【正文】 綜合寫作閱讀 TPO1 Reading In the United States, employees typically work five days a week for eight hours each day. However, many employees want to work a fourday week and are willing to accept less pay in order to do so. A mandatory policy requiring panies to offer their employees the option of working a fourday workweek for fourfifths (80 percent) of their normal pay would benefit the economy as a whole as well as the individual panies and the employees who decided to take the option. The shortened workweek would increase pany profits because employees would feel more rested and alert, and as a result, they would make fewer costly errors in their work. Hiring more staff to ensure that the same amount of work would be acplished would not result in additional payroll costs because fourday employees would only be paid 80 percent of the normal rate. In the end, panies would have fewer overworked and errorprone employees for the same money, which would increase pany profits. For the country as a whole, one of the primary benefits of offering this option to employees is that it would reduce unemployment rates. If many fulltime employees started working fewer hours, some of their workload would have to be shifted to others. Thus, for every four employees who went on an 80 percent week, a new employee could be hired at the 80 percent rate. Finally, the option of a fourday workweek would be better for individual employees. Employees who could afford a lower salary in exchange for more free time could improve the quality of their lives by spending the extra time with their families, pursuing private interests, or enjoying leisure activities. Listening Professor Offering employees the option of a fourday workweek won39。t affect the pany profits, economic conditions or the lives of employees in the ways the reading suggests. First, offering a fourday workweek will probably force panies to spend more, possibly a lot more. Adding new workers means putting much more money into providing training and medical benefits. Remember the costs of things like health benefits can be the same whether an employee works four days or five. And having more employees also requires more office space and more puters. These additional costs would quickly cut into pany profits. Second, with respect to overall employment, it doesn39。t follow that once some employees choose a fourday workweek, many more jobs will bee available. Hiring new workers is costly, as I argued a moment ago. And panies have other options. They might just choose to ask their employees to work overtime to make up the difference. Worse, panies might raise expectations. They might start to expect that their fourday employees can do the same amount of work they used to do in five days. If this happens, then no additional jobs will be created and current jobs will bee more unpleasant. Finally, while a fourday workweek offers employees more free time to invest in their personal lives, it also presents some risks that could end up reducing their quality of life. Working a shorter week can decrease employees39。 job stability and harm their chances for advancing their careers. Fourday employees are likely to be the first to lose their jobs during an economic downturn. They may also be passed over for promotions because panies might prefer to have fiveday employees in management positions to ensure continuous coverage and consistent supervision for the entire workweek. TPO2 Reading In many anizations, perhaps the best way to approach certain new projects is to assemble a group of people into a team. Having a team of people attack a project offers several advantages. First of all, a group of people has a wider range of knowledge， expertise, and skills than any single individual is likely to possess. Also, because of the numbers of people involved and the greater resources they possess, a group can work more quickly in response to the task assigned to it and can e up with highly creative solutions to problems and issues. Sometimes these creative solutions e about because a group is more likely to make risky decisions that an individual might not undertake. This is because the group spreads responsibility for a decision to all the members and thus no single individual can be held accountable if the decision turns out to be wrong. Taking part in a group process can be very rewarding for members of the team. Team members who have a voice in making a decision will no doubt feel better about carrying out the work that is entailed by the decision than they might doing work that is imposed on them by others. Also, the individual team member has a much better chance to “ shine” , to get his or her contributions and ideas not only recognized but recognized as highly significant, because a team’ s overall results can be more farreaching and have greater impact than what might have otherwise been possible for the person to acplish or contribute working alone. Listening Professor Now I want to tell you about what one pany found when it decided that it would turn over some of its new projects to teams of people, and make the team responsible for planning the projects and getting the work done. After about six months, the pany took a look at how well the teams performed. On virtually every team, some members got almost a free ride . . . they didn39。t contribute much at all, but if their team did a good job, they nevertheless benefited from the recognition the team got. And what about group members who worked especially well and who provided a lot of insight on problems and issues? Well . . . the recognition for a job well done went to the group as a whole, no names were named. So it won39。t surprise you to learn that when the real contributors were asked how they felt about the group process,