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  3. Read the article below about the real intentions of customers and the questi

Read the article below about the real intentions of customers and the questi

游客2025-05-17  2
问题     Read the article below about the real intentions of customers and the questions on the opposite page.
    For each question(13-18), mark one letter(A, B, C or D)on your Answer Sheet.
                    Turning Consumers into Customers
    The expression "supply and demand" was first coined as "demand and supply", by James Denham-Steuart in An Inquiry into the Principles of Political Economy, written in 1767. In his Inquiry, Denham-Steuart says of demand, "It must constantly appear reciprocal. If I demand a pair of shoes, the shoemaker either demands money, or something else for his own use," adding, "The nature of demand is to encourage industry." Nine years later, in The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith wrote, "The real and effectual discipline which is exercised over a workman is that of his customers. It is the fear of losing their employment which restrains his frauds and corrects his negligence."
    It helps to revisit these elementary lessons because we’ve been ignoring them on the Web—at the cost of billions of dollars in lost opportunities for businesses other than those driven by advertising and " big data" farming.
    To see what I mean, consider this fact: you are not a customer of Facebook or Twitter. Nor of Google’s search, mail, and other free services. The actual customers of those companies are advertisers, not you. In fact, you and I are the products being sold to advertisers. No matter how well those companies serve us with free goodies, the fact remains that these companies’ consumers and customers are different populations, and we are among the former, and not the latter, because we pay them nothing. In Adam Smith’s terms, we do not employ them.
    And, because we are merely consumers of these services, our concerns tend to be dismissed when they are in conflict with the ambitions of those services’ customers, the advertisers. This is why websites, advertisers and third parties take liberties with our personal data, our privacy, and our tolerance for "personalisation" of messages that still fail 99% of the time. This causes two problems. One is abuse of consumers. The other is a lack of what we could bring to the market’s table—besides money—if we were full-fledged customers.
    On the consumer protection front, the Tracking Protection Working Group of the W3C(the leading Web standards organisation)is meeting this week in Washington, as reported in an NPR story titled ’ Do Not Track’ Web Browser Option Gains Steam. Regulators and lawmakers in Washington are also on the case. Last year Sen. Jay Rockefeller introduced the Do-Not-Track Online Act. In February of this year, the White House published a Privacy Bill of Rights.
    An excellent source of ongoing documentation of consumer abuse is The Wall Street Journal’s What They Know, a series of reports begun on July 31, 2010. And, since journalism alone has proven insufficient for reversing the tide of abuse, Julia Angwin and the WTK team are convening Data Transparency Weekend starting this Friday in New York. The purpose is to "build free Web tools that promote data transparency and control". This is a strong move toward giving consumers the powers of customers, whether or not they pay anything. [br] From the last paragraph, we can infer that
选项 A、the consumers can expect to regain their reasonable rights.
B、the Wall Street’s attention on the websites is rising.
C、the authorities are promoting data transparency and control.
D、a series of reports could give consumers more power.
答案 A
解析 题目意为：“根据最后一段，我们能推断出……”，原文最后一段中指出从2010年7月31日起《华尔街日报》就针对消费者资料被滥用做出了一系列的报道，另外，JuliaAngwin与WTK团队正在召开数据透明周会议，以及本段末句指出This is a strongmove toward giving consumers the powers of customers，whether or not they payanything．即：这是关于赋予消费者和顾客一样的权益的一个重要举措，不论他们是否付费。由此可判断出消费者将有希望重获合理的权益，故A项为正确答案。
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