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1、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 GordonA). Amazon, by far the largest bookseller in the country, reported on May 19 that it is now selling more books in its electronic Kindle format than in the old paper-and-ink format. That is remarkable, considering that the Kindle has on
2、ly been around for four years. E-books now account for 14 percent of all book sales in this country and are increasing far faster than overall book sales. E-book sales are up 146 percent over last year, while hardback sales increased 6 percent and paperbacks decreased 8 percent.B). Does this spell t
3、he doom of the physical book? Certainly not immediately, and perhaps not at all. What it does mean is that the book business will go through a transformation in the next decade or so more profound than any it has seen since Gutenberg introduced printing from moveable type in the 1450s.C). Physical b
4、ooks will surely become much rarer in the marketplace. Mass market paperbacks, which have been declining for years anyway, will probably disappear, as will hardbacks for mysteries, thrillers, romance fiction, etc. Such books, which only rarely end up in permanent collections either private or public
5、, will probably only be available as e-books within a few years. Hardback and trade paperbacks for serious nonfiction and fiction will surely last 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 childrens books, who knows?
6、 Childrens books are like dog food in that the purchasers are not the consumers, so the market (and the marketing) is inherently strange.E). For clues to the books future, lets look at some examples of technological change and see what happened to the old technology.F). One technology replaces anoth
7、er only because the new technology is better, cheaper, or both. Thee greater the differential, the sooner and more thoroughly the new technology replaces the old. Printing with moveable type on paper reduced the cost of producing a book by orders of magnitude compared with the old-fashioned ones han
8、dwritten on vellum, which comes from sheepskin. A Bibleto be sure, a long bookrequired vellum made from 300 sheepskins and untold man-hours of scribe labor. Before printing arrived, a Bible cost more than a middle-class house. There were perhaps 50,000 books in all of Europe in 1450. By 1500 there w
9、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 hand drawing elaborate initial letters (often in red ink, hence the term). Very special books are still occasionally pr
10、oduced on vellum, but they are one-of-a-kind show pieces.H). Sometimes a new technology doesnt drive the old one extinct, but only parts of it while forcing the rest to evolve. The movies were widely predicted to drive live theater out of the marketplace, but they didnt, because theater turned out t
11、o have qualities movies could not reproduce. Equally, TV was supposed to drive movies extinct but, again, did not.I). Movies did, however, fatally impact some parts of live theater, such as vaudeville. (Ironically, TV gave vaudeville a brief revival in the 1950s in such shows as “The Ed Sullivan Sho
12、w” and brought many of the old vaudeville starsSophie Tucker, Jimmy Durante, Ben Blueout of retirement.) And while TV didnt kill movies, it did kill B pictures, shorts, and, alas, cartoons.J). Nor did TV kill radio. Comedy and drama shows (“Jack Benny,” “Amos and Andy,” “The Shadow”) all migrated to
13、 television. But because you cant drive a car and watch television at the same time, radio prime time became rush hour, while music, talk, and news radio greatly enlarged their audiences. Radio is today a very different business than in the late 1940s and a much larger one.K). Sometimes old technolo
14、gy lingers for centuries because of its symbolic power. Mounted cavalry replaced the chariot on the battlefield around 1000 BC. But chariots maintained their place in parades and triumphs right up until the end of the Roman Empire 1,500 years later. The sword hasnt had a military function for a hund
15、red years, but is still part of an officers full-dress uniform, precisely because a sword always symbolized an officer and a gentleman.L). Sometimes new technology is a little cranky at first. Television repairman was a common occupation in the 1950s, for instance. And so the old technology remains
16、as a back up. Steam captured the North Atlantic passenger business from sail in the 1840s because of its much greater speed. But steamships didnt lose their rigging and sails until the 1880s, because early marine engines had a nasty habit of breaking down. Until ships became large enough (and engines small enough) to mount two engines side by side, they needed to keep sails. (The high cost of steam and the lesser need for speed kept the majority of the
