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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2024-04-30  12
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] Compared with firms who offered limited DSL and cable-modem access, BVU______.
选项 A、has to cope with higher cost due to its use of fiber
B、delivers considerate services for its customers
C、covers three services within a single price
D、is still under local government’s support
答案 A
解析 推理判断题。根据第四段可知，BVU面临与那些给用户提供有限DSL及电缆调制解调路径的公司竞争的局面。根据段落内逻辑关系，可推断最后一句说明了原因，即光纤维是昂贵的，纯粹的商业企业是不会考虑为该纤维支付费用的，因此A)是本题答案。B)“为用户提供周到的服务”，与原文无关，故排除；C)“一个价钱包括三项服务”，与题干问题无关，故排除；D)“仍然受到当地政府的扶植”，是对原文的主观臆断，故排除。
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