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Tripod is ______.
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American’s life has once again been greatly changed by the new age of science and technology since the Second World War. Everything has speeded up to a tremendous rate. Information is immediate, nobody has to wait to hear any news. There is a television set in every house. There is instant printing which has changed the way that offices and the universities run.
But perhaps the biggest change is the telephone. People no longer write letters to one another. They pick up the telephone. Every house has at least two, sometimes three, four and five telephones. Every office bas many telephones. It speeds things up. And its cost is not much.
Perhaps the biggest difference is in the growth of computers. Computers can think, can remember, can calculate faster than any human brain. A computer can hold more than a million facts in its memory. There are computers that are so big they would fill this entire auditorium with machinery. Businesses and banks are now managed by computers. Parts of the government are managed by computers. Students’ grades, their marks are all managed by computers.
However, if a computer makes a mistake about one of you, it is terribly difficult to correct that mistake. And sometimes a computer does make mistake, never learned by another computer and the same mistake will go into other computers. So in many ways people have become the servants of computers who are bigger and cleverer than they are. Of course, computers speed up every operation because computers can immediately record, remember facts and produce new information that it combines with these facts. It makes science possible. Modem science would not be possible without the computers to do the calculations:
Life is complicated. People need to know many technical skills to get money from a bank. You have to know how to work the automatic teller that will give you your money. You have to know how to use the new punch button telephones. Everything is very complicated. Many Americans find it so complicated, that they try to escape by drinking alcohol. Alcoholism is a major disease in America. Some people take drugs and some people belong to strange religion looking for some meaning in their life. I think perhaps you read about the terrible event in Guyana, when people who belong to a strange religion all committed suicide. This sort of thing would not have happened fifty years ago. It is a by-product of an age that has become too complicated for people to live in happily.
There are many contradictions in American society. Because of the complex way of life people are no longer the optimistic, self- reliant free people that they were when they were pioneers, when they were conquering the new land. Now people are becoming more pessimistic. Very often they are lonely. The doctors who have the most work are psychiatrists trying to help people find ways that they can again be happy. Often efficiency replaces good quality.
We still have two classes of people. Too much money is still in the hands of too few people. The rich capitalists no longer wear black hats and stripped trousers. They have faces that nobody knows because now they are called the "multi - national corporations. "They are the great faceless companies like General Motors, General Fords, United States Steel. There are no longer any faces like Mr. Rockefeller or Mr. Ford. They have become faceless forces, which control our government and control the money. The poorest class is still mostly made up of black people, minority people, Spanish speaking Americans. And the poorest people have not benefited from the new age of science and technology. So Americans are no longer the happy care-free people that they once were.
According to the passage, the characteristic of a highly technological society is ______.
In the late 1960s many people in North America turned their attention to environmental problems, and new steel-and-glass skyscrapers were widely criticized: Ecologists pointed out that a cluster of tall buildings in a city often overburdens public transportation and parking lot capacities.
Skyscrapers are also lavish comsumers, and wasters of electric power. In one recent year, the addition of 17 million square feet of skyscraper office space in New York City raised the peak daily demand for electricity by 120,000 kilowattsenough to supply the entire city of Albany, New York, for a day.
Glass-walled skyscraper's can be especially wasteful. The beat loss (or gain)through a wall of half-inch plate glass is more than ten times that through a typical masonry wall filled with insulation board. To lessen the strain on heating and air-conditioning equipment, builders of skyscrapers have begun to use double- glazed panels of glass, and reflective glasses coated with silver or gold mirror films that reduce glare as well as heat gain. However, mirror-walled skyscrapers raise the temperature of the surrounding air and affect neighboring buildings.
Skyscrapers put a severe strain on a city's sanitation facilities, too. (if fully occupied, the two World Trade Center towers in New York City would alone generate 2.25 million gallons of raw sewage each year-- as much as a city the size of Stanford, Connecticut, which has a population of more than 109,000. )
Skyscrapers also interfere with television reception, block bird flyways, and obstruct air traffic. In Boston in the late 1960s, some people even feared that shadows from skyscrapers would kill the grass on Boston Common.
Still, people continue to build skyscrapers for all the reasons that they have always built them--personal ambition, civic pride, and the desire of owners to have the largest possible amount of rentable space.
The main purpose of the passage is to ______.
The University of Washington
听力原文：Man: So Jane, the changes are certainly quite wide-ranging, aren't they？
Woman: Yes, Oliver, the skills audit, targets, suggestion scheme, training arrangements... the list seems endless...
Man: I suppose different people will react differently - they won't all see the benefits of the changes...
Woman: Sure - and for some people, they'll feel their areas of responsibility are being taken over, become resentful, and the company must tread very carefully here.., because it's the tide of high turnover that the company is trying to stem with these measures. These days, it's often service that's the key to maintaining an edge... so what the company needs to avoid happening in the future is sales decreasing if clients stop feeling they're getting that treatment from happy, motivated staff here...
Man: Mm... I guess it was Human Resources that pushed for the changes, then？
Woman: Well, they were consulted. Actually, they're the kinds of ideas that you might have expected the team system might have generated - because they're quite wide-ranging, not just focused on one aspect. So, I guess it's quite surprising, in a way, that it was the leadership group which authored them.., what's good, I think, is the way they've spent quite an amount of time consulting with management at all levels, so they have a kind of hands-on feel.
Man: So what will affect us first？
Woman: Well, the skills audit, though its real effects won't be apparent for some time. I don't know, I think that was a wasted opportunity, really... It was so thorough, too thorough in fact... I mean, they asked absolutely everyone about absolutely everything because they were so obsessed with wanting to be accurate, but the result is they're just swamped with information.., they didn't need to be that in-depth...
Man: Uh-huh... So is it really these divisional targets that will have the first impact？
Woman: Er, yeah, I suppose.., but then again, there's some poor design involved there... Oh sure, they've carefully calculated how sales move throughout the year, but the point is that it's not only shifting actual products that counts - the targets should really be looking at data on customer satisfaction too, which is certainly a major concern in my section, where we're always looking for ways to keep that high enough to retain customers.
Man: So, are you unconvinced about the suggestions scheme too？
Woman: Er... I just think they should have gone further with it. After all the publicity it's been given, you'd think they'd want to involve everyone.., what you don't want is just the same ideas from the same people all the time... we've got all these short-term workers, they're in and out of organisations all the time.., we should be trying to capture their insights and observations, especially since they won't personally stand to benefit from making suggestions.
Man: And do you think the performance reviews are similarly flawed in their approach？
Woman: Oh, I don't want to seem too negative! The only unfortunate thing there is not incorporating what competitors are doing. We don't want to be saying one of our reps is underperforming at the moment, only to find out that so is everyone in the business at the moment. That could be very unfair, especially on the reps abroad, who are at the mercy of the supply situation too.
Man: And do you think that people have been missed out of the training programmes as well？
Woman: No, there I'm quite positive! They're going to be a real winner, I'm sure. A long time's been spent on trying to get our training right, and I think the final results are great. We've been far too focused on IT training, and' it's much better now that it's broadening out to include more aspects for staff to select from, according to their needs.
Man: So would you see all the changes having a lasting impact？
Woman: Well, they must have some kind of future . . . after all, they're the kind of thing our competitors h
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