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1、精品文档，仅供学习与交流，如有侵权请联系网站删除浙 江 新 通 外 语 专 修 学 校 雅 思 入 学 测 试ZheJiang Shinyway Language Institute Students Placement Test（60 minutes）ReadingYou are advised to spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-14 which are based on Reading Passage 1.Early Telecommunications DevicesAlthough it is hardly used anymore, t
2、he telegraph is familiar to most people . This early telecommunications device is credited, as any school student knows, to Samuel Morse, who , in 1844, made the first long-distance electronic communication via his invention, the Morse telegraph. What is not so commonly known is that Morses was not
3、the only telegraph nor he the only such inventor at this time. A rival system, developed by William Cooke and Wheatstone, was patented in England in 1845 and was subsequently adopted for use by British rail companies to enable speedy communication between rail stations.However , the Cooke-Wheatstone
4、 telegraph, which used six wires and a fragile receiver requiring five magnetic needles, proved to be awkward to use, difficult to transport and expensive to build . Morses version used one wire and a receiver of a simpler and stronger design. This is , no doubt, why it became the favored telegraph
5、in many parts of the world, especially the United States, which built a telegraph line along railway tracks crossing the North American continent, linking eastern cities with western frontiers.Morse chose the Magnetic Telegraph Company to handle the parents for his telegraph technology, and within s
6、even years of the appearance of his invention, the company had licensed use of the telegraph to over 50 companies across the US. In 1851, twelve of these companies came together to form the Western Union Company. By 1866, Western Union had grown to include over 4000 telegraph offices, almost all in
7、rail stations.Another early telecommunications device is still very much with us : the telephone. Although the telephone is popularly thought to be the brainchild of one man, Alexander Graham Bell, this is not the whole truth. Phillip Reis, a schoolteacher in Germany, invented a device in 1861 that
8、he labeled a telephone. Reiss invention was limited to transmitting musical tones, however, and could not send the sound of the human voice across the wire.While Reis was working on his invention, Bell and another man, Elisha Gray, were also working toward the invention of the telephone, though by a
9、n indirect route. Both were , in fact, seeking ways of allowing multiple telegraph signals to travel along the same telegraph line - a system known as a harmonic telegraph. Bell worked in Boston while Gray was based in Chicago, and the two were rivals in their area of research. For both inventors, t
10、he perfection of the harmonic telegraph proved too difficult and both, separately but at around the same time, changed plans and started on the development of a telephone. Most interesting of all is the fact that both men applied for a patent to the US Patent Office for their respective telephones o
11、n the same day, 14 February 1876. Bell was lucky enough to have arrived a few hours earlier than Gray and so it was Bell whose name was to be forever associated with the telephone. The harmonic telegraph, incidentally, was perfected by Thomas Edison, best known as the inventor of the light bulb, in
12、1881.Rights to Bells patent (now recognized as the most valuable patent in the history of technology) were offered to Western Union for $ 100 000, with the assumption that the giant telegraph company would be enthusiastic about the new technology. But Western Union disliked Bells design and instead
13、asked Elisha Gray to make refinements to his original telephone design. Bells company began to set up its own business and sell telephones, while Western Union, with its somewhat different design, was its competitor. Competition between the two continues for about two years, but all the while, the B
14、ell company was mounting a legal challenge to Western Union, claiming it held the only true basic patents for the telephone. It based its claim on the fact that Bell had beaten Gray to the Patent Office and so should be the sole recognized inventor of the telephone. Eventually, Western Union had to
15、agree with Bell and gave up its telephone rights and patents to the Bell company. The telegraph companys entire network of telephones was handed over to the Bell company. As compensation. Western Union was given 20 percent of revenue from rental of its former equipment; this arrangement was to last
16、until Bells patents expired. In an effort to fight the power the Bell company enjoyed from exclusive rights to Bells patents, a small telephone company, Pacific Union, established telephone services in the 1920s and 1930s that it claimed were based on the telephone design of Phillip Reis. They maint
17、ained that because Reiss invention pre-dated Bells, the Bell design was not the first of its kind and, therefore, Bells patents were not valid. Although the court accepted that the company may have been using Reiss technology, it nonetheless held that only Bells patents could legally be used.The Bel
18、l company, eventually named American Telephone & Telegraph, thus formed an effective monopoly on telephone services in the United States. The company subsequently grew to an extent that, a century later, it was the largest privately held enterprise in the world, with more than a million employees co
19、ntrolling communications between more than 100 million telephones. In 1984, American Telephone & Telegraph was found by a US court to be too monopolistic and was ordered to be broken up into several smaller companies.Patent: an official recognition of a person as the inventor of a deviceMonopoly: ex
20、clusive control of a marketQuestions 1-5Complete the table below: Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the passage for each answer. Write your answer in boxes 1-5 on your answer sheetYearEventInventor(s)(by surname)1845patent of telegraph(1)1851Establishment of(2)1861Invention of telephone(3)1876App
21、lication for patent of(4)Gray1881Successful development of(5)EdisonQuestions 6-10Look at the following lists of inventors and companies. Match each inventor to ONE of the companies that used his/their technology. Choose E if there is no information in the readingpassage. Write the appropriate letter
22、s A-E in boxes 6-10 on your answer sheet.N.B. You may use any letter more than once.InventorsExample* Morse answer: D (6) Bell(7) Cooke and Wheatstone(8) Edison(9) Gray(10) ReisCompaniesA. British rail companiesB. Pacific UnionC. American Telephone & TelegraphD. Western UnionOrE. no information in r
23、eading passageQuestions 11-14USING NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS. Answer the following questions. Write your answer in boxes 11-14 on your answer sheet.11. Name ONE reason why Cooke and Whearstones invention was not as successful as Morses.12. In what type of location did Western Union typically offer it
24、s telegraph services?13. What sort of information was Reiss original invention able to send?14. What device did Alexander Graham Bell try but fail to invent?WritingSupporters of technology say that it makes life better. Opponents argue that technology creates new problems that may threaten of damage the quality of life. Using one or two examples, discuss these two positions. Which view of technology do you support? Why? (30 minutes; 250 words)【精品文档】第 3 页