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
No revolutions in technology have as visibly marked the human condition as those in transport. Moving goods and people, they hav
No revolutions in technology have as visibly marked the human condition as those in transport. Moving goods and people, they hav
admin
2015-05-12
44
问题
No revolutions in technology have as visibly marked the human condition as those in transport. Moving goods and people, they have opened continents, transformed living standards, spread diseases, fashions and folk around the world. Yet technologies to transport ideas and information across long distances have arguably achieved even more: they have spread knowledge, the basis of economic growth.
The most basic of all these, the written word, was already ancient by 1000. By then China had, in basic form, the printing press, using carved woodblocks. But the key to its future, movable metal type, was four centuries away. The Chinese were hampered by their thousands of ideograms. Even so, they quite soon invented the primitive movable type, made of clay, and by the 13th century they had the movable wooden type. But the real secret was the use of an easily cast metal.
When it came, Europe — aided by simple Western alphabets — leapt forward with it. One reason why Asia’s civilizations, in 1000 far ahead of Europe’s, then fell behind was that they lacked the technology to reproduce and diffuse ideas. On Johannes Gutenberg’s invention in the 1440s were built not just the Reformation and the Enlightenment, but Europe’s agricultural and industrial revolutions too.
Yet information technology on its own would not have got far. Literally: better transport technology too was needed. That was not lacking, but here the big change came much later: it was railways and steamships that first allowed the speedy, widespread
dissemination
of news and ideas over long distances. And both technologies in turn required people and organizations to develop their use. They got them: for individual communication, the postal service; for wider publics, the publishing industry.
Throughout the 19th century, the postal service formed the bedrock of national and international communications. Crucial to its growth had been the introduction of the stamp, combined with a low price, and payment by the sender. Britain put all three of these ideas into effect in 1840.
By then, the world’s mail was taking off. It changed the world. Merchants in America’s eastern cities used it to gather information, enraging far-off cotton growers and farmers, who found that New Yorkers knew more about crop prices than they did. In the American debate about slavery, it offered abolitionists a low-cost way to spread their views, just as later technologies have cut the cost and widened the scope of political lobbying. The post helped too to integrate the American nation, tying the newly opened west to the settled east.
Everywhere,
its development
drove and was driven by those of transport. In Britain, travelers rode by mail coach to posting inns. In America, the post subsidized road-building. Indeed, argues Dan Schiller, a professor of communications at the University of California, it was the connection between the post, transport and national integration that ensured that the mail remained a public enterprise even in the United States, its first and only government-run communications medium, and until at least the 1870s, the biggest organization in the land.
The change
has not only been one of speed and distance, though, but of audience. About 200 years ago, a man’s words could reach no further than his voice, not just in range but in whom they reached. But, for some purposes, efficient communication is mass communication, regular, cheap, quick and reliable. When it became possible, it transformed the world.
The word "dissemination" underlined in Paragraph 4 means______.
选项
A、plantation
B、distribution
C、reception
D、direction
答案
B
解析
转载请注明原文地址:https://kaotiyun.com/show/VOgO777K
本试题收录于:
CATTI二级笔译综合能力题库翻译专业资格(CATTI)分类
0
CATTI二级笔译综合能力
翻译专业资格(CATTI)
相关试题推荐
EmmawasspeciallytrainedbeforetryingtoswimtheEnglishchannel,andafterhavingatoughtimewiththeroughandcoldwate
Ourape-menforefathershadnoobviousnaturalweaponsinthestruggleforsurvivalintheopen.Theyhadneitherthe【C1】_______
Inthe1960s,DouglasMcGregor,oneofthekeythinkersintheartofmanagement,developedthenowfamousTheoryXandTheoryY
Cultureisactivityofthought,andreceptivenesstobeautyandhumanefeeling.【C1】________ofinformationhavenothingtodowit
Salestactics,likeadvertising,reflectaspectsofthebasicassumptionsandvaluesthatprevailinacountry.Bycarefullylis
Asalways,IampleasedtobehereattheNationalPressClubformy(1)Speech.ThisistheseventhtimeIhavehadthe(2)to
TheMeToomovementinIndiagained【C1】______lastyearwhenpopularfiguresdecidedtocomeoutwiththeirstoriesofsexualabu
Iwouldn’ttrustsucha______person.
Everyoneshouldgetthedimetoday,oritwillbetoolatetogetthecontract.
Accordingtothespeaker,evenAmericaissufferingfromeconomicdepression,theAmericaneconomywillsoonberecoveredifAme
随机试题
护士小刘在书写日间交班报告时,在下列患者中首先应写
按照计算机病毒存在的媒体进行分类;病毒可以划分为网络病毒、文件病毒和混合病毒。
当人们认识物体时,物体所处的条件可能发生改变,但人们仍然能把它认出来,这是知觉的()
5岁女孩,因活动后气促2年就诊。体检:体格较瘦小,无发绀,双肺呼吸音清,P2亢进、分裂,胸骨左缘第2、3肋间闻及2/6级收缩期杂音。
(2007年)在不同进制的数中,下列最小的数是()。
下列各项中,注册会计师在确定特剐风险时不需要考虑的是()。
接受学习理论的提出者是布鲁纳。()
论述张之洞《劝学篇》“中体西用”思想。
普通的有线电视公司提供给他的客户50个电视频道,但新的光纤可以让电话公司提供给他的客户100至150个电视频道,收取的价格和有线电视公司一样,只要50元,因此,在几年内有线电视公司将被提供新的电视服务的电话公司所取代。下面哪个选项最有助于强化上面的论述?
YouuseittoWriteandsende-mails.PeoplecanMakeclothesWithit.
最新回复
(
0
)