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. benefit from customer innovation.
B. challenge academic institutes and R&D labs.
C. are pioneers in adopting customer innovation.
D. are predominant in new products research.
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 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. was a waste of time and money.
B. attracted nationwide attention.
C. encouraged the development of autonomous vehicles.
D. will not be organized again.
Text 1
At last weekend’s consumer-electronics show in Las Vegas, digital convergence arrived with a vengeance. Among the avalanche of new products were lots of mobile phones. Those fitted with digital cameras and camcorders are hardly new, but they now take even better pictures. Others can be used to play three-dimensional video games. Download movies, watch live TV (and record it during an incoming call), operate home-security systems and listen to music files downloaded from the internet. More marvels are on the way. In the midst of this frenzy of new and unfamiliar gizmos, product features would seem to count for everything. But companies in the hypercompetitive electronics industry are discovering something unexpected, and curious: brands matter almost as much as dazzling new technology.
One of the clearest demonstrations of this is South Korea’ s Samsung Electronics, which made a big splash this year in Las Vegas. Samsung was once best know
A. the location of production carried much weight.
B. brand has always exercised its decisive role.
C. great changes used to take place in markets.
D. a guarantee of quality equals a strong brand.
Text 3
Over the last twenty years, scholarly and popular writers have analyzed and celebrated the worlds of leisure and entertainment in the burgeoning cities of mid-nineteenth-century America, greatly expanding the literature on these subjects. They have found an enthusiastic readership by offering glimpses of modes of leisure, performance, and charlatanism that passed from the scene in the early 20th century, indicating how lively they were and how comparatively impoverished our own entertainment choices have become in an era dominated by corporate electronic media.
Many scholars have been lured into a fascination with the extinct demimonde of dime museums, exhibition hails, saloons, and industrial exhibitions. During this period entertainment relied upon artful deception, comparable in importance to such contemporary forms of amusement as minstrelsy and melodrama. The cultural activities were forms of representational play in which spectators are caused
A. it doesn't have enough charlatanism.
B. it is controlled by corporate electronic media.
C. there is a lack of vigor in current entertainment.
D. people's tastes have changed for the worse.
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