【科学备考】2019届高考英语书面表达专题集结：(17)概要写作二

概要写作（二）

1、Summary Writing

Directions: Read the following passage. Summarize the main idea and the main point(s) of the passage in no more than 60 words. Use your own words as far as possible.

A Workaholic Economy

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. Bookstores now abound with manuals describing how to manage time and cope with stress.

There are mainly two reasons for lost leisure.

Since 1970, companies have responded to improvements in the business climate by having employees work overtime rather than by hiring extra personnel. Some firms are even downsizing as their profits climb. 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(诱因) involve the structure of compensation(报酬). The way salaries and benefits are organized makes it more profitable to ask 40 employees to labor an extra hour each than to hire one more worker to do the same 40-hour job. 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. Therefore, it is more 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,” Bailyn of Massachusetts Institute of Technology maintains. “It’s taken as a negative signal about their commitment to the fi rm.” He adds that many corporate managers find it difficult to measure the contribution of their employees to a firm’s well-being, so they estimate staff productivity in terms of hours worked. Employees know this, and they adjust their behavior accordingly.

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答案：People actually work more hours than before despite the increased productivity. On one hand, it's because the payment distribution system makes it economical for companies to have employees work overtime than hiring more people. On the other hand,employees tend to work long hours because their working time is linked to their contribution to the firm.

2、Summary Writing

Quiet Virtue: The Conscientious

The everyday signs of conscientiousness(认真尽责)—being punctual, careful in doing work, self-disciplined, and scrupulous (一丝不苟的) in attending to responsibilities—are typical characteristics of the model organizational citizen, the people who keep things running as they should. They follow the rules, help out, and are concerned about the people they work with. It’s the conscientious worker who helps newcomers or updates people who return after an absence, who gets to work on time and never abuses sick leaves, who always gets things done on deadline.

Conscientiousness is a key to success in any field. In studies of job performance, outstanding effectiveness for almost all jobs, from semi-skilled labor to sales and management, depends on conscientiousness. Among sales representatives for a large American car manufacturer, those who were most conscientious had the largest volume of sales.

Conscientiousness also offers a buffer (缓冲) against the threat of job loss in today’s constantly changing market, because employees with this quality are among the most valued. For the sales representatives, their level of conscientiousness mattered almost as much as their sales in determining who stayed on.

But conscientiousness in the absence of social skills can lead to problems. Since conscientious people demand so much of themselves, they can hold other people to their own standards, and so be overly judgmental when others don’t show the same high levels of model behavior. Factory workers who were extremely conscientious, for example, tended to criticize co-workers even about failures that seemed unimportant to those they criticized, which damaged their relationships.

When conscientiousness takes the form of living up to expectations, it can discourage creativity. Success in creative professions like art or advertising calls for a balance between wild ideas and conscientiousness. Without enough conscientiousness to follow through, people become mere dreamers, with nothing to show for their imaginativeness.

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答案：

1. Conscientiousness is the feature of model organizational employees and keeps the company functioning successfully.

2. Conscientiousness has both advantages and disadvantages.

3. With conscientiousness, employees give outstanding performance, so they are less likely to be jobless.

4. Meanwhile, conscientious people without social skills tend to do have tense relationship with their fellow workers and conscientiousness can also damage creativity.

3、Summary Writing

Directions: Read the following passage. Summarize the main idea and the main point(s) of the passage in no more than 60 words. Use your own words as far as possible.

Do Smartphones Make Us Smarter?

Should teachers allow cellphones in a classroom? A recent study on the way smartphones disturb learning might help explain the issue. Researchers published findings showing how students were affected by their phones in the classroom. They explored the differences in student performance in four situations: open phone use allowed, phones allowed in the classroom but could not be used, no phones in the classroom and a no-instruction control group. After watching a 20-minute video, students took a short quiz. The result was that the students in a room without any

cellphones performed significantly better on the test. Scientists believe the way we attach ourselves to our phones could be the problem.

Smartphones have become so strongly established in society that many people are lost without them. We are now in an age when many people can’t imagine life without a phone. There is even a name for the anxiety caused by not having one—nomophobia, which is the powerful feeling people get when they don’t have sig nal, their battery is about to die, or they are separated from their phones. Their fear of missing out on important information or connections can have a controlling effect on their lives and can divide their attention from other important things like learning.

So does information technology help or block the way we think? In the past, people relied heavily on specific knowledge and knew who in their circle of friends would be most likely to know things in different subjects. Now, our friend with all the information is the Internet. Indications are that people don’t remember information as well if they know they can use a computer or phone to recall it quickly. So it may be more difficult to move information from the Internet into our long-term memory.

B ut the impact of being exposed to so much information isn’t all bad. Reports show that frequent Internet use can strengthen fast-paced problem solving and can speed up the ability to spot patterns in a lot of data.

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答案：

Researchers recently found smartphones influenced learning. For one thing, smartphones have become an essential part of life, without which people feel at a loss, thus distracting their attention from learning. For another, people rely so heavily on smartphones that their long-term memory