注意：每个空格只填一个单词。
Measurement done right can transform your organization. It can not only show you where you are now, but can get you to wherever you want to go. Measurement is important to high performance, improvement, and, ultimately, success in business, or in any other area of human effort. Measuring what matters is more important than most things we do. Here are 5 ideas for how to become more conscious of what you can stop doing, in order to make the time for performance measurement.
1. Stop reporting measures that no one uses. Be daring—stop reporting what you know isn’t being used, and if anyone notices, use it as an opportunity to start a conversation about how to decide what is worth measuring and reporting.
2. Reduce your time in meetings and the number of meetings you attend. Meetings always take longer than they need to. The big time wasters are tangents, people arriving late and violent agreements that mistakenly sound like useful debates. Start on time, finish early and diplomatically manage the discussion. Reduce and Agree only to meetings that have a clear purpose that is aligned to your role and responsibilities. Don’t go to meetings out of obligation or interest alone.
3. Rank your main concerns and drop the bottom 10. List your tasks, both what you are doing and what you should be doing, and rank them in order of importance. Simply stop doing the bottom 10—they are likely to have consequences far less than failing to measure what matters. Design your weekly schedule to make time for measurement. Set a regular time in your diary that you block out for measurement related activities, and then put the remainder of your tasks around that. Put the big rocks (the important stuff) in first and you’ll fit more of the smaller rocks in anyway.
4.Bring up measurement in conversations and existing meetings. Don’t wait for measurement time. Use natural conversations that have even minor importance to performance and results as an opportunity to talk about measures that matter. Set yourself progress goals for choosing, creating and using measures, and reward yourself when you achieve them. You can get others to hold you accountable. Agree progress goals with your manager or colleagues or customers for choosing, creating and using measures. Set regular check in time with them to pat you on the back or face the music.
5.Save time by stopping when it’s good enough. Stop over processing whatever you do, and get clear about the point at which you’ve done what will work, and don’t waste time.
| Title: The key to success is MEASUREMENT | |||
| Paragraph main idea | Supporting details | ||
| Functions of measurement | ·Change | ||
| ·Important to high performance, improvement, and, ultimately, success in business and other fields. | |||
| Be daring or brave | Report measurements | ||
| Reduction | It may waste your time. | ||
| number of meetings | Reason | A waste of time | |
| Way | Attend those having | ||
| List | Way | ·List your tasks and drop | |
| ·Rank them in order of importance | |||
| ·Design your weekly schedule | |||
| ·Set a regular time | |||
| Aim | Make useful time for reasonable | ||
| measurement | |||
| Discussion | Way | ·Make use of natural conversations or | |
| ·Set clear aim you can achieve and | |||
| ·Agree | |||
| ·Ensure time to check in the progress. | |||
| Way | ·Stop when it’s good enough. | ||
| ·Know your situation well and your next plan. | |||
1. Who is the woman?
| A．A captain. | B．A passenger. | C．A hostess. |
| A．Having enough flying experience. |
| B．Mastering several languages. |
| C．Being younger than 45. |
| A．Follow the checklists. |
| B．Warm up all the engines. |
| C．Make sure there are no breaks in the wings. |
| A．Try to stop at once. |
| B．Land on a long runway. |
| C．Land after short flying around. |
| A．By ringing them. | B．By visiting them. | C．By writing to them. |
1. Which position is open?
| A．Editors. |
| B．Reporters. |
| C．Website designers. |
| A．Chances to travel around. |
| B．Lots of money. |
| C．Free movies. |
| A．Work experience. |
| B．Good writing skills. |
| C．Access to the Internet. |
| A．The deadline. |
| B．The age limit. |
| C．The website address. |
There’s no doubt that work deadlines can be stressful. When you have too many, you can feel overcome. And nearing deadlines encourages last-minute dashes for the finish line, like when students pull ‘all-nighters’ in an attempt to achieve weeks’ worth of essay writing in a handful of hours.
Yet there’s no question deadlines can serve a positive psychological function-after all, without them, many students might never even finish their work. You can see evidence for the power of deadlines in the ‘real world’, too. For instance, in 2015, when the US National Science Foundation dropped its usual twice-yearly deadlines for grant submissions in geoscience, as part of an attempt to help the overburdened system, the effect was dramatic. Annual submissions fell by 59% without the pressure of a deadline and it seems that many scientists lacked the urgency and motivation to deliver their applications.
As new research findings shed light on the psychology of deadlines, we can learn ways that deadlines can be used to increase focus and boost perseverance.
【写作内容】
1. 用约 30 个单词概括上文信息的主要内容；
2. 谈谈设置”截止日期”的重要性；
3. 就 如何确保在”截止日期”内完成任务提出你的建议( 不少于两点) 。
【写作要求】
1. 写作过程中不能直接引用原文语句；
2. 作文中不能出现真实姓名和学校名称；
3. 不必写标题。
【评分标准】
内容完整， 语言规范， 语篇连贯， 词数适当。
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注意:每个空格只填一个单词。请将答案写在答题卡上相应题号的横线上。
To keep the creative juices flowing, employees should be receptive to criticism
Researchers have been curious about whether negative feedback really makes people perform better, particularly when it comes to completing creative tasks. The literature has been mixed about this. In a recent investigation, Kim, who in May will join the Cambridge Judge Business School as an assistant professor, observed –– through a field experiment and a lab experiment –– and reported on how receiving negative feedback might impact the creativity of the recipients(接受者).
In both studies, Kim found that negative feedback can inspire or prevent creative thinking. What is most important is where the criticism comes from. When creative professionals or participants received criticism from a boss or a peer, they tended to be less creative in their subsequent work. Interestingly, if an individual received negative feedback from an employee of lower rank, they benefited from it and became more creative.
Some aspects of these findings seem intuitive(凭直觉的). “It makes sense that employees might feel threatened by criticism from their managers,” says Kim. “Supervisors have a lot of influence in deciding promotions or pay raises. So negative feedback from a boss might cause career anxieties.” It also stands to reason that feedback from a co-worker might also be received as threatening because we often compete with our peers for the same promotions and opportunities.
When we feel that pressure from above or from our peers, we tend to fixate on the stressful aspects of it and end up being less creative in our future work, says Kim.
What Kim found most surprising was how negative feedback from their followers (employees that they manage) made supervisors more creative.
“It’s a bit counterintuitive(反直觉的) because we tend to believe we shouldn’t criticize the boss,” says Kim. “In reality, most supervisors are willing to receive negative feedback and learn from it. It’s not that they enjoy criticism –– rather, they are in a natural power position and can cope with the discomfort of negative feedback better.”
The key takeaways: bosses and coworkers need to be more careful when they offer negative feedback to someone they manage or to their peers. And feedback recipients need to worry less when it comes to receiving criticism, says Kim.
“The tough part of being a manager is pointing out a follower’s poor performance or weak points. But it’s a necessary part of the job,” says Kim. “If you’re a supervisor, just be aware that your negative feedback can hurt your followers’ creativity. Followers tend to receive negative feedback personally. Therefore, keep your feedback specific to tasks. Explain how the point you’re discussing relates to only their task behavior, not to aspects of the person.”
In short, anyone who wants to offer negative feedback on the job should do so attentively and sensitively and to promote creativity at work, we should all be receptive to criticism from supervisors, peers and followers.
To keep the creative juices flowing, employees should be receptive to criticism | |
Introduction to the topic | Experiments are conducted to find out whether negative feedback |
Negative feedback can inspire or hold back creativity, | |
Criticism from a boss or a peer | |
Our work is greatly influenced by our supervisors, so their criticism might bring about anxieties. | |
We compete with our peers for the same opportunities, thus feeling | |
Supervisors are in a favourable | |
Enlightenment from the study | When offering criticism to followers or peers, bosses and coworkers need to keep it |
Recipients should adopt a positive | |
| A．A policeman. | B．A gas station clerk. | C．A driving coach. |
8 . My whole career is about clothes – but I have no interest in fashion. What I love doing with clothes is using them to tell a story. That’s what costume design is all about. I wasn’t one of those little girls always dressing up dolls. My parents were musicians, so there was never any money, but our household was artistic.
As a child in the 1950s there was no TV, so we drew, painted and made things out of cardboard boxes. My parents encouraged me and my younger sister to be creative – making a mess was fine, and we were even allowed to draw on one of the walls at our home in Kensington, west London. After school I studied at Central Saint Martins School of Art, where I learned how to draw patterns and cut fabric. Back then it was set design, not costumes, that most interested me.
Thanks to a childhood friend, Nick Young, I was offered some unpaid work on early Merchant Ivory film productions. For a 1978 movie called Hullabaloo Over Georgie And Bonnie’s Pictures, I was asked to put together clothes for its star, Dame Peggy Ashcroft, to wear in India. After a meeting with her, Peggy took me aside. ‘My dear, we’re getting on quite well,’ she said. ‘They’ve given me a first-class ticket to India, now if I change it for two economy flights, will you come with me?’ Of course I said yes! No question.
It was before The Jewel In The Crown and A Passage To India, and Peggy had never been to India. At 70, she was a little nervous, but great fun. We shared a room and I looked after her in every possible way. At night we sat up in our little beds, having a brandy or whisky and discussing our day. After the shoot we went on holiday to Goa together. Peggy rode around on the back of my motorbike!
I became part of the Merchant Ivory team and went on to work on many other period films, including 1996’s Sense And Sensibility. I’ve known Emma Thompson for 30 years and she’s hilarious and wonderful.
I had won an Oscar before, in 1987 for A Room With A View, and have been nominated a further eight times. I keep my Oscars on a desk that belonged to my mother in my study, so they are very much on display but off the beaten track. Not in the living room and certainly not in the downstairs loo!
For a career I somehow fell into, it’s provided me with a wonderful life, really.
1. Why did Peggy and the author make friends with each other?| A．They were of the same age. | B．They worked in the same theater. |
| C．They were both good actors. | D．They got along very well. |
| A．The Jewel In The Crown. |
| B．A Room With A View. |
| C．Hullabaloo Over Georgie And Bonnie’s Pictures. |
| D．A Passage To India. |
| A．To show she was not talented in designing clothes. |
| B．To amuse the readers with a funny story. |
| C．To show her parents inspired her creativity. |
| D．To share a precious memory in her childhood. |
| A．Ambitious | B．Dedicated |
| C．Caring | D．Demanding |
1. Why is the man nervous?
| A．He doesn’t like job interviews. |
| B．He doesn’t want to lose his job. |
| C．He doesn’t have many employment options. |
| A．Three months. | B．Six months. | C．Two years. |
| A．With money from his brother. |
| B．With money from his parents. |
| C．With money from his savings. |
| A．He has finished his research. |
| B．He has been promoted to manager. |
| C．He is going to work in the research center. |
