阅读理解

　　Modcm inventions have speeded up people's lives amazingly．Motor-cars cover a bundred miles in little more than an hour．Aireraft cross the world a day, while computers operate at lightning speed．Indeed, this love of speed seems never-ending．Every ycar motor-cars are produced which go even faster each new computer boasts(吹嘘)of saving preeious seconds in handling tasks．

　　All this saves timc, but at a prick．When we lose or gain half a day in speeding aeross the world in an airplane, our bodies tell us so．We get the uncomfoerable feeling known as jet-lag; our bodies feel tlru they have been left bebind in anot ar nine zoors Again pending too long at compulers resul's in painti ninrts and fingers．Mobile phones also to dange according to some seientists; too much uss may thesmit h bul radiation into our brains, a we do not like to think about．

　　Howave, what do we do with the time we have saved?Certainly not or so it seems．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．Pcrhaps the days are long gone when we might listen quietly to a story on the radio, letting imavination take us into another world．

　　There was a time when some people's lives were devotcd simply to the cultivation of the land or the eare of eattle．No multi-tasking there; their lives wenl on 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 faeed;：they farmed with bare hands, often lived close to hunger, and had to fashion tools from wood and stone．Modem machinery has freed peope fre that primitive existcnee．