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与人类劳动者相比，机器人至少有一个不公平的优势：不用缴所得税。
测试中可能遇到的词汇和知识：
socialist社会主义者；社会党党员['səʊʃ(ə)lɪst; 'səʊʃəlɪst]
make a fortune发财，赚大钱
automation|自动化；自动操作[ɔːtə'meɪʃ(ə)n]
levy征收；征兵，征税['levɪ]
fray争论；打架[freɪ]
阅读马上开始，建议您计算一下阅读整篇文章所用的时间，对照下方的参考值就可以评估出您的英文阅读水平。
Robots have at least one unfair advantage over human workers: they do not pay income tax.
Bill Gates,co-founder of Microsoft and the world’s richest man,thinks that should change. It is an idea that until now has been associated more with European socialists than tech industry leaders,and puts him in the unusual position of explicitly arguing for taxes to slow the adoption of new technology.
Mr Gates made his fortune from the spread of PCs,which helped to erase whole categories of workers,from typists to travel agents. But,speaking in an interview with Quartz,he argued that it may be time to deliberately slow the advance of the next job-killing technologies.
“It is really bad if people overall have more fear about what innovation is going to do than they have enthusiasm,”he said.“That means they won’t shape it for the positive things it can do. And,you know,taxation is certainly a better way to handle it than just banning some elements of it.”
The idea of using taxes to support people put out of work by automation has been catching on in the tech world,but Mr Gates went further,pushing for a direct levy on robots that would match what human workers pay.
“Right now,the human worker who does,say,$50,000 worth of work in a factory,that income is taxed and you get income tax,social security tax,all those things,”he said.“If a robot comes in to do the same thing,you’d think that we’d tax the robot at a similar level.”
The extra money should be used to retrain people the robots have replaced,Mr Gates said,with“communities where this has a particularly big impact”first in line for support.
Some politicans have also joined the fray. Benoît Hamon,France’s Socialist candidate in this year’s presidential elections,has called for a tax on robots to fund a minimum income for all.
Some tech leaders have hinted that the tech companies’customers — rather than the industry itself — should foot a higher tax bill. In a recent interview with the Financial Times,Satya Nadella,Microsoft’s current chief executive,said:“Whenever somebody cuts cost,that means,hopefully,a surplus is getting created. You can always tax surplus.”
Mr Gates echoed that suggestion,though he also struck a more radical stance with his levy on the machines’producers.“I don’t think the robot companies are going to be outraged that there might be a tax,”he said.“It’s OK.”
请根据你所读到的文章内容，完成以下自测题目：
A.slow the adoption of new technology
B.accelerate the adoption of new technology
C.please the European socialists rather than tech industry leaders
D.gain more profit
答案 (1)
A.high-profit
B.high-efficiency
C.job-killing
D.hair-raising
答案 (2)
A.half level
B.a similar level
C.diploid level
D.threefold level
答案 (3)
A.to comfort the unemployed people
B.to retrain people replaced by robots
C.to support technical innovation
D.to encourage science-and-technology enterprise
答案 (4)
(1) 答案：A.slow the adoption of new technology解释：到目前为止，支持这种想法的更多是欧洲的社会主义者，而不是科技行业的领袖。这也体现了盖茨不同寻常的立场：明确支持通过征税来延缓新技术的应用。
(2) 答案：C.job-killing解释：盖茨从个人电脑(PC)的普及中发家，电脑普及是导致从打字员到旅行代理商等许多行业消失的因素之一。但他在接受Quartz采访时提出，当前或许应该有意地延缓下一批夺走工作岗位的技术的进步。
(3) 答案：B.a similar level解释：盖茨呼吁对机器人直接征收与人类工人水平相当的税金。
(4) 答案：B.to retrain people replaced by robots解释：针对机器人征收的税款应该用于对被机器人取代的人进行再培训，“受到特别大影响的群体”应该首先获得支持。