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  3. Ever since AL Gore invented it, the Internet has been a paradise for those with a creative attitude to facts. Students, for exam

Ever since AL Gore invented it, the Internet has been a paradise for those with a creative attitude to facts. Students, for exam

admin2010-07-06  61
问题      Ever since AL Gore invented it, the Internet has been a paradise for those with a creative attitude to facts. Students, for example, commission and sell essays with such ease there that online "paper mills" devoted to this trade are one of the few dotcom business models still thriving. With a few clicks of a mouse, a student can contract out any academic chore to "research" sites such as Gradersaver. com or the Evil House of Cheating.
     One market opportunity, however, frequently creates another. The past few months have seen a rapid rise in interest in software designed to catch the cheats. The subscriber base of Turnitin, a leading anti-plagiarism software house based in Oakland, California, has risen by 25% since the beginning of the year. Around 150,000 students in America alone are under its beady electronic eye. And in Britain, the Joint Information Systems Committee, the unit responsible for advising the country’s universities on information technology, has tested the firm’s software in five colleges. If everything goes well, every university lecturer in the country will soon be able to inspect his students’ submissions with it.
     Turnitin’s software chops each paper submitted for scrutiny into small pieces of text. The resulting "digital fingerprint" is compared, using statistical techniques originally designed to analyze brain waves (John Barrie, the firm’s founder, was previously a biophysicist), to more than a billion documents that have been fingerprinted in a similar fashion. These include the contents of online paper mills.  The classics of literature and the firm’s own archive of all submitted term papers, as well as a snapshot of the current contents of the World Wide Web.
     Whenever a matching pattern is found, the software makes a note.  After highlighting instances of replication, or obvious paraphrasing( according to Turnitin, some 30% of submitted papers are "less than original"), the computer running the software returns the annotated document to the teacher who originally submitted it -- leaving him with the final decision on what is and is not permissible.
     Which teachers and institutions will choose to employ such software? Past research has shown that, perhaps surprisingly, academic dishonesty correlates with high academic achievement. Nor is public exposure of widespread cheating likely to polish a university’s reputation. Universities with the highest-achieving students and the most faultless reputations may therefore have the must to lose from anti-plagiarism software. Indeed, a curious pattern has emerged among Turnitin’s clients: good universities, such as Duke, Rutgers and Cornell, employ it. Those that like to think of themselves as top-notch, such as Princeton, Yale and Stanford, do not. According to Dr. Barrie, "You apply our technology at Harvard and it would be like a nuclear bomb going off."
According to the passage, the great development of Turnitin is due to ______.
选项 A、its superb management
B、the thriving of academic cheating
C、its big electronic eye
D、the test of its software by the Joint Information Systems Committee
答案B
解析 选项A原文中没有提及。C项是Turnitin公司发展的后果，即生产出一种产品，但不是原因。D项只是说Joint Information Systems Committee测试了这一软件，但这并非Turnitin公司发展的原因。B项谈到的学术欺骗盛行才是促进该公司发展的重要原因，没有了学术欺骗也就不存在反欺骗的软件了。
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