Text 4
The entertainment industry and technology companies have been warring for years over the dazzling ability of computers and the Internet to copy and transmit music and movies.
A crucial battle ended this week with a ruling by America’s Supreme Court in favour of copyright holder and against two companies that distribute peer-to-peer (P2P) software, which lets users share files online with others. The court’s decision, though ostensibly a victory for content providers, is. nevertheless unlikely to stamp out file sharing—much of which will continue from outside America—or stop the technological innovation that is threatening the current business models of media firms.
The court was asked to decide whether two firms, Grokster and StreamCast, were liable for copyright infringement by their customers. Two lower courts had said that the firms were not liable, citing a 1984 ruling in favour of Sony’s Betamax video record
A. Copyright, to Be Protected Urgently.
B. The Pro-copyrightholder Verdict, a True Victory
C. Piracy out of Control.
D. Tech Firms, How Far to Go
Text 1
The standardized educational or psychological tests, that are widely used to aid in selecting, assigning, or promoting students, employees, and military personnel have been the target of recent attacks in books, magazines, the daily press, and even in Congress. The target is wrong, for in attacking the tests; critics divert attention from the fault that lies with ill-informed or incompetent users. The tests themselves are merely tools, with characteristics that can be measured with reasonable precision under specified conditions. Whether the results will be valuable, meaningless, or even misleading depends partly upon the tool itself but largely upon the user.
All informed predictions of future performance are based upon some knowledge of relevant past performance. How Well the predictions will be validated by later performance depends upon the amount, reliability, and appropriateness of the information used and on the skill and Wisdom with which it
A. Attacking standardized tests.
B. Don't blame the test—blame the user.
C. Standardized tests and their wide applications.
D. The standardized test—a useful means of assessment.
Text 2
Each advance in microscopic technique has provided scientists with new perspectives on the function of living organisms and the nature of matter itself. The invention of the visible-light microscope late in the sixteenth century introduced a previously unknown realm of single celled plants and animals. In the twentieth century, electron microscope have provided direct views of viruses and minuscule surface structures. Now another type of microscope, one that utilizes X rays rather than light or electrons, offers a different way of examining tiny de tails; it should extend human perception still farther into the natural world.
The dream of building an X-ray microscope dates to 1895; its development, however, was virtually halted in the 1940’ s because the development of the electron microscope was progressing rapidly. During the 1940’ s, electron microscopes routinely achieved resolution better than that possible with a visible-light micro
A. The detail seen through a microscope.
B. Sources of illumination for microscopes.
C. A new kind of microscope.
D. Outdated microscopic techniques.
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