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  3. Periodically in history, there come periods of great transition in which work changes its meaning. There was a time, perhaps 10,

Periodically in history, there come periods of great transition in which work changes its meaning. There was a time, perhaps 10,

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问题     Periodically in history, there come periods of great transition in which work changes its meaning. There was a time, perhaps 10, 000 years ago, when human beings stopped feeding themselves by hunting game and gathering plants, and increasingly turned to agriculture. In a way, that represented the invention of "work".
    Then, in the latter decades of the 18th century, as the Industrial Revolution began in Great Britain, there was another transition in which the symbols of work were no longer the hoe and the plow; they were replaced by the mill and the assembly line.
【R1】______
    With the Industrial Revolution, machinery—powered first by steam, then by electricity and internal combustion engines—took over the hard physical tasks and relieved the strain on human and animal muscles.
【R2】______
    And yet, such jobs have been characteristic of the human condition in the first three-quarters of the 20th century. They’ ve made too little demand on the human mind and spirit to keep them fresh and alive, made too much demand for any machine to serve the purpose until now.
    The electronic computer, invented in the 1940’ s and improved at breakneck speed, was a machine that, for the first time, seemed capable of doing work that had until then been the preserve of the human mind. With the coming of the microchip in the 1970’ s, computers became compact enough, versatile enough and (most important of all) cheap enough to serve as the brains of affordable machines that could take their place on the assembly line and in the office.
【R3】______
    First, what will happen to the human beings who have been working at these disappearing jobs? Second, where will we get the human beings that will do the new jobs that will appear—jobs that are demanding, interesting and mind-exercising, but that requires a high-tech level of thought and education?
【R4】______
    The first problem, that of technological unemployment, will be temporary, for it will arise out of the fact that there is now a generation of employees who have not been educated to fit the computer age. However, (in advanced nations, at least) they will be the last generation to be so lacking, so that with them this problem will disappear or, at least, diminish to the point of non-crisis proportions.
    The second problem—that of developing a large enough number of high-tech minds to run a high-tech world—will be no problem at all, once we adjust our thinking.
【R5】______
    Right now, creativity seems to be confined to a very few, and it is easy to suppose that that is the way it must be. However, with the proper availability of computerized education, humanity will surprise the elite few once again.
A. There remained, however, the "easier" labor—the labor that required the human eyes, ears, judgment and mind but no sweating. It nevertheless had its miseries, for it tended to be dull, repetitious, and boring. And there is always the sour sense of endlessly doing something unpleasant under compulsion.
B. For one thing, much of human effort that is today put into "running the world" will be unnecessary. With computers, robots and automation, a great deal of the daily grind will appear to be running itself. This is nothing startling. It is a trend that has been rapidly on its way ever since World War II.
C. And now we stand at the brink of a change that will be the greatest of all, for work in its old sense will disappear altogether. To most people, work has always been an effortful exercising of mind or body—compelled by the bitter necessity of earning the necessities of life—plus an occasional period of leisure in which to rest or have fun.
D. Clearly there will be a painful period of transition, one that is starting already, and one that will be in full swing as the 21st century begins.
E. In the first place, the computer age will introduce a total revolution in our notions of education, and is beginning to do so now. The coming of the computer will make learning fun, and a successfully stimulated mind will learn quickly. It will undoubtedly turn out that the "average" child is much more intelligent and creative than we generally suppose. There was a time, after all, when the ability to read and write was confined to a very small group of "scholars" and almost all of them would have scouted the notion that just about anyone could learn the intricacies of literacy. Yet with mass education general literacy came to be a fact.
F. This means that the dull, the boring, the repetitious, the mind-stultifying work will begin to disappear from the job market—is already beginning to disappear. This, of course, will introduce two vital sets of problem—is already introducing them.
【R5】
选项
答案E
解析 文章的最后一段中指出“a very few”“the elite few”，而选项中的“a very small group of‘scholars’”也正是指出了这种情况，故应选E。
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