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  3. Those days are long gone when placing a telephone call meant simply picking up the receiver and asking the operator to patch you

Those days are long gone when placing a telephone call meant simply picking up the receiver and asking the operator to patch you

admin2015-06-24  39
问题     Those days are long gone when placing a telephone call meant simply picking up the receiver and asking the operator to patch you through. Modem cell phones require users to navigate a series of menus to find numbers, place calls or check messages. Even the most tech-savvy may take weeks to discover some of the more mysterious multimedia functions. Imagine the difficulty forsomeone unable to read.
    That is the challenge for mobile communications companies aiming to branch out into developing countries. The prospects seen from the last decade are alluring: only about one third of China’s vast population and about one tenth of India’s use cell phones. But selling to poor rural areas is not likely to happen with a marketing version of "plug and play." Most potential buyers have little exposure to anything other than simple electronics. Reading through a series of hierarchical menus and pushing buttons for multiple purposes would be new concepts for such customers.
    To come up with a suitable device, Motorola relied on a team of anthropologists, psychologists and designers to study how textually illiterate villagers use their aging televisions, tape players and phones.
    The researchers noticed that their subjects would learn each button’s dedicated function With something more complicated, such as an automated teller machine, users would memorize a set of behaviors in order, which allowed them to move through the machine’s basic hierarchy without having to read the menu.The research, which lasted three years, led Motorola to craft a cellular phone slimmed down to three essential activities: calling, managing numbers and simple text messaging. "A lot of the functions in a cell phone are not useful to anyone," points out Gabriel White, who headed the interactive design team.The icon-based interface also required thought.
    Not all cell phone companies believe that a design for nonliterate users should start from scratch. Nokia’s behavioral researchers noticed that "newbies" rely on friends and relatives to help them with basic functions. Rather than confronting the challenge of a completely new interface, Nokia chose to provide some audio menus in its popular 1100 model and a preview mode so that people could try out functions without the risk of changing anything important. Mobile phones may even become tools for literacy, predicts BJ Fogg, who studies computer-human interaction at Stanford University. Phones might teach the alphabet or tell a story as users read along. "Imagine if it eventually could understand your weak points and drill you on those," Fogg proposes. And soon enough, he declares, designs or illiterate users will lead to more straightforward, elegant phones for everyone.
The slang term of "newbies" (Line 2, Paragraph 5) most probably means
选项 A、new students.
B、newcomers.
C、newborns.
D、new webs.
答案B
解析 词义推断题。原文该处提到是在亲人朋友的帮助下学会基本操作，由此可推断newbies有“新手”之义，B项正确。根据上下文，作者提到不是所有的手机制造商都选择从头开始设计手机以针对不识字的用户，其中诺基亚公司就选择其他设计策略来进行应对，故推断出newbies一词与手机用户意思相近，排除A、C项：D项与网络相关，也予以排除。
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