Directions: There are 3 passages in this part. Each passage is followed by some questions or unfinished statements. For each of them there are four choices marked A., B., C. and D.. You should decide on the best choice and write the answer on the Answer Sheet.

Passage two

They’re still kids, and although there’s a lot that the experts don’t yet know about them, one thing they do agree on is that what kids use and expect from their world has changed rapidly. And it’s all because of technology.

To the psychologists, sociologists, and generational and media experts who study them, their digital gear sets this new group apart, even from their tech-savvy (懂技术的) Millennial elders. They want to be constantly connected and available in a way even their older siblings don’t quite get. These differences may appear slight, but they signal an all-encompassing sensibility that some say marks the dawning of a new generation.

The contrast between Millennials and this younger group was so evident to psychologist Larry Rosen of California State University that he has declared the birth of a new generation in a new book, Rewired: Understanding the ingeneration and the Way They Learn, out next month. Rosen says the tech-dominated life experience of those born since the early 1990s is so different from the Millennials he wrote about in his 2007 book, Me, MySpace and I: Parenting the Net Generation, that they warrant the distinction of a new generation, which he has dubbed the “ingeneration”.

“The technology is the easiest way to see it, but it’s also a mind-set, and the mind-set goes with the little ‘I’, which I’m talking to stand for ‘individualized’,” Rosen says. “Everything is defined and individualized to ‘me’. My music choices are defined to ‘me’. What I watch on TV any instant is defined to ‘me’.” He says the iGeneration includes today’s teens and middle-school teenagers, but it’s too soon to tell about elementary-school ages and younger.

Rosen says the iGeneration believes anything is possible. “If they can think of it, somebody probably has or will invent it,” he says. “They expect innovation.”

They have high expectations that whatever they want or can use “will be able to be tailored to their own needs and wishes and desires.”

Rosen says portability is key. They are inseparable from their wireless devices, which allow them to text as well as talk, so they can be constantly connected-even in class, where cell phones are supposedly banned.

Many researchers are trying to determine whether technology somehow causes the brains of young people to be wired differently. “They should be distracted and should perform more poorly than they do,” Rosen says. “But findings show teens survive distractions much better than we would predict by their age and their brain development.”

Because these kids are more immersed and at younger ages, Rosen says, the educational system has to change significantly.

“The growth curve on the use of technology with children is exponential(指数的), and we run the risk of being out of step with this generation as far as how they learn and how they think,” Rosen says.

“We have to give them options because they want their world individualized.”