1 . JeffBezos has a rule at Amazon, or perhaps more appropriate a philosophy. If a team cannot be fed by two pizzas then that team is too large. The reasoning is quite straightforward and basic. More people means more communication, more bureaucracy, more chaos, and more of pretty much everything that slows things down, hence why large organizations are oftentimes considered as being so inefficient.
In 2013 Gallup released a report called “The State of The American Workplace", in which they found that smaller companies had more engaged employees. In fact,42% of employees working at companies of 10 or fewer were engaged at work versus only 30% of employees at large companies.
Most people are not familiar with the Ringelmann Effect which is the tendency for individual members to become less productive as the size of a group increases. This concept was named after Maximilien Ringelmann, a French professor of agricultural engineering who passed away in 1931.In one of his experiments he asked volunteers to perform a very simple task, to pull on a rope. He found that when only one person is pulling on the rope they give 100% of their effort; however, as more people are added the individual effort goes down.
This experiment was recreated in the 1970's by Alan Ingham who came up with the concept of “social loafing” which helps us understand why the individual effort decreases as the team size increases. So why does this happen? Because it becomes harder to extract the individual contributions and performance of each person.
Organizations should really think about what their team structures look like and create and follow similar “two pizza rules”. It's no coincidence that smaller organizations are oftentimes more nimble while large organizations look like they are stuck in the mud.
1. What is the author's purpose of mentioning “two pizza rules” in paragraph 1?| A．To make a comment. |
| B．To introduce the topic. |
| C．To provide an example. |
| D．To analyze a phenomenon. |
| A．It repeated the Ringelmann Effect experiment. |
| B．It was based on a simple task of pulling a rope. |
| C．It aimed to explore the reason behind the phenomenon. |
| D．It revealed the link between team size and individual effort. |
| A．Balanced. |
| B．Complicated. |
| C．Simple. |
| D．Flexible. |
| A．What Makes a Team More Productive? |
| B．Why Are Smaller Teams Better Than Larger Ones? |
| C．How Can Two Pizzas Be Shared by One Team? |
| D．Which Is More Important: Individual Effort r Team Size? |
2 . Patients often come into my office and ask, “How can I look younger?” While I always suggest healthy living — a balanced diet and regular exercise — in order to look and feel younger, I have never thought of facial exercises as part of that plan. That is, until a recent study, published in JAMA Dermatology (皮肤学), showed promising results that routine facial exercise may slow the merciless tide of time.
The theory behind the study originates from the fact that a major part of facial aging is due to the loss of fat and soft tissue, which leads to the growth and spread of wrinkles. If we can lift weights at the gym and enlarge muscles in arms, why couldn’t the same be done for muscles in our faces, therefore to create a more youthful face?
The concept of facial exercise is not a new one. A simple Internet search will produce a lot of blog posts and books on the subject, as well as various programmes that promise to be the next fountain of youth. What the JAMA Dermatology researchers did in their study, which was the first of its kind, was to examine this question from a more strict scientific aspect. They enrolled 27 women between the ages of 40 and 65 to perform daily, 30-minute exercises for eight weeks, and then continue every other day for a total of 20 weeks.
Dermatologists who did not know the participants were asked to rate their photographs before and after the exercise. The dermatologists found an improvement in cheek fullness and estimated the age of the participants at 51 years of age at the start of the programme and 48 at the end of the 20-week study. Furthermore, all the participants felt improvement in their own facial appearance at the end of the study.
While these results seem exalting, the study has some obvious limitations. Of the 27 patients involved, 11 gave up before completing the study. One reason may be that the programme was to time-consuming, clocking in at 30 minutes a day. The overall small size of the study also limits its generalizability to the larger population. In addition, there was also no control group, which would have helped reduce the possibility that this improvement happened by chance.
It’s also hard to draw conclusions about the longevity of these results. Probably the exercises must be continued to keep their effects. But for how long? And how frequently? Which exercises are most effective? Most studies are need to answer these questions.
1. According to the passage, which statement is true?| A．Though the concept of facial exercise is new, much information about it can be found on the Internet. |
| B．Some participants did not feel improvement in their facial appearance at the end of the study. |
| C．If there is a control group, the possibility that the improvement in the facial appearance happened by chance will be increased. |
| D．The reason why some participants quit the study before it was completely may be that they had not enough time. |
| A．Calming. | B．Challenging. | C．Frustrating. | D．Exciting. |
| A．Doubtful. | B．Positive. | C．Opposed. | D．Indifferent (中立的). |
| A．The study published in JAMA Dermatology is not reliable. |
| B．Healthy living is the only way to make someone look and feel young. |
| C．More studies are needed to further the present study on facial exercises. |
| D．As a dermatologist, the author was involved in the research project on facial exercises. |
3 . A robot with a sense of touch may one day feel “pain”, both its own physical pain and sympathy for the pain of its human companions. Such touchy-feely robots are still far off, but advances in robotic touch-sensing are bringing that possibility closer to reality.
Sensors set in soft, artificial skin that can detect both a gentle touch and a painful strike have been hooked up to a robot that can then signal emotions, Asada reported February 15 at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. This artificial “pain nervous system,” as Asada calls it, may be a small building block for a machine that could ultimately experience pain. Such a feeling might also allow a robot to “sympathize” with a human companion’s suffering.
Asada, an engineer at Osaka University, and his colleagues have designed touch sensors that reliably pick up a range of touches. In a robot system named Affetto, a realistic looking child’s head, these touch and pain signals can be converted to emotional facial expressions.
A touch-sensitive, soft material, as opposed to a rigid metal surface, allows richer interactions between a machine and the world, says neuroscientist Kingson Man of the University of Southern California. Artificial skin “allows the possibility of engagement in truly intelligent ways”.
Such a system, Asada says, might ultimately lead to robots that can recognize the pain of others, a valuable skill for robots designed to help care for people in need, the elderly, for instance.
But there is an important distinction between a robot that responds in a predictable way to a painful strike and a robot that’s able to compute an internal feeling accurately, says Damasio, a neuroscientist also at the University of Southern California. A robot with sensors that can detect touch and pain is “along the lines of having a robot, for example, that smiles when you talk to it,” Damasio says. ‘It’s a device for communication of the machine to a human.” While that’s an interesting development, “it’s not the same thing” as a robot designed to compute some sort of internal experience, he says.
1. What do we know about the “pain nervous system”?| A．It is named Affetto by scientists. | B．It is a set of complicated sensors. |
| C．It is able to signal different emotions. | D．It combines sensors and artificial skin. |
| A．Delivered. | B．Translated. | C．Attached. | D．Adapted. |
| A．Robots can smile when talked to. |
| B．Robots can talk to human beings. |
| C．Robots can compute internal feelings |
| D．Robots can detect pains and respond accordingly. |
| A．Machines Become Emotional | B．Robots Inch to Feeling Pain |
| C．Human Feelings Can Be Felt | D．New Devices Touch Your Heart |
