We have Star Performers Reading Answers

Nov 30, 2022

We have Star Performers Reading Answers consists of 13 questions that have to be answered by the candidates within 20 minutes. The topic contains question types, namely- choosing the correct paragraph, no more than two words and candidates should understand the concept of the passage and then should choose the option Yes/no/not given. Regarding the correct paragraph choosing, candidates should answer based on a given cue. Choosing the correct paragraph from the reading passage is important factor for the candidates. In more than two words, candidates are required to answer the questions within a word limit of two. IELTS reading passage is important for the candidates for identifying keywords, and recognizing synonyms to answer the question.

Check: Get 10 Free IELTS Sample Papers
Check: Register for IELTS Coaching - Join for Free Trial Class Now

Reading Passage Questions

The difference between companies is people. With capital and technology in plentiful supply, the critical resource for companies in the knowledge era will be human talent. Companies full of achievers will, by definition, outperform organisations of plodders. Ergo, compete ferociously for the best people. Poach and pamper stars; ruthlessly weed out second-raters. This, in essence, has been the recruitment strategy of the ambitious company of the past decade. The ‘talent mindset’ was given definitive form in two reports by the consultancy McKinsey famously entitled The War for Talent. Although the intensity of the warfare subsequently subsided along with the air in the internet bubble, it has been warming up again as the economy tightens: labour shortages, for example, are the reason the government has laid out the welcome mat for immigrants from the new Europe.
Yet while the diagnosis – people are important – is evident to the point of platitude, the apparently logical prescription – hire the best – like so much in management is not only not obvious: it is in fact profoundly wrong. The first suspicions dawned with the crash to earth of the dotcom meteors, which showed that dumb is dumb whatever the IQ of those who perpetrate it. The point was illuminated in brilliant relief by Enron, whose leaders, as a New Yorker article called ‘The Talent Myth’ entertainingly related, were so convinced of their own cleverness that they never twigged that collective intelligence is not the sum of a lot of individual intelligence. In fact, in a profound sense, the two are opposites. Enron believed in stars, noted author Malcolm Gladwell, because they didn’t believe in systems. But companies don’t just create: ‘they execute and compete and coordinate the efforts of many people, and the organisations that are most successful at that task are the ones where the system is the star’. The truth is that you can’t win the talent wars by hiring stars – only lose it. New light on why this should be so is thrown by an analysis of star behaviour in this months’ Harvard Business Review. In a study of the careers of 1,000 star-stock analysts in the 1990s, the researchers found that when a company recruited a star performer, three things happened.
First, stardom doesn’t easily transfer from one organisation to another. In many cases, performance dropped sharply when high performers switched employers and in some instances never recovered. More of success than commonly supposed is due to the working environment – systems, processes, leadership, accumulated embedded learning that are absent in and can’t be transported to the new firm. Moreover, precisely because of their past stellar performance, stars were unwilling to learn new tricks and antagonised those (on whom they now unwittingly depended) who could teach them. So they moved, upping their salary as they did – 36 per cent moved on within three years, fast even for Wall Street. Second, group performance suffered as a result of tensions and resentment by rivals within the team. One respondent likened hiring a star to an organ transplant. The new organ can damage others by hogging the blood supply, other organs can start aching or threaten to stop working or the body can reject the transplants altogether, he said. ‘You should think about it very carefully before you do a transplant to a healthy body.’ Third, investors punished the offender by selling its stock. This is ironic since the motive for importing stars was often a suffering share price in the first place. Shareholders evidently believe that the company is overpaying, the hiree is cashing in on a glorious past rather than preparing for a glowing present, and a spending spree is in the offing.
The result of mass star hirings as well as individual ones seems to confirm such doubts. Look at County NatWest and Barclays de Zoete Wedd, both of which hired teams of stars with loud fanfare to do great things in investment banking in the 1990s. Both failed dismally. Everyone accepts the cliche that people make the organisation – but much more does the organisation make the people. When researchers studied the performance of fund managers in the 1990s, they discovered that just 30 per cent of the variation in fund performance was due to the individual, compared to 70 per cent to the company-specific setting.
That will be no surprise to those familiar with systems thinking. W Edwards Deming used to say that there was no point in beating up on people when 90 per cent of performance variation was down to the system within which they worked. Consistent improvement, he said, is a matter not of raising the level of individual intelligence, but of the learning of the organisation as a whole. The star system is glamorous – for the few. But it rarely benefits the company that thinks it is working it. And the knock-on consequences indirectly affect everyone else too. As one internet response to Gladwell’s New Yorker article put it: after Enron, ‘the rest of corporate America is stuck with overpaid, arrogant, underachieving, and relatively useless talent.’
Football is another illustration of the star vs systems strategic choice. As with investment banks and stockbrokers, it seems obvious that success should ultimately be down to money. Great players are scarce and expensive. So the club that can afford more of them than anyone else will win. But the performance of Arsenal and Manchester United on one hand and Chelsea and Real Madrid on the other proves that it’s not as easy as that. While Chelsea and Real have the funds to be compulsive star collectors – as with Juan Sebastian Veron – they are less successful than Arsenal and United which, like Liverpool before them, have put much more emphasis on developing a setting within which stars-in-the-making can flourish. Significantly, Thierry Henry, Patrick Veira and Robert Pires are much bigger stars than when Arsenal bought them, their value (in all senses) enhanced by the Arsenal system. At Chelsea, by contrast, the only context is the stars themselves – managers with different outlooks come and go every couple of seasons. There is no settled system for the stars to blend into. The Chelsea context has not only not added value, but it has also subtracted it. The side is less than the sum of its exorbitantly expensive parts. Even Real Madrid’s galacticos, the most extravagantly gifted on the planet, are being outperformed by less talented but better-integrated Spanish sides. In football, too, stars are trumped by systems.
So if not by hiring stars, how do you compete in the war for talent? You grow your own. This worked for investment analysts, where some companies were not only better at creating stars but also at retaining them. Because they had a much more sophisticated view of the interdependent relationship between star and system, they kept them longer without resorting to the exorbitant salaries that were so destructive to rivals.

Solution and Explanation
Questions 1-4:
The Reading Passage has seven paragraphs A-G
Which paragraph contains the following information?
Write the correct letter A-G, in boxes 1-4 on your answer sheet.

Q1. One example from non-commerce/business settings that better system win bigger stars

Answer: F
Supporting Sentence: Significantly, Thierry Henry, Patrick Veira and Robert Pires are much bigger stars than when Arsenal bought them, their value (in all senses) enhanced by the Arsenal system
Keyword Location: Paragraph F, Lines 1-7
Explanation: Paragraph F of the above mentioned passage explains how football shows to win bigger stars better systems is a valuable factor. The clubs like Chelsea contains the funds for the purpose of star collectors those are compulsive. Although like Arsenal and United, they are not as prosperous for the reason that they focus on developing a setting which target making football stars. Thus we can conclude that clubs focusing on making stars in the setting are a better option than those who collects them.

Q2. One failed company that believes stars rather than the system

Answer: B
Supporting Sentence: Enron believed in stars, noted author Malcolm Gladwell, because they didn’t believe in systems.
Keyword: Company, stars, system
Keyword Location: Paragraph B, Line 3-5
Explanation: Enron was one of the unsuccesful company which had a firm belief in stars and not in the system. That company should be clear about a fact that besides creating the companies should also concentrate on executing and competing and coordinating the efforts implied by many people. Due to this, many organisations that achieved the success, are those which has the stars.

Q3. One suggestion that the author made to acquire employees than to win the competition nowadays

Answer: G
Supporting Sentence: So if not by hiring stars, how do you compete in the war for talent? You grow your own.
Keyword: Author, acquire, Employees, Competition
Keyword Location: Paragraph G, lines 1-2
Explanation: Paragraph G explains the suggestion of the narrator. He suggests a fact by saying that recruting already successful stars should not be an ultimate option for the companies. To battle in the competiton of talent, the companies should build their individual talent. This is equally important to maintain the talent for the future of the company along with stopping their own growing talent

Q4. One metaphor to human medical anatomy that illustrates the problems of hiring stars.

Answer: C
Supporting Sentence: One respondent likened hiring a star to an organ transplant.
Keyword: Metaphor, human, medical anatomy, hiring stars
Keyword Location: Paragraph C, Lines 7-9
Explanation: The narrator implies a metaphor in paragraph C about the cons of hiring stars in the field of human medical anatomy. He states about the human medical anatomy by the explanation about the difficulties of hiring stars in resemblance with a transplantation of an organ. The passage states that before organ transplantation to a fit human body, we should think precisely as the casualty of the other organs in human body can be caused by the transplantation of new organ. To hiring of a star is the sole purpose of the passage because their stardom is not transferable from organisation to organisation.

Questions 5-8:
Do the following statements agree with the information given in the Reading Passage ?
In boxes 5-8 on your answer sheet, write

YES if the statement agrees with the information
NO if the statement contradicts the information
NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this

Q5. McKinsey who wrote The War for Talent had not expected the huge influence made by this book.

Answer: NOT GIVEN
Explanation: No proper information regarding this has been discussed in the passage.

Q6. Economic conditions become one of the factors which decide whether or not a country would prefer to hire foreign employees.

Answer: YES
Supporting Sentence: Although the intensity of the warfare subsequently subsided along with the air in the internet bubble, it has been warming up again as the economy tightens: labour shortages, for example, are the reason the government has laid out the welcome mat for immigrants from the new Europe
Keyword: Economic conditions, factors, country, foreign employees
Keyword Location: Paragraph A, Last 2 lines
Explanation: Concluding lines of the paragraph A states that how financial cicumstances opt to recruit a country’s foreign employees. According the consultation of McKinsey, it csan be said that the ferocity of the rivalry works out in the situations of fixed economic sitaution resulting in the scarcity of the workers. So, reliant on the economic conditions of the state, the government must concentrate on recruiting the workers from abroad.

Therefore, the above statement is correct.

Q7. The collapse of Enron is caused totally by an unfortunate incident instead of the company's management mistake.

Answer: NO
Supporting Sentence: Enron believed in stars, noted author Malcolm Gladwell, because they didn’t believe in systems.
Keyword: Collapse, Ernon, unfortunate, incident, management mistake
Keyword Location: Paragraph B, Line 5^th
Explanation: The statement implies on explaining the causes which results in the downfall of Enron. It has been stated in the supporting sentence about the failure of Ernon. It is for the condition as it not believed on the system, rather it believed in stars. The point that the downfall of Enron was due to an unlucky episode is in a clash with this.

Therefore, the above statement is a wrong approach.

Q8. Football clubs that focus making stars in the setting are better than simply collecting stars

Answer: YES
Supporting Sentence: Significantly, Thierry Henry, Patrick Veira and Robert Pires are much bigger stars than when Arsenal bought them, their value (in all senses) enhanced by the Arsenal system.
Keyword: Football clubs, making stars, collecting
Keyword Location: Paragraph F, Lines 6-7
Explanation: Lines 6 and 7 of paragraph F states that rich football teams like Chelsea and Real have the resources to be the star collectors who are passionate. However, they are not much prosperous alike Arsenal and United. Their working to constitute a setting targets much on making football stars is the due cause for their establishment.

Therefore, the above statement is correct.

Questions 9-13:
Complete the following summary of the paragraphs of Reading Passage
Using NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the Reading Passage for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 9-13 on your answer sheet.

An investigation carried out on 1000 9.________ Participants of a survey by Harvard Business Review found a company hire a 10.________ has negative effects. For instance, they behave considerably worse in a new team than in the 11._______ that they used to be. They move faster than wall street and increase their 12._______. Secondly, they faced rejections or refuse from those 13.______ within the team. Lastly, the one who made mistakes had been punished by selling his/her stock share.

Question 9:

Answer: analysts
Supporting Sentence: In a study of the careers of 1,000 star-stock analysts in the 1990s, the researchers found that when a company recruited a star performer, three things happened.
Keyword: Investigation, participants, survey, negative effects, worse, rejections, stock share
Keyword Location: Paragraph B Last lines and Paragraph C, Lines 5-10
Explanation: The paragraph in the passage explains about the study found about the unfavorable casualties of a star performer who joins in a new association as a fresher. The behavioural nature of them becomes bad in the team which they had joined as a fresher, also facing rejections from the opponents in their team have to be received by them. They are penalized to sell their shares of stock, if a mistake has been committed by them.

Question 10:

Answer: performance star
Supporting Sentence: Moreover, precisely because of their past stellar performance, stars were unwilling to learn new tricks and antagonised those (on whom they now unwittingly depended) who could teach them.
Keyword: Investigation, participants, survey, negative effects, worse, rejections, stock share
Keyword Location: Paragraph B Last lines and Paragraph C, Lines 5-10
Explanation: The paragraph of the passage explains the concept about the ill causes of a star performer who joins a new company. The behavioural nature of them becomes bad in the team which they had joined as a fresher, also facing rejections from the opponents in their team have to be received by them. They are penalized to sell their shares of stock, if a mistake has been committed by them.

Question 11:

Answer: working environment
Supporting Sentence: Second, group performance suffered as a result of tensions and resentment by rivals within the team.
Keyword: Investigation, participants, survey, negative effects, worse, rejections, stock share
Keyword Location: Paragraph B Last lines and Paragraph C, Lines 5-10
Explanation: The paragraph of the passage explains the concept about the ill causes of a star performer who joins a new company. The behavioural nature of them becomes bad in the team which they had joined as a fresher, also facing rejections from the opponents in their team have to be received by them. They are penalized to sell their shares of stock, if a mistake has been committed by them.

Question 12:

Answer: Salary
Supporting Sentence: Second, group performance suffered as a result of tensions and resentment by rivals within the team.
Keyword: Investigation, participants, survey, negative effects, worse, rejections, stock share
Keyword Location: Paragraph B Last lines and Paragraph C, Lines 5-10
Explanation: The paragraph of the passage explains the concept about the ill causes of a star performer who joins a new company. The behavioural nature of them becomes bad in the team which they had joined as a fresher, also facing rejections from the opponents in their team have to be received by them. They are penalized to sell their shares of stock, if a mistake has been committed by them. Also, they have to face their rejection or refuse.

Question 13:

Answer: rivals
Supporting Sentence: Second, group performance suffered as a result of tensions and resentment by rivals within the team.
Keyword: Investigation, participants, survey, negative effects, worse, rejections, stock share
Keyword Location: Paragraph B Last lines and Paragraph C, Lines 5-10
Explanation: The paragraph of the passage explains the concept about the ill causes of a star performer who joins a new company. The behavioural nature of them becomes bad in the team which they had joined as a fresher, also facing rejections from the opponents in their team have to be received by them. They are penalized to sell their shares of stock, if a mistake has been committed by them.

Read more IELTS Reading Samples