A great deal of attention is being paid today to the so-called digital divide—the division of the world into the info(informatio

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问题     A great deal of attention is being paid today to the so-called digital divide—the division of the world into the info(information)rich and the info poor. And that divide does exist today. My wife and I lectured about this looming danger twenty years ago. What was less visible then, however, were the new, positive forces that work against the digital divide. There are reasons to be optimistic.
    There are technological reasons to hope the digital divide will narrow. As the Internet becomes more and more commercialized, it is in the interest of business to universalize access — after all, the more people online, the more potential customers there are. More and more governments, afraid their countries will be left behind, want to spread Internet access. Within the next decade or two, one to two billion people on the planet will be netted together. As a result, I now believe the digital divide will narrow rather than widen in the years ahead. And that is very good news because the Internet may well be the most powerful tool for combating world poverty that we’ve ever had.
    Of course, the use of the Internet isn’t the only way to defeat poverty. And the Internet is not the only tool we have. But it has enormous potential.
    To take advantage of this tool, some impoverished countries will have to get over their outdated anti-colonial prejudices with respect to foreign investment. Countries that still think foreign investment is an invasion of their sovereignty might well study the history of infrastructure(the basic structural foundations of a society)in the United States. When the United States built its industrial infrastructure, it didn’t have the capital to do so. And that is why America’s Second Wave infrastructure — including roads, harbors, highways, ports and so on — were built with foreign investment. The English, the Germans, the Dutch and the French were investing in Britain’s former colony. They financed them. Immigrant Americans built them. Guess who owns them now? The Americans. I believe the same thing would be true in places like Brazil or anywhere else for that matter. The more foreign capital you have helping you build your Third Wave infrastructure, which today is an electronic infrastructure, the better off you’re going to be. That doesn’t mean lying down and becoming fooled, or letting foreign corporations run uncontrolled. But it does mean recognizing how important they can be in building the energy and telecom infrastructures needed to take full advantage of the Internet.
It seems that now a country’s economy depends much on______.

选项 A、how well developed it is electronically
B、whether it is prejudiced against immigrants
C、whether it adopts America’s industrial pattern
D、how much control it has over foreign corporations

答案A

解析 从文章第2段的内容可知,伴随着互联网越来越商业化,其使用的普及符合商家的利益。毕竟,上网的人愈多,未来潜在的顾客就愈多。现在,愈来愈多的政府因为害怕自己的国家会落后于别国,所以想扩大互联网的使用范围。在以后的10~20年里,世界上将有一二十亿人口加入互联网。所以,我认为将来信息差距只会减小,而不会扩大。这是个好消息,因为互联网完全能够成为战胜目前我们所面对的世界贫困的强有力的工具。从第3段的内容可知,当然,使用互联网并不是战胜贫困的唯一方法。但其具有无限的潜力。从文章最后一段的内容可知,你拥有的、帮助你发展第三次基础设施建设浪潮——也就是当今的电子基础设施建设——的外国资本越多,你就会越富有。据此可知,一个国家的经济很大程度上取决于其电子基础设施的建设。A项与文章的意思相符,因此A项为正确答案。
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