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  3. A generation of e-mailing, followed by an explosion in texting, has pushed the telephone conversation into serious decline, crea

A generation of e-mailing, followed by an explosion in texting, has pushed the telephone conversation into serious decline, crea

admin2012-05-28  57
问题     A generation of e-mailing, followed by an explosion in texting, has pushed the telephone conversation into serious decline, creating new tensions between baby boomers and millennials (千禧一代)—those in their teens, 20s and early 30s.
    Nearly all age groups are spending less time talking on the phone; boomers in their mid-50s and early 60s are the only ones still yakking as they did when Ma Bell was America’s communications queen. But the fall of the call is driven by 18-to-34-year-olds, whose average monthly voice minutes have plunged from about 1 200 to 900 in the past two years, according to the research by Nielsen. Texting among 18-to-24-year-olds has more than doubled in the same period, from an average of 600 messages a month two years ago to more than 1 400 texts a month, according to Nielsen.
    Young people say they avoid voice calls because the immediacy of a phone call strips them of the control that they have over the arguably less-intimate pleasures of texting, e-mailing, or Facebooking. They even complain that phone calls are by their nature impolite, more of an interruption than the blip (提示音) of an arriving text. The bias against unexpected phone calls stems in good part from the way texting and e-mail have conditioned young people to be cautious about how they communicate when they are not face to face, experts say.
    Deborah Tannen, a linguistics professor at Georgetown University who studies how people converse in everyday life, said older generations misinterpret the way younger people use their cellphones. "One student told me that it takes her days to call her parents back and the parents thought she was intentionally putting them off," she said. "But the parents didn’t get it. It’s the medium."
    The difference in communications preferences has created a palpable (明显的) perception gap between young adults and their parents. Jane Beard, who coaches business leaders on public speaking, said that when her niece, Lindsay Spencer, 20, "is in classes at the University of Maryland, I’ll never hear from her until she comes over to do the laundry. We text multiple times a day."
    But Beard is understanding about the change in ways of conversing. Not all parents are quite that open to new ways. "My mom gets offended," said Muggaga Kintu, 32, an administrative assistant at Walter Reed Army Medical Center who prefers texting or calling on his own time when he’s not around patients. "She thinks I don’t want to hear from her, and that’s not the case. One day she called me when I was at work, and I told her, ’Instead of calling me, can you text me?’ ’What? You don’t like to hear from me? You don’t like the sound of my voice?’ She said."
What can we conclude based on the experiences of Jane Beard and Muggaga Kintu?
选项 A、The less popularity of phone calls should arouse the young’s concern.
B、Lives have changed profoundly due to the changing ways of communication.
C、Answering a phone call requires a certain amount of psychological energy.
D、Perception gap emerged due to different communication preferences.
答案D
解析 推理判断题。最后两段使用例证说明正是由于两代人对通讯方式有着不同的偏好，父母一代喜欢打电话，听到儿女的声音，感受到彼此之间的联系，而年青一代则喜欢发短信，喜欢一种掌控感和不被人打扰，因此才产生了这种新的代沟，所以答案为D)。
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