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  3. On July 15th India will become the latest country to shut down its official telegram service. In Britain, telegrams were replace

On July 15th India will become the latest country to shut down its official telegram service. In Britain, telegrams were replace

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问题     On July 15th India will become the latest country to shut down its official telegram service. In Britain, telegrams were replaced by Telemessages, which were simply telegrams printed out and put into the post, in 1982. Americas telegram service, operated by Western Union, ended in 2006. Australia shut down its telegram service in 2011. Are telegrams dead?
    Not quite. The honorable technology still clings to life, and not just in India. The mechanical telegraph dates back to the 1790s. In the 1840s such mechanical telegraphs gave way to electrical telegraphs, which sent messages as coded pulses along wires, and the word "telegram" emerged shortly afterwards to describe a message sent by telegraph. The invention of the telephone in the 1870s did not result in the immediate decline of the telegram, because the technical difficulty and expense of making long-distance phone calls meant that telegrams were still the easiest way to send international messages quickly. But as long-distance telephony became cheaper and easier, it was only a matter of time. From the 1970s, the emergence of electronic means of communication, starting with the fax machine, and then followed by e-mail and mobile-phone text messages in the 1990s, restricted telegrams to ceremonial uses such as messages relating to births, marriages and deaths.
    In India, the telegram held on a bit longer because it was used for internal government communications. Even after the shut-down of India’s official service, the telegram survives in a few other countries, including Belgium, Japan and Sweden, where it was kept as a nostalgic(怀旧的)service. And in many other countries private firms offer telegram-delivery services. So despite several recent reports to the contrary, the telegram is not quite dead, and will probably never die.
    Moreover, in some ways the tradition of the telegram is healthier than ever. Tweets, like text messages, also require users to keep their messages brief and telegraphic. Such digital messages have undermined the business case for the telegram, but have preserved aspects of telegraphic tradition. Some mobile phones used to announce incoming text messages with beeps that sound like Morse code, the international alphabet of telegraphy. The 19th-century technology of the telegram lives on, in spirit at least, in our 21st-century devices.
Which of the following is the first country try to end its telegram service?
选项 A、India.
B、Britain.
C、America.
D、Australia.
答案B
解析 此题是一道细节判断题，考查考生根据文章具体细节内容进行分析判断的能力。问题问下面哪个国家是第一个试图结束其电报服务的。本文第一段指出：7月15日，印度将成为最新的关闭其官方电报服务的国家。1982年，英国电信通信取代了电报。由西方联盟公司运营的美国电报服务也于2006年终结了。2011年澳大利亚停止了其电报服务。由此我们可以判断出英国是第一个结束其电报服务的国家。因此，本题的正确答案应该是B。选项A：印度，原文中提到印度是最新要结束其电报服务，根据文章上下文内容判断，应该是今年(可能是2012、2013、2014年)的7月15日，即文章出版的年份；C：美国，原文指出美国是在2006年结束电报服务的；D：澳大利亚，原文提到澳大利亚是在2011年停止电报服务的。因此这三个选项都是干扰项。
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