I. Read the text carefully and answer the questions below. Explain the words in bold.

Text A

One of the shared assumptions in-computer research is that talking to computers is a very good idea. Such a good idea that: speech is regarded as the natural interface: between human and computer.

Each company with enough money to spare and enough egotism to believe that it can shape everyone's future now has a 'natural language' research group. Films and TV series set in the future use computers with voice interfaces to show how far technology has advanced from our own primitive day and age. The unwritten assumption is that talking to your computer will in the end be as natural as shouting at your relatives.

The roots of this shared delusion lie in the genuine of spoken communication between humans. Meaning is transferred from person to person so effortlessly that it must be the best way of transferring information from a human to another object.

This view is totally misguided. Computers do not experience life as people do – it is shared human experience which enables people to understand each other precisely in a conversation where a transcript would make very little sense. Unfinished sentences, in-jokes, catchphrases, hesitation markers like 'er' and 'you know', and words whose meaning is only clear in the context of that one conversation are no bar to human understanding, but baffled early attempts at computer speech recognition.

It is true that recent advances in linguistic research and artificial intelligence address this problem, but they address it only in part. The problem essentially remains.

1. Is it a good idea to talk to computers?

2. Is speech regarded as the natural interface: between human and computer?

3. Will talking to your computer be as natural as shouting at your relatives?

4. What must be the best way of transferring information from a human to another object?

5. Computers do not experience life as people do, don’t they?

II. Explain in your own words what the phrase 'this shared delusion' describes?

III. Fill in the gap with the correct word derived from the words in brackets.

I've never understood the 1) _____ (to believe) that talking to your computer is a Good Thing. It seems to me to be 2) _____ (total) misguided. In fact, so-called 'natural communication' with a computer would 3) _____ (appearance) to be about as unnatural as you can get. People and computers inhabit 4) _____ (difference) worlds. Ever if you succeed in ordering your computer about, it'll never laugh at your jokes, make sarcastic 5) _____ (to comment), tell you the latest gossip or do any of the other things that make real human conversation such fun.

Then there's that awful prospect of an office full of people 6) _____ (to talk) to their machines. Quite apart from the noise generated, most people are bound to feel pretty ridiculous talking to something so 7) _____ (obvious) non-human.

I doubt very much, though, whether people in modern society are capable of speaking 8) _____ (clear) and unambiguously enough to a computer. Most of us don't have servants to boss around any more, and changes in the way we work mean that office managers are no longer used to giving crisp orders and 9) _____ (expectation) them to be obeyed.

There's no doubt that controlling a computer by speaking to it only works if you 10) _____ (imitation) an army drill sergeant. You have to 11) _____ (avoidance) all those 'could you's' and 'would you mind's' that most of us use when we're trying to get someone to do something they don't really want to do. Since this will be nigh on impossible for most of us, we'll end up with machines never doing what we 12) _____ (real) want and making all manner of mistakes in the process. We'll probably even be unable to pull the plug out when we've given up trying.

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