MBA英语测试附答案第七周.docVIP

　阅读理解 　　DOTCOMS may be moribund, but inside companies, the Internet is still finding cost-saving new uses. B2E--business-to-employee--didnt have a crash, says Bipin Patel, in charge of developing the potential of the corporate intranet at the Ford Motor Company. Its still growing. 　　Ford has gone further than most companies to get its employees online: it offered its American employees personal computers, and 90% of them accepted. Ford hopes that the free PCs will save its own and its employees time by moving services online. General Motors, Fords great rival, considered a similar scheme but found that most employees willing to use PCs already had them. It is helping staff to pay for high-bandwidth connections instead. 　　At Ford, the human-resources department has pioneered a scheme to provide up-to-the-minute information to employees about pay and benefits. In the past, employees sometimes found that it took weeks to get a copy of the pay information they needed to do their tax returns, and the departments staff spent mind-numbing hours answering the same questions from hundreds of different employees. Now employees can look at a password-protected site that displays their payslips over the previous 18 months. They can see all deductions, and the hours they worked. All this information was on the human-resources database: displaying it to employees has saved staff time. 　　People want more and more of this self-service information, which they can manage themselves, observes Mr Patel. There is no such thing as information overload here, because its their information. Even training seems to work better online: Ford employees can now download a range of courses, including one on Listening and Handling Tough Situations, all designed for digestion in ten- or 15-minute gobbets. The company claims to have cut training costs by $2m during the past six months, as fewer people leave their desks to learn. 　　The company also uses its intranet to communicate with its staff a