2. 外语
  3. YouTube has built a global reputation as the place to go for video clips of singing cats, laughing babies, reckless drivers, and

YouTube has built a global reputation as the place to go for video clips of singing cats, laughing babies, reckless drivers, and

admin2018-04-15  40
问题     YouTube has built a global reputation as the place to go for video clips of singing cats, laughing babies, reckless drivers, and harsh wedding processionals. But there’s more to the site than pointless entertainment: there is a growing collection of university lectures available. Earlier this year YouTube launched a new home for education, YouTube EDU, which started as a volunteer project by company employees seeking a better way to aggregate educational content uploaded by U.S. colleges and universities. Last month the subsite went international, with 45 universities in Europe and Israel adding their content to the stream.
    One need not be a student to reap the benefits of higher education anymore. In addition to YouTube EDU, Web sites like iTunes U, TED, and Academic Earth allow millions of people to download lectures by some of the world’s top experts—for free. Known as open educational resources—or OER—the movement is turning education into a form of mass entertainment. Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s(MIT)OpenCourseWare(OCW)offers free access to most of the school’s course material and lectures on subjects like Anglo-American folk music and the behavior of algorithms(运算法则). iTunes U provides free lectures, discussions, and conferences from schools like Oxford, Yale, and the French business institute HEC Paris.
    The democratization of higher education started in the 1990s when universities began looking to the Web to market their intellectual resources. In 1999, Germany’s University of Tubingen became the first institution of higher learning to offer free lectures on the Web, and in 2002, MIT launched its OCW site. Now nearly 45 percent of visitors to the MIT site are what the school calls "self-learners."
    Not everyone is convinced that the biggest consumers of online educational materials are motivated— or even bored—self-learners. "The idea that you are sitting in on a Saturday evening with nothing to do and you randomly come across a quantum(量子)-physics YouTube video and watch it, well, this is not happening," says Francesc Pedro, senior analyst of the OECD’s Centre for Educational Research and Innovation. The applications, he says, are actually much wider ranging: "Imagine what a treasure collection this is for a college teacher in Africa or a student in a developing country in Asia who can access good materials from prestigious universities at their fingertips."
    Whoever is using OER, the numbers keep growing. MIT’s site now gets more than 1.2 million visitors a month. Oxford’s iTunes material has surpassed a million uploads. Oxford philosophy professor Marianne Talbot and University of California Berkeley biology professor Marian Diamond have become Web darlings. But maybe not quite on a level with Oscar the talking dog.
The author most probably thinks that the singing cats and laughing babies on YouTube are _____.
选项 A、widely-received
B、meaningless
C、interesting
D、well-known
答案B
解析 根据第2句开头But引出的内容可以知道作者认为第1句提到的singing cats…都属于pointless entertainment，B与pointless同义，故为本题答案。
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