A Science Fiction Writer Coined the Useful Term ‘Cyberspace’ in 1982

Reading Passage Question

A science fiction writer coined the useful term ‘cyberspace’ in 1982, but the territory in question, the electronic frontier, is about 130 years old. Cyberspace is the ‘place’ where a telephone conversation appears to occur. Not inside your actual phone, but the plastic device on your desk. Not inside the other person’s phone, but in some other city. The place between the phones. The indefinite place out there, where the two of you, two human beings, actually meet and communicate. Although it is not exactly ‘real’, ‘cyberspace’ is a genuine place. Things happen there that have very genuine consequences. This ‘place’ is not ‘real’, but it is serious, it is earnest. Tens of thousands of people have dedicated their lives to it, to the public service of public communication by wire and electronics. People have worked on this ‘frontier’ for generations now.

Some people became rich and famous from their efforts, while some just played in it, as hobbyists. Others soberly pondered it, and wrote about it, and regulated it, and negotiated over it in international forums, and sued one another about it, in gigantic, epic court battles that lasted for years. And, almost since the beginning, some people have committed crimes in this place.

But in the past 20 years, this electrical ‘space’, which was once thin and dark and one-dimensional—little more than a narrow speaking tube, stretching from phone to phone—has flung itself open like a gigantic jack-in-the-box. Light has flooded upon it, the eerie light of the glowing computer screen. This dark electric netherworld has become a vast flowering electronic landscape. Since the 1960s, the world of the telephone has crossbred itself with computers and television, and though there is still no substance to cyberspace, nothing you can handle, it has a strange kind of physicality now. It makes good sense today to talk of cyberspace as a place all its own because people live in it now. Not just a few people, not just a few technicians and eccentrics, but thousands of people, quite normal people—and not just for a little while either, but for hours straight, over weeks, and months and years. Cyberspace today is a ‘Net’, a ‘Matrix’, international in scope and growing swiftly and steadily. It is growing in size, wealth, and political importance.

“A science fiction writer coined the useful term ‘cyberspace’ in 1982” - this is a GMAT reading comprehension passage with answers. Candidates need a strong knowledge of English GMAT reading comprehension.

This GMAT Reading Comprehension consists of 3 comprehension questions. The GMAT Reading Comprehension questions are designed for testing candidates’ abilities in understanding, analyzing, and applying information or concepts. Candidates can actively prepare with the help of GMAT Reading Comprehension Practice Questions.

Solution and Explanation

1. Which of the following cannot be inferred from the information in the passage?

(A) The term ‘cyberspace’ has been in use for over a century.
(B) People have used cyberspace to make profits.
(C) Cyberspace is not really a physical place.
(D) Regulations have been made governing cyberspace.
(E) Some people have used cyberspace to commit crimes.

2. What is the main purpose of the third paragraph in the passage?

(A) To underline the importance of cyberspace.
(B) To delineate the underlying threat of cyberspace to a normal man.
(C) To explain how cyberspace means different things to different people.
(D) To discuss the changes that have taken place in cyberspace in the last two decades.
(E) To discuss the political and social impact of cyberspace.

3. Which of the following would the author of the passage not agree with?

(A) Cyberspace includes email, social media websites, e-commerce, and so on.
(B) It would be incorrect to consider cyberspace an individual entity.
(C) Books have been written about cyberspace.
(D) Modern cyberspace is an amalgam of telephones and computers.
(E) Thousands of people are involved with cyberspace in some way or the other.

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