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考研英语阅读理解有一部分是截取自报刊文章，因此考生在复习备考的过程中要注意提高报刊文章的阅读能力，把握时事阅读。下面新东方在线小编分享历年真题同源的30篇报刊文章，附有注释和解析，希望考生认真阅读，提高对此类文章的阅读能力和增加相关词汇量。
考研英语阅读真题同源报刊文章30篇（19）
Behind the bleeding edge
MANKIND’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 thirdgeneration 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
bestknown example is that of mobile phones in the developing world. Fixedline
networks are poor or nonexistent in many developing countries, so people have
leapfrogged straight to mobile phones instead. The number of mobile phones now
far outstrips the number of fixedline telephones in China, India and
subSaharan Africa.
There are other examples. Incandescent light bulbs, introduced in the late
1870s, are slowly being displaced in the developed world by more
energyefficient lightemitting diodes (LEDs), 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 fixedline 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 oldfashioned 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.
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发表于 2017-8-6 15:51:12
