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  3. It was going to have roughly the effect of a neutron bomb attack on high streets and shopping malls. The buildings would be left

It was going to have roughly the effect of a neutron bomb attack on high streets and shopping malls. The buildings would be left

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问题     It was going to have roughly the effect of a neutron bomb attack on high streets and shopping malls. The buildings would be left standing but the people would vanish. Such was the superior efficiency of selling things via the Internet that brick-and-mortar stores would be unable to compete on price, choice or even service. Book and music sellers had already been "Amazoned". Soon web-based "category-killers", in everything from toys to pet supplies, would overwhelm their physical-world competitors. Shoppers would never be more than a mouse-click from the best deals. Traditional retailers, terrified of cannibalizing(同类相食)sales and destroying the value of their expensive properties, were already too late to meet the challenge. "In some categories," said Mary Meeker, a seer(预言家)of the Internet at Morgan Stanley, "it’s already game over."
    These are convenient beliefs for anyone justifying some e-commerce share prices, but they are already mostly wrong. The reasons should surprise no one. The Internet is not a dominant technology but rather a network of people. It is a rich and highly flexible means of communicating that is rapidly achieving pervasiveness because more and more people find it easy and convenient to use. But it is those people’s preferences that will count: and for most people, shopping is more than just a means to an end. Even if the Internet provided a perfectly efficient way to shop it would not provide a satisfactory alternative to the physical enjoyment of sniffing a ripe melon, say, or trying on a cashmere sweater.
    Of course, some products, such as music and banking, can be distributed electronically with success and cost saving. But most purchases cannot be reduced to digital code. And distributing physical goods is cumbersome(笨重的)and expensive. Behind even the most exciting user interface there are old-fashioned warehouses and lorries, customers who decline to sit at home waiting for purchases to arrive, and goods that must be re-wrapped and expensively returned. No wonder that the cost of getting goods to customers’ homes so often soaks up the notional price advantages of e-commerce.
    What Internet shoppers have quickly realized is that the web is an addition to, and not a substitute for, their shopping habits. It is wonderful for gathering up-to-date information about products and prices. Cyber Dialogue, a research firm, estimates that in 1998 23m Americans sought information online, but then made their purchases offline, compared with only 17.7m who did the whole thing online.
The cost of goods delivery brings about the result that______.
选项 A、distributing goods becomes troublesome and expensive
B、the notional price advantages of e-commerce are eliminated
C、old-fashioned warehouses and lorries have to be still in use
D、goods must be wrapped again and expensively returned
答案B
解析 本题实际上是考查对第3段末句中的soak up的理解。根据该句开头的No wonder可以推断，本句讲到运送成本对电子商务价格优势将产生负面的影响。而结合上文说到的仓储和运输问题，以及商品要重新包装等问题，可以推断这些问题使电子商务原先应有的价格优势都消失殆尽了，因此，soak up可理解为eliminate，即B为本题答案。
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