Reading Comprehension -Language V – December 2020

Life in Offices

“…if you’ve got to cry, then cry in the loo.” We all know how much of our lives we spend
not living them because we’re in bed asleep. But what about the still larger chunk that
disappears into offices and (alleged) work? Our offices gobble up our best hours and real
energy, drained of which we return (at six, seven, eight at night) to the homes and
relationships which are supposed to be the most important things in our lives. It’s an
unusual man whose life isn’t dominated more by this office than his marriage.
Most people don’t seem to see that office life is a contradiction in terms. Office
walls act as filters or transformers, dulling and dehumanizing every aspect of human
existence.
(10) Most offices don’t let in the daylight, but substitute the merciless radiance of
strip-lighting to promote headaches and expose blemishes with the intensity of
searchlights. Office furniture must not be too comfortable, office colors not too
stimulating.
People get transformed by offices, too, leaving their humanity and humor at the
door to put on the masks and stereotypes of the office charade. Attractive men turn into
office monsters or bureaucratic zombies, saucy girls veil themselves in something neat
and serviceable and start to stumble and stammer, plain ones blossom in the haven of
their own filing systems and become power-houses of knowledge and control.
Displaced animals struggle to recreate their lost jungles. Human ones import
(20)exotic plants which creep about steely office habitats in a hopeless search for the
sun.
The jungle instincts don’t end there, of course. People who perform passionless
routines among hostile machines, squashed flat by office pyramids and pecking orders,
can still evince odd tremors of their primordial nature.
We have all known office predators, stalking their prey through wars of nerves,
nips and sallies, or swift massacre. A couple of those with a bit of power can create a
black hole in an office, a giant maw of malice which destroys anything that comes near
it.
“Communication” is the polite word for what goes on in offices. It can be hard
(30)work, as people in dreary surroundings with nothing interesting to do often don’t
feel like talking to each other, and clog up the internal mail with memos. (One
management solution to this is to squash people into slum-like proximity so they hear
what each other’s up to without having to converse.)

Janet Watts The Observer (abridged)

1) What impression does the author want to create of offices by using the words
“chunk” and “gobble”? (lines 2 and 3)
2) How does the word “drained” add to the impression created? (line 4)
3) What does the writer mean when he says that “office life is a contradiction in
terms”? (line 7)
4) Illustrate from the references in the passage the dehumanizing and
transforming power of office work.
5) Explain the comparison made between “displaced animals” and office
employees. (line 19)
6) What do you understand by “squashed flat by office pyramids and pecking
orders”? (line 23)
7) How do certain people show their “primordial nature”? (line 24)
8) Pick out from the last two paragraphs the words or phrases which are
connected with the animal world. Justify their use.
9) Why is the word “communication” in inverted commas? (line 29)