Page 167 - DENG401_Advance Communication Skills

Advanced Communication Skills

Notes
Some weeks ago I receive a brochure from a Japanese travel agency inviting me to “enjoy
sport amid fantastic beauty.” The eye-catching headline advertised “golf, tennis, archery,
bicycling, sailing-the sport of your choice” in an “ideal vacation spot,” the heart of Ise-
Shima National Park, famous for its intricate shoreline and its production of cultured
pearls.
Having once worked as a tour guide, I knew how exhausting an all-day trip from Tokyo
to the Shima Peninsula can be; but the pamphlet intrigued me.
The schedule was strenuous. The bus was to leave Tokyo at 9 a.m. on Saturday, arriving at
the vacation hotel at 5 p.m. after a journey of more than 200 miles. The next morning, there
would be time for the sports the pamphlet touted. Then, at 2:30 p.m., the bus would leave
for Tokyo, arriving at 10:30 p.m. Sunday night.
It looked to me as if the time available for enjoying the beauties of nature described in the
brochure—“majestic green ridges linking mountain to mountain, “Clear cobalt-blue skies,”
“the azure sea,” and “picturesque small bays dotted with pearl rafts”—was likely to be
rather short. My pocket calculator confirmed that nearly 43 per cent of the excursion
period would be spent riding in the bus. Sleeping, eating, bathing, dressing, and so on,
which one can (and will) do at home anyway, would take up another 40 per cent. That
would leave 6½ hours, or a mere 17 per cent, for the sports which were supposed to be the
object of the trip. The cost quoted was $125, which would work out to approximately
$19.25 per hour of sport. If it was tennis I had in mind, I would clearly do a lot better to take
a half-hour drive out to some public tennis club in a Tokyo suburb pay a fee of $12, and
enjoy myself there for the day.
What the travel agency was selling, of course, was a package consisting of a number of
different elements, including “atmosphere,” integrated into a whole. Customers normally
pay their $125 for the package without trying to identify precisely how much they are
paying for each element and whether it is all ‘really worth the cost. To do this, one has to
probe into what is actually being offered, disentangling the various components of the
package and understanding how each element contributes to the whole.
(From the book ‘The mind of the strategist
(the art of Japanese business) by Kenichi Ohmae, TMH’)
Questions

1. What was the writer’s profession earlier? What was the brochure all about?
2. What calculations the writer did about the tour?

8.5 How to do Reading Comprehension

Let us take an example to understand how to do an RC. Taken from Oliver Twist, 1838, by Charles
Dickens
The evening arrived: the boys took their places; the master in his cook’s uniform stationed
himself at the copper; his pauper assistants ranged themselves behind him; the gruel was served
out, and a long grace was said over the short commons. The gruel disappeared; the boys whispered
each other and winked at Oliver, while his next neighbours nudged him. Child as he was, he was
desperate with hunger and reckless with misery. He rose from the table, and advancing, basin
and spoon in hand, to the master, said, some what alarmed at his own temerity—

“Please, sir, I want some more.”

160 LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY