Technology and money: Silicon Wall StreetBig tech pushes ever further into financeWith no end to the tech downturn in sight, the industry's titans are eyeing new markets. The bigger, the better; in the past year the combined revenue of Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and Meta reached 1.5tn, so further growth that moves the needle can only come from a giant business. One candidate is finance. What is more, that industry generates petabytes of data, the crunching of which is a core competency of tech firms. And it is dominated by stuffy, old institutions. For a tech ceo, it looks ripe for disruption.One such boss is Microsoft's Satya Nadella. On December 12th, his company announced a ten-year deal to provide cloud-computing and data-analytics services to the London Stock Exchange Group. As part of the transaction, Microsoft has agreed to pay £1.5bn (1.9bn) for a 43% stake in the financial-services firm. This follows a tie-up last year between Google Cloud Platform, Alphabet's cloud business, and CME, one of the world's busiest derivatives exchanges. Weeks later, Amazon Web Services (AWS), that giant's cloud division, announced a similar arrangement with the Nasdaq stock exchange.It is not just exchanges. Almost all banks and insurers now use big tech's cloud services, including increasingly sophisticated and tailor-made analytics, often powered by artificial intelligence. In October the Options Clearing Corporation became the first clearing house to get permission from American regulators to move its core operations on to the cloud.In paragraph one, the term "petabytes" most likely refers to ( )A Diversity of financial servicesB Revenue of tech companiesC Number of financial transactionsD Massive storage capacity
Technology and money: Silicon Wall Street Big tech pushes ever further into finance With no end to the tech downturn in sight, the industry's titans are eyeing new markets. The bigger, the better; in the past year the combined revenue of Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and Meta reached $1.5tn, so further growth that moves the needle can only come from a giant business. One candidate is finance. What is more, that industry generates petabytes of data, the crunching of which is a core competency of tech firms. And it is dominated by stuffy, old institutions. For a tech ceo, it looks ripe for disruption. One such boss is Microsoft's Satya Nadella. On December 12th, his company announced a ten-year deal to provide cloud-computing and data-analytics services to the London Stock Exchange Group. As part of the transaction, Microsoft has agreed to pay £1.5bn ($1.9bn) for a 43% stake in the financial-services firm. This follows a tie-up last year between Google Cloud Platform, Alphabet's cloud business, and CME, one of the world's busiest derivatives exchanges. Weeks later, Amazon Web Services (AWS), that giant's cloud division, announced a similar arrangement with the Nasdaq stock exchange. It is not just exchanges. Almost all banks and insurers now use big tech's cloud services, including increasingly sophisticated and tailor-made analytics, often powered by artificial intelligence. In October the Options Clearing Corporation became the first clearing house to get permission from American regulators to move its core operations on to the cloud. In paragraph one, the term "petabytes" most likely refers to ( ) A Diversity of financial services B Revenue of tech companies C Number of financial transactions D Massive storage capacity
题目解答
答案
解析
本题考查对文章中专业术语含义的理解，解题思路是结合上下文语境来推断“petabytes”的意思。
- 首先明确文章背景，科技公司的巨头们正将目光投向金融行业，原因之一是金融行业能产生大量数据，而处理这些数据是科技公司的核心能力。
- 接着分析“petabytes”所在句子 “What is more, that industry generates petabytes of data”，这里强调的是金融行业产生的数据量。
- 然后看各个选项：
- 选项A“Diversity of financial services”（金融服务的多样性），文中未提及与金融服务多样性相关内容，所以该选项不符合文意。
- 选项B“Revenue of tech companies”（科技公司的收入），“petabytes”修饰的是“data”，并非科技公司的收入，所以该选项错误。
- 选项C“Number of financial transactions”（金融交易的数量），“petabytes”描述的是数据量，而不是金融交易的数量，所以该选项也不正确。
- 选项D“Massive storage capacity”（大规模存储容量），“petabytes”是一个用于衡量数据存储容量的单位，通常表示非常大的数据量，与文中金融行业产生大量数据的语境相符，所以该选项正确。