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  3. There’s no reason for a city to be there, just a stream and a broad Appalach

There’s no reason for a city to be there, just a stream and a broad Appalach

游客2023-08-27  13
问题     There’s no reason for a city to be there, just a stream and a broad Appalachian valley. But Joseph Anderson wanted a city, and in the 1850s he willed one from the ground after a railway company built its state-line terminus(终端)on his father-in-law’s farmland. He named it, Bristol.
    "Paradise" was his second choice. Now, after the decline of the area’s timber and coal industries, paradise is what Bristol has left to sell. The city’s cost of living is 20% below the national average. And Bristol offers what 87% of America’s towns and counties lack: the optic-fiber Internet.
    Bristol, Virginia and Bristol, Tennessee face each other across State Street. To the north, electricity comes from Bristol Virginia Utilities(BVU), which answers to the city council, a common arrangement in rural America. In 1999 BVU ran optical fiber among its substations and city offices, at first purely for internal use. It used its fiber to save the city money on its phone exchange, but local businesses soon wanted the same service. Home Internet service followed in 2002. Then, with $9 million in state and federal grants, BVU pushed its fiber north to eight counties in Virginia’s Coalfield region.
    And the fiber brought jobs. In 2007 both Northrop Grumman, a big American defense contractor, and CGI, an international IT consultancy, said they would hire between them 700 technicians, consultants and call-operators at offices in nearby Lebanon, Virginia, part of BVU’s fiber backbone. Both cited the area’s universities and low cost of living, but neither would have come without BVU’s investment, which Northrop calls absolutely critical. A 2010 paper by Jed Kolko for the Public Policy Institute of California found evidence of a causal relationship in America between the arrival of broadband and employment growth; and the lower the population density, the stronger the effect. Wes Rosenbalm, BVU’s boss, sees the equation much as Joseph Anderson did 150 years ago. "Broadband is jobs," he says. "This is the next depot, the next highway. "
    Should cities be in the business of providing fast Internet access? It depends on whether the Internet is an investment or a product. BVU could not afford to maintain its fiber backbone without selling the Internet to consumers. And it could not build a subscriber base without offering cable television and a telephone line as well; households these days expect a single price for all three services. This has put it in direct competition with firms that already offered limited DSL and cable-modem access, which are fast enough for watching YouTube but not for Northrop Grumman. Fiber is expensive, and a purely commercial business would not have been minded to pay for it.
    All this is true for much of rural America, and it is a parallel of the reason why municipal utility companies were launched in the first place: to electrify thinly-populated areas where commercial utilities would not go. But it also raises the biting question of competition. [br] In his 2010 paper, Jed Kolko finds that______.
选项 A、the employment rate in a dense populated area is higher than low populated ones
B、Wes Rosenbalm was correct in his prediction of the arrival of broadband
C、the development of broadband will bring more work opportunities
D、BVU’s investment in the development of optical fiber decides the employment rate
答案 C
解析 事实细节题。根据定位句可知，杰德·科尔科发现，在美国，宽带的到来与就业率有着因果联系，人口密度越低，这种效果就越明显。由此可见，宽带的发展，会带来更多的工作机会，因此C)是本题答案。A)“人口稠密区的就业率高于人口稀少的地区”，是对原文的主观臆断，故排除；B)“韦斯·罗森巴姆对宽带到来的预测是正确的”，该内容与杰德·科尔科的调查无关，故排除；D)“BVU在光纤维发展方面的投资决定了就业率”，是对原文的曲解，故排除。
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