Eye contact is a nonverbal technique that helps the speaker “sell” his or her ideas to an audience. Besides its persuasive powers, eye contact helps hold listener interest.A successful speaker must maintain eye contact with an audience. To have good rapport (关系) with listeners, a speaker should maintain direct eye contact for at least 75 percent of the time. Some speakers focus exclusively on their notes. Others gaze over the heads of their listeners. Both are likely to lose audience interest and esteem. People who maintain eye contact while speaking, whether from a podium (演讲台) or from across the table, are “regarded not only as exceptionally well-disposed by their target but also as more believable and earnest.”To show the potency of eye contact in daily life, we have only to consider how passers-by behave when their glances happen to meet on the street. At one extreme are those people who feel obliged to smile when they make eye contact. At the other extreme are those who feel awkward and immediately look away. To make eye contact, it seems, is to make a certain link with someone.Eye contact with an audience also lets a speaker know and monitor the listeners. It is, in fact, essential for analyzing an audience during a speech. Visual cues (暗示) from audience members can indicate that a speech is dragging, that the speaker is dwelling on a particular point for too long, or that a particular point requires further explanation. As we have pointed out, visual feedback from listeners should play an important role in shaping a speech as it is delivered.1. This passage is mainly concerned with ______.2. According to the passage, a good speaker must ______.3. The word “target” in the last sentence of the second paragraph can best be replaced by ______.4. In daily life, when the glances of two passers-by happen to meet, these two persons will inevitably ______.5. Eye contact with an audience, according to the author, has all the following benefits for the speaker EXCEPT that it doesn’t ______.
