BEC剑桥商务英语高级真题集听力原文

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剑桥商务英语高级真题集听力原文1

This is the Business English Certificate Higher 3, Listening Test 1.

Part One. Questions 1 to 12.

You will hear the founder of a company called Manshee talking to business students about its development.

As you listen, for questions 1 to 12, complete the notes, using up to three words or a number.

After you have listened once, replay the recording.

You now have forty-five seconds to read through the notes.

[pause]

Now listen, and complete the notes.

[pause]

Man: Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I’m honoured to have this opportunity to talk to you.

Eight years ago, I bought my first computer, but I soon discovered that where I lived, it was difficult to find accessories for that particular make. That made me realise that other people must have the same problem.

Then I found that foreign magazines contained plenty of advertisements of mail order companies, so I started buying spare parts and things that way and selling them on to my friends at a small profit. That was how my company, Manshee, was born.

Four years later, Manshee was making a profit and had reached a turnover of six million pounds. We had four directors - myself and three of my friends - plus a staff of seventeen. The culture was young and the working environment didn’t have any structure. The company just grew and grew with its own momentum, and everything we did seemed to strike lucky. If we needed to buy some equipment or redecorate the sales office, we decided yes or no in isolation, only taking the short term - usually the cash flow for that month - into account.

However, the market became increasingly cut throat, and that led to falling margins. We realised, rather unwillingly, that the time had come to structure our future, but we didn’t really have much idea how to set about it. So we went to a firm of consultants who specialise in helping small businesses, and it proved a turning point. They insisted that we four directors sit down and rank our investments in order of importance for the coming years. It seems obvious now, but we’d never realised the value of doing it before.

Initially, we set out strategic and financial targets for the next three years, and now we’re pleased with just how many of those objectives we’ve met.

The value of bringing in outside expertise was that it gave us objectivity. It’s so easy to take things for granted, and to go on in the same mindset. Using consultants meant we received invaluable advice on our business priorities.

剑桥商务英语高级真题集听力原文2

Part One. Questions 1 to 12.

You will bear the opening of the Factories of the Year awards ceremony.

As you listen, for questions 1 to 12, complete the notes, using up to three words or a number.

After you bare listened once, replay the recording.

You now have forty-five seconds to read through the notes.

[pause]

Now listen, and complete the notes.

[pause]

Man: Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and "welcome to the Factories of the Year award. My name is Jonathan Hargreaves, and I’m Chief Executive of the Institute of Production Research, which organised these awards, in association with Barrington Business School. I’m delighted to introduce to you the school’s professor of manufacturing science, Jacqueline Allen, who again chaired the panel of judges. Jacqueline.

Woman: Thank you, Jonathan, and good morning, everyone. This year’s search for the Factories of the Year has produced a bumper crop of outstanding winners, which is very welcome proof that the old economy isn’t dead, but is emerging revitalised from its recent problems.

As ever, we initiated our search for the best by sending each participating factory a questionnaire. This consisted of fourteen pages and probably more questions than the recipients would have liked. From their answers, each factory was assessed on a basket of performance criteria. Some of these were immediately measurable, like handover times, which of course can have a big impact on productivity and which are showing a healthy tendency towards being shortened. Another was delivery reliability, a high score in which is essential for any customer-led organisation.

Other criteria which we considered were less tangible, but no less important for that. We took staff morale very seriously, because if it’s poor it can have measurable results such as high staff turnover and a high accident rate. And if a business can’t easily handle change, it may well create more problems than it solves, and its future is unlikely to be secure.

The next step was for the panel of judges to assess the results and devise a shortlist. We then visited these factories. I must say, I found it fascinating to see so many factories in action. As a result of these visits, we came up with the three winners in each category.

The factories that emerged from this process shared some familiar characteristics. Impressive people-management practices, for a start. A determination among the factory’s management team not to be second best, for another. And acting on the realisation that clever initiatives don’t count if they don’t further a factory’s mission. No successful factory can, for a moment, forget its customers, whether they’re internal to the company or external.

As ever, new trends emerged: an outstanding level of competence in supply-chain management, as well as in manufacturing, is increasingly important. The links between a factory, its suppliers and its customers can make or break an operation.

This year’s winners also demonstrate the importance of optimising the movement of goods and people around the factory. Confused, muddled-looking factories underperform, while successful ones use signs to help staff and visitors find the best route to their destination. And allowing goods or materials to get lost in some dusty corner of the warehouse is unacceptable: the problem of tracking components as they move through production has led to a number of developments, of which electronic tagging is one of the most exciting

剑桥商务英语高级真题集听力原文3

.

Part One. Questions 1 to 12.

You will hear part of a talk to a group of business students about the role of free gifts in product promotion.

As you listen, for questions 1 to 12, complete the notes, using up to three words or a number.

After you have listened once, replay the recording.

You now have forty-five seconds to read through the notes.

[pause]

Now listen, and complete the notes.

[pause]

Woman: Hello. My name’s Sue Barnard. I’ve come to talk to you this afternoon about that old marketing perennial, the free gift. I work as a marketing consultant, on a freelance basis, and I thought that I would begin with an anecdote. One of the companies I work with is a major manufacturer of consumer durables, and so I need to keep in touch with the latest campaigns being launched by rival groups, as well as seeing how our own efforts are looking. So I’m a keen reader of weekly magazines.

Although I’m actually based in Manchester, last week I happened to be with some clients at their sales conference, which was being held in Wales. On the way there, waiting at the station, I popped into a newsagents for a browse, to pass the time. The March issue of Prime magazine immediately caught my eye because the cover said ‘Free Gift this Issue: Free Diary’. And it puzzled me because I had seen the same issue on sale in Manchester without any gift. Clearly, people in Wales were getting the same magazine, but all packaged up in a special plastic jacket with this gift inside. Why, I wondered, were people in my area losing out?

Well, of course, the answer lies in the marketing policy of the magazine itself. No use giving everyone a freebie because then there’d be no way of gauging how successful it’d been in drumming up extra sales. In other words, it’s a controlled experiment. In this case, flat sales of Prime in Manchester, coupled with strong sales in Wales, would indicate that the gift had done the trick, and this type of strategy is vital for magazines as more and more, titles crowd the racks.

Just looking round the newsagents this week, you’ll find one magazine giving away a book worth six ninety-nine, when the magazine itself only costs two ninety-nine. And it doesn’t stop there. One rival is offering a CD, another a calculator. And so it goes on. You know, it really is a ‘readers’ market at the moment.

But, I can see you’re asking yourselves, if the gifts are actually far more expensive than the magazines... ? Well, clearly, the magazines are facing greater competition and it’s all about offering your reader the best possible value. If your competitor’s got something out, then you don’t want to be seen to be lagging behind. And once you’ve started, in a sense, you’ve got to keep on - you do get locked into a ‘circulation war’ where the only way to stay on top seems to be through the free gifts. And remember, it doesn’t matter if the gift costs more than the magazine because the real profits come not from the cover price, but from the advertising revenues. To keep those flowing in, you need good figures, and that’s where the free gifts come in.

And, of course, it can’t be any old gift. An inappropriate choice would do more harm than good. The gift must reinforce the true brand values of the magazine. The specialist titles are particularly good at this. And it’s also a good opportunity for people to sample your magazine; it may bring in new readers. With the right gift, you could even be looking at as much as fifteen per cent uplift on your sales, particularly in the teen market, where pop fashions come and go and it’s very important to encourage reader loyalty.

[pause]

Now listen to the recording again.

[pause]

That is the end of Part One. You now have 20 seconds to check your answers.

[pause]

Part Two. Questions 13 to 22.

You will hear five different people talking about workshops they have recently attended.

For each extract there are two tasks. Look at Task One. For each question 13-17, choose the aim of the workshop, from the list A-H. Now look at Task Two. For each question 18 to 22, choose the outcome of the workshop, from the list A-H.

After you have listened once, replay the recording.

You now have thirty seconds to read the two lists.

剑桥商务英语高级真题集听力原文4

4.

Part One. Questions 1 to 12.

You will hear a college lecturer talking to a class of business students about a supermarket chain. As you listen, for questions 1 to 12, complete the notes, using up to three words or a number.

After you have listened once, replay the recording.

You now have forty-five seconds to read through the notes.

[pause]

Now listen, and complete the notes.

[pause]

Man: Good morning. In today’s class we’ll be comparing two supermarket chains whose futures are looking very different at the moment. First of all, the Williams chain.

Sharon Tucker joined Williams two years ago as Sales Director, taking over as Chief Executive three months later. The company was struggling. Sales growth was fading away, and profits were falling. Its strategy of focusing on redesigning stores was doing nothing to boost sales. In short, Williams had lost its way.

After just one year under Tucker’s leadership, it’s regained its confidence, and with good reason. Sales have been rising for fifteen months, starting almost as soon as she walked in the door. They’re up by five per cent in the last six months, excluding new space, with profits over the same period rising by ten per cent. And the company claims to have attracted a million new customers.

Tucker came from the American chain Hurst’s, and her experience there persuaded her that everyday low pricing, the strategy pursued by that giant and by most of the British supermarket groups, wouldn’t work for a small player like Williams. Its larger rivals could too easily undercut it.

Instead, she decided to use a high-low strategy, which is generally known as loss-leading. The technique’s familiar: cut the price of twenty or so selected items each week. The radical part came in the implementation. Instead of making it a national campaign, which would allow Williams’s rivals to instantly follow its price cuts, the company’s ‘best deals’, as they’re called, vary from town to town, and change every week. The company employs five thousand distributors in order that, every week, a third of all the people living in the catchment area of a Williams store receive flyers through their doors, detailing these special offers. The price cuts are dramatic, like forty per cent off breakfast cereals, the same off bars of soap, fifty per cent off soft drinks, and so on. Indeed, many items are sold at below the cost to Williams.

Shoppers seem to love it, as is evident from Williams’s sales. But it’s high risk: sales have to increase by enough to limit the impact on profits, and they have to be able to deliver the goods. That’s harder than it sounds. Some of the products on offer fly out of the door, selling as much in a week as they normally would in a year. Organising adequate stock levels for that, on different products around the country, is a nightmare of logistics. What makes all this feasible, apart from very good planning, is that Williams’s distribution system isn’t centralized, unlike some of the other supermarket chains.