Passage One

Bill Clinton wrestles with the complexities of his economic plan, a surprising trend that could ultimately make life a lot easier for the new president may be developing. A handful of analysts believe that technology is beginning to help improve productivity in the service sector, If they are right, middle-class living standards which have stagnated for the past 20 years could start to improve.
The service sector gets little attention in most popular discussions of America’s economic problems. Manufacturing, where US workers go head-to-head with foreign competitors, is supposed to be the crucial area; services, which are mostly sheltered from international competition, are regarded as secondary at best. If anything, the growth of the service sector is seen as a symptom of our manufacturing decline, as steelworkers lose their high-paying jobs and become minimum-wage hamburger flippers. But serious analysts know that it is our performance in services not manufacturing that is the bigger economic problem.
In fact, US manufacturing performed reasonably well during the 1980s, with productivity growing at 2.9% per year. That was almost as fast as manufacturing productivity grew during the "good years" in 1950s and 1960s, and it was taster than productivity growth in most other advanced countries. So why didn’t we feel better Because near stagnation in service productivity-growth at only about 1.0% annually-held our living standard down.
Dominant service sector. The truth is that modern America is primarily a service economy. Currently, 70% of US workers are in the service sector, versus only 20% in manufacturing. If we could eliminate our persistent trade deficits in manufacturing, the prosperity would shift, but only slightly: A rough estimate is that completely eliminating our current trade deficit would raise the share of manufacturing in employment by only about 0.5%. In other word, like it or not, most Americans will work in the service sector for the foreseeable future. That means, in turn, that the productivity of the US work force as a whole depends mostly on the productivity of service workers.
But it is really possible to raise service productivity Some service jobs, like housecleaning and hair cutting, seem resistant to technological change at least until we learn to build robot maids and barbers. In the past, however, we have seen major improvements in service productivity. During the 1950s and 1960s, for example, a linked set of technological and social changes-widespread availability Of private ears and home refrigerators, the growth of supermarkets and an improved road system-led to huge increases in retail productivity. An earlier era saw a surge in office productivity because of such revolutionary innovations as typewriters, carbon paper and vertical file cabinets. Indeed the most significant American business success story of the late 20th century may well be Wal-Mart, which has applied extensive computerization and home-grown version of Japan’s "just-in-time" inventory methods to revolutionize retailing.
Analysts like Stephen Roach of Morgan Stanley now believe that additional productivity gains in the office are possible. Computers, it seems, are finally being used to eliminate paperwork: back offices are shrinking, and corporate hierarchies are getting flatter. If you squint, you can see these micro changes starting to show up in the macro numbers. We are now officially a year and a half into an economic recovery, yet unemployment remains stubbornly high. One of the reasons for this lingering joblessness is that productivity is rising faster than expected, primarily in the service sector. If America eventually returns to full employment, the total economy could be bigger and more productive.
Technology investment is helping to fuel these changes. Preliminary data show that while overall investment in this recovery is weak by historical standards, computer-related investment is soaring. It looks as if the service sector has decided that it now really knows how to make information technology work.
Like any radical change, the coming revolution in service productivity will have its victims. Skilled weavers were impoverished by the power loom, and small food stores were savaged by the rise of the supermarket. This time, it’s the middle managers who will lose. The past recession took an unprecedented toll of skilled, white-collar workers, and many of these jobs may never come back. But most of America could benefit from rising service productivity in the 1990s and that would be welcome news for Bill Clinton.

The development of technology in the service sector is largely beneficial to （）.

A．demonstrate the similarity between the hunting methods of mammals and those of non-mammals
B．broaden the application of his argument by including an insectivore as an example
C．make a distinction between higher and lower levels of consciousness
D．provide an additional illustration of the brutal characteristic of predators

A few years ago, at the height of the dotcom boom, it was widely assumed that a publishing revolution, in which the printed word would be supplanted by the computer screen, was just around the corner. It wasn’t: for many, there is still little to march the joy of cracking the spine of a good book and settling down for an hour or two of reading. But a recent flurry of activity by big technology companies—including Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Yahoo!—suggests that the dream of bringing books online is still very much alive.
The digitizing of thousands of volumes of print is not without controversy. On Thursday, Google, the world’s most popular search engine, posted a first installment of books on Google Print, an initiative first mooted a year ago. This collaborative effort between Google and several of the world’s leading research libraries aims to make many thousands of books available to be searched and read online free of charge. Although the books included so far are not covered by copyright, the plan has attracted the ire of publishers.
Five large book firms are suing Google for violating copyright on material that it has scanned and, although out of print, is still protected by law. Google has said that it will only publish short extracts from material under copyright unless given express permission to publish more, but publishers are unconvinced. Ironically, many publishers are collaborating with Google on a separate venture, Google Print. Publisher, which aims to give readers an online taste of books that are commercially available. The searchable collection of extracts and book information is intended to tempt readers to buy the complete books online or in print form.
Not to be outdone, Amazon, the world’s largest online retailer, has unveiled plans for its own foray into the mass e-book market. The firm, which began ten years ago as an online book retailer, now sells a vast array of goods. No doubt piqued that Google, a relative newcomer, should impinge upon its central territory, Amazon revealed on Thursday that it would introduce two new services. Amazon Pages will allow customers to search for key terms in selected books and then buy and read online whatever part they wish, from individual pages to chapters or complete works. Amazon Upgrade will give customers online access to books they have already purchased as hard copies. Customers are likely to have to pay around five cents a page, with the bulk going to the publisher.
Microsoft, too, has joined the online-book bandwagon. At the end of October, the software giant said it would spend around $ 200m to digitize texts, starting with 150, 000 that are in the public domain, to avoid legal problems. It will do so in collaboration with the Open Content Alliance, a consortium of libraries and universities. (Yahoo! has pledged to make 18, 000 books available online in conjunction with the same organization. ) On Thursday, coincidentally the same day as Google and Amazon announced their initiatives, Microsoft released details of a deal with the British Library, the country’s main reference library, to digitize some 25m pages; these will be made available through MSN Book Search, which will be launched next year.
These companies are hoping for a return to the levels of interest in e-books seen when Stephen King, a bestselling horror writer, published "Riding the Bullet" exclusively on the internet in 2000. Half a million copies were downloaded in the first 48 hours after publication. But this proved to be a high-water mark rather than a taste of things to come. While buyers were reluctant to sit in front of a computer screen to read the latest novels, dedicated e-book-reading gadgets failed to catch on.
The market for e-books is growing again, though from a tiny base. Both retailers and publishers reckon they will eventually be able to persuade consumers to do a lot more of their reading on the web. Some even hope they can become to online books what Apple’s iTunes is to online music. But there are crucial differences between downloading fiction and downloading funk. Online music was driven from the bottom up: illegal file-sharing services became wildly popular, and legal firms later took over when the pirates were forced (by a wave of lawsuits) to retreat; the legal providers are confident that more and more consumers will pay small sums for music rather than remain beyond the law. And the iPod music player anti its like have proved a fashionable and popular new way to listen to songs. The book world has no equivalent.
So the commercial prospects for sellers of online books do not yet look very bright. But they may get a lift from some novel innovations. The ability to download mere parts of books could help, for instance: sections of manuals, textbooks or cookery books may tempt some customers; students may wish to download the relevant sections of course books; or readers may want a taste of a book that they subsequently buy ill hard copy.And the ability to download reading matter onto increasingly ubiquitous hand-held electronic devices and 3G phones may further encourage uptake. In Japan, the value of e-books(mainly man-ga comic books)delivered to mobile phones has jumped, though! It will be worth only around 6 billion yen($51m), according to estimates.