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Whatever Happened to the Paperless Office? For office innova

游客2024-12-15  31
问题                 Whatever Happened to the Paperless Office?
    For office innovators, the unrealized dream of the "paperless" office is a classic example of high-tech hubris. Today’s office is drowning in more paper than ever before. But after decades of publicity, American offices may finally be losing their paper obsession. The demand for paper used to exceed the growth of the US economy, but the past two or three year have seen a marked slowdown in sales. Analysts attribute the decline to a variety of causes. Escaping our craving for paper, however, will be anything but a cold-turkey affair. There are some functions that paper serves where a screen display doesn’t work.
    In the early to mid 90s, a booming economy and improved desktop printers helped boost paper sales by 6 to 7 percent each year. But now, plain white office paper will see less than a 4 percent growth rate, despite the strong overall economy. A primary reason for the changes is that for the first time ever, some 47 percent of the workforce entered the job market after computers had already been introduced to offices. In addition, analysts point to the lifeless employment market for white-collar workers—the primary driver of office paper consumption—for the shift in paper usage.
    The changing attitudes toward paper have finally caught the attention of paper companies, says Richard Harper, a researcher at Microsoft and coauthor of the book, The Myth of the Paperless Office (2002). "All of a sudden, the paper industry has started thinking,’ We need to learn more about the behavioral aspects of paper use,’" he says. To reduce paper use, some companies are working to combine digital and paper capabilities. For example, Xerox Corp. is developing electronic paper: thin digital displays that respond to a stylus, like a pen on paper. Notations can be easily erased or saved digitally.
    Even with such technological advances, the improved capabilities of digital storage continues to act against " paperlessness", argues Paul Saffo, a technology forecaster at the Institute for the Future, a think tank in Palo Alto, Calif. In his prophetic and metaphorical 1989 essay, "The Electronic Pinata, " he wrote" , The information industry today is like a huge electronic pinata, composed of a thin paper crust surrounding an electronic core." The growing paper crust "is most noticeable, but the hidden electronic core that produces the crust is far larger—and growing more rapidly. The result is that we are becoming paperless, but we hardly notice at all." "That’s one of the great ironies of the information age," Saffo says. " It’s just common sense that the more you talk to someone by phone or computer, it inevitably leads to a face-to-face meeting."
    As buzzwords go, " paperless" has been known for a long time with little or no results.
    The term "paperless clearing houses" was probably first coined in a 1966 article in the Harvard Business Review in reference to the emergence of digital data storage. But " paperlessness" did not enter the public’s imagination until 1975, when a Business Week article entitled " The Office of the Future" predicted that by 1990"most record-handling will be electronic." Throughout the 1980s and 90s, the term "paperless" came to embody technology’s promise to permanently change the way people do business. The enthusiasm sometimes took on a life of its own, with the trendiest companies demanding " paperlessness" long before it was practical. [br] To which of the following is the author likely to agree?
选项 A、It is hard to change the habit of using paper.
B、There is a big reduction in the amount of paper being used.
C、The paper industry has responded to the change in the way paper is used.
D、Electronic and intelligent paper is the future trend.
答案 A
解析 本题考查作者观点。第一段最后两句指出，但是摆脱对纸张的需求是一件……的事情，因为它有一些不可替代的功能。根据上下文可知，cold-turkey的含义是“不容易的，很难的”，因此[A]正确。第二段虽然提到纸张销售势头减缓，但是第四段作者借萨福的观点指出：技术的发展不仅没有实现“无纸化”，反而增加了纸的消费。另外，第一段第二句也提到，今天的办公室工作中所使用的纸张比以往更多，因此[B]不正确。第三段提到，对纸张态度的改变终于引起了造纸公司的关注，造纸行业意识到要多了解用纸行为方面的情况，一些公司致力于开发电子纸技术。这里“态度的改变”指的是第二段提到的“纸的消费趋势发生变化”，不是“纸的使用方式发生改变”，排除[C]。文中介绍了电子纸，但它是不是未来发展趋势无从推知，排除[D]。
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