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
55
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).
Gear, though a great invention, is excluded from the list because it doesn’t have independent function.
选项
答案
B
解析
本题的关键词是gear“齿轮”,并不在八项发明之列,而本文前两段解释了榜单取舍的标准,其中B段第2句提到作者把没有独立功能的发明排除在外,齿轮就是其中之一,故选B。
转载请注明原文地址:https://kaotiyun.com/show/N8Y7777K
0
大学英语四级
相关试题推荐
A、Becausefoxeskillfarmanimals.B、Becausefoxeslookjustlikefarmdogs.C、Becausefoxesareverycunning.D、Becausefoxesm
A、Theundergroundoilresourceshavenotbeenaffected.B、Mostofthedesertanimalsandplantshavemanagedtosurvive.C、Theo
A、Shedidn’tneedherparents’moneyanymore.B、Shebeginstogetonwellwithherparents.C、Shealwaysstayedwithherparent
Manyyoungpeoplebelievegoodgrades,excellentinternshipswilllandthemtheiridealjob.However,contrarytowhattheythin
A、Pickupthepaperonthe12th.B、Finishtheassignmentearly.C、Typeoutthepaperbeforehandingitin.D、Makefullpreparati
Americansbelievethatindividualsmustlearnto【B1】_______themselvesorrisklosingfreedom.Thismeansachievingbothfinanci
A、NotgiveanysuggestionstoJack.B、NotseeJackanymore.C、NotlistentoJack’swords.D、NotsavehiswordsonJack.A男士说:我告
A、BecausehehasfinishedhisstudyofadvancedMathematics.B、Becausehewantstoenjoyhimselfbeforeexamination.C、Becauseh
Millionsofteenagersareindangerofputtingtheirhealthatriskbygettinghookedone-cigarettes,expertswarn.Leadinghea
A、ThemanhasfalleninlovewiththegirlatfirstsightB、Themanandtheprettywomanwereattractedtoeachother.C、Thewom
随机试题
某新建机场飞行区指标为4F,A施工单位承担跑道施工项目。该机场基层设计为水泥稳定碎石结构层,规范要求基层施工必须采用摊铺机作业,并尽可能消除纵向施工缝。为此,A施工单位拟租赁一台最大摊铺幅宽10m的摊铺机完成基层项目,该机摊铺作业与返回下幅作业起点的行走速
某工程项目施工合同价为560万元,合同工期为6个月,施工合同中规定:(1)开工前业主向施工单位支付合同价20%的预付款。(2)业主自第一个月起,从施工单位的应得工程款中按10%的比例扣留保留金,保留金限额暂定为合同价的5%,保留金到第三个月
甲企业在其银行存款不足1万元的情况下,向业务单位开出一张1.5万元的转账支票,银行可以处予()罚款。
保证遗产计划可变性的重要工具主要是( )。Ⅰ.遗嘱Ⅱ.人寿保险Ⅲ.可撤销信托Ⅳ.赠与
甲公司2013年度销售收入200万元、资金需要量30万元;2014年度销售收入300万元、资金需要量40万元;2015年度销售收入280万元、资金需要量42万元。若甲公司预计2016年度销售收入500万元,采用高低点法预测其资金需要量是()万元。
在对营业收入进行细节测试时,注册会计师对顺序编号的销售发票进行了检查。下列各项中,可以作为检查销售发票的识别特征的是()。
甲公司适用的所得税税率为25%,按净利润的10%提取法定盈余公积。甲公司从2×16年1月1日起将产品保修费用的计提比例由年销售收入的3%改为年销售收入的4%,提高的原因是公司产品质量出现波动,原计提的产品保修费用与实际发生的保修费用出现较大差异,假设甲公司
Everymarketactivityisaninvestmentintime,energyandmoney.Fewcompanieswouldspendalargesumofmoneyon,say,apurc
IfIaskyouwhatconstitutes"bad"eating,thekindthatleadstoobesityandavarietyofconnecteddiseases,you’relikelyto
______consideredthehumanbodyaestheticallysatisfactory.
最新回复
(
0
)