题目内容
A．desertB．trainsC．transportationD．goods
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A．got rid ofB．raisedC．avoidedD．lowered
Transportation
For many years in the desert, camels used to be the only form. of transportation(运输). Before the(51)of modern trains, camel trains used to carry all the goods for trading between Central Africa and Europe. Traders sometimes(52)to put together camel trains with 10,000 to 15,000 animals. Each animal often carried(53)400 pounds and could travel twenty miles a day. This form. of transportation was so important that camels were called the "ships of the(54)."
Now modern trains travel across the desert in a very(55)time. One engine can pull as much weight as 135,000(56), In addition, trains use special cars for their load. Refrigerator cars carry food; boxcars carry heavy goods, stock cars carry animals; and tank cars carry oil.
Air travel has changed, too. The earliest planes were biplanes (双翼飞机), with(57)sets of wings. The top speed of this plane was 60 miles per hour. The pilots used to sit or lie on the wings in the. open air. The plane(58)sometimes Stopped in the middle of a trip. it used to be(59)to fly in bad weather. In snow or in rain, the wings frequently became icy. Then the plane might go down.
Mechanical improvements during the First World War changed airplanes. Monoplanes(单翼飞机) took the(60)of biplanes. Pilots flew inside of covered cabins. Still, even these planes were small and expensive. Only(61)people were be able to travel in airplanes.
Now modern jets make air travel possible for all people. No place in the world is more than 24 hours away by jet. Further improvements have(62)the cost of flying, and they have made air travel(63)safer than it used to be. A modern 707 can carry 170 people and can fly at 600 miles per hour. People(64)used to eat, sleep, or watch movies on airplanes.(65)these things are a normal part of air travel!
A．muchB．soC．veryD．such
Nonverbal Thinking in Engineering
Many objects in daily use have clearly been influenced by science. However, their form. and function, their dimensions and appearance, were determined by technologists, designers, inventors, and engineers using nonscientific modes of thought. Many features and qualities of the objects that a technologist thinks about cannot be reduced to clear verbal descriptions; they are dealt with in the mind by a visual, nonverbal process. Pyramids, cathedrals, and rockets exist not because of geometry or thermo-dynamics (动力学), but because they were first the picture in the minds of those who built them.
The creative shaping process of a technologist's mind can be seen in nearly every artifact (人工制品 that exists. For example, in designing a diesel engine, a technologist might express individual (个人的) ways of nonverbal thinking on the machine by continually using an intuitive (直觉的) sense of rightness and fitness. What would be the shape of the combustion chamber (燃烧室)？ Where should the valves (阀) be placed？ Such questions have a range of answers that are supplied by experience, by physical requirement, by limitations of available space, and not in the least by a sense of form. Some decisions, such as wall thickness and pin diameter, may depend on scientific calculations, but the nonscientific component design remains primary.
Design courses, then, should be an essential element of engineering curricula. Nonverbal thinking, a central mechanism in engineering design, involves perceptions, which is the special technique of the artist, not the scientist. Because perceptive processes are not assumed to need "hard thinking", nonverbal thought is sometimes seen as a primitive stage in the development of cognitive processes and inferior to verbal mathematical thought.
If courses in design, which in a strongly analytical (分析的) engineering curriculum provide the background required for practical problem-solving, are not provided, we can expect to encounter silly but costly errors occurring in advanced engineering systems. For example, early modes of high-speed railroad cars loaded with high-tech controls were unable to operate in a snowstorm because the fan sucked snow into the electrical system. Random failures that bring automatic control systems into trouble are a reflection of the chaos that results when design is assumed to be primarily a problem in mathematics.
The passage is mainly concerned with
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