The main interest of travel agencies dealing with travel medicine is to
A. prevent people from falling in.
B. make money out of it.
C. give advice on specific countries.
D. get the government to pay for it.
The reigning notion today is that the laws of economics are not, after all, suspended in cyberspace like the laws of gravity in outer space. Content needs to be paid for on the Web just as in any other medium. And it probably has to be paid for the same way most other things are paid for. by the people who use it. We tried charging the customers at Slate. It didn't work. Future experiments may be more successful. But meanwhile, let's look again at this notion that in every medium except the Internet, people pay for the content they consume. It's not really true.
TV is the most obvious case. A few weeks ago a producer from "Nightline" contacted Slate while researching a possible show on the crisis of content on the Internet. He wanted to know how on earth we could ever be a going business if we gave away our content for free. I asked how many people pay to watch "Nightline". Answer none. People pay for their cable or satellite transmission, and they pay for content on HBO, but "Nightline" and other broadcast programs thrive without a penny directly from viewers. There are plenty of differences, of course, and the ability of Web sites to support themselves on advertising is unproven. But "Nightline" itself disproves the notion that giving away content is suicidal.
Now, look at magazines. The money that magazine subscribers pay often doesn't even cover the cost of persuading them to subscribe. A glossy monthly will happily send out $20 of junk mail—sometimes far more to find one subscriber who will pay $12 or $15 for a yearly subscription. Why? Partly in the hope that she or he will renew again and again until these costs are covered. But for many magazines including profitable ones—the average subscriber never pays back the cost of finding, signing and keeping him or her. The magazines need these subscribers in order to sell advertising.
Most leading print magazines would happily send you their product for free, if they had any way of knowing (and proving to advertisers) that you read it. Advertisers figure, reasonably, that folks who pay for a magazine are more likely to read it, and maybe see their ad, than those who don't. So magazines make you pay, even if it costs them more than they get from you.
This madcap logic doesn't apply on the Internet, where advertisers pay only for ads that have definitely appeared in front of someone's "eyeballs". They can even know exactly how many people have clicked on their ads. So far advertisers have been insufficiently grateful for this advantage. But whether they come around or not, there will never be a need on the Internet to make you pay just to prove that you're willing. So maybe the Internet's first great cliché had it exactly backward: Information has been free all along. It's the Internet that wants to enslave it.
The predominant idea of today is that
A. information should be free in cyberspace.
B. content on the Web should be paid for.
C. the laws of economics are not applicable to cyberspace.
D. the laws of economics are as outdated as the laws of gravity.
The Nicaraguan Sign Language (NSL) emerged in the late 1970s, at a new school for deaf children. Initially the children were instructed by teachers who could hear. No one taught them how to sign; they simply worked it out for themselves. By conducting experiments on people who attended the school at various points in its history, Dr. Senghas has shown how NSL has become more sophisticated over time. For example, concepts that an older signer uses a single sign for, such as rolling and falling, have been unpacked into separate signs by youngsters.
Early users, too, did not develop a way of distinguishing left from right. Dr. Senghas showed this by asking signers of different ages to converse about a set of photographs that each could see. One signer had to pick a photograph and describe it. The other had to guess which photograph was being described.
When all the photographs contained the same elements, merely arranged differently, older people, who had learned the early form. of the language, could neither signal which photo they meant, nor understand the signals of their younger partners. Nor could their younger partners teach them the signs that indicate left and right. The older people clearly understood the concept of left and right, they just could not converse about it a result that bears on the vexing question of how much language merely reflects the way the brain thinks about the world, and how much it actually shapes such thinking.
For a sign language to emerge spontaneously, though, deaf children must have some inherent tendency to tie gestures to meaning. Spoken language, of course, is frequently accompanied by gestures. But, as a young researcher, Dr. Goldin-Meadow suspected that deaf children use gestures differently from those who can hear. In a 30-year-long project carried out on deaf children in America and Taiwan, whose parents can hear normally, she has shown that this is true.
Even deaf children who have no deaf acquaintances use signs as words. The order the signs come in is important. It is also different from the order of words in either English or Chinese. But it is the same, for a given set of signs and meanings, in both America and Taiwan.
Curiously enough, the signs produced by children in Spain and Turkey, whom Dr. Goldin-Meadow is also studying, while similar to each other, differ from those that American and Taiwanese children produce. Dr. Goldin-Meadow is not certain why that is. However, the key commonality is that their spontaneously created languages resemble fully-formed languages.
The Nicaragua Sign Language is__________.
A. a non-verbal language created by deaf children.
B. an artificial language used by people in Nicaragua.
C. a language invented by teachers who teach the deaf.
D. a language described and modified by deliberate linguists