原文：
A
When rubber was first commercially produced in Europe during the nineteenth century, it rapidly became a very important commodity, particularly in the fields of transportation and electricity. However, during the twentieth century a number of synthetic materials, called plastics, superseded natural rubber in all but a few applications.
B
Rubber is a polymer – a compound containing large molecules that are formed by the bonding of many smaller, simpler units, repeated over and over again. The same bonding principle – polymerization – underlies the creation of a huge range of plastics by the chemical industry.
C
The first plastic was developed as a result of a competition in the USA. In the 1860s, $10, 000 was offered to anybody who could replace ivory – suppliers of which are declining – with something equally good as a material for making billiard balls. The prize was won by John Wesley Hyatt with a material called celluloid. Celluloid was made by dissolving cellulose, a carbohydrate derived from plants, in a solution of camphor dissolved in ethanol. This new material rapidly found used in the manufacture of products such as knife handles, detachable collars and cuffs, spectacle frames and photographic film. Without celluloid, the film industry could never have got off the ground at the end of the 19th century.
D
Celluloid can be repeatedly softened and reshaped by heat, and is known as a thermoplastic. In 1907 Leo Baekeland, a Belgian chemist working in the USA, invented a different kind of plastic by causing phenol and formaldehyde to react together. Baekeland called the material Bakelite, and it was the first of the thermosets – plastics that can be cast and moulded while hot, but cannot be softened by heat and reshaped once they have set. Bakelite was a good insulator, and was resistant to water, acids and moderate heat. With these properties it was soon being used in the manufacture of switches, household items, such as knife handles and electrical components for cars.
E
Soon chemists began looking for other small molecules that could be strung together to make polymers. In the 1930s, British chemists discovered that the gas ethylene would polymerise under heat and pressure to form a thermoplastic they called polythene. Polypropylene followed in the 1950s. Both were used to make bottles, pipes and plastic bags. A small change in the starting material – replacing a hydrogen atom in ethylene with a chlorine atom – produced PVS (polyvinyl chloride), a hard, fireproof plastic suitable for drains and gutters. And by adding certain chemicals, a soft form of PVC could be produced, suitable as a substitute for rubber in items such as waterproof clothing. A closely related plastic was Teflon, or PTFE (polytetrafluoroethylene). This had a very low coefficient of friction, making it ideal for bearings, rollers and non-stick frying pans. Polystyrene, developed during the 1930s in Germany, was a clear. Glass-like material, used in food containers, domestic appliances and toys. Expanded polystyrene – a white, rigid foam – was widely used in packaging and insulation. Polyurethanes, also developed in Germany, found uses as adhesives, coatings, and – in the form of rigid foams – as insulation materials. They are all produced from chemicals derived from crude oil, which contains exactly the same elements – carbon and hydrogen – as many plastics.
F
The first of the man-made fibres, nylon, was also created in the 1930s. Its inventor was a chemist called Wallace Carothers, who worked for the Du Pont company in the USA. He found that under the right conditions, two chemicals- hexamethylenediamine and adipic acid – would form a polymer that could be pumped out through holes and stretched to form long glossy threads that could be woven like silk. Its first use was to make parachutes for the US armed forces in World War Ⅱ. In the post-war years nylon completely replaced silk in the manufacture of stockings. Subsequently many other synthetic fibres joined nylon, including Orlon, Acrilan and Terylene. Today most garments are made of a blend of natural fibres, such as cotton ansd wool, and man-made fibres that make fabrics easier to look after.
G
The great strength of plastic is its indestructibility. However, this quality is also something of a drawback: beaches all over the world, even on the remotest islands, are littered with plastic bottles that nothing can destroy. Nor is it very easy to recycle plastics, as different types of plastics are often used in the same items and call for different treatments. Plastics can be made biodegradable by incorporating into their structure a material such as starch, which is attacked by bacteria and caused the plastic to fall apart. Other materials can be incorporated that gradually decay in the sunlight – although bottles made of such materials have to be stored in the dark, to ensure that they do not disintegrate before they have been used.
答案：
14. photographic film
15. Bakelite
16. switches
17. Britain 或 UK
18. fireproof
19. clear and glass-like
20. rigid
21. FALSE
22. NOT GIVEN
23. FALSE
24. TRUE
25. FALSE
26. TRUE
第二篇：THE GAP ofINGENUITY 创新空白
原文：
A
Ingenuity, as Idefine it here, consists not only of ideas for new technologies like computersor drought-resistant crops but, more fundamentally,of ideas for better institutions and social arrangements, like efficient marketsand competent governments. B
How much and whatkinds of ingenuity a society requires depends on a range of factors, includingthe society's goals and the circumstances within which it must achieve thosegoals——whether it hasa young population or an aging one, an abundance of natural resources or ascarcity of them, an easy climate or a punishing one, whatever the case may be.
C
How much and whatkinds of ingenuity a society supplies also depends on many factors, such as thenature of human inventiveness and understanding, the rewards an economy givesto the producers of useful knowledge, and the strength of political oppositionto social and institutional reforms.
D
A good supply ofthe right kind of ingenuity is essential, but it isn't, of course, enough byitself. We know that the creation of wealth, for example, depends not only onan adequate supply of useful ideas but also on the availability of other, moreconventional factors of production, like capital and labor. Similarly,prosperity, stability and justice usually depend on the resolution, or at leastthe containment, of major political struggles over wealth and power. Yet withinour economics ingenuity often supplants labor, and growth in the stock ofphysical plant is usually accompanied by growth in the stock of ingenuity. Andin our political systems, we need great ingenuity to set up institutions thatsuccessfully manage struggles over wealth and power. Clearly, our economic andpolitical processes are intimately entangled with the production and use ofingenuity.
E
The past century’s countless incremental changes in our societiesaround the planet, in our technologies and our interactions with oursurrounding natural environments have accumulated to create a qualitatively newworld. Because these changes have accumulated slowly, It’s often hard for us to recognize how profound andsweeping they've. They include far larger and denser populations; much higherper capita consumption of natural resources; and far better and more widelyavailable technologies for the movement of people, materials, andespecially information. F
In combination,these changes have sharply increased the density, intensity, and pace of ourinter actions with each other; they have greatly increased the burden we placeon our natural environment; and they have helped shift power from national andinternational institutions to individuals and subgroups, such as politicalspecial interests and ethnic factions.
G
As a result,people in all walks of life-from our political and business leaders to all ofus in our day-to-day——must cope with much more complex, urgent, and oftenunpredictable circumstances. The management of our relationship with this newworld requires immense and ever-increasing amounts of social and technicalingenuity. As we strive to maintain or increase our prosperity and improve thequality of our lives, we must make far more sophisticated decisions, and inless time, than ever before.
H
When we enhancethe performance of any system, from our cars to the planet's network offinancial institutions, we tend to make it more complex. Many of the naturalsystems critical to our well-being, like the global climate and the oceans, areextraordinarily complex to begin with. We often can't predict or manage thebehavior of complex systems with much precision, because they are often verysensitive to the smallest of changes and perturbations, and their behavior canflip from one mode to another suddenly and dramatically. In general, as thehuman-made and natural systems we depend upon become more complex, and as ourdemands on them increase, the institutions and technologies we use to managethem must become more complex too, which further boosts our need for ingenuity.
I
The good news,though, is that the last century's stunning changes in our societies andtechnologies have not just increased our need for ingenuity; they have alsoproduced a huge increase in its supply. The growth and urbanization of humanpopulations have combined with astonishing new communication and transportationtechnologies to expand interactions among people and produce larger, moreintegrated, and more efficient markets. These changes have, in turn, vastlyaccelerated the generation and delivery of useful ideas.
J
But—and this is the critical "but"——we should not jump to the conclusion that the supply ofingenuity always increases in lockstep with our ingenuity requirement: Whileit's true that necessity is often the mother of invention, we can't always relyon the right kind of ingenuity appearing when and where we need it. In manycases, the complexity and speed of operation of today's vital economic, social,arid ecological systems exceed the human brains grasp. Very few of us have morethan a rudimentary understanding of how these systems work. They remain fraughtwith countless "unknown unknowns," which makes it hard to supply theingenuity we need to solve problems associated with these systems.
k
In this book,explore a wide range of other factors that will limit our ability to supply theingenuity required in the coming century. For example, many people believe thatnew communication technologies strengthen democracy and will make it easier tofind solutions to our societies' collective problems, but the story is lessclear than it seems. The crush of information in our everyday lives isshortening our attention span, limiting the time we have to reflect on criticalmatters of public policy, and making policy arguments more superficial.
L
Modern marketsand science are an important part of the story of how we supply ingenuity.Markets are critically important, because they give entrepreneurs an incentiveto produce knowledge. As for science, although it seems to face no theoreticallimits, at least in the foreseeable future, practical constraints often slowits progress. The cost of scientific research tends to increase as it delvesdeeper into nature. And science's rate of advance depends on the characteristicof the natural phenomena it investigates, simply because some phenomena areintrinsically harder to understand than others, so the production of useful newknowledge in these areas can be very slow. Consequently, there is often acritical time lag between the recognition between a problem and the deliveryof sufficient ingenuity,in the form of technologies, to solve that problem. Progress in the socialsciences is especially slow, for reasons we don't yet understand; but wedesperately need better social scientific knowledge to build the sophisticatedinstitutions today’s world demands.
Questions:
Complete eachsentence with the appropriate answer, A, B, C, or D
Write the correctanswer in boxes 27-30 on your answer sheet.
27 The definitionof ingenuity
28 Therequirement for ingenuity
29 The creationof social wealth
30 The stabilityof society
A depends on manyfactors including climate.
B depends on themanagement and solution of disputes.
C is not only oftechnological advance, but more of institutional renovation.
D also depends onthe availability of some traditional resources.
Question 31-33
Choose thecorrect letter, A, B, C, or D.
Write youranswers in boxes 31-33 on your answer sheet.
31 What does theauthor say about the incremental change of the last 100 years?
A It has become ahot scholastic discussion among environmentalists.
B Itssignificance is often not noticed.
C It has reshapedthe natural environments we live in.
D It benefited amuch larger population than ever.
32 Thecombination of changes has made life.
A easier
B faster
C slower
D lesssophisticated
33 What does theauthor say about the natural systems?
A Newtechnologies are being developed to predict change with precision.
B Natural systemsare often more sophisticated than other systems.
C Minor alterationsmay cause natural systems to change dramatically.
D Technologicaldevelopments have rendered human being more independent of natural systems.
Question 34-40
Do the followingstatements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 3?
In boxes 34-40 onyour answer sheet, write
YES if thestatement is true
NO if thestatement is false
NOT GIVEN if theinformation is not given in the passage
34 The demand foringenuity has been growing during the past 100 years.
35 The ingenuitywe have may be inappropriate for solving problems at hand.
36 There are veryfew who can understand the complex systems of the present world.
37 Moreinformation will help us to make better decisions.
38 The nextgeneration will blame the current government for their conduct.
39 Science tendsto develop faster in certain areas than others.
40 Social sciencedevelops especially slowly because it is not as important as natural science.
答案：
|Archiver|手机版|小黑屋|雅思托福英语全球网
( 闽ICP备14014910号 )
|
闽公网安备 35020302034732号
发表于 2020-7-20 17:00:35
QQ好友和群
QQ空间
腾讯微博
腾讯朋友
收藏