English_for_today_4.doc

Lesson One
Machines in the City
Dick Mallory is a book publisher. His office on the fortieth floor of a skyscraper in the center of New York City is the world he works in. The world he lives in is a while house on a quiet street in a suburb 30 miles from the city. Whether he is at work in the heart1 of the big city or at home in the quiet suburb, Dick’s life is tied2 to machines. In many ways he represents modern man in the big city—modern man in the machine age.
In a typical working day, Dick and his wife are awakened by the buzzing of the electric alarm clock. As he pushes a button to silence the alarm, he turns on the radio besides his bed to hear the morning news. Then he goes to the bathroom for a quick shave with his electric shaver.
After dressing, Dick goes to the kitchen, where his wife has begun to prepare breakfast. Eggs are cooking on the electric stove, bread is being toasted in an electric toaster, and coffee is being made in an electric coffee maker. From the electric refrigerator Dick takes a carton of cream, another of fresh milk, and a can of frozen orange juice. He opens the can with an electric can opener and mixes the contents with several cans of cold water. Then the orange juice is ready, and Dick and his wife can begin breakfast. During breakfast, they sometimes watch the morning news program on television.
After breakfast, Dick gets the car out of the garage, and his wife drives him to the railroad station. The station is crowded with other commuters like himself, people who must travel 30 or even 50 miles to the city and back every day. Some are reading the morning paper; others are talking with one another, waiting nervously for the train. If the train is late, their routine, timed to the minute, could easily be upset. But exactly on schedule, the train arrives at the station. Forty-five minutes later it arrives in the city, still on schedule.
With the other commuters, Dick hurries from the train into the station. As he nears the door, it is whipped open by an electric eye, and he pass through into the waiting room. A moment later he steps onto a moving stairway that takes him rapidly up to the street level. Buses and taxis are everywhere, but because Dick’s office is only four blocks away, he always walks.
Soon he is inside the sixty-story skyscraper where his company has offices. At a long bank of elevators he waits until a green light flashes for an up car, then steps inside. He pushes the button for the fortieth floor, the door closes, and the car rises smoothly and noiselessly.
When the elevator reaches the fortieth floor, the door again slides open, and Dick steps into the familiar hall with its early-morning quiet, and hurries to his office. He turns on the lights and is soon at work. There is much to be done before the clerks and secretaries begin to arrive.
An hour later the day’s routine begins with the arrival of the mail. As he reads it, he usually takes notes, and on the more urgent points picks up the telephone and calls other departments in the building and other businesses in New York. It is a matter of routine for Dick to call the company’s offices in Chicago and San Francisco, and sometimes even to call its representatives in London and Paris. Once he has the information he needs, he dictates letters into a recording machine for his secretary to type and return to him later for his signature.
At times Dick is aware of the workers in the outer office answering telephones, typing letters, and filling papers. From a room next door he hears the even clicking of a machine that is duplicating copies of schedules and instruction sheets. Other machines are taking pictures of important letters and documents and producing many copies in a few minutes. From a special office nearby comes the hum of an electric computer, which is recording orders, billing customers, and making out the company payroll.
Often Dick is also aware of other sounds, the more or less muffled traffic noises that come from the street down below—the honking of horns, the blowing of whistles, the screeching of brakes. These are curiously mixed with the clang of hammers and riveting machines and with the shouts of the workmen putting up a new skyscraper next door. But Dick is used to noise—for the big city, a city of machines, must be a city of noise.
Although he is used to the noise, Dick usually looks forward to the end of the day, when he can return to his house in the quiet suburb. For relaxation he may mow the lawn with his power mower; or sometimes he repairs a piece of furniture with his electric tools. He may help his young children build a pen for their pet rabbit. Or he may just sit in a comfortable chair watching television or listening to his favorite music on the record player.
In the office or at home, machines are a part of the Mallorys’ life. Like many other city people, they would find it hard to live without machines.

Lesson Two
Machines on the Farm
　　On the old-time farm in America there were chickens and turkeys. There were also cows, pigs, and other livestock. But there were few machines. Most of the work was done by the entire farm family with the help of a “hired man.” Sometimes extra laborers were needed in buy seasons. Horses provided 79 percent of the power used, human labor 15 percent, and machines only 6 percent.
　　Today all that has changed. On many modern farms machines now furnish 96 percent of the power, human labor 3 percent, and horses 1 percent. Modern farms are enterprising businesses which keep only the livestock that can pay its way. The children go to school by bus every morning, the parents work on the farm or in the house, and hired help is seldom needed. Their work has been replaced by a whole army of farm machines.
　　Farmers in the machine age also use the new fertilizers, new sprays, new feeds, new hybrid seeds, and other helps developed by farm sciences. As a result the farmers are able to produce more food with less labor. This means fewer but larger farms and fewer but more prosperous farmers.
　　Let’s take a look at a typical mechanized farm – the 150 acres owned by Don and Betty Owen in Wisconsin. Life in the Owens’ farm is very different from farm life as many city people might imagine it. Good roads and an automobile mean that them can get to town, do their shopping, and be back home in a short time. If they buy in a quantity, the surplus food can be stored in a home freezer. They keep in touch with the news by radio, newspaper, and television. With the television they can call their neighbors and friends whenever they like.
　　The Owens’ dairy farm is one of the finest to be found anywhere. Don milks about fifty cows with only part-time help to get the milking machines on and off the cows and to care for the milk afterward. A pipeline carries the milk from milking machines to a cooling tank. The herd is kept in a large feedlot where there is an automatic feeder that fills itself from a silo. This feeder saves Don several hours every day. The barn has the most modern equipment the Owens can afford to buy.
　　The kitten is just as modern as the barn. It has a refrigerator, a freezer, an electric stove, and a dishwasher. It also has a washing machine and a clothes dryer. The kitten is constantly being improved so that the work can be done in less time.
　　For the Owens’ children, modern farm life is very different from the life their parents knew. The one-room schoolhouse their parents walked to was closed fifteen years ago. Today a big yellow bus picks the children up and takes them to a large consolidated school miles away. While the children still have trees to climb and animals to play with, they are more at ease on bicycles than on horses. And, just like city children, they spend a lot of time watching television or talking to their friends on the telephone.
　　It takes a long time and a lot of money to develop a modern farm. The Owens have been farming on their own ever since Don’s father died twenty years ago. They had to borrow the money to buy new machinery, new fertilizers, and new feeds. At last they are beginning to make money, and they hope in a few years to pay off all their loans.
　　With all the help from machines, farming still requires hard work and long hours. Betty and Don are up at 5:30 each morning and seldom stop working before late in the evening. But despite the hard work and long hours the Owens like their life on the farm. They wouldn’t trade it for any other.

Lesson Three
The Ultimate Machine: The Electronic Computer
With a tremendous roar from its rocket engine, the satellite is sent up into the sky. Minutes later, at an altitude of 300 miles, this tiny electronic moon begins to orbit about the earth. Its radio begins to transmit a staggering amount of information about the satellite's orbital path, the amount of radiation it detects, and the presence of meteorites Information of all kinds races back to the earth. No human being could possibly copy down all these facts, much less remember and organize them. But an electronic computer can.
The marvel of the machine age, the electronic computer has been in use only since 1946. It can do simple computations—add, subtract, multiply and divide—with lightning speed and perfect accuracy. It can multiply two 10-digit numbers in 1/1000 second, a problem that would take an average person five minutes to do with pencil and paper. Some computers can work 500,000 times faster than any person can.
Once it is given a “program” — that is, a carefully worked-out set of instructions devised by a technician trained in computer language — a computer can gather a wide range of information for many purposes. For the scientist it can get information from outer space or from the depth of the ocean. In business and industry the computer prepares factory inventories, keeps track of sales trends and production needs, mails dividend checks, and makes out company payrolls. It can keep bank accounts up to date and make out electric bills. If you are planning a trip by plane, the computer will find out what route to take and what space is available.
Not only can the computer gather facts, it can also store them as fast as they are gathered and can pour them out whenever they are needed. The computer is really a high-powered “memory” machine that “has all the answers”—or almost all. What is the most efficient speed for driving a car through the New York-New Jersey tunnels? What brand of canned goods is the most popular in a particular supermarket? What kind of weather will we have tomorrow? The computer will flash out the answer in a fraction of a second.
Besides gathering and storing information, the computer can also solve complicated problems that once took months for people to do. For example, within sixteen hours an electronic brain names CHEOPS (which stands for Chemical Engineering Optimization System) solved a difficult design problem. First, it was fed all the information necessary for designing a chemical plant. After running through 16000 possible designs, it picked out the plan for the plant that would produce the most chemical at the lowest cost. Then it issued a printed set of exact specifications. Before CHEOPS solved this problem, a team of engineers having the same information had worked for a year to produce only three designs, none of which was as efficient as the computer’s.
At times computers seem almost human. They can “read” handprinted letters, play chess, compose music, write plays and even design other computers. Is it any wonder that they are sometimes called “thinking” machines?
Not even computers can predict the future, but the benefits of computers are becoming more obvious every day.
a. Computers are being used in space travel. Rockets, satellites, and spaceships are guided by computers.
b. Computers are being used in aviation. They are used in the training of airline pilots. Computers also direct the flight of planes from one city to another, control their air speeds and altitudes, and even land them.
c. Computers are being used in medicine. They are used in analyzing blood samples, in diagnosing diseases, and in prescribing medication. They also keep records of the tissue type of patients waiting for organ transplant.
Even though they are taking over some of the tasks that were once accomplished by our own brains, computers are not replacing us—at least not yet. Our brain has more than 10 million cells. A computer has only a few hundred thousand parts. For some time to come, then, we can safely say that our brains are at least 10,000 times more complex than a computer. How we use them is for us, not the computer, to decide.

Lesson Four
America on Wheels
Early automobiles were sometimes only "horseless carriages" powered by gasoline or steam engines. Some of them were so noisy that cities often made laws forbidding their use because they frightened horses.
Many countries helped to develop the automobile. The internal-combustion engine was invented in Austria, and France was an early leader in automobile manufacturing. But it was in the United States after 1900 that the automobile was improved most rapidly. As a large and growing country, the United States needed cars and trucks to provide transportation in places not served by trains.
Two brilliant ideas made possible the mass production of automobiles. An American inventor named Eli Whitney thought of one of them, which is known as "standardization of parts." In an effort to speed up production in his gun factory, Whitney decided that each part of a gun could be made by machines so that it would be exactly like all the others of its kind. For example, each trigger would be exactly like all other triggers. A broken trigger could then be replaced immediately by an identical one. After Whitney's idea was applied to automobile production, each part no longer had to be made by hand. Machines were developed that could produce hundreds, even thousands, of identical parts that would fit into place easily and quickly.
Another American, Henry Ford, developed the idea of the assembly line. Before Ford introduced the assembly line, each car was built by hand. Such a process was, of course, very slow. As a result, automobiles were so expensive that only rich people could afford them. Ford proposed a system in which each worker would have a special job to do. One person for example, would make only a portion of the wheels. Another would place the wheels on the car. And still another would insert the bolts that held the wheels to the car. Each worker needed to learn only one or two routine tasks.
But the really important part of Ford's idea was to bring the work to the worker. An automobile frame, which looks like a steel skeleton, was put on a moving platform. As the frame moved past th