Questions 10-19
Newspaper publishers in the United States have long been enthusiastic users
and distributors of weather maps. Although some newspapers that had carried the
United States Weather Bureau's national weather map in 1912 dropped it once the
novelty had passed, many continued to print the daily weather chart provided by
(5) their local forecasting office. In the 1930's, when interest in aviation and progress in
air-mass analysis made weather patterns more newsworthy, additional newspapers
started or resumed the daily weather map. In 1935, The Associated Press (AP) news
service inaugurated its WirePhoto network and offered subscribing newspapers
morning and afternoon weather maps redrafted by the AP's Washington, B.C., office
(10)from charts provided by the government agency. Another news service, United Press International (UPI), developed a competing photowire network and also provided
timely weather maps for both morning and afternoon newspapers. After the United
States government launched a series of weather satellites in 1966, both the AP and
UPI offered cloud-cover photos obtained from the Weather Bureau.
(15) In the late 1970's and early 1980's, the weather map became an essential
ingredient in the redesign of the American newspaper. News publishers, threatened
by increased competition from television for readers' attention, sought to package
the news more conveniently and attractively. In 1982, many publishers felt
threatened by the new USA Today, a national daily newspaper that used a page-wide,
(20)full-color weather map as its key design element. That the weather map in USA
21 Today did not include information about weather fronts and pressures attests to the
largely symbolic role it played. Nonetheless, competing local and metropolitan
newspapers responded in a variety of ways. Most substituted full-color temperature
maps for the standard weather maps, while others dropped the comparatively drab
(25)satellite photos or added regional forecast maps with pictorial symbols to indicate
rainy, snowy, cloudy, or clear conditions. A few newspapers, notably The New York
Times, adopted a highly informative yet less visually prominent weather map that
was specially designed to explain an important recent or imminent weather event.
Ironically, a newspaper's richest, most instructive weather maps often are
(30)comparatively small and inconspicuous.
【題組】16. The word "drab" in line 24 is closest in meaning to
(A) precise
(B) poor
(C) simple
(D) dull
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