•Read the article below about losing an accent to achieve success, and the questions on the opposite page.

•For each question 18--18, mark one letter (A, B, C, or D) on your Answer Sheet for the answer you choose.

LOSING AN ACCENT TO ACHIEVE SUCCESS

It was painful for Irwin Layton to warn one of his recently promoted managers that he had to correct his speech--or it could cost him his career.

The word "voltage" came out of Edwin's mouth sounding like "woltage", and "this" sounded like "dis". This often resulted in mistakes being made in the shipments he ordered. "I was really forced into submission. They said, 'Either you improve your accent or your chances of getting promoted to senior management won't be good,'" said Edwin.

Edwin is a junior manager making $ 51,000 a year at a manufacturing company in Mountain View. Despite of mixed feelings, he hired a speech coach to help him out. He is not alone. Accent reduction is rapidly turning into a major business for speech coaches in the Bay Area and other large cities. Young, first-generation foreign professionals in America hoping to improve their careers appear to make up the majority of those paying to get rid of their accents.

"I have people whose command of English is good--they've gone to universities here in the United States, but when they go into the workplace, they are held back," said Arthur Compton, founder of the Institute of Language & Phonology in San Francisco.

Edwin said he was embarrassed and tried to ignore incidents throughout his career when colleagues would point out his accent and do imitations of his pronunciations for fun. Edwin's experiences early in his career made him very sensitive to the problems he faced with his accent, and, like many others, he compensated by pushing himself to great extremes in education.

"I felt that just because I had an accent, some people thought I was stupid," Edwin said. "They lost patience. They did not want to wait to listen for what I was trying to say. It made me feel so bad. I knew I had so much to offer--my primary motive for working there was to do what I could to improve the company. Yet, none of that seemed to matter to them because they didn't have patience."

Speech coaches and many other professionals say that some Americans have a prejudice against those who speak with an accent.

Losing an accent is hard work. Each language has certain sounds, as we can tell from the many different alphabets, that are just not found in other languages. We learn as babies to make these sounds by moving the lips, mouth, and tongue muscles in set patterns. So a speech coach tries and resets these patterns for people who speak other languages.

For 13 weeks, and at a cost of $ 795, Edwin spent an hour each week with a speech instructor, pronouncing, over and over again, compound words such as "zookeeper", preposition phrases such as "in regard to", as well as words such as "this" and "voltage", all the while looking into a mirror at his mouth. Seeing himself allowed him to have a visual image to go along with the sounds he was making.

"When class was over, I was exhausted," he said. But following the long procession of lessons, he improved by 78 percent, received a healthy injection of confidence, and admitted that he should have done it sooner. His boss, Layton, called it a "win-win" situation, and is so enthusiastic that he is sponsoring a second employee in the program.

How did Mr. Edwin's accent bring trouble to his work？

A．He could not get along well with his colleagues.

B．He made mistakes at work just because of his accent.

C．His talent and passion for work were ignored.

D．Both B and Ｃ.