66.The best title for this passage is____.

A. New Verbs from Old Nouns  B. The Development of the English language

   C. New Technology and New words   D. Technology and Language.

(D)

To many web-building spiders, most of whom are nearly blind, the web is their essential window on the world: their means of communicating, capturing prey(猎物), meeting mates and protecting themselves. A web-building spider without its web is like a men cast away on an island of solid rock,totally out of touch and destined to starve to death.

   So important is the web to an orb-web spider's survival that the animal will continue to construct new webs daily even if it is being starved. For 16 days the starving spider builds completely normal webs. Then, as the animal gets scrawnier(憔悴的), it constructs a wider-meshed web using fewer strands(线). Such webs would only trap larger prey, which is more economical from the perspective of a starving spider.

   The spider stores energy by recycling web protein. It simply eats its own web each evening and reuses it to produce new silk. In studies with radioactively,labeled materials, it was found that 95 percent of web protein reappears in the next day' web. Most of the energy needed for web-building is used in walking over the strands as they are laid down.

   Scientists are impressed by the adaptability of the spider's highly preprogrammed brain, which is larger for its size than the brain of any other invertebrate(无脊推动物).If web-building is interrupted, or if some of the existing strands are destroyed,the spider simply goes back to see where the web is left off and then finishes building a normal web. One spider will finish building the incomplete web of another. (259)

62. Where can you most probably read this passage?

   A. In a travel guide book.         B. On a university bulletin board.

C. In a health magazine.            D. In a doctor's prescription.

(C)

   It's not a new phenomenon, but have you noticed how many nouns are being used as verbs? We all use them, often without noticing what we're doing.

   I was arranging to meet someone for dinner last week, and I said “I’ll pencil it in my diary”, and my friend said “You can ink it in”, meaning that it was a firm arrangement not a tentative one!

Many of these new verbs are linked to new technology. An obvious example is the word fax, which is a shortening of facsimile originally, an exact copy of a book or document. We all got used to sending and receiving faxes, and then soon started talking about faxing something and promising we'd fax it immediately. So, nouns turn into verbs in two easy stages. Then along came email, and we were soon all emailing each other madly. How did we do without it? I can hardly imagine life without my daily emails.

Email reminds me, of course, of my computer and its software, which has produced another

couple of new verbs. On my computer I can bookmark those pages from the World Wide Web that I think I'll want to look at again, thus saving all the effort of remembering their addresses and calling them up from scratch. I can do the same thing on my PC, but there I don't bookmark; I favorite-coming from “favorite pages”, so the verb is derived from an adjective not a noun. I wasn’t really sure whether people said this,but someone told me recently that they had favorited a site I was looking for and so they could easily give me its address.

   In the late 1980s I noticed that lots of my friends had acquired pagers, and kept saying things like “I’ll page you as soon as I know what time we’re meeting”. They couldn't say it to me, though; 1 refused to have one. So my children bought me a mobile phone, now known simply as a mobile and I had to learn yet more new verbs. I can message someone, that is, I can leave a message (either spoken or written)for them on their phone.Or I can text them, write a few words suggesting when and where to meet, for example. How long will it be before I can mobile them, that is, phone them using my mobile? I haven’t heard that verb yet, but I’m sure I will soon. Perhaps I’ll start using it myself!  (415)

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