填空题Directions: Read the following text and answer questions by
finding information from the right column that corresponds to each of the marked
details given in the left column. There are two extra choices in the right
column. Mark your answers on the ANSWER SHEET. A man wakes up
in a New York apartment, brews coffee and goes out into the world, and
everything that can appear on a smartphone or iPad appears before his eyes
instead: weather reports , calendar reminders, messages from friends, his
girlfriend's smiling face. This is the promise of Google's Project Glass. Even
if the project itself never comes to fruition, though, the preview video
deserves a life of its own, as a window into what our era promises and what it
threatens to take away. On the one hand, the video is a
testament to modem technology's extraordinary feats—not only instant
communication across continents, but also an almost god-like access to
information about the world around us. But the video also captures the sense of
isolation that coexists with our technological mastery. The man in the Google
Glasses lives alone, in a drab, impersonal apartment. He is, in
other words, a characteristic 21st-century American, more electronically
networked but more personally isolated than ever before. As the N. Y.U.
Sociologist Eric Klinenberg notes in Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and
Surprising Appeal of Living Alone, there are now more Americans living by
themselves than there are Americans in intact nuclearfamily households. And
friendship, too, seems to be attenuating (减弱): a 2006 Duke University study
found that Americans reported having, on average, three people with whom they
discussed important issues in 1985, but just two by the mid-2000s.
The question hanging over the future of American social life, then, is
whether all the possibilities of virtual community can make up for the weakening
of flesh-and-blood ties and the decline of traditional communal
institutions. The optimists say yes. ff you believe writers
like Clay Shirky, author of 2008's Here Comes Everybody, the buzzing hive mind
of the Internet is well on its way to generating a kind of "cognitive surplus",
which promises to make group interactions even more effective and enriching than
they were before the Web. The pessimists, on the other hand,
worry that online life offers only an illusion of community. In Alone Together,
Sherry Turkle argues that the lure of Internet relationships, constantly
available but inherently superficial, might make both genuine connection and
genuine solitude impossible. Seeing the world through the eyes
of the man in the Google Glasses, though, suggests a more political reason for
pessimism. In his classic 1953 work, The Quest for Community, the sociologist
Robert Nisbet argues that in eras of intense individualism and weak communal
ties, an atomized, rootless population is more likely to embrace authoritarian
ideologies, and more likely to seek the protection of an omnicompetent
state. Today, social media are hailed for empowering dissidents
and undercutting tyrannies around the world. Yet it's hard not to watch the
Google video and agree with Forbes's Kashmir Hill when she suggests that such a
technology could ultimately "accelerate the arrival of the persistent and
pervasive" citizen surveillance state, in which everything you see and do can be
recorded, reported. In this kind of world, the man in the Google Glasses might
feel like a king of infinite space. But he'd actually inhabit a comfortable,
full-service cage. A. Internet will eliminate the social
advance achieved in the past centuries. B. individual liberty
might lead some people to embrace despotism ideology. C.
Internet is likely to bring genuine correlation to an end. D.
vast change has taken place in terms of the current American family
structure. E. the Internet will facilitate and enrich communal
interactions. F. the Internet technology will make personal
behaviour exposed to others. G. excessive addiction to the
Internet will bring about individualism.