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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.
The author mentioned the sales of science books in paragraph 5 to show that______.
选项 A、most of us are incapable of sustained attention
B、books need to compete for our time
C、we haven’t lost the ability to read deeply
D、the web makes us better-informed
答案C
解析 第五段第三句指出，“现代读者丧失了持久注意力”的观点站不住脚，复杂的科技图书的销量证明了这一点。由此可知，作者提到复杂的科技图书的销量是为了反驳Franzen的错误观点。之所以强调“复杂”的科技图书，是为了暗示这类图书需要人们的深入阅读，从而更能说明现代读者并未失去深人阅读的能力。[C]选项正确。
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