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
2020-06-21
22
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, oneway, 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).
After the invention of printing press, people no longer had to live by oral tradition and memory.
选项
答案
D
解析
本题的关键词是printing press,故定位应在2.The Printing Press小标题下的D段。该段第6句提到,在印刷机发明之前,就算是识字的人也只能是活在口头传述及大脑记忆的世界里,本题所述与此相符,故选D。
转载请注明原文地址:https://kaotiyun.com/show/xSd7777K
0
大学英语四级
相关试题推荐
A、Thelivesoftheirparents.B、Makingabetterlifeforallpeople.C、ThetroubleinAmericanfamilies.D、Thestrongopinions.
A、BecausetheydoubtedthereliabilityoftheInternet.B、Becausetheythoughtthingsonlinewereexpensive.C、Becausetheywere
A、HesaidallIraqiswereAmerica’senemy.B、Hementionedthereasonofeconomicthreat.C、HesaidthewarwasvitaltoAmerican
A、Buyflowersfromaflowershop.B、Inviteeveryonetheyknow.C、Askparentstopayforthewedding.D、Buyasecond-handwedding
A、Hewastheownerofatavern.B、Hewasjustaschoolboy.C、Hepaidhisfather’sdebts.D、Theauthordidn’tmention.D事实细节题。抓住此
A、Abook.B、$3,000.C、Ahandbag.D、AChristmascard.D题目询问什么东西据称被盗走了。文章首句提到“该店冤枉她偷了一张圣诞贺卡”,故答案为D。
A、HesaidallIraqiswereAmerica’senemy.B、Hementionedthereasonofeconomicthreat.C、HesaidthewarwasvitaltoAmerican
Researchershaveidentified1.4millionanimalspeciessofar—andmillionsremaintobediscovered,named,andscientificallyde
A、AteammembercalledBlakewasinjuredB、Christmaswascoming.C、Theycan’tscoremanygoals.D、Theystillhavesomeinfluence
随机试题
癃闭的病位,主要在()(1995年第70题)
7岁男孩,喘息1.5d,发热半日。近2年反复出现喘息,已发作8次,夜间明显,抗生素治疗无明显效果。其父有过敏性鼻炎病史。体检:肺部可闻及哮呜音,大汗淋漓、端坐呼吸,口唇发绀,体温38.4℃,呼吸50次/分,心率154次/分。发作期该患儿的饮食护理哪项不
下列说法错误的是()。
对投资者来说,债券赎回条款的不利体现在( )。
假定某国在一定时期内的劳动产出弹性和资本产出弹性分别是0.4和0.6,劳动力和资本的年增长率分别是2%和5%。如果该国在这一时期年经济增长速度为6%,则全要素生产率的增长率是()。
近年来。不少公司竞相开发“训练大脑”的游戏软件,市面上已有几十种益智游戏软件。尽管这类软件说明书写得五花八门,但涉及其功能时不外乎强调两点:“增强诸如注意力、记忆力和信息处理速度等大脑功能”:“减缓大脑随年龄增长而不可避免的功能下降的速度”。几乎所有的这类
本问卷设计了“在过去的两年中,您直接参与公共政策制定的次数是多少”的问题,旨在考查公民参与公共政策制定的频次,了解社会性别对参与次数的影响。该问题为单项选择问题,备选答案有六项:0次、1~2次、3次、4次、5次、6次以上。共有1383人进行了回答,其中,男
假设DAT为字节变量,下列三条指令中功能相同的是()。Ⅰ.MOVAL,DAT[2]Ⅱ.MOVAL,DAT+2Ⅲ.MOVAL,2[DAT]
将考生文件夹下PENG文件夹中的文件BLuE.WPS移动到考生文件夹下ZHU文件夹中,并将该文件改名为RED.WPS。
Whatkindofcourseisthemanseeking?Howlongdoesthemanwanttostudy?
最新回复
(
0
)