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  3. The "paperless office" has earned a proud place on lists of technological promises that did not come to pass. Surely, though, th

The "paperless office" has earned a proud place on lists of technological promises that did not come to pass. Surely, though, th

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问题     The "paperless office" has earned a proud place on lists of technological promises that did not come to pass. Surely, though, the more modest goal of the carbon-paperless office is within the reach of mankind? Carbon paper allows two copies of a document to be made at once. Nowadays, a couple of keystrokes can do the same thing with a lot less fuss. Yet carbon paper persists.
    This should not come as a surprise. Innovation tends to create new niches, rather than refill those that already exist. So technologies may become marginal, but they rarely go extinct. And today the little niches in which old technologies take refuge are ever more viable and accessible, thanks to the internet and the fact that production no longer needs to be so mass; making small numbers of obscure items is growing easier. On top of that, a widespread technostalgia seeks to preserve all the ways people have ever done anything. Steam locomotives; trebuchets; papyrus scrolls: all boast bands of enthusiasts making or restoring them, and sometimes making a nice profit selling the results to fans with money to spare.
    As a result technologies from all the way back to the stone age persist and even flourish in the modern world. According to What Technology Wants, a book by Kevin Kelly, one of the founders of Wired magazine, America produces over a million new arrow and spear heads every year. One of the things technology wants, it seems, is to survive. Carbon paper, to the extent that it may have a desire for self-preservation, may also take comfort in the fact that, for all that this is a digital age, many analogue products are hanging on, and even making comebacks.
    Indeed, digital technologies may prove to be more ephemeral than their predecessors. They are based on the idea that the medium on which a file’s constituent 0s and 1s are stored doesn’t matter, and on Alan Turing’s insight that any computer can mimic any other, given memory enough and time. This suggests that new digital technologies should be able to wipe out their predecessors completely. And early digital technologies do seem to be vanishing. The music cassette is enjoying a little hipster renaissance, it’s very distortion apparently part of its charm; but digital audio tape seems doomed.
    So revolutionary digital technologies may yet consign older ones to the dustbin. Perhaps this will be the case with a remarkable breakthrough in molecular technology that could, in principle, store all the data ever recorded in a device that could fit in the back of a van. In this instance, it would not be a matter of the new extinguishing the old. Though it may never have been used for MP3s and PDFs before, DNA has been storing data for over three billion years. And it shows no sign of going extinct.
The word "ephemeral(Line 1, Para 4)" means______.
选项 A、transient
B、accessible
C、enduring
D、appealing
答案A
解析 解答词义题的技巧在于理解该词所在句和上下文之间的关系。第一至三段分析指出：新技术很少取代老技术(老技术很少灭亡)。第四段第一句(所考词所在句)(Indeed表递进)指出，实际上，数字技术可能比其先前的技术更——。下文则说明：相比以前的技术，数字技术的特征使得新的数字技术更可能完全摧毁其前任。最后进一步通过类比“音乐磁带正在悄然复兴，数字录音却似乎难逃消亡厄运”说明数字技术生命短暂。[A]选项放入文中，完全能够和上下文顺接，故为正确选项。
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