2. 职称英语
  3. A great deal of attention is being paid today to the so-called digital divid

A great deal of attention is being paid today to the so-called digital divid

游客2025-04-02  4
问题     A great deal of attention is being paid today to the so-called digital divide—the division of the world into the info (information) rich and the info poor. And that divide does exist today. My wife and I lectured about this looming danger twenty years ago. What was less visible then, however, were the new, positive forces that work against the digital divide. There are reasons to be optimistic.
    There are technological reasons to hope the digital divide will narrow. As the Internet becomes more and more commercialized, it is in the interest of business to universalize access—after all, the more people online, the more potential customers there are. More and more governments, afraid their countries will be left behind, want to spread Internet access. Within the next decade or two, one to two billion people on the planet will be netted together. As a result, I now believe the digital divide will narrow rather than widen in the years ahead. And that is very good news because the Internet may well be the most powerful tool for combating world poverty that we’ve ever had.
    Of course, the use of the Internet isn’t the only way to defeat poverty. And the Internet is not the only tool we have. But it has enormous potential.
    To take advantage of this tool, some impoverished countries will have to get over their outdated anti-colonial prejudices with respect to foreign investment. Countries that still think foreign investment is an invasion of their sovereignty might well study the history of infrastructure (the basic structural foundations of a society) in the United States. When the United States built its industrial infrastructure, it didn’t have the capital to do so. And that is why America’s Second Wave infrastructure—including roads, harbors, highways, ports and so on—were built with foreign investment. The English, the Germans, the Dutch and the French were investing in Britain’s former colony. They financed them. Immigrant Americans built them. Guess who owns them now? The Americans. I believe the same thing would be true in places like Brazil or anywhere else for that matter. The more foreign capital you have helping you build your Third Wave infrastructure, which today is an electronic infrastructure, the better off you’re going to be. That doesn’t mean lying down and becoming fooled, or letting foreign corporations run uncontrolled. But it does mean recognizing how important they can be in building the energy and telecom infrastructures needed to take full advantage of the Internet. [br] Digital divide is something ______.
选项 A、getting worse because of the Internet
B、the rich countries are responsible for
C、the world must guard against
D、considered positive today
答案 C
解析 从文章第1段的内容可知，如今，人们非常关注所谓的数字差距问题——也就是把世界上的国家分成信息资源丰富的国家与信息资源贫乏的国家。这种差距在今天确实存在；20年前，我和妻子就针对这一隐约显示出的危险做过演讲；然而，一些新的能够预防这些信息差出现的积极因素在那时并不像现在这样突出。据此可知，数字差距是一个潜在的危险，应该提防。C项与文章的意思相符，因此C项为正确答案。
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