考研英语阅读命题思路透析和真题揭秘(54)

A great deal of attention is being paid today to the so called digital divide-the division of the world into the info（information）rich and the info poor. And that divide does exist today. My wife and I lectured about this looming danger twenty years ago. What was less visible then, however, were the new, positive forces that work against the digital divide. There are reasons to be optimistic.

There are technological reasons to hope the digital divide will narrow. As the Internet becomes more and more commercialized, it is in the interest of business to universalize access-after all, the more people online, the more potential customers there are. More and more governments, afraid their countries will be left behind, want to spread Internet access. Within the next decade or two, one to two billion people on the planet will be netted together. As a result, I now believe the digital divide will narrow rather than widen in the years ahead. And that is very good news because the Internet may well be the most powerful tool for combating world poverty that we've ever had.

Of course, the use of the Internet isn't the only way to defeat poverty. And the Internet is not the only tool we have. But it has enormous potential.

To take advantage of this tool, some impoverished countries will have to get over their outdated anti-colonial prejudices with respect to foreign investment. Countries that still think foreign investment is an invasion of their sovereignty might well study the history of infrastructure （the basic structural foundations of a society）in the United States. When the United States built its industrial infrastructure, it didn't have the capital to do so. And that is why America's Second Wave infrastructure-including roads, harbors, highways, ports and so on-were built with foreign investment. The English, the Germans, the Dutch and the French were investing in Britain's former colony. They financed them. Immigrant Americans built them. Guess who owns them now? The Americans believe the same thing would be true in places like Brazil or anywhere else for that matter. The more foreign capital you have helping you build your Third Wave infrastructure, which today is an electronic infrastructure, the better off you're going to be. That doesn't mean lying down and becoming fooled, or letting foreign corporations run uncontrolled. But it does mean recognizing how important they can be in building the energy and telecom infrastructures needed to take full advantage of the Internet.

今天，人们十分关注所谓的是信息鸿沟--世界上信息资源丰富的地区和信息资源贫乏的地区之间的差异；这个差异确实存在，我和我妻子20年前就曾谈及这个隐约显现的危险。然而，那是还有一些抵制信息鸿沟的、新的积极因素在那个时候还不太明显。实际上我们完全有理由感到乐观。

一些技术上的因素使我们有理由期望数字鸿沟会缩小。随着互联网的日趋商业化，上网普及符合商家的利益--毕竟，上网人数越多，潜在的客户就越多。现在越来越多的政府惟恐自己的国家落后，纷纷推广互联网的使用范围。在未来的一二十年之内，全球将有一二十亿人加入互联网。因此，我认为在未来几年中，信息鸿沟将会缩小而不会变大。这是一个好消息，因为互联网很可能成为我们战胜世界贫困的最有力的工具。

当然，使用互联网不是消灭贫困的惟一方法。同时互联网也不是我们所拥有的惟一工具，但它却拥有巨大的潜力。

要想利用互联网，某些贫困国家必须克服那种对国外投资所持的过时了的各种反殖民偏见。那些认为外国投资是对本国主权的侵犯的国家最好还是研究一下美国的基础设施（社会的基本结构基础）的建设历史。当初美国建设自己的工业基础设施时，缺乏必要的资金，因此美国的第二次基础设施建设浪潮--包括公路、港口，高速公路、港口等等--都是用国外资金建造的。英国、德国、荷兰和法国都在前英国殖民地投资。他们提供了资金，而美洲移民则去建造那些设施。想想看，现在谁拥有这一切设施呢？是美国人。我想，在这件事上，巴西或其他任何地方同样也该这么做。你拥有越多的外国资金去建造第三次浪潮基础设施（今天主要指电子基础设施），那么你的情况就会越好。这并不是说卑躬屈膝、任人蒙骗，也不是对外国公司不加控制。但这的确意味着你已经认识到外国公司对本国能源及通信基础设施建设的重要性，而这些基础设施对于充分利用互联网是必不可少的。