A. faithful
B. admirable
C. automatic
D. considerate

      I wandered in the park. The park bench was    1   as I sat down to read beneath the long, straggly
(蔓延的) branches of an old willow tree. I was disappointed by life with    2   reason to frown, for the
world was intent on dragging me down.
        3    that weren't enough to ruin my day, a young boy out of     4   approached me, all tired from play.
He stood right before me and said with great excitement, "Look what I found!"
    In his hand was a flower, and what a   5   sight, with its petals(花瓣) all worn not enough rain, or too
little light. I faked a small    6   , wanting him to take his dead flower and leave, and then    7  .
    But instead of leaving he sat next to my side and placed the flower to his nose and declared with
surprise, "It surely smells pretty and it's beautiful, too. That's why I picked it; here, it's for you."
    The weed before me was dying or dead. Not brilliant colors, orange, yellow or red. But I knew I must   8    it, or he might never leave. So I reached for the flower, and replied, "Just what I need."
    But    9    him placing the flower in my hand, he held it mid-air without    10    or plan. It was then that
I noticed for the very first time, that young boy could not see: he was blind.
    My    11    trembled, and tears shone like the sun as I    12   him for picking the very best one. "You're
welcome," he smiled, and then ran off to play, not    13    of the impact he'd had on my day.
    I sat there and wondered how he    14   to see a self-pitying woman beneath an old willow tree. How
did he    15    my difficult situation?    16     from his heart, he'd been blessed with true   17    .
    At last I could see,    18     the eyes of a blind child, the problem was not with the    19    ; the problem
was me. And for all of those times I myself had been    20   , I vowed(发誓) to see beauty, and appreciate every second that's mine.
    I held that wilted(枯萎) flower up to my nose and breathed in the fragrance of a beautiful rose and
smiled as that young boy.

      Gadgets (小装置) can be wildly expensive and quickly out-of-date, but Steven Poole is still the
first to buy them. Technological innovations (创新) are often quite stupid. The idea that you might
want to walk down the street holding a mobile phone in front of your face, just to experience the
wonders of video calling, is clearly ridiculous. Luckily for the tech companies, however, there are
some people who jump at the chance to buy into new gadgets before they are fully ready and cheap
enough for the mass-market. They are called early adopters, and their fate is a terrible one. I should
know, since I am one myself.
      Early adopters have a Mecca: it’s Tokyo’s Akihabara district, also known as “Electric City”.
There, in 1999, I bought a digital camera, a gizmo that few people in Britain had heard of. Over the
next few years I watched in great sadness as digital cameras became more popular, cheaper and more
powerful, until better models could be had for a quarter of the price I had paid. Did I feel stupid? What
I actually did was this: I splashed out more money last year for a new one, one that let me feel pleasantly
ahead of the curve once again. But I know that cannot last, and I’ll probably have to buy another in a
few years.
      Thus early adopters are betting on other people eventually feeling the same desires. And it’s worse
if that future never arrives. Early adopters of the Betamax home-video format in the 1970s could only
look on in sadness when their investment was nullified（使无效）by the success of VHS. All sorts of
apparently splendid inventions, such as videogame consoles like the Atari Jaguar have been abandoned
to the dustbin of history right after a few early adopters bought in. Those who invested thousands in a
Segway motorized scooter on the wave of ridiculous advertising campaigns that accompanied its launch
a couple of years ago can join the club.
      You might think we should just stop being so silly, save our money, and wait to see what really
catches on. But the logic of the industry is such that, if everyone did that, no innovation would become
popular. Imagine the third person to buy an ordinary telephone soon after Alexander Graham Bell had
invented it. Who was he going to call? Maybe he simply bought two phones, one for a special friend.
But still, the usefulness and eventual popularity of the device wasn’t clear at the time. Nobody dreamed
of the possibility of being able to speak to any one of millions of people. And yet if he, and the hundreds
and thousands of early adopters after him, had not bought into the idea, the vast communication networks
that we all take for granted today would never have been built.
     The same goes, indeed, for all new technologies. Those guys holding bricks to their ears that we
laughed at in the 1980s made the current mobile phone possible. People who bought DVD players
when they still cost a fortune, instead of today’s cheap one at the local supermarket, made sure that
the new format succeeded. Early adopters’ desire for desires supported the future financially. And
what did they get for their pains? They got a hole in their bank accounts and inferior, unperfected
technology. But still, they got it first. And today they are still at work, buying overpriced digital radios,
DVD recorders and LCD televisions, and even 3G phones, so that you will be eventually be able to
buy better and less expensive ones.
      So next time you see a gadget-festooned geek (满身新潮玩意的土包子) and feel tempted to
sneer (讥笑), think for a minute. Without early adopters, there would be no cheap mobile phones or
DVD players; there would be no telephone or television either. We are the tragic, unsung foot soldiers
of the technology revolution. We’re the desire-addicted pioneers, pure in heart, dreaming of a better
future. We make expensive mistakes so you don’t have to. Really, we are heroes.