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  3. On July 15th India will become the latest country to shut down its official telegram service. In Britain, telegrams were replace

On July 15th India will become the latest country to shut down its official telegram service. In Britain, telegrams were replace

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问题     On July 15th India will become the latest country to shut down its official telegram service. In Britain, telegrams were replaced by Telemessages, which were simply telegrams printed out and put into the post, in 1982. Americas telegram service, operated by Western Union, ended in 2006. Australia shut down its telegram service in 2011. Are telegrams dead?
    Not quite. The honorable technology still clings to life, and not just in India. The mechanical telegraph dates back to the 1790s. In the 1840s such mechanical telegraphs gave way to electrical telegraphs, which sent messages as coded pulses along wires, and the word "telegram" emerged shortly afterwards to describe a message sent by telegraph. The invention of the telephone in the 1870s did not result in the immediate decline of the telegram, because the technical difficulty and expense of making long-distance phone calls meant that telegrams were still the easiest way to send international messages quickly. But as long-distance telephony became cheaper and easier, it was only a matter of time. From the 1970s, the emergence of electronic means of communication, starting with the fax machine, and then followed by e-mail and mobile-phone text messages in the 1990s, restricted telegrams to ceremonial uses such as messages relating to births, marriages and deaths.
    In India, the telegram held on a bit longer because it was used for internal government communications. Even after the shut-down of India’s official service, the telegram survives in a few other countries, including Belgium, Japan and Sweden, where it was kept as a nostalgic(怀旧的)service. And in many other countries private firms offer telegram-delivery services. So despite several recent reports to the contrary, the telegram is not quite dead, and will probably never die.
    Moreover, in some ways the tradition of the telegram is healthier than ever. Tweets, like text messages, also require users to keep their messages brief and telegraphic. Such digital messages have undermined the business case for the telegram, but have preserved aspects of telegraphic tradition. Some mobile phones used to announce incoming text messages with beeps that sound like Morse code, the international alphabet of telegraphy. The 19th-century technology of the telegram lives on, in spirit at least, in our 21st-century devices.
The main idea of the last paragraph is that______
选项 A、old technologies will be replaced by new ones
B、the once great telegraphy is becoming history
C、the spirit of telegraphy will last long
D、telegram services will soon die out
答案C
解析 此题是一道段落大意题，考查考生根据文章某个段落的整体内容来总结概括段落大意的能力。问题问最后一段的主题是什么。文章最后一段指出：电报的传统在某些方面比以往更健康。推特消息和短信息一样，也要求用户表达的信息简洁明了如电报似的。这种数字信息已经削弱了电报业务状况，但保留了电报的传统方面。某些移动电话过去常常使用哔哔声来提示有接收的短信，这种哔哔声听起来就像国际电报的通用字符莫尔斯电码。在我们20世纪的各种装置设备中，19世纪电报的技术至少在精神上永存于世。由此我们可以概括推断出最后一段的主题是电报精神将永存于世。因此，本题的正确答案应该是C。选项A：旧的技术将被新的技术取代，不符合原文内容；B：这个曾经伟大的电报正在成为历史，文章最后一段没有提及这一点；D：电报服务很快将逐渐消失，不符合原文内容；因此这三个选项都不能用来概括本段的段落主题，均为干扰项。
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