考研英语阅读真题文章三十篇十九_大学英语阅读

考研英语阅读真题文章三十篇十九

　　Being behind the bleeding edge of technological development can sometimes be a good thing, in short. It means that early versions of a technology, which may be buggy, unreliable or otherwise inferior, can be avoided. America, for example, was the first country to adopt colour television, which explains why American television still looks so bad today: other countries came to the technology later and adopted technically superior standards.

　　The lesson to be drawn from all of this is that it is wrong to assume that developing countries will follow the same technological course as developed nations. Having skipped fixed line telephones, some parts of the world may well skip desktop computers in favour of portable devices, for example. Entire economies may even leapfrog from agriculture straight to hightech industries. That is what happened in Israel, which went from citrus farming to microchips; India, similarly, is doing its best to jump straight to a hightech service economy.

　　Those who anticipate and facilitate leapfrogging can prosper as a result. Those who fail to see it coming risk being jumped over. Kodak, for example, hit by the sudden rise of digital cameras in the developed world, wrongly assumed that it would still be able to sell old fashioned film and film cameras in China instead. But the emerging Chinese middle classes leapfrogged straight to digital cameras-and even those are now outnumbered by camera phones.