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  25
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    To take advantage of this tool, some impoverished countries will have to get over their outdated anti-colonial prejudices with respect to foreign investment.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] The writer mentioned the case of the United States to justify the policy of ______.
选项 A、providing financial support overseas
B、preventing foreign capital’s control
C、building industrial infrastructure
D、accepting foreign investment
答案 D
解析 本题可参照文章的第4段。从中可知，那些仍然认为外国的投资是对本国主权的侵犯的国家不妨研究一下美国的基础设施建设史；美国当年建设自己的工业基础设施时没有丰厚的资金。这就是为什么美国的第二次基础设施建设浪潮都是利用外国投资的原因。当时，英国、德国、荷兰以及法国都在这块英国的前殖民地上投资。这些国家给美国提供资金。美国移民建设了美国。现在，拥有美国的是美国人。你拥有的、帮助你发展第三次基础设施建设浪潮的外国资本越多，你就会越富有。但这并不意味着屈从和任人宰割，也不意味着让外国公司的经营不受控制。但是，这确实意味着——应该意识到在建设充分利用互联网所需的能源及电信基础设施的过程中，外国的资本可能有多么重要。据此可知，作者提到美国是为了证明利用外国投资的重要性。D项与文章的意思相符，因此D项为正确答案。
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