We have a crisis on our hands. You mean global warming? The world economy? No, the decline of reading. People are just not doing

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问题     We have a crisis on our hands. You mean global warming? The world economy? No, the decline of reading. People are just not doing it anymore, especially the young. Who’s responsible? Actually, it’s more like, What is responsible? The Internet, of course, and everything that comes with it — Facebook, Twitter. You can write your own list.
    There’s been a warning about the imminent(即将发生的)death of literate civilization for a long time. In the 20th century, first it was the movies, then radio, then television that seemed to spell doom for the written world. None did. Reading survived; in fact it not only survived, it has flourished. The world is more literate than ever before — there are more and more readers, and more and more books.
    The fact that we often get our reading material online today is not something we should worry over. The electronic and digital revolution of the last two decades has arguably shown the way forward for reading and for writing. Take the arrival of e-book readers as an example. Devices like Kindle make reading more convenient and are a lot more environmentally friendly than the traditional paper book.
    As technology makes new ways of writing possible, new ways of reading are possible. Interconnectivity allows for the possibility of a reading experience that was barely imaginable before. Where traditional books had to make do with photographs and illustrations, an e-book can provide readers with an unlimited number of links: to texts, pictures, and videos. In the future, the way people write novels, history, and philosophy will resemble nothing seen in the past.
    On the other hand, there is the danger of trivialization(简单化). One Twitter group is offering its followers single-sentence-long "digests" of the great novels. War and Peace in a sentence? You must be joking. We should fear the fragmentation(破碎)of reading. There is the danger that the high-speed connectivity of the Internet will reduce our attention span — that we will be incapable of reading anything of length or which requires deep concentration.
    In such a fast-changing world, in which reality seems to be remade each day, we need the ability to focus and understand what is happening to us. This has always been the function of literature and we should be careful not to let it disappear. Our society needs to be able to imagine the possibility of someone utterly in tune with modern technology but able to make sense of a dynamic, confusing world.
    In the 15th century, Johannes Guttenberg’s invention of the printing press in Europe had a huge impact on civilization. Once upon a time the physical book was a challenging thing. We should remember this before we assume that technology is out to destroy traditional culture.  
What do we learn from the second paragraph?

选项 A、Reading faced many challenges in its history.
B、The role of reading declines as electronic devices develop.
C、There is a tendency that fewer people read now.
D、The world is less literature due to the digital revolution.

答案A

解析 根据题干中的the second paragraph将本题出处定位到第二段。该段提到,读写文明即将灭亡这一警钟很长时间以来就已经被敲响。在20世纪,读写文明先后受到电影、广播、电视等媒体的冲击,但是阅读幸存了下来…,由此可知,阅读在其发展的历史上面临了诸多挑战,故答案为[A]。[B]与第二段第三句矛盾。[C]与第二段末句破折号后的句子矛盾。[D]与第二段末句破折号前的句子矛盾。
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