2014年6月英语四级阅读段落匹配题真题及答案
The End of the Book?
  By John Steele Gordon
  A). Amazon, by far the largest bookseller in the count ry, reported on May 19 that it is now selling more books i n its electronic Kindle format than in the old paper-and-i nk format. That is remarkable, considering that the Kindle has only been around for four years. E-books now account f or 14 percent of all book sales in this country and are in creasing far faster than overall book sales. E-book sales are up 146 percent over last year, while hardback sales in creased 6 percent and paperbacks decreased 8 percent.
  B). Does this spell the doom of the physical book? Cer tainly not immediately, and perhaps not at all. What it do es mean is that the book business will go through a transf ormation in the next decade or so more profound than any i t has seen since Gutenberg introduced printing from moveab le type in the 1450s.
  C). Physical books will surely become much rarer in th e marketplace. Mass market paperbacks, which have been dec lining for years anyway, will probably disappear, as will
hardbacks for mysteries, thrillers, "romance fiction," etc. Such books, which only rarely end up in permanent collecti ons either private or public, will probably only be availa ble as e-books within a few years. Hardback and trade pape rbacks for "serious" nonfiction and fiction will surely la
st longer. Perhaps it will become the mark of an author to reckon with that he or she is still published in hard copy.
  D). As for children's books, who knows? Children's boo ks are like dog food in that the purchasers are not the co nsumers, so the market (and the marketing) is inherently s trange.
  E). For clues to the book’s future, let’s look at so me examples of technological change and see what happened to the old technology.
  F). One technology replaces another only because the n ew technology is better, cheaper, or both. Thee greater th
e differential, the sooner and more thoroughly the new tec hnology replaces the old. Printing with moveable type on p aper reduced the cost o
f producin
g a book by orders of mag nitude compared wit
h the old-fashioned ones handwritten on vellum, which comes from sheepskin. A Bible—to be sure, a long book—required vellum made from 300 sheepskins and un
told man-hours of scribe labor. Before printing arrived, a Bible cost more than a middle-class house. There were perh aps 50,000 books in all of Europe in 1450. By 1500 there w ere 10 million.
  G). But while printing quickly caused the handwritten book to go extinct, handwriting lingered on well into the 16th century in the practice of "rubricating" books, or ha nd drawing elaborate initial letters (often in red ink, he nce the term). Very special books are still occasionally p roduced on vellum, but they are one-of-a-kind show pieces.
  H). Sometimes a new technology doesn't drive the old o ne extinct, but only parts of it while forcing the rest to evolve. The movies were widely predicted to drive live the ater out of the marketplace, but they didn't, because thea ter turned out to have qualities movies could not reproduc e. Equally, TV was supposed to drive movies extinct but, a gain, did not.
  I). Movies did, however, fatally impact some parts of live theater, such as vaudeville. (Ironically, TV
gave vau deville a brief revival in the 1950s in such shows as “Th e Ed Sullivan Show” and brought many of the old vaudevill e stars—Sophie Tucker, Jimmy Durante, Ben Blue—out of re
tirement.) And while TV didn't kill movies, it did kill B pictures, shorts, and, alas, cartoons.
  J). Nor did TV kill radio. Comedy and drama shows (“J ack Benny,” “Amos and Andy,” “The Shadow”) all migrat ed to television. But because you can’t drive a car and w atch television at the same time, radio prime time became rush hour, while music, talk, and news radio greatly enlar ged their audiences. Radio is today a very different busin ess than in the late 1940s and a much larger one.
  K). Sometimes old technology lingers for centuries bec ause of its symbolic power. Mounted cavalry replaced the c hariot on the battlefield around 1000 BC. But chariots mai ntained their place in parades and triumphs right up until the end of the Roman Empire 1,500 years later. The sword h asn't had a military function for a hundred years, but is still part of an officer's full-dress uniform, precisely b ecause a sword always symbolized "an officer and a gentlem an."
  L). Sometimes new technology is a little cranky at fir st. Television repairman was a common occupation in the 19 50s, for instance. And so the old technology remains as a back up. Steam captu
red the North Atlantic passenger busin
ess from sail in the 1840s because of its much greater spe ed. But steamships didn't lose their rigging and sails unt il the 1880s, because early marine engines had a nasty hab it of breaking down. Until ships became large enough (and engines small enough) to mount two engines side by side, t hey needed to keep sails. (The high cost of steam and the lesser need for speed kept the majority of the world’s oc ean freight moving by sail until the early years of the 20 th century.)steele
  M). Then there is the fireplace. Central heating was u biquitous in upper- and middle-class homes by the second h alf of the 19th century. But functioning fireplaces remain to this day a powerful selling point in a house or apartme nt. I suspect the reason is a deeply ingrained, atavistic love of fire. Fire was one of the earliest major technolog ical advances for humankind, providing heat, protection, a nd cooked food (which is much easier to eat and digest). H uman control of fire goes back far enough (over a million years) that evolution could have produced a genetic predis position towards fire as a central aspect of a human habit ation (just consider the phrase "hearth and home").
  N). Books—especially books the average person could a

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