Who would have thought that，globally, the IT industry produces about the same volumes of greenhouse gases as the world's airlines do—roughly 2 percent of all CO2 emissions?
Many everyday tasks take a surprising toll on the environment. A Google search can leak between 0.2 and 7.0 grams of CO2, depending on how many attempts are needed to get the “right” answer. To deliver results to its users quickly, then, Google has to maintain vast data centres round the world, packed with powerful computers. While producing large quantities of CO2, these computers emit a great deal of heat, so the centres need to be well air-conditioned, which uses even more energy.
However, Google and other big tech providers monitor their efficiency closely and make improvements. Monitoring is the first step on the road to reduction, but there is much more to be done, and not just by big companies.
There are few more sobering online activities than entering data into college-tuition calculators and gasping as the Web spits back a six-figure sum. But economists say families about to go into debt to fund four years of partying, as well as studying, can console themselves with the knowledge that college is an investment that, unlike many bank stocks, should yield huge dividends.
A 2008 study by two Harvard economists notes that the “labor-market premium to skill”—or the amount college graduates earned that’s greater than what high-school graduate earned—decreased for much of the 20th century, but has come back with a vengeance (报复性地) since the 1980s. In 2005, The typical full-time year-round U.S. worker with a four-year college degree earned $50,900, 62% more than the $31,500 earned by a worker with only a high-school diploma.
There’s no question that going to college is a smart economic choice. But a look at the strange variations in tuition reveals that the choice about which college to attend doesn’t come down merely to dollars and cents. Does going to Columbia University (tuition, room and board $49,260 in 2007-08) yield a 40% greater return than attending the University of Colorado at Boulder as an out-of-state student ($35,542)? Probably not. Does being an out-of-state student at the University of Colorado at Boulder yield twice the amount of income as being an in-state student ($17,380) there? Not likely.
No, in this consumerist age, most buyers aren’t evaluating college as an investment, but rather as a consumer product—like a car or clothes or a house. And with such purchases, price is only one of many crucial factors to consider.
As with automobiles, consumers in today’s college marketplace have vast choices, and people search for the one that gives them the most comfort and satisfaction in line with their budgets. This accounts for the willingness of people to pay more for different types of experiences (such as attending a private liberal-arts college or going to an out-of-state public school that has a great marine-biology program). And just as two auto purchasers might spend an equal amount of money on very different cars, college students (or, more accurately, their parents) often show a willingness to pay essentially the same price for vastly different products. So which is it? Is college an investment product like a stock or a consumer product like a car? In keeping with the automotive world’s hottest consumer trend, maybe it’s best to characterize it as a hybrid (混合动力汽车); an expensive consumer product that, over time, will pay rich dividends.
Welcome, Freshmen. Have an iPod
Taking a step that many professors may view as a bit counterproductive, some colleges and universities are doling out Apple iPhones and Internet-capable iPods to their students. The always-on Internet devices raise some novel possibilities, like tracking where students gather together. With far less controversy, colleges could send messages about canceled classes, delayed buses, campus crises or just the cafeteria menu.
While schools emphasize its usefulness —online research in class and instant polling of students, for example — a big part of the attraction is, undoubtedly, that the iPhone is cool and a hit with students. Being equipped with one of the most recent cutting-edge IT products could just help a college or university foster a cutting-edge reputation.
Apple stands to win as well, hooking more young consumers with decades of technology purchases ahead of them. The lone losers, some fear, could be professors.
Students already have laptops and cell phones, of course, but the newest devices can take class distractions to a new level. They practically beg a user to ignore the long-suffering professor struggling to pass on accumulated wisdom from the front of the room — a prospect that teachers find most irritating and students view as, well, inevitable.“When it gets a little boring, I might pull it out,” acknowledged Naomi Pugh, a first-year student at Freed-Hardeman University in Henderson, Term., referring to her new iPod Touch, which can connect to the Internet over a campus wireless network. She speculated that professors might try even harder to make classes interesting if they were to compete with the devices.
Experts see a movement toward the use of mobile technology in education, though they say it is in its infancy as professors try to come up with useful applications. Providing powerful handheld devices is sure to fuel debates over the role of technology in higher education.
“We think this is the way the future is going to work,” said Kyle Dickson, co-director of research and the mobile learning initiative at Abilene Christian University in Texas, which has bought more than 600 iPhones and 300 iPods for students entering this fall.Although plenty of students take their laptops to class, they don’t take them everywhere and would prefer something lighter. Abilene Christian settled on the devices after surveying students and finding that they did not like hauling around their laptops, but that most of them always carried a cell phone, Dr. Dickson said.
It is not clear how many colleges and universities plan to give out iPhones and iPods this fall; officials at Apple were unwillig to talk about the subject and said that they would not leak any institution’s plans.“We can’t announce other people’s news,” said Greg Joswiak, vice president of iPod and iPhone marketing at Apple. He also said that he could not discuss discounts to universities for bulk purchases.
At least four institutions — the University of Maryland, Oklahoma Christian University, Abilene Christian and Freed-Hardeman — have announced that they will give the devices to some or all of their students this fall.Other universities are exploring their options. Stanford University has hired a student-run company to design applications like a campus map and directory for the iPhone. It is considering whether to issue iPhones but not sure it is necessary, noting that more than 700 iPhones were registered on the university’s network last year.
At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, iPhones might already have been everywhere, if AT&T, the wireless carrier offering the iPhone in the United States, had a more reliable network, said Andrew Yu, mobile devices platform project manager at M.I.T.“We would have probably gone ahead with this, maybe just getting a thousand iPhones and giving them out,” Mr. Yu said.
The University of Maryland at College Park is proceeding cautiously, giving the iPhone or iPod Touch to 150 students, said Jeffrey Huskamp, vice president and chief information officer at the university. “We don’t think that we have all the answers,” Mr. Huskamp said. By observing how students use the gadgets, he said, “We’re trying to get answers from the students.”
At each college, the students who choose to get an iPhone must pay for mobile phone service. Those service contracts include unlimited data use. Both the iPhones and the iPod Touch devices can connect to the Internet through campus wireless networks. With the iPhone, those networks may provide faster connections and longer battery life than AT&T’s data network. Many cell phones allow users to surf the Web, but only some newer ones are capable of wireless connection to the local area computer network.
University officials say that they have no plans to track their students (and Apple said it would not be possible unless students give their permission). They say that they are drawn to the prospect of learning applications outside the classroom, though such lesson plans have yet to surface.
“My colleagues and I are studying something called augmented reality (a field of computer research dealing with the combination of real-world and virtual reality),” said Christopher Dede, professor in learning technologies at Harvard University.“Alien Contact,” for example, is an exercise developed for middle-school students who use hand-held devices that can determine their location. As they walk around a playground or other area, text, video or audio pops up at various points to help them try to figure out why aliens were in the schoolyard. “You can imagine similar kinds of interactive activities along historical lines,” like following the Freedom Trail in Boston, Professor Dede said. “It’s important that we do research, so that we know how well something like this works.”
The rush to distribute the devices worries some professors, who say that students are less likely to participate in class if they are multi-tasking. “I’m not someone who’s anti-technology, but I,m always worried that technology becomes an end in and of itself, and it replaces teaching or it replaces analysis,,’ said Ellen Millender, associate professor of classics at Reed College in Portland, Ore. (She added that she hoped to buy an iPhone for herself once prices fall.)
Robert Summers, who has taught at Cornell Law School for about 40 years, announced this week — in a detailed, footnoted memorandum —that he would ban laptop computers from his class on contract law.“I would ban that too if I knew the students were using it in class,” Professor Summers said of the iPhone, after the device and its capabilities were explained to him. “What we want to encourage in these students is an active intellectual experience, in which they develop the wide range of complex reasoning abilities required of good lawyers.”
The experience at Duke University may ease some concerns. A few years ago, Duke began giving iPods to students with the idea that they might use them to record lectures (these older models could not access the Internet).“We had assumed that the biggest focus of these devices would be consuming the content,” said Tracy Futhey, vice president for information technology and chief information officer at Duke.But that is not all that the students did. They began using the iPods to create their own “content,” making audio recordings of themselves and presenting them. The students turned what could have been a passive interaction into an active one, Ms. Futhey said.
It's the first question parents ask when their child is diagnosed with autism (自闭症). Will his future brothers or sisters have a higher risk of (1) ______ it, too?
According to the largest study of siblings (兄弟姐妹) in families with autism, the answer is yes. Among 664 children who had at least one older sibling with the developmental disorder, the (2) ______ risk of autism was nearly 19%, (3) ______ higher than previous sibling-recurrence estimates that were anywhere from 3% to 10%. Kids with more than one older autistic sibling had an even higher risk of the disorder: 32%.
The (4) ______ suggest that genes play a key role in autism risk. But they also hint that other environmental factors (5) ______ by siblings, like influences in the womb (子宫), may be important as well.
On the (6) ______ of the findings, the researchers recommend that doctors closely (7) ______ younger siblings of autistic children to pick up any early signs of the disorder, (8) ______ an unusually large head or delayed language development and communication skills. Evidence suggests that early (9) ______ and diagnosis of autism can help children take advantage of therapies that can treat some of its (10) ______.
| A）average B) basis C) common D) consequently E) detection F) developing G) distributed H)dramatically I) including J) monitor K) reason L) results M) shared N) symbols O)symptoms |
Directions: Read the following text carefully and then translate the underlined segments into Chinese. Your translation must be written clearly on the ANSWER SHEET.
Human beings in all times and places think about their world and wonder at their place in it. Humans are thoughtful and creative, possessed of insatiable curiosity. (1) Furthermore, humans have the ability to modify the environment in which they live, thus subjecting all other life forms to their own peculiar ideas and fancies. Therefore, it is important to study humans in all their richness and diversity in a calm and systematic manner, with the hope that the knowledge resulting from such studies can lead humans to a more harmonious way of living with themselves and with all other life forms on this planet Earth.
“Anthropology” derives from the Greek words anthropos “human” and logos “the study of.” By its very name, anthropology encompasses the study of all humankind.
Anthropology is one of the social sciences. (2) Social science is that branch of intellectual enquiry which seeks to study humans and their endeavors in the same reasoned. orderly, systematic, and dispassioned manner that natural scientists use for the study of natural phenomena.
Social science disciplines include geography, economics, political science, psychology, and sociology. Each of these social sciences has a subfield or specialization which lies particularly close to anthropology.
All the social sciences focus upon the study of humanity. Anthropology is a field-study oriented discipline which makes extensive use of the comparative method in analysis. (3) The emphasis on data gathered first-hand, combined with a cross-cultural perspective brought to the analysis of cultures past and present, makes this study a unique and distinctly important social science.
Anthropological analyses rest heavily upon the concept of culture. Sir Edward Tylor’s formulation of the concept of culture was one of the great intellectual achievements of 19th century science. (4) Tylor defined culture as “…that complex whole which includes belief, art, morals, law. Custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.” This insight, so profound in its simplicity, opened up an entirely new way of perceiving and understanding human life. Implicit within Tylor’s definition is the concept that culture is learned, shared, and patterned behavior.
(5) Thus, the anthropological concept of “culture.” like the concept of “set” in mathematics, is an abstract concept which makes possible immense amounts of concrete research and understanding.