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
25
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).
Nikola Tesla invented alternating current technology that enabled electricity to be transmitted over long distances.
选项
答案
G
解析
本题与“电”相关,定位应在5.The Electrical Grid标题下的G段。该段第2句与本题所述相符。
转载请注明原文地址:https://kaotiyun.com/show/A8Y7777K
0
大学英语四级
相关试题推荐
WriteacompositionentitledStudents’Part-timeJobs.Youshouldwriteatleast120wordsbutnomorethan180wordsaccording
PutonghuareferstoModernStandardChinese,orsimplyModernChinese.ItisthecommonlanguageoftheHannationality"withit
A、Pickupthepaperonthe12th.B、Finishtheassignmentearly.C、Typeoutthepaperbeforehandingitin.D、Makefullpreparati
Stuntpeople(替身演员)arenotmoviestars,buttheyarethehiddenheroesofmanymovies.Theywerearoundlongbeforefilms.E
A、Bybringingananimalrarelyseenonnearbyfarms.B、Bybringingabagofgraininexchangeforaticket.C、Byofferingtodo
ReachingnewpeaksofpopularityinNorthAmericaisIcebergWater,whichisharvestedfromicebergsoffthecoastofNewfoundl
JusticeisoneofthemostpopularcoursesinHarvard’shistory.Nearlyonethousandstudents【B1】______Harvard’shistoricSanders
TheWorldHealthOrganizationiscallingforurgentinternationalactiontopreventmillionsofchildrenfromdyingeveryyeara
Accordingtonewgovernmentfigures,pollutionlevelsarerisingagainafterseveralyearsofgradualdecline.Data【C1】_____
Threekeyfactsaboutrisingsealevelsneedtobepointedouttotheworld’spoliticiansandplanners:sea-levelriseisnowin
随机试题
设f(x)具有任意阶导数,且f’(x)=[f(x)]2,则f"’(x)=()
卵子受精部一般是在【】
下列选项中,不属于天王补心丹证临床表现的是
患者男性,64岁。因呕血、黑便2小时入院。既往有慢性乙型肝炎10余年。入院查.ALT124U/L,AST153U/L,总胆红素91μmol/L,血清白蛋白16g/L,凝血酶原时间21s,CO2﹣CP15mol/L,BUN20.5mmol/L,Cr25
2014年7月1日,甲公司、乙公司和张某签订了《个人最高额抵押协议》,张某将其房屋抵押给乙公司,担保甲公司在一周前所欠乙公司货款300万元,最高债权额400万元,并办理了最高额抵押登记,债权确定期间为2014年7月2日到2015年7月1日。债权确定期间内,
索赔台账应反映的内容有()。
汽车金融公司,是指经批准设立的,为中国境内的汽车()提供金融服务的非银行金融机构。
对于存在贷款偿还风险的贷款,都应至少归人关注类贷款。()
教师的哪一种领导方式对学生发展的促进作用最大?()
对精神分裂症有诊断意义的症状是()。
最新回复
(
0
)