2. 外语
  3. The "paperless office" has earned a proud place on lists of technological promises that did not come to pass. Surely, though, th

The "paperless office" has earned a proud place on lists of technological promises that did not come to pass. Surely, though, th

admin2014-06-30  9
问题     The "paperless office" has earned a proud place on lists of technological promises that did not come to pass. Surely, though, the more modest goal of the carbon-paperless office is within the reach of mankind? Carbon paper allows two copies of a document to be made at once. Nowadays, a couple of keystrokes can do the same thing with a lot less fuss.
    Yet carbon paper persists. Forms still need to be filled out in a way that produces copies. This should not come as a surprise. Innovation tends to create new niches(合适的职业), rather than refill those that already exist. So technologies may become marginal, but they rarely go extinct. And today the little niches in which old technologies take refuge are ever more viable and accessible, thanks to the Internet and the fact that production no longer needs to be so mass; making small numbers of obscure items is growing easier.
    On top of that, a widespread technostalgia(技术怀旧)seeks to preserve all the ways people have ever done anything, simply because they are kind of neat. As a result technologies from all the way back to the stone age persist and even flourish in the modern world. According to What Technology Wants, a book by Kevin Kelly, one of the founders of Wired magazine, America’s flintknappers(燧石工)produce over a million new arrow and spear heads every year. One of the things technology wants, it seems, is to survive.
    Carbon paper, to the extent that it may have a desire for self-preservation, may also take comfort in the fact that, for all that this is a digital age, many similar products are hanging on, and even making comebacks. Indeed, digital technologies may prove to be more transient than their predecessors. They are based on the idea that the medium on which a file’s constituent 0s and 1s are stored doesn’t matter, and on Alan Turing’s insight that any computer can mimic any other, given memory enough and time. This suggests that new digital technologies should be able to wipe out their predecessors completely. And early digital technologies do seem to be vanishing. The music cassette is enjoying a little renaissance, its very faithlessness apparently part of its charm; but digital audio tape seems doomed.
    So revolutionary digital technologies may yet discard older ones to the dustbin. Perhaps this will be the case with a remarkable breakthrough in molecular(分子的)technology that could, in principle, store all the data ever recorded in a device that could fit in the back of a van. In this instance, it would not be a matter of the new extinguishing the old. Though it may never have been used for MP3s and PDFs before, DNA has been storing data for over three billion years. And it shows no sign of going extinct.  
Why does the author mention the example of What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly?
选项 A、To point out that old technologies will flourish in the modern world.
B、To illustrate the importance of flintknappers.
C、To show that flintknapping is one of the stone age technologies.
D、To prove that old technologies seemingly never die.
答案D
解析 事实细节题。本题考查作者以凯文·凯利所著《技术想要什么》为例的目的。定位句提到“《连线》杂志创始人之一凯文·凯利在其《技术想要什么》一书中称，美国的燧石工每年生产超过100万支新箭头和矛头。技术所想要的事情之一似乎就是存活下去。”而作者在定位句前一句指出“所以，从石器时代以来的技术得以存在，甚至在现代世界兴盛起来。”故本文作者以凯文·凯利所著《技术想要什么》为例旨在证明旧技术似乎永远都不会消亡，故D)为答案。A)“旨在指出旧技术在现代社会将兴盛起来”为过度推断，故排除；B)“旨在说明燧石工的重要性”和C)“旨在说明燧石是石器时代以来的一门旧技术”均为对原文的曲解，故排除。
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