Directions: Read carefully the passage that begins on this page and the essay topic that follows. Respond to the topic by writing an essay that is controlled by a central idea and is developed by discussing specific examples.
Your essay will be evaluated on the basis of your ability to develop your central idea, to express yourlf clearly, and to u the conventions of written English. The topic has no “我有一个女朋友correct中国象棋术语” respon. Your essay will be due on May 26.
Introductory Note: Jared Diamond is a professor of physiology at the UCLA School of Medicine. The following passage is adapted from his 1997 book Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies.
Accepting or Rejecting Innovation
Once an inventor has discovered a u for a new technology, the next step is to persuade society to adopt it. Merely having a bigger, faster, more powerful device for doing something is no guarantee of ready acceptance. Innumerable such technologies were either not adopted at all or adopted only after prolonged resistance. Notorious examples include the world’s continued rejection of an efficiently designed typewriter keyboard and Britain’s long reluctance to adopt electric lighting. What is it that promotes an invention’s acceptance by a society?
尝粪忧心
The first and most obvious factor is relative economic advantage compared with existing technology. While wheels are very uful in modern industrial societies, that has not been so in some other societies. Some advanced Native American cultures in ancient Mexico invented wheeled vehicles with axles for u as toys, but not for transport. That ems incredible to us, until we reflect that the peoples of ancient Mexico lacked domestic animals to hitch to their wheeled vehicles, which therefore offered no advantage over human porters.
喝葡萄酒
A cond consideration is social value and prestige, which can override(废除) economic benefit---or lack thereof. Millions of people today buy designer jeans for double the price of equally durable generic jeans becau the social cachet(声望) of the designer label counts for more than the extra cost. Similarly, Japan continues to u its horrendously(可怕的) cumbersome(累赘的) kanji(汉字) writing system in preference to efficient alphabets or Japan's own efficient kana syllabary becau the prestige attached to kanji is so great.
Still another factor is compatibility with vested interests. This book, like probably every other typed document you have ever read, was typed with a QWERTY keyboard, named for the left-most six letters in its upper row. Unbelievable as it may now sound, that keyboard layout was designed in 1873 as a feat of anti-engineering. It employs a whole ries of perver tricks designed to force typists to type as slowly as possible, such as scattering the commonest letters over all keyboard rows and concentrating them on the left side, where right-handed people have to u their weaker hand. The reason behind all of tho emingly counterproductive features is that the typewriters of 1873 jammed i
f adjacent keys were struck in quick succession, so that manufacturers had to slow typists down. When improvements in typewriters eliminated the problem of jamming, trials in 1932 showed that an efficiently laid-out keyboard would let us double our typing speed and reduce our typing effort by 95 percent. But QWERTY keyboards were solidly entrenched(巩固) by then. The vested interests of hundreds of millions of QWERTY typists, typing teachers, typewriters and computer salespeople, and manufacturers have crushed all moves toward keyboard efficiency for over 60 years.
饮酒的危害
泻药对身体有害吗 While the story of the QWERTY keyboard may sound funny, many similar cas of resistance to change bad on financial interests or ttled habits have involved much heavier economic conquences. Why does Japan now dominate the world market for transistorized electronic consumer products to a degree that damages the United States balance of payments with Japan, even though transistors were invented and patented in the United States? Japan dominates the electronics market today becau the Japane company Sony bought transistor licensing rights from the American company Western Electric at a time when the American electronics consumer industry was churning out vac
uum tube models and was therefore reluctant to compete with its own products. Why were British cities still using gas street lighting into the 1920s, long after cities in the United States and Germany had converted to more efficient electric street lighting? British municipal governments rejected electric street lighting becau they had invested heavily in gas lighting; to protect tho investments, they placed regulatory obstacles in the way of competing electric light companies.
解暑饮料
Essay Topic
According to Diamond, what caus people to reject new technologies? To what extent do you think his ideas explain why people accept or reject innovations of all kinds---new products, new ideas, new ways of doing things? Write an essay responding to the two questions; to develop your own position, be sure to discuss specific examples. Tho examples can be drawn from anything you have read---including, if you choo, “Accepting or Rejecting Innovation”法学学科排名 itlf---as well as from your obrvation and experience.
