【文章內(nèi)容簡(jiǎn)介】 in the amount of paper being used per worker in the workplace.” says John Maine, vice president of a pulp and paper economic consulting firm. “More information is being transmitted electronically, and more and more people are fortable with the information residing only in electronic form without printing multiple backups.” In addition, Mr. Maine points to the lackluster employment market for whitecollar workers – the primary driver of office paper consumption – for the shift in paper usage. The real paradigm shift may be in the way paper is used. Since the advent of advanced and reliable officenetwork systems, data storage has moved away from paper archives. The secretarial art of “filing” is disappearing from job descriptions. Much of today39。s data may never leave its original digital format. The changing attitudes toward paper have finally caught the attention of paper panies, says Richard Harper, a researcher at Microsoft. “All of a sudden, the paper industry has started thinking,‘We need to learn more about the behavioural aspects of paper use,39?！?he says. “They had never asked, they39。d just assumed that 70 million sheets would be bought per year as a literal function of economic growth.” To reduce paper use, some panies are working to bine digital and paper capabilities. For example, Xerox Corp. is developing electronic paper: thin digital displays that respond to a stylus, like a pen on paper. Notations can be erased or saved digitally. Another idea, intelligent paper, es from Anoto Group. It would allow notations made with a stylus on a page printed with a special magnetic ink to simultaneously appear on a puter screen. Even with such technological advances, the improved capabilities of digital storage continue to act against “paperlessness,” argues Paul Saffo, a technology forecaster. In his prophetic and metaphorical 1989 essay, “The Electronic Pinata (彩罐),” he suggests that the increasing amounts of electronic data necessarily require more paper. The information industry today is like a huge electronic pinata, posed of a thin paper crust surrounding an electronic core,” Mr. Saffo wrote. The growing paper crust “is most noticeable, but the hidden electronic core that produces the crust is far larger – and growing more rapidly. The result is that we are being paperless, but we hardly notice at all.” In the same way that digital innovations have increased paper consumption, Saffo says, so has video conferencing – with its promise of fewer inperson meetings – boosting business travel. “That39。s one of the great ironies of the information age,” Saffo says. “It39。s just mon sense that the more you talk to someone by phone or puter, it inevitably leads to a facetoface meeting. The best thing for the aviation industry was the Internet.” 16. What function does the second sentence in the first paragraph serve? A. It further explains hightech hubris. B. It confirms the effect of hightech hubris. C. It offers a cause for hightech hubris. D. It offers a contrast to hightech hubris. 17. Which of the following is NOT a reason for the slowdown in paper sales? A. Workforce with better puter skills. B. Slow growth of the US economy. C. Changing patterns in paper use. D. Changing employment trends. 18. The two innovations by Xerox Corp. and Anoto Group feature _______. A. integrated use of paper and digital form. B. a shift from paper to digital form. C. the use of puter screen. D. a new style of writing. 19. What does the author mean by “irony of the information age”? A. The dream of the “paperless” office will be realized.B. People usually prefer to have facetoface meetings. C. More digital data use leads to greater paper use. D. Some people are opposed to videoconferencing.20. What is the author39。s attitude towards “paperlessness”? A. He reviews the situation from different perspectives. B. He agrees with some of the people quoted in the passage. C. He has a preference for digital innovations. D. He thinks airlines benefit most from the digital age.TEXT CWhen George Orwell wrote in 1941 that England was “the most classridden country under the sun”, he was only partly right. Societies have always had their hierarchies, with some group perched at the top. In the Indian state of Bihar the Ranveer Sena, an uppercaste private army, even killed to stay there. By that measure class in Britain hardly seems entrenched (根深蒂固的). But in another way Orwell was right, and continues to be. As a new YouGov poll shows, Britons are surprisingly alert to class – both their own and that of others. And they still think class is sticky. According to the poll, 48% of people aged 30 or over say they expect to end up better off than their parents. But only 28% expect to end up in a different class. More than twothirds think neither they nor their children will leave the class they were born into. What does this thing that people cannot escape consist of these days? And what do people look at when decoding which class someone belongs to? The most useful identifying markers, according to the poll, are occupation, address, accent and ine, in that order. The fact that ine es fourth is revealing: though some of the habits and attitudes that class used to define are more widely spread than they were, class still indicates something less blunt than mere wealth. Occupation is the most trusted guide to class, but changes in the labour market have made that harder to read than when Orwell was writing. Manual workers have shrunk along with farming and heavy industry as a proportion of the workforce, while the number of people in whitecollar jobs has surged. Despite this striking change, when they were asked to place themselves in a class, Brits in 2006 huddled in much the same categories as they did when they were asked in 1949. So, jobs, which were once a fairly reliable guide to class, have bee misleading. A