2、During the past few years, scientists the world over have suddenly found themselves productively engaged in task they once spent their lives avoiding – writing, and kind of writing, but particulary letter writing. Encouraged by electronic mail’s surprisingly high speed, convenience and economy, people who never before touched the stuff are regularly, skillfully, even cheerfully tapping out a great deal of correspondence.

Electronic networks, woven into the fabric of scientific communication these days, are the route to colleagues in distant countries, shared data, bulletin boards and electronic journals. Anyone with a personal computer, a modern and the software to link computers over telephone lines can sign on. An estimated five million scientists have done so with more joining every day, most of them communicating through a bundle of interconnected domestic and foreign routes known collectively as the Internet, or net.

E-mail is starting to edge out the fax, the telephone, overnight mail, and of course, land mail. It shrinks time and distance between scientific collaborators, in part because it is conveniently asynchronous (writers can type while their colleagues across time zones sleep; their message will be waiting). If it is not yet speeding discoveries, it is certainly accelerating communication.

Jeremy Bernstei, the physicist and science writer, once called E-mail the physicist’s umbilical cord (生命線). Lately other people, too, have been discovering its connective virtues. Physicists are using it; college students are using it, everybody is using it, and as a sign that it has come of age, the New Yorker has celebrated its liberating presence with a cartoon—an appreciative dog seated at a keyboard, saying happily,  “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”

1．The reasons given below about the popularity of E – mail can be found in the passage except           .

       A．direct and convenient                           B．time – saving in delivery

       C．money – saving                                   D．a(chǎn)vailable around the clock

2．How is the Internet or net explained in the passage?

      A．Electronic routes used to fax or correspond overnight.

      B．Electronic routes used to read home and international journals.

      C．Electronic routes waiting for correspondence while one is sleeping.

      D．Electronic routes connected among millions of users, home and abroad.

3．Which statement is closest in meaning to the underlined sentence in the third paragraph?

       A．It shrinks time for communication and accelerates discoveries

       B．Although it does not speed up correspondence, it helps make discoveries.

       C．It quickens communication even if it does not accelerate discoveries.

       D．The quick speed of correspondence may have ill – effects on discoveries.

4．What will happen to fax, land mail, overnight mail, etc. according to the writer?

       A．They will co-exist with E-mail for a long time.

       B．Fewer and fewer people will use them.

       C．Their functions cannot be replaced by E-mail.

       D．They will play an additional function to E – mail.

5．The writer mainly tells that          in the last paragraph.

       A．E – mail is nowadays becoming a trend

       B．E – mail can sometimes be unreliable

       C．the presence of E – mail deserves a discussion

       D．E – mail users often ignore its disadvantages