The concept of man versus machine is at least as old as the industrial revolution, but this phenomenon tends to be most acutely felt during economic downturns and fragile recoveries. And yet, it would be a mistake to think we are right now simply experiencing the painful side of a boom and bust cycle. Certain jobs have gone away for good, outmoded by machines. Since technology has such an insatiable appetite for eating up human jobs, this phenomenon will continue to restructure our economy in ways we can’t immediately foresee.
    When there is exponential improvement in the price and performance of technology, jobs that were once thought to be immune from automation suddenly become threatened. This argument has attracted a lot of attention, via the success of the book Race Against the Machine, by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, who both hail from MIT’s Center for Digital Business. 
    This is a powerful argument, and a scary one. And yet, John Hagel, author of The Power of Pull and other books, says Brynjolfsson and McAfee miss the reason why these jobs are so vulnerable to technology in the first place.
    Hagel says we have designed jobs in the U.S. that tend to be “tightly scripted” and “highly standardized” ones that leave no room for “individual initiative or creativity.” In short, these are the types of jobs that machines can perform much better at than human beings. That is how we have put a giant target sign on the backs of American workers, Hagel says.
    It’s time to reinvent the formula for how work is conducted, since we are still relying on a very 20th century notion of work, Hagel says. In our rapidly changing economy, we more than ever need people in the workplace who can take initiative and exercise their imagination “to respond to unexpected events.” That’s not something machines are good at. They are designed to perform very predictable activities.
    As Hagel notes, Brynjolfsson and McAfee indeed touched on this point in their book. We need to reframe race against the machine as race with the machine. In other words, we need to look at the ways in which machines can augment human labor rather than replace it. So then the problem is not really about technology, but rather, “how do we innovate our institutions and our work practices?”

For this part, you are allowed 30 minutes to write an essay entitled Man and Computer by commenting on the saying, "The real danger is not that the computer will begin to think like man, but that man will begin to think like the computer." You should write at least 150 words but no more than 200 words. Write your essay on Answer Sheet 1.

Man and Computer

    Many college students today own personal computers that cost anywhere from $1,000 to perhaps $5,000 or more. (1) _______, it is not uncommon for them to purchase (2) _______ costing another several hundred dollars. Twenty years ago, computers were (3) _______, but they were very large and extremely expensive. Few, if any, (4) _______ purchased computers for home use. Over the years, the price of the "guts" of a computer-its memory-has declined to less than a thousandth of the price per unit of memory that prevailed twenty years ago. This is the main reason why computers cost so much less today than they used to. Moreover, (5) _______ improvements have made it possible to (6) _______ memory circuitry that is small enough to fit into the portable personal computers that many of us own and use. (7) _______, as the price of computation has declined the average consumer and business have spent more on purchasing computers.
    (8) _______ improved agricultural technology, hybrid (杂交) seeds, (9) _______ animal breeding, and so on have vastly increased the amount of output a typical farmer can produce. The prices of goods such as meats and grains have fallen sharply relative to the prices of most other goods and services. As agricultural prices have fallen, many households have decreased their total expenses on food. Even though the (10) _______ of a product purchased generally increases when its price falls, total expenses on it may decline.

    Alex Pang's amusing new book The Distraction Addiction addresses those of us who feel panic without a cell phone or computer. And that, he claims, is pretty much all of us. When we're not online, where we spend four months annually, we're engaged in the stressful work of trying to get online.
    The Distraction Addiction is not framed as a self-help book. It's a thoughtful examination of the dangers of our computing overdose and a historical overview of how technological advances change consciousness. A "professional futurist", Pang urges an approach which he calls "contemplative (沉思的) computing.”He asks that you pay full attention to “how your mind and body interact with computers and how your attention and creativity are influenced by technology."
    Pang's first job is to free you from the common misconception that doing two things at once allows you to get more done. What is commonly called multitasking is, in fact, switch-tasking, and its harmful effects on productivity are well documented. Pang doesn't advocate returning to a pre-Internet world. Instead, he asks you to "take a more ecological (生态的) view of your relationships with technologies and look for ways devices or media may be making specific tasks easier or faster but at the same time making your work and life harder."
    The Distraction Addiction is particularly fascinating on how technologies have changed certain fields of labor-often for the worse. For architects, computer-aided design has become essential but in some ways has cheapened the design process. As one architect puts it, "Architecture is first and foremost about thinking.., and drawing is a more productive way of thinking" than computer-aided design.
    Somewhat less amusing are Pang's solutions for kicking the Internet habit. He recommends the usual behavior-modification approaches, familiar to anyone who has completed a not smoking program. Keep logs to study your online profile and decide what you can knock out, download a program like Freedom that locks you out of your browser, or take a "digital Sabbath (安息日 )": "Unless you're a reporter or emergency-department doctor, you'll discover that your world doesn't fall apart when you go offline."

    Emerging in the late Sixties and reaching a peak in the Seventies, Land Art was one of a range of new forms, including Body Art, Performance Art, Action Art and Installation Art, which pushed art beyond the traditional confines of the studio and gallery. Rather than portraying landscape, land artists used the physical substance of the land itself as their medium.
    The message of this survey of British land art—the most comprehensive to date—is that the British variant, typified by Long’s piece, was not only more domestically scaled, but a lot quirkier than its American counterpart. Indeed, while you might assume that an exhibition of Land Art would consist only of records of works rather than the works themselves, Long’s photograph of his work is the work. Since his “action” is in the past the photograph is its sole embodiment.
    That might seem rather an obscure point, but it sets the tone for an exhibition that contains a lot of black-and-white photographs and relatively few natural objects.
    Long is Britain’s best-known Land Artist and his Stone Circle, a perfect ring of purplish rocks from Portishead beach laid out on the gallery floor, represents the elegant, rarefied side of the form. The Boyle Family, on the other hand, stand for its dirty, urban aspect. Comprising artists Mark Boyle and Joan Hills and their children, they recreated random sections of the British landscape on gallery walls. Their Olaf Street Study, a square of brick-strewn waste ground, is one of the few works here to embrace the mundanity that characterizes most of our experience of the landscape most of the time.
    Parks feature, particularly in the earlier works, such as John Hilliard’s very funny Across the Park, in which a long-haired stroller is variously smiled at by a pretty girl and unwittingly assaulted in a sequence of images that turn out to be different parts of the same photograph.
    Generally however British land artists preferred to get away from towns, gravitating towards landscapes that are traditionally considered beautiful such as the Lake District or the Wiltshire Downs. While it probably wasn’t apparent at the time, much of this work is permeated by a spirit of romantic escapism that the likes of Wordsworth would have readily understood. Derek Jarman’s yellow-tinted film Towards Avebury, a collection of long, mostly still shots of the Wiltshire landscape, evokes a tradition of English landscape painting stretching from Samuel Palmer to Paul Nash.
    In the case of Hamish Fulton, you can’t help feeling that the Scottish artist has simply found a way of making his love of walking pay. A typical work, such as Seven Days, consists of a single beautiful black-and-white photograph taken on an epic walk, with the mileage and number of days taken listed beneath. British Land Art as shown in this well selected, but relatively modestly scaled exhibition wasn’t about imposing on the landscape, more a kind of landscape-orientated light conceptual art created passing through. It had its origins in the great outdoors, but the results were as gallery-bound as the paintings of Turner and Constable.

　　Leadership is the most significant word in today's competitive business environment because it directs the manager of a business to focus inward on their personal capabilities and style. Experts on leadership will quickly point out that "how things get done" influences the success of the outcomes and indicates a right way and a wrong way to do things. When a noted leader on the art of management, Peter Drucker, coined the phrase "Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things," he was seeking to clarify the distinctions he associates with the terms.
　　When Stephen Covey, founder and director of the Leadership Institute, explored leadership styles in the past decade, he focused on the habits of a great number of highly effective individuals. His Seven Habits of Highly Effective People became a popular bestseller very quickly. His ideas forced a reexamination of the early leadership paradigm (范例), which he observed centered on traits found in the character ethic and the personality ethic. The former ethic suggested success was founded on integrity, modesty, loyalty, courage, patience, and so forth. The personality ethic suggested it was one's attitude, not behavior, that inspired success, and this ethic was founded on a belief of positive mental attitude. In contrast to each of these ideas, Covey advocates that leaders need to understand universal principles of effectiveness, and he highlights how vital it is for leaders to first personally manage themselves if they are to enjoy any hope of outstanding success in their work environments. To achieve a desired vision for your business, it is vital that you have a personal vision of where you are headed and what you value. Business leadership means that managers need to "put first things first," which implies that before leading others, you need to be clear on your own values, abilities, and strengths and be seen as trustworthy.

    The human nose is an underrated tool. Humans are often thought to be insensitive smellers compared with Animals, (l) ______ this is largely because, (2) ______ animals, we stand upright. This means that our noses are (3) ______ to perceiving those smells which float through the air, (4) ______ the majority of smells which stick to surfaces. In fact, (5) ______, we are extremely sensitive to smells, (6) ______ we do not generally realize it. Our noses are capable of (7) ______ human smells even when these are (8) ______ to far below one part in one million.
    Strangely, some people find that they can smell one type of flower but not another, (9) ______ others are sensitive to the smells of both flowers. This may be because some people do not have the genes necessary to generate (10) ______ smell receptors in the nose. These receptors are the cells which sense smells and send (11) ______ to the brain. However, it has been found that even people insensitive to a certain smell (12) ______ can suddenly become sensitive to it when (13) ______ to it often enough.
    The explanation for insensitivity to smell seems to be that the brain finds it (14) ______ to keep all smell receptors working all the time but can (15) ______ new receptors if necessary. This may (16) ______ explain why we are not usually sensitive to our own smells—we simply do not need to be. We are not (17) ______ of the usual smell of our own house, but we (18  ______ new smells when we visit someone else’s. The brain finds it best to keep smell receptors (19) ______ for unfamiliar and emergency signals (20) ______ the smell of smoke, which might indicate the danger of fire.