《教你如何一月背9000个单词》.doc

洛基英语，中国在线英语教育领导品牌
　Passage Four
　　Questions 36 to 40 are based on the following passage:
　　Video recorders and photocopiers, even ticket machines on the railways, often seem unnecessarily difficult to use. Last December I bought myself a video cassette recorder (VCR) described as “simple to use”. In the first three weeks I failed repeatedly to program the machine to record from the TV, and after months of practice I still made mistakes. I am not alone. According to a survey last year by Ferguson, the British manufacturer, more than one in four VCR owners never use the timer (定时器) on their machines to record a programme: they don't use it because they've found it far too hard to operate.
　　So why do manufacturers keep on designing and producing VCRS that are awkward to use if the problems are so obvious? First, the problems we notice are not obvious to technically minded (有技术思想的) designers with years of experience and trained to understand how appliances work. Secondly, designers tend to add one or two features at a time to each model, whereas you or I face all a machine's features at once. Thirdly, although finding problems in a finished product is easy, it is too late by then to do anything about the design. Finally, if manufacturers can get away with selling products that are difficult to use, it is not worth the effort of any one of them to make