Iii Cambridge Practice Tests for ielts

24
The Ivrea centre was developed for ...
25
Japanese scientists are helping people ... underground life.
26
Frank Siegmund’s first underground room was used for ...

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68
Practice Test 3
READING PASSAGE 3
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 27-38 which are based on Reading Passage
3 below.
A Workaholic Economy
increased production has been almost
entirel} decoupled from employment.
Some firms are even downsizing as their
profits climb. “All things being equal,
we”d be better off spreading around the
work,’ observes labour economist
Ronald G. Ehrenberg of Cornell
University.
Yet a host of factors pushes employers
to hire fewer workers for more hours
and, at the same time, compels workers
to spend more time on the job. Most of
those incentives involve what Ehrenberg
calls the structure of compensation:
quirks in the way salaries and benefits
are organised that make it more
profitable to ask 40 employees to labour
an extra hour each than to hire one more
worker to do the same 40-hour job.
Professional and managerial employees
supply the most obvious lesson along
these lines. Once people are on salary,
their cost to a firm is the same whether
they spend 35 hours a week in the office
or 70. Diminishing returns may
eventually set in as overworked
employees lose efficiency or leave for
more arable pastures. But in the short
run, the employer’s incentive is clear.
Even hourly employees receive benefits -
such as pension contributions and medical
insurance - that are not tied to the number
of hours they work. Therefore, 
it is more
FOR THE first century or so of the
industrial revolution, increased
productivity led to decreases in working
hours. Employees who had been putting
in 12-hour days, six days a week, found
their time on the job shrinking to 10 hours
daily, then, finally, to eight hours, five
days a week. Only a generation ago social
planners worried about what people
would do with all this new-found free
time. In the US, at least, it seems they
need not have bothered.
Although the output per hour of work has
more than doubled since 1945, leisure
seems reserved largely for the
unemployed and underemployed. Those
who work full-time spend as much time
on the job as they did at the end of World
War II. In fact, working hours have
increased noticeably since 1970 —
perhaps because real wages have
stagnated since that year. Bookstores now
abound with manuals describing how to
manage time and cope with stress.
There are several reasons for lost leisure.
Since 1979, companies have responded
to improvements in the business climate
by having employees work overtime
rather than by hiring extra personnel, says
economist Juliet B. Schor of Harvard
University. Indeed, the current economic
recovery has gained a certain amount of
notoriety for its “jobless” nature:
Reprinted with permission. Copyright © 1994 by Scientific American, Inc. All rights reserved.

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69
Writing
profitable for employers to work their
existing employees harder.
For all that employees complain about
long hours, they, too, have reasons not
to trade money for leisure. “People who
work reduced hours pay a huge penalty
in career terms,” Schor maintains. “It”s
taken as a negative signal’ about their
commitment to the firm.’ [Lotte] Bailyn
[of Massachusetts Institute of
Technology] adds that many corporate
managers find it difficult to measure the
contribution of their underlings to a
firm’s well-being, so they use the number
of hours worked as a proxy for output.
“Employees know this,” she says, and
they adjust their behavior accordingly.
“Although the image of the good worker
is the one whose life belongs to the
company,” Bailyn says, “it 
doesn”t fit the
facts.’ She cites both quantitative and
qualitative studies that show increased
productivity for part-time workers: they
make better use of the time they have, and
they are less likely to succumb to fatigue in
stressful jobs. Companies that employ more
workers for less time also gain from the
resulting redundancy, she asserts. “The extra
people can cover the contingencies 
that you
know are going to happen, such as when
crises take people away from the
workplace.’ Positive experiences with
reduced hours have begun to change the
more-is-better culture at some
companies, Schor reports.
Larger firms, in particular, appear to be
more willing to experiment with flexible
working arrangements...
It may take even more than changes in
the financial and cultural structures of
employment for workers successfully to
trade increased productivity and money
for leisure time, Schor contends. She
says the U.S. market for goods has
become skewed by the assumption of
full-time, two-career households.
Automobile makers no longer
manufacture cheap models, and
developers do not build the tiny
bungalows that served the first postwar
generation of home buyers. Not even the
humblest household object is made
without a microprocessor. As Schor
notes, the situation is a curious inversion
of the “appropriate technology” vision
that designers have had for developing
countries: U.S. goods are appropriate
only for high incomes and long hours.
Paul Walluh

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70
Practice Test 3