1、SAT作文写作素材1Bell and his legacyIt is such a common occurrence that no one ever wonders from whence it came. But the telephone has a fascinating story behind it, one that could be entitled. The Conquest of Solitude. It is the story of Alexander Graham Bell.He was born in Edinburgh, Scotland. In 1847, t
2、he son of a man who was consumed, passionately consumed, with the workings of the human voice, how it is produced and used, and especially, in teaching the deaf how to use it. For in those days, you see, the deaf lived in permanent solitude. Not only could they not hear, they could not speak. After
3、all, how could they pronounce words, they couldnt hear? Perhaps this obsession of the elder Bell was one of the reasons he married whom he did. For the woman who would give birth to the inventor of the telephone was deaf! Young Alexander Graham Bell grew up with his fathers passions. In 1870, becaus
4、e of poor health, he migrated to Canada. It was not long before his success in teaching the deal to speak brought him to the attention of a wealthy merchant in Boston who had a deaf daughter, Mabel. Would Mr. Bell please teach Mabel how to speak? Yes, he would, and did. And they fell in love. It was
5、 she who inspired him through the exhausting experiments, who pulled him through the clepressioljs that often inflict those whose drive to succeed is so intense, while he developed the then remarkable instrument that transformed speech into electrical impulses that could then be converted back into
6、human speech at the end of a wire. He had pierced yet another solitude, the one that up until then had denied human speech between people distant from one another. A year later, in 1877, he and Mabel were married. He later became an American citizen. Oh, ALexander Grahahl Bell was showered with the
7、praise of the world. Honors came to him from all the points of the compass. Yes, he would go on to other discoveries, many of them. But in his own view, he was most proud of his efforts to help the deaf. So, when the government of France awarded him the Volta Prize for inventing the telephone, he co
8、mbined this monetary award with the money he made from selling the patent on another invention to establish the Volta Bureau in Washington, D. C. . Its purpose was to fund research on deafness. Today, it is called the Alexander Graham Bell Association. Its role has been changed to providing the late
9、st information to the deaf of the world on how best to cope with their disability. Alexander Graham Bell died in 1922: Mabel five months later. She loved him that much. His name is likely to live as long as man recalls history. After all, there is this constant reminder of how he brought the human f
10、amily into closer touch. The first voice to travel over a wire was even a surprise for its inventor. Alexander Graham Bell. He was experimenting in his laboratory late one night, and quite by accident he succeeded in transmitting a message to his assistant in the next room. What Mr. Bell could not k
11、now at the time was that that night in 1876 would mark the start of a revolution in communications. At first, two iron wires connected each pair of telephones. Then switchboards brought phone wires into one location, other inventions - the vacuum tube to amplify sound, and coaxial cables to link lon
12、g distances on land and under the seas - greatly expanded phone service. Transistors replaced the old vacuum tubes, and by the 1960s communications satellites eliminated the necessity of landlines. Today, bundles of glass fibers carry calls on laser beams of light. Many of these inventionsincluding
13、sound motion pictures and stereo recording, along with 23,00 other patentscome from AT&T Bell Laboratories founded in 1925. John Davis is executive director of Bell Laboratories Consumer Products Division. He says, as we move into the 1900s, we can expect even greater flexibility in telecommunicatio
14、ns. It is hard to imagine a world without the telephone. Our lives have grown to depend on computers linked into phone lines to do our shopping, our banking, or helping us through a typical day work. When you walk into your office, the first thing you do is to turn on the computer and pull up your e
15、lectronic mail for the day. Of course, your electronic mail does not come in through the mail-box, bit comes in through telephone lines. The nice thing is you can turn them around by simply forwarding back without having to worry about addressing or stamping or enveloping the information to the pers
16、on that sent you the message. 2The interview of Bill GatesQuestion: What has been your key to success? Bill Gates: Well, coming up with a simple explanation for the kind of success, that ah, Ive, Ive been 1) privileged to be part of working at Microsoft, It is very difficult. Certainly theres many e
17、lements to it. the vision of the company coming right, when the 2)micro-processor was coming into its own, the focus on software, and working with partners who could bring in the other elements, the focus on the long term, hiring great people, really working with customers, knowing that wed be there
18、 working with them ten years later and twenty years later. All of those have come together to build a great success story, thats been 3) incredibly fun to be part of it. I think, the people is probably the thing Id put at the top. Vision has got to be a big part of it, but so many of these things, y
19、ou know, really come down to day-to-day 4)execution. If wed 5)slacked off at any point, then you know there would have been plenty of people to come in and take our place, and theres certainly the case as we look forward, that we have to continue to obsolete the products, continue to stay in close t
20、ouch with the customers, continue to hire in great people and stand on top of the technology, or else, the 6)phenomenon will continue, but we wont have the role in it that we, that we have today. The Story of Bill Gates in his boyhoodAs a child-and as an adult as well-Bill was untidy. It has been sa
21、id that in order to counteract this. Mary drew up weekly clothing plans for him. On Mondays he might go to school in blue, on Tuesdays in green, on Wednesdays in brown , on Thursdays in black, and so on , Weekend meal schedules might also be planned in detail. Everything time, at work or during his
22、leisure time.Dinner table discussions in the Gates family home were always lively and educational. It was a rich environment in which to learn, Bill remembered.Bills contemporaries, even at the age, recognized that he was exceptional. Every year, he and his friends would go to summer camp. Bill espe
23、cially liked swimming and other sports. One of his summer camp friends recalled, He was never a nerd or a goof or the kind of kid you didnt want your team. We all knew Bill was smarter than us. Even back then, when he was nine or ten years old, he talked like an adult and could express himself in wa
24、ys that none of us understood.Bill was also well ahead of his classmates in mathematics and science. He needed to go to a school that challenged him to Lakeside-an all-boys school for exceptional students. It was Seattles most exclusive school and was noted for its rigorous academic demands, a place
25、 where even the dumb kids were smart.Lakeside allowed students to pursue their own interests, to whatever extent they wished. The school prided itself on making conditions and facilities available that would enable all its students to reach their full potential . It was the ideal environment for som
26、eone like Bill Gates.In 1968, the school made a decision that would change thirteen-year-old Bill Gatess life-and that of many of others, too.Funds were raised, mainly by parents, that enabled the school to gain access to a computer-a Program Data processor(PDP)-through a teletype machine. Type in a
27、 few instructions on the teletype machine and a few seconds later the PDP would type back its response. Bill Gates was immediately hooked- so was his best friend at the time, Kent Evans, and another student, Paul Allen, who was two years older than Bill.Whenever they had free time, and sometimes whe
28、n they didnt, they would dash over to the computer room to use the machine. The students became so single-minded that they soon overtook their teachers in knowledge about computing and got into a lot of trouble because of their obsession. They were neglecting their other studies-every piece of word
29、was handed in late. Classes were cut. Computer time was also proving to be very expensive. Within months, the whole budget that had been set aside for the year had been used up.At fourteen, Bill was already writing short programs for the computer to perform. Early games programs such as Tic-Tac-Toe,
30、 or Noughts and Crosses, and Lunar Landing were written in what was to become Bills second language, BASIC.One of the reasons Bill was so good at programming is because it is mathematical and logical. During his time at Lakeside, Bill scored a perfect eight hundred on a mathematics test. It was extr
31、emely important to him to get this grade-he had to take the test more than once in order to do it.If Bill Gates was going to be good at something. It was essential to be the best.Bills and Pauls fascination with computers and the business world meant that they read a great deal. Paul enjoyed magazin
32、es like Popular Electronics, Computer time was expensive and, because both boys were desperate to get more time and because Bill already had an insight into what they could achieve financially, the two of them decided to set themselves up as a company: The Lakeside Programmers Group. Lets call the real world and try to sell something to it! Bill announced.3FOR BLOOMING IN WARDSNIGHTINGALE In May 1857 a Commission to study the whole question of the army medical service began to sit. The price was high. Florence Nightingale was doing this grueling work because it was vital, not because she had
