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  3. As Nicholas Negroponte has done for the past three years, the founder and chairman of the non-profit One Laptop Per Child founda

As Nicholas Negroponte has done for the past three years, the founder and chairman of the non-profit One Laptop Per Child founda

admin2023-02-22  58
问题     As Nicholas Negroponte has done for the past three years, the founder and chairman of the non-profit One Laptop Per Child foundation has touched down in one world capital after another to pitch his innovative and audacious project to government leaders, curious teenies, education advocates, NGOs and anyone else who will listen. But even as he was crisscrossing Rome in a hectic  14 hours earlier this week, Negroponte’s attention was fixed on a factory near Shanghai.【B6】______________The Big Idea of Professor Negroponte—co-founder in 1985 of MIT’s influential Media Lab—is the development and distribution of a high-quality, low-cost laptop to potentially hundreds of millions of children throughout the developing world.
    The first task was to design a machine that would allow kids to connect wirelessly to the Internet without an outside source of electricity, and that would be rugged enough to function in often harsh conditions. Prototypes of the laptop (dubbed XO)—with built-in video and audio, a hand-crank and low wattage requirements—are getting high marks from technology reviewers.【B7】______________Negroponte confesses to "bluffing" on the original numbers to create momentum for the project. "You need scale to change people’s minds," he said. "We must create an avalanche."
    【B8】________________
    Such was the case Monday in Rome, where he was utilizing the most important new tool in one of his three speeches: the lime green laptop with a toy-like design that Negroponte carries with him everywhere. Throughout the day, he spoke to three packed auditoriums, and met with officials at the U.N.’s Rome-based Food and Agriculture Organization and Telecom Italia. In between, he taped an interview at Vatican Radio, lunched with two top advisers to former Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi, reviewed strategy with his own staff and fielded a proposal to distribute the computers in Florence and some of its 20 sister cities around the world.
    Still, the skeptics remain, noting for example that the price tag of what was once billed as a $100
    laptop is now closer to $200.【B9】______________The governments in China and India have also been resistant, convinced that they can do something similar on their own.
    【B10】___________________
    For example, he launched in mid-November in the United States a "Give One, Get One" program that will ask people to pay $400 for two XO’s, one of which they will receive and the other to be sent to a poor child.
    Taiwan-based laptop manufacturer Quanta will begin by turning out 44,000 units a week at a recently expanded factory in Changshu, northwest of Shanghai. Negroponte said some 300,000 orders have been booked so far. That avalanche, the critics will say, better start rolling soon. But Negroponte doesn’t seem to mind the doubters. He said: "When you tell me something’s impossible, that’s going to make me want to try."
    [A]   Though Negroponte and his project are not quite there yet, the 63-year-old professor is as busy as ever piling up the snow.
    [B]   But perhaps an even more difficult task was to generate enough mass interest in the project to allow the computer to be produced on such a vast scale that costs could be kept down.
    [C]  That’s where within a week—after all the development and design and gigabytes of both hype and skepticism—mass production will begin on the state-of-the-art, low-price computer.
    [D]  Negroponte has committed Italy to donating 50,000 of the laptops to Ethiopia, while the Vatican potential is particularly enticing, with some 50 million schoolchildren in Catholic schools around the world.
    [E]  Rome wasn’t built in a day, but that’s all the time that Nicholas Negroponte has for the Eternal City right now.
    [F]  Negroponte’s response has been to open up the program to individuals and companies.
    [G]   Moreover, the original strategy of getting six of the largest developing countries—Argentina, Brazil, Pakistan, Thailand, Nigeria and Libya—to commit to buying one million units stalled in August.
【B9】
选项
答案G
解析 空格前讲到人们对此项目仍持有怀疑态度，联系空格后的中国和印度政府的抵制行为，可知本段讲的应该是该项目遭到的质疑和困难。G提到6个发展中国家，它们都推迟了购买该项目的电脑，这显然是该项目遇到的困难，与空格前后的主题一致。再者，G开头的Moreover也表明了G与前文构成递进关系：空格前讲电脑的单价问题，G则进一步讲到国家层面的交易，语义递进。故确定本题选G。
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