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in company Intermediate
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11b Spam Simon Clarke
1 Complete the text below with the following words. Then answer the questions.
headache work adopt receive carried unlikely guess spend wage
harmless colleagues hoax dealing set
a What are the different types of spam?
b Why does it cost companies money?
c How much spam do you receive? What do you do about it? Is it a big problem for your company?
2 You work in the marketing department of a fast-food chain. You and your partner are working on
a project to promote a new line of pizzas which people can order by phone or over the Internet.
You are considering various methods of promotion. Discuss the advantages and disadvantages of
these ideas:
• cold calling to selected telephone numbers
• flyers delivered by hand to people’s homes
• direct mailing by post
• spamming to e-mail addresses on a database you have obtained
For each method consider the efficiency, cost and effect on your company’s image. As you discuss your
ideas, try to use the following phrases:
I (really don’t) think that we should … In my opinion … I’m not so sure about …
I (don’t) agree with your point … That’s an interesting idea, … I suppose we should …
The advantage of … The problem with … You have to remember that …
Looking back over the e-mails I have received in the
last couple of weeks, I can see there is at least one
message a day from someone I don’t know, offering
some service or product I am (1) _________________
to want. In some cases I can (2) _________________
where they got my e-mail address from, but in
others I have no idea. For me, this unsolicited junk email
is not a problem, I can just erase it from my
computer. However, in a recent survey, (3)
_________________ out for the company Novell Inc. in
the UK, 75% of those who were questioned claimed
to receive as many as five junk e-mails a day, and
15% calculated that they (4) _________________ at
least an hour a day dealing with unsolicited spam.
Apart from spam which tries to sell products
or services, there is also the problem of
(5) _________________ virus warnings, chain letters
(where terrible things will happen to you if you
don’t pass on the message to fifteen other people)
and jokes from friends and (6) _________________.
Although sometimes the content involved can be
offensive and contain racist or sexist language, most
of it is relatively (7) _________________. On the other
hand, in terms of wasting employees’ time, it’s a real
(8) _________________ for many businesses.
There are various strategies you can
(9) _________________ with spam. The easiest remedy
is just to delete any messages which come from an
unknown sender or look suspicious. To deal with
nuisance mail which comes from a regular source,
one solution is to (10) _________________ up your email
program to ignore mail from that particular
address. More legitimate spammers often give you
the option to ‘unsubscribe’ so you don’t (11)
_________________ any more of their messages,
although in my experience this often doesn’t seem
to make any difference. Even so, while you are
(12) _________________ with spam you are not doing
the work you were hired to do. If the data analysed
in the survey is correct, 1.4% of the national
(13) _________________ force is unproductive for this
reason at any time during a working day. With a
national UK (14) _________________ bill of £368bn a
year, this means that for UK businesses spam
represents an annual cost of around £5bn.