Thoughformanyofustheyearaheadmaylookprettydepressing,20...

问题详情：

Though for many of us the year ahead may look pretty depressing, 2016 promises one great breakthrough — a major step toward ending Africa’s particular and backward form of the great digital Divide.

Poor connectivity has bedeviled much of the continent’s internet access but now a huge

improvement is coming. It’s a new sub-sea cable, to be laid off Africa’s eastern coastline,

enabling a reliable and affordable international connectivity service to both coastal and

landlocked countries in Eastern, Central and Southern Africa.

The project is being developed by Liquid Sea, an offshore branch of Liquid Telecom, which

already runs a pan-African network based on land cable supported by satellite links for rural and

remote areas. Altogether, with offices from South Africa and Botswana in the south to Kenya in

the East, taking in Democratic Republic of Congo in the center, it makes up the continent’s

largest single connecting network crossing multiple national borders.

Africa has benefited in many ways from the digital revolution, but internet coverage still

differs from place to place.

And the unpleasant truth is that, despite some great advance in African development over

the last decade and more, its effects are unequal and taken as a whole, less than 16 percent of

Africans have access to the Internet, which compares that with 63 percent of Europeans and 79

percent of North Americans.

It’s obvious what a disadvantage is placed upon Africans by such digital inequality. The

economics of the entire process is skewed（歪的）by poor network performance in Africa, with

the total bandwidth available to shuttle data back and forth between African countries and the

rest of the world amounting to less than 1 terabit per second. That’s about one-seventieth of

Europe’s international bandwidth capacity（容量）.

Now Liquid Sea’s underwater cable stretching from eastern South Africa to the Middle East,

with onward connections to Europe, aims to contribute much more in building Africa’s better

connected digital future.

29. What does “bedeviled” most probably mean in Paragraph 2?

A. attracted

B. troubled

C. worsened

D. contributed

30. What would the Internet be like in Africa in the future?

A. Dependable and inexpensive .

B. Accessible and comfortable.

C. Central and controllable.

D. Possible and comparable.

31. What is implied in the passage?

A. International bandwidth capacity makes no difference.

B. Internet connections improve the equality in Africa.

C. Poor internet access limits the economy of Africa.

D. Africa is now far beyond developed countries.

32. Which of the following is the best title for the passage?

A. Unsafe Internet access in Africa

B. Digital-gap narrowing in Africa

C. Bandwidth available in Africa

D. Great Digital Divide in Africa

【回答】

BACB

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