Electronic Mail

During the past fewyears,scientists all over the world have suddenly found themselvespro-ductively engaged in task they once spent their lives avoiding—writing,anykind

of writing,butparticularly letter writing. Encouraged by electronic mail's surprisingly highspeed,convenience and economy,people who never before touched the stuff are

regularly,skillfully,evencheerfully tapping out a great deal of correspondence.

Electronicnetworks,woven into the fabric of scientific communication these days,are theroute to colleagues in distant countries,shared data,bulletin boards andelectronic

journals.Any-onewith a personal computer,a modern and the software to link computers overtelephone lines can sign on.An estimated five million scientists have done so

with more joiningevery day,most of them communicating through a bundle of interconnecteddomestic and foreign routes known col-lectively as the Internet,or net.

E-mail is startingto edge out the fax,the telephone,overnight mail,and of course,land mail.Itshrinks time and distance between scientific collaborators,in part because itis

conven-ientlyasynchronous（异步的）( Writercan type while their colleagues across time zones sleep; their message will bewaiting.).If it is not yet speeding discoveries,it

is certainlyaccelerating communication.

Jeremy Bernstein,thephysicist and science writer,once called E-mail the physicist's umbili-cal cord（脐带）.Later other people,too,have beendiscovering its connective

virtues. Physi-cistsare using it;college students are using it;everybody is using it;and as a signthat it has come of age,the New Yorker has celebrated its liberating presence

with a cartoon—anapprecia-tive dog seated at a keyboard,saying happily,“on the Internet,nobodyknows you're a dog.”

What will happento fax,land mail,overnight mail,etc.according to the writer?

A.Their functionscannot be replaced by E-mail.

B. They willco-exist with E-mail for a long time.

C. Less and lesspeople will use them.

D. They will play asupplementary function to E-mail.