首页
外语
计算机
考研
公务员
职业资格
财经
工程
司法
医学
专升本
自考
实用职业技能
登录
考研
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
admin
2014-06-25
29
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。
转载请注明原文地址:https://kaotiyun.com/show/JUK4777K
0
考研英语一
相关试题推荐
Everycultureattemptstocreatea"universeofdiscourse"foritsmembers,awayinwhichpeoplecaninterprettheirexperience
Untilthelate1940swhentelevisionbeganfindingitswayintoAmericanhomes,companiesreliedmainlyonprintandradiotopr
Untilthelate1940swhentelevisionbeganfindingitswayintoAmericanhomes,companiesreliedmainlyonprintandradiotopr
Untilthelate1940swhentelevisionbeganfindingitswayintoAmericanhomes,companiesreliedmainlyonprintandradiotopr
Innovationisawordlikedemocracy.Everyoneisinfavourofit,butdifferentpeopleattachdifferentmeaningstoit.IsEasyj
GenerationY—thegroupofAmericanscurrentlyintheirlateteenstoearly30s—getscalledalotofnames.Personalfinanceadvi
Antibiotics,beforetheybecameusedasdrugs,werenaturalproducts.Anewfindingprovidesthefirstdirect【C1】______thatanti
Antibiotics,beforetheybecameusedasdrugs,werenaturalproducts.Anewfindingprovidesthefirstdirect【C1】______thatanti
Antibiotics,beforetheybecameusedasdrugs,werenaturalproducts.Anewfindingprovidesthefirstdirect【C1】______thatanti
随机试题
我国饮水氟适宜浓度为
票据的功能包括()。
企业取得的下列各项收入中,应缴纳企业所得税的有()。
两种学习间发生相互干扰、阻碍的迁移称为()。
火车和汽车的车厢基本是金属封闭结构,在车厢里听不清半导体收音机的广播,却可以通过手机和外界通话,原因是()
在教师职业道德规范中,能判断教师行为是非善恶的最根本的道德标准是()
把戏:伎俩:手段
A.Anewbond-buyingprogramtohelptheweakmembersofeurozoneB.Performancesontheclosingceremonyofthe2012Paralym
实体是信息世界中广泛使用的一个术语,它用于表示
下列描述说明正确的是()
最新回复
(
0
)