It was going to have roughly the effect of a neutron bomb attack on high str

游客2024-05-15  15

问题     It was going to have roughly the effect of a neutron bomb attack on high streets and shopping malls. The buildings would be left standing but the people would vanish. Such was the superior efficiency of selling things via the Internet that brick-and-mortar stores would be unable to compete on price, choice or even service. Book and music sellers had already been "Amazoned". Soon web-based "category-killers", in everything from toys to pet supplies, would overwhelm their physical-world competitors. Shoppers would never be more than a mouse-click from the best deals. Traditional retailers, terrified of cannibalizing (同类 相食) sales and destroying the value of their expensive properties, were already too late to meet the challenge. "In some categories," said Mary Meeker, a seer (预言家) of the Internet at Morgan Stanley, "it’s already game over."
    These are convenient beliefs for anyone justifying some e-commerce share prices, but they are already mostly wrong. The reasons should surprise no one. The Internet is not a dominant technology but rather a network of people. It is a rich and highly flexible means of communicating that is rapidly achieving pervasiveness because more and more people find it easy and convenient to use. But it is those people’s preferences that will count; and for most people, shopping is more than just a means to an end. Even if the Internet provided a perfectly efficient way to shop it would not provide a satisfactory alternative to the physical enjoyment of sniffing a ripe melon, say, or trying on a cashmere sweater.
    Of course, some products, such as music and banking, can be distributed electronically with success and cost saving. But most purchases cannot be reduced to digital code. And distributing physical goods is cumbersome (笨重的) and expensive. Behind even the most exciting user interface there are old-fashioned warehouses and lorries, customers who decline to sit at home waiting for purchases to arrive, and goods that must be re-wrapped and expensively returned. No wonder that the cost of getting goods to customers’ homes so often soaks up the notional price advantages of e-commerce.
    What Internet shoppers have quickly realized is that the web is an addition to, and not a substitute for, their shopping habits. It is wonderful for gathering up-to-date information about products and prices. Cyber Dialogue, a research firm, estimates that in 1998 23m Americans sought information online, but then made their purchases offline, compared with only 17.7m who did the whole thing online. [br] The author compares _____ of the online sale to the effect of neutron bomb attack.

选项 A、the efficiency
B、the choice
C、the price
D、the service

答案 A

解析 作者在首段开头指出It会造成中子弹一样的冲击,但It指代什么,作者在第3句才说明,通过such联系上下文的功能可以知道,It指的就是网上销售的高效率.由此可见,选项A为本题答案。
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