【正确答案】 B

【答案解析】[听力原文] Moderator: Good evening. Everyone ready? Okay. Tonight we will discuss some of the details of the modem printing process. Let's welcome Professor Lee. Professor Lee: Good evening. Thank you for inviting me here. Tonight I will begin with the changes in the printing process introduced in the 19th century. First of all, we should know the first step a 19th-century printer had to do in order to print something. Okay, the first step in the 19th-century printing process was to create the typeset. Let me explain. By the 19th century, printers began using what we now call the hot metal typeset. Hot metal typesetting is a method, um, of creating a relief printing surface by injecting a molten metal alloy into a matrix. You may ask, 'What's an alloy?' Hmm. An alloy is simply a mixture of metals to create a new metal. Anyways, this alloy was typically an alloy of lead, tin, and a small amount of antimony. It was pioneered by the companies Monotype and Linotype in the late 19th century, and their typesetting machines dominated the industry for the 20th century. Remember, computers weren't commonplace in the printing industry until the 1980s. Anyways, moving along, the Linotype machine uses a 90-character keyboard to create an entire line of metal type at once. This allows much faster printing than with the Gutenburg-style system, urn, in which operators placed down one letter at a time. The machine revolutionized newspaper publishing, making it possible for a relatively small number of operators to set type for many pages on a daily basis. Moderator: You mean this was the first new printing process since Gutenburg? Professor Lee: Correct. Let me explain how it works. This new process was produced by Ottmar Mergenthaler in 1886. His Linotype machine was 2.1 meters tall. First of all, a typesetter would put the letter molds to be used to form a line on a page. Once an entire line of molds was assembled, the machine poured molten type metal into the stacked-up molds. This produced a complete line of type in reverse, so it would read properly when used to transfer ink onto paper. The lines of type were then assembled by hand into a page. But the most difficult process was punch cutting. The cutting of letter punches was a highly-skilled craft requiring much patience and practice. This was almost never done with cutting tools, so they used what is called a counterpunch, which is a type of punch used in the cutting of other punches. I hope I didn't confuse anyone. Does everyone get this? What is the first step of printing process in the 19th century? 李教授在介绍19世纪的印刷程序时首先就谈到the first step in the 19th-century printing process was to create the typeset，即19世纪的印刷程序的第一步是制版，因此选项B为答案。选项A和C都是对the hot metal typeset的具体解释，选项D是对alloy的具体解释，均排除。