Passage Four

For a quarter of a century, surveys of reading habits by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), a federally-funded body, have been favorite material for anyone who thinks America is dumbing down. Susan Jacoby, author of“The Age of American Unreason”，for example, cites the 2007 NEA report that “the proportion of 17-year-olds who read nothing (unless required to do so for school) more than doubled between 1984 and 2004.”

So it is a surprise that this bellwether seems to have taken a turn for the better. This week the NEA reported that, for the first time since 1982 when its survey began, the number of adults who said they had read a novel, short story, poem or play in the past 12 months had gone up, rising from 47% of the population in 2002 to over 50% in 2008.

The increase, modest as it is， has thrown educationalists into a tizzy. “It's just a blip，” one professor told The New York Times. It is certainly a snapshot. But it is not statistically insignificant. As the NEAs research director, Sunil Iyengar, points out, almost every demographic and ethnic group seems to be reading more.

The increase has been most marked in groups whose reading had declined most in the past 25 years, African-Americans and Hispanics (up by 15% and 20% respectively since 2002). It has also been larger among people at lower levels of education: reading among college graduates was flat, but among those who dropped out of high school it rose from under a quarter to over a third.

Most remarkable of all has been the rebound among young men. The numbers of men aged 18-24 who say they are reading books (not just online) rose 24% in 2002-08. Teachers sometimes despair of young men, whose educational performance has lagged behind that of young women almost across the board. But the reading gap at least may be narrowing. Dana Gioia, the NEAs outgoing chairman, thinks the reason for the turnaround is the public reaction to earlier reports which had sounded the alarm. “There has been a measurable change in society's commitment to literacy,” he says. “Reading has become a higher priority.”

It may also be benefiting from the growing popularity of serious-minded leisure pursuits of many kinds. Museums, literary festivals and live opera transmissions into cinemas are all reporting larger audiences. Mr. Iyengar thinks the division between those who read a lot and those who don't is eroding. What has not changed, though, is America's “functional illiteracy” rate. Fully 21% of adult Americans did not read a book last year because they couldn't one of the worst rates in the rich world.

What does the author mean by “dumbing down” in Paragraph 1?

According to Paragraph 2, the trend seems to have taken a turn for the better in that________.

Sunil Iyengar, the NEAs research director points out that________.

The underlined sentence in Paragraph 5 denotes that young men have________.

Which of the following statements is true according to the last two paragraphs?