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比如，消费品的生产几乎回到了一年前的水平。这是因为对汽车及其他物品的消费需求以及房屋产业在经济衰退期间都保持了健康发展，而且在2002年初仍然在增长。

此外，过去两个月中每月房屋建造和房产市场指数都在整个2001年的平均数以上。这表明房屋建造有了好的开始，可能不会成为今年GDP增长的累赘。

对于经济前景同样重要的是稳固的房产市场将有利于刺激对房屋相关物品和服务的需求。传统消费者在置家后的一年内会购买大部分家具、电子产品和纺织品。因此，今年在这些物品上的消费将看好。甚至现在当汽车销售下滑时，这些商品刺激也没有失去吸引力。期望消费商品的产量在未来的月份里超越年前的水平。

甚至办公设备部门的生产似乎也要降至最低点。它的产量因电脑设备0.6%的涨幅在1月上升了0.4%。第四季度里资本物品订购的上升表明未来的月份里生产的速度虽然缓慢但仍将继续上升。

Text 4

Timothy Berners-Lee might be giving Bill Gates a run for the money, but he passed up his shot at fabulous wealth—intentionally—in 1990. That’s when he decided not to patent the technology used to create the most important software innovation in the final decade of the 20th century: the World Wide Web. Berners-Lee wanted to make the world a richer place, not a mass personal wealth. So he gave his brainchild to us all.

Berners-Lee regards today’s Web as a rebellious adolescent that can never fulfill his original expectations. By 2005, he hopes to begin replacing it with the Semantic Web—a smart network that will finally understand human languages and make computers virtually as easy to work with as other humans.

As envisioned by Berners-Lee, the new Web would understand not only the meaning of words and concepts but also the logical relationships among them. That has awesome potential. Most knowledge is built on two pillars: semantics and mathematics. In number-crunching, computers already outclass people. Machines that are equally adroit at dealing with language and reason won’t just help people uncover new insights; they could blaze new trails on their own.

Even with a fairly crude version of this future Web, mining online repositories for nuggets of knowledge would no longer force people to wade through screen after screen of extraneous data. Instead, computers would dispatch intelligent agents, or software messengers, to explore Web sites by the thousands and logically sift out just what’s relevant. That alone would provide a major boost in productivity at work and at home. But there’s far more. 

Software agents could also take on many routine business chores, such as helping manufacturers find and negotiate with lowest-cost parts suppliers and handling help-desk questions. The Semantic Web would also be a bottomless trove of eureka insights. Most inventions and scientific breakthroughs, including today’s Web, spring from novel combinations of existing knowledge. The Semantic Web would make it possible to evaluate more combinations overnight than a person could juggle in a lifetime. Sure scientists and other people can post ideas on the Web today for others to read. But with machines doing the reading and translating technical terms, related ideas from millions of Web pages could be distilled and summarized. That will lift the ability to assess and integrate information to new heights. The Semantic Web, Berners-Lee predicts, will help more people become more intuitive as well as more analytical. It will foster global collaborations among people with diverse cultural perspectives, so we have a better chance of finding the right solutions to the really big issues—like the environment and climate warming.

1. Had he liked, Berners-Lee could have _____.

［A］created the most important innovation in the 1990s

［B］accumulated as much personal wealth as Bill Gates

［C］patented the technology of Microsoft software

［D］given his brainchild to us all

2. The Semantic Web will be superior to today’s web in that it _____.

［A］surpasses people in processing numbers

［B］fulfills user’s original expectations

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