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A．Above allB．In a wordC．As a resultD．For example
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The reigning notion today is that the laws of economics are not, after all, suspended in cyberspace like the laws of gravity in outer space. Content needs to be paid for on the Web just as in any other medium. And it probably has to be paid for the same way most other things are paid for. by the people who use it. We tried charging the customers at Slate. It didn't work. Future experiments may be more successful. But meanwhile, let's look again at this notion that in every medium except the Internet, people pay for the content they consume. It's not really true.
TV is the most obvious case. A few weeks ago a producer from "Nightline" contacted Slate while researching a possible show on the crisis of content on the Internet. He wanted to know how on earth we could ever be a going business if we gave away our content for free. I asked how many people pay to watch "Nightline". Answer none. People pay for their cable or satellite transmission, and they pay for content on HBO, but "Nightline" and other broadcast programs thrive without a penny directly from viewers. There are plenty of differences, of course, and the ability of Web sites to support themselves on advertising is unproven. But "Nightline" itself disproves the notion that giving away content is suicidal.
Now, look at magazines. The money that magazine subscribers pay often doesn't even cover the cost of persuading them to subscribe. A glossy monthly will happily send out $20 of junk mail—sometimes far more to find one subscriber who will pay $12 or $15 for a yearly subscription. Why？ Partly in the hope that she or he will renew again and again until these costs are covered. But for many magazines including profitable ones—the average subscriber never pays back the cost of finding, signing and keeping him or her. The magazines need these subscribers in order to sell advertising.
Most leading print magazines would happily send you their product for free, if they had any way of knowing (and proving to advertisers) that you read it. Advertisers figure, reasonably, that folks who pay for a magazine are more likely to read it, and maybe see their ad, than those who don't. So magazines make you pay, even if it costs them more than they get from you.
This madcap logic doesn't apply on the Internet, where advertisers pay only for ads that have definitely appeared in front of someone's "eyeballs". They can even know exactly how many people have clicked on their ads. So far advertisers have been insufficiently grateful for this advantage. But whether they come around or not, there will never be a need on the Internet to make you pay just to prove that you're willing. So maybe the Internet's first great cliché had it exactly backward: Information has been free all along. It's the Internet that wants to enslave it.
The predominant idea of today is that
The Nicaraguan Sign Language (NSL) emerged in the late 1970s, at a new school for deaf children. Initially the children were instructed by teachers who could hear. No one taught them how to sign; they simply worked it out for themselves. By conducting experiments on people who attended the school at various points in its history, Dr. Senghas has shown how NSL has become more sophisticated over time. For example, concepts that an older signer uses a single sign for, such as rolling and falling, have been unpacked into separate signs by youngsters.
Early users, too, did not develop a way of distinguishing left from right. Dr. Senghas showed this by asking signers of different ages to converse about a set of photographs that each could see. One signer had to pick a photograph and describe it. The other had to guess which photograph was being described.
When all the photographs contained the same elements, merely arranged differently, older people, who had learned the early form. of the language, could neither signal which photo they meant, nor understand the signals of their younger partners. Nor could their younger partners teach them the signs that indicate left and right. The older people clearly understood the concept of left and right, they just could not converse about it a result that bears on the vexing question of how much language merely reflects the way the brain thinks about the world, and how much it actually shapes such thinking.
For a sign language to emerge spontaneously, though, deaf children must have some inherent tendency to tie gestures to meaning. Spoken language, of course, is frequently accompanied by gestures. But, as a young researcher, Dr. Goldin-Meadow suspected that deaf children use gestures differently from those who can hear. In a 30-year-long project carried out on deaf children in America and Taiwan, whose parents can hear normally, she has shown that this is true.
Even deaf children who have no deaf acquaintances use signs as words. The order the signs come in is important. It is also different from the order of words in either English or Chinese. But it is the same, for a given set of signs and meanings, in both America and Taiwan.
Curiously enough, the signs produced by children in Spain and Turkey, whom Dr. Goldin-Meadow is also studying, while similar to each other, differ from those that American and Taiwanese children produce. Dr. Goldin-Meadow is not certain why that is. However, the key commonality is that their spontaneously created languages resemble fully-formed languages.
The Nicaragua Sign Language is__________.
Travel medicine has also been colonized by commercial interests—the vast majority of travel clinics in Britain are run by airlines or travel companies. And while travel concerns are happy to sell profitable injections, they may be less keen to spread bad news about travelers' diarrhea in Turkey, or to take the time to spell out preventive measures travelers could take. "The NHS consultant finds it difficult to define travelers' health," says Ron Behrens, the only NHS consultant in travel and tropical medicine and director of the travel clinic of the Hospital for Tropical Diseases in London. "Should it come within the NHS or should it be paid for？ It's a grey Tropical Diseases in London area, and opinion is split. No one seems to have any responsibility for defining its role," he says.
To compound its low status in the medical hierarchy, travel medicine has to rely on statistics that are patchy at best. In most cases we just don't know how many Britons contract diseases when abroad. And even if a disease is linked to travel there is rarely any information about where those afflicted went, what they ate, how they behaved, or which vaccinations they had. This shortage of hard facts and figures makes it difficult to give detailed advice to people, information that might even save their lives.
A recent leader in the British Medical Journal argued: "Travel medicine will emerge as a credible discipline only if the risks encountered by travelers and the relative benefits of public health interventions are well defined in terms of their relative occurrence, distribution and control." Exactly how much money is wasted by poor travel advice？ The real figure is anybody's guess, but it could easily run into millions. Behrens gives one example. Britain spends more than fl million each year just on cholera vaccines that often don't work and so give people a false sense of security. "Information on the prevention and treatment of all forms of diarrhea would be a better priority," he says.
Travel medicine in Britain is________.
Part A
Directions: Read the following four texts. Answer the questions below each text by choosing A, B, C or D. (40 points)
The past 40 years have witnessed an extraordinary evolution. From slow expensive machines controlled by punched cards, computers have become low-cost, powerful units taking up no more space than a briefcase. Simultaneously, our world has become interlaced with telephone wires, optic fibers, undersea cables, microwave links, television channels and satellite communications.
At the crossing of these two developments stands the Internet—a direct result of computer technology intersecting with communication technology. But for many in the world of today's media, this is merely a first landmark in what promises to be a giant upheaval in the way people communicate, relax and work. This is the era of digital convergence.
According to a recent article in Scientific American, convergence is in principle "the union of audio, video and data communications into a single source, received on a single device, delivered by a single connection." Digital technology has already provided a medium for integrating media that until now required distinct channels of communication: we can now send emails using our televisions or text messages over mobile phones. Real-time video can be transmitted over radio channels, while television and radio can be received on Personal Computers.
Full digital convergence promises real-time access to information anywhere in the world, and global communication through text, graphics, video and audio. In fact, there seems to be no technological limit to what might be possible. "The reality of 'anywhere, anytime' access to broadband digital networks is going to make our lives freer and fuller," Gerald Levin, chief executive officer of AOL Time Warner, has promised. But technology alone cannot bring about such a world, as long as consumers and companies do not embrace it, convergence is likely to go the way of several hyped-up predecessors.
Over a decade ago, for example, virtual reality was the technology of the future, and many people anticipated a day where we would be wearing head-mounted displays and interacting with all manner of virtual environments. At the time there was real concern about changes in industrial practices and social behavior. brought about by this technology. So what happened to this vision？ Well, we got it wrong. Currently, the home computer is the main interface to the Internet. But relatively few people in the world have access to PCs, and few would argue that they are ideal for the purpose—they can crash and freeze because they were not designed for widespread Internet use.
In this text the extraordinary evolution refers to______.
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