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

admin2016-10-18  41
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 less troubles.
    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, 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 fill 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(对旧式科技的怀念)seeks to preserve all the ways people have ever done anything, simply because they are kind of neat. Steam locomotives and papyrus scrolls(古本手卷): all boast bands of enthusiasts making or restoring them, and sometimes making a nice profit.
    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 short-lived 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, it’s very inaccuracy apparently part of its charm: but digital audio tape seems doomed.
    So revolutionary digital technologies may yet make older ones to the garbage container. Though it may never have been used for MP3s and PDFs before, DNA(the molecule in question)has been storing data for over three billion years. And it shows no sign of going extinct.
What does "viable" in Line 4 Paragraph 2 mean?
选项 A、Incredible.
B、Productive.
C、Feasible.
D、Improbable.
答案C
解析 词汇细节题。根据上下文可推断，古老技术赖以延续的小众领域正变得越来越容易存活、易进入，“viable”应与feasible为同义词，即“可实行”。
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