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As online shopping becomes yet more prevalent, and prepaid credit cards

游客2023-11-25  23
问题         As online shopping becomes yet more prevalent, and prepaid credit cards take the place of more and more low-value cash transactions, cash is now on its way out, accounting for just 40% of payments last year globally and dropping. From the following excerpts, you may find both benefits and concerns of removing cash from the economy.
        Write an article of NO LESS THAN 300 words, in which you should:
        1. summarize the trend of cashless society, and then
        2. express your opinion towards the tendency.
Excerpt 1
        To see how a society might operate without cash, we can look to Sweden, which is almost cashless already. In Stockholm, you don’t need to carry bills or change. You can make donations to your church using a credit card, and give money to a friend using an inter-person payment app called Swish—when splitting a restaurant check, for example. Many banks don’t accept or provide cash in their branches, and payment apps are on the rise.
        Swedish banks and businesses have good reason to prefer electronic payments. Stockholm has been a heist capital, with robberies targeting banks and cash-carrying security vans. But it’s not just the banks that prefer payments that can’t be stolen. Stockholm native Peter Mathsson says that locals rarely use cash. Even the smallest transaction is made with a card.
        Living experiments like Sweden prove that cash-free living is not only possible, but desirable and potentially advantageous. In fact, many parts of the world are already cash free. People pay for a single cup of coffee with a credit card, often without signing or entering a PIN. People are already happy to operate without cash, and with new options like Apple Pay, which lets you use your iPhone and your fingerprint to pay with better security than an actual card, that trend is likely to accelerate. The end of cash may seem like fancy thinking, but look at how money has changed since credit and debit cards started to usurp cash. We already route money around with bank transfers enacted from our tablets, we pay for Uber cars with the convenience of a phone app, and we travel abroad without even thinking about buying foreign currency before we go. And PayPal, the original cashless payment system, turned 18 years old this year.
Excerpt 2
        Governments and their agencies love electronic transactions. Without cash, it’s much harder to hide money from the tax man. The police and government agencies like the NSA love the trackable records that cashless payments leave behind. Last year, France and Spain both enacted laws that limit cash transactions.
        The promise is that banning cash would end black markets, but for honest citizens, the end of paper cash brings many unsettling downsides. Credit card transactions are already trackable, and electronic cash could bring that lack of anonymity to every single transaction you make. Once this information exists, it will become a target of government agencies such as the police and intelligence services and trafficked to insurance companies, tax collectors, fraud squads, and even marketers.
        "When all our payment transactions are tracked," says Rainey Reitman, activism director at the Electronic Frontiers Foundation, "it creates a trove of data we have no control over. It’s easy to imagine a daring divorce lawyer or a government agent trying to gain access to our financial history to try to build a story about who we are."
选项
答案                                                                         Cashless Transaction Has Two Sides
        Human beings are always blessed with new inventions while plagued by the downsides of them. Cashless transactions, due to its convenience, are embraced by many modern citizens, especially urban dwellers. Those who advocate for cashless transactions argue that a cash-free society will reduce the risk of cash robberies and improve living experience by facilitating payment. By contrast, there are concerns over the fact that paying by electronic means leaves behind transaction records which, if exposed to unscrupulous personnel or organizations, will bring catastrophes to innocent citizens. In my opinion, the trend of cashless society has both pros and cons.
        There is no doubt that electronic transactions have many benefits. The most obvious one is that people are no longer worried about being robbed of cash, since they do not need to carry cash with them. Bank transactions will be made simpler by this trend. Prior to the advent of phone apps, people who need to convert currency or pay off their credit card have no choice but to queue in the bank to handle relevant dealing. Now however, a simple touch on the smart phone will save all the trouble. On the level of governments, electronic transactions are trackable, thereby making it easier for government agencies to crack down on illegal dealing or money laundry.
        Traceability is, however, the primary concern over a cashless society, since people hate the idea that their transactions are monitored and tracked. Security of accounts is another big issue. Hackers may decode the encryption key of bank accounts and incur huge losses of both banks and individuals. That Google temporarily shut down its wallet system due to a security vulnerability is a good illustration of the possibility of accounts being hacked by immoral users. In addition, average citizens have little control over how the database that stores all the personal information would work and they are deeply concerned that their private information may be illegally given out or sold to others.
Overall, when enjoying the convenience of cash-free transactions, people should not lose sight of the accompanied risks. Before a sound system of electronic transactions can be invented, cashless payment is still no substitute for cash.
解析         材料围绕“无现金交易”进行了讨论，两个选段分别分析了这一现象的利弊。
        选段一以瑞典为例指出无现金交易能带来各种让人满意的潜在好处（desirable and potentially advantageous），它不仅能让银行避免钱款被盗（can’t be stolen），而且当地人也乐意选择这种支付方式（already happy to operate…），很少使用现金（rarely use cash），所以现金交易可能会成为历史。
        选段二主要说明了无现金交易的潜在弊端。虽然禁止现金交易有助于打击黑市（black markets），但对于诚实的市民（honest citizens）而言则有诸多弊端。无现金交易的实名制（lack of anonymity）导致了信息被追踪（trackable），因此可能会被包括欺诈团伙（fraud squads）在内的团体利用。
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