首页
外语
计算机
考研
公务员
职业资格
财经
工程
司法
医学
专升本
自考
实用职业技能
登录
外语
The Internet, wonderful though it is, reinforces one of life’s fundamental divisions: that between the literate and the illitera
The Internet, wonderful though it is, reinforces one of life’s fundamental divisions: that between the literate and the illitera
admin
2015-10-21
43
问题
The Internet, wonderful though it is, reinforces one of life’s fundamental divisions: that between the literate and the illiterate. Most websites, even those heavy with video content, rely on their users being able to read and—if interactive—write. Building your own site certainly does.
Guruduth Banavar, the director of IBM’s India Research Laboratory, wanted to allow people who struggle with literacy to create websites. So he and his colleagues have devised a system based on what is known as "voice extensible markup language" , a cousin of the hypertext markup language used on conventional websites that allows a website to be built and operated more or less by voice alone.
The " spoken web" Dr. Banavar hopes to conjure into existence will be based on mobile phones, which are already proving an effective alternative to computers for obtaining information online in poor countries. As well as making voice calls, people can text one another and, if their phones are up to the job, get access to the web. Across the developing world there are a number of successful banking and money-transfer services that rely on mobile phones rather than computers.
Dr. Banavar, however, thinks mobiles could be made to work much harder. His voice sites are hosted on standard computer servers and behave much like conventional websites. At their most basic they are designed for local use, acting as portals through which people can find out such things as when the mobile hospital will next visit their village, the price of rice in the local market and which wells they should use for irrigation. Instead of typing in a web address, the user rings the website up. Then, with a combination of voice commands and key presses, he navigates through a spoken list of topics and listens to subjects of interest.
That is useful, but not startlingly different from the sort of call-centre hell familiar to anyone who has tried to get information out of a large company by telephone. What makes Dr. Banavar’s approach different is that, by selecting an appropriate option with the handset, the user can add content to a voice site by recording a comment that is then made available to others. This can then be accessed as one of the "latest additions" or "most listened to" items in a spoken sub-menu. More important still, though, is that people can use a mobile phone to build their own voice sites— a process that, in trials conducted by the laboratory, even a non-expert could learn in as little as ten minutes.
To build a site the user first selects a suitable template. The system then talks him through the bells and whistles he might wish to add to that template. A carpenter or autorickshaw driver, for example, can advertise his services, receive and confirm offers of work and even undertake basic commercial transactions through such a site. And the site can store offers of work when its owner is unavailable—as often happens in places where several people share a handset.
Like a more conventional website, a voice site has a mechanism by which information can be linked together and browsed, both backwards and forwards. The system IBM employs to achieve this, the hyperspeech transfer protocol(HSTP), is similar in principle to the hypertext transfer protocol that provides links from one conventional website to another. The HSTP allows, for instance, someone listening to an item on a voice site to hear another linked item and then return to the first one and continue listening from where he left off.
India, one of the world’s fastest-growing mobile-phone markets, is an obvious place to try all this out. Although more than a third of its population of 1.2 billion now have a handset, they are often basic devices shared among families and friends. IBM is therefore carrying out trials of the spoken web in several parts of India—and, in collaboration with various other groups, in other countries.
Users will have to make calls, and those calls will cost money. But, Dr. Banavar thinks, there are many ways of paying for them. Public-service sites such as local portals might be toll-free and subsidised by governments. Commercial sites could take a small percentage of any transaction carried out over them. Advertising might also provide revenue. It would, after all, be more difficult for the listener to screen out than the visual adverts seen on a conventional site.
What is the tone of the passage?
选项
A、Instructive.
B、Introductory.
C、Ironical.
D、Unsatisfied.
答案
B
解析
态度题。通读全文可知,本文是一篇说明文,主要介绍了语音网站的原理、使用方法、益处以及试验推广情况,故[B]“介绍性的”为正确答案。本文主旨并非是对读者进行某种教育,故排除[A]“有教育意义的”;全文以介绍性语言为主,并未使用讽刺的语气,故排除[C]“讽刺的”;文中并未体现作者的不满情绪,而且,从第六段中作者所举的例子来看,语音网站是可以为那些不具备读写能力的劳动者提供实际帮助的,第八段也表明,作者认为语音网站在印度是有发展前途的,故排除[D]“不满意的”。
转载请注明原文地址:https://kaotiyun.com/show/5XKO777K
0
专业英语八级
相关试题推荐
Thoughratheryoungincomparisonwithsomeothers,______isthebiggestuniversityinEngland.
Decisionscanbemadequickly,ortheycanbemadeaftercarefulthought.Doyouagreeordisagreewiththefollowingstatement?
ThemoststrikingphoneticdifferencebetweenAmericanandBritishEnglishisthepronunciationof______inwords.
Self-discipline:theFoundationofProductiveLivingI.Issuestobenoticedatthethoughtofself-disciplineATroublesforso
Self-discipline:theFoundationofProductiveLivingI.Issuestobenoticedatthethoughtofself-disciplineATroublesforso
Self-discipline:theFoundationofProductiveLivingI.Issuestobenoticedatthethoughtofself-disciplineATroublesforso
Self-discipline:theFoundationofProductiveLivingI.Issuestobenoticedatthethoughtofself-disciplineATroublesforso
ThetraditionaldividinglineinAmericabetween"east"and"west"is______.
TheHundredYear’sWaristheintermittentconflictsbetween________thatlastedfrom1337to1453.
随机试题
家长制家庭
颅内压增高的临床表现是
患者女性,52岁,G4P2,绝经1年;患者于末次顺产后半年在当地计生站放置宫内节育器,至今25年,期间未规律随访。现要求取器就诊。该患者既往体健,妇科超声提示:宫内金属节育器,位置正常,术前谈话时不需要涉及的内容是
在人与事的配置过程中,既要达到工作的满负荷,又要符合人的生理心理要求,属于()原理。
在诗歌与散文的教学过程中,教师应在一定阅读量的基础上,____________,鉴赏研读。
经济学上常把投资、消费和出口比喻为拉动GDP的“三驾马车”。()
2021年6月,习近平总书记在青海考察期间指出,在党史学习教育中做到学史崇德,就是要引导广大党员、干部传承红色基因,涵养高尚的道德品质。根据他的讲话,广大党员、干部要()。
(2013年国考)在陈列馆里,有一只名为“西班牙公主”的船舶模型上雕刻着这样的文字:本船共计航行50年,其中11次遭遇冰川,有6次遭海盗抢掠,有9次与另外的船舶相撞,有21次发生故障抛锚搁浅。陈列馆的一面墙上,是对上千年来造船厂的所有出厂的船舶的概述:造船
元朝罪名体系最为显著的变化,是以下哪一项罪名的确立:()
You’restuckinaseaofstandstilltrafficwhentheybegin;hungerpangs,thekindthatunleashasteadystreamoffast-foodfa
最新回复
(
0
)