山西省平定县2016中考英语 阅读理解演练题（四）.docVIP

阅读理解 【基础能力测试】 【实战训练】 A 【2016中考模拟】阅读下列材料，从A、B、C、D四个选项中选出最佳的答案。 How long are you willing to wait for a webpage to open before you start to lose your patience? Half a minute? A few seconds? Google engineers have discovered that even 400 milliseconds―as short as the blink of an eye―is too long for most Internet users. A millisecond is one thousandth of a second. People hardly notice such a small time difference, but it does cause them to stop searching, reported The New York Times. “Without question, nobody likes to wait,” said Arvind Jain, a Google engineer. “Every millisecond matters.” Nowadays, millions of smart-phones and computers are continually gathering and sending out information. With so many people downloading maps, sports videos, news and restaurant recommendations, you can get digital “traffic jams”. Meanwhile, users are expecting faster and faster service. Google found that if one website is 250 milliseconds slower than another website, then people will visit it less often. This is why technology companies are now competing to be the fastest. Google said people do expect different things from different websites because they realize not all loading times are the same. For example, a person will be more patient waiting for a video to load than for a search result. Even so, four out of five online users will click away if a video takes too long to load. This makes it difficult for video websites to choose between the quality of pictures and fast loading times. Trying to get a higher speed has always been part of the history of the Internet. In the 1990s, when the World Wide Web first started to become popular, it was very crowded and slow; people called it the “World Wide Wait”. But engineers managed to fight the problem with new inventions. They laid a lot of fiber optic cables (光缆)for sending in high speed; they improved software so it would work more smoothly; they placed computer servers all around the world to be nearer to users; all this inc