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  3. Ramzi Raguii, a driver for the car-hire service Uber, was on vacation in Tun

Ramzi Raguii, a driver for the car-hire service Uber, was on vacation in Tun

游客2023-12-03  21
问题     Ramzi Raguii, a driver for the car-hire service Uber, was on vacation in Tunisia when he got word that the company had hired some political muckety-muck(大亨)named David Plouffe, who ran Barack Obama’s 2008 Presidential campaign and later served in the White House—as its senior vice-president of policy and strategy.
    Uber is an app that lets you hail a car: tap the screen and a car, with a driver, shows up wherever you are. Drivers sign on as independent contractors and use their own vehicles: Uber takes a twenty-per-cent commission on each fare.
    The service is popular among riders: an internal document leaked to the blog Valley wag late last year suggested that, each week, people worldwide were taking about 800,000 Uber rides. Drivers, meanwhile, appreciate the flexibility, autonomy, and ease of joining. The appeal of Uber is similar to that of Airbnb, which lets people rent out their homes to vacationers for a night or longer. Before the Internet, the reasoning goes, those who needed services and those who could provide them had fewer ways to find one another: companies like Uber use our newfound connectedness to put us in touch. What’s more, the companies can profit handsomely because they don’t actually own the property used to provide the service—the cars, in Uber’s case, or apartments, for Airbnb.
    Investors recently valued Uber at nearly twenty billion dollars, which struck some people as an absurdly high figure. But others believed that Uber could be worth more than that—not only because transportation is a big business, but because the company has the potential to do much more with its matchmaker app. Since Uber doesn’t own a fleet of cars or employ its drivers, it could, in theory, deploy its app for any number of other purposes. First it could displace the taxi industry. Then it could take on delivery trucks, moving vans, and more. Earlier this week, the company started testing out a home-delivery service in Washington, D. C.
    Raguii admires Uber for being innovative, but he has become an outspoken critic of some of its policies. He has recently started an organization called the Drivers Network because he doesn’t think politicians and regulators have offered much help.
    This isn’t for lack of pressure. Individual drivers like Raguii might not have much political influence, but lobbying groups representing traditional industries have worked hard to persuade the government to regulate their newer rivals more closely. In San Francisco, for instance, taxi operators have to provide a million dollars of liability coverage for their cars at all times: Uber, until recently, covered vehicles only when they held a passenger. But Uber, and companies like it, argue that they’re completely different from the industries that they’re displacing—taxis, hotels, employment agencies, and so on—and shouldn’t have to follow the old, fusty(陈腐的)regulations that apply to those industries.
    In these companies’ early days, no one seemed to complain much about that reasoning. But, in the past year, that has started to change. In the fall, Eric T. Schneiderman, New York’s attorney general, subpoenaed(传唤)Airbnb for information about its hosts—some of whom seemed to be operating in defiance of a law that barred short-term rentals in most cases. In April of this year, Schneiderman followed up with stern words in the Times about startups like Uber and Airbnb. "Amazingly, many of these companies claim that the fact that their goods and services are provided online somehow makes them immune from regulation," he wrote. Now, in California, a Democratic state legislator named Susan Bonilla is pushing a bill that would tighten auto-insurance regulations for transportation companies like Uber.
    Plouffe, in his new role, will be in charge of " all global policy and political activities, communications, and Uber branding efforts," Uber’s CEO, Travis Kalanick put it. This is a broad purview(范围)—Plouffe has said, in interviews, that he expects to "campaign" for Uber just as he did for the President—but, presumably, part of the job will be figuring out how to address challenges like the ones in California and New York. It will also include lobbying the government to come up with policies that are more favorable to Uber’s interests in the first place.
    Raguii hadn’t heard of Plouffe, but he said that he feels like he knows the type. He believes Uber has stayed under the radar of the regulatory establishment for the past several years and now that there are signs that this is changing. "This guy’s job is obvious—to tell these guys, how are we going to dodge the rules? How do we cut corners?"
    Of course, Plouffe described his mission differently. "We’ll be trying to change the point of view of established politicians, and there’s a lot of resistance coming from people who want to protect the status quo. " [br] We can infer from the first two paragraphs that______.
选项 A、drivers with Uber pay close attention to the executive suite
B、Uber’s new personnel change comes quite unexpectedly
C、drivers with Uber enjoy enough freedom and work flexibility
D、Uber’s development has aroused the interest of political circles
答案 C
解析 推断题。根据题干定位至文章前两段。第一段引出本文话题，提到了Uber的司机和管理层。第二段简单介绍了Uber的基本情况。第一段提到的司机正在外面度假，而从第二段对Uber的简单介绍中可以看出司机用自己的车辆，利用这个平台承接叫车服务。综合可知，Uber的司机拥有较大的自由度，工作时间也比较灵活，因此[C]为答案。
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