Summary.

14. From Passage A:

Using your own words as far as possible, summarise the ways in which technology has brought disadvantages and advantages to people’s working lives and behavour.

USE THE MATERIALS IN PASSAGE A FROM LINE14 TO LINE44.

Your summary, which must be in continuous writing (not note form), must not be longer than 150 words, (not counting the words given to help you begin.)

Begin your summary as follows:

Modern technology has affected our lives so much that we …

SUMMARY:

Modern technology has affected our lives so much that we

Disadvantages:
People seem to be in a rush, and increasingly impatient. The obsession with saving time results in many people trying to imitate computers in an effort to handle several tasks simultaneously – multi-tasking, as it is called. Frequently, the efficiency of their work suffers. Speed of thinking, too, is often confused with intelligence itself. We are so accustomed to constant activity that we find it difficult to sit and do nothing or even just one thing at a time. The motor-car has been blamed for its polluting effects and its demand for more and more roads, but it has banished the time-consuming and uncomfortable journeys endure in horse-drawn vehicles.

Advantages:
There was a time when come people’s lives were devoted to simply to the cultivation of the land or the care of cattle. Their lives proceeded at a much gentler pace, and in a familiar pattern. There is much that we might envy about a way of life like this. Yet before we do so, we must think of the hard tasks our ancestors faced: they farmed with bare hands, often lived close to hunger, and had to fashion tools from wood and stone. Modern machinery has freed people from that primitive existence. Technology has also made work in factories far less tedious, with machines performing the dull, repetitive tasks previously carried out by human hands. The computer, too, has brought major advantages in printing processes. No longer has each individual letter of every word to be set by hand in wooden blocks, ready for the printing press to ‘read’. Such is the speed of a computer printer that an author can put the finishing touches to a book and see it printed on the same day.