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A history of long and effortless success can be a dreadful handicap, but, if properly handled, it may become a driving force. When the United States entered just such a glowing period after the end of the Second World War, it had a market eight times larger than any competitor, giving its industries unparalleled economies of scale. Its scientists were the world's best, its workers the most skilled. America and Americans were prosperous beyond the dreams of the Europeans and Asians whose economies the war had destroyed.
It was inevitable that this primacy should have narrowed as other countries grew richer. Just as inevitably, the retreat from predominance proved painful. By the mid-1980s Americans had found themselves at a loss over their fading industrial competitiveness. Some huge American industries, such as consumer electronics, had shrunk or vanished in the face of foreign competition. By 1987 there was only one American television maker left, Zenith. (Now there is none: Zenith was bought by South Korea's LG Electronics in July.) Foreign-made cars and textiles were sweeping into the domestic market. America's machine-tool industry was on the ropes. For a while it looked as though the making of semiconductors which America had invented and which sat at the heart of the new computer age, was going to be the next casualty.
All of this caused a crisis of confidence. Americans stopped taking prosperity for granted. They began to believe that their way of doing business was failing, and that their incomes would therefore shortly begin to fall as well. The mid-1980s brought one inquiry after another into the causes of America's industrial decline. Their sometimes sensational findings were filled with warnings about the growing competition from overseas.
How things have changed! In 1995 the United States can look back on five years of solid growth while Japan has been struggling. Few Americans attribute this solely to such obvious causes as a devalued dollar or the turning of the business cycle. Self-doubt has yielded to blind pride. “American industry has changed its structure, has gone on a diet, has learnt to be more quick-witted,” according to Richard Cavanagh, executive dean of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. “It makes me proud to be an American just to see how our businesses are improving their productivity,” says Stephen Moore of the Cato Institute, a think tank in Washington, DC. And William Sahlman of the Harvard Business School believes that people will look back on this period as “a golden age of business management in the United States.”
1. The U.S. achieved its predominance after World WarⅡbecause _____.
A. it had made painstaking efforts towards this goal
B. its domestic market was eight times larger than before
C. the war had destroyed the economies of most potential competitors
D. the unparalleled size of its workforce had given an impetus to its economy
2. The loss of U.S. predominance in the world economy in the mid-1980s is manifested in the fact that its _______.
A. TV industry had withdrawn to its domestic market
B. semiconductor industry had been taken over by foreign enterprises
C. machine-tool industry had collapsed after suicidal actions
D. auto industry had lost part of its domestic market
3. What does the word “casualty” (Last line, Para. 2) mean?
A. Casualness.
B. Victim.
C. Suicidal industry.
D. Domestic market.
4. What can be inferred from the passage?
A. It is human nature to shift between self-doubt and blind pride.
B. Intense competition may contribute to economic progress.
C. The revival of the economy depends on international cooperation.
D. A long history of success may pave the way for further development.
5. The author seems to believe the revival of the U.S. economy in the 1990s can be attributed to ____.
A. the turning of the business cycle
B. the restructuring of industry
C. the improved business management
D. the success in education
What accounts for the great outburst of major inventions in early America—breakthroughs such as the telegraph, the steamboat and the weaving machine? Among the many shaping factors, I would single out the country's excellent elementary schools; a labor force that welcomed the new technology; the practice of giving premiums to inventors; and above all the American genius for nonverbal, “spatial” thinking about things technological.
Why mention the elementary schools? Because thanks to these schools our early mechanics, especially in the New England and Middle Atlantic states, were generally literate and at home in arithmetic and in some aspects of geometry and trigonometry. Acute foreign observers related American adaptiveness and inventiveness to this educational advantage. As a member of a British commission visiting here in 1853 reported, “With a mind prepared by thorough school discipline, the American boy develops rapidly into the skilled workman.”
A further stimulus to invention came from the “premium” system, which preceded our patent system and for years ran parallel with it. This approach, originated abroad, offered inventors medals, cash prizes and other incentives. In the United States, multitudes of premiums for new devices were awarded at country fairs and at the industrial fairs in major cities. Americans flocked to these fairs to admire the new machines and thus to renew their faith in the beneficence of technological advance.
Given this optimistic approach to technological innovation, the American worker took readily to that special kind of nonverbal thinking required in mechanical technology. As Eugene Ferguson has pointed out, “A technologist thinks about objects that cannot be reduced to unambiguous verbal descriptions; they are dealt with in his mind by a visual, nonverbal process... The designer and the inventor... are able to assemble and manipulate in their minds devices that as yet do not exist.” This nonverbal “spatial” thinking can be just as creative as painting and writing. Robert Fulton once wrote, “The mechanic should sit down among levers, screws, wedges, wheels, etc., like a poet among the letters of the alphabet, considering them as an exhibition of his thoughts, in which a new arrangement transmits a new idea.”
When all these shaping forces—schools, open attitudes, the premium system, a genius for spatial thinking—interacted with one another on the rich U.S. mainland, they produced that American characteristic, emulation. Today that word implies mere imitation. But in earlier times it meant a friendly but competitive striving for fame and excellence.
1. According to the author, the great outburst of major inventions in early America was in a large part due to _______.
A. elementary schools
B. enthusiastic workers
C. the attractive premium system
D. a special way of thinking
2. It is implied that adaptiveness and inventiveness of the early American mechanics _______.
A. benefited a lot from their mathematical knowledge
B. shed light on disciplined school management
C. were brought about by privileged home training
D. owed a lot to the technological development
3. Which of the following statements is true according to the text?
A. Patent system came before the premium system.
B. Unlike the premium system, patent system originated abroad.
C. Mechanical technology needs nonverbal thinking.
D. A technologist can deal with devices in a visual, nonverbal process.
4. A technologist can be compared to an artist because _______.
A. they are both winners of awards
B. they are both experts in spatial thinking
C. they both abandon verbal description
D. they both use various instruments
5. The best title for this passage might be _______.
A. Inventive Mind
B. Effective Schooling
C. Ways of Thinking
D. Outpouring of Inventions
It looked just like another aircraft from the outside. The pilot told his young passengers that it was built in 1964. But appearances were deceptive, and the 13 students from Europe and the USA who boarded the aircraft were in for the flight of their lives.
Inside, the area that normally had seats had become a long white tunnel. Heavily padded from floor to ceiling, it looked a bit strange. There were almost no windows, but lights along the padded walls illuminated it. Most of the seats had been taken out, apart from a few at the back, where the young scientists quickly took their places with a look of fear.
For 12 months, science students from across the continents had competed to win a place on the flight at the invitation of the European Space Agency. The challenge had been to suggest imaginative experiments to be conducted in weightless conditions.
For the next two hours, the flight resembled that of an enormous bird which had lost its reason, shooting upwards towards the heavens before rushing towards Earth. The invention was to achieve weightlessness for a few seconds.
The aircraft took off smoothly enough, but any feelings that I and the young scientists had that we were on anything like a scheduled passenger service were quickly dismissed when the pilot put the plane into a 45-degree climb which lasted around 20 seconds. Then the engines cut out and we became weightless. Everything became confused and left or right, up or down no longer had any meaning. After ten seconds of free-fall descent the pilot pulled the aircraft out of its nosedive. The return of gravity was less immediate than its loss, but was still sudden enough to ensure that some students came down with a bump.
Each time the pilot cut the engines and we became weightless, a new team conducted its experiment. First it was the Dutch who wanted to discover how it is that cats always land on their feet. Then the German team who conducted a successful experiment on a traditional building method to see if it could be used for building a future space station. The Americans had an idea to create solar sails that could be used by satellites.
After two hours of going up and down in the plane doing their experiments, the predominant feeling was one of excitement rather than sickness. Most of the students thought it was an unforgettable experience and one they would be keen to repeat.
1. What did the writer say about the plane?
A. It had no seats.
B. It was painted white.
C. It had no windows.
D. The outside was misleading.
2. Before the flight the young scientists felt ______.
A. sick
B. keen
C. nervous
D. impatient
3. What did the pilot do with the plane after it took off?
A. He quickly climbed and then stopped the engines.
B. He climbed and then made the plane fall slowly.
C. He took off normally and then cut the engines for 20 seconds.
D. He climbed and then made the plane turn over.
4. According to the text, the purpose of being weightless was ______.
A. to see what conditions are like in space
B. to prepare the young scientists for future work in space
C. to show the judges of the competition what they could do
D. to make the teams try out their ideas
5. This text was written to ______.
A. encourage young people to take up science
B. describe the process of a scientific competition
C. show scientists what young people can do
D. report on a new scientific technique
Google recently introduced a new service that adds social-networking features to its popular Gmail system. The service is called Buzz, and within hours of its release, people were howling about privacy issues—because, in its original form, Buzz showed everyone the list of people you e-mail most frequently. Even people who weren't cheating on their spouses or secretly applying for new jobs found this a little unnerving.
Google backtracked and changed the software, and apologized for the misstep, claiming that, gosh, it just never occurred to us that people might get upset. “The public reaction was something we did not anticipate. But we've reacted very quickly to people's unhappiness,” says Bradley Horowitz, vice president for product management at Google.
Same goes for Facebook. In December, Facebook rolled out a new set of privacy settings. A spokesman says the move was intended to “empower people” by giving them more “granular” control over their personal information. But many viewed the changes as a sneaky attempt to push members to expose more information about themselves—partly because its default settings had lots of data, like your photo, city, gender, and information about your family and relationships, set up to be shared with everyone on the internet. (Sure, you could change those settings, but it was still creepy.) Facebook's spokesman says the open settings reflect “shifting social norms around privacy.” Ten years after Facebook was founded, he says, “we've noticed that people are not only sharing more information but also are becoming more comfortable about sharing more information with more people.” Nevertheless, the changes prompted 10 consumer groups to file a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission.
What's happening is that our privacy has become a kind of currency. It's what we use to pay for online services. Google charges nothing for Gmail; instead, it reads your Email and sends you advertisements based on keywords in your private messages.
The genius of Google, Facebook, and others is that they've created services that are so useful or entertaining that people will give up some privacy in order to use them. Now the trick is to get people to give up more—in effect, to keep raising the price of the service.
These companies will never stop trying to chip away at our information. Their entire business model is based on the notion of “monetizing” our privacy. To succeed they must slowly change the notion of privacy itself—the “social norm”, as Facebook puts it—so that what we're giving up doesn't seem to valuable. Then they must gain our trust. Thus each new erosion of privacy comes delivered, paradoxically, with rhetoric about how Company X really cares about privacy. I'm not sure whether George Orwell would be appalled or impressed. And who knew Big Brother would be not a big government agency, but a bunch of kids in a Silicon Valley?
1. According to the passage, the original form of Buzz ______.
A. was released to test how people regarded their private rights
B. revolutionized the concept of the social networking function
C. ruined the reputation of Google's well-known Gmail system
D. aroused people's anger at the time it was added to Gmail system
2. It can be inferred from Bradley Horowitz's words that ______.
A. Google thought to promote users' awareness on socializing
B. Google made a mistake in judging their users' needs
C. Google's developing strategies were in tune with users' needs
D. the development of the digital age will change old opinions
3. What does Facebook evaluate about people's tolerance on private information sharing?
A. People can tolerate the private information sharing within the social norms.
B. People are still too conservative to share their private information.
C. People tend to keep up with the change of social norms on privacy.
D. People have tolerated well when their private information has been shared.
4. The ultimate goal of Google, Facebook and others is to ______.
A. upgrade their service to adapt to users' needs
B. ask users to pay more for their service
C. provide more entertainments for online users
D. persuade users to give up rights on privacy
5. What does the author think of some companies' strategies on people's privacy?
A. They intrude people's privacy in tricky disguise.
B. They endeavor to change people's idea on privacy.
C. They frighten people to give up some privacy.
D. They take serious responsibility for people's privacy.