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  3. Video recorders and photocopiers, even ticket machines on the railways, often seem unnecessarily difficult to use. Last December

Video recorders and photocopiers, even ticket machines on the railways, often seem unnecessarily difficult to use. Last December

admin2014-04-23  82
问题     Video recorders and photocopiers, even ticket machines on the railways, often seem unnecessarily difficult to use. Last December I bought myself a video cassette recorder (VCR) described as "simple to use". In the first three weeks I failed repeatedly to program the machine to record from the TV, and after months of practice I still made mistakes. I am not alone. According to a survey last year by Ferguson, the British manufacturer, more than one in four VCR owners never use the timer (定时器) on their machines to record a programme: they don’t use it because they’ve found it far too hard to operate.
    So why do manufacturers keep on designing and producing VCRS that are awkward to use if the problems are so obvious? First, the problems we notice are not obvious to technically minded (有技术思想的) designers with years of experience and trained to understand how appliances work. Secondly, designers tend to add one or two features at a time to each model, whereas you or I face all a machine’s features at once. Thirdly, although finding problems in a finished product is easy, it is too late by then to do anything about the design. Finally, if manufacturers can get away with selling products that are difficult to use, it is not worth the effort of any one of them to make improvements.
    Some manufacturers say they concentrate on providing a wide range of features rather than on making the machines easy to use. But that gives rise to the question, "Why can’t you have features that are easy to use?" The answer is you can.
    Good design practice is a mixture of specific procedures and general principles. For a start, designers should build an original model of the machine and try it out on typical members of the public—not on colleagues in the development laboratory. Simple public trials would quickly reveal many design mistakes. In an ideal world, there would be some ways of controlling quality such as that the VCR must be redesigned repeatedly until, say, 90 percent of users can work 90 percent of the features correctly 90 percent of the time.
It seems that manufacturers will remain reluctant to make improvements unless______.
选项 A、they can do so at a very low cost
B、they find their machines hard to operate
C、they have difficulty selling their products
D、they receive a lot of complaints about their machines
答案C
解析 本题问除非在什么条件下，生产厂家似乎是不愿意改进其产品的。利用查阅式阅读法，根据文章第二段最后一句，如果生产商能够卖掉操作难的产品，他们就不会做出任何努力来改进产品。由此我们可以推断出，只有在新产品积压卖不出去的情况下，生产商才会努力对自己的产品进行改进。因此，本题的正确答案应是选择项C“除非在他们的产品销售困难的情况下”。
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