Everyone must have had at least one personal experience with a computer error by this time. Bank balances are suddenly reported

admin2012-04-05  41

问题     Everyone must have had at least one personal experience with a computer error by this time. Bank balances are suddenly reported to have jumped from $379 into the millions, appeals for charitable contributions are mailed over and over to people with crazy sounding names at your address, department stores send the wrong bills, utility companies write that they’re turning everything off, that sort of thing. If you manage to get in touch with someone and complain, you then get instantaneously typed, guilty letters from the same computer, saying, "Our computer was in error, and an adjustment is being made in your account."
    These are supposed to be the sheerest, blindest accidents. Mistakes are not believed to be the normal behavior of a good machine. If things go wrong, it must be a personal, human error, the result of fingering a button getting stuck, someone hitting the wrong key. The computer, at its normal best, is infallible (没有错误的).
    I wonder whether this can be true. After all, the whole point of computers is that they represent an extension of the human brain, vastly improved upon but nonetheless human, superhuman maybe. A good computer can think clearly and quickly enough to beat you at chess, and some of them have even been programmed to write obscure verse. They can do anything we can do, and more besides.
    It is not yet known whether a computer has its own consciousness, and it would be hard to find out about this. When you walk into one of those great halls now built for the huge machines, and standing listening, it is easy to imagine that the faint, distant noises are the sound of thinking, and the turning of the spools (线轴) gives them the look of wild creatures rolling their eyes in the effort to concentrate, choking with information. But real thinking and dreaming are other matters. On the other hand, the evidences of something like an unconscious, equivalent to ours, are all around, in every mail. As extensions of the human brain, they have been constructed the same property of error, spontaneous, uncontrolled, and rich in possibilities.
What is implied in the first paragraph?

选项 A、Computers can’t think so their errors are natural and unavoidable.
B、Computers are so capable of making errors that none of them is avoidable.
C、Computers make errors such as miscalculation and inaccurate reporting.
D、Computer errors are obvious and one can hardly prevent them from happening.

答案D

解析 文章首段首句提到,每个人肯定都至少遇到过一次电脑出错的情况。下文紧接着列举了银行对账单、慈善捐款、百货公司账单和公共事业公司电脑出错给生活带来不便的例子。由此可知,电脑出错造成的麻烦涉及生活的方方面面,人们很难避免,故答案为D)“电脑出错是明显的,人们很难防范”。第一段没有提到电脑会不会自己思考,故排除A)。首段列举电脑出错的例子,但这并不能说明电脑有出错的能力,故排除B)。文中列举银行对账单从$379猛增至数百万,公共事业公司的电脑报告切断所有设施等都明确表明计算机会出现错误计算和不准确的报道,并不需要推断,故排除C)。
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