Text 1
Last November, engineers in the healthcare division of GE unveiled something called the "Light Speed VCT", a scanner that can create a startlingly good three-dimensional image of a beating heart. This spring Staples, an American office-supplies retailer, will stock its shelves with a gadget called a "wordlock", a padlock that uses words instead of numbers. The connection In each case, the firm’s customers have played a big part in designing the product.
How does innovation happen The familiar story involves scientist in academic institutes and R&D labs. But lately, corporate practice has begun to challenge this old, fashioned notion. Open source software development is already well-known. Less so is the fact that Bell, an American bicycle helmet maker, has collected hundreds of ideas for new products from its customers, and is putting several of them into production. Not only is the customer king: now he is market-resear
A. are eminent in a specific field.
B. are known to have invented new products.
C. lead the research teams of the corporations.
D. purchase the companies new products consistently.
Text 4
The historian Frederick J. Turner wrote in the 1890’s that the agrarian discontent that had been developing steadily in the United States since about 1870 had been speeded by the closing of the internal frontier -- that is, the depletion of available new land needed for further expansion of the American farming system. Not only was Turner’s thesis influential at the time, it was later adopted and elaborated by other scholars, such as John D. Hicks in The populist Revolt (1931). Actually, however, new lands were taken up for farming in the United States throughout and beyond the nineteenth century. In the 1890’s, when agrarian discontent had become most acute, 1,100,000 new farms were settled, which was 500,000 more than had been settled during the previous decade. After 1890, under the terms of the Homestead Act and its successors, more new land was taken up for fanning than had been taken up for this purpose in the United states up until t
A. underestimation of the amount of new land that was being farmed in the US.
B. underutilization of relatively small but rich plots of land.
C. overexpansion of the world transportation network for agricultural products.
D. extension of agrarian depressions beyond national boundaries.
Text 2
Last year, America’s Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency, DARPA, thought it would be a good idea to organize a robot race across the Nevada desert. The idea of the Grand Challenge, as DARPA dubbed it, was for autonomous robot vehicles to steer a 227km (142-mile) course and claim a $1 m jackpot. This would be a first step towards DARPA’s ultimate goal of being able to build unmanned self-driving military vehicles and thus keep American troops out of harm’s way on the battlefield.
This year’s crop of 23 entrants were offered an even greater incentive--a $ 2m prize for the win ner. That, plus the intervening 18 months, seems to have done the trick. This time, five vehicles finished the 211kin course. The winner, a modified Volkswagen Touareg dubbed Stanley by its makers, a team from Stanford University, did it in a mere six hours and 54 minutes.
Stanley was, of course, specially hardened by its designers for the rou
A. adventure through the Nevada desert.
B. delevop unpiloted vehicles for military use.
C. win a $lm jackpot.
D. keep American troops unharmed.
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