南京大学
- Introduction: The sense of smell is powerful. Odours affect us on a physical, psychological and social level. For the most part, however, we breathe in the aromas which surround us without being consciously aware of their importance to us. It is only when the faculty of smell is impaired for some reason that we begin to realise the essential role the sense of smell plays in our sense of well-being. A survey conducted at Montreal's Concordia University asked participants to comment on how important smell was to them in their lives. It became apparent that smell can evoke strong emotional responses. A scent associated with a good experience can bring us joy, while an odour associated with a bad memory may disgust us. Respondents to the survey noted that many of their olfactory (嗅觉的) likes and dislikes were based on emotional associations. Such associations can be powerful enough so that odours that we generally label unpleasant become agreeable, and those that we consider fragrant become disagreeable for particular individuals. The perception of smell, therefore, consists not only of the odours themselves, but of the experiences and emotions associated with them.Similarly, odours are essential in social bonding. One participant in the survey believed that there is no true emotional bonding without touching and smelling a loved one. In fact, infants recognise the odours of their mothers soon after birth and adults can often identify their children or spouses by scent. In one well-known test, women and men were able to distinguish by smell alone clothing worn by their partners from similar clothing worn by other people. Most of the subjects would probably never have given much thought to odour as a cue for identifying family members before being involved in the test, but as the experiment revealed, even when not consciously considered, smells register.In spite of its importance to our emotional and sensory lives, smell is probably the most undervalued sense in many cultures. It is often held that the human sense of smell is undeveloped compared with that of animals. While the olfactory powers of humans are nothing like as fine as those possessed by certain animals, they are still remarkably acute. Our noses are able to recognise thousands of smells, and to perceive odours which are present only in extremely small quantities.Smell, however, is a highly elusive phenomenon. Odours, unlike colours, for instance, cannot be named in many languages because the specific vocabulary doesn't exist. 'It smells like…., ' we have to say when describing an odour, struggling to express our olfactory experience. Nor can odours be recorded: there is no effective way to either capture or store them over time. We must make do with descriptions and recollections. Most of the research on smell to date has been of a physical scientific nature. Significant advances have been made in the understanding of the biological and chemical nature of olfaction, but many fundamental questions have yet to be answered. Researchers have still to decide whether smell is one sense or two. Other unanswered questions are whether the nose is the only part of the body affected by odours, and how smells can be measured objectively given the nonphysical components. Questions like these mean that interest in the psychology of smell will play an increasingly important role.
- Today’s shopping mall has as its antecedents historical marketplaces, such as Greek agoras, European piazzas, and Asian bazaars. The purpose of these sites, as with the shopping mall, is both economic and social. People go not only to buy and sell wares, but also to be seen, catch up on news, and be part of the human drama. Both the marketplace and its descendant the mall might also contain restaurants, banks, theaters, and professional offices. The mall is also the product of the creation of suburbs. Although villages outside of cities have existed since antiquity, it was the technological and transportation advances of the 19th century that gave rise to a conscious exodus of the population away from crowded, industrialized cities toward quieter, more rural towns. Since the suburbs typically have no centralized marketplace, shopping centers or malls were designed to fill the needs of the changing community, providing retail stores and services to an increasing suburban population. The shopping mall differs from its ancient counterparts in a number of important ways. While piazzas and bazaars were open-air venues, the modern mall is usually enclosed. Since the suburbs are spread out geographically, shoppers drive to the mall, which means that parking areas must be an integral part of a mall’s design. Ancient marketplaces were often set up in public spaces, but shopping malls are designed, built, and maintained by a separate management firm as a unit. The first shopping mall was built by J. C. Nichols in 1922 near Kansas City, Missouri. The Country Club Plaza was designed to be an automobile-centered plaza, as its patrons drove their own cars to it, rather than take mass transportation as was often the case for city shoppers. It was constructed according to a unified plan, rather than as a random group of stores. Nichols’ company owned and operated the mall, leasing space to a variety of tenants. The first enclosed mall was the Galleria Vittoria Emanuele in Milan, Italy in 1865–77. Inspired by its design, Victor Gruen took the shopping and dining experience of the Galleria to a new level when he created the Southdale Center Mall in 1956. Located in a suburb of Minneapolis, it was intended to be a substitute for the traditional city center. The 95-acre, two-level structure had a constant climate-controlled temperature of 72 degrees, and included shops, restaurants, a school, a post office, and a skating rink. Works of art, decorative lighting, fountains, tropical plants, and flowers were placed throughout the mall. Southdale afforded people the opportunity to experience the pleasures of urban life while protected from the harsh Minnesota weather. In the 1980s, giant megamalls were developed. While Canada has had the distinction of being home to the largest of the megamalls for over twenty years, that honor will soon go to Dubai, where the Mall of Arabia is being completed at a cost of over five billion U.S. dollars. The 5.3 million square foot West Edmonton Mall in Alberta, Canada, opened in 1981, with over 800 stores, 110 eating establishments, a hotel, an amusement park, a miniature-golf course, a church, a zoo, and a 438-foot-long lake. Often referred to as the “eighth wonder of the world,” the West Edmonton Mall is the number-one tourist attraction in the area, and will soon be expanded to include more retail space, including a facility for sports, trade shows, and conventions. The largest enclosed megamall in the United States is Blooming-ton, Minneapolis’s Mall of America, which employs over 12,000 people. It has over five hundred retail stores, an amusement park which includes an indoor roller coaster, a walk-through aquarium, a college and a wedding chapel. The mall contributes over one billion dollars each year to the economy of the state of Minnesota. Its owners have proposed numerous expansion projects, but have been hampered by safety concerns due to the mall’s proximity to an airport.
- Today’s shopping mall has as its antecedents historical marketplaces, such as Greek agoras, European piazzas, and Asian bazaars. The purpose of these sites, as with the shopping mall, is both economic and social. People go not only to buy and sell wares, but also to be seen, catch up on news, and be part of the human drama. Both the marketplace and its descendant the mall might also contain restaurants, banks, theaters, and professional offices. The mall is also the product of the creation of suburbs. Although villages outside of cities have existed since antiquity, it was the technological and transportation advances of the 19th century that gave rise to a conscious exodus of the population away from crowded, industrialized cities toward quieter, more rural towns. Since the suburbs typically have no centralized marketplace, shopping centers or malls were designed to fill the needs of the changing community, providing retail stores and services to an increasing suburban population. The shopping mall differs from its ancient counterparts in a number of important ways. While piazzas and bazaars were open-air venues, the modern mall is usually enclosed. Since the suburbs are spread out geographically, shoppers drive to the mall, which means that parking areas must be an integral part of a mall’s design. Ancient marketplaces were often set up in public spaces, but shopping malls are designed, built, and maintained by a separate management firm as a unit. The first shopping mall was built by J. C. Nichols in 1922 near Kansas City, Missouri. The Country Club Plaza was designed to be an automobile-centered plaza, as its patrons drove their own cars to it, rather than take mass transportation as was often the case for city shoppers. It was constructed according to a unified plan, rather than as a random group of stores. Nichols’ company owned and operated the mall, leasing space to a variety of tenants. The first enclosed mall was the Galleria Vittoria Emanuele in Milan, Italy in 1865–77. Inspired by its design, Victor Gruen took the shopping and dining experience of the Galleria to a new level when he created the Southdale Center Mall in 1956. Located in a suburb of Minneapolis, it was intended to be a substitute for the traditional city center. The 95-acre, two-level structure had a constant climate-controlled temperature of 72 degrees, and included shops, restaurants, a school, a post office, and a skating rink. Works of art, decorative lighting, fountains, tropical plants, and flowers were placed throughout the mall. Southdale afforded people the opportunity to experience the pleasures of urban life while protected from the harsh Minnesota weather. In the 1980s, giant megamalls were developed. While Canada has had the distinction of being home to the largest of the megamalls for over twenty years, that honor will soon go to Dubai, where the Mall of Arabia is being completed at a cost of over five billion U.S. dollars. The 5.3 million square foot West Edmonton Mall in Alberta, Canada, opened in 1981, with over 800 stores, 110 eating establishments, a hotel, an amusement park, a miniature-golf course, a church, a zoo, and a 438-foot-long lake. Often referred to as the “eighth wonder of the world,” the West Edmonton Mall is the number-one tourist attraction in the area, and will soon be expanded to include more retail space, including a facility for sports, trade shows, and conventions. The largest enclosed megamall in the United States is Blooming-ton, Minneapolis’s Mall of America, which employs over 12,000 people. It has over five hundred retail stores, an amusement park which includes an indoor roller coaster, a walk-through aquarium, a college and a wedding chapel. The mall contributes over one billion dollars each year to the economy of the state of Minnesota. Its owners have proposed numerous expansion projects, but have been hampered by safety concerns due to the mall’s proximity to an airport.
- In general, it is plausible to suppose that we should prefer peace and quiet to noise. And yet most of us have had the experience of having to adjust to sleeping in the mountains or the countryside because it was ‘too quiet', an experience that suggests that humans are capable of adapting to a wide range of noise levels. Research supports this view. For example, Glass and Singer (1972) exposed people to short bursts of very loud noise and then measured their ability to work out problems and their physiological reactions to the noise. The noise was quite disruptive at first, but after about four minutes the subjects were doing just as well on their tasks as control subjects who were not exposed to noise. Their physiological arousal also declined quickly to the same levels as those of the control subjects.But there are limits to adaptation and loud noise becomes more troublesome if the person is required to concentrate on more than one task. For example, high noise levels interfered with the performance of subjects who were required to monitor three dials at a time, a task not unlike that of a pilot or that of an air-traffic controller (Broadbent, 1957). Similarly, noise did not affect a subject's ability to track a moving line with a steering wheel, but it did interfere with the subject's ability to repeat numbers while tracking (Finkelman and Glass, 1970).Probably the most significant finding from research on noise is that its predictability is more important than how loud it is. We are much more able to ‘tune out' chronic background noise, even if it is quite loud, than to work under circumstances with unexpected intrusions of noise. In the Glass and Singer study, in which subjects were exposed to bursts of noise as they worked on a task, some subjects heard loud bursts and others heard soft bursts. For some subjects, the bursts were spaced exactly one minute apart (predictable noise); others heard the same amount of noise overall, but the bursts occurred at random intervals (unpredictable noise). Subjects reported finding the predictable and unpredictable noise equally annoying, and all subjects performed at about the same level during the noise portion of the experiment. But the different noise conditions had quite different effects when the subjects were required to proofread written material under conditions of no noise, as shown in Table 1. Table 1: Proofreading Errors and NoiseUnpredictable Predictable AverageNoise Noise Loud noise 40.1 31.8 35.9Soft noise 36.7 27.4 32.1Average 38.4 29.6
- Read the passages below and answer the questions that follow. Questions 1–3 are based on the following passage. Wondering what to do with that old Atari Home Video Game in the attic? It’s on the wish list of the Computer Museum of America, in San Diego, California, which hopes you will donate it to their holdings. The Museum was founded in 1983 to amass and preserve historic computer equipment such as calculators, card punches, and typewriters, and now owns one of the world’s largest collections. In addition, it has archives of computer-related magazines, manuals, and books that are available to students, authors, researchers, and others for historical research. One item currently on display is a 1920s comptometer, advertised as “The Machine Gun of the Office.” The comptometer was first sneered at by accountants and bookkeepers, many of whom could add four columns of numbers in their heads. The new machine was the first that could do the work faster than humans. The comptometer gained a large following, and its operation became a formal profession that required serious training. But by the 1970s, computers took over, and comptometers, and the job of operating them, became obsolete.
- Read the passages below and answer the questions that follow. Wondering what to do with that old Atari Home Video Game in the attic? It’s on the wish list of the Computer Museum of America, in San Diego, California, which hopes you will donate it to their holdings. The Museum was founded in 1983 to amass and preserve historic computer equipment such as calculators, card punches, and typewriters, and now owns one of the world’s largest collections. In addition, it has archives of computer-related magazines, manuals, and books that are available to students, authors, researchers, and others for historical research. One item currently on display is a 1920s comptometer, advertised as “The Machine Gun of the Office.” The comptometer was first sneered at by accountants and bookkeepers, many of whom could add four columns of numbers in their heads. The new machine was the first that could do the work faster than humans. The comptometer gained a large following, and its operation became a formal profession that required serious training. But by the 1970s, computers took over, and comptometers, and the job of operating them, became obsolete.
答案:our ability to smell is damaged
答案:predecessors
答案:predecessors
答案:B
答案:kitchen scales
答案:kitchen scales
