阅读理解
Last week the American novelist Jonathan Franzen spoke about the e-reader, which he said threatened the sense of permanence found in the printed book.
I am all for taking shots at Amazon and its popular Kindle, because the company is showing the unmistakable ticks of the power-mad monopoly, but Franzen was talking nonsense. If the printed word were the guardian of all democratic values, how is it that the country Germany where, in 1439, Johannes Gutenberg invented the movable type printing press yielded almost 500 years later to a totalitarian hell, in which books, and the knowledge in them, were suppressed with a relatively small number of bonfires? Ink on paper is not a guarantor of good government either.
What I guess Franzen is complaining about is that people using e-readers may not bring the serious attention to a book that he applies in his writing, which is famously undertaken in conditions of monastic rigour that exclude an internet connection. Like many, he believes that we are less able to focus on the deeper meaning of books and are the worse for it.
This belief about our attention-deficit is not proven, but the obvious point is we still have a choice between screen or print, which is likely to remain, because people will always take pleasure in reading a work on the page and marking a passage. Naturally, few of us read in the way that Dickens's audience did, but that is because of a deficit of time, not necessarily one of attention. We do, however, read and write more every year. The statistics of our hyperactivity are astonishing and show, for instance, that the information passing through our minds has risen threefold in the past 30 years and increases by about 6% every year.
So, the truth is that serious books such as Franzen's Freedom or The Corrections have to compete for our time, whether in print or on a screen. But if a book is good, it will earn the effort and reflection that no doubt Franzen's book deserve. Yet this is not an entitlement and the idea that we are becoming incapable of sustained attention simply doesn't hold up, as the sales of complicated science books attest. Indeed, I have a strong sense that the web has vastly increased our collective intelligence; that we are better informed, shrewder and able to grasp things more quickly than we were 20 years ago.
I am all for taking shots at Amazon and its popular Kindle, because the company is showing the unmistakable ticks of the power-mad monopoly, but Franzen was talking nonsense. If the printed word were the guardian of all democratic values, how is it that the country Germany where, in 1439, Johannes Gutenberg invented the movable type printing press yielded almost 500 years later to a totalitarian hell, in which books, and the knowledge in them, were suppressed with a relatively small number of bonfires? Ink on paper is not a guarantor of good government either.
What I guess Franzen is complaining about is that people using e-readers may not bring the serious attention to a book that he applies in his writing, which is famously undertaken in conditions of monastic rigour that exclude an internet connection. Like many, he believes that we are less able to focus on the deeper meaning of books and are the worse for it.
This belief about our attention-deficit is not proven, but the obvious point is we still have a choice between screen or print, which is likely to remain, because people will always take pleasure in reading a work on the page and marking a passage. Naturally, few of us read in the way that Dickens's audience did, but that is because of a deficit of time, not necessarily one of attention. We do, however, read and write more every year. The statistics of our hyperactivity are astonishing and show, for instance, that the information passing through our minds has risen threefold in the past 30 years and increases by about 6% every year.
So, the truth is that serious books such as Franzen's Freedom or The Corrections have to compete for our time, whether in print or on a screen. But if a book is good, it will earn the effort and reflection that no doubt Franzen's book deserve. Yet this is not an entitlement and the idea that we are becoming incapable of sustained attention simply doesn't hold up, as the sales of complicated science books attest. Indeed, I have a strong sense that the web has vastly increased our collective intelligence; that we are better informed, shrewder and able to grasp things more quickly than we were 20 years ago.
单选题
16.The author implies in the first two paragraphs that printed books______.
【正确答案】
A
【答案解析】推断题。第一段指出弗兰岑认为电子阅读器失去了印刷书籍中的永恒感。第二段对此予以反驳，以“德国在活字印刷术发明500年后依然陷入极权政治的魔爪”说明印刷书籍也无法保证民主的施行。故A项正确。
单选题
17.Paragraph 3 mainly displays Franzen's concern about______.
【正确答案】
D
【答案解析】主旨题。第三段指出，“弗兰岑真正抱怨的可能是，人们在使用电子阅读器时不能像他写作时对自己作品一样认真阅读，失去了关注作者深层含义的能力，故D项正确。
单选题
18.According to the fourth paragraph, the changes in our reading mainly arise from______.
【正确答案】
B
【答案解析】细节题。第四段第二句指出，很少有人会像狄更斯时代的读者那样阅读(阅读方式发生了变化)，这是因为缺少时间(a deficit of time)。然后又解释缺少时间的原因：现代读者需要读写的内容更多(read and write more)。由此可知，人们阅读方式发生变化的主要原因在于，读者在有限的阅读时间内需要处理的信息增多。B项符合文意。
单选题
19.The author mentioned the sales of science books in paragraph 5 to show that______.
【正确答案】
C
【答案解析】细节题。由science books定位到第五段第三句“现代读者丧失了持久注意力的观点站不住脚，复杂的科技图书的销量证明了这一点”。由此可知，作者提到复杂的科技图书的销量是为了反驳弗兰岑的错误观点。之所以强调“复杂”的科技图书，是为了暗示这类图书需要人们的深入阅读，从而更能说明现代读者并未失去深入阅读的能力，C项正确。
单选题
20.What would be the best title for the text?
【正确答案】
B
【答案解析】主旨题。文章最后一段中作者对自己所持观点进行了总结：网络增加了我们的群体智慧，使我们更加博学，更加敏锐，更快地领悟事情的要点。可见，B项最符合文意。