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Passage 4 Futurologists have not been very precise about how and how much digital media will change our lives. Most of comments have focused on the expectation that consumers will soon be able to use their TV or PC to shop, bank and order movies from their armchairs. Commentators envisage more dramatic change to everyday life. Nucholas Negroponte, director of MIT’s Media Lab, believes that a key development over the next five years will be the "personalization" of the computer, with wearable devices such as a wrist-mounted TV, computer and telephone. Peter Cochrane, head of research at British Telecom, looks further ahead, asking us to "imagine a virtual reality interface, with your visual context flooded by information from spectacle-mounted or contact lenses augmented by directional audio input, tactile gloves and prosthetic arms and fingers that will give you the sensation of touch, resistance and weight". Historically, enthusiasts for new technologies have usually been over-optimistic about the speed of change. Most new technologies take longer to be adopted by the general public than these enthusiast experts, although there have been exceptions: once they had reached critical mass, VCRs and mobile phones took off faster than most experts predicted. Arguably, everyday life in the advanced economies changed more between the 1880s and the 1930s than in the last fifty years or, possibly, the next. Nevertheless, it is valid to talk about a digital "revolution", since the extent of change is dramatic by many standards and digital technology is its biggest single driving force. Even if the enthusiasts overstate how quickly things will change, they may turn out to be right about the scale of that change. At this stage, no one knows how the digital revolution will develop. Although the technology itself is now becoming somewhat more predictable, exactly how, and how fast things will change will depend not Only on technological developments but also on the policies of key commercial and political players, especially in the US, Less predictable is how enthusiastically consumers will take to this technology on an everyday, mass market scale. Least predictable are the sociocultural and geopolitical responses: Will the digital revolution lead to greater international understanding or bitter rivalry Will it encourage materialism and erode religious belief, or lead to religious backlash Will it make people happier What is the passage mainly about
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Questions 18～20 are based on a talk introducing American adult education programs. You now have 15 seconds to read Questions 18～20. Which of the following is true according to the talk
Passage 2 Signs of deafness bad given him great anxiety as early as 1778. For a long time he successfully concealed it from all but his mast intimate friends. The touching document addressed to his brothers in 1802, and known as his "Will" should be read in its entirety. He reproached men for their injustice in thinking and calling him pugnacious, stubborn, and misanthropical when they did not know that for six years he had suffered from an incurable condition aggravated by incompetent doctors. He dwelled upon his delight in human society from which he had had so early to isolate himself, but the thought of which now filled him with dread as it made 14ira realize his loss, not in music — but in all finer interchange of ideas. He requested that after his death his present doctor shall be asked to describe his illness and to append it to his document in order that at least then the world might be as far as possible reconciled with him. He left his brothers property, such as it was, if more conventional than the rest of the document. During the last twelve years of his life, his nephew was the cause of most of his anxiety and distress. His brother, Kaspar Karl died in 1815, leaving a widow and a son The boy turned out utterly unworthy of his uncle’s persistent devotion and gave him every cause for anxiety. He failed in all his examinations, including an attempt to learn some trade in the polytechnic school, whereupon he fell into the hands of the police for at- tempting suicide, and after being expelled from Vienna, joined the army. Beethoven’s utterly simple nature could neither educate nor understand a human being who was not possessed by the wish to do his best. His nature was passionately affectionate, and he has suffered all his life from the want of a natural outlet for it. He had often been deeply in love and made no secret of it; there was no one that was not honorable and respected by society as showing the truthfulness and self-control of a great man. Beethoven’s orthodoxy in such matters has provoked the smiles of Philistines, especially when it showed itself in his objections to Mozart, Don Giovanni and the grounds for selecting the subject of Fidelio for his own opera. The last thing that Philistines will never understand is that genius is far too independent of convention to abuse it; and Beethoven’s life, with all its mistakes, its grotesqueness, and its pathos, is as far beyond the shafts of Philistine wit as his art. Beethoven’s contemporaries thought that he was ______.
Passage 3 During the adolescence, the development of political ideology becomes apparent in the individual: ideology here is defined as the presence of roughly consistent attitudes, more or less organized in reference to a more encompassing set of general principles. As such, political ideology is dim or absent at the beginning of adolescence. Its acquisition by the adolescent, in even the most modest sense, requires the acquisition of relatively sophisticated cognitive skills; the ability to manage abstractness, to synthesize and generalize, to imagine the future. These are accompanied by a steady advance in the ability to understand principles. The child’s rapid acquisition of political knowledge also promotes the growth of political ideology during adolescence. By knowledge I mean more than the dull "facts" such as the composition of country government, that the child is exposed to in the conventional ninth-grade school course. Nor do I mean only information on current political realities. These are facts of knowledge, but they are less critical than the adolescent’s absorption of a feeling for those many unspoken assumptions about the political system that comprise the common ground of understanding, for example, what the state can "appropriately" demand of its citizens, and vice versa, or the "proper" relationship of government to subsidiary social institutions, such as the schools and churches. Thus, political knowledge is the awareness of social assumptions and relationships as well as of objective facts. Much of the naivete that characterizes the younger adolescent’s grasp of politics stems not from an ignorance of "facts" but from an incomplete comprehension of the common conventions of the system, of which is and not customarily done, and of how and why it is or is not done. Yet I do not want to over-emphasize the significance of increased political knowledge in forming adolescent ideology, Over the years I have become progressively disenchanted about the centrality of such knowledge and have come to believe that much current work in political socialization, by relying too heavily on its apparent acquisition, has been misled about the tempo of political understanding in adolescence. Just as young children can count numbers in series without grasping the principle of ordination, young adolescents may have in their heads many random hits of political information without a secure understanding of those concepts that would give order and meaning to the information. Children’s minds pick up bits and pieces of data, but until the adolescent has grasped the encompassing function that concepts and principles provide, the data remain fragmented, random, disordered. The author uses the term "common ground of understanding" to refer to ______.
Passage 1 For centuries, explorers have risked their lives venturing into the unknown for reasons that were to varying degrees economic and nationalistic. Columbus went west to look for better trade routes to the Orient and to promote the greater glory of Spain. Lewis and Clark journeyed into the American wilderness to find out what the US had acquired when it purchased Louisiana, and the Appolo astronauts rocketed to the moon in a dramatic show of technological muscle during the cold war. Although their missions blended commercial and political-military imperatives, the explorers involved all accomplished some significant science simply by going where no scientists had gone. Today Mars looms as humanity’s next great terra incognita. And with doubtful prospects for a short- term financial return, with the cold war a rapidly fading memory and amid a growing emphasis on international cooperation in large space ventures, it is-clear that imperatives other than profits or nationalism will have to compel human beings to leave their tracks on the planet’s reddish surface. Could it be that science. which has long played a minor role in exploration, is at last destined to take a leading role The question naturally invites a couple of others: Are there experiments that only humans could do on Mars Could those experiments pro- vide insights profound enough to justify the expense of sending people across interplanetary space With Mars the scientific stakes are arguably higher than they have ever been. The issue of whether life ever existed on the planet, and whether it persists to this day, has been highlighted by mounting evidence that the Red Planet had abundant stable, liquid water and by the continuing controversy over suggestions that bacterial fossils rode to Earth on a meteorite from Mars. A more conclusive answer about life on Mars, past or present, would give researchers invaluable data about the range of conditions under which a planet can generate the complex chemistry that leads to life, If it could be established that life arose independently on Mars and Earth, the finding would provide the first concrete clues in one of the deepest mysteries in all of science: the prevalence of life in the universe. At present, a probable inducement for countries to initiate large-scale space ventures is ______.
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