Morethan100millionpeopleinNigeriaarenotconnectedtotheIn...

問題詳情：

More than 100 million people in Nigeria are not connected to the Internet. There are only a few networks that offer service and it is costly and undependable. Now, a new project provides a resource for offline viewing at no cost.

A non-profit organization called The WiderNet Project has developed the offline eGranary Digital Library. The service puts millions of digital documents, multimedia work and websites onto a server. The information is then available to students, medical workers, and researchers at no cost, whether there is Internet or not.

Users can access informative websites that eGranary updates every day such as Wikipedia, Khan Academy, Project Gutenberg, MIT Open Course Ware, and MIT BLOSSOMS (which is Math and Science video lessons for high school students). Other resources on the service include university and medical publications, computer software, and educational games.

Ahmadu Bello University, the largest university in Nigeria and the second largest in Africa, uses eGranary’s digital educational resources. Kasa Mathias, head of the school’s database department, says students can access tens of thousands of educational materials without much problem.

“We give them background information on the available databases that they can use for their research work, their assignments, especially projects, and sometimes we will carry them through sensitizing (啟用) on new databases that are available for them.”

Ibitoye Idowu, a first-year student of archeology, says easy access to university reading material, documents and journals has greatly helped his studying process, and that in some cases, he understands the digital materials better than class lectures.

Students now have great reading material, but only when there is electric power. It often fails. Student Ibitoye Idowu says those moments are difficult.

Muhammed Mu’azu who leads the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department says the university has spent a large amount of money on access to information, which is available for 40,000 students and teachers.

“With or without Internet access students and staff have most of these educational databases and university has also invested a lot in Internet access so even for online materials they are readily available for staff and students anywhere you are in the university campus.”

There are fears that students may waste time on social media networks like Facebook and Twitter instead of spending it on school work. Professor Mu’azu says the university needs to be careful about placing restrictions on usage. But he says it will investigate what a user is accessing if a large amount of bandwidth is used.

Muhammed Mu’azu compares the speed of the offline service to access over the Internet. The eGranary server can download hundreds of pages in less than 15 minutes. In the past, a 10-page document would take hours to download.

WiderNet says it aims to expand to thousands more education and health centers around the world.

59. The eGranary Digital Library is mainly intended for ________.

A. poor people in Nigeria                               B. Ahmadu Bello University

C. teachers and staff of a university                      D. people who can’t access the Internet

60. The underlined word “them” in Paragraph 5 probably refers to ________.

A. educational materials                                        B. available databases

C. assignments and projects                                 D. university students

61. Which of the following is TRUE according to the passage?

A. Offline eGranary Digital Library is available to over 100 million people in Nigeria now.

B. A university needs to pay for the service of eGranary Digital Library to offer it to students.

C. The power supply becomes the main challenge students face when using offline project.

D. Education and health centers in the world will all use eGranary’s digital educational resources.

【回答】

DDC

知識點：科普環保類閱讀

題型：閱讀理解