Passage three: Questions are based on the following passage.

After the Boston Marathon bombings, the process by which breaking news and information are generated and disseminated looked more ragged and exposed than ever: CNN stumbled, the New York Post painted a target on a high-school track athlete; Reddit launched a failed hunt for the bombers; and the name of Sunil Tripathi, a missing Brown student,trended on Twitter for all the wrong reasons.

The issue, in part, is velocity: news has never moved faster than it does now, and few events of the past several years have captured America’s attention like the Boston bombings.Every new bit of information was instantly, indiscriminately sucked into the media vacuum. If there is a medium of this moment, it is Twitter.

Twitter’s intrinsic, relentless driving of the new makes it the quintessential medium of breaking news, particularly combined with its capacity for spreading that news with breathtaking ease. By clicking “retweet,” you can re-broadcast a tweet from somebody to all of your followers. A tweet, and the information it contains, can go viral in seconds. So can misinformation, as countless celebrities killed by Twitter can attest. And the mechanics of Twitter offer only awkward partial solutions to that problem. The Wired writer Mat Honan, like many others, re-blasted a tweet referring to Sunil Tripathi as “Suspect #2” in the Boston bombings. That information was gravely wrong, but, as Honan describes, there was little he could do to prevent it from self-perpetuating.

Deeply disturbed by this inability to correct viral misinformation, Honan proposes that Twitter should have a correction mechanism that allows users to edit and rebroadcast tweets after they are posted. The original tweet would remain intact within the corrected tweet, so it would not simply vanish into a hole; there would be accountability. This impulse to regulate the information economy of Twitter and ensure that data and news is as correct as possible is understandable. But it would ruin Twitter as we know it.

For all of the ways in which Twitter has evolved since its creation, in 2006, when it was known as “twttr,” what has not changed is how profoundly Twitter relies on nowness.Nowness is not simply newness, or the new.” the question Twitter used to ask of users when they went to compose a tweet, “What’s happening?” is a direct inquiry about the state of now. Twitter’s intense focus on immediacy has manifested in many small ways—for instance, users can only see their three thousand most recent tweets (and the service only recently added the ability for users to download their entire Twitter archive and conduct searches of tweets from the past). But, most important, when a user logs into Twitter, what they see is a raw, unfiltered stream, with the newest content at the very top. Facebook, by contrast, shows users a curated feed; the top of the feed is not what’s new, it is what the algorithms think is best.

Twitter as a medium is so intently bound to the now that introducing content not of this moment is disruptive—it’s actually something of a prank to resurface someone’s tweets from the distant past, either by retweeting or favoriting them. My friend and I did that to each other yesterday, retweeting a series of stuff from several months ago; they arrived in my feed and hers, ripped away from any sense of context. It felt embarrassing. (This works, though slightly less powerfully, on other social networks that utilize streams and emphasize the present.)

One of the ways we’re learning to deal with the trade-offs inherent to real-time streams is a burgeoning self-awareness of their potential to spread misinformation in half a heartbeat. A mechanism that purports to make that stream more accurate—-even though a corrections button would not fully prevent bad information from spreading—would lull us toward a more complacent, less critical view of that stream. As Nick Kallen, a former systems engineer at Twitter, writes, “We’re dealing with a new medium. It has some aspects of conversation,and some of broadcast, some aspects of live television, and some of (an edited) newspaper. But it is none of these things all at the same time.”

Twitter is now, all the time.

Which of the following best describe the essence of Twitter according to the text?

Honan’s proposition on Twitter indicates that: ________.

What is the main difference between Twitter and Facebook according to the text?

Why does the author say “it’s actually something of a prank to resurface someone’s tweets from the distant past”?

Which of the following best describes author’s opinion?