Rectangles are _____ for you and me.

SUCCESSFUL TEAM WORK AND TEAM BUILDING Team building skills are critical for your effectiveness as a manager or entrepreneur. And even if you are not in a management or leadership role yet, better understanding of team work can make you a more effective employee and give you an extra edge in your corporate office. Team building success is when your team can accomplish something much bigger and work more effectively than a group of the same individuals working on their own. There are two critical factors in building a high performance team. The first factor in team effectiveness is the diversity of skills and personalities. It means people use their strengths in full, but can compensate for each other's weaknesses. Or, different personality types balance and complement each other. The other critical element of team work success is that all the team efforts are directed towards the same clear goals, the team goals. This relies heavily on good communication in the team and harmony in member relationships. In real life, team work success rarely happens by itself if there are no focused team building efforts or activities. There is simply too much room for problems. For example, different personalities may build up conflicts. Or even worse, some people with similar personalities may start fighting for authority and dominance in certain areas of expertise. Even if the team goals are clear and accepted by everyone, there may be no team commitment to the group goals, or no consensus on the means of achieving those goals. There may be a lack of trust and openness which may block the critical communication and lead to loss of coordination in the individual efforts. This is why every team needs a good leader who is able to deal with all team work issues.

1. Team building skills are not so critical if you are only an employee.()

2. To form. a high performance team, you need many important factors.()

3. A good team should have a diversity of personalities.()

4. Team work success is quite common in practice.()

5. To solve all the problems, you need a capable leader.()

听力原文： If you are in any major city in America, the chances are high that you are not far from a Starbucks. The company started in the West Coast city of Seattle, Washington, in 1971. Starbucks was named after a character in the famous American novel "Moby-Dick" by Herman Melville. Today, there are more than twelve thousand Starbucks around the world.

Sales last year were almost eight billion dollars. The company believes in opening many stores in busy areas of cities. For example, there are about thirty Starbucks stores in downtown Seattle. Starbucks sells more than just plain coffee. It started a whole coffee culture with its own special language and coffee workers called baristas. It sells many kinds of hot and cold coffee drinks, like White Chocolate Mocha and Frappuccino. It also sells music albums, coffee makers, food, and even books. But most of all, it sells the idea of being a warm and friendly place for people to sit, read or talk.

However, some people do not like the company's aggressive expansion. Faith Lapidus, a small coffee sell-er is taking the company to court. She says the way the company does business is illegal because it stops property owners from leasing stores to other coffee companies. She sees Starbucks as controlling the market and forcing out competition.

Nicolas O'Connell works for La Colombe, a coffee roasting company based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He says Starbucks has helped to educate people about coffee from many countries. But he criticizes the company for using machines more than people to make the coffee. Mr. O'Connell points out that the coffee culture is all about a hand-made product and interaction between people.

(30)

A．A great character in history.

B．A theatrical role in a play.

C．A special symbol in life.

D．An imaginary person in a fiction.

~ You will hear a short monologur talking about why cars are so popular in America.~ For each question (23-30), mark one letter (A, B or C) for the correct answer. __________are important parts of life in the United States.

A.Buses

B.Cars

C.Bikes

Meteors are ephemeral. They will usually vanish before you have a chance to point them out to somebody else. This makes them suitable for starry-eyed lovers to wish upon, but modern technology can put shooting stars to more profitable use. Next time you see one, bear in mind that a dispatcher may be using it to help him marshal a fleet of long-distance lorries.

To human eyes, a meteor is beautiful. To a radio wave, it is just another thing to bounce off, and bouncing radio waves off the sky is not new. Left to themselves radio waves travel in straight lines, which limits their range. To get them round corners, and over the horizon, they need something to bounce off. In the ionosphere—the uppermost level of the atmosphere—the sun's rays break down molecules into positively charged ions and free electrons. These can reflect (and refract) radiation. The ionosphere let Marconi and his contemporaries send radio messages over long distances.

When a pebble falls from space into the atmosphere, moving at tens of kilometers a second, it gets rid of a lot of energy. Like the energy from the sun's rays, this ionizes the molecules of the atmosphere. The meteor's 10—20km path is densely packed with ions. By the 1930s, radio waves bounced off meteor trails had been used by scientists to determine the speed, height and direction of meteors.

The obvious disadvantage of meteors—the fact that they are so transient—might suggest that bouncing radio waves off their trails would remain the preserve of scientists. In overall quantity, though, meteors bid fair to make up what they lack in constancy. On an average day there are a million reasonable-sized ones (one gram), 400 million smaller ones (one-hundredth of a gram), and 160 billion even tinier ones (one ten-thousandth of a gram).

Meteors also have advantage. The greater density of ions in a meteor trail makes it less susceptible to the many things which perturb the ionosphere, and hence the quality of radio signals that bounce off it—such as time of day, weather conditions, sun spots or indeed intrusive meteors. This immunity from "noise" matters to people who want to send digital data. Radio hams may enjoy the tribulations of chit-chat through adversity and static, but such a noisy medium is not good for transmitting error-free sequences of 0s and 1s. That is why meteor-burst communication (MBC) comes into its own when small amounts of data need to be gathered from many places fairly quickly.

A system under construction to monitor the flow of the Nile provides an example. A master transmitter sends a radio "probe" into the sky in roughly the direction of the target. When a conveniently aligned meteor materializes, the probe bounces off it and reaches the receiver. When the receiver hears its master's voice it responds along the same path, spurting out data about the river's recent behavior. The master station acknowledges receipt, gives any further instructions and signs off.

It then directs its probe towards the next of the 250 outstations. Depending on the system's sensitivity, the wait between suitably aligned meteors varies between four seconds and ten minutes. The bursts of communication between master and out-stations may take as little as tenth of a second. It must be completed in the second it takes for the meteor's trail to dissipate.

In America, Meteor Communications of Kent, Washington, is the biggest and oldest of the MBC companies. It has provided meteor-burst equipment for 14 years. Its devices have been planted along the Chinese-Russian border to send short encoded messages back to Beijing. Other systems in Argentina, Australia, Canada, Indonesia, South Africa and Europe have been set up to monitor a variety of things, solar radiation, tides, water supplies, motorway fog, snow conditions and the like.

The military applications are clear, remote unmanned stations could sense approaching enemy ships, a

A．mysterious

B．transient

C．unique

D．wired

听力原文：M: Pardon me, are you waiting in line for class registration?

W: Yes, I am. I think everybody in this line is as well.

M: I can't believe it! This line is huge. When I first walked up, I was hoping this wasn't for registration. How long have you been waiting?

W: About twenty minutes. It seems like the line goes pretty fast, but it's a long line.

M: I'll say!

W: I've watched a bunch of people who had been waiting in front of me leave. I guess they got disgusted and finally gave up. One couple said they had waited an hour and a half when they walked by.

M: Oh great! Do you have any idea why there are so many people?

W: I think the problem might be that the deadline as tomorrow. If you think it's had today, I bet tomorrow will be much worse.

M: I hope they don't close before we get to the front of the line.

W: I do too. I tried to use the automated telephone process to register, but it wasn't working right. That's probably another reason why the line is so long today. Last semester I registered for all of my classes over the phone.

M: Yeah, I've used that system before too, but I don't have a credit card anymore so I have to pay in person.

W: I don't know if that would have helped you very much. Apparently there were people who spent the night out here waiting to be first in line this morning.

M: That's really terrible. I can imagine somebody doing that for a concert, but just to register for classes it shouldn't be that difficult.

W: I know it, but I need to be in school this semester, so if that's what it takes, I'll do it.

(20)

A．They didn't have a credit card.

B．They couldn't want anymore.

C．They had spent the night in the line.

D．They felt ill.

()tonight, why not drop in and play chess with me?

A.Since you are free

B.For you are free

C.Because you are free

D.If you would be free

听力原文： If you are in any major city in America, the chances are high that you are not far from a Starbucks. In fact, you might be very close to several of these coffee stores. The company started in the West Coast city of Seattle, Washington, in 1971. Starbucks was named after a character in the famous American novel "Moby-Dick" by Herman Melville. Today, there are more than twelve thousand Starbucks around the world.

Sales last year were almost eight billion dollars. The company believes in opening many stores in busy areas of cities. For example, there are about thirty Starbucks stores in downtown Seattle. Recently, three Starbucks opened in the area near VOA headquarters in Washington, D.C.

Starbucks sells more than just plain coffee. It started a whole coffee culture with its own special language and coffee workers called baristas. It sells many kinds of hot and cold coffee drinks, like White Chocolate Mocha and Frappuccino. It also sells music albums, coffee makers, food, and even books. But most of all, it sells the idea of being a warm and friendly place for people to sit, read or talk.

Starbucks is a great success story. Buyers are willing to pay as much as five dollars for a coffee drink. People we talked to said they go to Starbucks because they can depend on it to have exactly what they want and to be nearby.

However, some people do not like the company's aggressive expansion. A small coffee seller is taking the company to court. She says the way the company does business is illegal because it stops property owners from leasing stores to other coffee companies. She sees Starbucks as controlling the market and forcing out competition.

Nicolas O'Connell works for La Colombe, a coffee roasting company based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He says Starbucks has helped to educate people about coffee from many countries. But he criticizes the company for using machines more than people to make the coffee. Mr. O'Connell points out that the coffee culture is all about a hand-made product and interaction between people.

Questions 33 to 35 are based on the passage you have just heard.

33. Where did Starbucks, the store name come from?

34. What is Starbucks' most extraordinary character?

35. Why does Mr. O'Connell not like Starbucks?

(30)

A．A special symbol in life.

B．A theatrical role in a play.

C．A great character in history.

D．An imaginary person in a fiction.