SECTION A MULTIPLE-CHOICE QUESTIONS In this section there are several passages followed by ten multiple-choice questions. For each multiple-choice question, there are four suggested answers marked A, B, C, and D. Choose the one that you think is the best answer and mark your answers on ANSWER SHEET TWO. PASSAGE ONE
"Mirrorworlds" is only one of David Gelernter"s big ideas. Another is "lifestreams"—in essence, vast electronic diaries. "Every document you create and every document other people send to you is stored in your lifestream," he wrote in the mid-1990s together with Eric Freeman, who produced a doctoral thesis on the topic. Putting electronic documents in chronological order, they said, would make it easier for people to manage all their digital output and experiences.
Lifestreams have not yet replaced the desktop on personal computers, as Mr. Gelernter had hoped. Indeed, a software start-up to implement the idea
folded
in 2004. But today something quite similar can be found all over the web in many different forms. Blogs are essentially electronic diaries. Personal newsfeeds are at the heart of Facebook and other social networks. A torrent of short text messages appears on Twitter.
Certain individuals are going even further than Mr. Gelernter expected. Some are digitising their entire office, including pictures, bills and correspondence. Others record their whole life. Gordon Bell, a researcher at Microsoft, puts everything he has accumulated, written, photographed and presented in his "local cyberspace". Yet others "log" every aspect of their lives with wearable cameras.
The latest trend is "life-tracking". Practitioners keep meticulous digital records of things they do: how much coffee they drink, how much work they do each day, what books they are reading, and so on. Much of this is done manually by putting the data into a PC or, increasingly, a smartphone. But people are also using sensors, mainly to keep track of their vital signs, for instance to see how well they sleep or how fast they run.
The first self-trackers were mostly über-geeks fascinated by numbers. But the more recent converts simply want to learn more about themselves, says Gary Wolf, a technology writer and co-founder of a blog called "The Quantified Self". They want to use technology to help them identify factors that make them depressed, and keep them from sleeping or affect their cognitive performance. One self-tracker learned, for instance, that eating a lot of butter allowed him to solve arithmetic problems faster.
A market for self-tracking devices is already emerging. Fitbit and Greengoose, two start-ups, are selling wireless accelerometers that can track a user"s physical activity. Zeo, another start-up, has developed an alarm clock that comes with a headband to measure people"s brainwave activity at night and chart their sleep on the web.
As people create more such self-tracking data, firms will start to mine them and offer services based on the result. Xobni, for example, analyses people"s inboxes ("xobni" spelled backwards) to help them manage their e-mail and contacts. It lists them according to the intensity of the electronic relationship rather than in alphabetical order. Users are sometimes surprised by the results, says Jeff Bonforte, the firm"s boss: "They think it"s creepy when we list other people before their girlfriend or wife."
PASSAGE TWO
A paradox of education is that presenting information in a way that looks easy to learn often has the opposite effect. Numerous studies have demonstrated that when people are forced to think hard about what they are shown they remember it better, so it is worth looking at ways this can be done. And a piece of research about to be published in
Cognition
, by Daniel Oppenheimer, a psychologist at Princeton University, and his colleagues, suggests a simple one: make the text convey the information harder to read.
Dr. Oppenheimer recruited 28 volunteers aged between 18 and 40 and asked them to learn, from written descriptions, about three "species" of extraterrestrial alien, each of which had seven features. This task was meant to be similar to learning about animal species in a biology lesson. It used aliens in place of actual species to be certain that the participants could not draw on prior knowledge.
Half of the volunteers were presented with the information in difficult-to-read fonts (12-point Comic Sans MS 75% greyscale and 12-point Bodoni MT 75% greyscale). The other half saw it in 16-point Arial pure-black font, which tests have shown is one of the easiest to read.
Participants were given 90 seconds to memorise the information in the lists. They were then distracted with unrelated tasks for a quarter of an hour or so, before being asked questions about the aliens, such as "What is the diet of the Pangerish?" and "What colour eyes does the Norgletti have?" The
upshot
was that those reading the Arial font got the answers right 72.8% of the time, on average. Those forced to read the more difficult fonts answered correctly 86.5% of the time.
The question was, would this result translate from the controlled circumstances of the laboratory to the unruly environment of the classroom? It did. When the researchers asked teachers to use the technique in high-school lessons on chemistry, physics, English and history, they got similar results. The lesson, then, is to make text books harder to read, not easier.
PASSAGE THREE
This is the 12th book of poems in about 50 years of writing by a great Northern Irish poet who is now in his eighth decade, and who recently recovered from a serious illness. Ageing and that brush with death have profoundly marked this new collection by Seamus Heaney. The change has stripped the poetry back to spare concentration on the small things of life—an old suit, the filling of a fountain pen, the hug that didn"t happen—which then open up to ever fuller significance, the more closely they are examined.
It has also made the poems easier to engage with: there are no puzzling Ulsterisms, for instance. Complications have been tossed aside. Words are no longer delved into for their etymological significance as they were in the 1970s. Now they are caressed for their mellifluousness. The collection feels personal—as if it had a compelling need to be written.
A decade and a half ago Mr. Heaney told that once the evil banalities of sectarianism seemed to be receding, his verse was able to admit the "big words" with which poetry had once abounded: soul and spirit, for example. In this collection both are present, at some level. The words describing a simple act—the passing of meal in sacks by aid workers onto a trailer—in the title poem, "Human Chain", transform this 12-line poem into a kind of parable. There is the collective, shared human burden of the act itself—the "stoop and drag and drain" of the heavy lifting—and then there is the wonderful letting go: "Nothing surpassed/That quick unburdening." Is the poet talking about the toil of life, and the aftermath of that toil?
The poems snatch precious remembered moments. They linger over the sweetness of particulars—vetch, the feel of an eel on a line. They pay attention to the heightened ritual of everyday things. The lines are short but move at a gentle pace and need to be read slowly, as the verse drifts back and forth over its country setting like a long-legged fly on a stream.
Above all, and this is an odd thing to say of words on a page, the book feels like handcrafted work. Time and again Mr. Heaney returns to the image of the pen. He began his long career writing of such a pen, nestling snug as a gun between finger and thumb. The gun, we hope, is history. The pen still nestles, fruitfully.
PASSAGE FOUR
In the digital realm, things seem always to happen the wrong way round. Whereas Google has hurried to scan books into its digital catalogue, a group of national libraries has begun saving what the online giant leaves behind. For although search engines such as Google index the web, they do not archive it. Many websites just disappear when their owner runs out of money or interest. Adam Farquhar, in charge of digital projects for the British Library, points out that the world has in some ways a better record of the beginning of the 20th century than of the beginning of the 21st.
In 1996 Brewster Kahle, a computer scientist and the Internet entrepreneur, founded the Internet Archive, a non-profit organisation dedicated to preserving websites. He also began gently harassing national libraries to worry about preserving the web. They started to pay attention when several elections produced interesting material that never touched paper.
In 2003 eleven national libraries and the Internet Archive launched a project to preserve "born-digital" information: the kind that has never existed as anything but digitally. Called the International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC), it now includes 39 large institutional libraries. But the task is impossible. One reason is the sheer amount of data on the web. The groups have already collected several petabytes of data (a petabyte can hold roughly 10 trillion copies of this article).
Another issue is ensuring that the data is stored in a format that makes it available in centuries to come. Ancient manuscripts are still readable. But much digital media from the past is readable only on a handful of fragile and antique machines, if at all. The IIPC has set a single format, making it more likely that future historians will be able to find a machine to read the data. But a single solution cannot capture all content. Web publishers increasingly serve up content-rich pages based on complex data sets. Audio and video programmes based on proprietary formats such as Windows Media Player are another challenge. What happens if Microsoft is bankrupt and forgotten in 2210?
The biggest problem, for now, is money. The British Library estimates that it costs half as much to store a digital document as it does a physical one. But there are a lot more digital ones. America"s Library of Congress enjoys a specific mandate, and budget, to save the web. The British Library is still seeking one.
So national libraries have decided to split the task. Each has taken responsibility for the digital works in its national top-level domain (web-address suffixes such as ".uk" or ".fr"). In countries with larger domains, such as Britain and America, curators cannot hope to save everything. They are concentrating on material of national interest, such as elections, news sites and citizen journalism or innovative uses of the web.
The daily death of countless websites has brought a new sense of urgency—and forced libraries to adapt culturally as well. Past practice was to tag every new document as it arrived. Now precision must be sacrificed to scale and speed. The task started before standards, goals or budgets are set. And they may yet change. Just like many websites, libraries will be stuck in what is known as "permanent beta".
单选题
The word "
folded
" in Line 2, Para. 2 means ---|||________|||---.
(PASSAGE ONE)
填空题SECTION B SHORT ANSWER QUESTIONS In this section there are five short answer questions based on the passages in Section A. Answer the questions with NO more than TEN words in the space provided on ANSWER SHEET TWO.
The passage mainly deals with 1.
(PASSAGE ONE)
填空题
What is the implication of the experiment on education?
(PASSAGE TWO)
填空题
What is the purpose of writing this article?
(PASSAGE THREE)
填空题
What does IIPC have to do specifically to face with daily death of countless websites?
(PASSAGE FOUR)
填空题
What is the topic of this passage?
(PASSAGE FOUR)