2008年12月英语六级考试真题

      2008年12月英语六级考试真题

　　Part Ⅰ                           Writing                      (30 minutes)

　　注意：此部分试题在答题卡1上。

　　Part Ⅱ Reading Comprehension (Skimming and Scanning) (15 minutes)

　　Directions: In this part, you will have 15 minutes to go over the passage quickly and answer the questions on Answer Sheet 1. For questions 1-7, choose the best answer from the four choices marked A), B), C) and D). For questions 8-10, complete the sentences with the information given in the passage.

　　Bosses Say 'Yes" to Home Work

　　Rising costs of office space, time lost to stressful commuting, and a slow recognition that workers have lives beyond the office - all are strong arguments for letting staff work from home.

　　For the small business, there are additional benefits too - staff are more productive, and happier, enabling firms to keep their headcounts(员工数) and their recruitment costs to a minimum. It can also provide competitive advantage, especially when small businesses want to attract new staff but don't have the budget to offer huge salaries.

　　While company managers have known about the benefits for a long time, many have done little about it, sceptical of whether they could trust their employees to work to full capacity without supervision, or concerned about the additional expenses teleworking policies might incur as staff start charging their home phone bills to the business.

　　Yet this is now changing. When communications provider Inter-Tel researched the use of remote working solutions among small and medium sized UK businesses in April this year, it found that 28% more companies claimed to have introduced flexible working practices than a year ago.

　　The UK network of Business Links confirms that it too has seen a growing interest in remote working solutions from small businesses seeking its advice, and claims that as many as 60-70% of the businesses that come through its doors now offer some form of remote working support to their workforces.

　　Technology advances, including the widespread availability of broadband, are making the introduction of remote working a piece of cake.

　　"If systems are set up properly, staff can have access to all the resources they have in the office wherever they have an internet connection," says Andy Poulton, e-business advisor at Business Link for Berkshire and Wiltshire. "There are some very exciting developments which have enabled this."

　　One is the availability of broadband everywhere, which now covers almost all of the country (BT claims that, by July, 99.8% of its exchanges will be broadband enabled, with alternative plans in place for even the most remote exchanges). "This is the enabler," Poulton says.

　　Yet while broadband has come down in price too, those service providers targeting the business market warn against consumer services masquerading(伪装) as business-friendly broadband.

　　"Broadband is available for as little as ?15 a month, but many businesses fail to appreciate the hidden costs of such a service," says Neil Stephenson, sales and marketing director at Onyx Internet, an internet service provider based in the north-east of England. "Providers offering broadband for rock-bottom prices are notorious for poor service, with regular breakdowns and heavily congested(拥堵的) networks. It is always advisable for businesses to look beyond the price tag and look for a business-only provider that can offer more reliability, with good support." Such services don't cost too much quality services can be found for upwards of ?30 a month.

　　The benefits of broadband to the occasional home worker are that they can access email in real time, and take full advantage of services such as internet-based backup or even internet-based phone services.

　　Internet-based telecoms, or VoIP (Voice over IP) to give it its technical title, is an interesting tool to any business supporting remote working. Not necessarily because of the promise of free or reduced price phone calls (which experts point out is misleading for the average business), but because of the sophisticated voice services that can be exploited by the remote worker - facilities such as voicemail and call forwarding, which provide a continuity of the company ← image for customers and business partners.

　　By law, companies must "consider seriously" requests to work flexibly made by a parent with a child under the age of six, or a disabled child under 18. It was the need to accommodate employees with young children that motivated accountancy firm Wright Vigar to begin promoting teleworking recently. The company, which needed to upgrade its IT infrastructure to provide connectivity with a new, second office, decided to introduce support for remote working at the same time.