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  3. Sixty-three years old and retired from a career as a welder, Jim Crawford doesn’t have much use for the Internet. The only time

Sixty-three years old and retired from a career as a welder, Jim Crawford doesn’t have much use for the Internet. The only time

admin2017-04-20  12
问题     Sixty-three years old and retired from a career as a welder, Jim Crawford doesn’t have much use for the Internet. The only time he goes online is to read through the automotive listings in the office of a local online auction company. If he sees something he likes, he says, he asks his mechanic to bid on it for him. Crawford is far from alone: About 15 percent of Americans older than 18 don’t use the Internet, according to a study released in September by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. An additional 9 percent use it only outside the home. They make up a shrinking, but not insignificant, segment of the population. And the gap between them and our increasingly digitized society is growing wider every day. "There is a group of Americans being left behind as technology advances without them," Lawrence E. Strickling, head of the Commerce Department’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration, told an audience at the Brookings Institution recently.
    These people are being left out even as access to broadband—Internet service provided by cable, fiber, DSL and other high-speed networks, as opposed to the older, slower dial-up service—has expanded dramatically in the past 20 years. Because of a national infrastructure upgrade that Strickling compares to the rural electrification effort of the 1930s, well over 90 percent of U. S. households are either wired for high-speed broadband or can get high-speed wireless access. But actual adoption of that service lags behind availability: As of October 2012, the NTIA found that 72.9 percent of homes used broadband Internet service. That’s remarkable growth from 2000, when only 4 percent of homes used broadband, but it still indicates a significant gap.
    So who are these Americans who remain disconnected from the online world? "They are disproportionately older," says Kathryn Zickuhr, who wrote the Pew study. According to the survey, which was done in May, 49 percent of non-Internet users are older than 65. They also are, in general, less educated. Although nearly everyone in the United States with a college degree is online, 41 percent of adults without a high school diploma are offline.
    The Pew survey asked these people why they don’t go online. Perhaps surprisingly, cost wasn’t the most common answer. The most prevalent reason, given by 34 percent of offline respondents, was that the Internet is not relevant to them. A slightly smaller group, 32 percent, cited problems with using the technology: They said that getting online was difficult or frustrating, or that they were worried about issues such as privacy or hackers. Nineteen percent of non-users cited concerns about the expense of owning a computer or paying for an Internet connection.
    Most policymakers would disagree with that sense of irrelevance. They point out that people who aren’t online have a harder time accessing vital services such as Medicare and Medicaid or the new health-care exchanges created under President Obama’s health-care law. They can’t perform useful daily functions that most Americans take for granted, such as looking up directions when traveling, using e-mail for speedy written correspondence, or being able to see and talk with faraway friends or relatives via Skype or FaceTime. They can’t easily search for competitive prices for housing, cars, appliances or other goods. Perhaps most importantly, they are at a major disadvantage when looking for a job: NTIA statistics show that 73 percent of unemployed Internet users reported going online to look for work.
    The Pew study found that only 14 percent of offline adults were previous Internet users. There’s good reason to believe if the rest of them tried it, they would find the service rewarding rather than irrelevant. Seeta Pena Gangadharan, a senior research fellow at the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute, described " intergenerational interactions between seniors who were timid and concerned about going online" and younger relatives. Seniors often rely on grandchildren to assist them, she says, then realize they need to learn how to use the technology themselves when those family members move away. A program in the D. C. area funded by the America Association of Retired Persons (AARP) Foundation and administered by Family Matters of Greater Washington seemed to confirm that point. Using an established social service organization, it distributed iPads and offered computer classes as well as discounted home Internet service to seniors, many of whom had never been online. Two months into the pilot program this summer, only five of the original 55 participants had dropped out.
    The advent of smartphones is also helping to narrow the Internet gap, says Lee Rainie, director of Pew’s Internet project. At a Washington Post forum last week, he said the relatively fast and inexpensive devices, which provide Internet connection via cellphone networks, have had a particularly positive effect on African American and Latino communities.
What is the main idea of the passage?
选项 A、Old people are in great need of improving their computer skills.
B、The gap between those who use Internet and those who don’t is widening.
C、Hackers and privacy problems hinder the development of Internet.
D、The young should help the old grasp the use of Internet.
答案B
解析 主旨题。第一段以实例着手，在该段倒数第二句点明了文章的主题：不上网的人与日益数字化的社会之间的差距在不断加大；第二段最后一句再次重申“a significant gap”；然后，在最后一段第一句又提到智能手机对缩小差距十分有利，因此，文章始终围绕使用网络和不使用网络的人之间的差距展开，故[B]为正确答案。虽然文章开篇以63岁的吉姆为例，说明美国还有很多人不怎么会使用网络，并且第三段也点明，远离互联网的美国人以老人为主，但文章内容主要集中在互联网的使用，而不是老年人的计算机技能方面，故排除[A]；文章第四段第三句提到了隐私或黑客问题，但这仅是某些人不上网的原因，不能概括本文的主旨，故排除[C]；文章仅在第六段提到了有些老年人依靠家中年轻人的帮助来使用互联网，但这也不能概括为文章的主旨，故排除[D]。
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