109年 - 109 高等考試_三級_新聞（選試英文）：新聞英文#88698

　　Only a few months ago residents of the impossibly picturesque Austrian village of Hallstatt were debating how to stem the influx of tourists thronging its narrow streets, nestled between soaring mountains and a sparkling lake. 

　　Careful what you wish for: With the collapse in international travel brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic, the tour groups that used to jam the streets — with up to 100 coaches arriving daily in the high season — have disappeared. 

　　In pre-coronavirus times the main concern for locals was that Hallstatt would be turned into an open-air theme park and become yet another symbol of the phenomenon of “overtourism.” With 1 million visitors per year for just 750 residents, the tiny village competed with the likes of Venice and Barcelona in the rankings of most tourists per inhabitant. 

　　“There are more than 600,000 photos of Hallstatt on Instagram,” Hallstatt Mayor Alexander Scheutz said. The number of coaches coming to Hallstatt doubled in the space of five years, reaching 21,254 last year. Many of the bigger tour groups were made up of visitors from Taiwan, China, South Korea and the US. 

　　While today the virus has brought a measure of serenity to the village, the debate on how tourism can be made more sustainable has returned even more forcefully. A growing divide had been opening up between the local winners and losers from the tourism boom, Scheutz said. 

　　As Austria was easing its COVID-19 lockdown last month, Hallstatt brought in a new system for limiting coach numbers — only for the coaches to vanish anyway. While the car park has been full on the weekends since lockdown eased, current visitors are overwhelmingly Austrians or people from neighboring countries. 

　　“The way it is now reminds us of how Hallstatt was before, and we’d like it to stay that way,” said one local climbing the steps to her house, which clings to the mountainside. 

　　The forced respite brought about by coronavirus should be a chance to “get things back in order,” Scheutz said, adding that the village could swap quantity for “quality” when it comes to tourism. But it’s not as easy as saying: “We’ll start from scratch,” he said.

科技巨頭亞馬遜（Amazon）正式禁止警方使用該公司的人臉識別軟體一 年。這一決定正值民權倡議人士對監控技術可能存在種族偏見表示擔憂 之際。本週，國際商業機器公司（IBM）亦表示，將停止提供其人臉識別 軟體作「大規模監控或種族歸納」之用。 

非裔美國人喬治 ‧ 佛洛伊德（George Floyd）在被警察制伏期間死亡，美 國抗議活動在多地蔓延，各企業在受到外界壓力要求回應之後，作出了這 樣的決定。 

「我們主張，各國政府應該訂立更有力的法規，監管人臉識別技術的有道 德使用，而在近日，國會似乎是凖備好迎接這一挑戰，」亞馬遜在一份聲 明中說。 

「我們希望，這一年暫停會給國會足夠的時間來實施合適的規則，而且假 如有需要，我們隨時會給予幫助。」不過，該公司稱，仍然會提供相關技 術協助警方偵測人口販賣等不法情事。