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  3. What Is the Paperless Office ? It became a classic example of a techno-Utopian prophecy becoming faulty. The notion of the "

What Is the Paperless Office ? It became a classic example of a techno-Utopian prophecy becoming faulty. The notion of the "

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问题                     What Is the Paperless Office ?
    It became a classic example of a techno-Utopian prophecy becoming faulty. The notion of the "paperless office", which dates back to the 1960s, sounded plausible enough. As computers began to spread and display technology improved, it seemed obvious that more and more documents would be written, distributed and read in electronic form, rather than on paper.
    What actually happened was that global consumption of office paper more than doubled in the last two decades of the 20th century, as digital technology made printing cheaper and easier than ever before. Not even the rise of the internet stemmed the tide. The web’s billions of pages provided a vast new source of fodder for the world’s humming printers. Although E-mail did away with much paper-based correspondence, some older, bosses who fears technology insisted on having their E-mails printed out so they could scribble their responses in pen for their secretaries to type in and send off.
    Yet the prediction seems to be coming true at last. American office workers’ use of paper has actually been in decline since 2001. What changed? The explanation seems to be sociological rather than technological. A new generation of workers, who have grown up with e-mail, word processing and the internet, feel less of a need to print documents out than their older colleagues did. Offices are still far from paperless, but the trend is clear. So does this mean that other apparently discredited technological prophecies might also benefit from a similar reversal of fortune?
    A closer look at the ones that have staged comebacks suggests three ways in which they could. The paperless office shows how a sociological shift can make the difference: although the technology did not change very much, its users did. In some cases, however, straightforward improvements in technology turn things around. As broadband grew, many predictions made during the boom—about the value of online advertising and the volume of e-commerce, for example—came true after all, albeit a few years late.
    A third way in which seemingly dying technologies can be revived is through an external shock. Perhaps the best example is the electric car. Growing concern about climate change, worries about energy security and a spike in the oil price have since effected an astonishing turnaround. Carmakers are now racing to build petrol-electric hybrid vehicles, and these are widely seen as steps on the way to all-electric ones.
We can learn from the whole passage that______.
选项 A、technological factors are more powerful than sociological ones
B、internal factors, as well as external ones, contribute to changes
C、the technological prophecy is nothing but an Utopian one
D、all the technological prophecies will come true sooner or later
答案B
解析 主旨大意题。根据题干提示纵览全文，全文共分两大部分：第一部分，文章第一、二、三段以“无纸化办公”的预言为例，说明技术乌托邦的幻灭和起死回生；第二部分，第四、五两段分别从内部和外部因素来进行分析，其中第四段又分别阐述了社会原因和技术原因。全文主旨还是在于说明产生变革的原因，故选[B]项。[A]项“技术因素比社会因素更力量”，[C]项“所有技术预言都是乌托邦”和[D]项“所有技术预言迟早都会实现”均不正确。
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