“Indeed”George Washington wrote in his diary in 1785, “some kind of fly,or bug,had begun to eat the leaves before I left home.” But the father of America was not the father of bug.When Washington wrote that, Englishmen had been referring to insects as bugs for more than a century, and Americans had already created lightning-bug(萤火虫). But the Enlish were soon to stop using the bugs in their language, leaving it to be the Americans to call a bug a bug in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
The American bug could also be a person, referring to someone who was crazy about a particular activity.Although fan became the usual term, sports fans used to be called racing bugs, baseball bugs and the like.
Or the bug could be a small machine or object, for example, a bug-shaped car. The bug could also be a burlar alarm, from which comes the expression to bug, that is, “to install(安装) an alarm”. Now it means a small piece of equipment that people use for listening secretly to others’ conversations.Since the 1840s,to bug has long meant “to cheat”,and since the 1994s it has been annoying.
We also know the bug as a flaw n a computer program or other design.That meaning dates back to the time of Tomas Edison.In 1878 he explained bugs as “little problems and difficulties” that required months of stdy and labor to overcome in developing a successful product. In 1889 it was recorded that Edison “had been up the two previous nights discovering′a bug′ in his invented record player.”
小题1:We learn from Paragraph 1 that .
A．American had difficulty in learning to use the word “bug”.
B．George Washinton was the first person to call the insect a bug.
C．the word bug was still popularly used in England in the nineteenth century.
D．both the Englishmen and Americans used the word bug in the gighteen century.小题2:What does the word “flaw” in the last paragraph mean？
A．Explanation.
B．Finding.
C．Origin.
D．Fault.小题3:The passage is mainly concerned with .
A．the misunderstanding of thr word bug
B．the deveopment of the word bug
C．the public views of the word bug
D．the special characteristics of the word bug
