2010 丁晓钟春季词汇班讲义

2010 丁晓钟春季词汇班讲义 点点英语 bbs.diandian.net-1- 目录

外刊文章： The paperless office：On its way, at last-------------------------------------------------1

The CIA and NSA Want You to Be Their Friend on Facebook------------------------4

Technology firms in the recession: Here we go again----------------------------------6

考研英语总体复习思路指导：如此准备，考研英语过关不在话下------------------9

1999 年Text 1 超精解[摘选自《超精解(上)》]------------------------------------------11

2007 年Text 3 超精解[摘选自《超精解(下)》]------------------------------------------16

2004 年大作文超精解[摘选自《超精解(下)》]-------------------------------------------25 The paperless office On its way, at last

Oct 9th 2008 | SAN FRANCISCO From The Economist print edition

No longer a joke, the “paperless” office is getting closer

(01) STEPHANIE BREEDLOVE and her husband founded Breedlove & Associates 16 years ago to help families who (legally) hire a nanny with the crushing burden of paperwork that this entails. There are pay stubs to be sent, federal and state tax returns to be filed, pay schedules to be updated and other trails of exceedingly boring paper.

Much of the firm’s small office in Austin, Texas, is taken up by 100 paper-filled filing

cabinets. An office manager spends 25 hours a week shuffling paper between desks and

drawers. At peak times, says Ms Breedlove, the office becomes “a sea of paper,” with

colour-coded stacks on conference tables, floors and chairs. (02) With luck, this will soon be a thing of the past. Last year Breedlove decided to

go paperless. It is now about halfway there, says Ms Breedlove. The constant flow of

information between Breedlove and its clients now goes via e-mail, with forms attached

as PDF files. The next step is to roll out an online service so that clients can log on to

1

manage their accounts. Only the Internal Revenue Service still insists on paper for some

things, says Ms Breedlove, but even it claims to be going electronic soon.

(03) Fewer trees will die and less ink will be squirted, but that is not her primary

motivation, she says. It is that everyone—clients and staff—is sick of paper. The clients

tend to be young, middle-class families with toddlers; they are good with technology and

already pay bills online, use e-tickets on planes, e-file their tax returns and Google

recipes rather than using cookbooks. And Breedlove’s 16 employees are in their 20s,

native to Facebook and instant-messaging and baffled by the need for paper. Now

everybody is happier. Next year the firm expects to be completely paperless.

(04) A decade ago this scenario was brought up only in sardonic jokes. Instead of

The Paperless Office: On its way, at last -2-点点英语bbs.diandian.net

the paperless office promised by futurists, offices and homes seemed to be drowning in

more paper than ever. In the digital era people were exchanging much more information,

but neither technology nor behaviour had caught up. They were printing e-mails for

archiving and Word documents for marking up by hand. A 2001 book, “The Myth of the

Paperless Office”, summed up the conventional wisdom. (05) But as it turned out, that was the very year when demand for office paper

began declining. David Pineault, a paper expert at InfoTrends, a consultancy, estimates

that office workers in rich countries will reduce their consumption of “uncoated

freesheet” paper (called “woodfree” in Europe) —the sort used in offices—every year for

the foreseeable future. Some market segments, such as high-quality paper for photo

printing, may buck the trend. But overall, Mr Pineault is “bearish” on paper.

(06) “It’s a generational thing,” says Greg Gibson, in charge of North American office

paper at International Paper (IP), the world’s largest paper-maker. Older people still

prefer a hard copy of most things, but younger workers are increasingly comfortable

reading on screens and storing and retrieving information on computers or online. As a

result, IP has closed five uncoated-freesheet mills in America in the past decade, and the

industry is consolidating. IP is investing instead in poor countries, where demand is still growing.

(07) As new generations of office workers leave university—where their class notes

and syllabuses are online these days—they take their habits with them. They like digital

information because it reduces clutter. It can be “tagged” and thus filed into many

folders instead of just one physical file. It can be searched by keyword. It can be cut,

pasted and remixed. It allows for easier collaboration, through features such as “track

changes”. It can be shared across an ocean as easily as across a desk. Increasingly, it

resides in the internet “cloud” and can be accessed from anywhere, not just in the office.

By contrast, paper tends to get torn, stained, burnt, soaked and lost.

(08) But within every trend, there is a smaller and countervailing micro-trend. Even

as people in rich countries print, copy and file less paper, says Mr Gibson, they demand

more beauty in the few things they do still print. Colour printing has been rising sharply,

thanks in part to better printers. The old rules have been inverted, says Mr Gibson.

People used to take a few photographs and print them all; now they take vast numbers

but print a few. Firms used to print reams of forms at headquarters, then disseminate

them to subsidiaries, where many were wasted. Now they distribute information, and

employees print only what they need.

(09) Surviving print jobs tend to be on what is known as “higher bright” paper, which

2

is smoother, heavier and offers better colour contrasts. It is a small part of today’s

office-paper market, but is growing by 8% a year, says Mr Gibson. Whereas copy paper

costs about $4 per 500 sheets, he says, better-quality paper costs up to $7, and thus

offers higher margins. By appealing to the senses, where screens are still second-best, such paper is the industry’s hope. 2010 丁晓钟春季词汇班讲义 点点英语 bbs.diandian.net-3-

(10) Information thus appears to be becoming paperless roughly as transport has

become horseless, says Paul Saffo, a technology visionary in Silicon Valley. When cars

came along, the number of horses in America dropped at first, but the number is now

roughly back to where it was in the late 19th century. As a share of the trips people take,

horses have become insignificant. But they are thriving for special occasions and sport.

Paper, too, has a future—for the fine copy of the “Iliad”, the women’s fashion magazine

and the memorable certificate. But nobody, least of all the staff at Breedlove, will shed a

tear for those stacks of tax forms on the carpet.

The CIA and NSA Want You to Be Their Friend on Facebook -4-点点英语bbs.diandian.net

The CIA and NSA Want You to Be Their Friend on Facebook The spy agencies are using the popular social-networking site as part of their recruiting efforts By Alex Kingsbury

(01) The online social-networking service Facebook works for finding old classmates

or arranging happy hours, so why not use it to help recruit the next generation of spies?

That's what's happening now in cyberspace, as the country's intelligence community

turns to such sites to attract a wider range of résumés.

(02) The CIA now has its own Facebook page, as does the hush-hush National

Security Agency, which vacuums up the world's communications for analysis. Both invite

Facebook members to register and read information about employment opportunities.

It's part of a larger, multiyear hiring push to boost the size of the U.S. intelligence community.

(03) But should the country's secret spy agency be encouraging potential hires to

publicize their interest in the intelligence field? Apparently, it's not a concern. In the first

place, since the groups are not directly moderated, it is impossible to control who

registers as a member. Some may enroll on the site out of curiosity. And, of course, none

of those who show interest are yet officers in the clandestine service.

(04) Even so, once they are on the CIA payroll, employees face no prohibition

against keeping social-networking accounts or pages. \agency officers are not, as

a rule, prohibited from maintaining a page on Facebook, they are made aware of

precautions to take if they choose to do so,\says CIA spokesman George Little.

(05) But the Facebook posting shouldn't necessarily cause a run on tinfoil hats. The

pages aren't designed to surreptitiously gather information about those who visit the site,

as fearful skeptics allege. In reality, says the CIA, they are flashy recruiting posters,

\

(06) \time to time over the past few years, we have used Facebook to share

information on employment opportunities with the agency,\says Little. He says it is part

of a much broader campaign \advertising media.\

(07) The NSA, for its part, sees the bleak tech-sector landscape as an opportunity to

attract good workers and provide jobs. The Facebook site, according to Don Weber,

deputy chief in the NSA's recruitment office, is just another venue where applicants can

learn more about the agency, \well as discuss those opportunities with fellow job seekers and NSA recruiters.\

3

(08) The NSA site is four months old and already has nearly 1,000 members, along

with a listing of current job openings, from cryptological and language analysts to

information system security designers. 2010 丁晓钟春季词汇班讲义 点点英语 bbs.diandian.net-5-

(09) Nearly 800 Facebook members have joined the CIA group, which is free and

does not require approval from a moderator. \the right people to do the job is of

the utmost importance,\one of those people.\

(10) It's all a far cry from the historical spy-recruiting process, which traditionally

focused on Ivy League campuses or the ranks of the U.S. military.

(11) Indeed, staffing the country's clandestine service has been a major focus in the

past few years. President Bush ordered the CIA to increase its collection, analysis, and

technological workforce by 50 percent—an ambitious goal that the CIA says has nearly been reached.

(12) The specifics of how much the agency spends on staffing and how many

people it employs are classified. But in his farewell address to the agency at its Virginia

headquarters last month, outgoing dDirector Michael Hayden told his employees that

increasing human resources had been one of his greatest achievements as chief of the

spy service. In the past few years, he said, the CIA has hired \

officers, chosen from hundreds of thousands of skilled Americans seeking to be part of

our mission.\has received between 130,000

and 150,000 job applications since the hiring push began. (13) Moreover, the face of the CIA and the broader intelligence community is

changing. Minorities accounted for almost a third of new CIA hires last year, a record.

Technology firms in the recession: Here we go again -6-点点英语bbs.diandian.net

Technology firms in the recession Here we go again Jan 15th 2009

From The Economist print edition

It cannot defy gravity, but the technology industry is faring better than it did

in the previous downturn

(01) THE news may turn out to be no more than rumour, but it is telling nonetheless.

To cut costs, several blogs recently reported, Microsoft and IBM would soon both get rid

of about 16,000 employees each, 17% and 4% respectively of their workforces. If true,

these would be some of the biggest cuts in the history of the information-technology (IT) industry.

(02) That such cuts are deemed credible is a sign of the industry’s plight. Hardly a

day passes without reports of collapsing revenues and workers being laid off. This week

Motorola said it would cut 4,000 jobs, and Seagate, a maker of hard disks, said it would

reduce its staff by 800. The earnings season is likely to bring even more bad news. As

The Economist went to press, Intel, the world’s largest chipmaker and an industry

bellwether, was expected to report a drop in fourth-quarter revenues of more than 20%

compared with a year earlier. Is the industry heading for a worse downturn than the one

that followed the internet crash in 2001?

(03) That would be quite a feat. In America, for instance, technology spending grew

by nearly 16% in 2000, only to contract by 6% in 2001. “The IT industry simply

imploded,” says Matt Asay, an industry veteran and executive of Alfresco, an

open-source software firm. “It felt like the sector’s reason for being had disappeared.”

(04) This time things are not yet that bad—and are unlikely to become so. In spite of

the string of bad news, some forecasters still expect global IT spending to grow this year,

at least when you allow for currency fluctuations. According to Forrester Research, a

4

market-research firm, technology purchases will decline by 3% in 2009 when counted in

dollars. But the dollar’s relative strength weighs heavily on the results of American firms

by devaluing their foreign revenues. When measured in a basket of local currencies,

weighted for each region’s share of the global IT market, Andrew Bartels of Forrester expects an increase of 3%.

(05) There are many reasons why spending is more robust than during the last

downturn. For a start, the IT market has become more global. Between 2003 and 2008,

developed countries’ share of IT spending fell from 85% to 76%, according to the

OECD’s recently published Information Technology Outlook. Demand from China and

India is expected to continue to grow despite the gloomy economic outlook.

(06) More importantly, last time around the IT industry was not the victim of an

economic crisis, but its cause, says Graham Vickery, author of the OECD report. For

2010 丁晓钟春季词汇班讲义 点点英语 bbs.diandian.net-7-

years companies had spent far too much on technology, buying more e-commerce

software than they could ever hope to use, for example. When the bubble burst they

abruptly cut spending. Today IT departments are much less prone to wasting money. In

fact, says Mark Raskino of Gartner, another market-research firm, most are quite lean.

Further cuts in technology budgets would be difficult, he argues, since they would

require many firms to reorganise themselves first. “IT is certainly not sacrosanct, but

fairly low on the list of things to cut,” he says.

(07) Tech firms, for their part, are in much better shape. Venture capitalists may

again have wasted money by investing in too many internet start-ups, this time labelled

“Web 2.0”. But, in general, the industry’s big companies are better managed and have