A great deal of attention is being paid today to the so-called digital divide—the division of the world into the information rich and the information poor. And that (1) does exist today. My wife and I lectured about this looming er twenty years ago. What was less (2) then, however, were the new, positive (3) that work against the digital divide. (4) , there are reasons to be (5) .
There are technological reasons to hope the digital divide will narrow. As the Internet becomes more and more (6) , it is in the interest of business to universalize (使普遍化) access—after all, the more people online, the more potential (7) there are. More and more (8) , afraid their countries will be left (9) , want to spread Internet access. Within the next decade or two, one to two billion people on the planet will be (10) together. As a result, I now believe the digital divide will (11) rather than widen in the years ahead. And that is very good news because the Internet may well be the most powerful tool for (12) world poverty that we’ve ever had.
Of course, the use of the Internet isn’t the only way to (13) poverty. And the Internet is not the only tool we have. But it has (14) potential.
To (15) advantage of this tool, some poor countries will have to get over their outdated anti-colonial prejudices (16) respect to foreign investment. Countries that still think foreign investment is a/an (17) of their sovereignty might well study the history of (18) (the basic structural foundations of a society) in the United States. When the United States built its industrials infrastructure, it didn’t have the capital to do so. And that is (19) America’s Second Wave infrastructure— (20) roads, harbors, highways, ports and so on—were built with foreign investment.