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Passage
One
"Drive
to the store? Wait by the mailbox for a catalog? Why bother?
The Internet's World Wide Web is the modern marketplace.
You can sit down at your computer and quickly find what
you want, when you want."
This is how the cyberspace sales pitch goes.
Can this shopper's paradise be real? I decided to find out.
My mission is simple (and enviable): Spend money. I draw
up a list of life's basics, ranging from life-changing purchases
to pocket-change niceties. Can you buy such things online?
Are they any less expensive? Is it any more convenient?
Armed with Netscape Navigator browsing software on my PC,
and looked into the Web via the CompuServe network and a
14 400bps modem, I am going cyber-shopping.
If the Web isn't always the best deal, it's
the fastest way to shop, isn't it? Not necessarily. As I
learn when buying groceries online, ordering is one thing—delivery is another. The only Web store I can find resembling
a grocer is American Supply International, which caters
mostly to Americans abroad hungering for homegrown staples
like Froot Loops, Pringles, and Cheez Whiz. But ASI also
delivers in the United States, so I order a $34 care package
with all the essentials: Doritos, canned tuna, Raisin Bran,
and assorted other yummies.
Don't order on an empty stomach. It took
nine days for ASI to get my order out the door, and about
a week more via parcel post to arrive at my doorstep. As
you might suspect, ASI doesn't sell perishables. But my
purchases seem to get easier, even pleasurable, as I go
down my list. Indeed, my online wine merchant, Virtual Vineyards,
is worthy of a B - school case study in how to conduct business
over the Web—at least in comparison to other Web sites.
The Virtual Vineyards site offers something
few others do: guidance. It singles out monthly specials.
It has sampler packs of Cabernets, Chardonnays, and medium-bodied
reds. It has a special button to limit your search to wines
under $15. And it has copious descriptions of each wine
it carries—far more helpful and believable than your usual
liquor-store employee.
My curiosity is piqued by a Pinot Blanc
from Domaine St. Gregory, so I investigate. I read a short
review brimming with wine talk like "full malolactic fermentation".
I'm sold. I drop the wine into my virtual
shopping basket and head to the checkout page, a secure
credit card order form. I try not to think about the shipping
charge, which runs $7.89 for the $12 bottle of wine. Fedex
delivers it two days later, in a box discreetly labeled
"Virtual" but not "Vineyards".
(440 words)
1.
The passage is a story about ________. ( B
)
(a) the rules of shopping on the net
(b) buying things online
(c) an imaginary shoppers' paradise
(d) the cyberspace sales pitch
2.
The author seems to be ________. (
B
)
(a) an American who lives overseas
(b) a person who lives in America
(c) a person who lives overseas
(d) none of the above
3.
The author's experiences tell us that ________. (
C
)
(a) things bought on the net are less expensive
(b) it is convenient to do shopping on the net
(c) buying on the net is not always enjoyable
(d) net shopping is mainly for food and drink
4.
________ is the brand name of a wine. (
B
)
(a) Virtual Vineyards
(b) Chardonnays
(c) Domaine St. Gregory
(d) Medium-bodied reds
5.
The
delivery of a Pinot Blanc will cost the author ________.
( C
)
(a) nothing if the purchase is made
(b) more than the wine itself
(c) more than half the price of the wine
(d) more than the wine bottle
TOP
Passage
Two
For all sorts of goods, Hong Kong
likes to think of itself as the perfect market; and for
home-delivery web retailing it could almost be true. Nowhere
else has 6m affluent, shopping-mad consumers crammed into
clusters of easy-to-reach apartment towers, connected by
some of the most advanced telecoms networks in the world.
That, at least, is the thinking behind adM@art, a new venture
by one of Hong Kong's most innovative tycoons, Jimmy Lai,
whose keen commercial instincts created Hong Kong's second-most
popular newspaper, one of its leading clothing retailers
and a stable of successful magazines. So why is adM@art
proving such a disaster?
adM@art seems to have plenty of advantages.
For a start, the groceries-to-electronics firm is following
a model that has tuned Webvan, a similar home-delivery retail
firm based in San Francisco, into one of the most keenly
followed Internet companies. Like Webvan's backer, who founded
Borders Books, Mr. Lai is a deep-pocketed entrepreneur (he
has already spent $26m of a planned $130m on the venture)
with a well-deserved reputation for winning in the face
of adversity.
Since adM@art launched in late June, it
has blanketed the city with delivery vans and triggered
a bruising supermarket price war, thanks to amazing discounts
and constant promotion in Mr. Lai's Apple Daily
newspaper. In a city with some of the most expensive retail
space in the world, it has the benefit of being mostly virtual,
with its fleet of vans operating from warehouse hubs in
cheap industrial space. And it has proved particularly adept
at exploiting the shadowy parallel import market, bringing
in cut-price Coca-cola and beer, to the fury of Hong Kong's
distributors.
Yet adM@art is losing an estimated $130
000 a day. Needing 30 000 orders a day to break even, it
is reportedly getting just 3 000 - 4 000 (Mr. Lai and adM@art
managers declined to be interviewed for this article). Despite
the trendy @sign, its barely functional website cannot take
orders; the site broke down within days of the launch and
for a while the company had to close every Tuesday to repair
the chaos of the previous week. Orders now come in by phone
or fax, which need lots of operators. Between the limitations
of the gray market, no prior grocery experience and a bare-bones
supply chain, its grocery selection is a meagre few hundred
items, almost randomly selected: a can of tuna next to an
electrical adapter next to a box of instant noodles.
These minor details aside, it has a further substantial
problem. Hong Kong is still a face-to-face shopping culture,
in which home shopping has never really taken off in any
form.
(434 words)
6.
We can learn from the passage that Hong Kong ________.
(
B
)
(a) is a perfect market for all sorts of goods
(b) has a population of 6 000 000
(c) is the world's telecommunications centre
(d) has an efficient web retailing system
7.
Jimmy Lai is one of Hong Kong's influential ________.
(
A
)
(a) industrialists
(b) adventurers
(c) newspaper agents
(d) tailors
8.
adM@art's similarity to Webvan lies in that ________.
(
C
)
(a) they are both joint venture businesses
(b) their founders are both editors by profession
(c) they work in the same way on the Internet
(d) they are both successful in retailing business
9.
One
of the advantages that adM@art has is ________. (
B
)
(a) the number of its delivery vans
(b) the promotion in Apple Daily
(c) the expensive retail space in the world
(d) the benefit of being virtual
10. The latest development in adM@art shows that ________.
(
D
)
(a) it is going to close in the near future
(b) it has overworked for too long
(c) it will not work without operators
(d) it is working with problems
TOP
Passage
Three
Getting into a new market
based on new technology is always risky and expensive. Developing
an E-commerce business right now is like trying to sell
cars when the roads haven't been built. It takes faith to
make an investment in technology that isn't producing immediate
returns for most people.
Faith is not a bad word to invoke here.
In the United States, we have faith in technology. If it's
new technology, it must be better. But there's another F
word here—Fear. The fear is probably less about Web security
than about choosing the wrong technology. What if you pick Betamax and your strongest competitor selects VHS?
The first rule is to pick standards, and
that's been decently addressed. The thing making the Web
possible is that it is standards-based—that's one of the
reasons its growth has been explosive. We have a standard
architecture using TCP/IP and Java. Pick either Netscape
or Internet Explorer as a browser and both do the job about
the same way. We're probably going to get Extensible Markup
Language (XML) as a standard for financial documents, joining
its cousin, Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), the graphics
standard.
However, there aren't standards how you
do business and what comprises the characteristics of an
organization that will succeed in E-business. Maybe the
rule is just plunging ahead. If you spend too much time
thinking about it, you're behind it.
It seems that the old rules of business
still apply, no matter how much anybody talks about Web
being a level playing field and giving a global reach. You
must know the capabilities of your organization. If you're
providing the same goods that are already sold through mail
order or telephone sales, there's probably not much change
in product delivery. But if you're providing services, such
as product support, can you deliver that support to a client
3 000 miles away? And if you're selling goods, can you deliver
in volume if Web-based marketing suddenly triples your orders?
You must be able to find out what customers
want and how they are responding to your services. This
doesn't require conducting Gallup polls. A friend of mine
is a research director for a Wall Street investment firm
that is currently putting money into new restaurant chains
in Europe. He described a recent trip to England as follows:
"I go to a restaurant for dinner, eat a little, count the
number of patrons, then go to another restaurant, eat a
little and count the number of patrons."
That kind of research works as part of the
formula for making investment decisions. Counting heads,
tallying hits on the Web, getting feedback, are all ways
to avoid shifts in the market that leave you far behind
competitors, and they can make up for betting on the wrong
software partner or computer system.
(468 words)
11.Developing an E-commerce business right now is like trying
to sell cars when the roads haven't been built. This statement
implies that ________. (
B
)
(a) E-business is mostly conducted in automobile sales
(b) E-business takes risks, like anything new
(c) technology seldom produces immediate gains
(d) the future of E-business is still not certain
12.
The fear that people have about new technology is ________.
(
A
)
(a) the wrong choice of it
(b) the security of the Web
(c) the explosiveness of its growth
(d) the inability to produce immediate returns
13.
The Web is based on standards such as ________. (
C
)
(a) Netscape and IE
(b) Betamax and VHS
(c) TCP/IP
(d) XML and HTML
14.
The rule in E-business is just "plunging
ahead", because ________. ( D
)
(a) there are no other standards as to how you do business
(b) it is one of the old rules that have always been applied
(c) Web is like a playing field, where one needs to plunge
(d) too much thinking gets one behind other competitors
15.
A
friend of the author's has recently been ________.
( D
)
(a) conducting a Gallup Poll of eating out
(b) investing in restaurant chains
(c) working at a company in Wall Street
(d) doing a market survey of restaurants
TOP
测验结果：15 题中 共答对题，
答错题， 还有题未答。
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