Darmowe konto pozwoli wrócić do niego później.

I blink out of my daze and lean forward. This has been happening to me a lot lately. When you have a job where you're only required to come into the office once a week, it's not ideal to zone out like a kid in algebra for fifty percent of that time, even less so to do it in front of your both terrifying and inspiring boss.

I study the notepad in front of me. I used to come to the Friday meetings with dozens of excitedly scribbled pitches. I would work in a kind of panic. I'd spend three days before pitch meetings in something of a sweaty Google trance, scrolling through image after image of places I'd never been to, feeling something like hunger growling in my gut. Today, however, I spent ten minutes scrawling the names of countries. Countries, not even cities.

Swapna is looking at me, waiting for me to pitch my next big summer feature, and I'm staring at the word Brazil. Brazil is the fifth-largest country in the world. You cannot write a short, snappy piece about vacationing in Brazil. You have to at least choose a specific region. I flip the page in my notebook, pretending to study the next one. It's blank. When my co-worker Garrett leans toward me as if to read over my shoulder, I snap it closed. "St. Petersburg," I say. Swapna arches an eyebrow. "We did St. Petersburg in our summer issue three years ago, remember?"

"Amsterdam?" Garrett throws out next to me.

"Amsterdam's a spring city," Swapna says, vaguely annoyed. "Besides, Amsterdam is so… trendy."

It is Swapna's closely held belief that to be on trend is to be already late to that trend. If she senses the zeitgeist warming to the idea of Toruń, Poland, then Toruń's banned for the next ten years. There's a literal list pinned to a wall in the office, entitled "Places R+R Will Not Cover". Each entry is in her handwriting and dated, and there's something of an underground betting pool on when a city will be freed from the List.

There's never so much quiet excitement in the office as those mornings when Swapna marches in and strides up to the List, ready to cross off one of these banned cities. Everyone watches with bated breath, wondering which city she's rescuing from Rest + Relaxation obscurity, and once she's safely in her office, whoever's closest to the List will run up to it, read the scratched out entry, and turn to whisper the name of the city to everyone in editorial. There's usually silent celebration.

When Paris was dropped from the List last fall, Garrett pulled a red beret out of a drawer in his desk, where he'd apparently been hiding it for just such an occasion. He wore it all day, pulling it off his head every time we heard the click and whine of Swapna's door. He thought he'd gotten away with it too, until she paused beside his desk on her way out for the night and said, "Au revoir, Garrett." His face had gone as bright as the beret, and though I didn't think Swapna had meant it to be anything but funny, he's never quite recovered his confidence since then.

Text 2

A CHANGE FOR THE BETTER?

Workplaces have become fairer thanks to a rising ethos of meritocracy: the idea that the best person for the job is the right person for the job. Formal assessment processes, for example, help ensure that job interviews are granted on merit, rather than being allocated on the basis of which CVs remind the hiring manager of a younger version of themselves. One consequence of meritocracy is the replacement of seniority-based promotion – where you get a better position "when it's your time" – with one based on ability, a development that means younger people with the appropriate skills can leap over older colleagues and end up managing them. Unfortunately, according to new research published in the Journal of Organizational Behavior, it turns out that this can have nasty repercussions.

Florian Kunze and Jochen Menges surveyed employees at 61 German companies. Nearly 8,000 participants reported an age difference in relation to their managers, and a subset described their experience of various negative emotions over the last six months. A quarter of the managers were younger than those they managed. Crucially, in companies where the size of the age gap between younger managers and older subordinates was statistically significant, employees tended to report more negative emotions, such as anger or fear. Why would this be? We are inclined to measure our life progress by using our peers as a benchmark, so if they pull ahead of us, rubbing our faces in our own inability to keep pace, a flash of envy is usually provoked. And it is even more irritating when those who are our juniors climb the ladder faster.

More broadly, being under the supervision of someone younger than us is a simple incongruence of status. This is an engine for resentment-based negative emotions which can be detrimental to productivity if not well managed. When Kunze and Menges asked the leadership of each company to report on its recent financial results, as well as different measures of efficiency, they found that companies experiencing more negative emotions showed worse performance on all counts. Presumably this is due to declining enthusiasm for collective effort in the face of so much frustration.

Kunze and Menges do not claim that companies should "revert to the old workplace with traditional age structures". However, they do believe the negative repercussions that they've revealed should be addressed. One suggestion is to help older subordinates make sense of their feelings and explore whether they can come to terms with them, rather than simply suppressing them. I believe this would best be done in conjunction with changing the culture around "career timetables" and addressing issues of hierarchy and participation, so that old-timers, whether managers or not, can share their accrued wisdom within the organizations to which they have contributed for so long.

For questions 4.1.–4.4., choose the answer that best matches the text and circle the appropriate letter (A, B, C or D).