Questions 84-90 are based on the following passage.
Imagine a society in which cash no longer exists. Instead "cash" is electronic, as in bankcard systems. Currency and coin are abandoned. The immediate benefits would be profound and fundamental. Theft of cash would become impossible. Bank robberies and cash-register robberies would simply cease to occur. Attacks on shopkeepers, taxi drivers, and cashiers would all end. Purse snatchings would become a thing of the past. Urban streets would become safer. Retail shops in once-dangerous areas could operate in safety. Security costs and insurance rates would fall. Property values would rise. Neighborhoods would improve.
Drug traffickers and their clients, burglars and receivers of stolen property, arsonists for hire, and bribe-takers would no longer have the advantage of using untraceable currency. Electronic "money" would leave incriminating wails of data, resulting in more arrests and convictions. These prosecutions, in turn, would inhibit further crimes.
The impact of the monetary change on underground economies would be nearly as dramatic as the effect on crime. In the United States, the underground economy is estimated at between 10% and 28% of the gross national product. Internal Revenue Service (IRS) researches suggest that almost all hidden labor is paid in currency.
In a society devoid of physical money, a change from cash to recorded electronic money would be accompanied by a flow of previously unpaid income-tax revenues running in the tens of billions of dollars. As a result, income-tax rates could be lowered and the national debt reduced.
Cash has been the root of much social and economic evil. The emergence of electronic funds-transfer technology makes it possible to change the nature of money and to divorce it from evil. Eighty percent of Americans regularly use credit cards. The development of a federal system to handle the country’ s 300 billion annual cash transactions in the United States electronically is within reach.
A national electronic-money system would operate as debit-card system. Each individual’s "money" would be held in his money-system account. A transaction would effect an instant transfer of "money" from his account to that of another account holder.
The principal differences between a national electronic-money system and commercial bank-card systems would be: the money system would be federally operated; payment would constitute "legal tender"; system-account holders would be able to receive as well as pay out funds by use of their accounts; and funds would be transferable between private-account holders as well as between merchants and private-account holders.
Only cash would be supplanted by electronic money. The use of checks, drafts, money orders, traveler’s checks, cashier’s checks, as well as letters of credit, acceptances, and other financial instruments would remain in regular use. Credit card and automatic-teller-machine systems (ATMs) would not necessarily change, although you could no longer obtain cash at ATMs. |
According to the author, we must change ______.
A．the forms of the money in order to catch thieves and robbers
B．the nature of money in order to root out the cause of evils
C．the availability of money so that evils can be stopped
D．the use of money so that income-tax can be reduced
