实用英语口语(高级)1.Predictingthefuture

1、实用英语口语 （高级） 1.Predicting the futureNEWSCAST：ERHumans can be impatient sometimes. We just cant wait to see what will happen in the future, so were constantly trying to predict it. Wouldnt you like to know what the world will be like in the year 2100? Will technology have changed peoples lives for the

2、 better or worse? Who knows?NEWSCAST：ERBut its fun to imagine Were going to look at threepeople from history who did justthat, visionaries whose imaginations were far ahead of their time and whosepredictions, although not always accurate, were certainly always interesting. LeonardoDa Vinci is most f

3、amous for works of art such as the Mona Lisa and the Last Supper.However, Da Vinci wasnt just a painter, he was also an engineer, a musician, abiologist, a writer, a mathematician and an inventor. Despite living in the sixteenthcentury, Da Vinci was able to predict some of the twentieth centurys maj

4、or inventions,even though it would have been impossible, at the time, to have built them.NEWSCAST：ERBy studying the flight of birds, Da Vinci designed rudimentary flying machines which, inthe twentieth century, would become airplanes, hang gliders and helicopters. In hisefforts to help defend the ci

5、ties in which he lived, he came up with the idea of a tank, amachine gun and a cannon. Four hundred years later, as the IndustrialRevolutioncompletely changed the face of the western world. HG Wells had only to look around himto think of the possible implications for the future. Regarded as the Fath

6、er of ScienceFiction, Wells became famous for his futuristic stories, such as The War of the Worlds, inwhich Martians attack London, or The Time Machine, about a man who time travels to theyear AD 802701.NEWSCAST：ERIt was in his 1901 book Anticipations, however, that HG Wells made his more realistic

7、,and accurate, predictions about the future. He wrote, for example, that in the future everycountry in the world would have huge highways on which thousands of cars and trucksdrove back and forth. This prediction has certainly come true. Another writer whopredicted the impact technology would have o

8、n the world was Philip K. Dick.NEWSCAST：ERSince his death in 1982, Dick has become famous due to many of his stories beingmade into science fiction movies. In the film Bladerunner, for example, robots who lookjust like humans, begin to learn human emotions and try to find out about the origin ofthei

9、r life. In Total Recall, travel companies give you an adventure holiday by implantingsynthetic memories into your brain. And, in A Scanner Darkly, the government uses stateof the art surveillance equipment to monitor the lives of its people. It seems unlikely that well see UFOs invade the earth, a time machine, or robots that look exactly the same as humans - at least in our lifetime - but as the drawings of Da Vinci prove, given enough time, and the