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英語四級聽力美文第42篇:Paper Still Has Weight
Humility is the best policy for technological forecasters. If you doubt that, remember thoseconfident predictions of 30 years ago about the coming arrival of the “paperless office.”
The arrival of computers everywhere in the workplace would, we were assured, soon makepaper a thing of the past. Bill Gates vision of a computer on every desk has been more or lessrealized. Yet most of the folks working at those desks are knee-deep in paper. Researchsuggests our increasing use of paperis due to the introduction of the very digital technologythat was supposed wipe it out. The case studies on email in the workplace, for example, showthat it can lead to a 40 percent increase in paper consumption —and this doesn’t take intoaccount the amount of paper used to print information from the Internet. There’s a wonderfulirony here, because the personal computer — not to mention the laser printer —was inventedin a lab set up by a copier company which was worried by all the talk of paperless offices. Ourattachment to paper is truly amazing.
An astonishing proportion of email users, for example, prints off their messages and storesthem all in filing cabinets. To the technological rationalist this behavior seems irrational. Whystore email messages in paper files,which take up valuable real estate and are effectivelyunsearchable, when you can keep them on a hard disk and effortlessly look through them forkeywords and phrases? The answer, of course, is it is the rationalists who are irrational. Ifpeople love paper, there must be a reason for it.And there is. It is highly portable, infinitelyflexible and embodies very high-resolution display technology, which consumes no batterypower. And it doesn’t have to be turned on before you can read it.
