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  3. There’s no reason for a city to be there, just a stream and a broad Appalachian valley. But Joseph Anderson wanted a city, and i

There’s no reason for a city to be there, just a stream and a broad Appalachian valley. But Joseph Anderson wanted a city, and i

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问题     There’s no reason for a city to be there, just a stream and a broad Appalachian valley. But Joseph Anderson wanted a city, and in the 1850s he willed one from the ground after a railway company built its state-line terminus(终端)on his father-in-law’s farmland. He named it, Bristol.
    "Paradise" was his second choice. Now, after the decline of the area’s timber and coal industries, paradise is what Bristol has left to sell. The city’s cost of living is 20% below the national average. And Bristol offers what 87% of America’s towns and counties lack: the optic-fiber Internet.
    Bristol, Virginia and Bristol, Tennessee face each other across State Street. To the north, electricity comes from Bristol Virginia Utilities(BVU), which answers to the city council, a common arrangement in rural America. In 1999 BVU ran optical fiber among its substations and city offices, at first purely for internal use. It used its fiber to save the city money on its phone exchange, but local businesses soon wanted the same service. Home Internet service followed in 2002. Then, with $9 million in state and federal grants, BVU pushed its fiber north to eight counties in Virginia’s Coalfield region.
    And the fiber brought jobs. In 2007 both Northrop Grumman, a big American defense contractor, and CGI, an international IT consultancy, said they would hire between them 700 technicians, consultants and call-operators at offices in nearby Lebanon, Virginia, part of BVU’s fiber backbone. Both cited the area’s universities and low cost of living, but neither would have come without BVU’s investment, which Northrop calls absolutely critical. A 2010 paper by Jed Kolko for the Public Policy Institute of California found evidence of a causal relationship in America between the arrival of broadband and employment growth; and the lower the population density, the stronger the effect. Wes Rosenbalm, BVU’s boss, sees the equation much as Joseph Anderson did 150 years ago. "Broadband is jobs," he says. "This is the next depot, the next highway. "
    Should cities be in the business of providing fast Internet access? It depends on whether the Internet is an investment or a product. BVU could not afford to maintain its fiber backbone without selling the Internet to consumers. And it could not build a subscriber base without offering cable television and a telephone line as well; households these days expect a single price for all three services. This has put it in direct competition with firms that already offered limited DSL and cable-modem access, which are fast enough for watching YouTube but not for Northrop Grumman. Fiber is expensive, and a purely commercial business would not have been minded to pay for it.
    All this is true for much of rural America, and it is a parallel of the reason why municipal utility companies were launched in the first place: to electrify thinly-populated areas where commercial utilities would not go. But it also raises the biting question of competition.
What do we know about BVU according to the passage?
选项 A、It originally used optical fiber within itself to save financial charge.
B、It started as a close business partner of the Bristol city council.
C、It didn’t come into the field of home Internet service until 1999.
D、It succeeded in selling optical fiber to eight counties in Virginia.
答案A
解析 事实细节题。根据定位句可知，1999年BVU在其分站和市办公室部署光纤维，起初只供内部使用，它用光纤来节省城市的电话交换费用。由此可见，A)是本题答案。B)“BVU成立时是布里斯托市议会的亲密生意伙伴”，是对原文的曲解，故排除；C)“BVU直到1999年才开始进入家庭网络服务领域”。与原文该段第五句Home Internet service followed in 2002中的年代不符，故排除；D)“BVU成功地将光纤维卖给了弗吉尼亚的八个县”，是对原文该段最后一句的误解，故排除。
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