with new materials, and I always tried to develop new techniques to make the most unique textiles for my fashion projects. One summer break, I came here to New York for an internship at a fashion house in Chinatown. We worked on two incredible dresses that were 3D printed. They were amazing ― like you can see here. But I had a few problems with them. They were made from hard plastics and that's why they were very breakable. The models couldn't sit in them, and they even got scratched from the plastics under their arms. So now the main challenge was to find the right material for printing clothes with. I mean the
material you feed the printer with. The breakthrough came when I was introduced to Filaflex, which is a new
kind of printing material. It's strong, yet very flexible. And with it, I was able to print the first garment, a red jacket that had
the word \can easily download this jacket, and change the word to something else. For example, your name or your
sweetheart's name. So I think in the future, materials will evolve, and they will look and feel like fabrics
we know today, like cotton or silk.
Q19. What does the speaker say about the skirt she is wearing now?
Q20. When did the speaker start experimenting with 3D printing?
Q21. What was the problem with the material the speaker worked on at New York fashion house?
Q22. What does the speaker say about the Filaflex?
Recording3
(中小企业的发展)
Welcome to the third lecture in our series on the future of small businesses in Europe. The purpose of today's lecture, as you have seen from the and the
abstract, is to examine in more detail the problems facing small and medium sized enterprises which arise at least in part from having to adapt to rapid
advances in technology. And I want to look at these both from a financial and from a personnel point of view and to offer a few hopefully effective solutions. Here we have three of the most important problems
facing small businesses that I want to look at today. First, keeping up with the pace of technological change, recruiting high quality staff in a time of skills shortages in I.T. as a whole and in a highly competitive market and the issue of retaining staff once they've been recruited and trained. Now all of these problems involve significant costs for all businesses, but they're a particularly challenging issue for small and medium sized enterprises. And
those costs will vary depending on the size and scale of the businesses. So let's come to the first issue on our list which is keeping pace with developments in technology. Now we all know that the technology
industry is intensely competitive with new products
being launched all year round, as the various
companies strive to compete with each other rather than say once a year or every couple of years. And this is a real headache for smaller businesses. So
let's imagine we have a small company which is doing OK. It's just about making a profit, and it spends most of its income on overheads. So for a company in this situation, keeping up to date with the latest technology, even if it's only for the benefit of key staff, this can be hugely expensive. So in my view, some creative thinking needs to come in here to find ways to help companies in this situation to stay ahead in the game. But at the same time to remain technologically competitive. Well there's the possibility that small groups of companies with similar
requirements, but not directly competing with each other, they could share the cost of upgrading in much the same way as let's say, an Internet operates within larger organizations. In fact, cost sharing could be a very practical solution, especially in
times of financial difficulty. If there's downward pressure on costs, because of a need for investment in other areas, I would
argue that this is a perfectly feasible solution.
Q23. What does
the speaker say about the problems facing small and medium sized
enterprises?
Q24. Why does the
speaker's say about the technology industry?
Q25. What is a
practical solution to the problems of small and medium sized
businesses?
精品2016年12月英语四级真题及答案解析（三套完整版）
