单选题
Wild Bill Donovan would have loved the Internet. The American spymaster who built the Office of Strategic Services in the World War Ⅱ and later laid the roots for the CIA was fascinated with information. Donovan believed in using whatever tools came to hand in the "great game" of espionage—spying as a "profession". These days the Net, which has already remade pastimes as buying books and sending mail, is reshaping Donovan"s vocation as well.
The last revolution isn"t simply a matter of gentlemen reading other gentlemen"s e-mail. That kind of electronic spying has been going on for decades. In the past three or four years, the World Wide Web has given birth to a whole industry of point-and-click spying. The spooks call it "open source intelligence", and as the Net grows, it is becoming increasingly influential. In 1995 the CIA held a contest to see who could compile the most data about Burundi. The winner, by a large margin, was a tiny Virginia company called Open-Source Solutions, whose clear advantage was its mastery of the electronic world.
Among the firms making the biggest splash in the new world is Straitford, Inc., a private intelligence-analysis firm based in Austin, Texas. Straitford makes money by selling the results of spying (covering nations from Chile to Russia) to corporations like energy-services firm McDermott International. Many of its predictions are available online at
www.straitford.com.
Straiford president George Friedman says he sees the online world as a kind of mutually reinforcing tool for both information collection and distribution, a spymaster"s dream. Last week his firm was busy vacuuming up data bits from the far corners of the world and predicting a crisis in Ukraine. "As soon as that report runs, we"ll suddenly get 500 new internet sign-ups from Ukraine," says Friedman, a former political science professor. "And we"ll hear back from some of them." Open-source spying does have its risks, of course, since it can be difficult to tell good information from bad. That"s where Straitford earns its keep.
Friedman relies on a lean staff with twenty in Austin. Several of his staff members have military- intelligence backgrounds. He sees the firm"s outsider status as the key to its success. Straitford"s briefs don"t sound like the usual Washington back-and-forthing, whereby agencies avoid dramatic declarations on the chance they might be wrong. Straitford, says Friedman, takes pride in its independent voice.
单选题
The phrase "making the biggest splash" (Line 1, Para. 3) most probably means ______.
【正确答案】
C
【答案解析】[解析] 从文章第2段的后半部分可知，1995年，中央情报局曾经举办过一次比赛，结果以绝对优势赢得比赛的是弗吉尼亚的一家小公司，名叫“开源信息咨询公司”，它的明显优势就是对电子世界的把握；从第3段的内容可知，在这个领域中最成功的公司之一是Straitford有限公司，这是一家位于得克萨斯州奥斯汀市的私营情报分析公司，它通过向一些公司出售间谍情报谋取利润。据此可知，making the biggest splash最可能的意思应该是——“成就最大的”。C项与文章的意思相符，因此C项为正确答案。
单选题
It can be learned from Paragraph 4 that ______.