High-quality customer service is preached (宣扬) by many, but actually keeping customers happy is easier said than done.
Shoppers seldom complain to the manager or owner of a retail store, but instead will alert their friends, relatives, co-workers, strangers—and anyone who will listen.
Store managers are often the last to hear complaints, and often find out only when their regular customers decide to frequent their competitors, according to a study jointly conducted by Verde Group and Wharton School.
“Storytelling hurts retailers and entertains consumers,” said Paula Courtney, President of the Verde Group. “The store loses the customer, but the shopper must also find a replacement.”
On average, every unhappy customer will complain to at least four others, and will no longer visit the specific store. For every dissatisfied customer, a store will lose up to three more due to negative review. The resulting “snowball effect” can be disastrous to retailers.
According to the research, shoppers who purchased clothing encountered the most problems. Ranked second and third were grocery and electronics customers.
The most common complaints include filled parking lots, cluttered (塞满了的) shelves, overloaded racks, out-of-stock items, long check-out lines, and rude salespeople.
During peak shopping hours, some retailers solved parking problems by getting moonlighting (业余兼职的) local police to work as parking attendants. Some hired flag wavers to direct customers to empty parking spaces. This guidance eliminated the need for customers to circle the parking lot endlessly, and avoided confrontation between those eyeing the same parking space.
Retailers can relieve the headaches by redesigning store layouts, pre-stocking sales items, hiring speedy and experienced cashiers, and having sales representatives on hand to answer questions.
Most importantly, salespeople should be diplomatic and polite with angry customers.
“Retailers who’re responsive and friendly are more likely to smooth over issues than those who aren’t so friendly,” said Professor Stephen Hoch. “Maybe something as simple as a greeter at the store entrance would help.”
Customers can also improve future shopping experiences by filing complaints to the retailer, instead of complaining to the rest of the world. Retailers are hard-pressed to improve when they have no idea what is wrong.
1.Why are store managers often the last to hear complaints?
A. Most customers won’t bother to complain even if they have had unhappy experiences.
B. Customers would rather relate their unhappy experiences to people around them.
C. Few customers believe the service will be improved. .
D. Customers have no easy access to store managers.
2. What does Paula Courtney imply by saying “…the shopper must also find a replacement” (Line 2, Para. 4)
A. New customers are bound to replace old ones.
B. It is not likely that the shopper can find the same products in other stores.
C. Most stores provide the same kind of service.
D. Not complaining to manager causes the shopper some trouble too.
3.What contributes most to smoothing over issues with customers?
A. Manners of the salespeople.
B. Hiring of efficient employees.
C. Huge supply of goods for sale.
D. Design of store layout.
4.To achieve better shopping experiences, customers are advised to ________.
A. exert pressure on stores to improve their service
B. settle their disputes with stores in a diplomatic way
C. voice their dissatisfaction to store managers directly
D. shop around and make comparisons between stores
About five years ago, an American electrical engineer named Scott Brusaw and his wife Julie came up with the idea of putting solar panels (控制板) on the ground rather than the roof. Then they began to develop the Solar Roadway. The Solar Roadway is an intelligent road that provides clean renewable energy using power from the sun while providing safer driving conditions, along with power and data delivery. They predict that the Solar Roadway will pay for itself through the generation of electricity along with other forms of income and that the same money that is being used to build and resurface current roads can be used to build the Solar Roadways.
Each Solar Road Panel measures roughly 4 meters by 4 meters and contains a microprocessor (微处理器) that monitors and controls the panel, while communicating with neighboring panels and the vehicles traveling overhead. The inventors suggest that this provides a communications device every 4 meters on every road which could be used for example to warn drivers of cars which are moving across a centre line and various other speed control problems. The top of the Solar Road panels is made of super-strong glass that would offer vehicles the tractions (抓地力) they need.
According to the inventors, the Solar Roadway creates and carries clean renewable electricity and therefore electric vehicles can be recharged at any conveniently located rest stop, or at any business that has paved Solar Road Panels in their parking lots.
The inventors say their Solar Roadway has many functions and advantages from main roads to driveways, parking lots, bike paths, sidewalks and runways. The Federal Highway Administration has given Brusaw ＄100,000 to develop the invention and Brusaw hopes to build a smart-road parking lot in the coming spring .
1.In the inventors’ opinion, the Solar Roadway ___________________________ .
A. is too expensive to build at present
B. costs no more money than current roads
C. can provide as many data as present computers
D. will bring them a large sum of money
2.The underlined word “they” in Paragraph 2 refers to .
A. the panels B. the inventors
C. the researchers D. the vehicles
3.It can be inferred from the text that ____________________________.
A. the Solar Roadway has already been put into use
B. ＄100,000 is only enough to build a smart-road parking lot
C. the Solar Roadway is not available for gas-powered cars
D. future electric vehicles can be charged anytime and anywhere
4.What can be the best title for the text?
A. Solar-powered smart road of the future
B. The great changes on the roadway
C. The influence the Solar Roadway has on people
D. The Solar Road—a much faster road
It’s 4 am, and Danilo C. Dequina is already awake. Holding a flashlight and a bucket, he is walking in the pre-dawn darkness along the shore of Old Poblacion Beach in the town of Maitum, Sarangani, in the far south of the Philippines.
A few minutes later, he spots a patch of sand that appears to have been disturbed by a turtle. Dequina studies the area carefully, figuring out where the eggs have been buried, and then starts digging slowly. After clearing away several centimeters of sand, he uncovers a large group of eggs, roughly the size of ping-pong balls. He picks them up and puts them in the bucket.
Dequina carries the eggs to his hatchery (孵卵所), some 50 meters away from the seashore. The hatchery is really just a sandy patch of land under the coconut trees enclosed by a black fence. It is here that he buries the turtle eggs he has collected. Today, Dequina scoops a hole, puts the eggs in it, and covers them with sand. After 45 to 70 days, the eggs will hatch. Dequina will then carry the hatchlings to the shore, and release them into the sea. He admits to feeling sorrow as he sets the hatchlings free -- most are hunted down by natural predators, and just one percent survive to adulthood.
According to the Philippine Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR), eight species of sea turtles face extinction, including four that come to the shores of Sarangani to lay their eggs -- the Hawksbill, Olive Ridley, Loggerhead and Green Turtles.
After learning about their plight (困境), Dequina attended a DENR training session on turtle conservation and decided to take action. He helped the local government to set up the Pawikan Nesting Sanctuary next to his house in 2003.
The hatchery drew the attention of the locals. “They started to change their attitudes towards sea turtles,” 52-year-old Dequina says. “If they see turtle eggs, they will either bring them to me or inform me of the nesting places.” Over the past ten years, more than 3,000 hatchlings have been released to the ocean.
1.Dequina walks along the shore to ________.
A. release small turtles
B. bury turtle eggs deeper
C. look for newly laid turtle eggs
D. clear away trash from the seaside
2. When Dequina finds turtle eggs along the shore, he will ________.
A. put them into the sea instantly
B. just bury them
C. pick them up and put them in the bucket
D. take them and go to his house
3.What is the attitude of local people toward Dequina’s efforts?
A. Doubtful. B. Disappointed.
C. Opposed. D. Supportive.
4.What do we learn from the passage?
A. Dequina feels sad when he releases hatchlings.
B. Dequina has worked for the hatchery for six years.
C. The hatchery is far from Dequina’s house.
D. The hatchery mainly protects injured turtles.
In the middle of the Atlantic Ocean and preparing for the worst, Australian adventurer Peter Seiter wrote a farewell note to his family, put it in a bottle and threw it overboard. With a sense of bad feeling he wrote: “The ocean has a personality of its own. The place can be such a peaceful environment to be in, yet it can be frightfully violent. I’ve experienced both.” Fearing he wouldn’t make it home, he placed the note -- dated June 11, 1998 -- in a wine bottle and covered the bottle.
“I included my geographical coordinates, so if anything happened to me, they’d know my last place when I threw the bottle into the ocean,” says Peter, who was then sailing from the Azores in Portugal to New York and knew the Atlantic could be dangerous. He also included some money with his message, asking whoever found it to use the money to post the letter to his family.
Seventeen days later he reached his destination, having survived the dangerous seas, but he assumed his message in the bottle had not -- until it was found on shore, 11 years later!
Recently, American woman Katherine Ginn and her friend came across the bottle on a deserted beach in the Bahamas. “Alongside it they’d found a life jacket and, assuming the worst, opened the bottle and spent 24 hours drying it out so they could read my story and write to my family as I requested,” says Peter, 44. “I couldn’t believe it -- that after all these years my bottle had turned up with its contents, still undamaged.”
Overjoyed, he wrote to the pair, saying he was alive and living in Australia with his family.
Katherine posted him his letter, money and some broken glass of his bottle placed in a tiny box as a special souvenir. These special items now share pride of place among photos of Peter’s Atlantic voyage. “I can’t express what this old letter means to me,” Peter says. “It gives me a sense of hope and belief. It’s something special to share with my children as they grow up.”
1. Why did Peter have the idea of a message bottle?
A. He missed his family very much then.
B. He hoped to share his experience with his family.
C. He regretted taking a risk on the ocean.
D. He thought he might lose his life on the voyage.
2.As for the survival of the message bottle, Peter ________.
A. felt very certain about it
B. thought it had little chance of reaching land
C. took a long time to search for it
D. wrote a letter to Katherine
3.What can be inferred about the message bottle according to Paragraph 3 and 4?
A. Katherine found it by chance on a crowded beach.
B. It was 11 years before they came across it at sea.
C. Perhaps there was water in it when Katherine found it.
D. Peter couldn’t believe more that it was not damaged.
4.From the passage, we can learn that ________.
A. this was Peter’s first voyage in the Atlantic
B. Peter spent eleven days in the Atlantic
C. without the life jacket, the bottle wouldn’t have survived
D. Katherine was a caring and careful person
完形填空
阅读下面短文，从短文后所给各题的四个选项（A、B、C和D）中，选出可以填入空白处的最佳选项，并在答题卡上将该项涂黑。
Times were tough in our household. My husband was out of work and there was no sign of anything for him. In addition to going to nursing school full-time, I was working three part-time jobs to put food on the table for our family of five.
After a rather meal one night, I answered the ringing phone. With no , a voice asked,“Do you need food? Come to my place and I can help you.” Directions followed and he hung up the phone. No in-depth conversation or queries as to our situation. It was up to us to decide whether we a voice on the telephone.
I was desperate. With food in the cabinet and no prospect of a job for my husband, I had to take a , swallow my pride, and accept the strange offer. Was there a ? When I uneasily got to a ranch home as ,I found there was no car in the garage. , lined up in orderly rows were tables filled with varieties of food. A craggy（轮廓分明有皱纹的）gentleman me, not much different than our phone conversation! “Look around. If you see what you want, yourself.”He handed me paper bags and turned to another new arrival, passing along the same .This couldn’t be real!
I guiltily filled the paper sacks with what needed and gratefully thanked the elderly man. “Be here next week. You’ll of the food by then” was his reply.
Then I learned the thing. Widowed and retired, he wanted to do something in his golden years to fill his time. Daily, he drove his pickup truck and begged for items and canned goods from local grocery stores and folks like us who had fallen on hard times.
I never knew what our weekly menus would be I had “shopped” in the garage, but I knew, with our bellies full, we could focus on paying necessary bills.
1.A. worrying B. boring C. confusing D. promising
2.A. just B. even C. ever D. also
3.A. delicious B. necessary C. simple D. ordinary
4.A. information B. communication C. introduction D. instruction
5.A. physical B. financial C. educational D. social
6.A. trusted B. accepted C. recognized D. satisfied
7.A. certainly B. originally C. actually D. barely
8.A. chance B. step C. decision D. measure
9.A. future B. possibility C. trap D. kindness
10.A. appointed B. directed C. guided D. requested
11.A. Therefore B. Besides C. Instead D. However
12.A. discovered B. greeted C. reminded D. examined
13.A. help B. enjoy C. behave D. seat
14.A. welcome B. supply C. assistance D. message
15.A. mostly B. eventually C. absolutely D. accidentally
16.A. leave out B. drop out C. run out D. get out
17.A. interesting B. worthwhile C. mysterious D. astonishing
18.A. usable B. additional C. acceptable D. valuable
19.A. recalled B. sought C. identified D. inspected
20.A. although B. since C. before D. Until
Most of the educators are ________ providing more freedom to the teenagers, believing that it may make them more creative and independent.
A. in charge of B. in search of
C. in favor of D. in place of
