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  3. Britain has one of the biggest online economies. Its researchers invented both the web and the computer. It has the English lang

Britain has one of the biggest online economies. Its researchers invented both the web and the computer. It has the English lang

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问题     Britain has one of the biggest online economies. Its researchers invented both the web and the computer. It has the English language—which helps to link it with California’s Silicon Valley and Indian high-tech—and great universities. There are thriving tech clusters in Bristol, London and elsewhere. More so than other European countries, Britain should be competing with America as a tech leader.
    Yet it has nurtured relatively few big tech companies and no huge ones. In particular, Britain has vanishingly few "platform" firms—i. e. , the sort that, like Microsoft, Google or Facebook, have built and marketed a service or piece of software on which other businesses and applications rely. That is where the real money is: platforms tend to yield lots of jobs in spin-offs and ancillary enterprises. Britain has Autonomy, which makes specialized search software, and ARM, which designs the microchips for Apple’ s iPhones. Both are leaders in their fields, but neither is a giant.
There should surely be more. Individual ideas and people are the key, obviously, but there are two problems with Britain’ s tech ecology that its government could ameliorate . One is the absence of a market as big and homogeneous as American tech firms enjoy. Another is a relative shortage of capital for start-ups and growing firms.
    Begin with the market. You might think that distance and geography would be marginal considerations for tech firms. You would be wrong. For American firms, a domestic market of 300m interconnected English-speaking consumers is a big advantage. Europe is fragmented not only by multiple languages but also by the lack of a properly common market in services, including digital ones, so tech firms must still overcome assorted legal and bureaucratic barriers to trade across the EU.
    When it comes to finance,Britain lags Silicon Valley, where many entrepreneurs see investing in the next generation as a sort of moral responsibility. George Osborne, the chancellor of the exchequer , made some progress in his most recent budget by increasing the tax relief available for investors in startups. He should now look at the capital-gains tax regime: investors who make speculative bets and hit the jackpot should be able to keep and reinvest more of their winnings. Designing a system that rewards such risks but does not allow people to shelter their income from tax is tricky, but not impossible. It would help British businesspeople to think bigger, too: the absence of funding for growth is one reason some sell up at a relatively early stage.
    The government should be more relaxed about bolstering the supply of indigenous entrepreneurs with foreigners, as well as about admitting more workers with technical and commercial skills that are in short supply. Beneath its wrongheaded , headline goal to slash net immigration, the government has sensibly made sure that a route remains open for entrepreneurs. The trouble is, it is not always obvious which would-be newcomer will end up striking gold; when a six-year-old Sergey Brin emigrated from Russia to America with his family, it was not yet clear that he would one day co-found Google. By cutting the numbers of foreign students it allows in, current immigration policy is shrinking the commercial pool as well as the academic one. London is a magnet for creative types everywhere; capitalize on that—and let more of them in.
What does the word "ameliorate" in Paragraph 3 probably refers to?
选项 A、to revamp
B、to abolish
C、to yield
D、to empower
答案A
解析 文章第三段的“but there are two problems with Britain’s tech ecology that its government could ameliorate”中ameliorate的实际宾语应该是problems，“问题”只有与[A]“改进”搭配最合适，出现了问题要改进，而非废除、屈服或授权。而且此篇文章都是讲英国本该是个科技强国，只是由于种种原因，使得它的高科技行业无力与美国抗衡。此题正确答案为[C]。
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