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Text 3People in business can use foresight to identify new products and services, as well as markets for those products and services. An increase in minority populations in a neighborhood would prompt a grocer with foresight to stock more foods linked to ethnic tastes. An art museum director with foresight might follow trends in computer graphics to make exhibits more appealing to younger visitors. Foresight may reveal potential threats that we can prepare to deal with before they become crises. For instance, a corporate manager with foresight might see an alarming rise in local housing prices that could affect the availability of skilled workers in the region. The public’s changing values and priorities, as well as emerging technologies, demographic shifts, economic constraints (or opportunities), and environmental and resource concerns are all parts of the increasingly complex world system in which leaders must lead. People in government also need foresight to keep systems running smoothly, to plan budgets, and to prevent wars. Government leaders today must deal with a host of new problems emerging from rapid advances in technology. Even at the community level, foresight is critical: School officials, for example, need foresight to assess numbers of students to accommodate, numbers of teachers to hire, new educational technologies to deploy, and new skills for students (and their teachers) to develop. Many of the best-known techniques for foresight were developed by government planners, especially in the military, when the post-World War Ⅱ atomic age made it critical to "think about the unthinkable" and prepare for it. Pioneering futurists at the RAND Corporation (the first "think tank") began seriously considering what new technologies might emerge in the future and how these might affect U.S. security. These pioneering futurists at RAND, along with others elsewhere, refined a variety of new ways for thinking about the future. The futurists recognized that the future world is continuous with the present world, so we can learn a great deal about what may happen in the future by looking systematically at what is happening now. The key thing to watch is not events (sudden developments or one-day occurrences) but trends (long-term ongoing shifts in such things as population. land use, technology, and governmental systems). Using these techniques and many others, futurists now can tell us many things that may happen in the future. Some are nearly certain to happen, such as the continuing expansion in the world’s population. Other events are viewed as far less likely, but could be extremely important if they do occur, such as an asteroid colliding with the planet. According to the text, the most important for the futurists to grasp is ______.
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Read the following text. Choose the best word or phrase for each numbered blank and mark A, B, C or D on ANSWER SHEET 1. With Airbus’s giant A380 airliner about in to take to the skies, you might think planes could not get much bigger — and you would be right. For a given design, it turns (21) , there comes a point where the wings become too heavy to generate (22) lift to carry their own weight. (23) a new way of designing and making materials could (24) that problem. Two engineers (25) University College London have devised an innovative way to customise and control the (26) of a material throughout its three-dimensional structure. In the (27) of a wing, this would make possible a material that is dense, strong and load-bearing at one end, close to the fuselage, (28) the extremities could be made less dense, lighter and more (29) . It is like making bespoke materials, (30) you can customise the physical properties of every cubic millimetre of a structure. The new technique combines existing technologies in a(n) (31) way. It starts by using finite-element-analysis software, of the type commonly used by engineers, (32) a virtual prototype of the object. The software models the stresses and strains that the object will need to (33) throughout its structure. Using this information it is then (34) to calculate the precise forces acting on millions of smaller subsections of the structure. (35) of these subsections is (36) treated as a separate object with its own set of forces acting on it — and each subsection (37) for a different microstructure to absorb those local forces. Designing so many microstructures manually (38) be a huge task, so the researchers apply an optimisation program, called a genetic algorithm, (39) This uses a process of randomization and trial-and-error to search the vast number of possible microstructures to find the most (40) design for each subsection.
Read the following text. Choose the best word or phrase for each numbered blank and mark A, B, C or D on ANSWER SHEET 1. With Airbus’s giant A380 airliner about in to take to the skies, you might think planes could not get much bigger — and you would be right. For a given design, it turns (21) , there comes a point where the wings become too heavy to generate (22) lift to carry their own weight. (23) a new way of designing and making materials could (24) that problem. Two engineers (25) University College London have devised an innovative way to customise and control the (26) of a material throughout its three-dimensional structure. In the (27) of a wing, this would make possible a material that is dense, strong and load-bearing at one end, close to the fuselage, (28) the extremities could be made less dense, lighter and more (29) . It is like making bespoke materials, (30) you can customise the physical properties of every cubic millimetre of a structure. The new technique combines existing technologies in a(n) (31) way. It starts by using finite-element-analysis software, of the type commonly used by engineers, (32) a virtual prototype of the object. The software models the stresses and strains that the object will need to (33) throughout its structure. Using this information it is then (34) to calculate the precise forces acting on millions of smaller subsections of the structure. (35) of these subsections is (36) treated as a separate object with its own set of forces acting on it — and each subsection (37) for a different microstructure to absorb those local forces. Designing so many microstructures manually (38) be a huge task, so the researchers apply an optimisation program, called a genetic algorithm, (39) This uses a process of randomization and trial-and-error to search the vast number of possible microstructures to find the most (40) design for each subsection.
Text 4When they were children, Terri Schiavo’s brother Bobby accidentally locked her in a suitcase. She tried so hard to get out of the suitcase that she jumped up and down and screamed. The scene predicted, horribly, how she would end, though by that stage she had neither walked nor talked for more than 15 years. By the time she finally died on March 31st, her body had become a box out of which she could not escape. More than that, it had become a box out of which the United States government, Congress, the president, the governor of Florida and an army of evangelical protestors and bloggers would not let her escape. Her life, whatever its quality, became the property not merely of her husband (who had the legal right to speak for her) and her parents (who had brought her up), but of the courts, the state, and thousands of self-appointed medical and psychological experts across the country. The chief difference between her case and those of Karen Quinlan and Nancy Cruzan, much earlier victims of Persistent Vegetative State (PVS), was the existence of the internet. When posted videotapes showed Mrs Schiavo apparently smiling and communicating with those around her, doctors called these mere reflex activity, but to the layman they seemed to reveal a human being who should not be killed. On March 20th, a CAT scan of Mrs Schiavo’s brain — the grey matter of the cerebral cortex more or less gone, replaced by cerebrospinal fluid — was posted on a blog. By March 29th, it had brought 390 passionate and warring responses. All this outside interference could only exacerbate the real, cruel dilemmas of the case. After a heart attack in February 1990, when she was 26, Mrs Schiavo’s brain was deprived of oxygen for five minutes and irreparably damaged. For a while, her family hoped she might be rehabilitated. Her husband Michael bought her new clothes and wheeled her round art galleries, in case her brain could respond. By 1993, he was sure it could not, and when she caught an infection he did not want her treated. Her parents disagreed, and claimed she could recover. From that point the family split, and litigation started. Each side, backed by legions of supporters, accused the other of money-grubbing and bad faith. A Florida court twice ordered Mrs Schiavo’s feeding tube to be removed and Jeb Bush, the governor of Florida, overruled it. The final removal of the tube, on March 18th, was followed by an extraordinary scene, in the early hours of March 21st, when George Bush signed into law a bill allowing Mrs Schiavo’s parents to appeal yet again to a federal court. But by then the courts, and two-thirds of Americans, thought that enough was enough. On March 24th the Supreme Court declined to hear the case. From the last paragraph we may infer that on Schiavo’s case ______.
Read the following text. Choose the best word or phrase for each numbered blank and mark A, B, C or D on ANSWER SHEET 1. With Airbus’s giant A380 airliner about in to take to the skies, you might think planes could not get much bigger — and you would be right. For a given design, it turns (21) , there comes a point where the wings become too heavy to generate (22) lift to carry their own weight. (23) a new way of designing and making materials could (24) that problem. Two engineers (25) University College London have devised an innovative way to customise and control the (26) of a material throughout its three-dimensional structure. In the (27) of a wing, this would make possible a material that is dense, strong and load-bearing at one end, close to the fuselage, (28) the extremities could be made less dense, lighter and more (29) . It is like making bespoke materials, (30) you can customise the physical properties of every cubic millimetre of a structure. The new technique combines existing technologies in a(n) (31) way. It starts by using finite-element-analysis software, of the type commonly used by engineers, (32) a virtual prototype of the object. The software models the stresses and strains that the object will need to (33) throughout its structure. Using this information it is then (34) to calculate the precise forces acting on millions of smaller subsections of the structure. (35) of these subsections is (36) treated as a separate object with its own set of forces acting on it — and each subsection (37) for a different microstructure to absorb those local forces. Designing so many microstructures manually (38) be a huge task, so the researchers apply an optimisation program, called a genetic algorithm, (39) This uses a process of randomization and trial-and-error to search the vast number of possible microstructures to find the most (40) design for each subsection.
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