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  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

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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.
According to the fourth paragraph, the changes in our reading mainly arise from______.
选项 A、the increase in choices of reading media
B、the demand to process more information
C、the emergence of attention-distracting e-readers
D、the decrease in our reading time
答案B
解析 第四段第二句指出，很少有人会像狄更斯时代的读者那样阅读(阅读方式发生了变化)，这是因为缺少时间(a deficit of time)。然后又解释缺少时间的原因：现代读者需要读写的内容更多。由此可知，人们阅读方式发生变化的主要原因在于，读者在有限的阅读时间内需要处理的信息增多。[B]选项符合文意。
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