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  3. Charles Wang has been to e-mail hell, and returned to tell the tale. His journey there began innocently enough when, as chairman

Charles Wang has been to e-mail hell, and returned to tell the tale. His journey there began innocently enough when, as chairman

admin2013-07-02  55
问题     Charles Wang has been to e-mail hell, and returned to tell the tale. His journey there began innocently enough when, as chairman of Computer Associates International, a software company, he first heard how quickly his employees had embraced their new electronic-mail system. They were sending messages to one another like crazy. "I said, ’ Wonderful,’ " recalls Wang. "And I also said, ’Let’s check into how people are using it. ’"

    But instead of a pleasant e-mail culture, what had evolved was a behavioral nightmare. "It was a disaster," he says. "My managers were getting 200 to 300 e-mails a day each. People were so fond of it they weren’t talking to each other. They were hibernating, e-mailing people in the next room. They were abusing it. " In just a few years, Wang’s high-tech communications system had gone crazy.
    To stop the insanity, Wang short-circuited the system, taking the astonishing step — considering what his $3.9 billion company does for a living — of banning all e-mails from 9: 30 a. m. to 12 noon and from 1: 30 p. m. to 4 p. m. These hours are now rigidly observed as a sort of electronic quiet time. Says Wang: "It worked wonderfully. People are walking the corridors again talking to other people. "
    So much for the e-mail revolution, which is now enslaving all those employees it was supposed to free, creating communication problems so new that they cannot be found in the pages of any management textbook. E-mail has corrupted corporate cultures and created bosses who turn e-mail into a terror weapon to subdue underlings and undermine rivals. E-mail has wasted years of executive time and gigabytes(十亿字节)of computer memory looking for lost keys.
    And the volume of traffic is still exploding. In 1994, for example, 776 billion e-mail messages moved through U. S. -based computer networks. As of 1997 that number is expected to more than triple, to 2. 6 trillion. By the year 2000, the number will nearly triple again, to 6. 6 trillion. Forty percent of the American workforce uses e-mail.
    So why are people saying such bad things about these computer-borne text message? Almost everyone agrees that e-mail is a wonderful invention. It is a convenient, highly democratic, informal medium for conveying messages that conforms well to human needs. E-mail is perhaps the ideal means by which one can run a global project. "It is one of the greatest innovations of the last 20 years, " says Paul Argenti, a professor of management communications at Dartmouth’s Tuck School. But Argenti and others also say it is a medium whose function is confusing, in parts because the process is so easy and informal that people treat it as they do conversation. But informal as it may be, e-mail is writing and constitutes a permanent record. And because so much of human conversation is nonverbal, e-mail messages, especially critical or complex ones, can easily be misinterpreted.
What could be the probable figurative meaning of " hibernating"(Line 4, Para. 2)?
选项 A、It means people get sleepy more easily for no actual work to do.
B、It means people are not moving around and not talking to each other.
C、It means people have more time for sleep for their high efficiency.
D、It means people become indifferent to each other even in the same office.
答案B
解析 语义理解题。hibernate的本意是“冬眠”，从上下文语境来看，这里是取其比喻意义，出现该词的前一句表示：人们非常着迷电子邮件，都不互相说话了。接着说即使是需要与隔壁的同事沟通，也是用电子邮件。所以可以判断选项[B]正确，“人们都不彼此走动，也不互相说话”。其他选项都不符合文中的语境。
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