Диалоги на английском языке с переводом (уровень Intermediate). № 101. Тема: Зачет по экзамену.

It's official - wearing casual clothes to work makes people rude, lazy and flirtatious. Dress-down Friday has not worked out. A host of new surveys from the States shows employers increasingly concerned that staff who turn up 'smart casual' are up to 50 per cent more likely to act rude and silly. Lateness, sluggishness or just not being there at all have all become hallmarks of the last day of the working week, according to a study for American Corporate Trends Magazine. So much so, that many bosses are now returning Friday to its previous strict and sober incarnation.

Friday first went casual in Britain in the late 1980s, but the practice didn't really catch on until the mid-Nineties. By then, the economy was booming and new sources of income and prestige - IT, biotechnology, dotcom - were emerging. The people who worked for these firms may have been rich, but bowler hats and umbrellas represented an older - now ailing - economy, one that had been founded in the mid-nineteenth century on a formal distinction between work and home. The New Economy, by contrast, liked to emphasise the continuity and even overlap between professional and domestic spaces. People brought scented candles to the office before returning home to a converted industrial site. In Frankfurt, workers could pop into 'nap rooms' after lunch, while in London the smartest new nightclub was called, quite simply, 'Home'. Work and play had become infinitely interchangeable.

Dressing down has proved to be more of a worry than getting dressed up in a uniform ever was. Even in those companies that are casual every day, the understanding is that you wear a suit whenever appropriate - to meet a client, make an important presentation. 'As a result I spend more time matching up my clothes to my schedule than I ever did before,' says Sarah Smart, who works for a Swiss bank.

Where dress-down Friday got it wrong was that employers had the hope that allowing people to wear buff-coloured trousers to the office would signal a loosening up of mental boundaries which, in turn, would release a stream of 'beyond the box' thinking. But clothing acts like a sharp trigger for sense memory. Wear casual clothes to work, and your brain thinks it's on holiday. It makes you want to gossip with your friends, drink coffee, and send loads of joke emails.

According to the text:

(1) People are naturally lazy and sluggish on the last day of the working week. T / F /
(2) Dress-down Fridays were popular in Britain in the late 1980s. T / F /
(3) In The New Economy there was no clear divide between work and home. T / F /
(4) Sarah Smart adapts the clothes she wears for specific occasions. T / F /
(5) It is still not clear whether clothing affects performance in the workplace. T / F /