Read the following passage and mark
the letter A, B, C, or D on your answer sheet to indicate the correct answer to
each of the questions from 1 to 8.
Smart cards and mobile phones are
becoming an increasingly popular way to make all sorts of payments. Even now,
in Japan thousands of transactions, from paying rail tickets to picking up the
groceries, take place every day with customers passing their handsets across a small flat-screen device. And
predictions in the world of finance reckon that payments using mobile phones
will have risen to more than $50 billion in the very near future.
What's the appeal of e-cash?
Compared to cheques or credit cards, it offers the speed of cash, but more so.
It takes just one tenth of a second to complete most transactions and as no
change is required, errors in counting are eliminated. Fraud and theft are also
reduced and for the retailer, it reduces the cost of handling money. Sony's
vision of having a chip embedded in
computers, TVs and games consoles means that films, music and games can be paid
for easily without having to input credit card details.
And what about the future of
the banks? Within their grip on the
market, banks and credit-card firms want to be in a position to collect most of
the fees from the users of mobile and contactless-payment systems. But the new
system could prove to be a "disruptive technology" as far as the
banks are concerned. If payments for a few coffees, a train ticket and a
newspaper are made every day by a commuter with a mobile, this will not appear
on their monthly credit card statements but on their mobile phone statements.
And having spent fortunes on branding, credit-card companies and banks do not
want to see other payment systems gaining popularity. It's too early to say
whether banks will miss out and if so, by how much. However, quite a few
American bankers are optimistic. They feel there is reason to be suspicious of
those who predict that high-street banks may be a thing of the past. They point
out that Internet banking did not result in the closure of their high-street branches as was predicted. On the contrary, more
Americans than ever are using local branches. So, whether we'll become a
totally cash-free society remains open to contention.
What is the main idea of the first paragraph?
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