Intermediate passages 1 The best recruiting agents

44 The benefits of technology

Science and technology are getting a bad press these days. Increasingly scornful of the materialism of our culture, some people speak about returning to a simpler, pre-industrial, pre-scientific day. They fail to realize that the "good old days" were actually horribly bad old days of ignorance, disease, slavery, and death. They fancy themselves in Athens, talking to Socrates or watching the latest play by Sophocles but never as a slave brutalized in the Athenian silver mines. They imagine themselves as medieval knights on armoured chargers but never as starving peasants. They also ignore the fact that, before modern technology, the full I flower of art and human intellect was reserved for the few. It was the technical advances that brought many of the marvels of mankind to even the poorest.

1. In the writer's opinion, some people

1. 
   think that the "good old days" were actually very bad
   
2. 
   do not have a realistic image of the past
   
3. 
   marvel at the technical advances that have been made
   
4. 
   are unable to cope with the speed of advances in science and technology
   

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2. Those who have nostalgic feelings for the past

A) usually work for the newspapers B) are well-read in the works of Sophocles
C) would like to have lived then to help slaves and peasants D) criticize today's materialism

3. 
   According to the writer, modern technology A) makes life too complicated and materialistic C) has benefited the rich and the poor alike
   

2. 
   means there are no longer any starving peasants
   

4. 
   has pushed art and human intellect aside