2020年初级商务英语阅读材料

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2020年初级商务英语阅读材料一

PlayStation 4 Sales Hit 100 Million Mark

Matthew Humphries

PS4 sales have topped 100 million units, Sony revealed in its first quarter earnings.

As The Verge reports, Sony announced 96.8 million PS4 sales at the end of the previous quarter, but a further 3.2 million sold by the end of June hit 100 million. In reaching the milestone when it has, the PS4 now counts as the fastest game console to hit 100 million sales.

According to Daniel Ahmad, senior analyst at Niko Partners, the PS2 reached the same total in five years and nine months, whereas the PS4 took just five years and seven months.

With the PlayStation 5 expected to launch after May 2020, time is running out for the PS4 to move up the sales charts much further. In the all-time sales list, the PS4 is now within touching distance of the Nintendo Wii (101.63 million) and the original PlayStation (102.49 million). It should easily surpass them before becoming last-gen, but next on the list after that is the Game Boy, which achieved 118.69 million units sold. That looks to be out of reach.

The only PlayStation not to achieve 100 million sales is the PS3, which only managed 87.4 million. How well the PS5 does depends on many factors including how much it costs, how good the initial games line-up is to give it sales momentum, and whether Microsoft manages to give Sony some strong competition with Project Scarlett.

2020年初级商务英语阅读材料二

Uber and Lyft Are Actually Making Traffic Worse in Some Cities

Lydia Dishman

It was a big promise to build an entire business on. But for the last handful of years, both Uber and Lyft have capitalized on the notion that by providing rides to people on demand via an app, traffic and pollution would be mitigated – especially in major urban centers. New research from both the ride-hailing juggernauts now suggests that’s not the case.

A joint analysis led by transportation consultancy Fehr & Peers examined Uber’s and Lyft’s combined mileage in September 2018 in the metro areas of Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, D.C. New York City wasn’t studied because of its vast public transportation system.

The results (which include city centers and their surrounding suburbs) reveal that, overall, Uber and Lyft make up just 1% to 3% of vehicle miles overall in the six metro areas. However, in places like San Francisco county, Uber and Lyft account for as much as 13.4% of all vehicle miles. It’s 8% in Boston, and 7.2% in Washington, D.C.. On average, between the six cities, as much as 62% of miles driven had a passenger. The rest were drivers on their way to pick up someone or just driving around between getting booked for a ride.

However, both Uber and Lyft are justifiably pointing their fingers toward the biggest cause of traffic and emissions: privately owned and commercial vehicles. Those account for 87% to 99% of total miles in the six areas studied.

Lyft’s chief policy officer, Anthony Fox.x (a former U.S. secretary of transportation), says this is a good time to consider congestion pricing to ease traffic, as is being implemented in Manhattan. Fox.x is pushing for a democratic approach to this. “The most effective congestion pricing model is one that applies to all vehicles on the road, including private automobiles, ridesharing, and commercial vehicles such as trucks, limousines, coach buses and taxis,” he writes. In other words, everyone needs to share the responsibility.

2020年初级商务英语阅读材料三

Women and Men Are Equally Bad at Multitasking, Study Finds

Kashmira Gander

Men and women are equally bad at multitasking, according to the authors of a study that debunks the widely held view women are better at juggling jobs.

The study, published in the journal PLOS One, involved 48 men and 48 women who completed language and number tasks. In some tests, the participants had to focus on two tasks at the same time, known as concurrent multitasking, while in others they diverted their attention from one job to another, or sequential multitasking. Participants also provided demographic information and had a cognitive screening to make sure the men and women were comparable in terms of mental and physical health.

Multitasking, including mixing and switching duties, was found to make both men and women equally slower and less accurate.

Marco Andre Hirnstein, a researcher at Norway’s University of Bergen who studies cognitive gender differences and did not work on this study, told Newsweek: “The findings are a piece in the mosaic: they don’t ultimately verify or falsify the stereotype, which has to do with the murky concept of multitasking.”

Hirnstein explained: “We all have a vague understanding of what it is, but if you are a researcher and actually want to test it there are myriad ways how to do it.”

Researchers can choose to look at concurrent and sequential multitasking, and a range of tasks, from those involving computers to real-life tasks that are more difficult to control.

“In our own study, we used a virtual reality task and also didn’t find any meaningful differences,” said Hirnstein. “Thus we are in line with the recent article. However, there are also studies that find advantages for women, or even advantages for men.”

He continued: “The stereotype is quite widespread – though not to the same degree as stereotypes about men’s and women’s superior spatial/mathematical and verbal abilities, respectively.”

Professor Tilo Strobach of Germany’s Medical School Hamburg, who has also published a study on gender stereotypes and multitasking but did not work on this research, told Newsweek: “I am not too surprised since the present findings fit to earlier studies in the field. These findings also show that gender differences are generally overrated.”

“Unfortunately, this study realized only one situation with different tasks performed in sequence and different tasks performed simultaneously, which limits the conclusions and generalizations a bit (but just a bit). The number of participants could be higher; however, this is also only a minor comment,” said Strobach.

He concluded: “The study shows that differences in multitasking (and potentially other cognitive and mental domains) are present between individuals rather than between different gender categories. That is, information about the gender of a person does not explain this person’s performance.”

2020年初级商务英语阅读材料四

Social Media, the Modern Day Radio of Music

Jenna Strauss

Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road,” featuring Billy Ray Cyrus, continues to rule the Billboard Hot 100 for a record breaking 17th week, dismantling the record for the most time tallied at No. 1 in the chart’s six-decade history. The “Old Town Road” outpaced Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee’s “Despacito”, featuring Justin Bieber, and Mariah Carey and Boyz II Men’s “One Sweet Day”, which spent 16 weeks at No. 1 on the Hot 100 in 2017 and 1995-96, respectively. What is even more spectacular than the success of Lil Nas X’s debut record is how it initially gained its traction. The record went viral on TikTok, one of the most popular and most interesting social media apps on the planet, which recently hit one billion downloads across Android and iOS

The success of “Old Town Road” hasn’t just blurred lines in musical genres, but is reshaping the way artists, labels, and marketing executives think about social media and its place in the life cycle of breaking a hit record. As the reach and scale of social media has allowed artists to tap into a global audience, marketing a record in today’s landscape requires executives and management teams to think from a digital first lense. This mindset has become even more critical, as major social media platforms continue to drive music discovery.

Consider the lifecycle of artist discovery from the pre-social media age to today. Prior to social, music was discovered pertinently through radio, which due to the difficulty of distribution, labels almost outright controlled. The linear path to breaking a record was clearer when the consumption platforms were less saturated with user generated content and when there were just less platforms overall one could actually pay attention too. Fast forward to today, and social media has opened up a direct to fan communication platform, which has resulted in artists viding for fans’ social currency. Why? The lifecycle of an artist to reaching the gen Z and millennial fan requires the use of social media, from the most popular platform in the world Facebook to emerging platforms like TikTok.

For instance, in a recent report from Music Watch, the research firm found that 9 out of 10 social media users do a music-related activity within the framework of an app. More specifically, the report found that Instagram leads the way, with 56 percent of users following, sharing or tagging musicians; Twitter comes next, with 51 percent; and Facebook has 44 percent of respondents liking a musician or artist – a number that rises to 47 percent among daily users. Among Snapchat users, 68 percent viewed or posted photos from live music events, while 23 percent captioned their posts with song lyrics.

With that in mind, every artist campaign needs to focus on not only creative content that puts an act above the cat in your Instagram feed, but also how this content can be easily shared. Sharing to earn social currency, is the most direct path to building a hit record in today’s music discovery ecosystem. Is your single or album release ready?