完形填空

Unit 1

When women do become managers, do they bring a different style and different skills to the job? Are they better, or worse, managers than men? Are women more highly motivated and committed than male managers?

Some research supports the idea that women bring different attitudes and skills to management jobs, such as greater cooperativeness, an emphasis on affiliation and attachment, and a willingness to bring emotional factors to bear in making workplace decisions. These differences are seen to carry advantages for companies, because they expand the range of techniques that can be used to help the company manage its workforce effectively.

A study commissioned by the International Women’s Forum discovered a management style used by some women managers (and also by some men) that differs from the command-and-control style traditionally used by male managers. Using this “interactive leadership”approach, “women encourage participation, share power and information, enhance other people’s self-worth, and get others excited about their work. All these things reflect their belief that allowing employees to contribute and to feel powerful and important is a win-win situation—good for the employees and the organization.”The study’s director predicted that “interactive leadership may emerge as the management style of choice for many organizations”.

Unit 3

A great deal of attention is being paid today to the so-called digital divide, the division of the world into the info rich and the info poor. And that divide does exist today. My wife and I lectured about this looming danger twenty years ago. What was less visible then, however, were the new, positive forces that work against the digital divide. Actually, there are reasons to be optimistic.

There are technological reasons to hope the digital divide will narrow. As the Internet becomes more and more commercialized, it is in the interest of business to universalize access—after all, the more people online, the more potential customers there are. More and more governments, afraid their countries will be left behind, want to spread Internet access. Within the next decade or two, one to two billion people on the planet will be netted together. As a result, I now believe the digital divide will narrow rather than widen in the years ahead. And that is very good news because the Internet may well be the most powerful tool for combating world poverty that we’ve ever had.

Of course, the use of the Internet isn’t the only way to defeat poverty. And the Internet is not the only tool we have. But it has enormous potential.

To take advantage of this tool, some poor countries will have to get over their out-dated anti-colonial prejudices with respect to foreign investment. Countries that still think foreign investment is a/an invasion of their sovereignty might well study the history of infrastructure in the United States. When the United States built its industrial infrastructure, it didn’t have the capital to do so. And that is why America’s Second Wave infrastructure—including roads, harbors, highways, ports and so on—were built with foreign investment.

Unit 4

The idea that some groups of people may be more intelligent than others is one of those hypotheses that dare not speak its name. But Gregory Cochran is prepared to say it anyway. He is that rare bird, a scientist who works independently of any institution. He helped popularize the