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Strategies for succesful reading

Name: Leonardo Lozano

Taller de aplicación de estrategias para la comprensión de textos

técnicos en inglés

Read each text carefully and complete the proposed activities and exercises to apply the
reading comprehension strategies discussed in the learning material. The strategies to be
applied are:
1. Using an English dictionary for improving reading
2. Identifying implied main ideas
3. Finding arguments in your reading
4. Making outlines of readings
5. Finding hypothesis, explanations and conclusions in readings

1. Using an English dictionary for improving reading

Read the following passage about process mapping (Lucidchart, 2017) and select at
least five (5) words you don’t know or that are unfamiliar to you. For each word you
choose, write an entry including the following information:
▪ The part of speech of the word (noun, verb, adjective, adverb)
▪ Other forms of the word
▪ The definition of the word. Use your own words to write the definition
▪ The sentence in which the word is found in the reading
▪ A sentence of your own using the new or unfamiliar word

What is Process Mapping

A process map is a planning and management tool that visually describes the flow of work.
Process maps show a series of events that produce an end result. A process map is also
called a flowchart, process flowchart, process chart, functional process chart, functional
flowchart, process model, workflow diagram, business flow diagram or process flow
diagram. It shows who and what is involved in a process and can be used in any business
or organization and can reveal areas where a process should be improved.
The purpose of process mapping is for organizations and businesses to improve
efficiency. Process maps provide insight into a process, help teams brainstorm ideas for
process improvement, increase communication and provide process documentation.
Process mapping will identify bottlenecks, repetition and delays. They help to define
process boundaries, process ownership, and process responsibilities
Process maps can save time and simplify projects because they:
▪ Create and speed up the project design
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▪ Provide effective visual communication of ideas, information and data

▪ Help with problem solving and decision making
▪ Identify problems and viable solutions
▪ Can be built quickly and economically
▪ Show processes broken down into steps and use symbols that are easy to follow
▪ Show detailed connections and sequences
▪ Show an entire process from the beginning to the end (Lucidchart, 2017).

Check an example of how to apply the strategy!

Insight
Noun / ɪnsaɪt /
Insightful (adjective)
Insightfully (adverb)
If you gain insight or an insight into a complex situation or
problem, you can understand that situation or problem very
well.
Process maps provide insight into a process
That movie gave us insights into what a slave’s
life was like in the past.

1.1. Word # 1

Flow
- Noun
- Flowing (verb)
- The word flow can be used as a noun or a verb, for example, as a verb, it is
used to describe the motion of something, such as the motion of a river, and
as a noun, to describe the movement or process of something, like
information.
- “A process map is a planning and management tool that visually describes the flow
of work.”
- The river was flowing downhill very rapidly.
- The flow of ideas I received that night were very intense.
Actividad de proyecto 8
Strategies for succesful reading
Name: Leonardo Lozano

1.2. Word # 2
Involved
- Adjective
- Involvedly (adverb)
- Involved is used to define the participation or having part of something.
- “It shows who and what is involved in a process and can be used in any business
or organization and can reveal areas where a process should be improved.”
- I was at a party and I found myself involved in a very intrinsic argument

1.3. Word # 3
Improved
- Verb
- Improvability (noun); Improvable (adjective); Improver (noun)
- This word is used to define the quality or value of something getting better.
- “It shows who and what is involved in a process and can be used in any business
or organization and can reveal areas where a process should be improved.”
- I noticed my sleep quality improved when I stopped smoking.

1.4. Word # 4
Brainstorm
- Noun
- Brainstormer (verb)
- To find a solution to a problem by thinking in a group of people the possible new
ideas amongst all the participants.
- Process maps provide insight into a process, help teams brainstorm ideas for
process improvement, increase communication and provide process
documentation.
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- My colleagues and I brainstormed about the possible solutions to global warming.

1.5. Word # 5
Viable
- Adjective
- Viably (adverb)
- Capable of working or existing
- Identify problems and viable solutions
- My family and I looked for viable solutions to the coronavirus pandemic

2. Identifying implied main ideas

Read the following excerpt from an article about reasons not to use open source
software and identify the implied idea the author is trying to communicate in the passage.
Remember that to be able to find the implied idea you need to focus on the supporting
details and on what they have in common. Remember to follow these steps:
▪ Identify what is the topic of the reading passage. What is it about?
▪ Read the passage and note each of the major supporting details.
▪ Ask yourself what is the author trying to tell you about the topic?
▪ Turn the topic into a sentence that reflects the author’s purpose, and that will be
the implied main idea.

Linux has made an enormous impact on the server market, but the same can't be said for
the desktop market — and for good reason. Despite making big steps in the last several
years, it's still tricky for the uninitiated to use, and the user interfaces of the various
distributions remain far inferior to those of Windows or Mac OS X.
While Linux very well may be technically superior to these proprietary operating systems,
its weaknesses mean that most users will find it more difficult and less appealing to work
with. That means lower productivity, which will likely cost far more than purchasing a
proprietary operating system with which your staff is familiar (Rubens, 2017).

2.1. What is the topic of the reading passage?

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Linux – the difficult and less appealing operating system to the public eye.

2.2. What is the implied main idea being referred to in the reading passage?

That Linux, even though a great operating system, it doesn’t have as much success in
the market because of its difficult and less appealing form of functioning.

2.3. What details can you find in the reading that support your proposed implied
main idea?

The second paragraph makes a statement where Linux has been technically superior to
other operating systems, such as Mac OS and Windows, but because of the technicality,
most users will find it difficult and less appealing to use, so they prefer Windows or Mac
OS.

3. Finding arguments in your reading

Read the following excerpt from an article about a study conducted on the impact of
Human Resource information system policies on privacy (Lukaszewski, K., Stone, D., &
Johnson, R., 2016), and identify the arguments against and for implementing these types
of information systems. In order to find the arguments, complete the following steps:
▪ Identify what subject is the reading passage talking about.
▪ Find the arguments for implementing Human Resources information systems.
Remember that you should look for all the reasons or explanations the author of
the passage provides to express that using these information systems at
organizations is something good.
▪ Find the arguments against implementing Human Resources information
systems. Search for those details the author introduces in the reading passage to
convince you that implementing these information systems is not good.
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▪ Take a stand for or against the topic. Express whether you support or oppose the
implementation of Human Resources information systems and provide your own
arguments.

Impact of Human Resource Information System Policies on Privacy

Organizations are increasingly using human resource information systems (HRIS) to
manage employee data. Surveys have revealed that 80 percent of large organizations now
use HRIS to collect and store data about employees to enhance employment decision
making. A HRIS is a system used to acquire, store…analyze…and distribute information
regarding an organization's human resources. These systems offer several benefits
including 1) reduced costs, 2) decreased time needed for HR processes, and 3) increased
self-service capabilities. As a result, a HRIS may not only increase the efficiency of the HR
function but also help HR provide better services to employees.
Despite the many advantages of a HRIS, researchers have raised concerns about the
extent to which they have the potential to violate employees’ rights to privacy. Researchers
have warned that the increased use of computerized systems gives employers access to
data that may unfairly stigmatize employees. For instance, a HRIS may give supervisors
access to data that have little job relevance (e.g., bankruptcies), and one survey indicated
that many organizations collect data about employees’ credit history, driving records,
lifestyle, and workers’ compensation claims.
Furthermore, researchers have expressed concerns that a HRIS will decrease employees'
perceptions of control over information and that organizations will release data to third
parties. An organization that uses a HRIS also creates a major change in the employment
environment and may increase employees' feelings of vulnerability. Even modest systems
may give anyone, with or without authorization, access to highly sensitive information
(wages). Privacy is typically based on the expectation that sensitive information will not be
shared, but surveys have indicated that 69 percent of organizations share data with third
parties. Not surprisingly, the loss of employee privacy may also have a negative effect on
organizations. Research showed that invasion of privacy is negatively related to employee
attitudes and to organizational citizenship behaviors (Lukaszewski, K., Stone, D., &
Johnson, R., 2016).

3.1. What subject or topic is the reading passage talking about?

The reading passage is about the advantages and disadvantages on the HRIS (human
resource information system) that organizations incorporate in order to keep a track
record of their employees; this goes to say that there is no sense of privacy, but there
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are many benefits from the HRIS.

3.2. What arguments for and against HRIS implementation are introduced in the
reading passage?

Arguments for Arguments against

1. Reduced Costs 1. potential to violate employees’ rights to

privacy
2. Decreased time needed for HR 2. may unfairly stigmatize employees
processes
3. increased self-service capabilities 3. HRIS may give supervisors access to
data that have little job relevance
4. Increase the services of the HR function 4. HRIS will decrease employees'
perceptions of control over information
5. help HR provide better services to 5. organizations will release data to third
employees parties
6. manage employee data 6. may increase employees' feelings of
vulnerability
7. Enhance employment decision making 7. 69 percent of organizations share data
with third parties

3.3. What is your opinion regarding the subject discussed in the reading passage?
Are you against or do you support the implementation of HRIS?

My opinion on the topic is pretty biased, given that we currently live in a world where
technology is practically inevitable, the term ‘privacy’ keeps on having little meaning. In
other words, organizations, big or small, have the access to technology and with this
technology they have access to the private lives of any human being they wish to
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contract. So, if a business wishes to hire someone, there is a certainty that they will
have access to some of their private information on a social demographic scale, such as
credit scores, child support, family members, income, etc. Am I against the HRIS, sure,
but do I support it, of course. Firstly, I support this system because we also live in a
world where it is essential to know your employee, and there are records that we all as
humans have, and those should be public. Let’s say for instance, someone wants to be
hired at a day-care, but has a history of child abuse or sexual offense, and the day care
doesn’t have access to this technology. Given a couple of weeks, it turns out their new
hire sexual assaults a child. As time goes by, they realize this particular person has a
history of child abuse. Now, this could have all been avoided if the technology was
accessible to the organization. And that’s one of my strongest points, I believe if anyone
has something to hide, they shouldn’t be hired, and thanks to the HRIS, any information
is available to the employer. Secondly, and lastly, I am not for it because I believe
privacy is very important. However, business is business, and if someone is a
responsible employee, they shouldn’t be afraid of their private lives being available to
the employer.

4. Making outlines of readings

Read the article about Natural Language Processing (NLP) and make an outline including
the most relevant information. Remember to follow the steps described below:
▪ Start by adding an introduction that includes your thesis statement about the
reading. What is the reading mainly about?
▪ Add your main points
▪ Expand on your subpoints.

Natural Language Processing (NLP) in machine learning

As human beings, understanding language is one of our first achievements, and
associating words to their meaning seems natural. It’s also automatic to handle discourses
that are ambiguous, unclear, or simply have a strong reference to the context of where we
live or work (such as dialect, jargon, or terms family or associates understand). In addition,
humans can catch subtle references to feelings and sentiments in text, enabling people to
understand polite speech that hides negative feelings and irony.
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Computers don’t have this ability but can rely on NLP, a field of computer science
concerned with language understanding and language generation between a machine and
a human being. Since Alan Turing first devised the Turing Test in 1950, which aims at
spotting an artificial intelligence based on how it communicates with humans, NLP experts
have developed a series of techniques that define the state of the art in computer-human
interaction by text.
A computer powered with NLP can successfully spot spam in your email, tag the part of a
conversation that contains a verb or a noun, and spot an entity like the name of a person
or a company (called named entity recognition). All these achievements have found
application in tasks such as spam filtering, predicting the stock market using news articles,
and de-duplicating redundant information in data storage.
Things get more difficult for NLP when translating a text from another language and
understanding who the subject is in an ambiguous phrase. For example, consider the
sentence, “John told Luca he shouldn’t do that again.” In this case, you can’t really tell
whether “he” refers to John or Luca. Disambiguating words with many meanings, such as
considering whether the word mouse in a phrase refers to an animal or a computer device,
can prove difficult. Obviously, the difficulty in all these problems arises because of the
context.
As humans, we can easily resolve ambiguity by examining the text for hints about
elements like place and time that express the details of the conversation (such as
understanding what happened between John and Luca, or whether the conversation is
about a computer when mentioning the mouse). Relying on additional information for
understanding is part of the human experience. This sort of analysis is somewhat difficult
for computers.
Moreover, if the task requires critical contextual knowledge or demands that the listener
resort to common sense and general expertise, the task becomes daunting. Simply put,
NLP still has a lot of ground to cover in order to discover how to extract meaningful
summaries from text effectively or how to complete missing information from text
(dummies, 2017).

Introduction

Natural Language Processing is a method used, not only to understand human-

to-human interaction, but also human-to-computer interaction. Language, as is,
is already a very difficult process to understand, and still, we have trouble
sometimes understanding one another based on the context of our
communication. Now, many scientists and just regular people, are trying to do
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the same, but with computers. Nonetheless, over the years, the deciphering of
language and computers have become a lot simpler, thanks to the NLP.
Although there are still some challenges because, just like humans, computers
and software’s aren’t perfect.

4.1. First main point

Human-to-computer interaction is one of the main points the article expresses, being
that the human controls the input and output of the computer, they also have to
understand the software and hardware components of the computer. NLP has
helped humans better understand the computer and artificial intelligence by solving
some of the contextual problems they once faced, such as the computer
determining whether an e-mail is spam or not, or the way spell check is enabled and
the computer can determine what someone actually meant to write.

4.1.1. Subpoints

Just like humans, computers aren’t perfect. There are still many challenges humans
face, and that is to incorporate such artificial intelligence into a computer, that,
somewhere in the near future, the computer can actually understand what the
person writing is trying to express, based on emotions, something that a computer,
to this day, has no access to. So, the computer will still make mistakes trying to
understand a human because of the contextual use of the language. Let’s not
forget, computer has its own universal language, something that the human has to
understand first.

4.2. Second main point

Language is a very difficult tool that is still hard, even for anthropologists and
sociologists to understand. The way humans can interact with one another, whether
its spoken language or corporal language, can still baffle a language major because
of the complex understanding language can cause among another person’s
emotions and feelings. If this is still difficult for humans to understand, imagine how
hard it is to develop this thinking into a computer.
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4.2.1. Subpoints

Something straight out of science fiction, is the idea that one day computers will have
the ability to understand human emotions and feelings. Could this be a breakthrough in
science and the world as we know it, or could it be your typical I-Robot movie, where
robots could potentially take over the world? The truth is, we don’t know because as of
now, it is just science fictions. However, computers and humans are becoming closer
and closer in understanding one another, even if the feelings and emotions aren’t there,
people have a stronger relationship with their devices, than they do with one another.

4.3. Third main points

As science, humans and technology keep growing and getting even more complex as
time goes by, we could live to see the probable day where computers and NLP have a
better understanding of language than humans do. Computers have less room for
marginable error than humans do, this means that computers could be a potential tool to
help us better understand the way we communicate with one another if we are able to
help develop in computers what exactly our language is.

4.3.1. Subpoints

Computers and science could one day help us understand our language and the way we
communicate with each other, but we first have to understand ourselves and our culture.
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Language is not universal. People all over the world speak different languages and
interact in different ways, that is the beauty of language. But, this could cause problems
for a computer to understand because many people interact in different ways, and some
words may even mean something else in another language.

5. Finding hypothesis, explanations and conclusions in readings

Read the following article on the impact of Information Technology (IT) on organizations’
performance written by Jack Nilles from the Center for Future Research and find the
hypothesis this author is trying to make about IT. Don’t forget to also list the main
supporting details or explanations he provides to prove his idea.

The Impact of IT on Organizations

Information technology (IT) is dramatically changing the business landscape. Although
organization cultures and business strategies shape the use of IT in organizations, more
often the influence is stronger the other way around. IT significantly affects strategic
options and creates opportunities and issues that managers need to address in many
aspects of their business. This article outlines some of the key impacts of technology and
the implications for management on:
▪ Business strategy - collapsing time and distance, enabling electronic commerce
▪ Organization Culture - encouraging the free flow of information
▪ Organization Structures - making networking and virtual corporations a reality
▪ Management Processes - providing support for complex decision-making
processes
▪ Work - dramatically changing the nature of professional, and now managerial work
▪ The workplace - allowing work from home and on the move, as in telework
Business Strategy
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IT creates new opportunities for innovation in products and services. Services which used
to be delivered in person can now be delivered over networks. Among the key levers are:
✓ resequencing: including parallel processing of data-bases

✓ simultaneity: making information instantly available in several systems (e.g. via

OLE)
✓ time extension: offering 24 hour a day; 365 days a year service

✓ portability: taking service and products closer to the user

✓ reusability: using information captured for one purpose (e.g. transactions), and

using for others (e.g. customer targeting)
Organization Culture

Newer types of IT such as electronic mail and groupware are creating significant changes

in the way that information flows around group ware, and between them and their
customers and suppliers. It can hasten the development of more open and innovative
cultures.
Management Processes

IT is rapidly entering the era where it supports unstructured management processes as

well as highly routinized business processes. It provides more effective ways of accessing
information from multiple sources, including use of external information on databases and
the Internet. However, group decision support systems that operate in a meeting room
environment can help enhance decision making, but it does need someone who is an
expert facilitator to help the group master the technique of structured discussion.
Work
IT is dramatically changing the nature of professional work. There are few offices where
professional do not make use of personal computers, and in many jobs involving extensive
information and knowledge based work, the use of the computer is often a core activity.
Becoming effective not only requires traditional skills of organizing, thinking, writing etc.,
but knowing how best to use the power of IT for researching sources, accessing
information, connecting to experts, communicating ideas and results, and packaging the
knowledge (asset) for reuse. One aspect of this is the need for hybrid managers - people
who are competent at both their discipline and IT.
The Workplace
The way in which IT diminishes the effect of distance means that it creates a variety of
options for reorganizing the workplace. At a basic level, it can provide more flexibility in the
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office, allowing desk sharing and a degree of location independence within a building (this
will develop as CTI (Computer Telephony Integration) and wireless PCs become more
firmly established. At another level, it permits the dispersion of work teams, thus saving
costs of relocation and travel. It has also created the mobile professional and allows
people to work effectively from home (Skyrme, 2017).

5.1. What is the issue discussed in the reading passage?

The issue is that thanks to the advancement in technology, the ways organizations are
functioning, are constantly changing. IT changes the way an organization functions, but
it is also very beneficial to the business if management is capable of adapting to the
change and incorporating new business information. With that being said, an
organization should see IT as a beneficial business proposition, as appose to a threat.

5.2. What is the hypothesis or theory the author is trying to prove?

The author is trying to prove that IT significantly affects strategic options and creates
opportunities and issues that managers need to address in many aspects of their
business.

5.3. What arguments, examples, details or explanations the author uses to support
his idea or hypothesis?

The author demonstrates how in 6 business components, IT directly affects the strategic
options and the creation of opportunities in: Business strategy, Organization Culture,
Organization Structures, Management Processes, Work, and the Workplace.
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After completing all the previous exercises and writing down your
answers, save and send this document to your tutor through the link
available in the learning platform.

References
dummies. (2017). Natural Language Processing in Machine Learning - dummies.
Recuperado de http://www.dummies.com/programming/natural-language-processing-
machine-learning/

Lucidchart. (2017). What is Process Mapping. Recuperado de

https://www.lucidchart.com/pages/process-mapping

Lukaszewski, K. k., Stone, D. D., & Johnson, R. r. (2016). Impact of Human Resource
Information System Policies on Privacy. AIS Transactions On Human-Computer
Interaction, 8(2), 58-72.

Rubens, P. (2017). 7 Reasons Not to Use Open Source Software. Recuperado de

https://www.cio.com/article/2378859/open-source-tools/7-reasons-not-to-use-open-source-
software.html

Skyrme, D. (2017). The Impact of IT on Organizations (David Skyrme Associates).

Skyrme.com. Recuperado de https://www.skyrme.com/insights/5itorg.htm