高级英语 答 案 |
2006-2-19 20:51:53 点击数： 进入论坛 |
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Part Two
Read the following passage carefully and complete the succeeding four items: Ⅴ，Ⅵ，Ⅶ and Ⅷ.
The Birth of Computing:
The Forgotten Father Figure
1) It seems curious that Charles Babbage is remembered today as the grandfather of computing, for Babbage never completed a single one of his clunky mechanical calculating machines, and his work was largely forgotten after his death in 1871. It was only with the construction of the first electronic computers in the 1940s, by people who were unaware of Babbage's work, that the groundbreaking nature of that work became apparent. Had Babbage never lived, in other words, the rise of the computer would have happened anyway. That is because today's computers owe their ancestry not to Babbage but to the work of another 19th-century pioneer, Hermann Hollerith.
2) In contrast to Babbage, who wanted to automate the business of mathematical calculation, Hollerith was interested in the field of data processing. Babbage intended his elaborate“calculating engines”to be used by scientists, in much the same way that specialist supercomputers are today. The particular application he had in mind was the production of error-free mathematical and astronomical tables. Hollerith, on the other hand, made his name building machines to handle an enormous data-processing task: the analysis of the results of the United States' census.
3) When the first American census took place in 1790, tabulating the data it collected took nine months. As the country's population grew larger, however, and the number of questions asked in each census increased, a problem of delay gradually emerged. The results of the 1880 census took seven years to compile梞aking them out of date by the time they were published.
4) This was unsatisfactory because, for example, seats in the House of Representatives were (and are) assigned according to census data. It became apparent that a new way would have to be found to compile the results of the 1890 census, in order to keep up with rapid demographic changes. Indeed, without a new approach the 1900 census would already have been under way by the time the 1890 results became available.
5) Hollerith, a former employee of the Census Bureau, had the idea of building a tabulating machine. His first design, patented in 1884, used a long strip of paper into which holes were punched to represent information. The record for each person was to be punched across the strip, which would then be run through the machines. Electrical contacts made through the holes in the strip would drive electro-mechanical counters. In this way the number of records matching particular criteria could be counted.
6) Before long, Hollerith improved this scheme, by using combinations of holes to represent more complex pieces of information. At the same time, he switched from a paper strip to punched cards. By clever wiring of the tabulating machine, it was possible to count the number of cards with particular combinations of attributes.
7) Hollerith also invented a sorting machine, to facilitate the tabulation of subsets of the population. When a card was inserted into the tabulating machines, the counters would be updated accordingly, and the appropriate drawer in the sorting machine would open.本新闻共 6页,当前在第 3页 1 2 3 4 5 6 |
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| 2007年4月大考时间 |
| 2007年4月21日-4月22日 |
| 2007年7月加考时间 |
| 2007年7月7日-7月8日 |
| 2007年10月大考时间 |
| 2007年10月27日-10月28日 |
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