【单选题】
Directions: In this part, you will have 15 minutes to go over the passage quickly and answer the questions onAnswer Sheet 1. For questions 1-7, choose the best answer from the four choices markedA、,B、,C、andD、. For questions 8-10, complete the sentences with the information given in the passage.
A、library to Last Forever
"The fundamental reasons why the electric car has not attained the popularity it deserves are the failure of the manufacturers to properly educate the general public regarding the wonderful utility of the electric; the failure of ’power companies’ to make it easy to own and operate the electric by an adequate distribution of charging and boosting stations. "
This quotation would hardly surprise anyone who follows electric vehicles.But it may be surprising to hear that in the year when it was written thousands of electric cars were produced and that year was nearly a century ago. This appeared in a 1916 issue of the journalElectrical World, which I found in GoogleBooks, our searchable repository of millions of books. It may seem strange to look back a hundred years on a topic that is so contemporary, yet I often find that the past has valuable lessons for the future. In this case, I was lucky—electric vehicles were studied and written about extensively early in the 20th century, and there are many books on the subject from which to choose.Because books published before 1923 are in the public domain, I am able to view them easily.
But the vast majority of books ever written are not accessible to anyone except the most persistent researchers at premier academic libraries.Books written after 1923 quickly disappear into a literary black hole. With rare exceptions, one can buy them only for the small number of years they are in print.After that, they are found only in a vanishing number of libraries and used book stores.As the years pass, contracts get lost and forgotten, authors and publishers disappear, the rights holders become impossible to track down.
Inevitably, the few remaining copies of the books are left to decay slowly or are lost to fires, floods and other disasters. While I was at Stanford in 1998, floods damaged or destroyed tens of thousands of books. Unfortunately, such events are not uncommon—a similar flood happened at Stanford just 20 years prior. You could read about it in The Stanford-Lockheed Meyer Library Flood Report, published in 1980, but this book itself is no longer available.
Because books are such an important part of the world’s collective knowledge and cultural heritage, Larry Page, the co-founder of Google, first proposed that they digitize all books a decade ago, when they were a fledgling(无经验的) startup.At the time, it was viewed as so ambitious and challenging a project that they were unable to attract anyone to work on it.But five years later, in 2004, GoogleBooks (then called Google Print) was born, allowing users to search hundreds of thousands of books. Today, they number over 10 million and counting.
The next year GoogleBooks were sued (起诉) by theAuthors Guild and theAssociation ofAmerican Publishers over the project. While they have had disagreements, they have a common goal—to unlock the wisdom held in the enormous number of out-of-print books, while fairly compensating the rights holders.As a result, they were able to work together to devise a settlement that accomplishes the shared vision. While this settlement is a win-win for authors, publishers and Google, the real winners are the readers who will now have access to a greatly expanded world of books.
There has been some debate about the settlement, and many groups have offered their opinions, both for and against. This agreeme
网考网参考答案：C
网考网解析：
[一点即通] 根据题干关键词settlement，Authors Guild，Google定位到原文第六段最后两句：As a result, we were able to work together to devise a settlement that accomplishes our shared vision. While this settlement is a win-win for authors, publishers and Google, the real winners are the readers who will now have access to a greatly expanded world of books. 和第七段首句：There has been some debate about the settlement, and many groups have offered their opinions, both for and against. 可知最终谷歌图书、作者、出版人之间达成了共赢的协议，但是人们对此褒贬不一，C)项符合文意。 document.getElementById("warp").style.display="none"; document.getElementById("content").style.display="block"; 查看试题解析出处>>
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