信息高速公路与美国电信革命：从基础设施到数字经济的转型

学习英语不仅要掌握语法和词汇，更重要的是能在真实场景中自然运用。然而，课本上的句子往往过于正式，与实际生活中的表达相差甚远。想要说出一口地道、自然的英语，就需要接触真实语境中的对话。在这里，我们精选日常高频使用的英语表达，涵盖社交、工作、旅行等场景，帮你摆脱“教科书式英语”，学会老外真正在用的说法。下面是本期《电脑英语信息高速公路》的内容，坚持积累，让你的英语更贴近生活！

I am pleased to announce today that as the beginning of the new year, President Clinton will present to Congress a package of legislative and administrative proposals on telecommunications. These changes coming in the related fields of telecommunications and computing and telephony and other related fields are going to make up one of the most powerful revolutions in the entire history of humankind. Today, most people are primarily receivers of information through the electronic media. We watch television, we listen to the radio. In this coming decade, we will each transmit more and more information as well over the same lines of communication. We'll send and receive not just on the telephone as we do now, but across the full range of the new technologies. Each person will turn from being just a consumer to being a consumer and a provider. In a way, this change represents another kind of empowerment. The communications revolution recognizes each individual as a source of information that adds value to our community and to our economy. Interactive television will mean holding a business meeting without leaving your living room. It will mean that people at home can use the television set not simply as passive entertainment but as an active tool. These changes are coming not overnight or out of the blue, rather, they are the outgrowth of a steady series of changes that encompass much of our history.

It used to be that nations were more or less successful in their competition with other nations depending on the quality of their transportation infrastructure. The nation with the best deep water ports or the most efficient railroads had a competitive advantage over others, and we began to think of infrastructure in those terms. After World War II, when tens of millions of American families first purchased automobiles and thousands of businesses began to rely on trucks every single day, we quickly found our network of two-lane highways to be hopelessly inadequate. So, we built a network of interstate highways, and that contributed enormously to our post-war economic dominance of the world. Today, commerce works not just on asphalt highways but along information highways, and tens of millions of American families and businesses now use computers. The two-lane information roads built for telephone service are no longer adequate. It's not that we have a shortage of information—indeed, we often now have a lot more than what we know to do with. Take just one brief example, the Land Satellite. It is capable of taking a complete photograph of the Earth's surface every 18 days and has been doing so for 20 years. Yet, 95% of all of the images it has made have never been seen by a human eye. We have an insatiable hunger for knowledge as we try to solve the challenging problems that confront us, and yet, in many cases, the information just sits unused.

In order to communicate richly detailed images that allow us to deal with large quantities of information, we have to combine two technologies: first, computers, and second, transmission lines or networks. Computers now have a rapidly growing capacity to transform data into recognizable patterns or images that allow us to use them handily. To communicate those images or those conglomerations of vast quantities of data among ourselves, we need networks capable of carrying those images to every house and business. We know how to do that technologically, but to accomplish it we must unscramble the legal, regulatory, and financial problems that have threatened our ability to complete such a network. We are already using it to communicate in ways that enrich and even save our lives. All of these applications will enhance the quality of life and spur economic growth. Over half of the US workforce is now in jobs that are information-based. The telecommunication and information sector of the US economy now accounts for 12% of the gross domestic product, and it is growing much faster than any other sector. Last year, the revenues in this sector exceeded $700 billion. We exported over $48 billion worth of telecommunications equipment alone. Today, more than ever, businesses run on information. Flexible information networks are as essential to manufacturing as steel and plastic. If we do not move decisively to ensure that America has the information infrastructure we need, every business and consumer will suffer.

We must first understand how the information marketplace will operate. One helpful way is to think of the national information infrastructure as a network of highways, much like the interstates of the 1950s. These are highways carrying information rather than people or goods. Some highways will be made of fiber optics, others of coaxial cables, others will be wireless. But this is a key point—they must and will be two-way highways, so that each person will be able to send information in video form as well as just words, in addition to receiving information. These new information highways will be wider than today's technology permits. Television programs contain far more bytes of information than a telephone conversation, and new uses of video and computers will involve even more information moving at faster speeds. This new information marketplace based on these highways will include four major components. First, the owners of the highways, because unlike the interstates, the information highways will be built and funded privately. Secondly, the makers of information appliances like telephones, televisions, and computers, along with new products of the future that combine aspects of all three. Third, information providers—local broadcasters, digital libraries, service providers, and millions of individuals who want to share or sell information. And most importantly, the information customers, who will demand privacy, affordability, and choice. At some point in the next two decades, we will think about the information marketplace in terms of these four components. We will not talk about cable or telephone or cellular or wireless separately, because there will be free and open competition between everyone who provides and delivers information.

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