In more recent years, () heat exchangers have frequently been employed for jacket water and oil cooling.
New peace proposals _______ at the recent Middle East conference.
They have learned about()in recent years.
This book is about the future of technology. In it we will examine some of the many recent developments in a few key fields and try, in a limited way, to predict where they will take us in the next fifteen years or (1)____.
If that sounds like a modest goal, it’s not. Technology is the (2)____(dominate) force of our time and probably of all time to come. It appears in more varieties than we can count. It changes so rapidly (3)____ no scientist or engineer can keep up with his own field, much less with technology in general. It permeates and shapes our lives at every turn. We live in technology (4)____ fish live in the sea, and we have only a little better chance of (5) f____ the details of its future changes.
Yet the task is well worth undertaking. Whatever hints we can glean (一点点搜集) about the future win help us prepare for the changes to come. Modest forecasts, evidence of trends, a few concrete developments to be expected all are better than no warning at all. And (6) th____ technology has made the present much less stable than the past, and surely will make the future more disturbed still, there is good reason to hope that our lives, in sum and on average, will be better as a result. In an age of uncomfortable (7) ch____, this is reassurance(保证) we all can use.
For an idea of what is to come—in magnitude if not in (8) sp____—look to the past. In the last ninety years, the world has shrunk, while human experience has advanced almost beyond the recognition of these who grew up in our grandparent’s generation.
A century after America’s (9)____(found) conceived their agrarian (耕地的) democracy, nearly all their descendents still lived on fanning. Since World War I, technology has extracted us from behind horse-drawn plows and plugged us into (10) as____ lines and offices. Today it is removing many of us from offices and letting us work at home or forcing us to work on the road.
The Threatened Environment In recent years we have come to realize that several threats to the environment are fundamental. One is acid rain, which is created by the millions of tones of sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxides spewed out of North American smokestacks and automobile exhaust pipes1. The oxides mix with water vapor in the air to form weak sulphuric and nitric acid, which later falls as acid rain. The result is increased acidity in lakes, which has curtailed the ability of many fish to reproduce, and in the soil, which has slowed the growth of trees and increased their vulnerability to disease.2
With every news report, the externality dimension of environmental problems3 seems to become clearer. For instance, it was recently reported that Lapp villagers in northern Sweden and Norway were forbidden to eat local reindeer meat after their herds became contaminated by fallout from the nuclear accident at ChernobyI5 in far-off Ukraine. Similarly, Canadian wildlife scientists have found high levels of PCBs6 and other contaminants in polar-bear livers.
But some pollution problems involve such dramatic externalities that the whole world is affected. One example is the greenhouse effect. The steadily rising and essentially irreversible concentration7 of carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere causes it to trap increasing amounts of the heat radiated by the planet. The general warming trend is expected to have disastrous effects, including mass starvation in some less developed countries, flooding of entire coastal areas, and severe droughts on the Canadian Prairies, perhaps within the next fifty years.
Another worldwide threat is in the upper atmosphere—the thinning of the layer of ozone, a bluish gas that shields the earth from the sun’s ultraviolet rays. Synthetic chemicals called chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) are depleting the ozone layer. One estimated result is that the chance of getting skin cancer is now 8 to 16 percent greater than it was in 1950.
Hazardous wastes (such as those from nuclear plants, industrial manufacturing, laboratories, and medical institutions) represent yet another critical environmental problem improperly disposed, they can threaten all forms of organic life. Unfortunately, little has been done so far to solve this problem. Indeed there are many instances in which industrialized countries have literally just shipped the problem off to the poorest of the less developed countries—countries unequipped with the necessary storage and treatment facilities, and certainly too poor to deal with the serious environmental problems that will follow. For example, in 1988 the government of Guinea-Bissau13 signed a contract with two British firms to receive 15 million tones of pharmaceutical wastes over a five-year period. While this arrangement was very inexpensive from the firms’ point of view, the payments to Guinea-Bissau totaled more than four times that county’s national product. It makes it difficult to solve the problem when parts of the world are so poor that they are forced to regard such transactions as “good deals”.
The users of the world’s resources simply must be made to take the external costs of their actions into consideration when making their decisions. The people who are hacking down the world’s rain forests at the rate of 1200 hectares an hour are literally cutting away the lungs of the earth, since rain forests contribute a large percentage of the oxygen in the earth’s atmosphere. But these individuals are not necessarily evil: in many cases, they are forced to overuse the environment for their own or their country’s immediate survival. For example, some developing countries’ needs for foreign exchange to pay for imports compel them to cut timber faster than it can be regenerated. They simply cannot afford to worry about the future.
Obviously, many of these problems cannot be solved without political decisions to redistribute income to the less developed countries, and to define property rights. But the right kinds of political and institutional changes will be forthcoming only if they are rooted in an understanding of the externality dimension of environmental issues.
To view the results of the most recent Automatic SQL Tuning Advisor task, which sequence should you follow?()
Several users have recently been calling the helpdesk about a recent network outage. These calls have increased in the last hour and are all by different users calling about the same issue. Which of the following types of communication skills should the helpdesk technicians MOST likely exercise while answering each call? ()
Trying to Find a Partner One of the most striking findings of a recent poll in the UK is that of the people interviewed, one in two believes that it is becoming more difficult to meet someone to start a family with. Why are many finding it increasingly difficult to start and sustain intimate relationships? Does modern life really make it harder to fall in love? Or are we making it harder for ourselves? It is certainly the case today that contemporary couples benefit in different ways from relationships. Women no longer rely upon partners for economic security or status. A man doesn't expect his spouse to be in sole charge of running his household and raising his children. But perhaps the knowledge that we can live perfectly well without a partnership means that it takes much more to persuade people to abandon their independence. In theory, finding a partner should be much simpler these days. Only a few generations ago, your choice of soulmate (心上人) was constrained by geography, social convention and family tradition. Although it was never explicit, many marriages were essentially arranged. Now those barriers have been broken down. You can approach a builder or a brain surgeon in any bar in any city on any given evening. When the world is your oyster (牡蛎) ,you surely have a better chance of finding a pearl. But it seems that the old conventions have been replaced by an even tighter constraint: the tyranny of choice. The expectations of partners are inflated to an unmanageable degree: good looks, impressive salary, kind to grandmother, and right socks. There is no room for error in the first impression. We think that a relationship can be perfect. If it isn't, it is disposable. We work to protect ourselves against future heartache and don't put in the hard emotional labor needed to build a strong relationship. Of course, this is complicated by realities. The cost of housing and child-rearing creates pressure to have a stable income and career before a life partnership. Which of the following was NOT a constraint on one's choice of soulmate in the old days?()
Due to a recent change in government regulations, Company.com needs to create two independent but synchronized copies of their data. These copies must be contained in separate storage device a minimum of 100 km apart. The customer has capacity in two systems that meet the criteria, one with SSA disk and the other is FAStT. What facility can be used to manage this issue?()
NHS has suffered from under-funding in recent decades,as a result of which many()people have been turning to private medical health care.