Text 4Timothy Berners-Lee might be giving Bill Gates a run for the money, but he passed up his shot at fabulous wealth—intentionally—in 1990. That’s when he decided not to patent the technology used to create the most important software innovation in the final decade of the 20th century: the World Wide Web. Berners-Lee wanted to make the world a richer place, not a mass personal wealth. So he gave his brainchild to us all.
Berners-Lee regards today’s Web as a rebellious adolescent that can never fulfill his original expectations. By 2005, he hopes to begin replacing it with the Semantic Web—a smart network that will finally understand human languages and make computers virtually as easy to work with as other humans.
As envisioned by Berners-Lee, the new Web would understand not only the meaning of words and concepts but also the logical relationships among them. That has awesome potential. Most knowledge is built on two pillars: semantics and mathematics. In number-crunching, computers already outclass people. Machines that are equally adroit at dealing with language and reason won’t just help people uncover new insights; they could blaze new trails on their own.
Even with a fairly crude version of this future Web, mining online repositories for nuggets of knowledge would no longer force people to wade through screen after screen of extraneous data. Instead, computers would dispatch intelligent agents, or software messengers, to explore Web sites by the thousands and logically sift out just what’s relevant. That alone would provide a major boost in productivity at work and at home. But there’s far more.
Software agents could also take on many routine business chores, such as helping manufacturers find and negotiate with lowest-cost parts suppliers and handling help-desk questions. The Semantic Web would also be a bottomless trove of eureka insights. Most inventions and scientific breakthroughs, including today’s Web, spring from novel combinations of existing knowledge. The Semantic Web would make it possible to evaluate more combinations overnight than a person could juggle in a lifetime. Sure scientists and other people can post ideas on the Web today for others to read. But with machines doing the reading and translating technical terms, related ideas from millions of Web pages could be distilled and summarized. That will lift the ability to assess and integrate information to new heights. The Semantic Web, Berners-Lee predicts, will help more people become more intuitive as well as more analytical. It will foster global collaborations among people with perse cultural perspectives, so we have a better chance of finding the right solutions to the really big issues—like the environment and climate warming.
第36题Had he liked, Berners-Lee could have _____.
［A］created the most important innovation in the 1990s
［B］accumulated as much personal wealth as Bill Gates
［C］patented the technology of Microsoft software
［D］given his brainchild to us all
正确答案：B
本题考查考生根据上下文进行推理的能力文章一开始就提到“伯纳斯·李原本可以在财富上与比尔·盖茨一比高低但是1990年他主动放弃了获得巨额财富的机会givesba(good)runfortheirmoney“不让……轻易取胜与……进行激烈竟争”passup“放弃不要（机会等）”第一段倒数第二句又接着提到“他想让世界变得更加富有而不是积累个人财富所以他把互联网这个他个人智慧的结晶无偿给了我们”由此我们可以推出［B］项表述了他有能力却不愿意做的事情 文章第一段中间部分说到：伯纳斯·李决定不为用来创造20世纪90年代最重要的软件发明（万维网）的技术申请专利［A］［C］项是对文意的曲解［D］项在首段末句提到是伯纳斯·李已经做到的事情
