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  3. A generation of e-mailing, followed by an explosion in texting, has pushed the telephone conversation into serious decline, crea

A generation of e-mailing, followed by an explosion in texting, has pushed the telephone conversation into serious decline, crea

admin2012-05-28  115
问题     A generation of e-mailing, followed by an explosion in texting, has pushed the telephone conversation into serious decline, creating new tensions between baby boomers and millennials (千禧一代)—those in their teens, 20s and early 30s.
    Nearly all age groups are spending less time talking on the phone; boomers in their mid-50s and early 60s are the only ones still yakking as they did when Ma Bell was America’s communications queen. But the fall of the call is driven by 18-to-34-year-olds, whose average monthly voice minutes have plunged from about 1 200 to 900 in the past two years, according to the research by Nielsen. Texting among 18-to-24-year-olds has more than doubled in the same period, from an average of 600 messages a month two years ago to more than 1 400 texts a month, according to Nielsen.
    Young people say they avoid voice calls because the immediacy of a phone call strips them of the control that they have over the arguably less-intimate pleasures of texting, e-mailing, or Facebooking. They even complain that phone calls are by their nature impolite, more of an interruption than the blip (提示音) of an arriving text. The bias against unexpected phone calls stems in good part from the way texting and e-mail have conditioned young people to be cautious about how they communicate when they are not face to face, experts say.
    Deborah Tannen, a linguistics professor at Georgetown University who studies how people converse in everyday life, said older generations misinterpret the way younger people use their cellphones. "One student told me that it takes her days to call her parents back and the parents thought she was intentionally putting them off," she said. "But the parents didn’t get it. It’s the medium."
    The difference in communications preferences has created a palpable (明显的) perception gap between young adults and their parents. Jane Beard, who coaches business leaders on public speaking, said that when her niece, Lindsay Spencer, 20, "is in classes at the University of Maryland, I’ll never hear from her until she comes over to do the laundry. We text multiple times a day."
    But Beard is understanding about the change in ways of conversing. Not all parents are quite that open to new ways. "My mom gets offended," said Muggaga Kintu, 32, an administrative assistant at Walter Reed Army Medical Center who prefers texting or calling on his own time when he’s not around patients. "She thinks I don’t want to hear from her, and that’s not the case. One day she called me when I was at work, and I told her, ’Instead of calling me, can you text me?’ ’What? You don’t like to hear from me? You don’t like the sound of my voice?’ She said."
According to Deborah Tannen, the older generations should recognize that
选项 A、their children are just too busy to reply
B、it’s the medium that makes difference
C、children have phone gripes about them
D、they are intruding their children’s lives
答案B
解析 细节推断题。文中指出．Deborah Tannen认为，长辈们误解了年轻人使用手机的方式，不是孩子们故意不接电话。只是因为他们习惯了电邮和短信这种通讯方式。因为他们交流的媒介发生了改变，而父母不了解这一点，所以双方难以避免产生误解，故答案为B)。
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