The Internet, e-commerce and globalization are making a new economic era possible. By the middle of the 21 st century, capitalis

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问题     The Internet, e-commerce and globalization are making a new economic era possible. By the middle of the 21 st century, capitalist markets will largely be replaced by a new kind of economic system based on networked relationships, contractual arrangements and access rights.
    Has the quality of our lives at work, at home and in our communities increased in direct proportion to all the new Internet and business-to-business Intranet services being introduced into our lives? I have asked this question to hundreds of CEOs and corporate executives in Europe and the United States. Surprisingly, virtually everyone has said, "No, quite the contrary." The very people responsible for ushering in what some have called a "technological renaissance" say they are working longer hours, feel more stressed, are more impatient, and are even less civil in their dealings with colleagues and friends—not to mention strangers. And what’s more revealing, they place much of the blame on the very same technologies they are so aggressively championing.
    The techno gurus promised us that access would make life more convenient and give us more time. Instead, the very technological wonders that were supposed to liberate us have begun to enslave us in a web of connections from which there seems to be no easy escape.
    If an earlier generation was preoccupied with the quest to enclose a vast geographic frontier, the dotcom generation, it seems, is more caught up in the colonization of time. Every spare moment of our time is being filled with some form of commercial connection, making time itself the most scarce of all resources. Our e-mail, voice mail and cell phones, our 24-hour electronic trading markets, online banking services, all-night e-commerce, and 24-hour Internet news and entertainment all holler for our attention.
    And while we have created every kind of labor-and time-saving device to service our needs, we are beginning to feel like we have less time available to us than any other humans in history. That is because the great proliferation of labor-and time-saving services only increases the diversity, pace and flow of commodified activity around us. For example, e-mail is a great convenience. However, we now find ourselves spending much of our day frantically responding to each other’s electronic messages. The cell phone is a great time-saver. Except now we are always potentially in reach of someone else who wants our attention.
    Social conservatives talk about the decline in civility and blame it on the loss of a moral compass and religious values. Has anyone bothered to ask whether the hyperspeed culture is making all of us less patient and less willing to listen and defer, consider and reflect?
    Maybe we need to ask what kinds of connections really count and what types of access really matter in the e-economy era. If this new technology revolution is only about hyperefficiency, then we risk losing something even more precious than time—our sense of what it means to be a caring human being.
We learn from this text that many corporate executives feel that______.

选项 A、technological advances are essential to today’s economic system
B、technology has actually led to a decline in their quality of life
C、longer hours are making their workers more impatient and uncivil
D、technology can be blamed for many of today’s social problems

答案B

解析 属信息推断题。题目中的关键词corporate executives出现在第二段第二、三句,上下文大意为:因特网、内联网等新服务的出现是否使我们的生活及工作质量也得到了相应提高?公司经理们对这一问题的回答几近一致,让人吃惊:“没有,正好相反。”由此可知,他们认为自己的生活质量不但没有提高反而下降了(decline),选项B与此相符。
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