2. 外语
  3. Read the article below about the real intentions of customers and the questions on the opposite page. For each question(13-1

Read the article below about the real intentions of customers and the questions on the opposite page. For each question(13-1

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问题     Read the article below about the real intentions of customers and the questions on the opposite page.
    For each question(13-18), mark one letter(A, B, C or D)on your Answer Sheet.
                    Turning Consumers into Customers
    The expression "supply and demand" was first coined as "demand and supply", by James Denham-Steuart in An Inquiry into the Principles of Political Economy, written in 1767. In his Inquiry, Denham-Steuart says of demand, "It must constantly appear reciprocal. If I demand a pair of shoes, the shoemaker either demands money, or something else for his own use," adding, "The nature of demand is to encourage industry." Nine years later, in The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith wrote, "The real and effectual discipline which is exercised over a workman is that of his customers. It is the fear of losing their employment which restrains his frauds and corrects his negligence."
    It helps to revisit these elementary lessons because we’ve been ignoring them on the Web—at the cost of billions of dollars in lost opportunities for businesses other than those driven by advertising and " big data" farming.
    To see what I mean, consider this fact: you are not a customer of Facebook or Twitter. Nor of Google’s search, mail, and other free services. The actual customers of those companies are advertisers, not you. In fact, you and I are the products being sold to advertisers. No matter how well those companies serve us with free goodies, the fact remains that these companies’ consumers and customers are different populations, and we are among the former, and not the latter, because we pay them nothing. In Adam Smith’s terms, we do not employ them.
    And, because we are merely consumers of these services, our concerns tend to be dismissed when they are in conflict with the ambitions of those services’ customers, the advertisers. This is why websites, advertisers and third parties take liberties with our personal data, our privacy, and our tolerance for "personalisation" of messages that still fail 99% of the time. This causes two problems. One is abuse of consumers. The other is a lack of what we could bring to the market’s table—besides money—if we were full-fledged customers.
    On the consumer protection front, the Tracking Protection Working Group of the W3C(the leading Web standards organisation)is meeting this week in Washington, as reported in an NPR story titled ’ Do Not Track’ Web Browser Option Gains Steam. Regulators and lawmakers in Washington are also on the case. Last year Sen. Jay Rockefeller introduced the Do-Not-Track Online Act. In February of this year, the White House published a Privacy Bill of Rights.
    An excellent source of ongoing documentation of consumer abuse is The Wall Street Journal’s What They Know, a series of reports begun on July 31, 2010. And, since journalism alone has proven insufficient for reversing the tide of abuse, Julia Angwin and the WTK team are convening Data Transparency Weekend starting this Friday in New York. The purpose is to "build free Web tools that promote data transparency and control". This is a strong move toward giving consumers the powers of customers, whether or not they pay anything.
The negligence of what Adam Smith advocated in The Wealth of Nations by the Internet has caused
选项 A、the promotion of profits in a company only by commercials.
B、the loss of many business opportunities except advertising.
C、the easy access to customers’ data on the web.
D、the role advertising plays in doing business on the Web.
答案B
解析 题目意为：“亚当·斯密在《国富论》中的主张在互联网受到忽视可能引发……”，定位词negligence与文中第二段中的been ignoring相呼应。原文提到…at the cost ofbillions of dollars in lost opportunities for businesses other than those driven byadvertising and“big data”farming．即：很多商家只注重用广告以及“大数据”来驱动网站发展，却忽视了消费者的重要性，而其代价是损失掉价值百亿的商机。故B为正确答案。其余三项与文意不符，故排除。
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