Passage One
Questions 56 to 60 are based on the following passage.
The paperless office has earned a proud place on lists of technological promises that did not come to pass. Surely, though, the more modest goal of he carbon-paperless office is within the reach of mankind? Carbon paper allows two copies of a document to be made at once. Nowadays, a couple of keystrokes can do the same thing with a lot less fuss.
Yet carbon paper persists. Forms still need to be filled out in a way that produces copies. This should not come as a surprise. Innovation tends to create new niches, rather than refill those that already exist. So technologies may become marginal, but they rarely go extinct. And today the little niches in which old technologies take refuge are ever more viable and accessible, thanks to the Internet and the fact that production no longer needs to be so mass; making small numbers of obscure items is growing easier.
On top of that, a widespread Technology of nostalgia seeks to preserve all the ways people have ever done anything, simply because they are kind of neat. As a result technologies from all the way back to the stone age persist and even flourish in the modern world. According to What Technology Wants, a book by Kevin Kelly, one of the founders of Wired magazine, Americas flintknappers produce over a million new arrow and spear heads every year. One of the things technology wants, it seems, is to survive.
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