TASK 4. (0-8)
Read two texts about bosses. Do tasks 4.1.-4.8.
Text 1
THIS SUMMER
“Poppy,” Swapna says from the head of the dull gray conference table. “What have you got?”
The benevolent ruler of the Rest + Relaxation magazine empire, Swapna Bakshi-Highsmith,
could not possibly exemplify our fine magazine’s two core values any less. The last time
Swapna rested was probably three years ago, when she was eight and a half months
pregnant and on doctor-mandated bed rest. Even then, she spent the whole time
video-conferencing with the office, so I don’t think there was a ton of relaxation involved.
Everything about her is sharp and pointed and smart. Her winged eyeliner could slice
through an aluminum can, and her emerald eyes could crush it afterward. In this moment,
both are pointed squarely at me. “Poppy? Hello?”
I blink out of my daze and lean forward. This has been happening to me a lot lately. When
you have a job where you’re only required to come into the office once a week, it’s not ideal
to zone out like a kid in algebra for fifty percent of that time, even less so to do it in front of
your both terrifying and inspiring boss.
I study the notepad in front of me. I used to come to the Friday meetings with dozens of
excitedly scribbled pitches. I would work in a kind of panic. I’d spend three days before pitch
meetings in something of a sweaty Google trance, scrolling through image after image of
places I’d never been to, feeling something like hunger growling in my gut. Today, however,
I spent ten minutes scrawling the names of countries. Countries, not even cities.
Swapna is looking at me, waiting for me to pitch my next big summer feature, and I’m staring
at the word Brazil. Brazil is the fifth-largest country in the world. You cannot write a short,
snappy piece about vacationing in Brazil. You have to at least choose a specific region. I flip
the page in my notebook, pretending to study the next one. It’s blank. When my co-worker
Garrett leans toward me as if to read over my shoulder, I snap it closed. “St. Petersburg,”
I say. Swapna arches an eyebrow. “We did St. Petersburg in our summer issue three years
ago, remember?”
“Amsterdam?” Garrett throws out next to me.
“Amsterdam’s a spring city,” Swapna says, vaguely annoyed. “Besides, Amsterdam is so…
trendy.”
It is Swapna’s closely held belief that to be on trend is to be already late to that trend. If she
senses the zeitgeist warming to the idea of Toruń, Poland, then Toruń’s banned for the next
ten years. There’s a literal list pinned to a wall in the office, entitled “Places R+R Will Not
Cover”. Each entry is in her handwriting and dated, and there’s something of an underground
betting pool on when a city will be freed from the List.
There’s never so much quiet excitement in the office as those mornings when Swapna
marches in and strides up to the List, ready to cross off one of these banned cities. Everyone
watches with bated breath, wondering which city she’s rescuing from Rest + Relaxation
obscurity, and once she’s safely in her office, whoever’s closest to the List will run up to it,
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read the scratched out entry, and turn to whisper the name of the city to everyone in editorial.
There’s usually silent celebration.
When Paris was dropped from the List last fall, Garrett pulled a red beret out of a drawer in
his desk, where he’d apparently been hiding it for just such an occasion. He wore it all day,
pulling it off his head every time we heard the click and whine of Swapna’s door. He thought
he’d gotten away with it too, until she paused beside his desk on her way out for the night
and said, “Au revoir, Garrett.” His face had gone as bright as the beret, and though I didn’t
think Swapna had meant it to be anything but funny, he’s never quite recovered his
confidence since then.
Adapted from: People We Meet on Vacation by Emily Henry
For questions 4.1.-4.4., choose the answer that best matches the text and circle
the appropriate letter (A, B, C or D).
4.1. The opening lines of the text illustrate that
A. Swapna attaches importance to unwinding when she is working from home.
B. Swapna’s ambition is to show more empathy towards her employees.
C. Swapna strives hard to achieve some work-life balance.
D. Swapna’s lifestyle is not in line with what the magazine is about.
4.2. Poppy’s description of her preparations for the Friday meetings reveals
A. her anxiety triggered by comments from the co-workers she wanted to outshine.
B. the undesirable effects of Swapna’s mood swings on her staff.
C. her insufficient involvement in earlier projects assigned by Swapna.
D. the discrepancy between her former and current commitment to work.
4.3. When selecting places to promote in her magazine, Swapna
A. does not encourage any contribution from her employees.
B. rules out destinations which are coming into vogue.
C. comes up with an arbitrary shortlist of her favourites.
D. takes the underground betting pool into account.
4.4. Based on the last paragraph, we can conclude that Garrett
A. was flattered by Swapna’s attention.
B. treated Swapna’s comments with blatant disregard.
C. felt intimidated by Swapna’s remark.
D. appreciated Swapna’s peculiar sense of humour.
TRANSFER YOUR ANSWERS TO THE ANSWER SHEET!
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Text 2
A CHANGE FOR THE BETTER?
Workplaces have become fairer thanks to a rising ethos of meritocracy: the idea that the best
person for the job is the right person for the job. Formal assessment processes, for example,
help ensure that job interviews are granted on merit, rather than being allocated on the basis
of which CVs remind the hiring manager of a younger version of themselves. One
consequence of meritocracy is the replacement of seniority-based promotion - where you
get a better position “when it’s your time” - with one based on ability, a development that
means younger people with the appropriate skills can leap over older colleagues and end up
managing them. Unfortunately, according to new research published in the Journal of
Organizational Behavior, it turns out that this can have nasty repercussions.
Florian Kunze and Jochen Menges surveyed employees at 61 German companies. Nearly
8,000 participants reported an age difference in relation to their managers, and a subset
described their experience of various negative emotions over the last six months. A quarter
of the managers were younger than those they managed. Crucially, in companies where
the size of the age gap between younger managers and older subordinates was statistically
significant, employees tended to report more negative emotions, such as anger or fear. Why
would this be? We are inclined to measure our life progress by using our peers as
a benchmark, so if they pull ahead of us, rubbing our faces in our own inability to keep pace,
a flash of envy is usually provoked. And it is even more irritating when those who are our
juniors climb the ladder faster.
More broadly, being under the supervision of someone younger than us is a simple
incongruence of status. This is an engine for resentment-based negative emotions which can
be detrimental to productivity if not well managed. When Kunze and Menges asked
the leadership of each company to report on its recent financial results, as well as different
measures of efficiency, they found that companies experiencing more negative emotions
showed worse performance on all counts. Presumably this is due to declining enthusiasm for
collective effort in the face of so much frustration.
Kunze and Menges do not claim that companies should “revert to the old workplace with
traditional age structures”. However, they do believe the negative repercussions that they’ve
revealed should be addressed. One suggestion is to help older subordinates make sense of
their feelings and explore whether they can come to terms with them, rather than simply
suppressing them. I believe this would best be done in conjunction with changing the culture
around “career timetables” and addressing issues of hierarchy and participation, so that
old-timers, whether managers or not, can share their accrued wisdom within
the organizations to which they have contributed for so long.
Adapted from: digest.bps.org.uk
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Based on the text, complete sentences 4.5.-4.8.
4.5. From the first paragraph we learn that in many companies promotion no longer
4.6. In the second paragraph, the author argues that employees’ negative emotions result
from people’s natural tendency to compare themselves to colleagues who
4.7. The survey findings showed that negative emotions led to
in the companies which took part in the study.
4.8. In the last paragraph, the author suggests how companies can
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dopuszczalne są błędy językowe i/lub ortograficzne, o ile nie zakłócają komunikacji,
a odpowiedź wskazuje, że zdający zrozumiał tekst.