题目内容
Within Australia, Australian Hotels Inc. (AHI) operates nine hotels and employs over 2,000 permanent full-time staff, 300 permanent part-time employees and 100 casual staff. One of its latest ventures, the Sydney Airport Hotel (SAH), opened in March 1995. The hotel is the closest to Sydney Airport and is designed to provide the best available accommodation, food and beverage and meeting facilities in Sydney's southern suburbs. Similar to many international hotel chains, however, AHI has experienced difficulties in Australia in providing long-term profits for hotel owners, as a result of the country's high labour-coat structure. In order to develop an economically viable hotel organisation model, AHI decided to implement some new policies and practices at SAH.
The first of the initiatives was an organisational structure with only three levels of management -- compared to the traditional seven. Partly as a result of this change, there are 25 percent fewer management positions, enabling a significant saving. This change also has other implications. Communication, both up and down the organisation, has greatly improved. Decision-making has been forced down in many eases to front-line employees. As a result, guest requests are usually me without reference to a supervisor, improving both customer and employee satisfaction.
The hotel recognised that it would need a different approach to selecting employees who would fit in with its new policies. In its advertisements, the hotel stated a preference for people with some "service" experience in order to minimize traditional work practices being introduced into the hotel. Over 7,000 applicants filled in application forms for the 120 jobs initially offered at SAH. The balance of the positions at the hotel (30 management and 40 shift leader positions) were predominantly filled by transfers from other AHI properties.
A series of tests and interviews were conducted with potential employees, which eventually left 280 applicants competing the 120 advertised positions. After the final interview, potential recruits were divided into three categories. Category A was for applicants exhibiting strong leadership qualities, Category C was for applicants perceived to be followers, and Category B was for applicants with both leader and follower qualities. Department heads and shift leaders then composed prospective teams using a combination of people from all three categories. Once suitable teams were formed, offers of employment were made team members.
Another major initiative by SAH was to adopt a totally multi-skilled workforce. Although there may be some limitations with highly technical jobs such as cooking or maintenance, wherever possible, employees at SAH are able to work in a wide variety of positions. A multi-skilled workforce provides far greater management flexibility, during peak and quiet times to transfer employees to needed positions. For example, when office staff are away on holidays during quiet periods of the year, employees in either food or beverage or housekeeping departments can temporarily fill in.
The most crucial way, however, of improving the labour cost structure at SAH was to find better, more productive ways of providing customer service. SAH management concluded this would first require a process of "benchmarking". The prime objective of the benchmarking process was to compare a range of service delivery processes across a range of criteria using made up of employees from different departments within the hotel which interacted with each other. This process resulted in performance measures that greatly enhanced SAH's ability to improve productivity and quality.
The front office team discovered through this project that a high proportion of AHI club member reservations were incomplete. As a result, the service provided to these guests was below the standard promised to them as part of their membership agr
查看答案
搜索结果不匹配？点我反馈
更多问题
It looks as if it came straight from the set of Star Wars. It has four-wheel drive and rises above rocky surfaces. It lowers and raises its nose when going up and down hills. And when it comes to a river, it turns amphibious; two hydro jets power it along by blasting water under its body. There is room for two passengers and a driver, who sit inside a glass bubble operating electronic, aircraft-type controls. A vehicle so daring on land and water needs windscreen wipers -- but it doesn't have any. Water molecules are disintegrated on the screen's surface by ultrasonic sensors.
This unusual vehicle is the Racoon. It is an invention not of Hollywood but of Renault, a rather conservative French state-owned Carmaker, better known for its family hatchbacks. Renault built the Racoon to explore new freedoms for designers and engineers created by advances in materials and manufacturing processes. Renault is thinking about startlingly different cars; other producers have radical new ideas for trains, boats and aeroplanes.
The first of the new freedoms is in design. Powerful computer-aided design (CAD) systems can replace with a click of a computer mouse hours of laborious work done on thousands of drawing boards. So new products, no matter how complicated, can be developed much faster. For the first time, Boeing will not have to build a giant replica of its new airliner, the 777, to make sure all the bits fit together. Its CAD system will take care of that.
But Renault is taking CAD further. It claims the Racoon is the world's first vehicle to be designed within the digitised world of virtual reality. Complex programs were used to simulate the vehicle and the terrain that it was expected to cross. This allowed a team led by Patrick Le Quement, Renault's industrial-design director, to "drive" it long before a prototype existed.
Renault is not alone in thinking that virtual reality will transform. automotive design. In Detroit, Ford is also investigating its potential. Jack Telnac, the firm's head of design, would like designers in different parts of the world to work more closely together, linked by computers. They would do more than style. cars. Virtual reality will allow engineers to peer inside the working parts of a vehicle. Designers will watch bearings move. oil flow, gears mesh and hydraulics pump. As these techniques catch on, even stranger vehicles are likely to come along.
Transforming these creations from virtual reality to actual reality will also become easier, especially with advances in materials. Firms that once bashed everything out of steel now find that new alloys or composite materials (which can be made from mixtures of plastic, resin, ceramics and metals, reinforced with fibers such as glass or carbon) are changing the rules of manufacturing. At the same time, old materials keep getting better, as their producers try to secure their place in the factory of the future. This competition is increasing the pace of development of all materials.
One company in this field scaled composites. It was started in 1982 by Burt Rutan, an aviator who has devised many unusual aircraft. His company develops and tests prototypes that have ranged from business aircraft to air racers. It has also worked on composite sails for the America's Cup yacht race and on General Motors' Ultralite, a 100-miles-per-gallon experimental family car built from carbon fiber.
Again, the Racoon reflects this race between the old and the new. It uses conventional steel and what Renault describes as a new "high-limit elastic steel" in its chassis. This steel is 30% lighter than the usual kind. The Racoon also has parts made from composites. Renault plans to replace the petrol engine with a small gas turbine, which could be made from heat-resisting ceramics, and use it to run a generator that would provide power for electric motors at each wheel.
With composites it is possible
In contrast to traditional analyses of minority business, the sociological analysis contends that minority business ownership is a group-level phenomenon, in that it is largely dependent upon socialgroup resources for its development. Specifically, this analysis indicates that support networks play a critical role in starting and maintaining minority business enterprises by providing owners with a range of assistance, from the informal encouragement of family members and friends to dependable sources of labor and clientele from the owner's ethnic group. Such self-help networks, which encourage and support ethnic minority entrepreneurs, consist of "primary" institutions, those closest to the individual in shaping his behavior. and beliefs. They are characterized by the face-to-face association and cooperation of persons united by ties of mutual concern. They form. an intermediate social level between the individual and larger "secondary" institutions based on impersonal relationships. Primary institutions comprising the support network include kinship, peer, and neighborhood or community subgroups.
A major function of self-help networks is financial support. Most scholars agree that minority business owners have depended primarily on family funds and ethnic community resources for investment capital. Personal savings have been accumulated often through frugal living habits that require sacrifices by the entire family and are thus a product of long-term family financial behavior. Additional loans and gifts from relatives forthcoming because of group obligation rather than narrow investment calculation, have supplemented personal savings. Individual entrepreneurs do not necessarily rely on their kin because they cannot obtain financial backing from commercial resources. They may actually avoid banks because they assume that commercial institutions either cannot comprehend the special needs of minority enterprise or charge unreasonably high interest rates.
Within the larger ethnic community, rotating credit associations have been used to raise capital. These associations arc informal clubs of friends and other trusted members of the ethnic group who make regular contributions to a fund that is given to each contributor in rotation. One author estimates that 40 percent of New York Chinatown firms established during 1900-1950 utilized such associations as their initial source of capital. However, recent immigrants and third or fourth generations of older groups now employ rotating credit associations only occasionally to raise investment funds. Some groups like Black Americans, found other means of financial support for their entrepreneurial efforts. The first Black-operated banks were created in the late nineteenth century as depositories for dues collected from fraternal or lodge groups, which themselves had sprung from Black churches. Black banks made limited investments in other Black enterprises. Irish immigrants in American cities organized many building and loan associations to provide capital for home construction and purchase. They in turn, provided work for many Irish home-building contractor firms. Other ethnic and minority groups followed similar practices in founding ethnic-directed financial institutions.
Which of the following can be inferred from the passage about rotating credit associations？
Tomorrow evening about 20 million Americans will be shown, on their television screens, how easy it is to steal plutonium (钚) and produce "the most terrifying blackmail weapon ever devised" -- a homemade atomic bomb.
They will be told that no commercial nuclear plant in the United States -- and probably in the world -- is adequately protected against a well planned armed attack by terrorists, and that there is enough information on public record to guide a nuclear thief not only to the underground rooms of nuclear plants where plutonium is stored, but also to tell him how the doors of those underground rooms are designed.
The hour-long television programme, "The Plutonium Connection", makes its point by showing how a 20-year-old student of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in five weeks designed an atomic bomb composed of plutonium and parts from a hardware store.
The young man, whose identity is being kept secret for fear he may be kidnapped by terrorists, is quoted as saying: "I was pretty surprised about how easy it is to design a bomb. When I was working on my design, I kept thinking there's got to be more to it than this, but actually there isn't. It's simple."
The student worked alone, using information he obtained from science libraries open to the public. The television programme, produced for non-commercial stations across the country by a Boston educational station, shows how quantities of other "secret" information are available to anyone.
The Atomic Energy Commission's public reading room in Washington is described by the narrator as "the first place a bomb-designer would visit when he was planning his plutonium theft. On file there and freely available are the plans of every civilian nuclear installation in the country."
The programme seems certain to create enormous controversy -- not only over the lack of nuclear safeguards, But also over the morality of appointing the student to design a bomb and the wisdom of drawing attention to the ways that a nuclear thief can work.
Even an official of Public Broadcasting System, which is distributing the TV programme, confessed to uneasiness: "It's a terribly important subject, and people should know about the dangers, but I can't help wondering if the programme won't give someone ideas."
"The Plutonium Connection" explains, for example, that the security systems of nuclear plants were all designed to prevent sabotage by perhaps one or agents of some foreign power. But now this appears less of a hazard than the possibility of an attack by an armed band of terrorists with dedicated disregard for their own lives.
The programme discusses two major plutonium reprocessing plants in the US -- one already operating in Oklahoma, one being completed in South Carolina -- neither of which has more than a handful of armed guards to supplement the alarms, fences and gun-detectors that Government security requires. Both are in such remote areas that it would take at least 45 minutes for a sizeable force to be assembled, if there were an attack.
An official of the South Carolina plant -- a joint operation of Allied Chemical, Gulf Oil and Royal Dutch Shell -- admits to television viewers that the "system we've designed would probably not prevent" a band of about 12 armed terrorists from entering.
Stealing plutonium is even easier, the programme suggests. Despite constant survey of all materials on the list, there are inevitably particles of plutonium unaccounted for -- about I lb a month at the Oklahoma plant, owned by the KerrMcGee oil company, which in a year adds up to enough to make an atomic bomb. It is suggested that stealing would be even easier if instrument technicians were unscrupulous enough to alter their measuring devices.
The television film also shows radioactive fuel being transported to nuclear processing plants in commercial armoured cars.
SECTION B INTERVIEW
Directions: In this section you will hear everything ONCE ONLY. Listen carefully and then answer the questions that follow. Questions 1 to 5 are based on an interview. At the end of the interview you will be given 10 seconds to answer each of the following five questions.
Now listen to the interview.
听力原文：Interviewer: In your study, you identified students who stood out from the crowd because they, more than their peers, could find enjoyment in both work and play. You also found students who were disengaged and passive about most of the activities they participated in. What was the context of your longitudinal study？
Interviewee: With the help from a grant from a famous Foundation, we identified 1,000 children who were in 6th, 8th, 10th, and 12th grades in 12 school districts from three states and everywhere in between. Nine years later, we are still following some of the participants as young adults, although a much smaller group of them.
We selected students randomly. We were not looking for children who enjoyed school or did not enjoy school. We just tried to get as much of a cress-section as possible. We developed questionnaires and interviewed these students, but we obtained most of our data through giving each student a programmable pager for a week. This pager would go off eight times a day, early morning to 11 p.m. , at random moments, Whenever the pager signaled, the students would take out a little booklet and write where they were, what they were doing, what they were thinking about, their level of concentration, how happy they were, and how creative they felt when doing different activities.
They reported about 30 times during the week, so we received about 30,000 reports. And that allowed us to begin to see these children's experiences, the feelings and thoughts they had during the day, both at school and out of school. For instance, every time the pager went off, they had to say whether what they were doing was more like play, more like work, or like neither work nor play.
Interviewer: Was life more like work or play for these teenagers？
Interviewee: About 30 percent of the time they stated that it was like work; 30 percent of the time, they said that what they were doing was like play; 30 percent neither; and they reported that for 10 percent of their time. what they were doing was like both work and play.
Interviewer: In your follow-up studies, you concluded that students who often say that what they are doing is like both work and play are more likely to go on to college or make a successful transition to work.
Interviewee: Those students who say that whatever they do is more like work seem to do well in high school. Although they say that what they are doing is work and they don't enjoy it at the moment, they record on the response sheet that the activity is important to their future. So they understand that, "Okay. This is work. It's not pleasant. But it will profit me in the future."
Those kids who say that what they do is mostly play enjoy their activities, but they don't think of them as being important for the future. But the best situation is when a person sees a life activity as both work and play. Unfortunately, only about 10 percent of the time do students report this experience. Some kids never report that they have this experience. The worst thing is to frequently feel that what you do is neither enjoyable right now nor good preparation for the future.
Interviewer: We've published many articles on multiple intelligences and learning styles. Do you think people of a certain kind of intelligence are more likely to have the flow experience？
Interviewee: It depends on whether there are opportunities for your particular skill or intelligence. If you are musically inclined, for instance, and there is no opportunity to play music at your school and no other place to get the experience of playing, then you
微信支付 
支付宝支付