首页
外语
计算机
考研
公务员
职业资格
财经
工程
司法
医学
专升本
自考
实用职业技能
登录
外语
Of the millions of inventions, what are the eight greatest? A)I’ve drawn up a list. And there’s one thing I know about this
Of the millions of inventions, what are the eight greatest? A)I’ve drawn up a list. And there’s one thing I know about this
admin
2016-09-21
20
问题
Of the millions of inventions, what are the eight greatest?
A)I’ve drawn up a list. And there’s one thing I know about this list: You won’t agree with it. Some of you will write to tell me I forgot the gun, the airplane, or whatever. Which is fine: A top eight list is all about starting a good argument. But to draw up such a list, you have to set some guidelines, and here are mine: I’m starting at the year zero. Otherwise, we’d never get out of prehistory. And I’m limiting inventions to physical devices. The scientific method, the university and electricity don’t count—they are, respectively, a concept, a social system, and something we discovered but which existed all along.
B)This is a list of end products. That is, I’m excluding components with no independent function. Take the gear, for example. A groundbreaking bit of technology to be sure. Without it, we’d scarcely have any machines at all. But we never say, "Oh, damn, I’m out of gears!" Ditto microchips, transistors, and ball bearings. Here, then, in no particular order, are my nominees as the eight greatest inventions.
1. The Mechanical Clock
C)Before this invention, time was inseparable from events, the main one being the Sun crossing the sky. Only local time existed, no universal river of time. If you agreed to meet someone at sunset, you had to say where, because the Sun is always setting somewhere. Then, mechanical clocks came around. Gradually, as these clocks all came to be coordinated, they created public time, a thing in itself: one single, universal current flowing everywhere throughout the universe, always at the same pace. People could now communicate with each other by coordinating to this universal frame of reference. Thus, clocks made factories, offices, schools, meetings, and appointments possible.
2. The Printing Press
D)Unoriginal, I know, but still it’s true. Gutenberg’s press, with its movable type, launched publishing. In the short term, this made the Reformation possible by putting a Bible in the hands of anybody who wanted one. The Church lost its lock on truth, and the sovereign individual soon emerged as the key unit of Western society. In the longer term, publishing universalized literacy. Before this invention, so few could read that, effectively, even those few lived in a world of oral tradition and memory. Humanity’s consensual picture of reality was shaped by stories, told and retold. In this fluid world, if the big picture shifted, no one knew, because they had nothing to check it against. The proliferation of text fixed objective reality. Now, when two people disagree about what happened yesterday, they can look it up. Our modern collective picture of reality is founded on facts archived as text.
3. Immunization and Antibiotics
E)Three centuries ago, almost everyone died of infectious diseases. When the plague broke out in 1347, it killed nearly half of Europe—in about two years. When diseases such as smallpox reached North America, they reduced the indigenous population by about 90 percent within a century. As late as 1800, the leading cause of death in the West was tuberculosis. Hardly anyone died of old age back then, one reason why elders were revered. Today, elders are a dime a dozen: nothing unusual about surviving past 70. In the United States, 73 percent of people die of heart failure, cancer, and stroke. It’s a different world, folks.
4. The Telephone
F)Lots of people imagined the telephone before any telephone existed. Once the device was invented, and businessmen had wrested it away from the inventors, the Network began to form. That’s the actual invention—the Network. It enables anyone to talk to anyone anywhere at any given moment. So today, anyone’s real-time group includes people not physically present, and they could be anywhere. The infrastructure took some time to develop, but the telephone implied all this from the start.
5. The Electrical Grid
G)Electricity existed all along, but the system of devices needed to generate this force and distribute it to individual buildings was an invention, launched initially by Edison: He effectively turned electricity into a salable commodity and his Pearl Street station was the world’s first electric power station. Nikola Tesla’s invention of alternating current(AC)technology then made it possible to transmit electricity over long distances, leading to the nationwide grid we know today. Now, anyone in the West and throughout most of the world can tap into the grid to power everything from light bulbs to computers. We are, in fact, a social organism animated by electricity.
6. The Automobile
H)Once cars were invented, roads were improved. Once roads were improved, cities sprouted suburbs, because people could now live in the country, yet work in the city. And thus we have become a nation of sprawl, rather than density. Furthermore, as cars grew popular, the oil industry boomed. Oil became a key to power and wealth—and one of the major factors for political and economic unrest in the Middle East And here we are today.
7. The Television
I)Wherever a television set is on, it absorbs attention like no other piece of furniture. Jane Healy, in her book Endangered Minds, says television has changed the human brain itself. Our neural networks are not hardwired at birth but continue to develop for several years, new circuits forming in response to our first interactions with the environment. In much of the developed world, young children interact largely with television, so their neural networks can accommodate its warm, one-way, pacifying, activity-dampening stimulus.
8. The Computer
J)My deepest, richest, most diverse, and rewarding relationship is with my computer. It plays games with me, tells me jokes, plays music to me, and does my taxes. I have great conversations with it, too. These conversations appear as e-mail and take on the personalities of supposed "friends," but the human embodiments of those "friends" are rarely with me. My concrete relationship is with this object on my desk(or in my lap).
Before the clock was invented, there was not a universal reference of time.
选项
答案
C
解析
本题与“时钟”有关,故定位应在1.The Mechanical Clock标题下的C段。该段第2句提到,只有当地时间存在,并没有宇宙时间之河,本题中的a universal reference of time是原文no universalriver of time的同义改写。
转载请注明原文地址:https://kaotiyun.com/show/38Y7777K
0
大学英语四级
相关试题推荐
EndangeredPeoplesA)Today,itisnotdistance,butculturethatseparatesthepeoplesoftheworld.Thecentralquestionofour
Chinesepeoplehavetheirownculturewhenitcomestogivinguniquebabygiftsorrelatives’gifts.Whenitisanew-bornbaby,
A、Checkhisbookrecordoften.B、Applyforajobasalibraryassistant.C、Usehismiddlenameaswell.D、Gotoanotherlibrary
A、HebelievesthatJohnwon’tquithisjob.B、HebelievesthatJohnwillresignhisjob.C、John’sparentshavespoilthimtoomu
A、TheBritish.B、TheAmericans.C、TheRomans.D、TheRussians.C细节题。文中提到,罗马人首先使用记载式广告,他们把墙上的部分区域磨平并且刷白,然后写上或刻上广告,故答案为C)。
A、TheyarebothanxioustotryItalianfood.B、Theyarelikelytohavedinnertogether.C、Themanwilltreatthewomantodinner
A、Americansociety.B、Americanculture.C、Americans’personality.D、Americans’activity.C主旨大意题。题目是对文章主旨大意的考查。文章谈到了美国人的独立性、对待友谊
JusticeisoneofthemostpopularcoursesinHarvard’shistory.Nearlyonethousandstudents【B1】______Harvard’shistoricSanders
A、Theymayattackhumanbeingsinthefarm.B、Theycausedabortionoffarmanimals.C、Theydestroythefarmcrops.D、Theyhavev
TheWorldHealthOrganizationiscallingforurgentinternationalactiontopreventmillionsofchildrenfromdyingeveryyeara
随机试题
A.流感病毒B.轮状病毒C.两者均是D.两者均非核酸分节段()
2岁男童,因夜间多惊醒、烦躁,头部枕秃而就诊。查体,囟门尚未闭合,乳牙未萌出。X线检查干骺端临时钙化带模糊。该病的病因是
不属于预警评价指标的构建应遵循原则的内容是()。
甲股份有限公司(以下简称“甲公司”)于2015年1月1日正式动工兴建一栋办公楼,工期预计为1年,工程采用出包方式,合同约定分别于2015年1月1日、7月1日和10月1日支付工程进度款1500万元、3500万元和2000万元。甲公司为建造办公楼借入两笔专门借
下列有关外币财务报表折算的表述中错误的是()。
2016年1月10日,甲公司向乙公司签发一张转账支票,P银行为付款人,甲公司在该支票上记载了“违约金5万元”的字样。甲公司在该支票上并未记载收款人名称,但授权乙公司补记。乙公司在支票上补记自己为收款人后,将该支票背书转让给丙公司。丙公司于2017年3月20
人们经常将少林寺大雄宝殿称为“三宝殿”是因为里面供奉着三尊佛像。
同一测试内部各题目所测的是一种行为或行为特征,说明()较高。
请认真阅读下列材料,并按要求作答。
资本主义政治制度本质上是资产阶级进行政治统治和社会管理的手段和方式,是为资产阶级专政服务的,因此它不可避免地有其历史的和阶级的局限性,包括
最新回复
(
0
)