01 - Sales StrategiesHow can a company improve its sales? One of the keys to more effective selling is for a company to first decide on its “sales strategy”. In other words, what is the role of the salesperson? Is the salesperson’s job narrative, suggest ive, or consultive?The “narrative” sales strategy depends on the salesperson moving quickly into a standard sales presentation. His or her pitch highlights the benefit for the customer of a particular product or service. This approach is most effective for customers whose buying motives are basically the same and is also well suited to companies who have a large number of prospects on which to call.The “suggestive” approach is tailored more for the individual customer. The salesperson must be in a positio n to offer alternative recommendations that meet a particular customer’s needs. One key aspect of the suggestive approach is the need for the salesperson to engage the buyer in some sort of discussion. The salesperson can then use the information from the customer to suggest an appropriate product or service.The final strategy demands that a company’s sales staff act as “consultants” for the buyer. In this role, the salesperson must acquire a great deal of information about the customer. They do this through market research, surveys, and face-to-face discussions. Using this information, the salesperson makes a detailed presentation tailored specifically to a consumers needs.More and more sales teams are switching from a narrative or a suggestive approach to a more consultative strategy. As a result, corporations are looking more at intangibles (无形资产) such as creativity and analytical skills and less at educational background and technical skills.Sales strategies are classified as narrative, suggestive and consultive. Salespeople use the narrative strategy to promote products with standard presentations. The suggestive approach requires the salesperson to recommend a suitable product after talking with customers. The consultive strategy demands that salespeople acquire information about customers and act as their “consultants”. Nowadays more and more sales teams prefer the consultive approach. (60 words)02 - When You Hear the Final WhistleOne of the hardest things for any sportsperson to do is to know when to retire. But even harder is finding the answer to the question “What am I going to do with the rest of my life?”Some sportspeople go on playing too long. Perhaps they just can’t stand life without the “high” of playing professional sport. Michael Jordan, the greatest basketball player of all time retired three times. He retired once from the Chicago Bulls, made a successful comeback with the Bulls, then retired again. His second comeback with an inferior team ended in failure and he retired for ever at the age of 38. Jordan said, “There will never be anything I do that will fulfill me as much as competing did.”Others can’t resist the chance of one last “pay day”. Muhammad Ali needed the money, but his comeback fight, at the age of 39, against Trevor Berbick, was one of the saddest spectacles in modem sport. After losing to Berbick, Ali retired permanently. Three years later he developed Parkinson’s disease.For some people, the pain of retirement never leaves them. As Jimmy Greaves, an ex- England international footballer said, u I think that a lot of players would prefer to be shot once their career is over. J, Many of them spend their retirement in a continual battle against depression, alcohol, or drugs.But for the lucky few, retirement can mean a successful new career. Franz Beckenbauer is a classical example of a footballer who won everything with his club, Bayern Munich. After retiring he became a successful coach with Bayern and finally president of the club. John McEnroe, the infamous “bad boy” of tennis, is now a highly respected and highly paid TV commentator. But sadly, for most sportspeople these cases are the exceptions.For one thing, sportspeople find it hard to decide when to retire. Some don’t want to retire because they can’t stand living without playing professional sport while others just need money. For another, sportspeople find it harder to decide what to do after retirement. Some suffer from the pain of retirement while the lucky few take up a new career. (60 words)03 - IKEASince it opened its first store in 1943 , IKEA has become one of the biggest furniture empires in the world. The company has made people think differently about the way they furnish their homes, particularly in countries like Germany, the UK and France. Over 365 million people worldwide spend more than £8 billion in IKEA stores each year and the number of customers keeps rising. The best-selling products are bookshelves, sofas, candles, chairs and coat hangers, but perhaps IKEA is most famous for its flatpack furniture.Flatpack furniture was invented by chance in 1956 by a man called Gillis Lundgren. He lived in a Swedish town called Almhult and worked for a small furniture company. One day Lundgren needed to deliver a table to a customer, but the table wouldn’t fit in his car. “Let’s pull off the legs and put them underneath,” said Lundgren — and that was the moment flatpack furniture was bom. From that simple beginning, the small furniture company became IKEA and Lundgren became one of its top designers.The se cret of IKEA’s success is not just the design, it’s also the price. Flatpacks don’t take up much space, so IKEA can send furniture round the world vey cheaply. Also the stores don’t employ lots of salespeople to help you find or carry things; it seems peop le don’t mind doing that for themselves. And most importantly, IKEA doesn’t pay anyone to put the furniture together — they let the customers do that. Apparently, people would rather pay less and build the furniture themselves.IKEA is a big furniture chain store, well known for its flatpack furniture, which was invented by Gillis Lundgren when he managed to put a table into a car. IKEA’s success lies in the design and the price. IKEA can deliver flatpacks round the world cheaply. Customers would rather pay less and put the furniture together themselves. (57 words)4 - Refusing to Be ModernizedAn elderly couple are going to exchange candles for light bulbs after 37 years without electricity at their Suffolk home. Pat Payne, 74, and his wife Margaret, 72, brought up their large family in their farmhouse in Whepstead, near Bury St Edmunds, without any modem appliances.Their children left home years ago but now one of them has moved back and is paying £ 19,000 to have electricity put in the 200-year-old house next month. Mrs. Payne said that she was looking forward to “ being modernized “ but does not feel that she has missed much by not having electricity.“It would have been nice to have been able to do the ironing or to have vacuum cleaner instead of having to sweep the floor, but we got by,” she said. “I think our children are more excited about us getting electricity than we are.”The couple have mostly lived off the land. Mr. Payne, a former farm labourer, grows vegetables in the garden. Without a fridge or freezer in the three-bedroom house, milk is delivered every other day and fresh meat is bought as needed. Water comes from a well.Mrs. Payne used to wash clothes by hand, and with nine children that was a lot of clothes, but she believes that not having electricity may have been a good thing for her children while they were growing up.“Instead of watching television, they played together and used to make up games or read books,” she said.The life also suited her and her husband. “ Neither of us has eve r been seriously ill and we rarely get a cough or cold,” Mrs. Payne said. “With our fresh vegetables and not having central heating it’s been a very healthy way to live.”The Paynes have lived in their farmhouse without electricity for 37 years but they do n’t regret it. They think living in this way does good to their children’s growing up and their health. Now they are going to have electricity put in their house and will make use of modern alliances. (51 words)5 - Designer Brands Aren’t for Me!Although I follow fashion, I hate the phrase “must-have”. If I read that Ugg boots or Prada sunglasses are the latest “must-haves”, my immediate reaction is to think, “Why must I have them?” Why should I fall for the designer’s manipulative tactics, which are only intended to increase his bank balance at the expense of mine?Designer brands, in general, are for people who are too insecure to trust their own tastes. These people decide that everything at Prada must be “cool”, so if you shop there, you can’t go wrong. I find it much more satisfying to pop into one of the cheap chain stores on the High Street and buy a copy of designer’s clothes for a tenth of the price. OK, you have to use your skill to find the one garment in there that looks great. But it’s worth it! It’s like finding a piece of gold in a river. The find gives you immense satisfaction.Which is why, according to a survey done by a British bank, young people with money are abandoning the designer shops and buying their clothes in chain stores, second-hand shops, and in markets. This is the best news I’ve heard all week. It means that young people have the confidence to trust their judgment. They are prepared to take risks to look individual and not mass-produced.That has always been my shopping philosophy. The surprisingly high prices in designer shops leave me open-mouthed. Even if I had the money, I would think of all the other things I could spend it on!The writer thinks there is no need to buy those “must-haves” and that designer brands are intend ed for those who aren’t sure of their tastes. He prefers to do shopping in a cheap chain store. Besides, a survey reports that rich young people are switching to cheaper places to do shopping, thus looking individual. (54 words)6 - A Lesson Goes ViralAt the end of 2014, Tulsa, Oklahoma, sixth-grade teacher Melissa Bour received a friend request on Facebook from one of her students. She didn’t accept the request, but a quick browse through the girl’s friends list revealed the names of dozens of kids from her classroom. Many of the students’ Facebook pages were completely public, meaning even strangers could search through the kids’ personal photos and messages.“I saw middle fingers, students dressed inappropriately, and extremely offensive language,” Meli ssa says. “It was disturbing.” When she brought up her discovery in class, the students thought it was nothing. So she created a post of her own.With a bright green Sharpie, she wrote on a piece of paper in all caps, “Dear Facebook：My 12-year-old students think it is ‘no big deal’ that they are posting pictures of themselves ... Please help me show them how quickly their images can get around.” She put a picture of the letter on her Facebook page and asked people to share it.In hours, it was shared 108 ,000 times across dozens of states and four countries. She deleted it after eight hours, but it continued to spread. “I wanted to show them that it’s on the Internet forever,” she says.As she explained the results of her experiment in class, the students’ “eyes got bigger and bigger,” she says. “It scared a few of them into deleting their pages completely,” she says. Others have removed inappropriate posts and used privacy settings to manage their pages.Her intention wasn’t to scare them off social media bu t to push them to be mindful of what they post. Melissa says, “I tell them, ‘just because everyone else is sharing doesn’t mean you have to.’”At the end of 2014, Melissa Bour, a sixth-grade teacher in Tulsa, Oklahoma, found her students were using social media improperly. In order to warn them of the danger, she posted a picture with some words on it. It spread quickly and remained online even when deleted. She told the students what she did and her efforts were fruitful. (59 words)7 - Parallel LivesMargaret Richardson and Terry Connelly have almost identical taste in clothes, both have four children of more or less the same age, and both were married on exactly the same day. Not surprising, perhaps, Margaret and Terry are identical twins. What is surpri sing is that they didn’t even meet until they were in their mid-thirties.What happens if, like Terry and Margaret, identical twins are separated at birth and brought up in different families? Will their backgrounds make them completely different, or will their shared genes still mean that they have a lot in common? Professor Tom Bouchard from the University of Minnesota, set out to find the answer to this question. He traced more than a hundred pairs of twins who were adopted by different parents at birth, sixty-four of whom were identical twins. Each twin is then tested and interviewed about every detail of their life and personality.It turned out that Margaret and Terry were not unusual. As well as looking very similar, many twins had the same IQ, the same health problems, the same hobbies and interests, the same attitudes and even the same tastes. Several pairs of twins arrived at their first meeting in the same clothes, and one pair of middle-aged women were wearing identical jewellery. Others had made the same career choices：Jerry and Mark Levy first met in their thirties to discover that they were both firefighters, who drank the same kind of beer and weighed exactly the same.Of course, some of this must be coincidence. But Professor Bouchard has come to a remarkable conclusion. Identical twins brought up separately are more similar than non-identical twins brought up together. “I am not saying that upbringing doesn’t matter —it’s very important of course —but this research shows that our genes influence almost every part of our lives：they influence our IQ, our hobbies; our personalities, our political attitudes, our health, even the clothes and food we like.”Margaret Richardson and Terry Connelly are identical twins. Though they were separated at bi rth and didn’t meet until in their mid-thirties, they had a lot in common. Professor Tom Bouchard found through his study that identical twins who grew up separately are more like each other than non-identical twins who grew up together and that genes play a large part. (60 words)8 - They Beat Odds TogetherAFTER A CAR CRASH left 14-year-old Collin Smith unable to walk, doctors told him he had a 20 percent chance of finishing high school. The opportunity to attend college seemed even slimmer. Yet eight years later, Collin earned a bachelor of arts degree in communications from High Point University. Collin had achieved the nearly impossible — with the help of a kind man five decades his senior.Dial back to 2005. Ernest Greene had just moved to the same area that Collin and his parents lived. The families did not know each other. But when Ernest heard about Collin’s accident and the fact that his parents would not be able to care full-time for their son, Ernest says, he felt a calling. “The Lord was leading me to help,” he says. He had time to spare.Ernest approached Collin’s parents with the idea that he look after the boy while they were at work. The Smiths gratefully accepted. Collin, now 23 , says it was hard for him to understand then “how someone I didn’t know would drop everything to help me.”Ernest sought training to care for Collin and then began arriving at the Smiths’ home early on weekday mornings. He would help Collin get out of bed, wash, and dress. He would help him have breakfast. Then he’d drive Collin to school. And at 3 p.m., every day, Ernest would drive back to pick him up. Then, while the two waited for one of Collin’s parents to get home, “we played a lot of Monopoly,” says Ernest with a laugh.Collin graduated from high school with the rest of his class and was accepted to nearby High Point. Ernest accompanied him to every class. “The first year was interesting,” Ernest recalls. “Collin didn’t want to stick out.” Ernest, on the other hand, says he took full advantage of the opportunity, taking down notes and often commenting in class.Collin Smith lost his ability to walk at 14 after a car accident. When Ernest Greene, 64 then, heard about that, he offered to help him. He looked after the boy, sent him to school and picked him up after school. Thanks to Ernest, Collin graduated from high school and was admitted to a nearby college. (56 words)9- What I Think of Boxing as a SportBoxing is a popular sport that many people seem to be fascinated by. Newspapers, magazines and sports programmes on TV frequently cover boxing matches. Professional boxers earn a lot of money, and successful boxers are treated as big heroes.It seems to me that some people, especially men, find it appealing because it is an aggressive sport. When they watch a boxing match, they can identify with the winning boxer, and this gives them the feeling of being a winner themselves. It is a fact that many people have feelings of aggression from time to time, but they cannot show their aggression in their everyday lives. Watching a boxing match gives them an outlet for this aggression.However, there is a negative side to boxing. It can be a very dangerous sport. Although boxers wear gloves during the fights, and amateur boxers even have to wear helmets, there have frequently been accidents in both professional and amateur boxing, sometimes with dramatic consequences. Boxers have suffered from head injuries, and occasionally, fighters have even been killed as a result of being knocked out in the ring. Furthermore, studies have shown that there are often long-term effects of boxing, in the form of serious brain damage, even if a boxer has never been knocked out.To conclude, I am personally not at all in favour of aggressive sports like boxing. I think it would be better if less time was given to aggressive sports on TV, and we celebrated more men and women from non-aggressive sports as our heroes and heroines in our society. I believe that the world is aggressive enough already! Of course, people like competitive sports, and so do I, but I think that hitting other people in an aggressive way is not something that should be regarded as a sport.Some people love boxing because it is an aggressive sport, which echoes with the feelings of aggression they have. But boxing is also a dangerous sport, not only because boxers are very likely to be injured or even killed, but also because there might be potential brain damage. Personally, the writer doesn’t like boxing and appeals for non-aggressive sports. (59 words)。