Unit one: Born to Surf
The web magazine From the Window contains poetry and literature from well-know writers across the global. There are thoughtful articles analyzing the state of the world we live in. There is even a piece from the Secretary General of the United States, Kofi Annan. It may come as some surprise to find out that the editor of the magazine is a 12-year-old girl, Joy Nightingale.
From the window won Joy Nightingale the prize in the 1999 childnet international and Cable and Wireless awards. These are given annually for the best use of the Internet by and for young people. And they highlight one of the most welcoming aspects of the virtual world. Children have taken to the Internet as though they are born surfing.
Perhaps this is because adults have had to change their understanding of technology while children simply accept it as natural. Whatever the reason, children can be found building websites an E-mailing friends across the world while adults are still asking:” Tell me again-where exactly is cyberspace？”
Of course there is growing concern about the fact that Children can travel far away from parental supervision in cyberspace. In response, many parents have installed software packages which pervert access to violent or pornographic websites. Childnet is taking a more positive line. The website is a gateway to a world of education and entertainment.
The rapid growth in Internet culture has led analysts to speculate that society will soon be divided between the “information rich” and “information poor”. For Childnet it is especially important hat children at the margins of society through poverty or disability have the chance to take their place as equal citizens in the virtual world.
Unite tow:
When you can e-mail your colleagues from the comfort of your garden, there is no need to suffer an uncomfortable journey just to speak to them. If you need an important document, it can be faxed via satellite to your mobile phone, and
viewed on laptop computer. You can receive the document almost immediately, even from another continent.
Since the price of technology gets lower every day, ownership of the means of production becomes a reality. Having bought the computer, mobile phone, fax machine, Internet connection and printer that are their only material tools, telecommuters become true electric peasants.
Living and working in the same environment like traditional peasant farmers, they do not till the soil with their hands but grow services from fertile resources of their minds.
With no fancy office on the twenty-fifth floor, however, the
micro-entrepreneur can have trouble proving his or her credentials. Rightly or
wrongly, people respond to status symbols like big offices in smart building.” If the company can afford all this,” people think, “it must be doing pretty well.” But faced with one person doing business from a room at home, clients are tempted to think that their contact is not such a big-shot after all. But is it
necessarily true that a central location and a large office make a better worker?
In fact, studies show that homeworkers are actually more disciplined about completing tasks and indeed work longer hours than their colleagues in the office. Like the traditional peasant who owned his land, they feel that they own their work.
Furthermore they aren’t tied to schedule but work when it suits them. If that means taking an hour or two to play with the children and then staying up until midnight to finish a presentation, the net result is a happier worker who has completed the task.
Unit three:
When 1998 began, East Africa should have been at its most beautiful: normally the short rainy season ends in December, the rivers subside, and the country sparkles; farmers raise crops, animals graze, tourists go on safaris. But this year was different. The rains were heavy and long. The water spread out for miles in places in Kanya and Somalia, cutting off villages and forcing herders to crowd with their livestock onto a few patches of dry land. Things quickly turned ugly. Camels, cows, sheep, and goats all stared dying of violent fevers. Some people,
too, began to get sick. Some went temporarily blind; others began bleeding uncontrollably.
The disease was Rift Valley fever, caused by an obscure mosquitoborne virus. It pops up every few years in Africa when standing water encourages mosquitoeggs to hatch-this year’s huge floods brought a spectacular outbreak.
According to official estimates, at least 89,000 people caught the disease. Two
hundred died, but then the disease is not usually fatal to humans. Animal losses, however, were almost certainly vast-owners reported losing up to 90 percent of their herds.
Yet catastrophic as the East Africa floods were, they had to jostle for the world’s attention with other cases of strange weather-with unusual occurrences of droughts, fires rains, cold snaps, and heat waves. Every year brings its own grab bag of such anomalies, but this year many of them could be linked to a phenomenon in the empty expanses of the equatorial Pacific-a change in the ocean currents and winds that began in the early months of 1997 and that altered weather patterns around the world. The change in the weather was, of course, the work of El Nino.
By the end of 1997, El Nino had already become a celebrity of sorts. In 1998,
however, El Nino’s effects on the world came into full flower. It helped make the
year the hottest ever recorded. In addition to Rift Valley fever, El Nino has been linked to an upsurge in diseases ranging from cholera to malaria to dengue fever, in Kenya, Cambodia, Peru, and other countries scattered around the globe.
Unite four:
We may roughly classify the speakers of English into two groups: one in which the speakers use English as their native language, the other in which the speakers learn English as a second language for the purpose of education, commerce, and so on. In the former group we, obviously, would include England, Canada, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand. Naturally, not all people in these countries speak English natively, but a large majority do. In the latter group, we would include, among others, India, Denmark, Kenya, Burma, Turkey, Ethiopia, and the Philippines. Not all these countries use English for the same purpose . Each of them uses English for important social and commercial activities.
English also serves as an international second language. It is one of the important languages of commerce. Its use in international diplomacy is
strengthened by its acceptance as one of the official languages of the United
Nations. English is also the language of the majority of technical materials in the world; therefore, many people heavily rely on English to communicate with people of similar training and interests.
Learning a second language extends one’s vision and expands the mind. Looking at the world or oneself through a different language system shows the
limits of one’s own perception and adds new dimensions to familiar objects or
events. A second language teaches us different ways of labeling and organizing our experiences. The history and literature of a second language record the real
and fictional lives of a people and their culture; knowledge of them adds to our
ability to understand and to feel as they feel. Learning English as a second
language provides another means of communication through which the window of the entire English speech community becomes a part of your heritage.
Unit five:
It is an astonishing fact that there are laws of nature, rules that summarize conveniently-not just qualitatively but quantitatively-however the world works. We might imagine a universe in which there are no such laws, in which the 1080 elementary particles that make up a universe like our own behave with utter and uncompromising abandon. To understand such a universe we would need a brain at least as massive as the universe. It seems unlikely that such a universe could
have life and intelligence, because beings and brains require some degree of internal stability and order. But even if in a much more random universe there were such beings with an intelligence much greater than our own, there could not be much knowledge, passion or joy.
Fortunately for us, we live in a universe that has at least important parts that are knowable. Our common-sense experience and our evolutionary history have prepared us to understand something of the workaday world. When we go into other realms, however, common sense and ordinary intuition turn out to be highly unreliable guides. It is stunning that as we go close to the speed of light our mass
increases indefinitely, we shrink toward zero thickness in the direction of motion,
and time for us comes as near to stopping as we would like. Many people think that this is silly, and every week or two I get a letter from someone who complains
to me about it. But it is virtually certain consequence not just of experiment but also of Albert Einstein’s brilliant analysis of space and time called Theory of Relativity. It does not matter that these effects seem unreasonable to us. We are
not in the habit of traveling close to the speed of light. The testimony of our common sense is suspect at high velocities.
The idea that the world places restrictions on what humans might do is frustrating. Why shouldn’t we be able to have intermediate rotational positions? Why can’t we travel faster than the speed of light? But so far as we can tell, this is the way the universe is constructed. Such prohibitions not only press us toward a little humility; they also make the world more knowable.
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