The machine discussed in this passage was the ancestor (祖先) of today’s ().

A．typewriter (打字机)
B．television
C．record player
D．computer

In the 1880’s, Engineer Herman Hollerith was given a job by the American government to make an official count of the country’s total population, which is now called census. Mr. Hollerith worked hard to search for a way to record the census information of America, and found it on a train, where he saw a conductor using some tool to make holes in tickets. The position of each hole told something about the ticket holder (持有人) , such as hair or eye color. If the "passenger’ turned out to be a train robber, this record would help the pollce catch the criminal. What he saw on the train greatly inspired him to invent a machine which could calculate like an abacus. Hollerith designed punched (打过孔的) cards for an electric computering machine, for each hole gave the answer to a question, and the machine counted the holes. Thus, the great grandfather of the modern computer was born.