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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.
Telegram services are still kept in some countries for______.
选项 A、reminding people of the good old days
B、ceremonial uses for major events
C、internal government communications
D、communications between private firms
答案A
解析 此题是一道细节推断类题，考查考生根据文章中的细节内容进行理解和弓l申推断的能力。问题问有些国家仍然保留电报服务是为了什么。文章第三段后半部分与此相关的信息指出：电报仍然在其他一些国家包括比利时、日本和瑞典幸存下来，在这些国家电报是作为一种怀旧服务保存下来的。由此可以推断出本题的正确答案应该是A，让人们回忆过去的好时光，即怀旧。选项B：重大事件的礼节性使用；C：政府内部通信；D：私营公司之间的沟通交流。这三个选项都不是某些国家保留电报服务的原因，均为干扰项。
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