题目内容

The Telecommunications Revolution
A transformation is occurring that should greatly boost living standards in the developing world. Places that until recently were deaf and dumb are rapidly acquiring up-to-date telecommunications that will let them promote both internal and foreign investment. It may take a decade for many countries in Asia, Latin America, and Eastern Europe to improve transportation, power supplies, and other utilities. But a single optical fiber with a diameter of less than half a millimeter can carry more information than a large cable made of copper wires. By installing optical fiber, digital switches, and the latest wireless transmission systems, a parade of urban centers and industrial zones from Beijing to Budapest are stepping directly into the Information Age. A spider's web of digital and wireless communication links is already reaching most of Asia and parts of Eastern Europe.
All these developing regions see advanced communications as a way to leap over whole stages of economic development. Widespread access to information technologies, for example, promises to condense the time required to change from labor-intensive assembly work to industries that involve engineering, marketing, and design. Modem communications "will give countries like China and Vietnam a huge advantage over countries stuck with old technology".
How fast these nations should push ahead is a matter of debate. Many experts think Vietnam is going too far by requiring that all mobile phones be expensive digital models, when it is desperate for any phones, period. "These countries lack experience in weighing costs and choosing between technologies," says one expert.
Still, there's little dispute that communications will be a key factor separating the winners from the losers. Consider Russia. Because of its strong educational system in mathematics and science, it should thrive in the Information Age. The problem is its national phone system is a rusting antique that dates from the 1930s. To lick this problem, Russia is starting to install optical fiber and has a strategic plan to pump $40 billion into various communications projects. But its economy is stuck in recession and it barely has the money to even scratch the surface of the problem.
Compare that with the mainland of China. Over the next decade, it plans to pour some $100 billion into telecommunications equipment. In a way, China's backwardness is an advantage, because the expansion occurs just as new technologies are becoming cheaper than copper wire systems. By the end of 1995, each of China's provincial capitals except for Lhasa will have digital switches and high-capacity optical fiber links. This means that major cities are getting the basic infrastructure to become major parts of the information superhighway, allowing people to log on to the most advanced services available.
Telecommunications is also a key to Shanghai's dream of becoming a top financial center. To offer peak performance in providing the electronic data and paperless trading global investors expect, Shanghai plans telecommunications networks as powerful as those in Manhattan.
Meanwhile, Hungary also hopes to jump into the modem world. Currently, 700,000 Hungarians are waiting for phones. To partially overcome the problem of funds and to speed the import of Western technology, Hungary sold a 30% stake in its national phone company to two Western companies. To further reduce the waiting list for phones, Hungary has leased rights to a Dutch-Scandinavian group of companies to build and operate what it says will be one of the most advanced digital mobile phone systems in the world. In fact, wireless is one of the most popular ways to get a phone system up fast in developing countries. It's cheaper to build radio towers than to string lines across mountain ridges, and businesses eager for reliable service are willing to accept a significantly higher price tag for a wireless call—the fee is typically two to four times as much as for calls made over fixed lines.
Wireless demand and usage have also exploded across the entire width and breadth of Latin America. For wireless phone service providers, nowhere is business better than in Latin America—having an operation there is like having an endless pile of money at your disposal. BellSouth Corporation, with operations in four wireless markets, estimates its annual revenue per average customer at about $2,000 as compared to $860 in the United States. That's partly because Latin American customers talk two to four times as long on the phone as people in North America.
Thailand is also turning to wireless, as a way to allow Thais to make better use of all the time they spend stuck in traffic. And it isn't that easy to call or fax from the office: The waiting list for phone lines has from one to two million names on it. So mobile phones have become the rage among businesspeople who can remain in contact despite the traffic jams.
Vietnam is making one of the boldest leaps. Despite a per person income of just $220 a year, all of the 300,000 lines Vietnam plans to add annually will be optical fiber with digital switching, rather than cheaper systems that send electrons over copper wires. By going for next-generation technology now, Vietnamese telecommunications officials say they'll be able to keep pace with anyone in Asia for decades.
For countries that have lagged behind for so long, the temptation to move ahead in one jump is hard to resist. And despite the mistakes they'll make, they'll persist—so that one day they can cruise alongside Americans and Western Europeans on the information superhighway.

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Slavery Gave Me Nothing to Lose
I remember the very day that I became black. Up to my thirteenth year I lived in the little Negro town of Eatonville, Florida. It is exclusively a black town. The only white people I knew passed through the town going to or coming from Orlando, Florida. The native whites rode dusty horses, and the northern tourists traveled down the sandy village road in automobiles. The town knew the Southerners and never stopped chewing sugar cane when they passed. But the Northerners were something else again. They were peered at cautiously from behind curtains by the timid. The bold would come outside to watch them go past and got just as much pleasure out of the tourists as the tourists got out of the village.
The front deck might seem a frightening place for the rest of the town, but it was a front row seat for me. My favorite place was on top of the gatepost. Not only did I enjoy the show, but I didn't mind the actors knowing that ! liked it. I usually spoke to them in passing. I'd wave at them and when they returned my wave, I would say a few words of greeting. Usually the automobile or the horse paused at this, and after a strange exchange of greetings, I would probably "go a piece of the way" with them, as we say in farthest Florida, and follow them down the road a bit. If one of my family happened to come to the front of the house in time to see me, of course the conversation would be rudely broken off.
During this period, white people differed from black to me only in that they rode through town and never lived there. They liked to hear me "speak pieces" and sing and wanted to see me dance, and gave me generously of their small silver for doing these things, which seemed strange to me, for I wanted to do them so much that I needed bribing to stop. Only they didn't know it. The colored people gave no coins. They disapproved of any joyful tendencies in me, but I was their Zora nevertheless. I belonged to them, to the nearby hotels, to the country—everybody's Zora.
But changes came to the family when I was thirteen, and I was sent to school in Jacksonville. I left Eatonville as Zora. When I got off the riverboat at Jacksonville, she was no more. It seemed that I had suffered a huge change. I was not Zora of Eatonville anymore; I was now a little black girl. I found it out in certain ways. In my heart as well as in the mirror, I became a permanent brown—like the best shoe polish, guaranteed not to rub nor run.
Someone is always at my elbow reminding me that I am the granddaughter of slaves. It fails to register depression with me. Slavery is something sixty years in the past. The operation was successful and the patient is doing well, thank you. The terrible war that made me an American instead of a slave said "On the line!". The period following the Civil War said "Get set!", and the generation before me said "Go!". Like a foot race, I am off to a flying start and I must not halt in the middle to look behind and weep. Slavery is the price I paid for civilization, and the choice was not with me. No one on earth ever had a greater chance for glory—the world to be won and nothing to be lost. It is thrilling to think, to know, that for any act of mine, I shall get twice as much praise or twice as much blame. It is quite exciting to hold the center of the national stage, with the audience not knowing whether to laugh or to weep.
I do not always feel colored. Even now I often achieve the unconscious Zora of that small village, Eatonville. For instance, I can sit in a restaurant with a white person. We enter chatting about any little things that we have in common and the white man would sit calmly in his seat, listening to me with interest.
At certain times 1 have no race, I am me. But in the main, I feel like a brown bag of mixed items propped up against a wall—against a wall in company with other bags, white, red and yellow. Pour out the contents, and there is discovered a pile of small things both valuable and worthless. Bits of broken glass, lengths of string, a key to a door long since decayed away, a rusty knife- blade, old shoes saved for a road that never was and never will be, a nail bent under the weight of things too heavy for any nail, a dried flower or two still with a little fragrance. In your hand is the brown bag. On the ground before you is the pile it held—so much like the piles in the other bags, could they be emptied, that all might be combined and mixed in a single heap and the bags refilled without altering the content of any greatly. A bit of colored glass more or less would not matter. Perhaps that is how the Great Stuffer of Bags filled them in the first place—who knows？

Small cars, rather than huge gas-gulpers, are winning sales.
More and more Americans are beginning to treasure the limited energy supply in their daily life.
__ More and more people are riding buses and forming car pools to help reduce consumption of fuel, with some of the larger cities putting new push behind efforts to develop rapid-transit systems.
1.TSRecent awareness of the energy shortage in America has brought the bicycle into renewed popularity.

I hear a lot of people talking about Ecstasy, calling it a fun, harmless drug. All I can think is, "if they only knew."
I grew up in a small, rural town in Pennsylvania. It's one of those places where everyone knows your name, what you did, what you ate and so on. I was a straight-A student and one of the popular kids, liked by all the different crowds. Drugs never played a part in my life. They were never a question -- I was too involved and focused on other things.
I always dreamed of moving to New York City to study acting and pursue a career in theater. My dream came true when my mom brought me to the city to attend acting school. As you can imagine, it was quite a change from home.
I was exposed to new people, new ideas and a completely new way of life -- a way of life that exposed me to drugs. Most of the people that I met in the acting school had already been doing drugs for years. I felt that by using drugs, I would become a part of their world and it would deepen my friendships with them to new levels. I tried pot, even a little cocaine, but it was Ecstasy that changed my life forever.
I remember the feeling I had the first time I did Ecstasy: complete and utter bliss. I could feel the pulse of the universe. It was as if I had unlocked some sort of secret world; it was as if I'd found heaven. And I wondered how anything that made you feel so good could possibly be bad.
As time went by, things changed. I graduated, and began to use drugs, especially Ecstasy, more frequently. As I did, I actually started to look down on those who did not. I surrounded myself only with those who did. I had gone from a girl who never used drugs to a woman who couldn't imagine life without them.
In five months, I went from a person living somewhat responsibly while pursuing my dream to a person who didn't care about a thing -- and the higher I got, the deeper I sank into a dark, lonely place. When I did sleep, I had nightmares and the shakes. I had pasty skin, a throbbing head and the beginnings of paranoia, but I ignored it all, thinking it was normal until the night I thought I was dying.
On this night, I was sitting on the couch with my friends, watching a movie and feeling normal when suddenly, I felt as if I needed to jump out of my skin. Racing thoughts, horrible images and illusions crept through my mind. I thought I was seeing the devil, and I repeatedly asked my friends if I was dead. On top of all this, I felt as if I was having a heart attack. Somehow, I managed to pick up the telephone and call my mom in the middle of the night, telling her to come get me. She did, pulling me out of my apartment the next morning.
I didn't know who I was or where I was as my mom drove me back to my family's hospital in Pennsylvania. I spent most of the drive curling up in the back seat while my younger sister tried to keep me calm.
I spent the next 14 days in the hospital in a state of extreme confusion. This is what Ecstasy gave me -- but it didn't stop there. My doctors performed a scan of my brain. I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw the results. The scan showed several dark marks on the image of my brain, and my doctors told me those were areas -- areas that carry out memory functions -- where the activity of my brain had been changed in some way.
Since I saw that scan, my life has been an uphill crawl.
I hear people say Ecstasy is a harmless, happy drug. There's nothing happy about the way that "harmless" drug chipped away at my life. Ecstasy took my strength, my motivation, my dreams, my friends, my apartment, my money and most of all, my sanity. I worry about my future and my health every day. I have many mountains ahead of me, but I plan to keep climbing because I'm one of the lucky ones.
I've been given a second chance, and that's not something that everyone gets.

Longing for a New Welrare System
A welfare client is supposed to cheat. Everybody expects it. Faced with sharing a dinner of raw pet food with the cat, many people in wheelchairs I know bleed the system for a few extra dollars. They tell the government that they are getting two hundred dollars less than their real pension so they can get a little extra welfare money. Or, they tell the caseworker that the landlord raised the rent by a hundred dollars.
I have opted to live a life of complete honesty. So instead, I go out and drum up some business and draw cartoons. I even tell welfare how much I make! Oh, I'm tempted to get paid under the table. But even if I yielded to that temptation, big magazines are not going to get involved in some sticky situation. They keep my records, and that information goes right into the government's computer. Very high-profile.
As a welfare client I'm expected to bow before the caseworker. Deep down, caseworkers know that they are being made fools of by many of their clients, and they feel they are entitled to have clients bow to them as compensation. I'm not being bitter. Most caseworkers begin as college-educated liberals with high ideals. But after a few years in a system that practically requires people to lie, they become like the one I shall call "Suzanne", a detective in shorts.
Not long after Christmas last year, Suzanne came to inspect my apartment and saw some new posters pasted on the wall. "Where'd you get the money for those？" she wanted to know.
"Friends and family."
"Well, you'd better have a receipt for it, by God. You have to report any donations or gifts."
This was my cue to beg. Instead, I talked back. "I got a cigarette from somebody on the street the other day. Do I have to report that？"
"Well, I'm sorry, but I don't make the rules, Mr. Callahan."
Suzanne tries to lecture me about repairs to my wheelchair, which is always breaking down because welfare won't spend money maintaining it properly. "You know, Mr. Callahan, I've heard that you put a lot more miles on that wheelchair than average."
Of course I do. I'm an active worker, not a vegetable. I live near downtown, so I can get around in a wheelchair. I wonder what she'd think if she suddenly broke her hip and had to crawl to work.
Government cuts in welfare have resulted in hunger and suffering for a lot of people, not just me. But people with spinal cord injuries felt the cuts in a unique way: The government stopped taking care of our chairs. Each time mine broke down, lost a screw, needed a new roller bearing, the brake wouldn't work, etc., and I called Suzanne, I had to endure a little lecture. Finally, she'd say, "Well, if I can find time today, I'll call the medical worker."
She was supposed to notify the medical worker, who would certify that there was a problem. Then the medical worker called the wheelchair repair companies to get the cheapest bid. Then the medical worker alerted the main welfare office at the state capital. They considered the matter for days while I lay in bed, unable to move. Finally, if I was lucky, they called back and approved the repair.
When welfare learned I was making money on my cartoons, Suzanne started "visiting" every fortnight instead of every two months. She looked into every comer in search of unreported appliances, or maids, or a roast pig in the oven, or a new helicopter parked out back. She never found anything, but there was always a thick pile of forms to fill out at the end of each visit, accounting for every penny.
There is no provision in the law for a gradual shift away from welfare. I am an independent businessman, slowly building up my market. It's impossible to jump off welfare and suddenly be making two thousand dollars a month. But I would love to be able to pay for some of my living and not have to go through an embarrassing situation every time I need a spare part for my wheelchair.
There needs to be a lawyer who can act as a champion for the rights of welfare clients, because the system so easily lends itself to abuse by the welfare givers as well as by the clients. Welfare sent Suzanne to look around in my apartment the other day because the chemist said I was using a larger than usual amount of medical supplies. I was, indeed: The hole that has been surgically cut to drain urine had changed size and the connection to my urine bag was leaking.
While she was taking notes, my phone rang and Suzanne answered it. The caller was a state senator, which scared Suzanne a little. Would I sit on the governor's committee and try to do something about the thousands of welfare clients who, like me, could earn part or all of their own livings if they were allowed to do so, one step at a time？
Hell, yes, I would! Someday people like me will thrive under a new system that will encourage them, not seek to convict them of cheating. They will be free to develop their talents without guilt or fear--or just hold a good, steady job.