阅读理解。
Modern inventions have speeded up people's lives amazingly. Motor-cars cover a hundred
miles in little more than an hour, aircraft cross the world a day, while computers operate at
lightning speed. Indeed, this love of speed seems never-ending. Every year motor-cars are
produced which go even faster and each new computer boasts (吹嘘) of saving precious
seconds in handling tasks.
All this saves time, but at a price. When we lose or gain half a day in speeding across the
world in an airplane, our bodies tell us so. We get the uncomfortable feeling known as jet-lag;
our bodies feel that they have been left behind in another time zone. Again, spending too long at
computers results in painful wrists and fingers. Mobile phones also have their danger, according
to some scientists; too much use may transmit harmful radiation into our brains, a consequence
we do not like to think about.
However, what do we do with the time we have saved? Certainly not relax, or so it seems.
We are so accustomed to constant activity that we find it difficult to sit and do nothing, or even
just one thing at a time. Perhaps the days are long gone when we might listen quietly to a story
on the radio, letting imaginations take us into another world.
There was a time when some people's lives were devoted simply to the cultivation of the land
or the care of cattle. No multi-tasking there; their lives went on at a much gentler pace, and in a
familiar pattern. There is much that we might envy about a way of life like this. Yet before we
do so, we must think of the hard tasks our ancestors faced; they farmed with bare hands, often
lived close to hunger, and had to fashion tools from wood and stone. Modem machinery has
freed people from that primitive existence.
1. The new products become more and more time-saving because ______.
A. time is limited
B. the manufacturers boast a lot
C. the prices are increasingly high
D. our love on speed seems never-ending
2. What does "the days" in Paragraph 3 refer to?
A. Imaginary life.
B. Times of inventions.
C. Simple life in the past.
D. Time for constant activity.
3. What is the author's attitude towards the modern technology?
A. Critical.
B. Objective.
C. Optimistic.
D. Negative.
4. What does the passage mainly discuss?
A. The present and past times.
B. Machinery and human beings.
C. Imaginations and inventions.
D. Modern technology and its influence.
