2. 考研
  3. Last week the American novelist Jonathan Franzen spoke about the e-reader, which he said threatened the sense of permanence foun

Last week the American novelist Jonathan Franzen spoke about the e-reader, which he said threatened the sense of permanence foun

admin2014-06-25  50
问题     Last week the American novelist Jonathan Franzen spoke about the e-reader, which he said threatened the sense of permanence found in the printed book. He went on to suggest that this loss of permanence might eventually prove "inconsistent with a system of justice and self-government".
    I am all for taking shots at Amazon and its popular Kindle, because the company is showing the unmistakable ticks of the power-mad monopoly, but Franzen was talking nonsense. If the printed word were the guardian of all democratic values, how is it that the country Germany where, in 1439, Johannes Gutenberg invented the movable type printing press yielded almost 500 years later to a totalitarian hell, in which books, and the knowledge in them, were suppressed with a relatively small number of bonfires? Ink on paper is not a guarantor of good government either. So we need to tamp it down a bit: the e-reader is not the barbarian at the gate; governments become corrupt and civil society is lost for other reasons.
    What I guess Franzen is complaining about is that people using e-readers may not bring the serious attention to a book that he applies in his writing, which is famously undertaken in conditions of monastic rigour that exclude an internet connectioa Like many, he believes that we have become shallow readers, less able to focus on the deeper meaning of books and are the worse for it.
    This belief about our attention-deficit is not proven, but the obvious point is we still have a choice between screen or print, which is likely to remain, because people will always take pleasure in reading a work on the page, admiring the paper and typefaces(admittedly rare), marking a passage. Naturally, few of us read in the way that Dickens’s audience did, but that is because of a deficit of time, not necessarily one of attention. We do, however, read and write more every year. The statistics of our hyperactivity are astonishing and show, for instance, that the information passing through our minds has risen threefold in the past 30 years and increases by about 6% every year.
    So, the truth is that serious books such as Franzen’s Freedom or The Corrections have to compete for our time, whether in print or on a screen. But if a book is good, it will earn the effort and reflection that no doubt Franzen’s books deserve. Yet this is not an entitlement and the idea that we are becoming incapable of sustained attention simply doesn’t hold up, as the sales of complicated science books attest. Indeed, I have a strong sense that the web has vastly increased our collective intelligence; that we are better informed, shrewder and able to grasp things more quickly than we were 20 years ago. If Dickens were alive today, guess who’d be blogging, offering the occasional tweet, setting up literary websites, digging out some of his old work and repackaging it in ebooks.
What would be the best title for the text?
选项 A、The Deprived Attention in E-readers
B、Smarter Readers in the Digital Age
C、Mourn the Lost Permanence in Printed Words
D、Read deeply as Dickens’s Audience Did
答案B
解析 本文介绍并驳斥了Franzen关于“电子书失去了纸质书的永恒感，无法保障民主政权，使读者失去了持久注意力”等一系列观点，最后进一步总结指出，网络增加了我们的群体智慧，使我们更加博学，更加敏锐，更快地领悟事情的要点。可见，[B]选项最符合文意。
转载请注明原文地址:https://kaotiyun.com/show/WUK4777K
0

考研英语一

相关试题推荐
随机试题
最新回复(0)