Question

A Robot About the House

As civilization proceeds in the direction of technology, it passes the point of supplying all the basic essentials of life: food, shelter, clothes, and warmth. Then we are faced with a choice between using technology to provide and fulfil needs which have hitherto been regarded as unnecessary or, on the other hand, using technology to reduce the number 5 of hours of work which a man must do in order to earn a given standard of living. In other words, we either raise our standard of living above that necessary for comfort and happiness or we leave it at this level and work shorter hours. I shall take it as axiomatic that mankind has, by that time, chosen the latter alternative. Men will be working shorter and shorter hours in their paid employment. It follows that the housewife will 10 also expect to be able to have more leisure in her life without lowering her standard of living. It also follows that human domestic servants will have completely ceased to exist. Yet the great majority of the housewives will wish to be relieved completely from the routine operations of the home such as scrubbing the floors or the bath or the cooker, or washing the clothes or washing up, or dusting or sweeping, or making beds.

By far the most logical step to relieve the housewife of routine, is to provide a robot
slave which can be trained to the requirements of a particular home and can be programmed to carry out half a dozen or more standard operations (for example, scrubbing, sweeping and dusting, washing up, laying tables, making beds), when so switched by the housewife. It will be a machine having no more emotions than a car, but having a memory for instructions and a limited degree of instructed or built in adaptability according to the positions in which it finds various types of objects. It will operate other more specialized machines, for example, the vacuum cleaner or clothes washing machine.
Extracted from ‘A Robot about the House’ by M.W. Thring (adapted)

Read the passage mentioned above and answer the questions that follow :
Questions
1. What is the first use of technology in human life ?
2. Which kind of people want to work for shorter hours or raise their standard of living ?
Ans- Lazy kind of people want to work for shorter hours or raise their standard of living.
3. What is it that the author takes as self-evident ?
4. What, according to the author, are the routine operations of the home ?
5. How will the new slave which the author envisages to help the house be different from the present-day domestic servants ?
6. How will this new slave be different from the modern machines like the vacuum cleaner or a washing machine ?
7. Pick out the word from the passage which means the same as ‘tasks’.
8. Which word in the passage means the opposite of ‘luxuries’?
Holy Thursday
Is this a holy thing to see
In a rich and fruitful land,
Babes reduc’d to misery,
Fed with cold and usurious hand ?
Is that trembling cry a song ?
Can it be a song of joy ?
And so many children poor?
It is a land of poverty.
And their sun does never shine,
And their fields are bleak and bare,
And their ways are fill’d with thorns :
It is eternal winter there.
For where’er the sun does shine,
And where’er the rain does fall,
Babe can never hunger there,
Nor poverty the mind appall.
-William Blake


Read the poem mentioned above and answer the questions that follow :
Questions
1. What is not holy in a rich and fruitful land ?
2. What are the poor children doing ?
3. How is the country ‘a land of poverty ?
4. What are the signs of ‘eternal winter’?
5. What is the important sign of a prosperous land ?
6. Give the meaning of the phrase, ‘fruitful land’.
7. Which word is the opposite of ‘generous’ in the poem ?
8. What is happening on ‘Holy Thursday’ which makes the poet say these words?

Answer 1

Answer:

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Explanation:

Answer 2

what is the first use of techology in human life