早看早好！英语专四专八考试常用词汇（6）

【M6】

Telecommunications stand for devices and systems that transmit electronic or optical signals across long distances. Telecommunications enables people around the world to contact one another, to access information instantly, and to communicate from remote areas. Telecommunications usually involves a sender of information and one or more recipients linked by a technology, such as a telephone system, that transmits information from one place to another. Telecommunications enables people to sand and receive personal messages across town, between countries, and to and from outer space. It also provides the key medium for delivering news, data, information, and entertainment.

Telecommunications devices convert different types of information, such as sound and video, into electronic or optical signals. Electronic signals typically travel along a medium such as copper wire or are carried over the air as radio waves. Optical signals typically travel along a medium such as strands of glass fibers. When a signal reaches its destination, the device on the receiving end converts the signal back into an understandable message, such as sound over a telephone, moving images on a television, or words and pictures on a computer screen.

Telecommunications messages can be sent in a variety of ways and by a wide range of devices. The messages can be seat from one sender to a single receiver (point-to-point) or from one sender to many receivers (point-to-multipoint). Personal communications, such as a telephone conversation between two people or a facsimile (fax) message (see Facsimile Transmission), usually involve point-to-point transmission. Point-to-multipoint telecommunications, often called broadcasts, provide the basis for commercial radio and television programming.

Telecommunications begin with messages that are converted into electronic or optical signals. Some signals, such as those that carry voice or music, are created in an analog or wave format, but may be converted into a digital or mathematical format for faster and more efficient transmission. The signals are then sent over a medium to a receiver, where they are decoded back into a form. that the person receiving the message can understand. There are a variety of ways to create and decode signals, and many different ways to transmit signals.

Individual people, businesses, and governments use many different types of telecommunications systems. Some systems, such as the telephone system, use a network of cables, wires, and switching stations for point-to-point communication. Other systems, such as radio and television, broadcast radio signals over the air that can be received by anyone who has a device to receive them. Some systems make use of several types of media to complete a transmission. For example, a telephone call may travel by means of copper wire, fiber-optic cable, and radio waves as the call is sent from sender to receiver. All telecommunications systems are constantly evolving as telecommunications technology improves. Many recent improvements, for example, offer high-speed broadband connections that are needed to send multimedia information over the Internet.

Personal computers have pushed the limits of the telephone system as more and more complex computer messages are being sent over telephone lines, and at rapidly increasing speeds. This need for speed has encouraged the development of digital transmission technology. The growing use of personal computers for telecommunications has increased the need for innovations in fiber-optic technology.

Telecommunications and information technologies are merging and converging. This means that many of the devices now associated with only one function may evolve into more versatile equipment. This convergence is already happening in various fields. Some telephones and pagers are able to store not only phone numbers but also names and personal information abo

A．Current development.

B．Transmission of message.

C．Computer networking.

D．Government regulation.

听力原文： Now European finance ministers are expected to reprimand the Irish government today after they meet in Brussels. They've been alarmed by December's budget in the Irish Republic which cut taxes and increased government spending. The other European countries fear this will stoke up inflation and undermine the stability of the Euro, the single currency.

Finance ministers from the European Unions 15 states are holding their regular monthly meeting in Brussels. They've been given the tricky task of handing out some public criticism to the government of the country with the most successful economy, the Irish Republic. In the last five years Ireland has boomed growing by an average eight percent a year, unemployment has reached its lowest level for 20 years and commodity prices in Dublin became more expensive than in London.

Why do other European countries criticize Ireland?

A．They worry that the Irish Republic's budget plan will undermine the stability of European Unions.

B．EU countries fear that Irish Republic's finance plan will cause inflation.

C．Other countries will have to cut taxes.

D．Other EU countries must increase government spending, too.

Thomas Hardy's impulses as a writer, all of which he indulged in his novels, were numerous and divergent, and they did not always work together in harmony. Hardy was to some degree interested in exploring his characters' psychologies, though impelled less by curiosity than by sympathy. Occasionally he felt the impulse to comedy (in all its detached coldness) as well as the impulse to farce, but he was more often inclined to see tragedy and record it. He was also inclined to literary realism in the several senses of that phrase. He wanted to describe ordinary human beings; he wanted to speculate on their dilemma rationally (and, unfortunately, even schematically); and he wanted to record precisely the material universe. Finally, he wanted to be more than a realist. He wanted to transcend what he considered to be the banality of solely recording things exactly and to express as well his awareness of the occult and the strange.

In his novels these various impulses were sacrificed to each other inevitably and often. Inevitably, because Hardy did not care in the way that novelists such as Flaubert or James cared, and therefore took paths of least resistance. Thus, one impulse often surrendered to a fresher one and, unfortunately, instead of exacting a compromise, simply disappeared. A desire to throw over reality a light that never was might give way abruptly to the desire on the part of what we might consider a novelist-scientist to record exactly and concretely the structure and texture of a flower. In this instance, the new impulse was at least an energetic one, and thus its indulgence did not result in a relaxed style. But on other occasions Hardy abandoned a perilous, risky, and highly energizing impulse in favor of what was for him the fatally relaxing impulse to classify and schematize abstractly. When a relaxing impulse was indulged, the style. —that sure index of an author's literary worth —was certain to become verbose. Hardy's weakness derived from his apparent inability to control the comings and goings of these divergent impulses and from his unwillingness to cultivate and sustain the energetic and risky ones. He submitted to first one and then another, and the spirit blew where it listed; hence the unevenness of any one of his novels. His most controlled novel, Under the Greenwood Tree, prominently exhibits two different but reconcilable impulses —a desire to be a realist-historian and a desire to be a psychologist of love —but the slight interlockings of plot are not enough to bind the two completely together. Thus even this book splits into two distinct parts.

The most appropriate title for the passage could be ______.

A．Under the Greenwood Tree: Hardy's Ambiguous Triumph

B．The Real and the Strange: the Novelist's Shifting Realms

C．Hardy's Novelistic Impulses: the Problem of Control

D．Divergent Impulses: the Issue of Unity in the Novel