商务英语综合教程（上册）Unit_16_Welcome_to_the_Wired_World教材教学课件.ppt

Unit Sixteen ;Introduction; Text ; 1 1997 may be the year for the world to catch up with a vision of a networked future, and the results are shaking up enterprises, economies and governments around the world. Financial markets have moved off paper and onto ether waves; businesses are grabbing at newly globalized markets; and even slow-moving bureaucracies are fingering the Internet, searching for a balance between information and freedom. Starting this week in Davos, Switzerland, 1,200 of the world’s most influential businessmen and politicians---leaders who may not have known a data link from a cuff link a decade ago---will spend six days debating the shape and texture of life in the networked future. An additional journalist, dignitaries and other interested observers will be in attendance. ; 2 The economic forces that lured traders across the Indian Ocean to Asia in the 1500s and statched America with railroads in the 1800s are now overlaying the world with fiber-optic and wireless networks. In India, where street traffic can move at a sacred cow’s pace, high-tech visionaries have proposed a 10,000-km super-road that will gird the sub-continent not only with asphalt but with fiber-optic cable. By the time such a project was complete, more value could move on light waves than truck beds.; 3 It is also, of course, measured in dollars. For softwarepreneurs in India or telemarketers in Taiwan, the electric seduction is the same: growth. The implicit promise of a networked society---with its own eye-blinking evolution---is that you will superchange the velocity of everything from cash flow to customer service. Hewlett-Packard, for instance, has estimated that wiring its sales force has jacked up productivity and allowed sales people to spend more time with customers. Aircraft manufacturer Boeing used three-dimensional interactive software and networked teams to create an electronic mock-up of the 777, virtually eliminating drawings and