Technology is the application of knowledge to production. Thanks to modern (S1) ______ we have been able to increase greatly the (S2) ______of our work force. New machines and new methods have helped (S3) ______ down time and expense while increasing overall out put. This has meant more production and a higher standard of living. For most of us in America, modern technology is thought of as the (S4) ______ why we can have cars and television sets. Furthermore, technology has also (S5) ______ the amount of food available to us, by means of modern farming machinery and animal breeding techniques, and has extended our life span via medical technology. Will mankind continue to live longer and have a higher (S6) ______ of life To a great extent, the answer (S7) ______ on technology and our ability to use it widely. (S8) _______________________ The advancement of technology depends upon research and development, and the latest statistics show that the United States is continuing to pump billions of dollars annually into such efforts. So while we are running out of some scarce resources, (S9) _______________________. Therefore, in the final analysis the three major factors of production -- land, labor and capital -- are all influenced by technology. When we need new skills on techniques in medicine, people will start developing new technology to meet those needs. (S10) ____________________. S5
TEXT E Rabies is an ordinarily infectious disease of the central nervous system, caused by a virus and, as a rule, spread chiefly by domestic dogs and wild flesh-eating animals. Man and all warm-blooded animals are susceptible to rabies. The people of ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome ascribed rabies to evil spirits because ordinarily gently and friendly animals suddenly became vicious and violent without evident cause and, after a period of maniacal behaviour, became paralysed and died. Experiments carried out in Europe in the early nineteenth century of injecting saliva from a rabid dog into a normal dog proved that the disease was infectious. Preventive steps, such as the destruction of stray dogs, were taken and by 1826 the disease was permanently eliminated in Norway, Sweden and Denmark. Though urban centres on the continent of Europe were cleared several times during the nineteenth century, they soon became reinfected since rabies was uncontrolled among wild animals. During the early stages of the disease, a rabid animal is most dangerous because it appears normal and friendly, but it will bite at the slightest provocation. The virus is present in the sailvary glands(腺) and passes into the saliva so that the bite of the infected animal introduces the virus into a fresh wound. If no action is taken, the virus may become established in the central nervous system and finally attack the brain. The incubation(潜伏期) period varies from ten days to eight months or more, and the disease develops more quickly the nearer to the brain the wound is. Most infected dogs become restless, nervous, and irritable and vicious, then depressed and paralysed. With this type of rabies, the dog’s death is inevitable and usually occurs within three to five days after the onset of the symptoms. Anti-rabies vaccine(疫苗) is widely used nowadays in two ways. Dogs may be given three-year protection against the disease by one powerful injection, while persons who have been bitten by rabid animals are given a course of daily injections over a week or ten days. The mortality rate from all types of bites from rabid animals has dropped from 9% to 0.5%. In rare cases, the vaccine will not prevent rabies in human beings because the virus produces the disease before the person’s body has time to build up enough resistance. Because of this, immediate vaccination is essential for anyone bitten by an animal observed acting strangely and the animal should be captured circumspectly, and examined professionally or destroyed. Once a person, infected, he should______.
A. be isolated immediately
B. be observed in hospital
C. be given vaccinatio at once
D. be examinated professionally
TEXT B One thing that distinguishes the online world from the real one is that it is very easy to find things. To find a copy of The Economist in print, one has to go to a news-stand, which may or may not carry it. Finding it online, though, is a different proposition. Just go to Google, type in "economist" and you will be instantly directed to economist.com. Though it is difficult to remember now, this was not always the case. Indeed, until Google, now the world’s most popular search engine, came on to the scene in September 1998, it was not the case at all. As in the physical world, searching online was a hit-or-miss affair. Google was vastly better than anything that had come before: so much better, in fact, that it changed the way many people use the web. Almost overnight, it made the web far more useful, particularly for non- specialist users, many of whom now regard Google as the internet’ s front door. The recent fuss over Google’s stock market flotation obscures its far wider social significance: few technologies, after all, are so influential that their names become used as verbs. Google began in 1998 as an academic research project by Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, who were then graduate students at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. It was not the first search engine, of course. Existing search engines were able to scan or "crawl" a large portion of the web, build an index, and then find pages that matched particular words. But they were less good at presenting those pages, which might number in the hundreds of thousands, in a useful way. Mr Brin’s and Mr Page’s accomplishment was to devise a way to sort the results by determining which pages were likely to be most relevant. They did so using a mathematical recipe, or algorithm, called PageRank. This algorithm is at the heart of Google’s success, distinguishing it from all previous search engines and accounting for its apparently magical ability to find the most useful web pages. Untangllng the web PageRank works by analysing the structure of the web itself. Each of its billions of pages can link to other pages, and can also, in turn, be linked to. Mr Brin and Mr Page reasoned that if a page was linked to many other pages, it was likely to be important. Furthermore, if the pages that linked to a page were important, then that page was even more likely to be important. There is, of course, an inherent circularity to this formula--the importance of one page depends on the importance of pages that link to it, the importance of wb4ch depends in turn on the importance of pages that link to them. But using some mathematical tricks, this circularity can be resolved, and each page can be given a score that reflects its importance. The simplest way to calculate the score for each page is to perform a repeating or "iterative" calculation (see article). To start with, all pages are given the same score. Then each link from one page to another is counted as a "vote" for the destination page. Each page’s score is recalculated by adding up the contribution from each incoming link, which is simply the score of the linking page divided by the number of outgoing links on that page. (Each page’s score is thus shared out among the pages it links to.) Once all the scores have been recalculated, the process is repeated using the new scores, until the scores settle down and stop changing (in mathematical jargon, the calculation "converges"). The final scores can then be used to rank search results: pages that match a particular set of search terms are displayed in order of descending score, so that the page deemed most important appears at the top of the list. Which of the following is NOT true
A. Each page can be given a score that reflects its importance.
B. In the beginning of rating a page’s relative importance, all pages are given the same score.
C. The importance of one page depends on the importance of pages that link to it, the importance of which depends in turn on the importance of pages that link to them.
D. One page’s score is given totally to another page it links to.