Unit2
The automobile industry ranks as among the most lucrative and powerful industries of the twentieth century.There are presently 500 million cars on earth, or one car for every ten
people.Sales of the automobile industry stand at about a trillion dollars, making it the world’s biggest manufacturing industry.
Two of the most frustrating things about driving a car are getting lost and getting stuck in traffic.While the computer revolution is unlikely to cure these problems, it will have a positive impact.Sensors in your car turned to radio signals from orbiting satellites can locate your car precisely at any moment and warn of traffic jams.We already have twenty-four Navstar satellites orbiting the earth,making up what is called the Global Positioning System.They make it possible to determine your location on the earth to within about a hundred feet.At any given time,there are several GPS satellites orbiting overhead at a distance of about 11000 miles.Each satellite contains four “atomic clocks,” which vibrate at a precise frequency,according to the laws of the quantum theory.
Promoters of this computerized highway have great hopes for its future.By 2010, telematics may well be incorporated into one of the major highways in the United States.If successful,by2020,as the price of microchips drops to below a penny a piece,telematics could be adopted in thousand of miles of highway in the United States.This could prove to be an environmental boon as well, saving fuel,reducing traffic jams, decreasing air pollution,and serving as an alternative to highway expansion.
Unit6
Meanwhile, technology has not only allowed work to spread into our leisure time--the laptop-on the-beach syndrome--but added the new burden of dealing with faxes, emails and voicemails.It has also provided us with the opportunity to spend hours fixing software glitches on our personal computers or filling our heads with useless information from the Internet.
There is another reason for our increased time stress levels,too:risingprosperity.As ever-large quantities of goods and services are produced,they have to oblige:we buy more,travel more and play more, but we struggle to keep up.So we suffer from what Wilson calls discontent with super abundance --the confusion of endless choice.
“You’ve got people retiring early,you’ve got the unemployed,you’ve got another people maybe only peripherally involved in the economy who don’t have this situation at all.If you’re unemployed,your problem is that you’ve got too much time,not too little.