The World Wide Web, an enormous collection of Internet addresses or sites, all of which can be accessed for information, has been mainly responsible for the increase in interest in the Internet in the 1990s. Before the World Wide Web, the “Net” was comparable to an integrated collection of computerised typewriters, but the introduction of the “Web” in 1990 allowed not only text links to be made but also graphs, images and even video. A Web site consists of a “home page ”，the first screen of a particular site on the computer to which you are connected, from where access can be had to other subject related “pages” (or screens) at the site and on thousands of other computers all over the world. This is achieved by a process called “hypertext”. By clicking with a mouse device on various parts of the screen, a person connected to the “Net” can go travelling, or “surfing” through a web of pages to locate whatever information is required.
Anyone can set up a site; promoting your club, your institution, your company's products or simply yourself, is what the Web and the Internet is all about. And what is more, information on the Internet is not owned or controlled by any one organisation. It is, perhaps, true to say that no-one and therefore everyone own s the “Net”. Because of the relative freedom of access to information, the Internet has often been criticised by the media as a potentially hazardous tool in the hands of young computer users. This perception has proved to be largely false however, and the vast majority of users both young and old get connected with the Internet for the dual purposes for which it was intended-discovery and delight.
TRUE／FALSE／NOT GIVEN
a. Everyone is aware of the Information Superhighway. T F NG
b. Using the Internet costs the owner of a telephone extra money. T F NG
c. Internet computer connections are made by using telephone lines. T F NG
d. The World Wide Web is a network of computerised typewriters. T F NG
e. According to the author, the Information Superhighway may be T F NG
the future hope of education.
f. The process called‘hypertext'requires the use of a mouse device. T F NG
g. The Internet was created in the 1990s. T F NG
h. The “home page” is the first screen of a “Web” site on the “Net”.
T F NG
i. The media has often criticised the Internet because it is dangerous. T F NG
j. The latest technological revolution will change the way humans T F NG
communicate.
练习四
The Australian political scene is dominated by two major parties that have quite different political agendas. However, the policies of the Australian Labor Party and the Liberal Party have become much more difficult to tell apart in recent years. In fact, it would be true to say that both parties consist of conservative, moderate and radical elements, and therefore the general public is often perplexed about which party to vote for. Nonetheless, it is usual to find that an Australian will lean towards supporting one of these two parties and remain faithful to that pary for life.
The Labor Party was formed early in the twentieth century to safeguard the interests of the common working man and to give the trade unions political representation in Parliament. The Party has always had strong connections with the unions, and supports the concept of a welfare society in which people who are less fortunate than others are financially, and otherwise, assisted in their quest for a more equitable slice of the economic pie. The problem is that such socialist political agendas are extremely expensive to implement and maintain, especially in a country that, although comparatively wealthy, is vast and with a small working and hence taxpaying population base. Welfare societies tend towards bankruptcy unless government spending is kept in check.
The Liberal Party, on the other hand, argues that the best way to ensure a fair division of wealth in the country is to allow more freedom to create it. This, in turn, means more opportunities, jobs created etc., and therefore more wealth a vailable to all. Just how the poor are to share in the distribution of this wealth (beyond being given, at least in theory, the opportunity to create it) is, however, less well understood. Practice, of course, may make nonsense of even the best theoretical intentions, and often the less politically powerful are badly catered for under governments implementing “free-for-all” policies.
It is no wonder that given the two major choices offered them, Australian voters are increasingly turning their attention to the smaller political parties, which claim to offer a more balanced swag of policies, often based around one major current issue. Thus, for instance, at the last election there was the No Aircraft Noise Party, popular in certain city areas, and the Green Party, which is almost solely concerned with environmental issues.
TRUE／FALSE／NOT／GIVEN
a. Policies in support of the concept of a welfare society are costly. T F NG
b. Australians usually vote for the party they supported early in life. T F NG
c. The Labor Party was formed by the trade unions. T F NG
d. Radical groups are only found within the Labor Party. T F NG
e. The Liberal Party was formed after the Labor Party. T F NG
f. Welfare-based societies invariably become bankrupt. T F NG
g. According to the author, theories do not always work in practice. T F NG
h. Some Australian voters are confused about who to vote for. T F NG
i. The No-Aircraft-Noise Party is only popular in the city. T F NG
j. The smaller parties are only concerned about the environment. T F NG
练习五
The need for a satisfactory education is more important than ever before. Nowadays, without a qualification from a reputable school or university, the odds of landing that plum job advertised in the paper are considerably shortened. Moreover, one's present level of education could fall well short of future career requirements.
It is no secret that competition is the driving force behind the need to obtain increasingly higher qualifications. In the majority of cases , the urge to upgrade is no longer the result of an insatiable thirst for knowledge. The pressure is coming from within the workplace to compete with ever more qualified job applicants, and in many occupations one must now battle with colleagues in the reshuffle for the position one already holds.
Striving to become better educated is hardly a new concept. Wealthy parents have always been willing to spend the vast amounts of extra money necessary to send their children to schools with a perceived educational edge. Working adults have long attended night schools and refresher courses. Competition for employment has been around since the curse of working for a living began. Is the present situation so very different to that of the past?
The difference now is that the push is universal and from without as well as within. A student at secondary school receiving low grades is no longer as easily accepted by his or her peers as was once the case. Similarly , in the workplace, unless employees are engaged in part-time study, they may be frowned upon by their employers and peers and have difficulty even standing still. In fact, in these cases, the expectation is for careers to go backwards and earning capacity to take an appreciable nosedive.
At first glance, the situation would seem to be laudable; a positive response to the exhortation by a former Prime Minister, Bob Hawke, for Australia to become the “clever country”. Yet there are serious ramifications according to at least one educational psychologist. Dr Brendan Gatsby has caused some controversy in academic circles by suggesting that a bias towards what he terms “paper” excellence might cause more problems than it is supposed to solve. Gatsby raises a number of issues that affect the individual as well as society in general.
Firstly, he believes the extra workload involved is resulting in abnormally high stress levels in both students at secondary school and adults studying after working hours. Secondly, skills which might be more relevant to the undertaking of a sought-after job are being overlooked by employers interviewing candidates without qualifications on paper. These two areas of concern for the individual are causing physical and emotional stress respectively.
Gatsby also argues that there are attitudinal changes within society to the exalted role education now plays in determining how the spoils of working life are distributed. Individuals of all ages are being driven by social pressures to achieve academic success solely for monetary considerations instead of for the joy of enlightenment. There is the danger that some universities are becoming degree factories with an attendant drop in standards. Furthermore, our education system may be rewarding doggedness above creativity; the very thing Australians have been encouraged to avoid. But the most undesirable effect of this academic paper chase, Gatsby says, is the disadvantage that “user pays” higher education confers on the poor, who invariably lose out to the more financially favoured.
Naturally, although there is agreement that learning can cause stress, Gatsby's comments regarding university standards have been roundly criticised as alarmist by most educationists who point out that, by any standard of measurement, Australia's education system overall, at both secondary and tertiary levels, is equal to that of any in the world.
TRUE／FALSE／NOT／GIVEN
a. It is impossible these days to get a good job without a qualification T F NG
from a respected institution.
b. Most people who upgrade their qualifications do so for the joy T F NG
of learning.
c. In some jobs, the position you hold must be reapplied for. T F NG
d. Some parents spend extra on their children's education because T F NG
of the prestige attached to certain schools.
e. According to the text, students who performed bally at school T F NG
used to be accepted by their classmates.
f. Employees who do not undertake extra study may find their T F NG
salary decreased by employers.
g. Australians appear to have responded to the call by a former T F NG Prime Minister to become better qualified.
h. Australia's education system is equal to any in the world in the T F NGopinion of most educationists.
练习六
Over 120 years ago, the English botanist J.D. Hooker, writing of Australian edible plants. suggested that many of them were “eatable but not worth eating”. Never theless, the Australian flora, together with the fauna, supported the Aboriginal people well before the arrival of Europeans. The Aborigines were not farmers and were wholly dependent for life on the wild products around them. They learned to eat, often after treatment, a wide variety of plants.
The conquering Europeans displaced the Aborigines, killing many, driving others from their traditional tribal lands, and eventually settling many of the tribal remnants on government reserves, where flour and beef replaced nardoo and wallaby as staple foods. And so, gradually, the vast store of knowledge, accumulated over thousands of years, fell into disuse. Much was lost.
However, a few European men took an intelligent and even respectful interest in the people who were being displaced. Explorers, missionaries, botanists, naturalists and government officials observed, recorded and, fortunately in some cases, published. Today, we can draw on these publications to form the main basis of our knowledge of the edible, natural products of Australia. The picture is no doubt mostly incomplete. We can only speculate on the number of edible plants on which no observation was recorded.
Not all our information on the subject comes from the Aborigines. Times were hard in the early days of European settlement, and traditional foods were often in short supply or impossibly expensive for a pioneer trying to establish a farm in the bush. And so necessity led to experimentation, just as it must have done for the Aborigines, and experimentation led to some lucky results. So far as is known, the Aborigines made no use of Leptospermum or Dodonaea as food plants, Yet the early settlers found that one could be used as a substitute for tea and the other for hops. These plants are not closely related to the species they re placed, so their use was not based on botanical observation. Probably some experiments had less happy endings; L.J. Webb has used the expression “eat, die and l earn” in connection with the Aboriginal experimentation, but it was the successful attempts that became widely known. It is possible the edibility of some native plants used by the Aborigines was discovered independently by the European settlers or their descendants.
Explorers making long expeditions found it impossible to carry sufficient food for the whole journey and were forced to rely, in part, on food that they could find on the way, Still another source of information comes from the practice in other countries. There are many species from northern Australia which occur also in southeast Asia, where they are used for food.
In general, those Aborigines living in the dry inland areas were largely dependent for their vegetable foods on seed such as those of grasses, acacias and eucalyptus. They ground these seeds between flat stones to make a coarse flour. Tribes on the coast, and particularly those in the vicinity of coastal rainforests, had a more varied vegetable diet with a higher proportion of fruits and tubers. Some of the coastal plants, even if they had grown inland, probably would have been unavailable as food since they required prolonged washing or soaking to render them non-poisonous: many of the inland tribes could not obtain water in the quantities necessary for such treatment. There was also considerable variation in the edible plants available to Aborigines in different latitudes. In general, the people who lived in the moist tropical areas enjoyed a much greater variety than those in the southern part of Australia.
Questions 1-7
Do the following statements reflect the claims of the writer in Reading Passage 3? In boxes 1-7 write:
YES if the statement reflects the writer's claims
NO if the statement contradicts the writer NOT GIVES if there is no information about this in the passage
1. Most of the pre-European Aboriginal knowledge of wild foods has been recovered.
2. There were few food plants unknown to pre-European Aborigines.
3. Europeans learned all of what they knew of edible wild plants from Aborigines.
4. Dodonaea is an example of a plant used for food by both pre-Europe an Aborigines and European settlers.
