2. 外语
  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

admin2016-10-18  28
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 less troubles.
    Yet carbon paper persists. Forms still need to be filled out in a way that produces copies. 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 fill 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(对旧式科技的怀念)seeks to preserve all the ways people have ever done anything, simply because they are kind of neat. Steam locomotives and papyrus scrolls(古本手卷): all boast bands of enthusiasts making or restoring them, and sometimes making a nice profit.
    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’s flintknappers(燧石工)produce 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 similar products are hanging on, and even making comebacks.
    Indeed, digital technologies may prove to be more short-lived 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 renaissance, it’s very inaccuracy apparently part of its charm: but digital audio tape seems doomed.
    So revolutionary digital technologies may yet make older ones to the garbage container. Though it may never have been used for MP3s and PDFs before, DNA(the molecule in question)has been storing data for over three billion years. And it shows no sign of going extinct.
The passage is mainly concerned with______.
选项 A、the comebacks of carbon-paperless office
B、the fact that new technologies may vanish while the old survive
C、the reason why old technologies will always be with us
D、the importance of keeping improving technologies all the time
答案B
解析 主旨题。文章以复写纸为例说明老技术不会消亡，接下来论证原因，最后阐述新技术终将难逃消亡厄运。综上所述，本文的主旨是数字技术终将消亡而老技术可逃过消亡厄运。
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