READING TEST 30

Corporate social Responsibility – a new concept of “market”

Maybe Ben & Jerry’s and The Body Shop set themselves up for a fall by appearing to have a monopoly on making an honest buck. But their struggles are a lesson on how little we know about the minefield of “ethical” marketing. The Body Shop, along with the American ice cream maker Ben and Jerry’s, was hailed as a new breed of green, or environmentally conscious, business.

Ben and Jerry’s

A Ben & Jerry’s offers a very sweet benefits package to employees. First, every one of the 700+ Ben & Jerry’s workers is entitled to three free pints of ice cream, sorbet or frozen yogurt per day worked. (Some workers use allotments of their free treats to barter for other goods and services in town such as haircuts. Beyond the freebies, personnel receive a 50% discount on the company’s frozen goodies, a 40% discount on merchandise and a further 30% break on non-Ben & Jerry’s foods at company outlets.

B Workers are further entitled to pay family leave and may take advantage of the Employee Stock Purchase Program to purchase company stock (after six months with the organization) at a 15% discount. Beginning in 1998，316 stock options are awarded to each worker (excluding directors and officers) and stock is also assigned to each employee’s 40IK plan at the end of the calendar year. These contributions are intended to achieve the company’s goal of linked prosperity, i.e. to assure that future prosperity is widely shared by all employees.

The Body Shop

C History of The Body Shop Anita Roddick started The Body Shop with a mere £4,000 and a dream. With over 1,900 stores in 50 countries. The Body Shop was founded in 1976 in Brighton, England. From her original shop, which offered a line of 25 different lotions, creams, and oils, Roddick became the first successful marketer of body care products that combined natural ingredients with ecologically-benign manufacturing processes. Her company’s refusal to test products on animals, along with an insistence on nonexploitative labor practices among suppliers around the world, appealed especially to upscale, mainly middleclass women, who were and have continued to be the company’s primary market. As sales boomed, even the conservative financial markets approved of The Body Shop, s impressive profit picture, and a public stock offering in 1984 was successful. An expansion campaign followed. In 1988 the company entered the U.S. market by opening a store in New York City, and by 1997 the company boasted 1,500 stores, including franchises, in 47 countries. Anti-marketing seemed to be smart marketing, at least as far as The Body Shop was concerned.

D Part of the secret of The Body Shop’s early success was that it had created a market niche for itself. The company was not directly competing against the traditional cosmetics companies, which marketed their products as fashion accessories designed to cover up flaws and make women look more like the fashion models who appeared in their lavish ads. Instead, The Body Shop offered a line of products that promised benefits other than appearance healthier skin, for instance rather than simply a better-looking complexion. The company is known for pioneering the natural-ingredient cosmetic market and establishing social responsibility as an integral part of company operations. The Body Shop is known for its ethical stances, such as its monetary donations to the communities in which it operates, and its business partnerships with developing countries. In 1988 Roddick opened her first store in the United States, and by that time- through various social initiatives such as the 66 Stop the Bum” campaign to save the Brazilian rainforest (the source of many of the company’s natural ingredients, (and strong support of employee volunteerism -The Body Shop name had become synonymous with social activism and global preservation worldwide. The company had also become immensely profitable.

E By the mid-1990s，however，The Body Shop faced growing competition, forcing it to begin its first major advertising initiative, the most prominent part of which was the “Ruby” campaign. The campaign was personified by Ruby, a doll with Rubenesque proportions who was perched on an antique couch and who looked quite pleased with herself and her plump frame. Randy Williamson, a spokesperson for The Body Shop, said: “Ruby is the fruit of our long-established practice of challenging the way the cosmetic industry talks to women. The Ruby campaign is designed to promote the idea that The Body Shop creates products designed to enhance features, moisturize, cleanse, and polish, not to correct ‘flaws.5 The Body Shop philosophy is that there is real beauty in everyone. We are not claiming that our products perform miracles.”

F the Competition the Body Shop lost market share in the late 1990’s to product-savvy competitors that offered similar cosmetics at lower prices. The main competitors are H20, Sephora, Bath and Body Work, and Origins. Research Results Research showed that women appreciate The Body Shop for its ethical standards. They are pleased by companies with green actions, not promises. The research proved that The Body Shop has been put on the back burner in many people’s minds: overcrowded by newer, fresher Brands. Companies like the Body Shop continually hype their products through advertising and marketing, often creating a demand for something where a real need for it does not exist. The message pushed is that the route to happiness is through buying more and more of their products.  Under such consumerism, the increasing domination of multinationals and their standardised products is leading to global cultural conformity. Other downfall factors also include misleading the public, low pay and against unions, exploiting indigenous people Also the mass production, packaging and transportation of huge quantities of goods is using up the world’s resources faster than they can be renewed and filling the land sea and air with dangerous pollution and waste

G the Problem the Body Shop has used safe and timid advertising over the last decade, decreasing market share and brand value. With the rise of new, more natural and environmentally friendly competitors, The Body Shop can no longer stand behind being the greenest or most natural. The Solution The Body Shop is the originator of ethical beauty with our actions speaking louder than our words. This is the new direction of The Body Shop. We will be a part of different acts of kindness in big cities. We will eliminate unwanted graffiti, purify city air, and give the customer an opportunity to be a part of something good.

Photovoltaics on the rooftop

A natural choice for powering the family home

A In the past, urban home owners have not always had much choice in the way electricity is supplied to their homes. Now, however, there is a choice, and a rapidly increasing number of households worldwide are choosing the solar energy option. Solar energy, the conversion of sunlight into energy, is made possible through the use of ‘photovoltaics’, which are simple appliances that fit onto the roof of a house.

B The photovoltaics-powered home remains connected to the power lines but no storage is required on-site, only a box of electronics (the inverter) to the interface between the photovoltaics and the grid network. Figure 1 illustrates the system. During the day, when the home may not be using much electricity, excess power from the solar array is fed back to the grid, to factories and offices that need daytime power. At night, power flows the opposite way. The grid network effectively provides storage. If the demand for electricity is well matched to when the sun shines, solar energy is especially valuable. This occurs in places like California in the US and Japan, where air-conditioning loads for offices and factories are large but heating loads for homes are small.

C The first systematic exploration of the use of photovoltaics on homes began in the US during the 1970s. A well-conceived program started with the sitting of a number of residential experiment stations, at selected locations around the country, representing different climatic zones. These stations contained a number of ‘dummy’ houses, each with a different solar-energy system design. Homes within the communities close to these stations were monitored to see how well their energy use matched the energy generated by the stations’ dummy roofs. A change in US government priorities in the early 1980s halted this program.

D With the US effort dropping away, the Japanese Sunshine Project came to the fore. A large residential test station was installed on Rokko Island beginning in 1986. This installation consists of 18 ‘dummy5 homes. Each equipped with its own 2-5 kilowatt photovoltaic system (about 20 – 50 square meters for each system). Some of these simulated homes have their own electrical appliances inside, such as TV sets, refrigerators and air conditioning units, which switch on and off under computer control providing a lavish lifestyle for the non-existent occupants. For the other systems, electronics simulate these household loads. This test station has allowed the technical issues involved in using photovoltaics within the electricity network to be explored in a systematic way, under well-controlled test conditions. With no insurmountable problems identified, the Japanese have used the experience gained from this station to begin their own massive residential photovoltaics campaign.

E Meanwhile, Germany began a very important “1,000 roof program, in 1990， aimed at installing photovoltaics on the roofs of 1,000 private homes. Large federal and regional government subsidies were involved, accounting in most cases for 70% of the total system costs. The program proved immensely popular, forcing its extension to over 2,000 homes scattered across Germany. The success of this program stimulated other European countries to launch similar program.

F Japan’s ‘one million roof program’ was prompted by the experience gained in the Rokko Island test site and the success of the German 1,000 roof program. The initially quoted aims of the Japanese New Energy Development Organization were to have 70,000 homes equipped with the photovoltaics by the year 2000, on the way to 1 million by 2010. The program made a modest start in 1994, when 539 systems were installed with a government subsidy of 50 percent. Under this program, entire new suburban developments are using photovoltaics.

G This is good news, not only for the photovoltaic industry, but for everyone concerned with the environment. The use of fossil fuels to generate electricity is not only costly in financial terms, but also in terms of environmental damage. Gases produced by the burning of fossil fuels in the production of electricity are a major contributor to the greenhouse effect. To deal with this problem, many governments are now proposing stringent targets on the amount of greenhouse gas emissions permitted. These targets mean that all sources of greenhouse gas emissions including residential electricity use, will receive closer attention in the future.

H It is likely that in the future, governments will develop building codes that attempt to constrain the energy demands of new housing. For example, the use of photovoltaics or the equivalent maybe stipulated to lessen demands on the grid network and hence reduce fossil fuel emissions. Approvals for building renovations may also be conditional upon taking such energy-saving measures. If this were to happen, everyone would benefit. Although there is an initial cost in attaching the system to the rooftop, the householder’s outlay is soon compensated with the savings on energy bills. In addition, everyone living on the planet stands to gain from the more benign environmental impact


Assessing the risk

A As a title for a supposedly unprejudiced debate on scientific progress, “Panic attack: interrogating our obsession with risk” did not bode well. Held last week at the Royal Institution in London, the event brought together scientists from across the world to ask why society is so obsessed risk and to call for a “more rational” approach, seem to be organising society around the grandmotherly maxim of better safe than sorry’，” exclaimed Spiked, the online publication that organised the event. “What are the consequences of this overbearing concern with risks?”

B The debate was preceded by a survey of 40 scientists who were invited to describe how awful our lives would be if the “precautionary principle” had been allowed to prevail in the past Their response was: no heart surgery or antibiotics, and hardly any drugs at all; no acroplanes, bicycles or high-voltage power grids; no pasteurisation, pesticides or biotechnology; no quantum mechanics; no wheel; no “discovery” of America. In short, their message was: no risk, no gain.

C They have absolutely missed the point. The precautionary principle is a subtle idea. It has various forms, but all of them generally include some notion of cost-effectiveness. Thus the point is not simply to ban things that are not known to be absolutely safe. Rather, it says: “Of course you can make no progress without risk. But if there is no obvious gain from taking the risk, then don’t take it.”

D Clearly, all the technologies listed by the 40 well-chosen savants were innately risky at their inception, as all technologies are. But all of them would have received the green light under the precautionary principle because they all had the potential to offer tremendous benefits _ the solutions to very big problems – if only the snags could be overcome.

E If the precautionary principle had been in place, the scientists tell us, we would not have antibiotics. But of course we would – if the version of the principle that sensible people now understand had been applied. When penicillin was discovered in the 1920s, infective bacteria were laying waste to the world. Children died from diphtheria and whooping cough, every open drain brought the threat of typhoid, and any wound could lead to septicaemia and even gangrene. Penicillin was turned into a practical drug during the Second World War, when the many pestilences that result from war threatened to kill more people than the bombs. Of course antibiotics were a priority. Of course the risks, such as they could be perceived, were worth taking.

G And so with the other items on the scientists, list: electric light bulbs, blood transfusions, CAT scans, knives, the measles vaccine —the precautionary principle would have prevented all of them, they tell us. But this is just plain wrong. If the precautionary principle had been applied properly, all these creations would have passed muster, because all offered incomparable advantages compared to the risks perceived at the time.

H Another issue is at stake here. Statistics are not the only concept people use when weighing up risk. Human beings, subtle and evolved creatures that we are, do not survive to three-score years and ten simply by thinking like pocket calculators. A crucial issue is concumer’s choice. In deciding whether to pursue the development of a new technology, the consumer’s right to choose should be considered alongside considerations of risk and benefit Clearly, skiing is more dangerous than genetically modified tomatoes. But people who ski choose to do so; they do not have skiing thrust upon them by portentous experts of the kind who now feel they have the right to reconstruct our crops. Even with skiing there is the matter of cost effectiveness to consider: skiing, I am told, is exhilarating. Where is the exhilaration in GM soya?

I indeed, in contrast to all the other items on Spiked’s list, GM crops stand out as an example of a technology whose benefits are far from clear. Some of the risks can at least be defined. But in the present economic climate, the benefits that might accrue from them seem dubious. Promoters of GM crops believe that the future population of the world cannot be fed without them. That is untrue. The crops that really matter are wheat and rice, and there is no GM research in the pipeline that will seriously affect the yield of either. GM is used to make production cheaper and hence more profitable, which is an extremely questionable ambition.

J If it had been in place in the past it might, for example, have prevented insouciant miners from polluting major rivers with mercury. We have come to a sorry pass when scientists, who should above all be dispassionate scholars, feel they should misrepresent such a principle for the purposes of commercial and political propaganda.People at large continue to mistrust science and the high technologies it produces partly because they doubt the wisdom of scientists. On such evidence as this, these doubts are fully justified


Section 1: Questions 1-13

Question (1)

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Questions 1-4

The reading Passage has seven paragraphs A-H.

Which paragraph contains the following information?

Write the correct letter A-G, in boxes 1-4 your answer sheet.


1 An action taken to Establishing social responsibility in conservation project 

2 A description of the conventional way the ads applied to talk to its customers 

3 A history of a humble origin and expansion 

4 Management practices are intended to lined up the company’s goal with participants, prosperity 

Questions 5 - 7

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Questions 5-7

Choose the three correct letter, A- F.

Write your answers in boxes 5-7 on your answer sheet.


What are true about the Ben & Jerry’s company management

  • A
  • B
  • C
  • D
  • E
  • F

Questions 8 - 10

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Questions 8-10

Choose the three correct letter, A- F.

Write your answers in boxes 8-10 on your answer sheet.


What are the factors once contributed to the success for the BODY SHOP?

  • A
  • B
  • C
  • D
  • E
  • F

Questions 11 - 13

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Questions 11-13

Choose the three correct letter, A- F.

Write your answers in boxes 11-13 on your answer sheet.


What are the factors leading to the later failure for BODY SHOP Company?

  • A
  • B
  • C
  • D
  • E
  • F
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Section 1
Section 2: Questions 14-26

Question (14)

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Questions 14-19

Reading passage 2 has nine paragraphs (listed A-H)

Which paragraph contains the following information?

Write the appropriate letters A-Hin boxes 14-19 on your answer sheet.

NB you       may use any letter more than once

14 examples of countries where electricity use is greater during the day than at night

15  detailed description of an experiment that led to photovoltaics being promoted throughout the country

16 The negative effects of using conventional means of generating electricity

17 An explanation of the photovoltaics system

18 The long-term benefits of using photovoltaics

19 A reference to wealthy countries being prepared to help less wealthy countries have access to photovoltaics

Question (20)

Questions 20-26

Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 2?

In boxes 20-26 on your answer sheet, write

TRUE if the statement is true

FALSE if the statement is false

NOT GIVEN if the information is not given in the passage

20 Photovoltaics are used to store electricity.

21  Photovoltaics are used to store electricity.

22 The solar-powered houses on Rokko Island are uninhabited.

23 In 1994, the Japanese government was providing half the money required for installing photovoltaics on homes

24 Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Australia all have strict goals with regard to greenhouse gas emissions

25 Residential electricity use is the major source of greenhouse gas emission.

26 Energy-saving measures must now be included in the design of all new homes and improvements to buildings.

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Section 2
Section 3: Questions 27-40

Question (27)

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 Questions 27-32

Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 3?

TRUE if the statement is true

FALSE if the statement is false

NOT GIVEN if the information is not given in the passage

27  The title of the debate is not unbiased.

28 All the scientists invited to the debate were from the field of medicine.

29 The message those scientists who conducted the survey were sending was people shouldn’t take risks.

30 All the 40 listed technologies are riskier than other technologies.

31 It was worth taking the risks to invent antibiotics.

32 All the other inventions on the list were also judged by the precautionary principle.

Questions 33 - 39

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Questions 33-39

Summary

Complete the following summary of the paragraphs of Reading Passage， using no more than three words from the Reading Passage for each answer. Write your answers in boxes 33-39 on your answer sheet.

When applying precautionary principle to decide whether to invent a new technology, people should also consideration of the 33 ，along with the usual consideration of 34 For example, though risky and dangerous enough, people still enjoy 35 for the excitement it provides. On the other hand, experts believe that future population desperately needs 36 in spite of their undefined risks. However，the researches conducted so far have not been directed towards increasing the yield of 37 ,but to reduce the cost of 38 and to bring more profit out of it. In the end, such selfish use of precautionary principle for business and political gain has often led people to 39 science for they believe scientists are not to be trusted.

Question (40)

Questions 40

Choose the correct letter, A，B，C or D.

Write your answers in boxes 40 on your answer sheet.

40

What is the main theme of the passage?

  • A
  • B
  • C
  • D
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Section 3
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