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  3. In 1995 George Gilder, an American writer, declared that "cities are leftover baggage from the industrial era. " Electronic comm

In 1995 George Gilder, an American writer, declared that "cities are leftover baggage from the industrial era. " Electronic comm

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问题     In 1995 George Gilder, an American writer, declared that "cities are leftover baggage from the industrial era. " Electronic communications would become so easy and universal that people and businesses would have no need to be near one another. Humanity, Mr Gilder thought, was "headed for the death of cities".
    It hasn’t turned out that way. People are still flocking to cities. In Silicon Valley and the newer tech hubs what Edward Glaeser, a Harvard economist, calls "the urban ability to create collaborative brilliance" is alive and well.
    Cheap and easy electronic communication has probably helped rather than hindered this. First, connectivity is usually better in cities than in the countryside, because it is more lucrative to build telecoms networks for dense populations than for sparse ones. Second, electronic chatter may reinforce rather than replace the face-to-face kind. Cheap electronic communication may have made modern economies more "relationship-intensive", requiring more contact of all kinds.
    A third factor is becoming increasingly important; the production of huge quantities of data by connected devices, including smartphones. These are densely concentrated in cities, because that is where the people, machines, buildings and infrastructures that carry and contain them are packed together. They are turning cities into vast data factories. "That kind of merger between physical and digital environments presents an opportunity for us to think about the city almost like a computer in the open air," says Assaf Biderman of the SENSEable lab.
    As those data are collected and analysed, and the results are recycled into urban life, they may turn cities into even more productive and attractive places. Some of these "open-air computers" are being designed from scratch, but most cities are stuck with the infrastructure they have, at least in the short term. Exploiting the data they generate gives them a chance to upgrade it. And, particularly in poorer countries, places without a well-planned infrastructure have the chance of a leap forward. Researchers from the SENSEable lab have been working with informal waste-collecting cooperatives in So Paulo whose members sift the city’s rubbish for things to sell or recycle. By attaching tags to the trash, the researchers have been able to help the co-operatives work out the best routes through the city so they can raise more money and save time and expense.
    Enforcing the law may also become easier. Andrew Hudson-Smith, director of the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis at University College London, thinks that within five years or so police forces will be able to predict and prevent some crimes by watching Twitter and other social media. The thought may give civil libertarians the creeps, but some Londoners, recalling the part played by instant messaging in last year’s riots in their city, may wish the police already had such foresight.
    However, the real prize, says John Day of IBM Research, lies not in single areas such as infrastructure or policing but in making whole cities better by drawing on data from multiple sources for multiple purposes.
According to the first two paragraphs, cities______.
选项 A、are facing threats from electronic communications
B、are becoming less densely populated
C、are seeing less physical communication among citizens
D、are enjoying great potential for development
答案D
解析 前两段中作者反驳了“信息化时代城市必将消亡”的观点，指出现在城市依然繁荣，人们依然涌向城市，在硅谷等科技中心“城市创造协作式辉煌”的能力依然很强大。由此可见，目前城市仍有巨大的发展潜力，[D]选项正确。
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