2018年可锐考研英语阅读真题范文（七）Don’t shoot the messengerThey poison the mind and corrupt the morals of the young, who waste their time sitting on sofas immersed in dangerous fantasy worlds. That, at least, was the charge levelled against novels during the 18th century by critics worried about the impact of a new medium on young people. Today the idea that novels can harm people sounds daft. And that is surely how history will judge modern criticism of video games, which are accused of turning young people into violent criminals. This week European justice ministers met to discuss how best to restrict the sale of violent games to children. Some countries, such as Germany, believe the answer is to ban some games altogether. That is going too far. Criticism of games is merely the latest example of a tendency to demonise new and unfamiliar forms of entertainment. In 1816 waltzing was condemned as a fatal contagion that encouraged promiscuity; in 1910 films were denounced as an evil pure and simple, destructive of social interchange in the 1950s rock ’n’roll music was said to turn young people into devil worshippers and comic books were accused of turning children into drug addicts and criminals. In each case the pattern is the same: young people adopt a new form of entertainment, older people are spooked by its unfamiliarity and condemn it, but eventually the young grow up and the new medium becomes accepted-at which point another example appears and the cycle begins again. The opposition to video games is founded on the mistaken belief that most gamers are children. In fact, twothirds of gamers are over 18 and the average gamer is around 30. But the assumption that gamers are mostly children leads to a double standard. Violent films are permitted and the notion that some films are unsuitable for children is generally understood. Yet different rules are applied to games. Aren’t games different because they are interactive? It is true that video games can make people feel excited or aggressive, but so do many sports. There is no evidence that videogaming causes longterm aggression. Games ought to be agerated, just as films are, and retailers should not sell adultrated games to children any more than they should sell them adultrated films. Ratings schemes are already in place, and in some countries restrictions on the sale of adultrated games to minors have the force of law. Oddly enough, Hillary Clinton, one of the politicians who has led the criticism of the gaming industry in America, has recently come round to this view. Last month she emphasised the need for parents to pay more attention to game ratings and called on the industry, retailers and parents to work together. But this week some European politicians seemed to be moving in the other direction: the Netherlands may follow Germany, for example, in banning some games outright. Not all adults wish to play violent games, just as not all of them enjoy violent movies. But they should be free to do so if they wish.二．Doughnut adjust your setHAVE you ever seen anything on television that made you shout or shake your fist in anger at the screen? Televisions are, of course, unable to respond to such reactions. But that could beabout to change. Controlling your television and other home entertainment devices using voice commands or gestures is starting to become possible thanks to a new generation of controllers.Consider, for example, the controller that went on sale last month with Nintendo’s Wii games console. In place of the usual combination of buttons and joysticks, the Wii has a motionsensitive controller. The console can determine how the controller is moving in space and what it is pointing at, and uses that information to control what is happening on screen. Depending on the game, the controller becomes a warrior’s sword or a golf club.For some games, the controller connects up via a cable to a second, smaller handset called the Nunchuk after the weapon favoured by Bruce Lee in his martial arts movies . It is then possible to use one controller for movement, and the other to fire weapons or use items. The number of buttons on both controllers has been reduced to a minimum, as Nintendo hopes to draw in new customers who find existing games consoles too complicated. But whether the Wii will introduce a generation of grandmothers to the joys of karate games remains to be seen.This living room overload is likely to get worse as telecoms operators launch a new generation of television over broadband services, using a technology called IPTV. This will make possible thousands of channels, downloadable programs and films, plus messaging, internet access and games. It will also involve the biggest and most complicated controllers ever seen. The experience isn’t as good as it could be, says Michael Cai of Parks Associates, a consultancy. So some companies believe a new approach is needed.Other companies have looked at using speech based controllers in the living room. One firm, Promptu, developed a voice control system for American cable operators and tested it in conjunction with Motorola, which makes set top boxes. But it has now decided to reposition the technology as a voice based navigation system for mobile phones. A simpler approach is taken by the In Voca voice activated remote control. It is a universal remote control that can recognise 50 separate commands spoken by up to four separate users, from lower volume to Cartoon Network .A recent entry to the field is Apple Computer, a firm renowned for designing elegant, easy to use products. In 2007 it will launch a new device, called the iTV, that acts as a bridge between a television and a computer. It has a deliberately simple remote control that, like Apple’s iconic iPod music player, involves just one button and one wheel. Steve Jobs, the company’s boss, boasts that it is very Apple . Might his company be the one to solve the remote control confusion?三．Behind the bleeding edgeMANKIND’S progress in developing new gizmos is often referred to as the march of technology . That conjures up images of constant and relentless forward movement orchestrated with military precision. In reality, technological progress is rather less orderly. Some technologies do indeed improve at such a predictable pace that they obey simple formulae such as Moore’s law, which acts as a battle plan for the semiconductor industry. Other technologies proceed by painful lurches-think of third generation mobile phones, or new versions of Microsoft Windows. And there are some cases, particularly in the developing world, when technological progress takes the form of a leapfrog.Such leapfrogging involves adopting a new technology directly, and skipping over the earlier, inferior versions of it that came before. By far the best known example is that of mobile phones in the developing world. Fixed line networks are poor or non existent in many developing countries, so people have leapfrogged straight to mobile phones instead. The number of mobile phones now far outstrips the number of fixed line telephones in China, India and sub Saharan Africa.There are other examples. Incandescent light bulbs, introduced in the late 1870s, are slowly being displaced in the developed world by more energy efficient lightemitting diodes , in applications from traffic lights to domestic lighting. LEDs could, however, have an even greater impact in parts of the developing world that lack mains power and electric lighting altogether. LEDs’greater energy efficiency makes it possible to run them from batteries charged by solar panels during the day.Being behind the bleeding edge of technological development can sometimes be a good thing, in short. It means that early versions of a technology, which may be buggy, unreliable or otherwise inferior, can be avoided. America, for example, was the first country to adopt colour television, which explains why American television still looks so bad today: other countries came to the technology later and adopted technically superior standards.The lesson to be drawn from all of this is that it is wrong to assume that developing countries will follow the same technological course as developed nations. Having skipped fixed line telephones, some parts of the world may well skip desktop computers in favour of portable devices, for example. Entire economies may even leapfrog from agriculture straight to hightech industries. That is what happened in Israel, which went from citrus farming to microchips; India, similarly, is doing its best to jump straight to a hightech service economy.Those who anticipate and facilitate leapfrogging can prosper as a result. Those who fail to see it coming risk being jumped over. Kodak, for example, hit by the sudden rise of digital cameras in the developed world, wrongly assumed that it would still be able to sell old fashioned film and film cameras in China instead. But the emerging Chinese middle classes leapfrogged straight to digital cameras-and even those are now outnumbered by camera phones.。