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  3. Internet Will Soon Close The Internet, perhaps the most important technological development of the past 30 years, succeeded

Internet Will Soon Close The Internet, perhaps the most important technological development of the past 30 years, succeeded

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问题                         Internet Will Soon Close
    The Internet, perhaps the most important technological development of the past 30 years, succeeded unexpectedly. It started out in an experimental backwater, nurtured far from the mainstream. It was spawned with no business plan and with no CEO leading the charge. Instead, a group of researchers— nerds, really—had the very un-entre-preneurial idea to develop a set of free and open technical protocols to move data from one place to another. The PC, which I think of as a companion technology to the Internet, likewise groomed as the hobbyhorse of passionate nerds who (at least initially) shared their designs. Both the Internet and the PC were released unfinished, and because they were open technologies, businesses and inventors could use them as a springboard for innovation. New applications were deployed to use them without needing the permission of their vendors.
    This kind of openness isn’t found in cars, fridges, TiVos or any other major technology. It’s what helped the Internet and PC succeed over more boring, predictable counterparts— proprietary networks like CompuServe and information appliances like dedicated smart word processors. However, now that PCs and the Internet have become mainstream tools, there’s rising pressure to turn them into the appliances they defeated: to close them, in some cases forbidding outside tinkering altogether, and in others allowing it only under closely monitored and controlled circumstances. The Internet and the PC as wellsprings of innovation are living on borrowed time.
    The new closed models that represent the likely future of consumer computing and networking are no minor tweaks. We face wholesale revision of the Internet and PC environment of the past several decades. The change is coming partly because of the need to address security problems peculiar to open technologies, and partly because businesses want more control over the experience that customers have with their products. The trend from open systems toward closed ones threatens the culture of serendipitous tinkering that has given us the Web, instant messaging, peer-to-peer networking, Skype, Wikipedia and a host of other innovations, each of which emerged from left field. It will produce a concentrated set of new gatekeepers, with us and them prisoner to their limited business plans and to regulators who fear things that are new and disruptive.
The word "spawn" (Line 5, Para. 1) most probably means______.
选项 A、sprung
B、produced
C、spelled
D、spared
答案B
解析 语义理解题。结合spawn所在的上文可知，该句是对前文的补充说明，该词与start out应该是同义词(见第1题分析)。因此，选项[B](产生)正确。
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