Unit 4 Information Technology
Text A
I.Reading Comprehension
1. Complete the following passage with the information you get from the text. 1) co-founder 2) value/significance 3) drop-out 4) engineering 5) titans/giants 6) attention 7) floundering/struggling 8) surpassed 9) technology 10) daunting
2. Essay Questions
1) As a touch-screen computer without a keyboard, iPad is a ground-breaking new product. Extending the iPhone’s innovations of a more versatile screen and lightweight applications designed for specific tasks, it points to a future beyond the computer mouse – and a world without Windows.
2) Apple has released Ping, a social network similar to Facebook for iTunes users. And it will counter Google’s smaller 7-inch tablet computer with a similar gadget of its own.
3) His strong spiritual aspiration, relentless ambition and obsessive attention to details.
4) No fixed answer. 5) No fixed answer.
II.Blank-filling: Complete the following sentences with the words given in the box. Change the form when necessary.
1) rebuttal 2) sideline 3) stir up 4) rankle 5) write off 6) obsessive 7) surpass 8) culmination 9) fledgling 10) rudimentary
III.Paraphrasing
1. Rewriting: Rewrite the underlined part of each sentence in your own words. 1) More than ten years ago, it was highly speculated that both Mr. Job’s career and Apple, the company he had co-founded would fail in the competition, their relevance to the future of technology written off both in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street.
2) Mr. Gates himself championed a tablet computer nearly a decade ago, however it was not well-received by the market due to its need of a stylus to write on its screen and the PC-like interface. 3) A spirituality guided by his training in Zen Buddhism has played a central part in his life, and with such spiritual belief he even avoided using medical treatment for a period while struggling against pancreatic cancer. 4) Compromise seems too strong a word, but now as a world leader in this business, Apple has become more pragmatic. 5) After antitrust authorities took an interest this year, Mr. Jobs backed off a requirement that forced developers to use Apple’s software tools to create apps,
barring rival Adobe’s technology—nevertheless this change of strategy seemed to be designed intentionally to please software developers who might otherwise turn more attention to creating apps for phones running Google’s software.
2. Sentence Transformation: Complete the following sentences based on the structures given.
1) As an acknowledged master for a long time, Mr. Jobs knows very well the art of generating this suspension of disbelief which is essential to stirring up demand for gadgets most consumers had no idea they needed. 2) In order to rule its new kingdom even more closely than what Microsoft did to the PC, Apple now makes the decision on which applications are available in its online store and sets the rules for how those applications are developed. 3) Despite being a college drop-out with no formal engineering background, he and Mr. Wozniak founded their new business by resorting to their electronics hobby right after returning from India. 4) It is regarded by those who have worked for him that Mr. Jobs, as a stern taskmaster, cares more about what is possible to be achieved than those long-range visions. 5) Though it seems out of his character, Mr. Jobs now is forced to compete with others who are considering Apple as their main rival.
IV.Translation
1. Sentence Translation
1) 一月份发布会之前，公众的期待就被煽动得无比高涨，即便是依照乔布斯自己的苛刻标准，这也是不寻常的。
2) 好几个月来，高科技圈一直在猜测传说中的苹果公司最新的开拓性产品。 3) 这对美国作家菲茨杰拉德被广泛引用的名言“美国社会中没有从头再来一说”是个绝妙的反驳。
4) 比尔·盖茨是难以取胜的劲敌。由于他对个人电脑软件领域的垄断，在其处于事业的巅峰时期，比尔·盖茨可能更加富有，也可能更能呼风唤雨。
5) 有了平板电脑iPad助力，苹果的总市值五月份终于超过了微软成为全世界最有价值的科技公司。
V.Cloze
1) platform 2) unveil 3) executive 4) launches 5) strategic 6) health 7) excellent 8) centered 9) crucial 10) popularity
VI.Listening
1. Multiple Choice: Listen to Part One and choose the best answer to each question.
1) C 2) B 3) D 4) D 5) B
2. Listen to Part Two and answer the following questions.
1) The Calligraphy class. Because it was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and he found it fascinating.
2) Ten years later, when they were designing the first Macintosh computer, what he learnt in the class all came back to him. And they designed the first computer with beautiful typography.
3) No one can predict the future. But the future is decided by what you did in the past. So what we can do is to trust in something—courage, destiny, life etc. and let it guide us.
Tapescripts
Part I
―I am honored to be with you today for your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. Truth be told, I never graduated from college. And this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.
The first story is about connecting the dots.
I dropped out of Reed College after the first six months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out? It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: ―We’ve got an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?‖ They said: ―Of course.‖ My biological mother found out later that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would go to college. This was the start in my life.
And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trusted that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked far more interesting.
It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5 cents deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the seven miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:
Part II
Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus, every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.
None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.
Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something—your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever.‖
Text B
I. Speaking 1. Discussion
1) The first generations of modern mobile phones were purely devices for conversation and text messages. The money lay in designing desirable handsets, manufacturing them cheaply and distributing them widely. This played to European strengths. And Nokia has been a highly efficient manufacturing and logistics machine capable of churning out a dozen handsets a second and selling them all over the world.
2) As microprocessors become more powerful, mobile phones are changing into hand-held computers. As a result, most of their value is now in software and data services. This is where America, in particular Silicon Valley, is hard to beat. Nokia, along with the rest of Europe’s mobile industry, is also being squeezed in both simple handsets and networking equipment. Cheap mobile phones based on chips from MediaTek, a company based in China’s Taiwan, are increasingly popular in developing countries. By some accounts this system and its users now account for more than one-third of the phones sold globally. And China’s Huawei begins to take the lead in manufacturing wireless networks.
3) The major strategy is turning the Finnish hardware-maker into a provider of software and services. A former senior executive of Microsoft was brought in to work as the new CEO. The first option is trying to turn Symbian, its own operating system for smartphones, into the first platform for mobile software and services after the iPhone and Android. But this must be done as quickly as possible. Or it could teaming up with Microsoft and bet on Microsoft’s new mobile operating system, Windows Phone 7.
