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What does the sentence "I'm only trying to inject levity into an extremely grim picture" (para.4) imply？
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"Qandary" (para.6) is closest to ______.
听力原文： As we all know, when machines work they give off a lot of noise, and the noise can sometimes be very unpleasant, or annoying. As a result, people have been trying to find ways to reduce noise. Although it may sound a bit strange to you all, one of the best ways to make machines quieter, in cars for example, may be to make them noisier. The source of this paradox is electronic anti-noise which creates sound waves to cancel out unwanted noise, such as rattles, blare, etc.
Now although the idea dates back to the 1930s, it's only recently that advances in computer technology have made anti-noise a commercial possibility. Take France for example. Here industry spends a fortune to get rid of noise. We all know how unpleasant it is. Both people working in factories and ordinary people at home enjoying their leisure can be affected by noise. Delicate machines are affected by noise as well. The government has passed a lot of regulations concerning acceptable levels of noise.
Noise is costly to industry. In the first place, just following a single regulation can cost 1 to 2 billion US dollars in the textile industry, they say.
Then secondly, of course, vibration can cause damage to machinery. Even very small vibrations can cause parts to wear out and equipment to fail. And naturally enough, this gets added on to the price of the products. About 5% to 15% of the price of a product comes from noise and vibration costs, it's estimated.
At present, methods used to dampen down noise and vibrations rely on techniques that are 30 or 40 years old. They usually involve wrapping the noisy or vibrating component in anything from cotton to concrete. But this is often expensive and inefficient.
The modern electronic anti-noise devices don't reduce sound. Instead, sound is used to attack sound. The trick is to hit these sound waves with other waves in a carefully controlled way. It may not be possible to eliminate noise completely, but engineers can build systems to eliminate specific kinds of noise and vibration. The new systems can deal with repetitive noise. This unfortunately means that there is not much that can be done about one-off noise, like someone trying to learn to play a trumpet. But they can handle fairly regular things like engine noise.
A French company has developed a technique which uses a microphone and a microprocessor. The processor measures the sound and directs a speaker to broadcast sound waves that are out of phase with the engine noise. The company claimed that it will make a car engine quieter, if not completely 100% silent. There are a number of other areas of application in the noisy, industrial environment of today. One system which the company is developing, aims to minimize the noise of aircraft engines and helicopter vibrations. Now anti-noise systems would be able to reduce noise in the cabin of an airplane to mere acceptable levels.
Another area which affects ordinary households nowadays concerns the noise which electricity and gas suppliers create. The electricity companies spend a lot of money each year, cutting the harm of transformers, trying to quiet the noise and maintaining equipment that is constantly affected by vibration. If they can get rid of or even stop the vibrations, manufacturers can increase production speeds. But, of course, people working in noisy workplaces are perhaps more affected than anything by the effects of noise. Anti-noise can also create "zones of quiet" in noisy workplaces. To create such a zone, you do two things.
First, microphones are suspended around the workplace. Then speakers that produce out-of- phase sound waves can then be put close to the worker under the desk or the machine. A company working in this area has tested this system and says that it cuts noise levels enough for somebody inside the zone to hear a conversation from anoth
Because on top of the wrenching change affecting essentially every non-online media, here comes a very scary-looking economic downturn.
Think of the recession, says Barclays analyst Anthony DiClemente, "as a vine growing up a wall. Except instead of a healthy vine, like at Wrigley [Field], it's like—'feed me, Seymour'— from The Little Shop of Horrors. "
Forgive the surfeit of pop-culture jokes. I'm only trying to inject levity into an extremely grim picture. According to ad tracker TNS Media Intelligence, which provided all such figures for this column, automotive and financial services were the No. 1 and No. 3 U. S. ad categories last year. We all know what happened to the latter in recent months. In 2007, Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, and Washington Mutual spent $ 213.1 million on advertising. Even if those companies' new owners spend something to reassure old customers, you're likely looking at a nine- figure sum sucked out of the ad marketplace by those guys alone. And when major carmakers report sales drops of 30%, boffo ad buys do not follow. Ford Motor's ad spending was down over 31% for the first half of this year. Car sales' slide has accelerated since. In case you're wondering, the No.2 ad category was retail, which is now under severe pressure as consumers spend less.
The consequences of all this contraction are readily apparent when you talk to key media executives. Magazines sell ads long before they appear, and advertisers already are making noises about cutting back in the first half of 2009, says one senior executive in that industry. "Everyone says they are going to keep advertising in a downturn," says another executive, who has run major sales organizations in different media. "But not everyone actually does it. That's just the reality of having to report earnings and profits." And while the wealthiest consumer may remain relatively untouched, those who have recently traded up to high-end products may slam the brakes on such consumption, raising chances that luxury advertisers will be affected, too. Food looks more likely to stay stable. One mordant TV executive puts it this way. "The auto industry is out. And Campbell's Soup is in. "
How the dollars flow—or rather don't flow—in any downturn can shape events in ways obscured until much later. As strange as it sounds today, the tech bust that started in 2000 meant that total dollars spent on online display advertising declined 21% between 2001 and 2002. And as strange as it sounds today, many established media organizations used that decline as a rationale for deemphasizing the Web in favor of their traditional businesses—and underinvestment allowed all manner of Web-only startups to outflank them in the one medium that's still growing. While online display ads will still be up in '09, says BMO Capital Markets analyst Leland Westerfield, that growth rate will likely slow. Look for search advertising to hold up, so Google should be hurt the least.
Elsewhere, Barclay's DiClemente suggests, the slowdown's effects will move up a media ladder of sorts, starting with newspapers, magazines, radio, local TV, and then hitting broadcast and—possibly—cable TV. There's a "high probability," he says, that the "advertising malaise spreads to network TV"—the one long-running medium that's held steadiest as others have fallen off.
DiClemente is forecasting a 5.5% pullback in ad spending next year, with only Web and cable TV posting ad upticks. It may be hard to conjure a scenario worse than today's, given what radio, local TV, and newspapers are currently experiencing. This has been a year, in which many unthinkable things have happened—newspaper executives,
教学设计是联系教育理论与教学实践的桥梁，有利于教师的创造性发挥。 ()
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