Unit 1 1 Digital technologies, such as camera-phones and the internet, are very different from the analogue counterparts. A digital imagine, unlike a conventional photograph can be quickly and easily copied and distributed around the world. Another important difference is that digital devices are far more widespread. Most people take their camera phones with them everywhere.
2 will this past- life without privacy-be our future?Many futurists ,science fiction writers and privacy advocates believe so.Big Brother, they have long warned, is watching.Closed-circuit television camera often track your moves,your mobile phone reveals your location, your transit pass and credit cards leave digital trails.Now there is the possibility that citizens are being watched.
3 Alternatively, the omnipresence of cameras and other surveillance technologies might end up making individuals more conformist, says Mr. Brin, as they suppress their individuals to avoid drawing too much attention to themselves.
4 The survtheyeillance society is on its way,just as privacy advocates have long warned.But it has not taked quite the form they imagined.Increasingly,it is not just Big Brother who is watching-but lots of little brothers,too.
Unit 2 1 Last year, a German member of parliament was caught photographing a confidential document of which only a few copies were handed out (and later collected) at a background meeting on health-care reform. Some Berlin politicians are said to let reporters eavesdrop on fellow parliament by calling them right before an important meeting—and then failing to hang up, in effect turning their phones into bugs.
2 The government seems to be wagering that German ambition about the current war may help swing popular opinion here about giving back the gate. 3 That’s what restitution often comes down to these days.
4 Globalization, it turns out, has only intensified, not diminished, cultural differences among nations. The forces of nationalism love to exploit culture because it is symbolic, economical potent and couches identity politics in a legal context that tends to pit David against Goliath.
5 The country’s only potent weapon left may be antiquities. It plays to popular sentiment and national pride. While the art world likes to ponder the merits or misfortunates of seeing art from one place in another place or the inequalities that have resulted from centuries of imperialist collecting the real issue behind the Egyptian claims, as with so many others, is nationalism.
6 Laws are laws, of course, and looting can’t be tolerated, although when decades or centuries have passed, laws have changed, populations shifted, empires come and gone, legal arguments can be dubious. But the larger truth is that all patrimony arguments ultimately live or die in the morally murky realm of global relations, meaning that modern governments like Egypt’s and Iraq’s may win sympathy today by counting on Western guilt about colonialism when asking for the return of art from ancient sites within their current borders. At the same time there’s no international clamor for Russia to return storerooms of treasures it stole from Germany at the end of the war, or for that matter, for Sweden to fork over the spoils of a war 350 years ago with Denmark. It’s about emotion, not airtight logic and consistent policy.
7 The vagaries of realpolitik, and a shifting sense of justice, determine these things. That’s not meant to sound cynical. Plenty of good arguments, legal, moral, intellectual, economic and artistic, support returning objects that came from Egypt back to Egypt, or from Greece back to Greece, or from Italy back to Italy. And plenty support the opposite: dispersing these artifacts around the world, where they can act as diplomats, benefiting not least the people who occupy the territories from which the art came. Unit 3 1 Since doctors have the right to perform such operations, it is up to the patient to monitor their background and decide whether he or she feels comfortable with their training. A patient should also investigate the facility where a procedure would be performed. Technological advances have made it possible to perform intricate surgeries in nonhospital setting on an outpatient basis. Some are done in private, freestanding surgical centers, others in doctor’s offices.
2 Plastic surgery may have lost some of it’s stigma, but these that doesn’t mean the risks have vanished too. Part of the problem may be that it is not necessary, from a legal standpoint, to be trained as a plastic surgeon to practice plastic surgery. All a person needs is a medical degree. But may doctors don’t bother with the special training and practice the surgery anyway to supplement their incomes. Patients often enjoy a doctor’s office because it feels more personal; many doctors prefer it because they exercise complete control over their surroundings and costs. That can be perfectly safe as long as the offices maintain safety precautions, but some states and local governments do not monitor whether they do the task can be left to accrediting agencies. States may require offices to be accredited, but the agencies perform inspections and give the seal of approval.
Unit 4 1 On more than one occasion i have paused to reflection on that very question given some current trends and ideas about children as little sponges of learning. I remember seeing a recent current affairs program where there was much hype about teaching two-year-olds to read and was mystified at the parents who gleefully expressed how they were paving the way for their child’s future by having them participate in this program.
2 Moreover,in order to ensure that children have skills and knowledge needed for the future,school are increasing academic demands on children at very young ages-even in pre-school or earlier.The truth of the matter,however,is that any agenda which forces learning upon young children may actually be doing more harm than good. Children are born curious and ready to learn and from a neurological standpoint it makes sence to arm parents with this knowledge and provide support and assistance.Education and learning are not a race .While leisure and play may be increasingly portrayed as wasteful the brain is uniquely programmed to ensure that too much too fast may actually result in some form of breakdown.
3 As noted above ,neurons provide the raw material for learning by building connections in the brain.Throughout life neurons become differentiated to assume specialised roles and form connections with other neurons enabling them to communicate and store information. Stimulating experiences activate certain connections, repetition consolidates these connections and the brain learns. However ,there is also a neurological timetable that extends from birth into the second
decade of life. Through early childhood and into adolescence this timetable is significantly influenced by myelin. This important material insulates an equally important of the neuron known as the axon.Current research identifies that the escalation of myelin occurs in various stages and there is actually a 100% increase in myelin during adolescence.In other words ,the build-up and acquisition of myelin towards full brain maturation is more marathon than sprint and no measure of extra tuition or early training in any activity will influence this developmental timeline. 4 You may be wondering why myelin is so significant.As an insulator,myelin aids in the transmission of information from one neuron to another and the more myelinates axons in the brain, the greater opportunity for neural information to be passed quickly.The end result of all of this is that certain activities may be easier to learn when regions of the brain are sufficiently myelinated or when our brain become fatter.The growth of myelin ,otherwise known as myelination is very important for children due to the fact that when we are born we have very few myelinated axons.This is one reason why visual acuity and motor coordination are so limited at birth.
Unit 5 1 Universities are important, and not just for training scientists, doctors, and layers. When taught well, the humanities can help students think beyond the a “how” and into the “why”—and they provide the invaluable gift of critical thinking, They’re useful skills for any job, and they’re vital attributes for a healthy democracy.
2 Freely available online lectures and textbooks give universities the opportunity to reduce costs and increase quality, while focusing resources on what really matters: contact time between teachers and students. The simple fact is that the education most universities provide isn’t worth the money. If they don’t have world-class reputations—and only a few do—then they need to change fast, or watch an exodus of students away to cheaper, better alternative.
Unit 9 1 High prices are the ultimate signal that demand is outstripping supply,that there is simply not enough food to go around.Such agflation hits the poorest billion people on the planet the hardest,since they typically spend 50 to 70 percent of their income on food. Even though prices have fallen with the imploding world economy,they are still near record highs, and the underlying problems of low stockpiles, rising population ,and flattening yield growth remain.Climate change-with its hotter growing seasons and increasing water scarcity-is projected to reduce future harvests in much of the world,raising the specter of what some scientists are now calling a perpetual food crisis.
2 With world population spiraling toward nine billion by mid-century,these experts now say we need a repeat performance,doubling current food production by 2030.In other words,we need another Green Revolution,And we need it in half the time.
3 human population ,he observed ,increases at a geometric rate ,doubling about much more slowly. Therein lay a biological trap that humanity could be never escape.
4 The power of population is definitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man.This implies a strong and constantly operating check on population from the difficulty of subsistence.Malthus thought such checks could be voluntary ,such as birth control,abstinence,or delayed marriage-or involuntary,through