THE BENEFITS OF TECHNOLOGY j
Science and technology are getting a bad press these days. Increasingly
scornful of the materialism of our culture, some people speak about returning to a
simpler, pre-industrial, pre-scientific day. They fail to realize that the "good old days" 1
were actually horribly bad old days of ignorance, disease, slavery, and death. They I
fancy themselves in Athens, talking to Socrates or watching the latest play by
Sophocles but never as a slave brutalized in the Athenian silver mines. They
imagine themselves as medieval knights on armoured chargers but never as
starving peasants. They also ignore the fact that, before modern technology, the full I
flower of art and human intellect was reserved for the few. It was the technical
advances that brought many of the marvels of mankind to even the poorest.
E X E R C I S E 1: Find words or phrases in the passage which mean the same as:
COLUMN A COLUMN B
a) be criticized in the media
(phrase)
b) feeling and showing that something deserves
no respect; showing contempt
c) lack of knowledge
d) system of people being owned by other people
and having to work for them
e) like the idea of; imagine
f) treated cruelly, violently, and inhumanely
g) of the period in history from AD 1000 to about
AD 1500
h) in the Middle Ages, a man - usually of noble
birth - who had a high military rank and served
the king in battle, and who is usually seen (in
pictures, etc.) riding a horse and dressed in a
protective metal suit
i) covered with protective metal wear
j) strong horse used by an army officer in battle,
especially by high-ranking warriors during the
Middle Ages
k) suffering or dying from hunger
I) person working on the land, often poor and
considered to be of low status
m) wonderful thing causing admiration and
surprise
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