You should open __ with would-be jumpers.

Book Value

A Older people in particular are often taken aback by the speed with which the Internet's "next big thing" can cease being that. It even happens to Rupert Murdoch, a septuagenarian me dia mogul. Two years ago he bought MySpace, a social-networking site that has becomed the world's largest. The other day, however, Mr Murdoch was heard lamenting that MySpace appears already to be last year's news, because everybody is now going to Facebook, the second-largest social network on the web, with 31 million registered users at the last count Facebook was started in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg, a student at Harvard and not even 20 a the time, along with two of his friends. The site requires users to provide their real names and e-mail addresses for registration, and it then links them up with current and former friend., and colleagues with amazing ease. Each Facebook ,profile" becomes both a repository of each user's information and photos, and a social warren where friends gossip, exchange messages and "poke" one another.

B Facebook is generating so much excitement this summer that bloggers are likening Mi Zuckerberg to Steve Jobs, the charismatic boss of Apple, and calling his company "the nex Google" on the assumption that a stock market listing must be imminent. It may be. Mr Zuck. erberg has rejected big offers from new- and old-media giants such as Yahoo! and Viacom One of his three sisters, who also works for Facebook, has posted a silly video online that makes fun of Yahoo!'s takeover bid and sings about "going for IPO". And Facebook has advertised for a "stock administration manager" with expertise in share regulations. Yet Mr Zuckerberg insists that he is "a little bit surprised about how focused everybody is on the 'exit'." The truth is that he is sick of talking about it. The venture capitalists backing Facebook may want to cash out, but Mr Zuckerberg is only 23 and doesn't need the money. He also happens to believe—rather as Google's young founders do—that he can, and should, change the world. A flotation would be a big distraction.

C Metaphorically, Mr Zuckerberg views himself as similar to the pioneering Renaissance map-makers who amassed and combined snippets of information and then charted new lands and seas so that other people could use their maps to find, say, new trade routes. In Mr Zucker-berg's case, the map charts human relationships. Whereas many of the other social networks on the web primarily help people to make new contacts online—whether for hanky panky, marriage or business—Mr Zuckerberg is exclusively interested in "mapping out" the "real and pre-existing connections" among people, he says.

D The fancy mathematical name he has for this map is a "social graph", a model of nodes and links in which nodes are people and connections are friendships. Once this social graph, or map, is in place, it becomes a potent mechanism for spreading information. For instance, he says, "we automatically know who should have a new photo album," because as soon as one person uploads it to the site, all her friends see it, and the friends of friends might notice too. Other social networks can also do this, of course, but Facebook is distinctive in several ways. First, it is currently considered classier than, say, MySpace. One academic researcher argues that Facebook is for "good kids", whereas MySpace is for blue-collar kids, "art fags", "goths" and "gangstas". Facebook's roots are indeed preppie. Mr Zuckerberg took Latin, Greek and fencing at Phillips Exeter Academy and started Facebook at Harvard, after all. From there, it spread to other elite universities, and it only opened up to the general population last September.

E Mr Zuckerberg, however, thinks that the bigger difference is that Facebook is now becoming a "platform". By this he means that it is evolving into a technology on top of which others can build new software tools and businesses. In May, Mr Zuckerberg op

When assessing different attitudes toward disclosure, we should take __ into consideration.

&8226;Read this text taken from an article about the importance to companies of not losing their employees' knowledge.

&8226;Choose the best sentence from the opposite page to fill each of the gaps.

&8226;For each gap (9-14), mark one letter (A-H) on your Answer Sheet.

&8226;Do not use any letter more than once.

Protecting the corporate memory

Many companies risk losing expertise through job cuts. But by analysing how staff interact, they may be able to minimise the damage.

Many staff have knowledge which is essential to their company. So what can businesses do to avoid losing that expertise when staff leave, and to dissuade employees from keeping their knowledge to themselves in the face of possible job cuts？

First, they need to recognise the problem. A downturn in the economy exposes many companies' lack of commitment to understanding and using their people's knowledge. When companies feel they're in a crisis, it is one of the things that goes by the board. Unless, that is, they've made it a routine or suffered because of losing knowledge in the past.

Next, any attempt to stop knowledge walking out of the door must be handled sensitively. (9) Employees would be extremely cynical and see it as an attempt to extract their unique knowledge, which they believe gives them job security.

Strong incentives are needed to coax people into divulging their expertise when being dismissed. (10) At first sight, this might seem excessive, but the disadvantages should be weighed against the benefits.

Of course, not all knowledge can be captured by the organisation and turned into a process. (11) To find out who these 'knowledge hotspots' are, companies need to question their staff and analyse their social networks. Companies shouldn't ask employees what they know, but who they would ask if they wanted to know about different subjects. (12) And, more importantly, the process reveals the others who always know somebody who knows.

The latter can be high on the list for redundancy because managers are unsure what they do, or because they appear to be weak performers. (13) People like this are often not ambitious but they can hold a company together. The most valuable knowledge is often not possessed by the people who seem to be star performers.

If those at the centre of knowledge networks come to be seen as the most valuable people, those who keep their knowledge to themselves will look vulnerable when downsizing is deemed necessary. (14) In such companies, the incentive to share knowledge should be even greater when jobs are under threat.

For some companies, it may be too late to salvage important knowledge. Building a culture where knowledge is understood, valued and shared can take a long time. Now may be the time to prepare for the next downturn.

A. Organisations that reward people for sharing knowledge will know who falls into each of these two opposing categories.

B. This approach enables them to identify those with a limited number of network relationships.

C. Launching a knowledge-sharing initiative at a time when people are expecting redundancies would not be a good idea.

D. This provides evidence of the risk that such a policy will meet resistance. Because of the difficulty of achieving this, it is far better not to lose the valuable sources of knowledge at all. But a 'knowledge mapping' exercise might reveal that they play a critical role as mentors to the rest of the team.

G. The price may be an increase in their redundancy package, provision of career counselling, or an agreement to hire them back as consultants.

H. When companies feel they're in a crisis, it is one of the things that goes by the board.

(9)

Cross-cultural communication begins when people understand how __ relate to each other within our society.

Questions 31-35

Complete the following sentences using NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the text.

America's __ has more than tripled since 1980.