GRE写作素材SectionTwo:ScienceandTechnolo

会计考友 · 发表于 2012-8-15 12:52:21

对于素材中用黑体字的部分，特别建议你熟读，背诵，因为它们在语言和观点上都值得吸收。学习语言的人应该明白，表达能力和思想深度都靠日积月累，潜移默化。从某种意义上说，提高英语写作能力无捷径可走，你必须大段背诵英语文章才能逐渐形成语感和用英语进行表达的能力。这一关，没有任何人能代替你过。
因此，建议你下点苦功夫，把背单词的精神拿出来背诵文章。何况，并不是要求你背了之后永远牢记在心：你可以这个星期背，下个星期忘。这没有关系，相信你的大脑具有神奇的能力。背了工具箱里的文章后，你会惊讶的发现：I can think in English now！
1. Computer in Education

There is a great deal of interest in the use of computers in education. The educational use of computers is called Computer Assisted Instruction, or CAI. Many public schools in the United States have acquired computers and CAI programs to rum on them. School districts are establishing computer resource centers and special training programs to help teachers use computers. In addition, some colleges and universities are beginning to establish computer literacy requirements for graduation. In spite of all this interest in the use of computers in education, some educators and students still may be wondering if this expensive toy is really worth their time and, in some cases, money. The answer is a definite yes: The use of computers in education has important benefits for both students and teachers.

Computers enhance a student’s learning experience in many ways. First of all, the computer has the ability to accommodate individual differences in learning speed because the user (the student) is the one who controls the pace of the lessons. In addition, because a computer is nonjudgmental, the learner does not have to be afraid of reprisal or humiliation when making errors. For example, because computers can repeat information over and over, the user can ask for many repetitions of a lesson without fearing a judgmental response about his or her ability to learn. The beneficial effects of learning in a stress-free atmosphere are well documented. A third advantage of CAI is that computer can give a student immediate feedback. It can tell the student why she or he is wrong as soon as an error is made, and it can even provide an approach hint for figuring out the correct answer.

Not only do computers benefit students, they also make the teacher’s job easier. One advantage lies in the preparation of instructional materials. Schools and colleges can purchase educational computer programs that can be adapted to any learning situation. These systems, called “authoring systems,” are like skeletal lesson plans: The format of several exercises and tests is already planned out; all the teacher adds is the information he or she wants the students to learn (mathematical problems, vocabulary lists, and so forth). The authoring system automatically incorporates these teaching points into its preplanned format and then is ready to be used by several students for a long time. The system can also correct the students’ work and determine and record grades. In addition, the computer offers numerous advantages to teachers in managing their classrooms. A computer laboratory (a room having one computer for every two students) can free the teacher to meet individually with students while the rest of the class is occupied with computer lessons. Finally, computers can help teachers keep student records and chart student progress, thereby cutting down on time—consuming paperwork.”

With all of these advantages for both teachers and students, it is easy to see why there is so much interest in using computers in education. Of course, there are those who are skeptical and view computers as a passing fad. There are those also who simply are afraid of them. In time, however, computers will become as familiar in the classroom as chalkboards are today.

2. Computer Make the Workplace Less Friendly

We have seen the future, and it hurts.

That’s what millions of American office workers are discovering every year as computer come to dominate the office and the mania for ever-increasing profits consumes the work environment. If present sentiments persist, there could be a white-collar revolt, as executives and stenographers alike find that the “office of tomorrow” is just the keypunch counterpart of the sweatshop of yesterday.

会计考友 · 发表于 2012-8-15 12:52:22

One reason for this is the computer’s potential to “deskill” work—to reduce it to simple, repetitive actions. For example, instead of having each worker in an insurance company record an incoming insurance claim and then stay with it through all phases of processing, the job is broken up: One drone does nothing but complete the same log-in forms; another grind out identical letters to different addresses.

Even valued senior employees are burning out as a consequence, of computer monitoring—which affects between 20 and 35 percent of America’s workers, according to a report by the Office of technology Assessment [OTA].

When workers use electronic gear, it is easy to meter work-time to the millisecond, tally breaks and phone calls, or rank a worker’s output against that of his colleagues. Terminals track the number of keystrokes a workers uses in completing a particular project. This is all necessary, managers say, to improve productivity. (Yet the Japanese don’t do it, finding the notion offensive to loyalty and group spirit.)

BankAmerica, for example, paid $1million in 1985 to install a computer system for rating the 3,500 employees in the credit card division on 200 specific work criteria. “I measure everything that moves,” the senior vice president in charge declared.

Workers are less enthusiastic. A Boston insurance-claim keypuncher finds incredible pressure to enter data faster and faster to meet management’s standards. “I’d leave work every day with a terrible headache and pain in my neck and shoulders.” It’s a familiar complaint. An OTA survey of 110 organizations between 1982 and 1986 found that approximately two-third were engaged in some form of computer surveillance, monitoring, standardized pace, or quota systems.

This despite the fact that as early as 1981, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health found that clerical work involving computers and video display terminals produced a higher level of tension than air-traffic control. Proponents of high technology dismissed the findings a transient spasm of adjustment to the new digital workplace. The volume of stress-based complaints continues to rise, however.”

In an atmosphere of computer monitoring, inept work station, inflexible pacing, and nerve-wracking anxiety, workman’s compensation claims based on job stress have more than doubled since 1980, and now account for approximately 15 percent of all occupational disease claims. According to estimates by the OTA, stress-related illness costs business, between $50 and $75 billion per year.

Labor Department figures show that productivity in the services sector—where electronic equipment should have maximum impact and which employs nearly three quarters of all American workers—is scarcely above levels in the mid-1970s, chiefly because of problems understanding and adapting to new technology.

3. Solar Energy

Solar power was an exotic new technology when John Schaeffer graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1972 and helped start a primitive commune in the woods in northern California. He was a tinkerer, and in his spare time he managed to rig up a solar-powered television set so he wouldn’t have to miss his favorite shows. Soon Schaeffer was selling solar panels to his fellow urban refugees. Today Schaeffer’s beard has become a white goatee, and his Real Goods Trading Company has blossomed into a catalog operation that is the country’s largest retailer of home solar equipment. With a circulation of 400,000, the catalog offers everything for the energy-efficient home. The growth of Real Goods—sales have jumped from $29,000 in 1986 to $10 million in 1933—is a small but sharp tremor along the shifting tectonic plates of America’s energy landscape.

Until now, solar energy has appealed mostly to affluent homeowners and the save-the-environment folks. That’s because buying and installing solar equipment can cost $15,000 for an average-size home before any currents starts to flow. What’s making solar energy so hot? For one thing, the technology is getting better and cheaper. The price of the photovoltaic cells that convert sunlight to electricity has fallen sharply from $500 a watt in the 1960s to about $4 today.

会计考友 · 发表于 2012-8-15 12:52:23

Companies are now rushing to break the $2 barrier. Texas Instruments and Southern California Edison have joined forces to produce flexible solar panels from inexpensive low-grade silicon. The innovative technology will allow the panels to be integrated into car and building design and, even more important; will crash the price to $2.50 a watt.

Some of the biggest boosters of solar power are the utility companies, eager for a clean source of electricity that will enable them to produce more power without new billion-dollar plants. Both as consumers of solar technology and as the promoters of home solar panels, utilities will drive much of the industry’s growth into the next century. “Utilities are beginning to realize that they’re going to have to get on the solar bandwagon,” says S. David Freeman, general manager of the Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD). “If they don’t and rates go up sharply, people are going to buy their own solar panels and pull the plug on the utilities.” His company embraced alternative energy when rate payers voted to close its trouble nuclear facility in 1989.

Last month, 68 utilities from New York City to San Francisco formed a consortium to purchase $500 million worth of solar panels over six years. SMUD is putting solar cells on 100 residential roofs a year as part of a five-year pilot project. Encouraged by the response, SMUD has ordered 100,000 more solar panels, enough to generate electricity for 2,400 homes, and is purchasing land for a 100-MW solar furnace that would rival the size of standard power plants.

What SMUD is doing parallels what developing countries have been up to for many years? These nations, which cannot afford to build costly nuclear or fossil-fuel plants in rural areas, now, buy nearly two thirds of all solar panels produced in the U.S. “In Mexico there are 28 million people without electricity, and Mexico has the most ambitious solar electrification program in the world.” Elsewhere, India and Zimbabwe are using World Bank financing to light up remote areas with solar power; India is installing photovoltaic systems in 38,000 villages, and Zimbabwe is bringing sun power to 2,500 villages.

But the era of solar power will have to wait for the cost of converting sunlight to fall enough to pay for the cost of installing a system. “Solar is competitive now if you take the long view,” says SMUD general manager Freeman. “And it’s going to be highly competitive by the end of the decade.” If he’s right, the forecast for the industry in the 21st century is bright and sunny.

4. Micro machines

In the past, one of the biggest disadvantages of machines has been their inability to work on a micro (or tiny) scale. For example, doctors did not have devices allowing them to go inside the human body to identify health problems or to perform delicate surgery. Repair crew did not have a way of identifying broken pipes located deep within a high-rise apartment building. However, that’s about to change. Advances in computers and biophysics have started a micro miniature revolution that’s allowing scientists to envision and in some cases actually build microscopic machines. These devices promise to radically change the way we live and work.

Micromachines already are making an impact. At Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, research scientists have designed a 4-inch silicon chip that holds 700 tiny primitive motors. At Lucas Nova Sensor in Fremont, California, scientists have perfected the world’s first microscopic blood-pressure sensor. Micro machines have captured the interest of a wide range of industries. Automobile manufacturers soon will begin using tiny devices that run on static electricity to sense when to release an airbag and how to keep engines and breaks operating efficiently. Machines like these are likely to appear in airplanes and even space vehicles by the beginning of the next century. Some futurists envision micro machines also being used to explore the deep sea in small submarine, or even to launch finger sized rockets packed with micro miniature instruments.

会计考友 · 发表于 2012-8-15 12:52:24

The applications are most promoting in the medical field. Cardiovascular Imaging Systems in Sunnyvale, California, manufacturers a probe smaller than 1 millimeter that can provide snapshots of a patient’s arteries. It’s currently used in more than 200 cardiology centers around the world. Says Director of Marketing Adam Dakin: “Everybody is trying to create miniaturized devices for invasive surgery. There’s no question that it will play a prominent role in the future.”

Although simple versions of miniature devices have already had an impact, advanced versions and widespread use are still several years away. In Japan, scientists are designing an “intelligent” micro device that can travel through the human digestive tract. And airplanes eventually might be able to twist and adapt their wings to be more efficient and flexible. Artificial body parts might provide total flexibility and full capabilities for people who have lost their natural limbs.

“There is an explosion of new ideas and applications,” says Kurt Petersen, who eight years ago co founded Lucas Nova Sensor. So, when scientists now think about future machines doing large and complex tasks, they’re thinking smaller than ever before.

5. Social Responsible in Science and Arts

Compared with the immediate practical responsibility of the scientist, the responsibility of the artist must seem puny. The decision which faces him is not, I think, one of practical action: of course he will try to throw his weight into the scale, and that weight, if he is a writer or even a painter of genius, may have its effect. For the novelist—in our society the only artist who has a mass audience and at the same time effective economic control of the means of addressing it – the hope of some decisive influence is a reasonable one. For him, since he takes of all artists what is probably the largest portion of his culture as material, there is no more escape from the necessity for treating the content of his work seriously than there is for the social psychologist he is coming so closely to resemble. The dichotomy which people have tried to establish between artistic proficiency and artistic content is becoming unbearable to almost all sensitive minds. I doubt if it has ever been real—we might have admired Shelley as much if he had been indifferent to such things as war and tyranny, though I doubt it; certainly had he been indifferent we should never have been led by him.

There is no Hippocratic Oath in literature, and I am not attempting to draw one up. As far as I am concerned, the artist is a human being writ large and his ethics are the ethics of any human being. Perhaps I can best illustrate what seems to me the new consciousness of those duties of assertion and refusal from one writer, and I do not think it is without significance that this writer projects the whole situation of choice into a scientific parable, the parable of a pestilence: a pestilence many human beings are called to fight against, called not by any supernatural obligation but by the simple fact that the fight against a plague is something like a biological human obligation. Albert Camus seems to me to be the first modern writer, though I am certain he will not be the last, to put the problem of responsibility in specific terms: “ I only know”, he wrote, “that in this world there are pestilences and there are victims, and it is up to us not to ally ourselves with the pestilences.” For the medical scientist, who knows that he may quite well be called upon today to use literal pestilences, of mind and body, in psychological and bacteriological warfare that statement has a meaning clearer, I think, and more imperative than its author intended. But for the scientist as general enemy of pestilences and the artist as general representative of humanity, the basic pestilence which, by its epidemic spread in our time challenges his allegiance, is the same—it is the pestilence which, through the spread of irrational fears and irrational hatreds, through the acceptance of coercion, through the neglect of what one can only call social and personal sanitation in our attitudes to society, leads us to forget who we are and who our fellow men are: the pestilence which exterminates “gooks” or dissidents, which apologizes for torture and massacre in any shape or form, whether it be called for the moment revolution or collective security, the pestilence of atom bombs and concentration camps. In the last resort, there is only one ethically satisfactory reply to that pestilence: an unqualified and unargued “No”. This “No” does not spring, I think, from any idealistic or metaphysical imperative, but simply from the fact that by saying anything else we should cease to be human beings.

会计考友 · 发表于 2012-8-15 12:52:25

6. Environmental Stress

New technologies often cause new form of pollution and environmental stress. Pollution may be defined as the addition to the environment of agents that are potentially damaging to the welfare of humans or other organisms. Environmental stress is a more general term that refers to the effects of society on the natural environment. Pollution is the most common form of environment stress, but it is not the only one.

One example of environmental stress resulting from technology is the surprising finding that winter fish kills in Wisconsin lakes were caused by snowmobiles. Heavy snowmobile use on a lake compacts the snow, thereby reducing the amount of sunlight filtering through the ice and interfering with photosynthesis by aquatic plants. As the plant life dies, its decomposition further reduces the amount of oxygen in the water. The fish then die of asphyxiation.

The fish-plant-oxygen relationship is a natural ecological system. The snowmobile is a technological innovation with a variety of potential uses. The production, marketing, and use of snowmobiles are elements of a social system. It is this social system that is responsible for the environmental stress resulting from snowmobile use. The land available for snowmobiling is increasingly scarce in an urban society like the United States. Frozen lakes near urban centers thus seem ideal for this purpose, but snowmobiles cause environmental stress in the form of fish kills and thereby create the need for new social controls over the uses of this technology.

Often the need for such controls does not become apparent until a great deal of damage has been done. Nor is it ever entirely clear that new social controls or new technologies can solve the problem at hand. For example, we know how to solve the problem of sulfur emissions from burning coal (which cause the acid rain that destroys forests and lakes), but these are costly and hence are politically controversial. Opinion polls have shown that Americans think not enough is being done to improve and protect the environment. A large majority believe environmental quality is declining. But when faced with the higher tax bills and energy rates required to pay the costs of cleaning up the environment, they often protest.

Studies of the impact and social control of technologies are an increasingly active frontier of sociological research. The Environmental Sociology section of the American Sociological Association routinely publishes research reports that assess the polluting and environmentally stressful impacts of technology. Many such studies have shown that the people who bear the heaviest burden of pollution are most often those who are least able to escape its effects. The poor, minorities, and workers and their families in industrial regions are exposed to higher levels of air, water, and solid-waste pollution than more affluent people. But these studies have also shown that the effects of pollution frequently either are not perceived or are denied by the people who feel them most. For example, a random sample survey on perceptions of pollution in two highly polluted mining and lumbering towns in central Canada found that “half of the total number of respondents interviewed either did not perceive a pollution problem at all, or else regarded it as being of very little importance.” The study also found that even among those who did perceive the effects of pollution in the air and water and on the landscape, a huge majority (83-89 percent were “not prepared to do anything about it.”

This is not a surprising finding. People whose livelihoods depend on polluting industries generally learn to tolerate and even ignore the pollution associated with those industries. In fact, when environmental activists protect against the polluting effects of mines and smelters, they often find that their most vocal opponents are those who are most negatively affected by the pollution. In the past twenty years, however, there has been a significant change in attitudes, especially on the part of trade union leaders in polluting industries; such leaders are more likely to press for pollution controls than they were in the past.

会计考友 · 发表于 2012-8-15 12:52:26

In sum, although scientific discoveries and technological advances have produced tremendous improvements in the quality of human life, they have often had negative consequences as well. The risk of cancer caused by the inhalation of asbestos particles, the possibility of large-scale industries accidents, the ethical issues raised by the use of life-prolonging technologies, and the ever-present danger of nuclear holocaust are as much a part of the modern era as space travel, miracle drugs, and computers that can operate whole factories. Although technology is not “out of control,” there is clearly a need for improved procedures for anticipating and preventing the negative consequences of new technologies.

7. High Technology and Employment

The rapid growth of employment in industrial regions like California’s “Silicon Valley,” Route 128 outside Boston, and the “Silicon Prairie” in the Dallas Fort Worth area, as well as in hundred of industrial parks throughout the United States, is viewed as one of the benefits of investment in high-technology industries. The term high technology is associated with computers, advanced electronics, genetic engineering, and other frontiers of technological change, but it is rarely well defined. And without a clear definition of this term it is almost impossible to assess its impact on society.

As the term is used by academics, policymakers, and journalists, high technology refers to at least one of the following features of technology:

An extensive degree of technological sophistication embodied in a product.

A rapid rate of employment growth associated with an innovative product.

A large research and development effort associated with production.

One implication of this definition is that it includes job-creating processes like research and development as well as technologies like computers, which also have created new growth in employment. Yet the employment-producing features of high technology can be problematic. Many high technologies, such as robotics and computer-aided design, are intended to reduce employment by substituting the work of machines guided by computers for human production of all kinds. Early machine technologies tended to replace human labor power, but high technology tends to reduce the need for human brain power. Employment in occupations like drafting and industrial drawing in engineering and architecture, for example, is threatened by the accelerating use of computer design and graphics programs.

8. The Effects of Technology

It should be noted that the effects of new technologies are not always positive. The phrase technological dualism is sometimes used to refer to the fact that technological changes often have both positive and negative effects. The introduction of diesel locomotives, for example, greatly increased the efficiency of railroad operations, but it is also led to the decline and eventual abandonment of railroad towns whose economies were based on the servicing of steam locomotives. Another example is the automation of industrial production. Automation has greatly improved manufacturing process in many industries. It has increased the safety of certain production tasks and led to improved product quality in many cases. But it has also replaced thousands of manual workers with machines, and significant numbers of those workers find themselves unemployed and lacking the skills required by the high-tech occupations of postindustrial society.

Some observers go so far as to say that technology is a danger to the modern world. They feel that it has become an autonomous force that it is out of control. This is a recurrent theme in movies and science fiction-HAL, the computer that takes over the ship in 2001: A Space Odyssey is a good example. But it is also claimed that technology is increasingly independent from human control in the real world. Events like the accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear-power plant in 1979; the toxic gas leak that killed more than 2,000 people in Bhopal, India, in 1984; and the disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear-power plant in the Soviet Union in 1986 seem to indicate that human beings cannot control the technologies they have created.

会计考友 · 发表于 2012-8-15 12:52:27

Sociologists who have studies this issue point out that the problem is not one of humans being dominated by machines but, rather, one of depending on technology to meet a wide and growing range of human needs. The Three Mile Island power plant provided electricity for thousands of homes and businesses; the Bhopal facility produced a pesticide that made possible larger harvests of much needed grain. The result of our dependence on the benefits of complex technologies is an increasingly complex set of organizations and procedures for putting those technologies to work. This requires more human effort and skill, and the chances of error and breakdown are greater. The point is not that technology is out of control but that often there is a lag between the introduction of new technologies and the development of adequate controls over the application of those technologies.

One of the main issues that concerns social scientists in this regard is why such lags occur. Consider the problem known as wind shear. In recent years numerous major plane crashes have been caused by sudden downdrafts associated with severe thunderstorms on the approaches to airport runways. These downdrafts literally slam large aircraft to the ground. Industry and government officials have known about the wind-shear problem since at least 1975, when an Eastern Airlines jet crashed at New York’s Kennedy Airport under such conditions. But not until a similar crash occurred in New Orleans in 1984 were airports ordered to install instruments that could predict such conditions. Why the delay? Some sociologists have argued that the pressure on corporations to show a profit causes them to neglect spending on safety measures. Others, taking a more functionalist view, tend to explain such lags in terms of the time required for organizations to recognize the causes of the problem and develop new statuses and roles to cope with them.

9. Technology and Social Change

The obvious importance of technology to human cultural and social evolution has led some sociologists to view technology as a basic principle of social change. The classic statement of this view is that of William Fielding Ogburn. Ogburn hypothesized that inventions affect the size of populations, which in turn influences the course of history. (For example, overpopulation often leads to wars and migrations.) Some inventions affect population directly: Improvement in sanitation, the development of cures for fatal illnesses, and more effective contraceptive techniques are examples. But inventions can also have indirect effects on population. For example, techniques that improve crop yields or permit long-term storage of food surpluses make it possible to support a larger population with a given amount of farmland. And improvement in military technology (e.g., the use of horses in warfare, the invention of gunpowder, and the development of the armored tank) have had dramatic effects on the conduct of war and hence on population size.

Ogburn also proposed the theory known as cultural leg. In his words, “A cultural lag occurs when one of two parts of culture which are correlated changes before or in greater degree than the other part does, thereby causing less adjustment between the two parts than existed previously”. This theory is most often applied to the adaptation of social institutions to changing technologies. For example, the industrial revolution gave birth to too many kinds of machines, often with moving parts that made them dangerous to use. The rates of injury and death resulting from industrial accidents climbed rapidly in the decades following the introduction of the new machines to the United States around 1870. Such accidents spelled disaster for workers and their families, since it was hard to prove that the employer was responsible for the accident. It was not until around 1910 that the concepts of employer liability and worker’s compensation were adopted, a lag of about forty years.

会计考友 · 发表于 2012-8-15 12:52:28

One problem with the cultural-lag theory is that it fails to account for the effects of social power. For example, workers who sought compensation for the cost of industrial accidents did not have nearly as much power to influence lawmakers as the owners of the machines did. When this power imbalance changed as a result of the labor movement, it became possible to enact legislation that would protect the workers.

The lags described by Ogburn can be at least partially reduced by the process of technology assessment, or efforts to anticipate the consequences of particular technologies for individuals and for society as a whole. The massive plan to reduce air pollution in the Los Angeles Basin described at the beginning of the chapter requires careful assessment. According to the National Environmental Policy Act of 1972 and related state laws, any major action by a public agency that affects the environment must be assessed for its impact on the environment and on the citizens involved. Laws that require technology assessment especially those that require corporations as to abide by the finding of such assessment-tend to increase the power of citizens in communities affected by technological change. They are therefore a source both of conflict and of movements for social reform. In the Los Angeles case, a number of small, inadequately funded environmental organizations were able to force the California Environmental Policy Administration to fund the air pollution plan.

Theories that view technological innovations as a source of social change must also recognize that technological changes do not occur at an even pace. Some analysts, particularly the Soviet economist N.D.Kondratieff, believe that technological innovation follows a cyclical pattern. They have shown that the growth of particular industries produces a “long boom,” a period of economic expansion and prosperity that lasts about twenty-five years and is followed by a period of decline and depression of about the same duration.

It may be that the new technologies of computers and automation will began another long boom or wave of economic growth in the next decade, as many people in advanced industrial societies hope. But it is clear that in the late 1970s the previous long boom, stimulated in part by the availability of cheap energy, was over. A new economic boom therefore may depend on new developments in energy technologies.

10. The Quest for Energy

Throughout human history a central aspect of technological change has been the quest for new sources of energy to meet the needs of growing population. That quest has given rise to a succession of energy technologies, each more sophisticated than the last. Animal power gave way to steam-driven machinery, which in turn was replaced by the internal-combustion engine. Reliance on oil and its derivatives, especially gasoline, encouraged the growth of powerful energy corporations, which often lobby government agencies for assistance in developing new technologies like nuclear energy. And today the technologically advanced nations are attempting to control the fusion reaction, in which hydrogen atoms are fused into helium, thereby producing an enormous release of energy. The implications of this energy technology, if it can be achieved, are staggering. Fusion promises to bring about a major revolution in human existence. It could make possible the colonization and exploration of space, the rapid development of the less-developed nations, the elimination of energy technologies based on oil and coal (which pollute the environment), and much else. But the effort to develop fusion power is also indicative of a fundamental crisis in modern life: the dwindling supply of energy resources.

The problem of oil depletion is only the most recent in a serious of energy crises that began with the depletion of the supply of game animals through hunting in Paleolithic times. The shortage of meat created conditions that spurred the development of agriculture. Later, in the waning years of the Roman Empire, a shortage of labor power to grind flour encouraged the use of water power. The industrial revolution had its origins in the depletion of the supply of wood during the Renaissance. Coal was plentiful, and experiments with its use as an energy source led to the development of new techniques for producing energy and new machinery and processes for manufacturing goods. Today, as supplies of oil and coal diminish, the search for new energy sources continues.

会计考友 · 发表于 2012-8-15 12:52:29

It would seem from what we have said so far that the quest for energy is a positive force that results in new, sometimes revolutionary technologies that greatly improve the quality of human life. Many people believe that societies can meet their growing energy needs by continually investing in more sophisticated technologies. This approach has led to the development of huge nuclear-power plants to replace oil-fueled generators, and it is widely hoped that investment in fusion, an even more complex technology, will eliminate the dangers posed by nuclear power.

This view is subject to considerable criticism, however. Amory Lovins, for example, distinguishes between “hard” and “soft” energy paths. The former “relies on rapid expansion of centralized high technologies to increase supplies of energy, especially in the form of electricity.” The latter “combines a prompt and serious commitment” to efficient use of energy and rapid development of renewable energy sources.” Present and proposed energy policies favor the “hard” path, which involves intensive use of available coal, oil, and natural gas plus heavy investment in nuclear power. These are “capital-intensive” technologies because they rely heavily on sophisticated equipment (capital) rather than labor power.

“Soft” energy technologies depend on renewable sources like sun and wind and tend to be labor-intensive in that larger numbers of people are needed to produce a given amount of energy. They are more diverse than “hard” energy technologies and are more directly matched to energy needs. (Solar energy, for example, can be used to heat water without first being converted into electricity.) But the major difference between the two paths, according to Lovins, is that whereas the soft path depends on “pluralistic consumer choice in deploying a myriad of small devices and refinements, the hard path depends on difficult, large-scale projects [e.g., nuclear-power plants and fusion reactors] requiring a major social commitment under centralized management.” Such projects are characterized by a “remote and … uncontrollable technology run by a faraway, bureaucratized, technical elite who have probably never heard of you.”

Whether or not one accepts Lovins’s thesis, the trend toward greater use of nuclear power to generate electricity has become a major social and political issue. Underlying the conflict over the safety of nuclear-power plants is the issue of control. In the ancient world those who controlled the irrigation systems were the ruling elite; in the United States the “robber barons” of the late nineteenth century often gained both wealth and political influence from their control of oil and coal supplies. Thus, much of the opposition to nuclear-power plants stems from the recognition that control over energy supplies is a key source of economic and political power.

11. Technology in Everyday Life

In a review of research on the impact of new technologies on the daily lives of Americans, Claude S. Fischer found that such research has not kept pace with technological innovation. Even revolutionary innovations like the automobile and the telephone remain poorly understood. Conflicting claims abound. For example, in 1936 Helen and Robert Lynd were told by residents of Middletown that automobile use seemed to be decreasing church attendance and generating conflict within the family. But other studies suggested that the automobile was increasing church attendance, especially among more isolated people who found it easier to get to church on Sunday.

Given such gaps in our understanding of the impact of technology on social life, Fischer argued that sociologists should avoid assuming that the effects of innovations are experienced by everyone in more or less the same way. Instead, he believes that technologies should be thought of as facilitators of human action rather than as forces that dictate what we do. Often, for example, our uses of technologies do not conform to what their innovators believed possible or desirable. A case in point is the growing incidence of computer crimes and the use of home antenna dishes to tap into satellite video transmissions.

会计考友 · 发表于 2012-8-15 12:52:30

The place of technology in modern societies is a subject of continuing controversy. Key issues include not only the impact of technology on daily life but also the need to control the development and uses of technological innovations so that they benefit all sectors of society.

12. Science, Technology and Society: The Case of Medical Technology

Throughout most of human history, limitations on food production, together with lack of medical knowledge, have placed limits on the size of population. Dreadful diseases like the bubonic plague have actually reduced populations. In England the plague, known as the Black Death, was responsible for a drastic drop in the population in 1348 and for the lack of population growth in the seventeenth century. In 1625 more than 35,000 residents of London died of the plague. Smallpox and dysentery have had similar, though less dramatic, effects.

Until relatively recently physicians were powerless either to check the progress of disease or to prolong life. In fact, they often did more harm than good—their remedies were more harmful than the illnesses they were intended to cure. As Lewis Thomas has stated, “Bleeding, purging, cupping, the administration of infusions of every known plant, solutions of every known metal, every conceivable diet including total fasting, most of these based on the weirdest imaginings about the cause of the disease, concocted out of nothing but thin air-this was the heritage of medicine up until a little over a century ago.”

Thomas’s point is that the nineteenth century, when scientists finally began to understand the nature of disease, physicians based their treatments on folklore and superstition. In fact, with few exceptions the practice of healing, like many other aspects of science, was closely linked to religion. In ancient Greece people who suffered from chronic illnesses and physical impairments would journey to the temple of Asclepius, the god of healing, in search of a cure. Even today pilgrims still travel to the cathedral at Lourdes in France in the belief that they may be cured of blindness, paralysis, or leprosy. Not until Louis Pasteur, Robert Koch, and other researchers developed the germ theory of disease did medicine become fully differentiated from religion. Their discoveries, together with progress in internal medicine, pathology, the use of anesthesia, and surgical techniques, led to the twentieth-century concept of medicine as a scientific discipline.

During the nineteenth century scientific research resulted in the discovery of the causes of many diseases, but at first this progress led physicians to do less for their patients rather than more: They began to allow the body’s natural healing processes to work and ceased to engage in damaging procedures like bloodletting. At the same time, they made major strides toward improving public-health practices. They learned about hygiene, sterilization, and other basic principles of public health, especially the need to separate drinking water from waste water. These innovations, which occurred before the development of more sophisticated drugs and medical technologies, contributed to a demographic revolution that is still under way in some parts of the world. Suddenly rates of infant mortality decreased dramatically, births began to outnumber deaths, and life expectancy increased. This change resulted not from the highly sophisticated techniques of modern medicine but largely from the application of simple sanitation techniques and sterilization procedures. In fact, these simple technologies have had such a marked effect on infant survival that the rate of infant mortality in a society is often used as a quick measure of its social and economic development.

In sum, as medical science progressed toward greater understanding of the nature of disease and its prevention, new public-health and maternal-care practices contributed to rapid population growth，in the second half of the nineteenth century, such discoveries as antiseptics and anesthesia made possible other life-prolonging medical treatments. In analyzing the effects of these technologies, sociologists ask how people in different social classes gain access to them and how they can be more equitably distributed among the members of a society. The ways in which medical technologies have been institutionalized in hospitals and the medical profession are a central focus of sociological research on these questions.

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[GRE写作] GRE写作素材SectionTwo:ScienceandTechnolo