I. Read the passage again and choose the correct answer. Discuss the answers with a partner.

1 What is an early adopter?

a. someone who likes to buy the latest gadgets

b. someone who invents new gadgets

с someone who gets to the shops first

2 What can you buy in Tokyo's Akihabara district?

a. very cheap gadgets

b. poor quality gadgets

с very new gadgets

3 Which of the following gadgets were successful?

a. the Atari Jaguar consule

b. the Segway motorized scooter

с the VHS home video

4 How were telephones first marketed?

a. As a way of speaking to special friends

b. As a way of listening to music

с As a way of communicating with millions

5 Why are early adopters 'heroes'?

a. because they spend lots of money

b. because they try out new inventions for the rest of us

с because they are funny

 

II. Explain the compound adjectives from the article in your own words.

1 a neon-soaked warren of high-rise gadget emporia

2 a new-fangled type of gizmo

3 a gadget-festooned geek

4 the desire-addicted vanguard

 

III.Follow up

In your opinion, which of the recently-invented gadgets will still be around ten years from now? Which will soon be obsolete, and what will they be replaced by?

DVD recorder i-pod mobile phone laptop

READING 2

THE PRICE OF RPOGRESS

I was listening sleepily to that ingenious contraption, my digital clock radio, the other morning, when I half-heard one of those items that infects your day. It was about a new invention. A genius has decided that we wait too 5 long at supermarket check-outs, and so he has developed a considerate computer to let the brain take the strain. It all involves weighing, and tearing off special little tags from each item you buy, and feeding them into a machine and weighing again.

10 Now I can recall a time when there were a few long queues in supermarkets, because the companies ploughed their profits into employing two people at each check-out: one to ring up and the other to help you speedily pack. Remember? It was also when every garage 15 was staffed by friendly men who filled the ear up, checked the oil and even did the tyres, before an infernal machine encased a solitary soul in glass by the till, reading off the digits and charging you accordingly. It meant jobs for them; and for you … people who had the 20 time to be jolly, grouchy, helpful or saucy. Maybe you believe in that sort of progress. But I would like to smash the dreadful machines. I simply cannot understand why otherwise intelligent humans have gone computer-mad. It starts early: teachers despair of time- 25 telling when all the kids sport hideous digital watches that peep, play tunes, start and stop, even how firework displays, but instil no sense of the hands moving majestically round a clock, face. No more 'Happy Families'; computer toys bark at them in Americanese 30 and cost a fortune in batteries. Instead of learning mental arithmetic they grow up thinking that calculators are their right. As adults, they drivel on learn a dead vocabulary that owes nothing to Shakespeare 35 or Milton. Boring, mindless, boring. As for thinking, our computers will do it for us.

Computers breed laziness and discontent. A couple came to my house and gazed in disbelief at the battered old Olympia on which I'm typing this, 'Gosh, we'd have 40 thought you would have a word processor by now.' I go to a library and see my beloved dusty manuscripts and old newspaper cuttings replaced by gleaming terminals, so you cannot actually handle the stuff. Then I hear from a friend that he is actually contemplating spending money 45 on a cosy 'home computer', so that all the little details of his life can be stored in its nasty cold brain. As for organising, our computers will do it for us.

All the science fiction fantasies of computers taking over the world, or being used to plot some devious 50 overthrow of government are not far from the truth I see all around me. Myths are rooted in a need to explain to ourselves the workings of the universe, and of human nature. That modern myth foretells the insidious corruption of man by his own dinky¹ little invention.

.55 The computer generation (God help them) assumes that it is better to calculate, buy petrol, tell the time, work out your holiday plans, pay your bills, and even shop. with the aid of a computer. Alter all, our civilisation is founded, now. on the certainty that we can kill by remote 60 control, and a computer error could unleash Armageddon.² The age of the computer is the age of dehumanisa-tion. Significantly in my old (c. 1969) Oxford dictionary the word does not exist except as a subheading - a person who computes or calculates. Now the person has gone. 65 As tor feeling, our computers won't do that for us.

 

I. ANSWER THE FOLLOWING:

1 Explain the phrase 'ingenious contraption' (line 1).

2 What does the writer mean by an item 'that infects your day' (line 3)?

3 How effective does the writer seem to think the new invention will be, and why?

4 What is wrong with the service which the writer receives at garages these days?

5 What does 'It' in line 18 refer to?

6 Explain in other words why teachers disapprove of digital watches.

7 What might 'Happy Families' have been?

8 Why does the writer think that the new vocabulary, learnt by adults, is 'dead'?

9 In what way do computers 'breed laziness and discontent'?

10 What are the 'gleaming terminals' at the library?

11 Explain 'to plot some devious overthrow of government' (lines 49-50).

12 Explain the phrase 'rooted in' (line 51).

13 What is 'that modern myth' (line 53)?

14 Why does the writer see the dictionary definition of a computer as significant?

15 Summarise in 50-100 words the writer's complaints about computers.

 

READING 3