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  3. The average person sees tens of thousands of images a day—images on television, in newspapers and magazines, and on the sides of

The average person sees tens of thousands of images a day—images on television, in newspapers and magazines, and on the sides of

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问题     The average person sees tens of thousands of images a day—images on television, in newspapers and magazines, and on the sides of buses. Images also grace soda cans and T-shirts, and Internet search engines can instantly procure images for any word you type. On Flickr. com, a photosharing Web site, you can type in a word such as "love" and find photos of couples in embrace or parents hugging their children. Type in "terror", and among the results is a photograph of the World Trade Center towers burning. "Remember when this was a shocking image? " asks the person who posted the picture.
    The question is not merely rhetorical. It points to something important about images in our culture: they have become less magical and less shocking. Until the development of mass reproduction, images carried more power and evoked more fear.
    Today, anyone with a digital camera and a PC can produce and alter an image. As a result, the power of the image has been diluted in one sense, but strengthened in another. It has been diluted by the ubiquity of images and the many populist technologies (like inexpensive cameras and picture-editing software) that give almost everyone the power to create, distort, and transmit images. But it has been strengthened by the gradual surrender of the printed word to pictures. Text ceded to image might be likened to an articulate person being rendered mute, forced to communicate via gesture and expression rather than language.
    We love images and the democratizing power of technologies that give us the capability to make and manipulate images. What we are less eager to consider are the broader cultural effects of a society devoted to the image. Historians and anthropologists have explored the story of mankind’s movement from an oral-based culture to a written culture, and later to a printed one. But in the past several decades we have begun to move from a culture based on the printed word to one based largely on images.
    In making images rather than texts our guide, are we opening up new vistas for understanding and expression, creating a new form of communication that is " better than print,” as some scholars have argued? Or are we merely making a peculiar and unwelcome return to forms of communication once ascendant in preliterate societies?
    Two things in particular are at stake in our contemporary confrontation with an image-based culture. First, technology has considerably undermined our ability to trust what we see, yet we have not adequately grappled with the effects of this on our notions of truth. Second, if we are indeed moving from the era of the printed word to an era dominated by the image, what impact will this have on culture? Will we become too easily accustomed to verisimilar rather than true things, preferring appearance to reality and in the process rejecting the demands of discipline and patience that true things often require of us if we are to understand their meaning and describe it with precision?
What does "forms of communication once ascendant in preliterate societies" (line 8, para. 5) refer to?
选项 A、Images.
B、Written words.
C、Printed images.
D、Texts.
答案A
解析 根据文章第五段第二句话“Or are we merely making a peculiar and unwelcome return to forms of communication once ascendant in preliterate societies? ”，即或者我们只是做了一个特殊的，不受欢迎的回归，回归到了文明前社会的交流形式? 这里的文明前社会的交流形式指的就是图片，故选A。
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