单选题 Mr Mitsuyasu Ota, the Mayor of Hirate, in western Japan, made this week"s news columns after imposing a one-day-a-week ban on the use of computer equipment in the town"s municipal offices. The step was taken on the grounds that young staff "mistakenly think they are working" when sitting attentively at their computer screens. At the same time, Mr Ota lamented that "young people are not in the habit of writing by hand any more".
One of the favourite arguments brought out by the opposition in technology wars is the notion that a technical short cut is simultaneously a kind of mental impoverishment, and that the man with the pen will think and write more effectively than the man with the Compaq.
Leaving aside the question of whether advanced technology makes you think less dynamically, the idea that there should be recognisable stylistic discrepancies between the work of pen-pushers and key-tappers shouldn"t in the least surprise us. Historically, literary styles have always borne a strong relationship to the available technology. The quill pen, most obviously, allowed its owner only a certain number of words between refills, thereby encouraging all those lengthy Gibbonian sentences crammed with subordinate clauses. The fountain pen—which allowed you to write as many words as you wanted—and the manual typewriter created further revolutions. It is not particularly far-fetched, for example, to suggest that the elliptical prose of early-20th-century Modernist masters such as Hemingway derives in part from its having been typed, rather than written down.
But what about the computer screen? What effect does that have on the elemental patterns by which the writer downloads the words in his or her head? Without wanting to sound like Mayor Ota, I suspect that to a certain kind of writer it is as much a hindrance as a help. A single glance at the average bookshop will demonstrate that novels are getting longer. There are excellent aesthetic reasons for that, of course, but there is also a technical explanation. Which is to say that computers allow you to write more words and to write them more quickly, without the restraint of having to alter everything by hand and then rewrite.
Every so often, as a reviewer, one stumbles with a sinking heart across one of these enormous wordy affairs, which, however assiduous the attentions of its editor, betrays its origin as a screen-aided mental show-off. Perhaps, like the municipal employees of Mayor Ota"s Hirate, we should all try banning computers one day a week.

【正确答案】 A

【答案解析】[解析] 第一段提到了Ota市长的做法和观点，他每周一天禁止市政办公室的人使用计算机设备，原因是年轻人不再用手写字了。第四段表达了作者的一些观点，他虽然不想让人感到他与Ota市长口气一样，但他认为，对某些写作者来说，计算机既可以是一种帮助，同时也可能是一个障碍，如：小说变长了，这当然有美学上的原因，但是也有技术原因在里面，因为计算机能使人写得更快，并随意修改。言外之意，写得长未必内容更丰富。
最后一段更清楚地表达了作者的观点。一名写评论的人(指作者自己)会经常伤心地(with a sinking heart)见到一本这样的漫长的宏卷，无论编辑者多么用心，你都能立刻看出来这是用计算机写出来的用以炫耀智力的东西(称其华而不实)。像Ota市长的雇员们那样，或许我们都应该尝试一下每周一天不使用计算机。