前程百利小编为大家带来托福阅读材料。这个材料为大家说明了现代技术发明产生的地域因素，发明者之间的合作等等问题，其中的有难度词汇已经标出含义。希望大家在阅读的过程中积累相关背景知识，并在不断的阅读练习中提高自己的阅读能力。
Think of the device you're reading this on. It's the culmination(结果) of hundreds maybe thousands of inventions that all got added together to form a computer tablet(平板电脑) or smartphone. Most of this technology came out of Silicon Valley one of the world's greatest hubs(中心) for innovation. But what is it about that place that makes it such a fruitful(多产的) breeding ground for ideas?
Intuitively you might imagine that having lots of inventors clustered together(聚集在一起) would be great for collaboration(合作). One engineer or company can quickly take someone else's idea and build upon it. Now there's research to back(支持) that up. A recent study of the entire U.S. patent(专利) system — covering millions of patents dating back to 1836 — finds that geographic clustering does in fact accelerate the pace of innovation.
"Our empirical findings(经验研究) indicate that during the 20th century inventions in large U.S. cities built on recent advances much more often than comparable inventions in smaller U.S. cities" according to the University of Waterloo's Mikko Packalen and Stanford University's Jay Bhattacharya in a paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Looking at keywords that represent important technological leaps such as "database(数据库)" "microprocessor(微处理器)" or "transistor(晶体管)" the researchers examined how quickly those terms made it into other patents soon after the terms first appeared in the U.S. patent system. They found that in places with higher population density(人口密度) inventors were quicker to pick up on new ideas and incorporate(纳入) them into their own work.
This might sound like an obvious conclusion. But Packalen and Bhattacharya point out there's nothing special about geographic clustering that makes innovation inevitable. A big city that's home to a dominant industry(主导产业) could plausibly (令人信服地)suppress(抑制) innovation if the industry in question decides a new invention poses a threat(构成威胁) for instance.
So the fact that America's inventors do their best work when they're around other inventors seems like something worth appreciating and perhaps promoting through public policy. There's just one complication(问题): For whatever reason the researchers note that the benefits of geographic clustering appeared to drop off(逐渐减少，出现下滑迹象) beginning in the 1960s and 1970s.
What's so interesting about that pattern is that it fits the rise of advanced communications technologies along with a precipitous fall(陡然下降) in the cost of talking to someone over long distances. One of the first examples that comes to mind is the Internet which the researchers say has "made new ideas available more cheaply to all regardless of where they were developed." But you also can't forget the rise of satellite communications(卫星通讯) fiber optics(光纤) the fax machine(传真机) the cellphone and all manner of other technologies that shrunk(缩短) distances and made it easier for inventors in small towns to benefit from advantages enjoyed by inventors in large cities.
While the researchers don't provide conclusive(确凿的) evidence for that conclusion they point to predictions from as far back as 1920 that communications technology would someday lead to a dramatic decrease in the cost of innovation. The economist Alfred Marshall "himself explored the implications of such ‘cheapening of the means of communication(通信成本下降)’ and raised the possibility that location might play only a minor(不太重要的，较小的) role in knowledge production" Packalen and Bhattacharya write.
Whether this is actually what we're seeing isn't fully clear. But it does raise questions about whether it's better to cluster innovators together — or whether the Internet has effectively erased(消除) the tremendous(极大的) historical advantages of physical proximity(接近).
以上就是前程百利小编为大家带来的托福阅读材料，平时的阅读练习是托福考试阅读备考的重要一环。希望大家利用好每份材料，尽可能多地从中获取知识。预祝大家托福考试取得好成绩。
