英语四级真题长篇阅读的答案及解析_大学英语阅读

英语四级真题长篇阅读的答案及解析

　　As for children s books, who knows? Children s books are like dog food in that the purchasers are not the consumers, so the market is inherently strange.

　　For clues to the book s future, let s look at some examples of technological change and see what happened to the old technology.

　　One technology replaces another only because the new technology is better, cheaper, or both. The greater the difference, the sooner and more thoroughly the new technology replaces the old. Printing with moveable type on paper dramatically reduced the cost of producing a book compared with the old-fashioned ones handwritten on vellum, which comes from sheepskin. A Bible to be sure, a long book required vellum made from 300 sheepskins and countless man-hours of 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 were 10 million.

　　But while printing quickly caused the hand written book to die out, handwriting lingered on well into the 16th century. Very special books are still occasionally produced on vellum, but they are one-of-a-kind show pieces.

　　Sometimes a new technology doesn t drive the old one out, 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 didn t, because theater turned out to have qualities movies could not reproduce. Equally, TV was supposed to replace movies but, again, did not.