1 . When he was a kid, Alex Vardakostas began working in the grill (烧烤店) alongside adult employees. He estimates he has cooked 50,000 burgers (汉堡包).
Now, Vardakostas co-owns a burger joint called Creator, in San Francisco, California. But he doesn’t stand over a grill flipping burgers, and neither do his employees. At Creator, burgers are cooked and assembled entirely by machine. And because it costs less to maintain the machine than to pay a kitchen’s worth of employees, burgers cost less.
Creator is just one example of a growing phenomenon: Automation is taking over more and more jobs. That means work is done by machines or computers instead of people.
According to a report from McKinsey Global Institute, about 800 million people could be forced out of their jobs by 2030, McKinsey predicts that as technology improves, some tasks will be done more quickly or cheaply by machine, so businesses will install robots or computer programs to perform them.
Some jobs are more likely to be automated than others. Machines can do jobs that have three characteristics: They are routine, repetitive, and predictable. Some of these jobs pay low wages and require little education. But others pay well and demand an advanced college degree. Taxi drivers, cashiers, lawyers, and doctors all perform some tasks that can be done by machines.
So what jobs are safe from automation? Answers include coming up with new ideas or work that involves interacting with other people and building relationships, Jobs in engineering, science, the arts,therapy, and nursing are examples.
At Creator, Vardakostas hired people to do just that kind of work. Instead of repetitive burger prepping, workers interact with customers and advise them on flavor pairings, like mushroom sauce with pickles and onion jam. “In our world at Creator, all the work is creative and social,” Vardakostas says. “And I think that is what we’re going to see more of the future.”
1. What’s the difference between Creator and a traditional restaurant?| A．There is neither worker nor waiters at Creator at all. |
| B．The price of burgers at Creator is higher than that of a traditional one. |
| C．The number of owners of Creator is larger than that of a traditional one. |
| D．Some work is done by machines instead of humans at Creator. |
| A．More working opportunities have to be created. |
| B．More cheap machines will be invented. |
| C．A lot of people will lose their jobs. |
| D．Humans will have difficulty in running business. |
| A．To introduce the topic of the text. |
| B．To increase the plot of the story. |
| C．To introduce a modern restaurant. |
| D．To make an advertisement for Vardakostas. |
