Cast your mind back to the past twenty years and hardly did anyone have their ow

Cast your mind back to the past twenty years andhardly did anyone have their own email account. The Internet had just taken offin 1991 and people were only using office and PC­based email exchanges.

In the mid 1990s external email providers appeared.The most famous of these was Hotmail, the first free email provider andweb­based email service. Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith launched Hotmail on July4, 1996. And Microsoft took note of and bought Hotmail for $400 million onDecember 30, 1997, a nice birthday present for Bhatia who turned 29 that day.It was relaunched as MSN Hotmail and in 2007 was relaunched again as WindowsLive Hotmail.

Fast forward the present day and most of us have atleast a personal web­based email account. It seems impossible to live withoutthem. One of the biggest advantages of email is the fact that communication hasbecome so much easier, especially with those across different time zones. Emailtakes seconds to send a message whereas letters, as we used to communicate by,could take weeks. Of course there was the fax, that beeping invention from the1980s, but it wasn’t as secure as email and you never knew if the person on theother end had picked up your fax or if it had got lost somewhere in the office.

In conclusion, one of the best inventions from the1990s has to be email. But sometimes people are too closely connected to theiremail and have a compulsion to check it several times a day. At work,people have become lazy and instead of going to speak to the person sittingnext to them, they send an email，causing an inbox to pile up with more time spent reading email and responding rather thanworking. Clearly, an invention that saved time because of its quick and speedyconnection can now also cause us to waste a lot of time.

1.The earliest web-based email came into beingprobably _______.

A. in 1991                            B.in 1996                   C.in 1997                   D.in 2007

2.The authormentions “fax” in the third paragraph in order to tell us that _______.

A. it is exactly as good as email

B. it is much better than email

C. it is less convenient than email

D. it is easier and faster than email

3.The underlined word “compulsion” in Paragraph 4probably means “_______”.

A. strong desire                  B.common sense               C.special curiosity          D. generalidea

4.Which is the main idea of the last paragraph?

A. We should check email boxes frequently.

B. Lazy people like sending an email.

C. Email brings us great convenience.

D. Good inventions also cause problems.

试题答案

【答案】

1.B

2.C

3.A

4.D

【解析】

试题