What do Keith Grainger's words (in Paragraph 2) mean?
A. Supermarket magazines feed in a lot of information.
B. Supermarket magazines reasonably combine the need of customers and the promotion of brands.
C. They did a good job.
D. Their magazines have an unrivalled advantage.
The ad-men in those days enjoyed simple pleasures. They puffed away at their desks. They drank throughout the day. They had affairs with their colleagues. They socialised not in order to bond, but in order to get drunk.
These days many companies are obsessed with fun. Software firms in Silicon Valley have installed rock-climbing walls in their reception areas and put inflatable animals in their offices. Wal-Mart orders its cashiers to smile at all and sundry. The cult of fun has spread like some disgusting haemorrhagic disease. Acclaris, an American IT company, has a "chief fun officer". TD Bank, the American arm of Canada's Toronto Dominion, has a "Wow!" department that dispatches costume-clad teams to "surprise and delight" successful workers. Red Bull, a drinks firm, has installed a slide in its London office.
Fun at work is becoming a business in its own right. Madan Kataria, an Indian who styles himself the "guru of giggling", sells "laughter yoga" to corporate clients. Fun at Work, a British company, offers you "more hilarity than you can handle", including replacing your receptionists with "Ab Fab" lookalikes. Chiswick Park, an office development in London, brands itself with the slogan "enjoy-work", and hosts lunchtime events such as sheep-shearing and geese-herding.
The cult of fun is deepening as well as widening. Google is the acknowledged champion: its offices are blessed with volleyball courts, bicycle paths, a yellow brick road, a model dinosaur, regular games of roller hockey and several professional masseuses. But now two other companies have challenged Google for the jester's crown—Twitter, a microblogging service, and Zappos, an online shoe-shop.
This cult of fun is driven by three of the most popular management fads of the moment: empowerment, engagement and creativity. Many companies pride themselves on devolving power to front-line workers. But surveys show that only 20% of workers are "fully engaged with their job". Even fewer are creative. Managers hope that "fun" will magically make workers more engaged and creative. But the problem is that as soon as fun becomes part of a corporate strategy it ceases to be fun and becomes its opposite—at best an empty shell and at worst a tiresome imposition.
"Mad Men" helps people get to see that office life has changed over the years in all the following EXCEPT
A. women have been equally treated as male citizens
B. it's getting harder to enjoy one's job
C. people feel better about themselves in that they are getting more competent at work
D. simple pleasures are less experienced
The sun rose upon a tranquil world, and beamed down upon the peaceful village like a benediction. Breakfast over, Aunt Polly had family worship: It began with a prayer built from the ground up of solid courses of Scriptural quotations, welded together with a thin mortar of originality; and from the summit of this she delivered a grim chapter of the Mosaic Laiv, as from Sinai.
Then Tom girded up his loins, so to speak, and went to work to "get his verses. " Sid had learned his lesson days before. Tom bent all his energies to the memorizing of five verses, and he chose part of tJie Sermon on the Mount, because he could find no verses that were shorter. At the end of half an hour Tom had a vague general idea of his lesson, but no more, for his mind was traversing the whole field of human thought, and his hands were busy with distracting recreations. Mary took his book to hear him recite, and he tried to find his way through the fog:
"Blessed are the—a—a—"
"Poor"—"Yes—poor; blessed are the poor—a—a—"
"In spirit-"
"In spirit; blessed are the poor in spirit, for they—they—"
"THEIRS—" x
"For THEIRS. Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are they that mourn, for they—they—"
"Sh—"
"For they—a—"
"S, H, A—"
"For they S, H—Oh, I don't know what it is!"
"SHALL!"
"Oh, SHALL! for they shall—for they shall—a—a—shall mourn—a—a—blessed are they that shall—they that—a—they that shall mourn, for they shall—a—shall WHAT? Why don't you tell me, Mary?—what do you want to be so mean for?"
"Oh, Tom, you poor thick-headed thing, I'm not teasing you. I wouldn't do that. You must go and learn it again. Don't you be discouraged, Tom, you'll manage it—and if you do, I'll give you something ever so nice. There, now, that's a good boy. "
"All right! What is it, Mary, tell me what it is. "
"Never you mind, Tom. You know if I say it's nice, it is nice. "
"You bet you that's so, Mary. All right, I'll tackle it again. "
And he did "tackle it again"—and under the double pressure of curiosity and prospective gain he did it with such spirit that he accomplished a shining success. Mary gave him a brand-new "Barlow" knife worth twelve and a half cents; and the convulsion of delight that swept his system shook him to his foundations. True, the knife would not cut anything, but it was a "sure-enough" Barlow, and there was inconceivable grandeur in that—though where the Western boys ever got the idea that such a weapon could possibly be counterfeited to its injury is an imposing mystery and will always remain so, perhaps. Tom contrived to scarify the cupboard with it, and was arranging to begin on the bureau, when he was called off to dress for Sunday-school.
In the first paragraph, the word "grim" (. . . a grim chapter... ) means______.
A. sacred
B. omniponent
C. cheerful
D. gloomy