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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.
The drastic drop of telegram services is mainly caused by______.
选项 A、long-distance telephony and fax
B、long-distance telephony and Internet services
C、fax and mobile-phone text messages
D、Internet services and mobile-phone text messages
答案D
解析 此题是一道细节推断题，考查考生根据文章中的具体细节来进行总结归纳和分析推断的能力。问题问导致电报服务急剧下降的主要原因是什么。文章第二段与问题相关的部分指出：19世纪70年代发明的电话并没有导致电报的直接衰退，因为技术难度和打长途电话的费用意味着电报仍然还是最简单的发送国际讯息的方式。但是，随着长途电话变得越来越便宜和容易，这只是一个时间问题。从20世纪70年代开始，从传真机到之后20世纪90年代出现的电子邮件和手机短信，这些电子通信手段的出现限制了电报礼节性的使用，如与出生、婚姻和死亡相关的信息的传递。再结合第一段各个不同国家结束电报服务的情况，我们可以推断出电报服务急剧衰退的主要原因是电子通信手段如电子邮件和手机短信等的出现。所以，本题的答案应该是D，互联网服务和手机短信。选项A：长途电话和传真，原文中提到长途电话没有导致电报的直接衰退，还需要一段时间；B：长途电话和互联网服务，不符合原文内容；C：传真和手机短信，原文中虽然提到了传真，但是它对电报冲击不如互联网上发的电子邮件和手机短信影响力大。所以这三个选项均为干扰项。
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