新東方：大學(xué)英語四級(jí)考試閱讀講義(三)

　　31. What do you suppose was the attitude of Dr. Samuel Johnson towards ladies preaching?

　　A) He believed that ladies were born worse preachers than men.

　　B) He was pleased that ladies could preach, though not as well as men.

　　C) He disapproved of ladies preaching.

　　D) He encouraged ladies to preach.

　　32. Today, computers are still inferior to man in terms of .

　　A) decision making C) growth of reasoning power

　　B) drives and feelings D) information absorption

　　33. In terms of making quick decisions, the human brain cannot be compared with the computer because .

　　A) in the long process of evolution the slow pace of life didn't require such ability of the human brain

　　B) the human brain is influenced by other factors such as motivation and emotion

　　C) the human brain may sometimes freeze up in a dangerous situation

　　D) computers imitate life while the human brain does not imitate computers

　　34. Though he thinks highly of the development of computer science, the author doesn't mean that .

　　A) computers are likely to become a new form of intelligent life

　　B) human beings have lost control of computers

　　C) the intelligence of computers will eventually surpass that of human beings

　　D) the evolution of intelligence will probably depend on that of electronic brains

　　35. According to the passage, which of the following statements is TRUE?

　　A) Future man will be made of silicon instead of flesh and blood.

　　B) Some day it will be difficult to tell a computer from a man.

　　C) The reasoning power of computers has already surpassed that of man.

　　D) Future intelligent life may not necessarily be made of organic matter.

　　Passage Four

　　Questions 36 to 40 are based on the following passage:

　　Video recorders and photocopiers, even ticket machines on the railways, often seem unnecessarily difficult to use. Last December I bought myself a video cassette recorder (VCR) described as “simple to use”. In the first three weeks I failed repeatedly to program the machine to record from the TV, and after months of practice I still made mistakes. I am not alone. According to a survey last year by Ferguson, the British manufacturer, more than one in four VCR owners never use the timer (定時(shí)器) on their machines to record a programme: they don't use it because they've found it far too hard to operate.

　　So why do manufacturers keep on designing and producing VCRS that are awkward to use if the problems are so obvious? First, the problems we notice are not obvious to technically minded (有技術(shù)思想的) designers with years of experience and trained to understand how appliances work. Secondly, designers tend to add one or two features at a time to each model, whereas you or I face all a machine's features at once. Thirdly, although finding problems in a finished product is easy, it is too late by then to do anything about the design. Finally, if manufacturers can get away with selling products that are difficult to use, it is not worth the effort of any one of them to make improvements.

　　Some manufacturers say they concentrate on providing a wide range of features rather than on making the machines easy to use. But that gives rise to the question, “Why can't you have features that are easy to use?” The answer is you can. Good design practice is a mixture of specific procedures and general principles. For a start, designers should build an original model of the machine and try it out on typical members of the public—not on colleagues in the development laboratory. Simple public trials would quickly reveal many design mistakes. In an ideal world, there would be some ways of controlling quality such as that the VCR must be redesigned repeatedly until, say, 90 per cent of users can work 90 per cent of the features correctly 90 per cent of the time.

　　36. The author had trouble operating his VCR because .��

　　A) he had neglected the importance of using the timer

　　B) the machine had far more technical features than necessary

　　C) he had set about using it without proper training

　　D) its operation was far more difficult than the designer intended it to be