Back those photos up
The images were striking. Homes on the East Coast were washed away by Superstorm Sandy. People were in tears, picking up faded photographs, among their only remaining possessions.
If that doesn’t move you to get serious about safekeeping your lifetime of memories, what will? The digital age offers tools never imaginable before—including one-click access to a lifetime of family photos.
Here is a brochure on how to back up (存) your photos and save them online, where they can live forever and be accessible in good times and bad.
Scanning
The first step for those old photos is to scan them and save them to a digital format. Most printers come with scanners these days, so that’s an easy but extremely time-consuming step.
Storing the photos
With your scans in place, import the photos into your computer, and back them up.
You could make multiple copies of the disks and spread them to loved ones. Or you could choose external(外接的) hard drives or USB thumb drive, and add your photo and video collection from your computer.
Online backup
If you need lots of space, look at a pure online backup service, Caronite.
Caronite backs up 300 million files daily. Once you sign up, it starts to pick up everything you have on your hard drive. But photo collection on your computer’s main hard drive charges for $59 a year.
Cloud Storage
For folks who don’t need automatic backup, but instead want to take a more active approach, Dropbox, Google Drive and Microsoft’s SkyDrive let you store files online by yourself, share and instantly access them. All offer free options—2GB of free storage for Dropbox, 5GB for Google and 7GB for SkyDrive. But if you want more, you need to pay.
Bottom Line
The hard drive or flash drive is the cheapest and easiest. But drives can fail. Online services are more expensive, but more secure. With more of us switching back and forth between our computers, such services are the best way to get access to our data from wherever we are.
小题1:Why does the author mention Superstorm Sandy?
A．To tell the background of the scanning photos.
B．To attract the readers’ interest in the backups.
C．describe a severe natural disaster.
D．To win the readers’ sympathy.小题2:What can we know from the passage?
A．Scanning photos takes little time but costs a lot.
B．Caronite charges for backing up photos from hard drive.
C．Google Drive offers unlimited free photo storage on line.
D．The hard drive or flash drive is the cheapest and safest.小题3:Which of the following allows storing files automatically?
A．Caronite.
B．Dropbox.
C．SkyDrive.
D．Flash drive.小题4:What’s the passage mainly about ?
A．tell real stories about storage services
B．introduce some of the storage services
C．describe the functions of storage services
D．argue about the advantage of storage services
小题1:B
小题2:B
小题3:A
小题4:B
题目分析：本文主要就是介绍了在计算机和网络上保存文件的多个方法和具体的步骤，以及每一种保存方法的具体信息。
小题1:B 推理题。在文章一开始提到了飓风桑迪，是为了告诉我们照片是很容易就被毁坏的，需要我们把它们保存好，引起下面要讨论的保存备份照片的内容。故B正确。
小题2:B 细节题。根据文章倒数第三段Caronite backs up 300 million files daily. Once you sign up, it starts to pick up everything you have on your hard drive.说明Caronite的备份是需要使用你的硬件hardware的，故B正确。
小题3:A 细节题。根据倒数第三段Caronite backs up 300 million files daily.Once you sign up, it starts to pick up everything you have on your hard drive.说明你一旦注册以后Caronite就自动从你的硬件里保存文件了，故A正确。
小题4:B 主旨大意题。本文主要就是介绍了在计算机和网络上保存文件的多个方法和具体的步骤，以及每一种保存方法的具体信息。故B正确。
点评：本文主要就是介绍了在计算机和网络上保存文件的多个方法和具体的步骤，以及每一种保存方法的具体信息。考查科普类短文阅读，此类文章的最大的障碍是词汇以及考生对阅读内容的不熟悉，需要考生在阅读的时候有足够的耐心。要养成在上下文串联中猜测词义的能力，根据上下文中出现的同义词，近义词，反义词，以及词义的解释来理解生词。同时要抓住文章的中心，不要受其他信息的影响。要根据题目及选项以及文章的上下文串联合理的判断推理。