very useful means of writing in monthly parts so you could buy parts of novels serially, quite cheaply. Dickens' works were absolutely best-sellers and this continued throughout the thirty or forty years of his writing life.

W: Why is he still so popular, when so many writers go out of fashion?

M: I think in the end you put it down to nothing short of genius, that what he was doing was writing for a popular audience in his own time.

Which is NOT the place where they are talking?

A．London University.

B．The home of Charles Dickens.

C．London.

D．The Dickens Museum,

听力原文：W: It' s exciting to visit the home of Charles Dickens, now the Dickens Museum, in Doughty Street, London. Dr. Sanders, can you give us a brief introduction to the great writer?

M: Yeah. The novelist Charles Dickens has been a best selling author for a very long time, in fact since his work appeared a hundred and fifty years ago. It' s here in this house that he completed "The Pickwick Paper". It was here, too, that he wrote "Nicholas Nickleby" and "Oliver Twist". They followed on the success of "The Pickwick Papers" and established his reputation as a leading author.

W: Dickens really was the first great popular novelist, wash' t he?

M: Exactly. He and his publishers had discovered the very useful means of writing in monthly parts so you could buy parts of novels serially, quite cheaply. Dickens' works were absolutely best-sellers and this continued throughout the thirty or forty years of his writing life.

W: Why is he still so popular, when so many writers go out of fashion?

M: I think in the end you put it down to nothing short of genius, that what he was doing was writing for a popular audience in his own time.

Which is NOT the place where they are talking?

A．London University.

B．The home of Charles Dickens.

C．London.

D．The Dickens Museum,