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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2024-11-22  0
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] According to the passage, Uber is essentially______.
选项 A、a blog where people share driving resources
B、a network which serves as self-help rental intermediary
C、an e-community which keeps renters and tenants in touch
D、an Internet company that innovates ways of connection
答案 B
解析 细节题。浏览题干和选项可知，本题考查Uber的实际性质。第二段和第三段对此有比较详细的介绍。这是一种应用软件，乘客可借此发布叫车的信息，而司机也可以很灵活地选择自己愿意承担的用车业务。第三段还提到companies like Uber use our newfound connectedness to put us in touch，综合这些信息可知，Uber是一个网络，通过这个网络平台人们可以自助租车，因此[B]正确。
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