Reading Text
Once wrote a celebrated culinary authority: 'Pastry, like horses and children, seems to sense when you are afraid of it and plays up accordingly.' Had she been composing today, she might well have added that computers are no different. Like small children, they do not (2) .......... well to coercion, and just as one established way of (3) .......... with a fractious child is to send it to its room to (4) .......... off, so too, when a machine begins to misbehave, the first recourse is often simply to switch it off and turn one's attention elsewhere; precisely why the machine functions (5) .......... when rebooted remains entirely beyond me.
(6) .......... human emotions and inner states to inanimate objects is, of course, thoroughly unscientific; it is only those who lack any real understanding of machines who persist in believing that they conduct themselves like people. Yet I would (7) .......... that, however misguided it may be to treat machines as though they were human, it remains (8) .......... to treating human beings as though they were machines.