填空题

This book is about the future of technology. In it we will examine some of the many recent developments in a few key fields and try, in a (36) way, to predict where they will take us in the next fifteen years or so.
If that sounds like a modest goal, it’s not. Technology is the (37) force of our time and probably of all time to come. It appears in more (38) than we can count. It changes so rapidly that no scientist or engineer can keep up with his own field, much less with technology in general. It has (39) and shaped our lives at every turn, we live in technology as fish live in the sea, and we have only a little better chance of (40) the details of its future changes.
Yet the task is well worth undertaking. Whatever hints we can gather about the future will help us prepare for the changes to come. And though technology has made the present much less (41) than the past, and surely will make the future more disturbed still, there is good reason to hope that our lives, in sum and on average, will be better as a result. In an age of uncomfortable (42) , this is reassurance we all can use.
For an idea of what is to come—in magnitude if not in specifics—look to the past. In the last ninety years, the world has shrunk, while human experience has (43) almost beyond the recognition of those who grew up in our grandparents’ generation.
A century after America’s founders (44) their agrarian (耕地的) democracy, nearly all their descendents still lived on farming. Since World War I, technology has (45) us from behind horse-drawn plows and plugged us into assembly lines and offices. Today it is removing many of us from offices and letting us work at home or forcing us to work on the road.
A. similarities
B. forecasting
C. conceived
D. varieties
E. reformed
F. stable
G. challenges
H. advanced
I. neutral
J. permeated
K. opportunities
L. limited
M. extracted
N. reminding
O. dominant