首页
外语
计算机
考研
公务员
职业资格
财经
工程
司法
医学
专升本
自考
实用职业技能
登录
外语
It’s never easy to plumb the reading habits of children, but teachers and parents perennially knock themselves out with worry ov
It’s never easy to plumb the reading habits of children, but teachers and parents perennially knock themselves out with worry ov
admin
2017-03-15
44
问题
It’s never easy to plumb the reading habits of children, but teachers and parents perennially knock themselves out with worry over any sign of a decline. Among US teenagers, reading skills haven’t improved in high schools since 1999, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a standardized test. To many educators, the wild success of the "Harry Potter" books only underscores the paucity of reading in the lives of today’s children, who somehow manage to find copious amounts of time for videogames, Web surfing and text messaging. "Fast-paced lifestyles, coupled with heavy media diets of visual immediacy, beget brains misfitted to traditional modes of academic learning," writes psychologist Jane Healy in Endangered Minds. The lure of the visual in today’s electronic media, it would seem, is proving too much for the increasingly antiquated pleasures of the written word.
What should be done? Healy and others would have us mount a vigorous campaign to restore reading to its rightful place, or risk raising a generation cut off from a rich cultural heritage. Before we jump on our high horses, however, it might be helpful to look at the conflict between visual media and the written would not so much as a battle between technology and culture, but between two technologies, each representing a different mode of communication.
It’s easy to forget after all this time that writing is as much a form of technology as the Internet. Humans roamed the earth for thousands of year without language, and then for thousands more before coming up with an alphabet to represent the sounds they uttered. In his book Orality and Literacy, the late scholar Walter Ong points out that when Homer set down the Iliad. He was adapting a long oral tradition—in which stories were passed from one speaker to the next—to a relatively new medium. In fifth century B.C. Athens, writing and reading has become part of the culture, but it was still new enough for Plato to express skepticism. In the Phaedrus, Socrates asserts the superiority of oral argument: writing is a crutch, Plato wrote, that would lead to the decline of memory, and a passive medium that cannot defend its arguments.
It might seem that the advent of the computer is as big a change in the technology of expression as the written word was. But the real revolution may not yet have arrived. To the extent that computers merely extend the original invention of writing (by allowing the word to be published electronically), they aren’t wholly new. What may come to represent a truly revolutionary mode of communicating is the visual aspect of new media—in particular, the visual interactivity of videogames. Whereas language, writing, printing, e-books and text messaging form a continuum based on the written word, videogames and their ilk appeal to a completely different part of the brain.
Visual media are, if anything, a more natural mode for humans than the written word, at least according to neuroscientist Marcel Just of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Evolution created Homosapiens with a finely honed visual sense: an ability to take in the vast sweep of a landscape and pick out the smallest movement—a lion in the shadows?—or a partially hidden grove of berries. Whereas reading is a technically difficult skill that takes years to learn, our visual brains take almost effortlessly to videogames. "It’s an accident that our culture invented writing and reading," says Just. "It’s a cultural artifact we’ve developed, but it’s not in the nature of man. Two hundred years from now, we won’t need this medium to transmit knowledge."
Some people defend electronic media by arguing that it encourages the use of the written word on Web sites and in blogs. This may be true at the moment, but it’s probably false comfort. Bigger bandwidth and greater computing power seem destined to lead to an increase of video at the expense of the written word; when teens get instant video messaging, for instance, it’s hard to imagine that they’ll prefer text. Does this mean that future generations will be unable to concentrate long enough to finish a novel? Perhaps. But visual media, using technologies we don’t yet know about, may rise to the level of literature. Using brain imaging, Just has found that the brain takes in written and visual input differently at the level of perception, but that higher function— following a plot, grasping irony—are the same regardless of how the brain gets the signals. The intellectual health of future generations may ride not only on whether they read books, but on whether they can come up with another medium as good, or better.
Introduce briefly the viewpoints of Jane Healy and Marcel Just.
选项
答案
Jane Healy: Fast-paced lifestyles, coupled with heavy media diets of visual immediacy, beget brains misfit to traditional modes of academic learning. Marcel Just: Visual media are a more natural mode for humans than the written word. It is a cultural artifact we’ve developed, but it’s not in the nature of man.
解析
转载请注明原文地址:https://jikaoti.com/ti/kDCYFFFM
本试题收录于:
NAETI高级口译笔试题库外语翻译证书(NAETI)分类
0
NAETI高级口译笔试
外语翻译证书(NAETI)
相关试题推荐
Although"namingrights"haveproliferatedinAmericanhighereducationforthepastseveraldecades,thephenomenonhasrecentl
Although"namingrights"haveproliferatedinAmericanhighereducationforthepastseveraldecades,thephenomenonhasrecentl
Althoughsalmonmaytravelhundredsofmilesfromwheretheywerespawned,theywillultimatelyreturntheretolayeggs.
Althoughtheyplanttreesinthisareaeveryyear,thetopsofsomehillsarestilluncovered.
During1872—1976,aBritishscientificexpeditionmadephysicalandbiologicalsurveysoftheAtlanticandthePacific,cruising
下面你将听到一段关于中国法制建设的讲话。当今是法行天下的时代。国运之兴盛,政治之昌明,社会之稳定,经济之发展,民族之团结,文化之繁荣,人民之安居乐业,都离不开法律之维系和法律之保障。中国也不例外。一个国家采取什么样的治国方略,关系着国家的前途和命
在冷战结束后的新形势下,两国要不要及如何发展双边关系,是中美两国面临的重大课题。“永久正常贸易关系”的通过表明,在美国,支持发展中美关系的力量占了上风,美国政府、国会、工商企业界和公众的主流都支持以建设性的态度与中国打交道。其次,中美关系的内涵得
年轻男性用酒精或者毒品来寻求刺激,或者他们认为这是一种让自己更受欢迎的方式。而年轻女性用香烟、毒品或者烈酒来让自己感觉更快乐、缓解压力或者减肥。
年轻男性用酒精或者毒品来寻求刺激,或者他们认为这是一种让自己更受欢迎的方式。而年轻女性用香烟、毒品或者烈酒来让自己感觉更快乐、缓解压力或者减肥。
随机试题
盐酸异丙基肾上腺素作用于
A.腹内斜肌、腹横肌的弓状下缘B.腹外斜肌腱膜C.腹股沟韧带和腔隙韧带D.腹膜、腹横筋膜和联合肌腱E.腹内斜肌和联合肌腱构成腹股沟管前壁的是
嗜酸性粒细胞增多不见于下列哪项疾病
甲、乙、丙三人签订合伙协议并开始经营,但未取字号,未登记,也未推举负责人。其间,合伙人与顺利融资租赁公司签订融资租赁合同,租赁淀粉加工设备一台,约定租赁期限届满后设备归承租人所有。合同签订后,出租人按照承租人的选择和要求向设备生产商丁公司.支付了价款。请回
建筑物的经济寿命早于或与土地使用期限一起结束的,应根据土地剩余使用期限确定受益期限。()
直径为20mm的管流,平均流速为9m/s。已知水的运动粘性系数ν=0.0114cm2/s,则管中水流的流态和水流流态转变的临界流速分别是()。[2016年真题]
某工程的施工企业所在地是县城,该企业承揽的工程的不含税造价为2000万元,则该工程的含税造价为()万元。
下列各项中,与企业储备存货有关的成本有()。
设矩阵相似于矩阵(1)求a,b的值;(2)求可逆矩阵P,使P-1AP为对角矩阵。
在德国,主张“初等师范学校教师由师范学院来培养,中等学校教师由四年制大学来培养,担任中等学校的教师需经学业考试合格方能获得见习教师的资格,见习两年后,经专业考试合格者担任助理教师,以后再经正式任命才能成为任期终身的中学教师”的历史时期是
最新回复
(
0
)