Video recorders and photocopiers, even ticket machines on the railway, often seem unnecessarily difficult to use. Last December

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问题      Video recorders and photocopiers, even ticket machines on the railway, often seem unnecessarily difficult to use. Last December I bought myself a video cassette recorder (VCR) described as "simple to use". In the first three weeks I failed repeatedly to program the machine to record from the TV, and after months of practice I still made mistakes. I am not a lone. According to a survey last year by Ferguson, the British manufacturer, more than in four VCR owners never use the timer on their machines to record a programme they don’t use it because they’ve found it far too hard to operate.
     So why do manufacturers keep on designing and producing VCRs that are awkward to use if the problems are so obvious? First, the problems are not obvious to technically minded designers with years of experience and trained to understand how appliances work. Secondly, designers tend to add one or two features at a time to each model, whereas you or I face all a machine’s features at once. Thirdly, although finding problems in a finished product is easy, it is too late by then to do anything about the design. Finally, if manufacturers can get away with selling products that are difficult to use, it is not worth the effort of any one of them to make improvements.
     Some manufacturers say they concentrate on proving a wide range of features rather than on making the machines easy to use. But that gives rise to the question, "Why can’t you have features that are easy to use*." The answer is you can.
     Good design practice is a mixture of specific procedures and general principles. For a start, designers should build an original model of the machine and try it out on typical members of the public—not on colleagues in the development laboratory. Simple public trials would quickly reveal many design mistakes. In an idem world, there would be some ways of controlling quality such as that the VCR must be redesigned repeatedly until, say, 90 per cent of users can work 90 per cent of the features correctly 90 per cent of the time.
One of the reasons why VCRs are so difficult to use is that ________.

选项 A、the designers are often insensitive to the operational complexities of their machines
B、the range of features provided is unlimited
C、there is no ideal way of controlling quality
D、their designers often ignore the complaints of their users

答案A

解析 从文中作者给的原因可以看出,设计者是精于设计、使用机器的,他们关注的是增加功能,而忽视了对那些对机器不熟悉的普通人而言,机器过于复杂了。所以,该题答案为A。
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