Unit 3 Under the sea reading课时作业
I.阅读理解
A
To some, Facebook, Twitter and similar social-media platforms are the highest level of communication—better, even, than face-to-face conversations, since more people can be involved. Others think of them more as something that leads to self-appreciation, threatens privacy and reduces intelligent conversations to the exchange of rude memes. They might even, these kinds of arguments go, be creating a generation of electronic addicts who are incapable of reflective, individual, original thought.
A topic ripe for anthropological (人类学的) study, then. And such a study, the “Why We Post (发帖)” project, has just been published by nine anthropologists, led by Daniel Miller of University College, London.
The participants in “Why We Post” worked independently for 15 months at locations in Brazil, Britain, Chile, China (one rural and one industrial site), India, Italy, Trinidad and Tobago, and Turkey. They buried themselves within families and their surrounding communities.That, the team believes, let them form a subtle view of the roles of social media in their study sites which could not be gained by analysing participants’ public postings. These by-standers’ viewpoints deny much received wisdom. One of the biggest doubts is the “selfie”—which is often blamed for causing self-regard and too much focus on attractiveness. “Why We Post”, however, reveals that the selfie itself has many faces. In Brazil many selfies posted by men were taken at the gym. But at the British site, Dr Miller found, school children posted five times as many “groupies” (images of the picture-taker with friends) as they did selfies. Britons have also created a category called “uglies” (曝丑照), of which the purpose is to take as ugly a self-image as possible.
The often-humorous, marked-up images known as memes have also come in for criticism. They lower down traditional forms of public debate, spreading far and wide with little context. But memes serve different purposes in different cultures. In India they tend to focus on serious and religious issues;Trinidadian memes are more often send-ups of politicians. Yet in all cases Dr Miller sees meme-passing not as limiting what social media users think and say, but as enabling
conversations. Many users happily forward memes with strong political or economic messages on which they would not dare to comment individually.
Critics also often view the online characters people create for their social-media postings as false images designed for the medium at hand. Trinidadians, however, disagree. They see online profiles as more representative of a person’s true self even than what is seen in real life. Also, young boys and girls in Turkey see things differently. Social media permit them to be in constant contact with one another, in full view of their parents, but to keep their conversations and photos to themselves.
In rural China and Turkey social media were viewed as a distraction from education. But in industrial China and Brazil they were seen to be an educational resource. Such a divide was evident in India, too. There, high-income families regarded them with suspicion but low-income families advocated them as a supplementary source of schooling. In Britain, meanwhile, they were valued not directly as a means of education, but as a way for pupils,parents and teachers to communicate.
The skeptics’ reaction to new technology seems equally deep-rooted. New means of communication from railways and the telegraph onwards have always attracted critics. Therefore, sooner or later, the doubters either convert, or die. 1.What can we learn from Paragraph 1?
A.Face-to-face conversations are better than social media. B.Social-media platforms bring more problems than benefits. C.Opinions are divided on the influences of social media. D.More people will be addicted to electronic products.
2.Which of the following statements is Daniel Miller likely to support?
A.Selfies make people focus too much on attractiveness. B.Memes lower down traditional forms of public debate. C.Online images created for social media are false. D.Not all received wisdom is true on social media. 3.The underlined word “That” in Paragraph refers to . A.the way the team carried out their project B.the way the team analysed public postings
C.the way the families lived in the communities D.the way the participants buried themselves 4.The writer’s attitude towards social media is .
A.ambiguous C.unknown
B.positive D.negative
B
Shiny things absorb less heat when left in the sun. This means that if the Earth could be made a little shinier it would be less likely to suffer global warming. Ways to brighten it, such as adding nanoscale(纳米级)specks of salt to low clouds, making them whiter, or putting a thin haze of particles into the stratosphere(平流层), are the field of “geoengineering”(地球工程). A small band of scientists have mostly been using computer models to study the subject. Some of them are now proposing outdoor experiments—using seawater-fed sprayers to churn out particles of the exact size needed to brighten clouds, or scattering sulphur particles(硫粒子) from underneath a large balloon 20km up in the sky.
The scientists hope to understand some of the processes on which these technologies depend, as a way of both measuring their possibility (can you reliably make the proper amount of sea salt brighten clouds?) and assessing their risks (how much damage to the ozone layer might a stratospheric haze do, and how might such damage be minimized?). The experiments would be far too small to have any climatic effects. The amount of sulphur put into the stratosphere by the experimental balloon would be 2% of what a passenger jet crossing the Atlantic emits in an hour.
However, many scientists doubt whether geoengineering experiments have any effects. And some environmentalists say that such experiments reflect the hubris(傲慢)of humans, who believe they can toy with nature.
Geoengineering is not an alternative to relieving climate change by cutting carbon emissions. Even if emissions do start to fall, the cuts will take decades to have any effect so temperatures are likely to go on rising for some time. The planet is not getting cooler and the pressures on the climate are unlikely to go away. It is therefore not too hard to imagine a world, decades from now, in which emissions are falling but temperatures are rising steeply and the ability to adapt to them has been stretched too far. An additional way to stabilize temperatures might then seem appropriate. Geoengineering offers that possibility.
5.The aim of the outdoor experiments in Paragraph 1 is .
A.to relieve the global warming B.to brighten the clouds C.to test the computer models D.to study geoengineering
6.The geoengineering climate experiment would hardly take any climate effect because . A.scientists aren’t sure whether sea salt can brighten clouds B.geoengineering would minimize the damage to the ozone layer C.the amount of sulphur emitted by a balloon is very small D.a passenger jet emits much more sulphur than a balloon does 7.Even if carbon emission is reduced right away, . A.global warming will be relieved B.climatic pressure will be removed C.the temperature will remain stable D.global warming will last for years 8.We can infer from the passage that . A.passenger jets are a major cause of global warming B.scientists don’t show due respect for the environment C.geoengineering is better than cutting carbon emissions D.cutting emissions isn’t enough to relieve climate change
C
Not so long ago, most people didn’t know who Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce was going to become. She was just an average high school athlete. There was every indication that she was just another Jamaican teenager without much of a future. However, one person wanted to change this. Stephen Francis observed then eighteen-year-old Shelly-Ann at a track meet and was convinced that he had seen the beginnings of true greatness. Her times were not exactly impressive, but even so, he sensed there was something trying to get out, something the other coaches had overlooked when they had assessed her and found her lacking. He decided to offer Shelly-Ann a place in his very strict training sessions. Their cooperation quickly produced results, and a few years later at
Jamaica’s Olympic trials in early 2008, Shelly-Ann, who at that time only ranked number 70 in the world, beat Jamaica’s unchallenged queen of the sprint(短跑).
“Where did she come from?” asked an astonished sprinting world, before concluding that she must be one of those one-hit wonders that spring up from time to time, only to disappear again without signs. But Shelly-Ann was to prove that she was anything but a one-hit wonder. At the Beijing Olympics she swept away any doubts about her ability to perform consistently by becoming the first Jamaican woman ever to win the 100 metres Olympic gold. She did it again one year on at the World Championships in Berlin, becoming world champion with a time of 10.73—the fourth fastest time ever.
Shelly-Ann is a little woman with a big smile. She has a mental toughness that did not come about by chance. Her journey to becoming the fastest woman on earth has been anything but smooth and effortless. She grew up in one of Jamaica’s toughest inner-city communities known as Waterhouse, where she lived in a one-room apartment, sleeping four in a bed with her mother and two brothers. Waterhouse, one of the poorest communities in Jamaica, is a really violent and overpopulated place. Several of Shelly-Ann’s friends and family were caught up in the killings;one of her cousins was shot dead only a few streets away from where she lived. Sometimes her family didn’t have enough to eat. She ran at the school championships barefooted because she couldn’t afford shoes. Her mother Maxime, one of a family of fourteen, had been an athlete herself as a young girl but, like so many other girls in Waterhouse, had to stop after she had her first baby.Maxime’s early entry into the adult world with its responsibilities gave her the determination to ensure that her kids would not end up in Waterhouse’s roundabout of poverty. One of the first things Maxime used to do with Shelly-Ann was taking her to the track, and she was ready to sacrifice everything.
It didn’t take long for Shelly-Ann to realize that sports could be her way out of Waterhouse. On a summer evening in Beijing in 2008, all those long, hard hours of work and commitment finally bore fruit. The barefoot kid who just a few years previously had been living in poverty, surrounded by criminals and violence, had written a new chapter in the history of sports.
But Shelly-Ann’s victory was far greater than that. The night she won Olympic gold in Beijing, the routine murders in Waterhouse and the drug wars in the neighbouring streets stopped. The dark cloud above one of the world’s toughest criminal neighbourhoods simply disappeared
2018-2019学年高中英语(人教版)选修七Unit 3 Under the sea reading课时作业(5)
