确实可以说，在准备雅思的过程中，阅读《经济学人》对我的帮助非常大，虽然还没有考试，不知道雅思听说读写到底能考到什么地步，但是至少在阅读《经济学人》的过程中学到了知识，提高了英语水平，顺便还提升了逼格。
那我就试着大家分享一下，长线备战雅思（三到五个月），或者有足够多的时间学习《经济学人》(毕竟真的很难懂！！！）或者只是想提高英语水平的人， 可以通过阅读《经济学人》学到什么。
如果排版大家看的不舒服的话，可以看这篇公众号文章，排版较为清晰。https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/8MkRdw8UZTWW6ZRHLCblww
先看一下雅思考试。
个人觉得《经济学人》的文章完全满足这四点，满分！
而这些话题在《经济学人》里都可以找到相关的话题，只要找到一篇精读，就可以积累相当多的词汇、词伙、用法、句式等。
看一个具体的题目:
这是雅思Speaking部分part2中的一个考题：
这是雅思writing 部分 task 2 有关team work 的作文：
当看到这个口语话题或者作文题目的时候，最先反映在头脑里的应该是观点。而关于team work 词汇、词组、表达，应该在生活中、备考过程中积累，平时看到就拿一个小本本记下来，或者用印象笔记，Instapaper存起来，放在手机里有空拿起来看一看。（具体用手机等工具学习英语的方法可以参考Eric 的公众号：英语学习笔记ericzenglish）
而我们通读《经济学人》的过程中，对于备考而言，可以学习：
下面拿经济学人3.19日的文章来举个例子：
Team spirit
TEAMS have become the basic building-blocks of organisations. Recruitment ads routinely call for “team players”. Business schools grade their students in part on their performance in group projects. Office managers knock down walls to encourage team-building.Teams are as old as civilisation, of course: even Jesus had 12 co-workers. But a new report by Deloitte, “Global Human Capital Trends”, based on a survey of more than 7,000 executives in over 130 countries, suggests that the fashion for teamwork has reached anew high. Almost half of those surveyed said their companies were either in the middle of restructuring or about to embark on it; and for the most part, restructuring meant putting more emphasis on teams.
词汇：
结构：
这一段九个句子，简简单单，但是又有很多值得学习的地方（对我而言）。
备考技巧：
篇章中没有用连接词比如 for example 之类的，很顺畅的用每个句子的逻辑把每个句子链接在一起，只在最后用了一个for the most part =mostly / usually
当早晨起来晨读的时候，可以照着这个思路讲一段"what do you think about team work?"这样的对话；你也可以使用这些词组试着造句。
第二段：
Companies are abandoning functional silos and organising employees into cross-disciplinary teams that focus on particular products, problems or customers. These teams are gaining more power to run their own affairs. They are also spending more time working with each other rather than reporting upwards. Deloitte argues that a new organisational form is on the rise: a network of teams is replacing the conventional hierarchy.
词汇：
a organisational form
结构：四句话
The fashion for teams is driven by a sense that the old way of organising people is too rigid for both the modern marketplace and the expectations of employees. Technological innovation puts a premium on agility. John Chambers, chairman of Cisco, an electronics firm, says that “we compete against market transitions, not competitors. Product transitions used to take five or seven years; now they take one or two.” Digital technology also makes it easier for people to co-ordinate their activities without resorting to hierarchy. The “millennials” who will soon make up half the workforce in rich countries were reared from nursery school onwards to work in groups.
词汇:
work in groups
结构：五句话
思路：总起1说原因，然后2，3，4继续论证技术发展需要合作，5举例再论证
The fashion for teams is also spreading from the usual corporate suspects (such as GE and IBM) to some more unusual ones. The Cleveland Clinic, a hospital operator, has reorganised its medical staff into teams to focus on particular treatment areas; consultants, nurses and others collaborate closely instead of being separated by speciality and rank. The US Army has gone the same way. In his book, “Team of Teams”, General Stanley McChrystal describes how the army’s hierarchical structurehindered its operations during the early stages of the Iraq war. His solution was to learn something from the insurgents it was fighting: decentraliseauthority to self-organising teams.
词汇：
结构：六句话
思路：总起1，举了两个例子: 医院23 军队456
A good rule of thumb is that as soon as generals and hospital administrators jump on a management bandwagon, it is time to ask questions. Leigh Thompson of Kellogg School of Management in Illinois warns that, “Teams are not always the answer—teams may provide insight, creativity and knowledge in a way that a person working independently cannot; but teamwork may also lead to confusion, delay and poor decision-making.” The late Richard Hackman of Harvard University once argued, “I have no question that when you have a team, the possibility exists that it will generate magic, producing something extraordinary…But don’t count on it.”
词汇：
teamwork
结构：
思路：提出观点，举两个例子
Hackman (who died in 2013) noted that teams are hampered by problems of co-ordination and motivation that chip away at the benefits of collaboration.High-flyers forced to work in teams may be undervalued and free-riders empowered. Groupthink may be unavoidable. In a study of 120 teams of senior executives, he discovered that less than 10% of their supposed members agreed on who exactly was on the team. If it is hard enough to define a team’s membership, agreeing on its purpose is harder still.
词汇：
结构：五句话
Profound changes in the workforce are making teams trickier to manage. Teams work best if their members have a strong common culture. This is hard to achieve when, as is now the case in many big firms, a large proportion of staff are temporary contractors. Teamwork improves with time: America’s National Transportation Safety Board found that 73% of the incidents in its civil-aviation database occurred on a crew’s first day of flying together. However, as Amy Edmondson of Harvard points out, organisations increasingly use “team” as a verb rather than a noun: they form teams for specific purposes and then quickly disband them.
词汇：
结构：
Teeming with doubts
The least that can be concluded from this research is that companies need to think harder about managing teams. They need to rid their minds ofsentimental egalitarianism: the most successful teams have leaders who set an overall directionand clamp down on dithering and waffle. They need to keep teams small and focused: giving in to pressure to be more “inclusive” is a guarantee of dysfunction. Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s boss, says that “If I see more than two pizzas for lunch, the team is too big.” They need to immunise teams against groupthink: Hackman argued that the best ones contain “deviants” who are willing to ruffle feathers. A new study of 12,000 workers in 17 countries by Steelcase, a furniture-maker which also does consulting, finds that the best way to ensure employees are “engaged” is to give them more control over where and how they do their work—which may mean liberating them from having to do everything in collaboration with others.
词汇：
结构：
However, organisations need to learn something bigger than how to manage teams better: they need to be in the habit of asking themselves whether teams are the best tools for the job. Team-building skills are in short supply: Deloitte reports that only 12% of the executives they contacted feel they understand the way people work together in networks and only 21% feel confident in their ability to build cross-functional teams. Slackly managed teams can become hotbeds of distraction—employees routinely complain that they can’t get their work done because they are forced to spend too much time in meetings or compelled to work in noisy offices. Even in the age of open-plan offices and social networks some work is best left to the individual.
词汇：
结构：
最后给大家总结一下相关的阅读方法
平时学习过程中，大家可以在网站上（阅读原文）上阅读，看得时候可以导到印象笔记或者instapaper里做笔记，用客户端（app:Economist）的同学，可以直接在软件里查词，或者复制粘贴到上述软件做笔记，也可以导成pdf放在手机下载的kindle里做笔记）
