雅思阅读真题+题目+答案：Making Copies

雅思阅读真题+题目+答案：Making Copies

A

Copying is the engine of civilization: culture is behavior duplicated. The oldest copier invented by people is language，by which an idea of yours becomes an idea of mine. The second great copying machine was writing. When the Sumerians firstly transposed spoken words into stylus marks on clay tablets more than 5,000 years ago, they hugely extended the human network that language had created. Writing freed copying from the chain of living contact. It made ideas permanent, portable and endlessly reproducible.

B

Until Johann Gutenberg invented the printing press in the mid-1400s, producing a book in an edition of more than one generally meant writing it out again. Printing with moveable type was not copying, however. Gutenberg couldn, t take a document that already existed, feed it into his printing press and run off facsimiles. The first true mechanical copier was manufactured in 1780, when James Watt, who is better known as the inventor of the modern steam engine, created the copying press. Few people today know what a copying press was, but you may have seen one in an antiques store, where it was perhaps called a book press. A user took a document freshly written in special ink, placed a moistened sheet of translucent paper against the inked surface and squeezed the two sheets together in the press, causing some of the ink from the original to penetrate the second sheet, which could then be read by turning it over and looking through its back.

C

Copying presses were standard equipment in offices for nearly a century and a half. (Thomas Jefferson used one, and the last president whose official correspondence was copied on one was Calvin Coolidge.) The machines were displaced, beginning in the late 1800s, by a combination of two 19th century inventions: the typewriter and carbon paper.

D

Among the first modern copying machines, introduced in 1950 by 3M, was the Thermo-Fax, and it made a copy by shining infrared light through an original document and a sheet of paper that had been coated with heat-sensitive chemicals. Competing manufacturers soon introduced other copying technologies and marketed machines called Dupliton, Dial- A-Matic Autostat, Verifax, Copease and Copymation. These machines and their successors were welcomed by secretaries, who had no other means of reproducing documents in hand, but each had serious drawbacks. All required expensive chemically treated papers. And all made copies that smelled bad, were hard to read, didn, t last long and tended to curl up into tubes.

E

Success was not immediate. Haloid, with considerable help from Battelle, introduced its first xerographic copier, which it called the Model A, in 1949, but the machine was almost comically difficult to operate, and all the early testers returned it. In 1959, it introduced an office copier called the Haloid Xerox 914, a machine that, unlike its numerous competitors, made sharp, permanent copies on ordinary paper—a huge breakthrough. The process, which Haloid called xerography, was so unusual and nonintuitive that physicists who visited the drafty warehouses where the first machines were built sometimes expressed doubt that it was even theoretically feasible.

F

Remarkably, xerography was conceived by one person— Chester Carlson, a shy, soft-spoken patent attorney, who grew up in almost unspeakable poverty and worked his way through junior college and the California Institute of Technology. He made his discovery in solitude in 1937 and offered it to more than 20 major corporations, among them IBM, General Electric, Eastman Kodak and RCA. All of them turned him down, expressing what he later called “an enthusiastic lack of interest” and thereby passing up the opportunity to manufacture what Fortune magazine would describe as “the most successful product ever marketed in America.” Carlson’ s invention was indeed a commercial triumph. Essentially overnight, people began making copies at a rate that was orders of magnitude higher than anyone had believed possible. This year, the world will produce more than three trillion xerographic copies and laser-printed pages—about 500 for every human on earth.

。。。。。此处省略部分雅思阅读真题原文！

雅思阅读真题题目：

Questions 14-19

Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 2? In boxes 14-19on your answer sheet, write

TRUE if the statement agrees with the information

FALSE if the statement contradicts the information

NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this

14 Human’ s first written words were noted on papyrus by Sumerians.

15 Much training work was needed after Johann Gutenberg’ s invention of moveable type.

16 Coping press was invented in late 18th century after the appearance of steam engine.

17 Copying presses was sold poorly after its invention from end of 18th century.

18 Several invention of modern copying machines from 1950 needed costly paper.

19 Unlike earlier coping inventions, Haloid Xerox 914 allowed works printed on the plain papers well and lasting.

。。。。。。

雅思阅读真题+题目+答案：Making Copies，完整版下载，10元有偿下载！