雅思阅读真题+题目+答案：Company Innovation

雅思阅读真题+题目+答案：Company Innovation

A

IN A scruffy office in midtown Manhattan，a team of 30 artificial-intelligence programmers is trying to simulate the brains of an eminent sexologist, a well-known dietician, a celebrity fitness trainer and several other experts. Umagic Systems is a young firm, setting up websites that will allow clients to consult the virtual versions of these personalities. Subscribers will feed in details about themselves and their goals; Umagic’s software will come up with the advice that the star expert would give. Although few people have lost money betting on the neuroses of the American consumer, Umagic’s prospects are hard to gauge (in ten years’ time, consulting a computer about your sex life might seem natural, or it might seem absurd). But the company and others like it are beginning to spook large American firms, because they see such half-barmy “innovative” ideas as the key to their own future success.

B

Innovation has become the buzz-word of American management. Firms have found that most of the things that can be outsourced or re-engineered have been (worryingly, by their competitors as well). The stars of American business tend today to be innovators such as Dell, Amazon and Wal-Mart, which have produced ideas or products that have changed their industries.

C

A new book by two consultants from Arthur D.Little records that, over the past 15 years, the top 20% of firms in an annual innovation poll by Fortune magazine have achieved double the shareholder returns of their peers. Much of today’s merger boom is driven by a desperate search for new ideas. So is the fortune now spent on licensing and buying others’ intellectual property. According to the Pasadena-based Patent & Licence Exchange，, trading in intangible assets in the United States has risen from $15 billion in 1990 to $100 billion in 1998, with an increasing proportion of the rewards going to small firms and individuals.

D

And therein lies the terror for big companies: that innovation seems to work best outside them. Several big established “ideas factories”, including 3M，Procter & Gamble and Rubbermaid, have had dry spells recently. Gillette spent ten years and $1 billion developing its new Mach 3 razor; it took a British supermarket only a year or so to produce a reasonable imitation. “In the management of creativity, size is your enemy,” argues Peter Chernin, ，who runs the Fox TV and film empire for News Corporation. One person managing 20 movies is never going to be as involved as one doing five movies. He has thus tried to break down the studio into smaller units—even at the risk of incurring higher costs.

E

It is easier for ideas to thrive outside big firms these days. In the past, if a clever scientist had an idea he wanted to commercialise, he would take it first to a big company. Now, with plenty of cheap venture capital, he is more likely to set up on his own. Umagic has already raised $5m and is about to raise $25m more. Even in capital-intensive businesses such as pharmaceuticals, entrepreneurs can conduct early-stage research, selling out to the big firms when they reach expensive, risky clinical trials. Around a third of drug firms’ total revenue now comes from licensed-in technology.

F

Some giants, including General Electric and Cisco, have been remarkably successful at snapping up and integrating scores of small companies. But many others worry about the prices they have to pay and the difficulty in hanging on to the talent that dreamt up the idea. Everybody would like to develop more ideas in-house. Procter & Gamble is now shifting its entire business focus from countries to products; one aim is to get innovations accepted across the company. Elsewhere, the search for innovation has led to a craze for “intrapreneurship” 一devolving power and setting up internal ideas-factories and tracking stocks so that talented staff will not leave.

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雅思阅读真题题目：

Questions 28-33

The reading Passage has ten paragraphs A-l.

Which paragraph contains the following information?

Write the correct letter A-l, in boxes 28-33 on your answer sheet.

NB You may use any letter more than once.

28 Approach to retain best employees

29 Safeguarding expenses on innovative idea

30 New idea might be proved wrong

31 Example of three famous American companies’ innovation

32 Example of one company change its concentration

33 Example of a company resolving financial difficulties itself

Questions 34-37

Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 3? In boxes 34-37 on your answer sheet, write

TRUE if the statement is true

FALSE if the statement is false

NOT GIVEN if the information is not given in the passage

34 Umagic is a new representative of innovative small company.

35 Amazon and Wal-Mart exchanged their innovation experience.

36 New idea holder has already been known to take it to small company in the past.

37 IBM failed to understand Umagic’s proposal of one new idea.

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