厦门大学考博英语真题（二）

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Direction: Read the following passage carefully and then translate the underlined sentences into Chinese．

1．The onrush of cheap communications, powerful computers and the Internet all explain why many people feel that, nowadays, change is happening ever more rapidly as technological progress accelerates. Moore's law, that the power of microchips doubles every 18 months, has been tested and found correct. This is what gives people the sense of a world shifting beneath their feet．

2．Yet the implication that rapid change is a new phenomenon is again misleading. If you measure the time it takes for a technology to become widely diffused, today's experience does not seem unusual. Take the car. The basic patent for an internal-combustion engine capable of powering a car was filed in 1877. By the late 1920s—50 years later—over half of all American households owned a car．

3．The comparable dates for the computer are harder to tie down, but the first big computer, based on vacuum valves, was built in 1946. The transistor—the first semiconductor device—was invented at Bell Laboratories in 1948. The first patent for an integrated circuit was filed in 1959. Now, in 1999-50 years after the first one was built—around half of American households own a computer. The pace of introduction has been similar to that of the car．

4．You have to cheat, choosing only the date for the personal computer, say (mid-1970s), or the internet (ditto) to make it seem much more rapid．

Comparing its diffusion among private users is, you might say, unfair to the computer, for that machine's main use is in businesses. On that measure, the best historical analogy is with electrification, and the spread of the electric dynamo into factories．

5．According to Paul David, a historian at Stanford University in California, the first electricity-generating stations had been installed in New York and London in 1881, but it was well into the 1920s before the dynamo became widely used and started to raise productivity. The adoption of the computer in business has also been slow, and failed to have any measurable impact on productivity until very recently．

KEY

1．今天，随着科技的飞速发展、通讯的廉价、计算机功能的强大和因特网的不断涌现，人们的生活日新月异。

2．但是把这种快速变化视为新现象是错误的。如果你算一下一项技术从它产生到被广泛应用所需要的时间，那么你对今天所发生的这些变化就不会觉得奇怪了。

3．计算机究竟诞生于何时，我们已经很难弄清楚了。但第一台大型真空电子管计算机管是在1946年产生的。

4．如果你想它看起来的确比别的技术快得多，那么你就得蒙混过关了，你可以从个人计算机或者因特网的诞生算起，也就是从20世纪70年代中期算起。

5．根据斯坦福大学历史学家保罗·大卫的介绍，1881年，第一批发电机被安装在纽约和伦敦，但直到20世纪20年代发电机才得到广泛的应用并提高了社会生产力。