题目内容
Although SF seems to take as its future social settings nothing more ambiguous than the current status quo or its totally evil variant, SF is actually a more important vehicle for speculative visions about macroscopic social change. At this level, it is hard to deal with any precision as to when general value changes or evolving social institutions might appear, but it is most important to think about the kinds of societies that could result from the rise of new forms of interaction, even if one cannot predict exactly when they might occur.
In performing this "what if…" function, SF can act as a social laboratory as authors ruminate upon the forms social relationships could take if key variables in their own societies were different, and upon what new belief systems or mythologies could arise in the future to provide the basic rationalizations for human activities. If it is true that most people find it difficult to conceive of the ways in which their society, or human nature itself, could undergo fundamental changes, then SF of this type may provoke one's imagination—to consider the diversity of paths potentially open to society.
Moreover, if SF is the laboratory of the imagination, its experiments are often of the kind that may significantly alter the subject matter even as they are being carried out. That is, SF has always had a certain cybernetic effect on society, as its visions emotionally engage the future—consciousness of the mass public regarding especially desirable and undesirable possibilities. The shape a society takes in the present is in part influenced by its image of the future; in this way particularly powerful SF images may become self-fulfilling or self-avoiding prophecies for society. For that matter, some individuals in recent years have even shaped their own life styles after appealing models provided by SF stories. The reincarnation and diffusion of SF futuristic images of alternative societies through the media of movies and television may have speeded up and augmented SF's social feedback effects. Thus SF is not only change speculator but change agent, send an echo from the future that is becoming into the present that is sculpting it. This fact alone makes imperative in any education system the study of the kinds of works discussed in this section.
In discussing the subject matter of SF, the author focuses on
查看答案
搜索结果不匹配？点我反馈
更多问题
EI Nino means "the little boy" or "the Christ child" in Spanish, and is so called because its warm current is felt along coastal Peru and Ecuador around Christmas. But the local warming is just part of an intricate set of changes in the ocean and atmosphere across the tropical Pacific, which covers a third of the Earth's circumference. Its intensity is such that it affects temperatures, storm tracks and rainfall around the world.
Droughts in Africa and Australia, tropical storms in the Pacific, torrential rains along the Californian coast and lush greening of Peruvian deserts have all been ascribed to the whim of EI Nino. Until recently it has been returning about every three to five years. But recently it has become more frequent—for the first time on record it has returned for a fourth consecutive year—and at the same time a giant pool of unusually warm water has settled clown in the middle of the Pacific and is showing no signs of moving.
Climatologists don't yet know why, though some are saying these aberrations may signal a worldwide change in climate. The problem is that nobody really seems sure what causes the EI Nino to start up, and what makes some stronger than others. And this makes it particularly hard to explain why it has suddenly started behaving so differently.
In the absence of EI Nino and its cold counterpart, La Nina, conditions in the tropical eastern Pacific are the opposite of those in the west: the east is cool and dry, while the west is hot and wet. In the east, it's the winds and currents that keep things cool. It works like this. Strong, steady winds, called trade winds, blowing west across the Pacific drag the surface water along with them. The varying influence of the Earth's rotation at different latitudes, known as the Coriolis effect, causes these surface winds and water to veer towards the poles, north in the northern hemisphere and south in the southern hemisphere. The surface water is replaced by colder water from deeper in the ocean in a process known as upwelling.
The cold surface water in turn chills the air above it. This cold dense air cannot rise high enough for water vapor to condense into clouds. The dense air creates an area of high pressure so that the atmosphere over the equatorial eastern Pacific is essentially devoid of rainfall.
The writer begins the text with
Towards euro's creep into British economy, the views of Neil Kinnock and David Southwell are
In exploring the effect of El Nino, the author mainly focuses on
A．meansB．styleC．mediumD．way
微信支付 
支付宝支付