考研

[E] Ultimately, says Mr Donahoe, the post will have to stop delivering mail on Saturdays. Then perhaps on other days too. The post has survived new technologies before, he points out. “In 1910, we owned the most horses, by 1920 we owned the most vehicles.” But the internet just might send it the way of the pony express.

[F] But as ever more Americans go online instead of sending paper, the volume of mail has been plummeting. The decline is steeper than even pessimists expected a decade ago, says Patrick Donahoe, the current postmastergeneral. Worse, because the post must deliver to every address in the country—about 150m, with some 1.4m additions every year—costs are simultaneously going up. As a result, the post has lost $20 billion in the last four years and expects to lose another $8 billion this fiscal year.

[G] And although the recession made everything worse, the internet is the main culprit. As Christmas cards have gone online (and “green”), so have bills. In 2000, 5% of Americans paid utilities online. Last year 55% did, and eventually everybody will, says Mr Donahoe. Photos now go on Facebook, magazines come on iPads. Already, at least for Americans under a certain age, the post delivers only bad news or nuisances, from jury summonses to junk mail. Pleasant deliveries probably arrive by a parcel service such as UPS or FedEx.

1→2→3→C→4→5→E

Passage 6

Directions: For question 1—5, choose the most suitable paragraphs from the list A—G and fill them into the numbered boxes to form a coherent text. Paragraphs A and B have been correctly placed.

[A] Among national newspapers, paywalls are still rare, though the New York Times and the Times of London both have them. Most wallbuilding is being done by small local outfits. “Local newspapers are more vital to their communities, and they have less competition,” explains Ken Doctor, the author of “Newsonomics”

[B] The paywallbuilders tend to report a drop in online traffic. But not usually a steep drop, and not always an enduring one. Oklahoma’s Tulsa World, which started demanding subscriptions from heavy online readers in April, reports that traffic in August of this year was higher than a year earlier. One possible explanation, odd as it may sound, is that readers are still discovering its website. “We have paper subscribers who want nothing to do with the internet,” explains Robert Lorton, the Tulsa World’s publisher. Fewer than half of the newspaper’s print subscribers have so far signed up for unrestricted free access to the website. Other newspapers report similar proportions.

[C] That suggests the game is not over. The earlyadopting young abandoned print newspapers long ago. But many newspapers have a surprisingly large, if dwindling, herd of paying customers. They will milk them as hard as they can.

[D] On October 10th the Baltimore Sun will join a fastgrowing club. The newspaper will start tracking the number of times people read its stories online; when they reach a limit of 15 a month, they will be asked to pay. Local bloggers may squawk about content wanting to be free. But perhaps not as much as they would have done a few months ago. There is a sense of inevitability about paywalls. In April 2010 PaidContent, an online publication, found 26 American local and metropolitan newspapers charging for online access. Several times that number now do so. More than 100 newspapers are using Press+, an online payment system developed in part by a former publisher of the Wall Street Journal. Media News, a newspaper group, put up two paywalls in 2010; it has erected 23 so far this year.

[E] Why the rush? One reason is that building paywalls has become easier: Press+ and Google’s One Pass will collect online subscriptions on behalf of newspapers, skimming a little off the top. The popularity of Apple’s iPad is another explanation. Many newspapers have created paidfor apps. There is little point doing that if a tablet user can simply read the news for free on a web browser. But the big push comes from advertising—or the lack of it.

[F] The most ambitious architects are in Europe. Since May Slovakia has had a virtual national paywall—a single payment system that encompasses nine of the country’s biggest publications. Slovaks who want to read news online pay 2.90 ($3.90) a month, which is split between the newspapers according to a formula that accounts for where people signed up and how heavily they use each publication’s website. Piano Media, which built the system, plans to launch another national paywall in Europe early next year.

[G] Jim Moroney, publisher of the Dallas Morning News, says American newspapers used to abide by an “8020” rule. That is, 80% of their revenues came from advertising and 20% came from subscriptions. Those days are over. Newspaper advertising, print and online combined, has crashed from $9.6 billion in the second quarter of 2008 to $6 billion in the second quarter of 2011, according to the Newspaper Association of America. Few believe it will ever fully recover. So the race is on to build a subscription business, both in print (cover prices are going up) and online.

1→A→2→3→4→B→5

Passage 7

Directions: For question 1—5, choose the most suitable paragraphs from the list A—G and fill them into the numbered boxes to form a coherent text. Paragraphs A and G have been correctly placed.

[A] A GOOD unit of measurement, writes Robert Crease, must satisfy three conditions. It has to be easy to relate to, match the things it is meant to measure in scale (no point using inches to describe geographical distances) and be stable. In his new book, “World in the Balance”, Mr Crease, who teaches philosophy at Stony Brook University on Long Island and writes a column for the magazine Physics World, describes man’s quest for that metrological holy grail. In the process, he shows that the story of metrology, not obvious material for a pageturner, can in the right hands make for a riveting read.

[B] In response the metre, from the Greek metron, meaning “measure”, was ushered in, helped along by French revolutionaries, eager to replace the Bourbon toise (just under two metres) with an allnew, universal unit. The metre was to be defined as a fraction of the Paris meridian whose precise measurement was under way. Together with the kilogram, initially the mass of a decaliter of distilled water, it formed the basis of the metric system.

[C] Successful French metrological diplomacy meant that in the ensuing decades the metric system supplanted a hotchpotch of regional units in all bar a handful of nations. Even Britain, long wedded to its imperial measures, caved in. (Americans are taking longer to persuade.) In 1875 Nature, a British magazine, hailed the metric system as “one of the greatest triumphs of modern civilisation”. Paradoxically, Mr Crease argues, it thrived in part as a consequence of British imperialism, which all but wiped out innumerable indigenous measurement systems, creating a vacuum that the new framework was able to fill.

[D] For all its diplomatic success, though, the metre failed to live up to its original promise. Tying it to the meridian, or any other natural benchmark, proved intractable. As a result, the unit continued to be defined in explicit reference to a unique platinumiridium ingot until 1960. Only then was it recast in less fleeting terms: as a multiple of the wavelength of a particular type of light. Finally, in 1983, it was tied to a fundamental physical constant, the speed of light, becoming the distance light travels in 1/299,792,458 of a second. (The second had by then itself got a metrological makeover: no longer a 60th of a 60th of a 24th of the period of the Earth’s rotation, it is currently the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of a phenomenon called microwave transition in an atom of caesium133.)

[E] The earliest known units met the first two of Mr Crease’s requirements well. Most were drawn from things to hand: the human body (the foot or the mile, which derives from the Latin milia passuum, or 1,000 paces) and tools (barrels, cups). Others were more abstract. The journal (from jour, French for “day”), used in medieval France, was equivalent to the area a man could plough in a day with a single ox, as was the acre in Britain or the morgen in north Germany and Holland.

[F] But no two feet, barrels or workdays are quite the same. What was needed was “a foot, not yours or mine”. Calls for a firm standard that was not subject to fluctuations or the whim of feudal lords, grew louder in the late 17th century. They were a consequence of the beginnings of international trade and modern science. Both required greater precision to advance.

[G] Now the kilogram, the last artefactbased unit, awaits its turn. Adding urgency is the fact the “real” kilogram, stored in a safe in the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in Sèvres, near Paris, seems to be shedding weight relative to its official copies. Metrologists are busy trying to recast it in terms of Planck’s constant, a formula which is deemed cosmicly inviolate, as is the speed of light (pending further findings from CERN, anyway). In his jolly book, Mr Crease is cheering them on.

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