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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

admin2014-06-25  31
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 book What Technology Wants is mentioned to show______.
选项 A、the profit potential of old technologies
B、the vitality of old technologies
C、the possible revival of carbon paper
D、the goal of technology
答案B
解析 根据题干关键词定位到第三段。第三段首句承接上段(多种因素使得技术不会走向消亡)指出结果：非常古老的技术都可能会存在于现实世界，甚至得以繁荣。随后指出，What TechnologyWants一书写道：美国每年会生产超过100万支新箭头和矛头。可见，作者意在引用该书内容说明旧有技术的生命力，[B]选项正确。
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