Revision Exercises for Module 5 Unit 3 Life in the futureClass___________ Name (Chinese /English) ________________ No.______Part I ReadingSection1I read a few books written in 1920 about the future. At that time life seemed to be full of possibilities and everybody was very optimistic that technology would improve the quality of everybody’s life. Has that happened today? 1: increased free time Writers in the past guessed that increasing technology would result in a shorter working week. They worried that people lacked the skills to make the best use of all this free time. But they need not have been concerned because the opposite has happened. The workload for many office workers is now heavier and takes more time than it did in 1920. 2: the human robot It was also suggested that over the next 90 years it would become harder to tell the difference between a human and a machine. Of course it has not been possible to create a machine that can behave like a human being. Robots still don’t have private feelings and emotions as people do. 3: the paperless officeWhen computers were introduced into offices, office workers were able to correct their work on the screen for the first time. This was felt to be such a saving of time that many people predicted that reading or writing on paper could be skipped. However this prediction lost sight of the fact that when people are writing more than two pages of text, they find reading and correcting it much more convenient in paper form. As office workers are obliged to write many reports, there are still as many, if not more, paper copies in various stages of production. In all three cases mentioned above the predictions by writers in 1920...
