问答题

As online shopping becomes yet more prevalent, and prepaid credit cards take the place of more and more low-value cash transactions, cash is now on its way out, accounting for just 40% of payments last year globally and dropping. From the following excerpts, you may find both benefits and concerns of removing cash from the economy. Write an article of NO LESS THAN 300 words, in which you should: 1. summarize the trend of cashless society, and then 2. express your opinion towards the tendency.Excerpt 1 To see how a society might operate without cash, we can look to Sweden, which is almost cashless already. In Stockholm, you don’t need to carry bills or change. You can make donations to your church using a credit card, and give money to a friend using an inter-person payment app called Swish—when splitting a restaurant check, for example. Many banks don’t accept or provide cash in their branches, and payment apps are on the rise. Swedish banks and businesses have good reason to prefer electronic payments. Stockholm has been a heist capital, with robberies targeting banks and cash-carrying security vans. But it’s not just the banks that prefer payments that can’t be stolen. Stockholm native Peter Mathsson says that locals rarely use cash. Even the smallest transaction is made with a card. Living experiments like Sweden prove that cash-free living is not only possible, but desirable and potentially advantageous. In fact, many parts of the world are already cash free. People pay for a single cup of coffee with a credit card, often without signing or entering a PIN. People are already happy to operate without cash, and with new options like Apple Pay, which lets you use your iPhone and your fingerprint to pay with better security than an actual card, that trend is likely to accelerate. The end of cash may seem like fancy thinking, but look at how money has changed since credit and debit cards started to usurp cash. We already route money around with bank transfers enacted from our tablets, we pay for Uber cars with the convenience of a phone app, and we travel abroad without even thinking about buying foreign currency before we go. And PayPal, the original cashless payment system, turned 18 years old this year.Excerpt 2 Governments and their agencies love electronic transactions. Without cash, it’s much harder to hide money from the tax man. The police and government agencies like the NSA love the trackable records that cashless payments leave behind. Last year, France and Spain both enacted laws that limit cash transactions. The promise is that banning cash would end black markets, but for honest citizens, the end of paper cash brings many unsettling downsides. Credit card transactions are already trackable, and electronic cash could bring that lack of anonymity to every single transaction you make. Once this information exists, it will become a target of government agencies such as the police and intelligence services and trafficked to insurance companies, tax collectors, fraud squads, and even marketers. "When all our payment transactions are tracked," says Rainey Reitman, activism director at the Electronic Frontiers Foundation, "it creates a trove of data we have no control over. It’s easy to imagine a daring divorce lawyer or a government agent trying to gain access to our financial history to try to build a story about who we are."