One greater benefit of the Web is that it allows us to move information online that now re

sides in paper form. Electronic commerce is increasing steadily. It is difficult to measure, because a lot of electronic commerce involves existing buyers and sellers who are simply moving paper-based transactions to the Web. That is not new business. Microsoft, for example, purchases millions of dollars of PCs online instead of by paper. However, that is not a fundamental change; it has just improved the efficiency of an existing process. The biggest impact has occurred where electronic commerce matches buyers and sellers who would not previously have found each other. That is a new type of commerce.

Today, about half of all PCs are still not connected to the Web. Getting communications costs down and making all the software simpler will bring in those people. And that, in turn, will move us closer to the critical mass that will make the Web lifestyle. everyone's lifestyle.

The boundary between a television set and a PC will be blurred (使模糊) because even the set-top box (机顶盒) that you connect up to your cable or satellite will have a processor more powerful than what we have today in the most expensive PC.This will, in effect, make your television a computer.

Interaction with the Web also will improve, making it much easier for people to be involved. Today the keywords we use to search the Web often display too many articles to sort through, many of them out of context. If you want to learn about the fastest computer chip available, you might end up getting responses instead about potato chips being delivered in fast trucks. If you ask about the speed of chips, the result will be about computers, not potatoes.

To predict that it will take over ten years for these changes to happen is probably pessimistic. We usually overestimate what we can do in two years and underestimate what we can do in ten. The Web will be as much a way of life as the car by 2008 or even earlier.

Electronic commerce becomes a new type of commerce when ______.

A．paper-based trading is moved on to the Web

B．the efficiency of the existing process is improved by the Internet

C．a Web site offers more goods than a store

D．new buyers and sellers find each other on the Internet