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
Part Ⅱ Reading Comprehension (Skimming and Scanning) Directions: In this part, you will have 15 minutes to go over the passage q
Part Ⅱ Reading Comprehension (Skimming and Scanning) Directions: In this part, you will have 15 minutes to go over the passage q
admin
2010-10-28
64
问题
Part Ⅱ Reading Comprehension (Skimming and Scanning)
Directions: In this part, you will have 15 minutes to go over the passage quickly and answer the questions on Answer Sheet 1. For questions 1-7, choose the best answer from the four choices marked A), B), C) and D). For questions 8-10, complete the sentences with the information given in the passage.
Who’s Afraid of Google?
Rarely if ever has a company risen so fast in so many ways as Google, the world’s most popular search engine. This is true by just about any measure: the growth in its market value and revenues; the number of people clicking in search of news, the nearest pizza parlor or a satellite image of their neighbor’s garden; the volume of its advertisers; or the number of its lawyers and lobbyists.
Such an ascent is enough to evoke concerns -- both paranoid(偏执的) and justified. The list of constituencies that hate or fear Google grows by the week. Television networks, book publishers and newspaper owners feel that Google has grown by using their content without paying for it. Telecoms firms such as America’s AT&T and Verizon are annoyed that Google prospers, in their eyes, by free-riding on the bandwidth that they provide; and it is about to bid against them in a forthcoming auction for radio spectrum. Many small firms hate Google because they relied on exploiting its search formulas to win prime positions in its rankings, but dropped to the Internet’s equivalent of Hades after Google modified these algorithms(运算法则).
And now come the politicians. Libertarians dislike Google’s deal with China’s censors. Conservatives moan about its uncensored videos. But the big new fear is to do with the privacy of its users. Google’s business model assumes that people will entrust it with ever more information about their lives, to be stored in the company’s "cloud" of remote computers. Some users now keep their photos, blogs, videos, calendars, e-mail, news feeds, maps, contacts, social networks, documents, spreadsheets (电子数据表), presentations, and credit-card information -- in short, much of their lives -- on Google’s computers.
But the privacy problem is much subtler than that. As Google compiles more information about individuals, it faces numerous trade-offs. At one extreme it could use a person’s search history and advertising responses in combination with, say, his location and the itinerary in his calendar, to serve increasingly useful and welcome search results and ads. This would also allow Google to make money from its many new services. But it could scare users away. As a warning, Privacy International, a human-rights organization in London, has berated Google, charging that its attitude to privacy "at its most blatant is hostile, and at its most benign is ambivalent".
And Google could soon, if it wanted, compile files on specific individuals. This presents "perhaps the most difficult privacy issues in all of human history," says Edward Felten, a privacy expert at Princeton University. Speaking for many, John Battelle, the author of a book on Google and an early admirer, recently wrote on his blog that "I’ve found myself more and more wary" of Google "out of some primal, lizard-brain fear of giving too much control of my data to one source."
More JP Morgan than Bill Gates
Google is often compared to Microsoft; but its evolution is actually closer to that of the banking industry. Just as financial institutions grew to become repositories of people’s money, and thus guardians of private information about their finances, Google is now turning into a supervisor of a far wider and more intimate range of information about individuals. Yes, this applies also to rivals such as Yahoo! and Microsoft. But Google, through the sheer speed with which it accumulates the treasure of information, will be the one to test the limits of what society can tolerate.
It does not help that Google is often seen as arrogant. Granted, this complaint often comes from sourgrapes rivals. But many others are put off by Google’s assertion of its own holiness, as if it merited unquestioning trust. This after all is the firm that chose "Don’t be evil" as its corporate motto and that explicitly intones that its goal is "not to make money", as its boss, Eric Schmidt, puts it, but "to change the world". Its ownership structure is set up to protect that vision.
Ironically, there is something rather cloudlike about the multiple complaints surrounding Google. The issues are best parted into two cumuli: a set of "public" arguments about how to regulate Google; and a set of "private" ones for Google’s managers, to do with the strategy the firm needs to get through the coming storm. On both counts, Google -- contrary to its own propaganda -- is much better judged as being just like any other "evil" money-grabbing company.
Grab the money
That is because, from the public point of view, the main contribution of all companies to society comes from making profits, not giving things away. Google is a good example of this. Its "goodness" stems less from all that guff about corporate altruism than from Adam Smith’s invisible hand. It provides a service that others find very useful -- namely helping people to find information (at no charge) and letting advertisers promote their wares to those people in a finely targeted way.
Given this, the onus of proof is with Google’s would-be prosecutors to prove it is doing something wrong. On antitrust, the price that Google charges its advertisers is set by auction, so its monopolistic clout is limited; and it has yet to use its" dominance in one market to muscle into others in the way Microsoft did. The same presumption of innocence goes for copyright and privacy. Google’s book-search product, for instance, arguably helps rather than hurts publishers and authors by rescuing books from obscurity and encouraging readers to buy copyrighted works. And, despite Big Brotherish talk about knowing what choices people will be making tomorrow, Google has not betrayed the trust of its users over their privacy. If anything, it has been better than its rivals in standing up to prying governments in both America and China.
That said, conflicts of interest will become inevitable -- especially with privacy. Google in effect controls a dial that, as it sells ever more services to you, could move in two directions. Set to one side, Google could voluntarily destroy very quickly any user data that it collects. That would assure privacy, but it would limit Google’s profits from selling to advertisers information about what you are doing, and make those services less useful, ff the dial is set to the other side and Google hangs on to the information, the services will be more useful, but some dreadful intrusions into privacy could occur.
The answer, as with banks in the past, must lie somewhere in the middle in that the right point for the dial is likely to change, as circumstances change. That will be the main public interest in Google. But, as the bankers (and Bill Gates) can attest, public scrutiny also creates a private challenge for Google’s managers: how should they present their case?
One obvious strategy is to allay concerns over Google’s trustworthiness by becoming more transparent and opening up more of its processes and plans to scrutiny. But it also needs a deeper change of heart. Pretending that just because your founders are nice young men and you give away lots of services, society has no right to question your motives no longer seems sensible. Google is a capitalist tool -- and a useful one. Better, surely, to face the coming storm on that foundation, than on a stale slogan that could be your undoing. =
What largely gives rise to Google’s "goodness"?
选项
A、Adam Smith’s economic theories.
B、Google aims at benefiting the society.
C、A useful service Google provides.
D、Google makes profits for itself.
答案
D
解析
题干中的give rise to的意思是“造成,导致”,表结果。而原文中的stem from“源于”,其后接原因、再根据题干中的largely和原文中比较级less,可以确定答案应该与Adam Smith’s invisible hand有关。选项A 过于宽泛,故错误。选项B 实际上是对文中corporate altruism的同义转述,故错误。结合该段第一句中come from... ,not... 可知,Adam Smith’s invisible hand的含义正好与corporate altrui
转载请注明原文地址:https://kaotiyun.com/show/AZz7777K
0
大学英语六级
相关试题推荐
PassageOneItcanbeshowninfactsendfiguresthatcyclingisthecheapest,mostconvenient,endmostenvironmentallydes
PassageOneItcanbeshowninfactsendfiguresthatcyclingisthecheapest,mostconvenient,endmostenvironmentallydes
Politicalinstitutionsdevelopwhenthecomplexityofthesocietyreachesthepointatwhichkinshiporganizationcannolonger
A、Becausehamburgersaregoodtoeat.B、Becausetheyareeasytomake.C、Becausetheycouldsellhamburgersthroughoutthecount
PassageOneITEMONEFORSALE:OceanKayakFrenzy,BrightYellow,$300;noaccessories.Theirkayakhasbeenstoredintheg
PassageOneITEMONEFORSALE:OceanKayakFrenzy,BrightYellow,$300;noaccessories.Theirkayakhasbeenstoredintheg
A、Inabuilding.B、Inatreehole:C、inacave.D、Alloftheabove.D
Themostinterestingarchitecturalphenomenonofthe1970’swastheenthusiasmforrefurbishingoldbuildings.Obviously,thisw
随机试题
影响系统安全性的因素有哪些?
价值是一种绝对的量,商品的价值只能通过与另一种商品_________才能获得表现;交换价值可以随着_________的变化而与价值相背离。
下面关于USB的叙述中,错误的是()
结核性脑膜炎常侵犯的颅神经是
男,60岁。半年前因精神因素起病,表现失眠,好忘事,说话啰嗦,重复近4个月,愁眉苦脸,要自杀,少言少语,自觉对不起子女,翻箱倒柜,认错家人。既往高血压病史,无脑卒中病史,曾诊断“抑郁症”“原发性高血压”。经治疗,一度病情好转,表现豁然开朗,对往事感到莫
在河岸边开挖隧洞,在基坑上下游修筑围堰,施工期间河道的水流由隧洞下泄,这种导流方法称为()。
华联公司为综合性百货公司,销售商品全部采用现金结箅方式,商品销售价格中均不含增值税额。2012年一2013年度,华联公司发生的有关交易或事项如下。 (1)2013年2月1日,华联公司与金山公司签订商品委托代销合同。委托代销合同约定,采用视同买断方式进行
下列关于个人住房贷款的还款方式表述,正确的是()。
下列关于A、B、C三种反应时说法正确的是()
Teachersneedtobeawareofthe______,intellectual,andphysicalchangesthatyoungadultsexperience.
最新回复
(
0
)