1 . Is loyalty in the workplace dead?

Just recently, Lynda Gratton, a workplace expert, proclaimed that it was. In The Financial Times, she said that it had been “killed off through _________ contracts, outsourcing, automation and multiple careers.”

It’s sad if this good virtue is now out of place in the business world. But the situation may be more _________. Depending on how you _________ it, loyalty may not be dead, but is just playing out differently.

Fifty years ago, an employee could stay at the same company for decades, said Tammy Erickson, an author and work-force consultant. Many were _________ longtime employment along with health care and a pension.

Now many companies cannot or will not hold up their end of the bargain, so why should the employees hold up theirs? Given the opportunity, they’ll take their skills and their portable retirement accounts elsewhere. These days, Ms. Gratton writes, _________ is more important than loyalty: “Loyalty is about the future - trust is about the present.”

Ms. Erickson says that the quid pro quo (交换物，报酬) of modern employment is more likely to be: As long as I work for you, I promise to have the relevant skills and _________ fully in my work; in return you’ll pay me _________, but I don’t expect you to care for me when I’m 110.

For some baby boomers, this _________ has been hard to accept. Many started their careers _________ that they would be rewarded based on tenure (任职).

A longtime employee who is also productive and motivated is of enormous value, said Cathy Benko, chief talent officer at Deloitte. On the other hand, she said, “You can be with a company a long time and not be highly committed.”

Ms. Benko has seen her company shift its ____________ to employees’ level of engagement - or “the level at which people are motivated to deliver their best work” - rather than length of tenure.

Then there are the effects of the recent recession. Many people - if they haven’t been ____________- have stayed in jobs because they feel they have no choice. Employers may need to prepare for disruptions and turnover when the job market improves.

If the pendulum(摇摆不定的事态或局面) shifts, how will businesses persuade their best employees to stay? ____________ may do the trick, but not always. Especially with younger people, “you’re not going to buy extra loyalty with extra money,” Ms. Erickson said. ____________, employers need to make jobs more challenging and give workers more creative space, she said.

Loyalty may not be what it once was, but most companies will still be better off with at least a core of people who stay with them across decades.

If loyalty is seen as a ____________ to keep workers of all ages fulfilled, productive and involved, it can continue to be cultivated in the workplace - to the ____________ of both employer and employee.

6 . The 16^th-century dramatist Ben Johnson generously called Shakespeare a writer “not of an age, but for all time.” And so it has proven to be, for Shakespeare’s plays are still the most translated and most _________ of any play writer’s in the world. But if you ask people what accounts for Shakespeare’s _________ popularity, you will get a number of different answers. Some will say that he was a great storyteller, others that the _________ lies in the beauty of his poetry. Some scholars point out that he was born in a lively period of England’s history, a time of great national confidence and cultural activity, particularly in the theatre. _________, they claim, he was able to produce an extraordinary volume of work.

This last explanation seems a little _________. A more interesting answer is put forward, although a little over-enthusiastically, by Harold Bloom in his book Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. Bloom argues that Shakespeare gave us something in his writing that the world had not seen in _________ before: characters with a strong personality. These lifelike characters gave us a real insight into the human _________: Iago, the trusted advisor of Othello, whose jealousy leads him to betray his honest master; Rosalind, the heroine in As You Like It, who remains true to her friends and family in spite of the danger to herself. Through the mouths of such characters, we learn truths about life that we can all _________. These truths are made more moving and more memorable by the way in which they are _________: briefly and poetically.

Shakespeare has been dead almost 400 years, but the words and saying attributed (归功于) to him still __________ the English language today. So whether you are “fashionable” or “sanctimonious,” thank Shakespeare, who probably __________ the terms. In fact, it is amazing just how great Shakespeare’s influence on everyday language has been. Take, for example, these phrases from Michael Macrone’s light-hearted book Brush Up Your Shakespeare.

Macrone is more interested in the Shakespearean language that has survived than the reasons for its __________. According to his research, some of these sayings are slightly different from their original meaning once taken out of the __________ of the plays in which they first appeared. For example, “be all and end all” is used today to mean “the most important thing”, but in Macbeth, it means “the end of the matter”.

Regardless of such technicalities, it is still remarkable that so many of Shakespeare’s words have survived the large __________ in language between their time and the present day. The beauty of those words is certainly one reason, but as Johnson suggested, it is the humanity relevance of their __________ that brings them to life.