The Future of Work Is Rich in Technology(长篇阅读题)
A) We check e-mail as soon as we reach home, and take a look at our inboxes along the way. We respond to calls, texts, and messages even while on vacation. At work, we use Cisco Telepresence(远程呈现) or Skype to discuss with colleagues all over the world. Companies often allow employees to work from home for one or two days a week; some let them live in remote locations. This has all become the norm. A decade ago, we could not have imagined being always on, always connected, with work following us wherever we go.
B) This is just the beginning. The nature of work itself is changing for knowledge workers. During this decade, location will cease to be a barrier; many types of work will be done as micro-tasks; and we will be cooperating in new ways. What will be most problematic is that our employers will make even greater demands on us and further intrude (侵入) into our lives. This is the future we are headed into, whether we like it or not.
C) For our grandparents, "work" was almost always in a factory or on a farm. Today, the farm and factory jobs are performed by a decreasing minority. There are still many jobs in the services sector that require physical work. But increasingly our workforce is performing tasks that are done with the mind that require knowledge and skill. These knowledge jobs can be assisted by technology.
D) Note how accounting firms routinely outsource (把……外包) boring work, as do lawyers, and as do doctors, for tasks such as medical transcription. Not long ago, small and mid-sized projects were outsourced through Web sites---not just to India but also to remote workers in the United States and Europe. A micro-task economy is now flourishing on some sites, in which smaller tasks are farmed out. Big and small tasks such as data handling, Web site development, design, and transcription are commonly done by workers in diverse locations. Crowdsourcing (众包) is making it possible for work to be done simultaneously (同时的) by many people -no matter where they are.
E) Businesses are beginning to do this as well. Rather than locking workers in departmental silos (筒仓), companies on the cutting edge are encouraging employees to start communicating with each other on internal social-media sites. What used to be the quarterly e.-mail from the CEO has become a kind of information-sharing within companies---at all levels. Companies will start designing and developing new products and services by engaging their entire employee base.
F) Telepresence robots are taking video conferencing to a new level. There are several products on the market, such as Beam by Suitable Technologies and Fellow Robots, that allow a screen mounted on a mobile platform to move around the office and experience what is happening in a more human way. Imagine walking into your boss’s office while you are at home, stepping into a conference room to join a meeting, or chit-chatting with your peers around the water fountain. Next generation video-conferencing technologies such as Mezzanine by Oblong Industries are using multiple screens and spatial user interfaces (界面) to allow people in different locations to cooperate and share electronic information in a science fiction-like setting.
G) We can expect Google Glass-type devices to bring the computer display to our body---so that we view the screen on our glasses and don't need to sit at a desk any more. I expect future versions to provide 3D experiences that simulate the holodecks (全景操作平台) we saw in Star Trek. And who knows, we may well have holodecks that make it feel as though we are together---but that is getting too far into the future. During this decade, we'll have to settle for 2D interfaces and 3D simulations.
H) This is all exciting and terrifying enough. But what worries me is the intrusion (侵入) that companies will increasingly make into our lives and the exhaustion we will suffer from always being at the call of our employers. I know from personal experience how hard it is to turn off e-mail and disconnect from social media. This will only get worse for all of us as we become more connected.
I) And then there will be demands by our employers for us to better manage our lifestyles---so that they can reduce their health bills and get more out of us. Just as companies reward workers who join health clubs and stop smoking, we will see them making greater demands. They will be able to measure what we do because we will increasingly be wearing biometric (生物计量的) -monitoring devices such as the Nike FuelBand and Fitbit Flex and our smartphones will be adding new sensors. The new generation of sensor-based devices will continually gather data about our movement, heart rate, weight, sleep, and other health-related matters and upload these to the cloud. Before giving you more sick leave, employers will probably demand that you improve your lifestyle and habits.
J) All of this may seem like science fiction, but it isn't. The future is happening faster than we think and changing important parts of our existence.
A) We check e-mail as soon as we reach home, and take a look at our inboxes along the way. We respond to calls, texts, and messages even while on vacation. At work, we use Cisco Telepresence(远程呈现) or Skype to discuss with colleagues all over the world. Companies often allow employees to work from home for one or two days a week; some let them live in remote locations. This has all become the norm. A decade ago, we could not have imagined being always on, always connected, with work following us wherever we go.
B) This is just the beginning. The nature of work itself is changing for knowledge workers. During this decade, location will cease to be a barrier; many types of work will be done as micro-tasks; and we will be cooperating in new ways. What will be most problematic is that our employers will make even greater demands on us and further intrude (侵入) into our lives. This is the future we are headed into, whether we like it or not.
C) For our grandparents, "work" was almost always in a factory or on a farm. Today, the farm and factory jobs are performed by a decreasing minority. There are still many jobs in the services sector that require physical work. But increasingly our workforce is performing tasks that are done with the mind that require knowledge and skill. These knowledge jobs can be assisted by technology.
D) Note how accounting firms routinely outsource (把……外包) boring work, as do lawyers, and as do doctors, for tasks such as medical transcription. Not long ago, small and mid-sized projects were outsourced through Web sites---not just to India but also to remote workers in the United States and Europe. A micro-task economy is now flourishing on some sites, in which smaller tasks are farmed out. Big and small tasks such as data handling, Web site development, design, and transcription are commonly done by workers in diverse locations. Crowdsourcing (众包) is making it possible for work to be done simultaneously (同时的) by many people -no matter where they are.
E) Businesses are beginning to do this as well. Rather than locking workers in departmental silos (筒仓), companies on the cutting edge are encouraging employees to start communicating with each other on internal social-media sites. What used to be the quarterly e.-mail from the CEO has become a kind of information-sharing within companies---at all levels. Companies will start designing and developing new products and services by engaging their entire employee base.
F) Telepresence robots are taking video conferencing to a new level. There are several products on the market, such as Beam by Suitable Technologies and Fellow Robots, that allow a screen mounted on a mobile platform to move around the office and experience what is happening in a more human way. Imagine walking into your boss’s office while you are at home, stepping into a conference room to join a meeting, or chit-chatting with your peers around the water fountain. Next generation video-conferencing technologies such as Mezzanine by Oblong Industries are using multiple screens and spatial user interfaces (界面) to allow people in different locations to cooperate and share electronic information in a science fiction-like setting.
G) We can expect Google Glass-type devices to bring the computer display to our body---so that we view the screen on our glasses and don't need to sit at a desk any more. I expect future versions to provide 3D experiences that simulate the holodecks (全景操作平台) we saw in Star Trek. And who knows, we may well have holodecks that make it feel as though we are together---but that is getting too far into the future. During this decade, we'll have to settle for 2D interfaces and 3D simulations.
H) This is all exciting and terrifying enough. But what worries me is the intrusion (侵入) that companies will increasingly make into our lives and the exhaustion we will suffer from always being at the call of our employers. I know from personal experience how hard it is to turn off e-mail and disconnect from social media. This will only get worse for all of us as we become more connected.
I) And then there will be demands by our employers for us to better manage our lifestyles---so that they can reduce their health bills and get more out of us. Just as companies reward workers who join health clubs and stop smoking, we will see them making greater demands. They will be able to measure what we do because we will increasingly be wearing biometric (生物计量的) -monitoring devices such as the Nike FuelBand and Fitbit Flex and our smartphones will be adding new sensors. The new generation of sensor-based devices will continually gather data about our movement, heart rate, weight, sleep, and other health-related matters and upload these to the cloud. Before giving you more sick leave, employers will probably demand that you improve your lifestyle and habits.
J) All of this may seem like science fiction, but it isn't. The future is happening faster than we think and changing important parts of our existence.
举一反三
- The day-to-day feel and quality of each of our lives does not sit on( ). A: which people we spend most of our time with B: what we do for a living C: what we do with ourselves when we’re not at work D: where we travel
- If we’d all work together, I think we could accomplish our goal.
- If we'd all work together, I think we could ________ (实现) our goal.
- We have entered the 21st century and the career ______ of the future rely more and more on possessing a good ______ , rather than a good ______ . There are three keys to unlocking a ______ and meaningful future. The first is the ability to ______ . That is, we should be able to dream about ______ we want to do in the future. Next is the ability to ______ what it will take to ______ our dream. Finally, we should be able to plan to make our future what we want ______ to be. These three keys will ______ us to an ideal tomorrow.
- Section B Directions: In this section, you are going to read a passage with ten statements attached to it. Each statement contains information given in one of the paragraphs. Identify the paragraph from which the information is derived. You may choose a paragraph more than once. Why Study History? A)Let's face it, our first experience with history is that it is a course that we have to take in order to graduate. As a junior and senior high school student, we have to study American history and state history, and perhaps even take a general course in western civilization (文明) or world history. We didn't have a choice. And the fact that we are forced to take history puts us on the defensive. We begin to build that splendid brick wall that will prevent us from getting anything important out of history. B)The main problem as I see it, is not history itself. The study of history can be fun. But there's only one thing that can make our first experience with history a horrible thing indeed: and that's a poor instructor. I was fortunate. I managed to have a number of excellent history instructors throughout my high school years and this was at a time when I was leaning toward the physical sciences, geology and biology to be exact. I might not have been an excellent history student, but I do remember having excellent history teachers. C)Fine. That's my experience. But experience aside, why study history in the first place? What could history offer the business major? the student hoping to study web page development? the student taking her first psychology class? or the lawyer? or the worker on the shop floor? Well, simply stated, everything has a history, whether we like it or not. Even history itself has a history. Try hard as we might, we can't escape the past. We can't let go of the past. And we celebrate the past all the time. D)You may have been told that we study history so that we won't repeat the mistakes of the past. This is the wishful thinking (一厢情愿) school of historical interpretation (诠释). It's too clean. If we have learned from the past then over the centuries we ought to have built on so much knowledge that things like war, poverty, injustice and immorality ought not to exist. Of course, we've still got a long way to go along this line. E)You may also have heard that everything repeats itself, so if we study the past, we can be sure to know something of the future. I don't hold to this view either. To insist that the study of the past will help to know something of the future is a nice idea, but what I really want to know about is the present. History cannot "tell" the future. History can, on the other hand, help to understand all that is the present. So, faced as we are with the question "why study history?" I can only hope to answer by telling you why I study history. F)Well first off, it's extremely important for us to be in touch not only with the past of our own country, but also of the world as well. History tells us things about the world in which we live. When we are young, we know little about the world beyond our immediate family and environment. As we grow older we realize that the world extends far beyond those limited surroundings and we are hungry for more knowledge of the wider world. But no matter how much of it we explore, all we see is the world as it is today. However, the way the world works is a result of a very long period of development, and we can never understand it well enough unless we try to learn as much as possible about our past. G)Most of us want to live meaningful lives, and we want to understand more than is enough for our mere survival. In our search for understanding our place in the world, we turn to history. There we find a much larger store of human beliefs and values than we come across in our everyday lives. In doing so, we develop a wiser understanding of who we are, of what we can achieve, and of what dangers put individuals, families, communities and nations at risk. H)Of course, there are also more practical reasons why we should study history. Historians examine facts, compare them, evaluate (评价) them, and reach conclusions. By studying history, our own ability to perform these tasks is increased, and this ability is crucial in many walks of life. If you think about it, it's what managers, journalists, politicians, doctors, lawyers and many other professionals have to do every day -- each in their profession. I)But history is enjoyable, too. We should know something of our past in order to be proud of our achievements and how we may have played our part in the development of civilization. With increasing globalization, individual countries are losing the traditions and customs of their own regions, but knowing our history would mean that these traditions do not entirely disappear. However, we should not feel that only our history is of value to the world. Every country has been important to the development of civilization and we must not be so arrogant (傲慢) as to think only ours counts. ______11.What the world is now has taught us that it has not come true that we study history to avoid repeating the same mistakes of the past.