15000 bài tập tách từ đề thi thử môn Tiếng Anh có đáp án (Phần 87)

Imagine the busy streets of New York City, an enormous place with millions of people. Every day, the streets are congested with people going about their daily lives. Now imagine a small robot in the middle of all of those people rolling down a busy sidewalk. Most people would not even notice the teninch smiling robot, called a Tweenbot, rolling along the street. This strange machine may interest some people, while others would ignore it completely. A researcher interested in studying how helpful people really are uses such robots in her experiments that take place on the streets of New York.

The Tweenbots experiment is the idea and creation of Kacie Kinzer. Kinzer’s idea was to make a robot that could navigate the city and reach its destination only if it was aided by pedestrians. Tweenbots rely on the kindness of warm-hearted strangers. Made simply of cardboard, wheels, and a device to turn the wheels, the Tweenbots face many dangers on the city streets. They could be run over by cars or smashed by careless kids. Kinzer thought her little robots might even be seen as some kind of terrorist device. The only real protection a Tweenbot has is its friendly smile. In addition to that, each of Kinzer’s robots is fitted with a flag that displays instructions for the robot’s destination. The only way these robots will reach their final point is if someone lends them a hand. Tweenbots are essentially a social experiment aimed at providing people a chance to show how caring they are.

On a daily basis, people in New York City are often in a hurry to get around. However, the Tweenbots, through their inability to look after themselves, took people out of their normal routines. The people who noticed the helpless little robots were actually interested in helping the Tweenbots find their way home. Tweenbots move at a constant speed and can only go in a straight line. If one was to get stuck, or was going in the wrong direction, it would be up to strangers to free it or turn it in the right direction. Surprisingly, no Tweenbot was lost or damaged, and each one arrived at its target in good condition. In fact, most people treated the robot in a gentle manner, and some even treated it as though it were a small living being. 

Even if you were in a rush to go somewhere, would you stop and help a Tweenbot successfully reach its destination?

By the mid-nineteenth century, the term "icebox" had entered the American language, but ice was still only beginning to affect the diet of ordinary citizens in the United States. The ice trade grew with the growth of cities. Ice was used in hotels, taverns, and hospitals, and by some forward-looking city dealers in fresh meat, fresh fish, and butter. After the Civil War (1860-1865), as ice was used to refrigerate freight cars, it also came into household use. Even before 1880, half the ice sold in New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, and one-third of that sold in Boston and Chicago, went to families for their own use. This had become possible because a new household convenience, the icebox, a precursor of the modern refrigerator, had been invented.

Making an efficient icebox was not as easy as we might now suppose. In the early nineteenth century, the knowledge of the physics of heat, which was essential to a science of refrigeration, was rudimentary. The common-sense notion that the best icebox was one that prevented the ice from melting was of course mistaken, for it was the melting of the ice that performed the cooling. Nevertheless, early efforts to economize ice included wrapping the ice in blankets, which kept the ice from doing its job. Not until near the end of the nineteenth century did inventors achieve the nice balance of insulation and circulation needed for an efficient icebox.        

But as early as 1803, an ingenious Maryland farmer, Thomas Moore, had been on the right track. He owned a farm about twenty miles outside the city of Washington, for which the village of Georgetown was the market center. When he used an icebox of his own design to transport his butter to market, he found that customers would pass up the rapidly melting stuff in the tubs of his competitors to pay a premium price for his butter, still fresh and hard in neat, one-pound bricks. One advantage of his icebox, Moore explained, was that farmers would no longer have to travel to market at night in order to keep their produce cool.

It isn’t difficult to imagine how increases in international commerce and in the movement of people—two defining features of globalization—might influence health. More goods go more places today than at any (261)___________ in history. More people travel farther, more frequently, and come in contact with more people and goods, than at any point in history.

This increased movement of both goods and people increases opportunities for the spread of disease around the world. And it’s not just goods and services that can travel across oceans and state borders—so can diseases like AIDS, malaria, or tuberculosis. The (262)___________ of BSE, or ―mad cow disease,‖ in several European countries is only one example of (263)___________trade can promote the spread of dangerous diseases. Mosquitoes that carry malaria have been found aboard planes thousands of miles from their primary habitats, and (264)___________ seafood carrying cholera bacteria have been shipped from Latin America to the United States and Europe.

 But just as globalization increases the frequency and ease (265)___________ which diseases can move around the world, it also can improve access to the medicines, medical information, and training that can help treat or cure these diseases.