[填空题]You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14-26, which are based on
Reading Passage 1 below.
You Are Here: How Digital Maps Are Changing the Landscape of
the 21st Century
A Buried beneath
November’s headlines depicting rising tensions on the Korean Peninsula, European
economic woes, and the disclosure of confidential State Department cables, a
meaningful geopolitical event went largely overlooked: Nicaragua invaded Costa
Rica. There was no shooting war and the incident involved only a small swath of
disputed territory along the San Juan River, part of which divides the two
nations. But a Nicaraguan commander added an interesting wrinkle to the
narrative when he dragged an unlikely culprit into the dispute: Google. The
commander cited Google Maps, which had erroneously depicted a stretch of the
border in Nicaragua’s favour by as much as 1.7 miles. Google quickly moved to
amend the faulty border data and sportingly apologised.
B
The incident raises some interesting issues concerning the future of mapmaking
that, thus far, our brave new digital world hasn’t yet been forced to confront.
Whereas cartography—particularly the act (or the art) of drawing political lines
on geographical charts—used to be the purview of nations and international
bodies, commercial entities like Google, Bing, Mapquest, and other digital
services are the principal mapmakers of the 21st century.
C Orbiting GeoEye satellites and camera-equipped Google sedans are the
Magellans of the digital age, dispatched to explore and catalogue—and most
importantly make public—unprecedented amounts of geographical data via the Web.
If anyone wants to locate anything—be it a coffee house, a post office, or an
international boundary users log into Google or Bing, not the U.N. or the U.S.
Geological Survey (USGS). But these commercial maps are compiled from a variety
of sources and often blend government-derived mapping data with user-generated
content. As such, they are subject to conflicting information, differences of
political opinion and—as the Nicaraguan incident shows—outright error.
D ’With a lot of these web-based tools, the need for formal
training in cartography is going away, and that’s both a good thing and a bad
thing,’ says Dr. Brian Tomaszewski, an assistant professor in the Department of
Information Sciences & Technologies at the Rochester Institute of
Technology. It’s good because it creates rich, centralised data compilations
that users constantly update. But before that can happen, someone like Google
has to build the underlying map, and there’s no single source or authority for
global map data to draw from. That leaves companies in the unenviable position
of trying to pick and choose the best data and massage it to fit a single
geographical template.
E In the case of Nicaragua, it
turns out that data was simply incorrect. A post on Google’s ’Lat Long Blog’
explained the error: ’Yesterday we became aware of a dispute that referenced the
border between Costa Rica and Nicaragua as depicted on Google Maps. This
morning, after a discussion with the data supplier for this particular border
(the U.S. Department of State), we determined that there was indeed an error in
the compilation of the source data, by up to 2.7 kilometres.’
F Viewed on Google Maps, however, an incorrect border looks like any other
border, and if the U.S. State Department (and, more importantly, Google) says
the border is in one place, who is Costa Rica to say it’s not In strict
cartographic sense, the treaty that originally established the border is the
final word. But no one locates a border by reading a 150-year-old treaty; people
find borders by looking at maps, and in the 21st century people consult maps by
opening their Web browsers.
G ’We look at the computer
and say "how can it be wrong, it’s on the computer",’ says Dr. Frank Galgano,
professor and chairman of Villanova University’s Geography and the Environment
Department. It’s to the computer that the world increasingly turns to find just
about everything, lending digital mapmakers incredible power to shape users’
geospatial perceptions.
H What’s largely missing is the
healthy skepticism that users apply to other piecemeal compendia of information
like Wikipedia, Galgano says. Google knows its maps contain errors; it says so
in the user agreement (you read that closely, didn’t you). For those people
searching for the nearest Starbucks in Manhattan these errors are largely
negligible. But for an American hiking near the Iranian border, they can lead to
miscalculations with serious consequences.
I ’People are
forgetting to use common sense and critical thinking,’ Tomaszewski says. ’Google
Maps isn’t an official mapping agency like a government. They buy or acquire
data and then assemble it into a map. It’s almost frightening to think that
militaries or governments might rely on Google as the final word on boundaries
or borders between nations.’
J But there are a variety of
reasons why a government or military might do so, not least of which is the lack
of anything better. In the United States, the USGS maintains an extensive
collection of publicly available map data accurate down to about 130 feet. Many
other nations treat their official maps as state secrets. Still others don’t
have the resources to produce accurate maps at all. That makes commercial,
publicly available maps like Google’s very attractive, if not any more
authoritative.
K Why Nicaragua chose to use a Google Map
to justify military actions along a tense border is something for the geopolicy
wonks to debate. Regardless, the incident embodies the changing nature and
impact of cartography in a rapidly digitising environment. After all, borders
are nothing more than imaginary lines enforced by mutual agreement. Cartography
is inexact enough already, and the blurring line between ’official’ cartography
and commercial maps rich in content but low in complexity further compounds that
lack of concreteness.
L That’s not to say commercial maps
don’t carry tremendous value. Their accessibility has revolutionised the way
people use maps, particularly as they pertain to commerce. The economic
importance of being ’on the map’ may not be outwardly apparent, but consider the
case of Sunrise, Fla.; the community of 90,000 has inexplicably disappeared from
Google Maps three times since August of last year. During these ’blackouts’,
local businesses reported flattening commerce as new customers couldn’t locate
them. Online orders ground to a halt for some businesses. After all, how would
anyone find a florist or automotive shop that’s not searchable When Sunrise
disappeared from Google Maps, it might as well have disappeared
completely.
M So what makes a real map in the 21st
century Some would argue that the musty old analogue maps tucked into national
archives around the world are still the real deal, invested with the authority
of governments. But if asked which is more important to their everyday lives,
the citizens of Sunrise, Fla., might argue that commercial maps, regardless of
inaccuracies or oversimplifications, represent a far greater social and economic
utility. To the average person, commercial maps like those compiled by Google,
Bing, or Yahoo have become at least as equally important as their ’official’
counterparts.Reading Passage 1 has thirteen paragraphs, A-M.
Which paragraph contains the following information
Write the correct letter, A-M, in boxes on your answer sheet.
the description that maps have commercial values
