Directions: In this part, you will have 15 minutes to go over the passage quickly and answ

er the questions on Answer Sheet 1.

For questions 1-4, mark

Y(for YES) if the statement agrees with the information given in the passage;

N (for NO) if the statement contradicts the information given in the passage;

NG (for NOT GIVRN) if the information is not given in the passage.

For questions 5-10, complete the sentences with the information given in the passage.

What Will Be

We've now acknowledged some fundamental ancient human fumes and the ways they will affect and be affected by the Information Marketplace. It is time to consider the greatest changes that the Information Marketplace has to offer. To get to it, let's reconstruct the key discoveries we have made, which together describe "what will be."

We began with a simple but fur-reaching model of the future world of information as an Information Marketplace, where people and their computers will buy, sell, and freely exchange information. Our first discovery was that this Information Marketplace can indeed be built on a technological foundation: the information system. We went on to explore the many human-ma-chine interfaces people will use to get in and out of this new edifice, from virtual reality and fancy bodysuits to the lowly keyboard, and singled out speech interfaces as perhaps the most significant and imminent. We explored the pipes that will carry our information and the ways we will bend them to give us the speed, reliability, and security we need. We also saw how a vast array of new shared software tools will evolve on this system, shifting the attention of the entire software business from individual to interconnected computers. The arrival of this foundation is certain, but it could be delayed by a decade or more if the key players continue their wars for control and their indifference toward the shared system they all need. We saw too that there won't be just a handful of winners that will survive these wars; the field is vast, rich, and full of challenges for almost every supplier and consumer of information to be a winner.

Our second major discovery was that the Information Marketplace will dramatically affect people and organizations on a wide scale. Besides its many uses in commerce, office work, and manufacturing, it will also improve health care, provide new ways to shop, enable professional and social encounters across the globe, and generally permeate the thousands of things we do in the course of our daily lives. It will help us pursue old and new pleasures, and it will encourage new art forms, which may be criticized but will move art forward, as new tools have always done. It will also improve education and training, first in specific and established ways and later through breakthroughs that are confidently awaited. Human organizations from tiny companies to entire national governments will benefit too, because so much of the work they do is information work.

Putting all these detailed uses in perspective, we came to realize that they are different faces of two major new forces: electronic bulldozers and electronic proximity. Each has broad consequences for society. The electronic bulldozers' effect is primarily economic, increasing human productivity in both our personal lives and the workplace. The rapid, widespread distribution of information in the form. of info-nouns (text, photos, sounds, video) and especially info-verbs (human and machine work on information) is one simple way in which productivity will increase. Automatization is the other powerful effector; machine-to-machine exchanges will off-load human brain work the way machines of the

A．Y

B．N

C．NG