Unit Three
Hackers: The Enemy on the Internet
Until comparatively recently the opportunities for criminal activity on the Internet have been low. However, the volume of business done on the Internet is growing rapidly, ad people order books and other products and make money transactions. All this is creating temptations for hackers.
Hackers are often young people who are obsessed by computers. They use them to prowl the Internet, looking for ways to break into computer systems run by banks, telephone companies and even government department. They look for samples of credit cards and try to steal the numbers.
Recently in America, hackers have been caught testing the security system at the Pentagon, headquarters of the American Defense Department. But still the hackers persist often for a dare “because it’s there” although with what success nobody really knows.
①Estimates for worldwide sales on the Internet now range between $US 40 billion and $US 90 billion by the end of the year 2000. Much of this is in publishing and software purchases, which require the disclosure of credit card numbers, but there is really no limit to what can be conducted on the Internet.
“You just don’t give your credit card out to anybody,” experts say. “And in the same way that you should regularly change your credit card access number, you can defeat hackers by regularly changing your Internet password. If you don’t ,it’s like leaving the bank vault door wide open.”
When it comes to creating your password, experts recommend including a few punctuation marks and numbers rather than relying on letters in the alphabet. Telecom media communications manager Gien Sowry says that when it comes to security of credit cards, the Internet offers a higher standard than many others whose honesty is taken for granted.
For example, few people think twice about giving a credit card number over the phone and many are equally careless about what happens to the carbon copy when completing a transaction over the counter.
Some customers may inadvertently reveal their passwords to hackers via what is known as a Trojan horse form of virus. ②These are attached to documents or messages being received, and lodge in a computer’s hard drive. Next time the customer logs on to an Internet service provider the virus reveals where it is and the password to anyone who is prowling the Net looking for such information. They can then tap in.
The two ways to defeat such snooping are:
to have an up-to-date virus scanner which can recognise the invader and delete it, and
constant password changes.
名人名言：
Glass, porcelain and reputation are easily cracked and never well mended.
-----------Franklin
单词：
hacker
comparative---------comparatively
opportunity
criminal---------crime
tempt-----------temptation-------------obsess
prowl
sample------------------specimen
credit
pentagon
persist
range--------------scope
publish-----------publication
software--------hardware----------compute-------------input-----------keyboard
require-------------requirement----------necessitate-----------necessity
disclose-----------disclosure---------enclose--------enclosure--------reveal-------leak----leakage
access---------------admission
vault
recommend
punctual--------punctuation
medium-------------moderate
inadvertent-----------------------indifferent-----accidental------deliberate
via
virus
attach
document---------documentary
lodge-------------lodging
log
snoop
up-to-date--------contemporary------fashionable------out-of-date
scan
invade------invasion-------assault
delete---------detach
porcelain----china----------earthenware
reputation
crack-----------split
Unit Four
El Nino (厄尔尼诺)
El Nino is the term used for the period when sea surface temperatures are above normal off the South American coast along the equatorial Pacific, sometimes called the Earth’s heartbeat, and is a dramatic but mysterious climate system that periodically rages across the Pacific.
El Nino means “the little boy” or “the Christ child” in Spanish, and is so called because its warm current is felt along coastal Peru and Ecuador around Christmas. ①But the local warming is just part of an intricate set of changes in the ocean and atmosphere across the tropical Pacific, which covers a third of the Earth’s circumference.. Its intensity is such that it affects temperatures, storm tracks and rainfall around the world.
Droughts in Africa and Australia tropical storms in the Pacific, torrential rains along the Californian coast and the Peruvian deserts have all been ascribed to the whim of El Nino.
②This at least is the theory, and it has worked pretty well over the past century, with El Nino occurring about every three to five years and La Nina in between. But there have been some baffling developments in recent years. For one thing, El Nino has returned three times in the past four years. For another, since 1976 El Nino has dominated relative to the cooler phase(La Nina). There has been only one significant La Nina, but five El Ninos, including an extremely severe one in 1982-83 that caused damage costing 8 billion dollars. Moreover a huge pool of warm water has settled down near the dateline in the central Pacific.
Yet it is important to understand the changes if scientists are to be able to forecast the climatic effects of El Ninos with any degree of accuracy. This is not just an academic task—accurate forecasts can spell out feast or famine in many tropical countries around the world. Forecasting efforts have focused on El Nino, whose effects are generally more severe than those of La Nina.
A worrying possibility is that the changes maybe due to greenhouse warming. If so, the recent fluctuations may be an early glimpse of worse things to come.
名人名言：
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
--------Shaw
A fool may ask more questions in an hour than a wise man may answer in a year.
If things were to be done twice, all would to wise.
生词与联想词：
equator---------arctic
drama--------dramatic--------------opera
mysterious-------------mystery-----myth
climate
periodical
current-------------currency
Christian—Christ----Christianity----------Christmas
intricate--------sophisticated---------elaborate
atmosphere------atmospheric
tropical-----------tropic
circumference----------------diameter------------------radius
intensity--------------intense------intensive
drought
torrent
ascribe
whim
baffle-------puzzle-------bewilder--------riddle--------perplex
dominate------dominant----------predominate
phase
forecast---------cast--------foresee-------predict
accuracy------accurate-------precise--------------precision
academy--------academic-
feast---------festival---------eve
famine--------------starve
greenhouse
fluctuate----sway------swing
glimpse----------gaze-----------peep
reasonable----------rational---------plausible
adapt----------revise