Passage 2 A great deal of attention is being paid today to the socalled digital pide — the pision of the world into the info(information) rich and the info poor. And that pide does exist today. My wife and I lectured about this looming danger twenty years ago. What was less visible then, however, were the new, positive forces that work against the digital pide. There are reasons to be optimistic.
There are technological reasons to hope the digital pide will narrow. As the Internet becomes more and more commercialized, it is in the interest of business to universalize access — after all, the more people online, the more potential customers there are. More and more governments, afraid their countries will be left behind, want to spread Internet access. Within the next decade or two, one to two billion people on the planet will be netted together. As a result, I now believe the digital pide will narrow rather than widen in the years ahead. And that is very good news because the Internet may well be the most powerful tool for combating world poverty that we’ve ever had.
Of course, the ue of the Internet isn’t the only way to defeat poverty. And the Internet is not the only tool we have. But it has enormous potential.To take advantage of this tool, some impoverished countries will have to getover their outdated anticolonial prejudices with respect to foreign investment. Countries that still think foreign investment is an invasion of their sovereignty might well study the history of infrastructure (the basic structural foundations of a society) in the United States. When the United States built its industrials infrastructure, it didn’t have the capital to do so. And that is why America’s Second Wave infrastructure — including roads, barbors, highways, prots and so on — were built with foreign investment. The English, the Germans, the Dutch and the French were investing in Britain’s former colony. They financed them. Immigrant Americans built them. Guess who owns them now? The Americans. I believe the same thing would be true in places like Brazil or anywhere else for that matter. The more foreign capital you have helping you build your Third Wave infrastructure, which today is an electronic infrastructure, the better off you’re going to be. That doesn’t mean lying down and becoming fooled, or letting foreign corporations run uncontrolled. But it does means recognizing how important they can be in building the energy and telecom infrastructures needed to take full advantage of the Internet.
第55题Digital pide is something _______ .
A getting worse because of the Internet
B the rich countries are responsible for
C the world must guard against
D considered positive today
正确答案：C
