The End of Email Reading Answers with Explanation

IELTS Reading Passage: The End of Email

More than 107 trillion emails are sent every year, yet its hold on our daily communication is beginning to slip.

[A] For several years now, internet researchers have noticed that younger users are turning away from email in favour of other digital ways of keeping in touch. ComScore, a leading US internet research firm, recently reported a 59% decline in the use of web-based email among 12 to 17 year olds, an 18% decline among 25 to 35 year olds, and an 8% fall among 35 to 44 year olds. Email even appears to be losing its grip inside the workplace.

[B] Atos Origin, Europe's largest IT company, plans to do away with internal email altogether. Staff will still use it to correspond with clients and outside businesses, but among themselves they will rely on newer tools such as instant messaging, along with the much older method of simply talking face to face. The company's chairman made headlines worldwide after mentioning he hadn't sent an email in over three years. A number of other companies have also been quietly stepping back from email as their main internal communication tool; Intel, for instance, has been trying out 'no-email Fridays', encouraging engineers to sort out problems over the phone or in person instead.

[C] This shift partly reflects what employees themselves want, since many of them are under 30, but it is also being driven by a volume of email that has simply become unmanageable. Workers who typically receive around 200 emails a day end up spending five to twenty hours a week just clearing their inbox. This kind of distraction has been a familiar part of office life for well over a decade. More than 107 trillion emails are now sent every year, half of which are spam, while the rest is a mix of round robins, personal notes, and hastily written memos that pile up in archives without doing much for productivity. Research shows it takes 64 seconds to regain concentration after reading an email, and once you factor in that US office workers have been observed checking email and switching windows roughly 37 times an hour, the scale of the distraction becomes clear.

[D] Employees are increasingly expected to lean on collaboration tools and social media platforms rather than email to communicate with co-workers, which in practice means newer types of electronic messaging. Instant messaging is one such tool. Devised in the 1990s by people playing games online, IM is simpler and far more responsive than email. Users can see when colleagues are online and exchange short, continuous strings of dialogue on screen, much closer to a phone call than to email. These messages tend to get deleted as they go, so inboxes and archives never really clog up. Being less formal than email, IM also turns out to be a far more efficient way of doing things like arranging a meeting, and this kind of 'chat' facility is frequently built directly into larger social networks such as Facebook and Twitter.

[E] The immediacy of these real-time messaging systems lets people stay connected and broadcast details to each other, their location, activities, plans, and daily schedule, without needing to send a constant stream of emails. 'Status updates', short messages that all of a user's contacts can see, let people share information that might not really be worth a full email but is still genuinely useful. Tools like these grew out of a level of everyday internet engagement that simply didn't exist back when email first took over as the dominant form of communication in the early 1990s.

[F] Until roughly a decade ago, most neuroscientists believed the brain stopped developing once childhood ended. But the constant stream of distraction and information we now expose ourselves to, through email, web browsing, television, and multitasking, is thought to be reshaping the way we think, effectively rewiring our brains. Scientists have drawn a parallel between electronic communication and the kind of mild addiction linked to food stimulants that release small bursts of dopamine in the brain: a message arriving gives us a small buzz of excitement that fades, leaving us feeling flat and a little bored until the next one lands. Whether this makes us less productive is still an open question, though research suggests people actually work better in short bursts of focused effort broken up by pauses, even pointless ones spent on email, than they do across long, unbroken stretches of work.

[G] An estimated three billion email accounts still exist worldwide, a figure that dwarfs any other single form of communication. Email also holds on to a few genuinely distinctive strengths. Unlike the wide range of social networks and IM services online, each requiring its own account and often its own software, email systems remain fundamentally compatible with one another regardless of which program you use. Even its irritations come with an upside: email archives have proved to be a genuinely valuable resource, and because it is an asynchronous medium, meaning recipients decide for themselves when to open a message, it lets us hold on to a bit more control over our own time. This isn't the end of email; it will remain a cornerstone of business communication for a good while yet. It is simply the end of its monopoly.

Questions for Reading Passage: The End of Email

Questions 1 - 6

The reading passage has seven paragraphs, labelled A-G.

Which paragraph contains the following information?

Write the correct letter, A-G, in boxes 1-6 on your answer sheet.

NB You may use any letter more than once.

1. Reasons behind the appeal of social networking tools over email

2. A description of alternatives to email as a form of workplace communication

3. A reference to why one company plans to cut down its internal email traffic

4. A brief conclusion on the effects technology has on our attention span

5. Evidence pointing to a decline in the popularity of email

6. A reference to some positive features that email still offers

Questions 7 - 10

Write your answers in boxes 7-10 on your answer sheet.

List FOUR examples of information that people share through Instant Messaging.

7. ……………….

8. ……………….

9. ……………….

10. ……………….

Questions 11 - 13

Complete the sentences below with words taken from the reading passage.

Use NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS for each answer.

Write your answers in boxes 11-13 on your answer sheet.

11. Young people are drawn to social networking tools that give them the level of …………… they are looking for.

12. One advantage of social networking is that it lets users stay in control of the …………… they come across.

13. Email works as an ……………………, which is why a sender can never be fully sure their message has actually been read.