---
title: Dripping Water
date: '2005-07-25'
slug: dripping-water
---

Just as what I wrote in the former weblog, memories long ago would show up in your mind when sitting alone... I don't know why I find this piece of memory in retrospect... Anyway, the purpose of writing this weblog is just recording some English words here to help me learn them by heart.

---

longitudinal study

纵向研究

Each year the project will conduct an extensive survey of these 2,000 households and then, using standard longitudinal methods for retention, watch as the non-users become users and as the users become more advanced and comfortable users.

unprecedented 

adj.空前的

While television has had an unprecedented influence on American culture (witness the debate after the April 1999 Colorado school shootings), television has been primarily about entertainment and leisure.

dwarf

n.矮子, 侏儒
v.(使)变矮小（相形见绌就这么说）

Believing that the importance and influence of computer technology and the Internet will dwarf that of television, this is a project designed to do the important research that should have been conducted on television in the 1940s.

comprise

v.包含, 由...组成

The research plan calls for drawing a truly random and representative American sample comprising computer and Internet users and non-users as they are accounted for in the national population.

compel

vt.强迫, 迫使

Then we will learn what compels many of them to become users and how their already-established patterns of media use, child-rearing policies, economic and political behavior and other activities change.

retail store

零售店

Can small retail stores compete with Internet business?
