Reading bank
Unit 7
1
Before you read, check that you know the meaning of the words in bold. Match
them with their definitions (a–h). Use a dictionary if necessary.
1 How much spam do you receive each day?
a while you are away
2 Do you use any strategies to filter unwanted emails?
b not kept informed
3 Is your inbox packed with hundreds, even
thousands, of old emails?
c completely full of
4 Do you know anyone who has a compulsion to
check messages very frequently?
d organise your thoughts
again
e unwanted emails
5 Do you ever ask anyone to check and reply to your
emails in your absence?
f a strong desire – almost an
addiction
6 Do you feel out of the loop if you don’t check your
messages regularly?
g block, remove or delete
7 How long would you be happy unplugging from any
electronic communication?
h not being connected to the
internet
8 How long does it take you to reorient yourself after
stopping work to check emails?
2
Answer the questions in Exercise 1 about yourself.
3
Read the text quickly and choose the sentence which best describes the main idea.
The writer:
a describes serious issues that can occur when staff do not have access to the internet.
b describes a new theory about how often employees should check their emails in order
to be more productive.
c notes that an old concept related to how often emails are read might be useful when
used in the modern workplace.
4
Read sections A and B and decide if these statements are true (T), false (F) or if the
text doesn’t give this information (NG).
1 Research carried out by Dan Russell showed that people usually responded to emails
within sixty seconds.
2 The writer usually sends at least eighteen emails during a working day.
3 Research suggests that people receive between eighty and ninety emails a day.
4 The writer thinks that thanks to smartphones, we now tend to check emails less often.
5 The writer’s colleagues email him about unimportant matters at least twice a day.
6 After an interruption, some people may take as long as thirty minutes to get back into
a task.
5
Read section C and answer the questions.
1 What were Mark and Voida trying to find out with the experiment?
2 What methods did they use to observe the participants?
6
Choose the option (a or b) which can replace the words/phrases in italics. The
correct words/phrases are in section C of the text.
1 When analysing the data, it’ll be important to consider how many responses were
received.
a keep a note of
b bear in mind
2 When the researchers conducted the experiments, they were surprised by the results.
a analysed
b carried out
3 The participants in the sleep experiment were men aged thirty to fifty.
a subjects of
b researchers doing
4 The exam is unlikely to take a complete day, so she should be back in the office by 12 p.m.
a full
b working
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Reading bank
7
Complete the sentences with the correct form of the answers to Exercise 6.
1 Scientists had never
were eagerly anticipating the results.
this type of experiment before and they
2 The data was easy to collect but it took a
it was ready to publish.
3 For this experiment, the scientists need female
ages of twenty and twenty-five.
4 Staff need to
responded to quickly.
year of analysis before
between the
that sales are lost if customer emails are not
Control your inbox
A More than a decade ago, Dan Russell, a researcher at IBM, won attention for his
email signature: ‘Join the slow email movement! Read your mail just twice each
day. Recapture your life’s time and relearn to dream.’
5
10
15
That was unrealistic even then. While some people are slow to respond to email,
most of us are quick to check it. A 2003 study found that the typical email was
read within six seconds of arrival. Another study, from 2006, by computer
scientist Karen Renaud and colleagues, found that people would check their
email eighteen times an hour.
When I think about my own behaviour, eighteen times an hour sounds about
right. It’s like a nervous twitch, with the bonus that I can tell myself and others
that I’m being professional. It’s also insane: most of us do not actually receive
eighteen emails an hour. I don’t – not after filtering spam. One estimate of the
typical load is eighty to ninety emails a day, which suggests that half the time
Professor Renaud’s subjects checked email, they would have found nothing there.
B Smartphones, packed with e-messaging alternatives, can only have worsened
the compulsion to check for new messages. Nevertheless, Mr Russell was right:
there are ways in which email might be a lot more useful if we slowed it down.
20
If you check email no more than twice a day, problems solve themselves in your
absence. When a colleague emails the entire company asking whether anyone
has seen his coffee mug, the treasure will be found before anything hits your
inbox. Meetings will be announced, withdrawn because of a typo in the date,
then reannounced. It’s so much easier to wait.
25
And slow email should mean more time concentrating on a single task at a time.
We will no longer set aside important work to open the email browser tab, and
then on to Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia or wherever. It takes time to reorient
ourselves after these self-interruptions; estimates vary from a few seconds to
half an hour.
30
35
C Bearing all this in mind, one might ask: What happens when our email is
turned off? Researchers Gloria Mark and Stephen Voida carried out just this
experiment, observing what happened to thirteen office workers when the
researchers disconnected their email for a week. The subjects were being watched,
electronically tracked and were even wearing heart monitors. They became
less stressed, stayed on task for longer and spoke to their colleagues more. They
sometimes felt a little out of the loop, but they survived the experience.
Unplugging for a full working week might be too much for most of us. It’s
certainly too much for me. So twice a day it shall be.
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