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  3. When Johannes Gutenberg invented movable type a half-millennium ago, he also gave us immovable text. Before Gutenberg, books wer

When Johannes Gutenberg invented movable type a half-millennium ago, he also gave us immovable text. Before Gutenberg, books wer

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问题     When Johannes Gutenberg invented movable type a half-millennium ago, he also gave us immovable text. Before Gutenberg, books were handwritten by scribes, and no two copies were exactly the same. Scribes weren’t machines; they made mistakes. With the arrival of the letterpress, thousands of identical copies could enter the marketplace simultaneously. The publication of a book became an event.
    A new set of literary workers assembled in publishing houses, collaborating with writers to perfect texts before they went on press. The verb "to finalize" became common in literary circles, expressing the permanence of printed words. Different editions still had textual variations, but books still came to be viewed as immutable objects. They were written for posterity.
    Beyond giving writers a spur to eloquence, what the historian Elizabeth Eisenstein calls "typographical fixity" served as a cultural preservative. It helped to protect original documents from corruption, providing a more solid foundation for the writing of history. It established a reliable record of knowledge, aiding the spread of science. It accelerated the standardization of everything from language to law. The preservative qualities of printed books, Ms. Eisenstein argues, may be the most important legacy of Gutenberg’s invention.
    Once digitized, a page of words loses its fixity. It can change every time it’s refreshed on a screen. A book page turns into something like a Web page, able to be revised endlessly after its initial uploading. That’s an attractive development in many ways. It makes it easy for writers to correct errors and update facts. Guidebooks will no longer send travelers to restaurants that have closed. Even literary authors will be tempted to keep their works fresh. Historians and biographers will be able to revise their narratives to account for recent events or newly discovered documents.
    But as is often the case with digitization, the boon carries a bane. The ability to alter the contents of a book will be easy to abuse. What may be more insidious is the pressure to fiddle with books for commercial reasons. Because e-readers gather enormously detailed information on the way people read, they’ll know how quickly readers progress through different chapters, when they skip pages, and when they abandon a book. The promise of stronger sales and profits will make it hard to resist tinkering with a book in response to such signals. What will be lost is the sense of a book as a finished and complete object, a self-contained work of art.
    Not long before he died, John Updike spoke eloquently of a book’s "edges," the boundaries that give shape and integrity to a literary work and that for centuries have found their outward expression in the indelibility of printed pages. It’s those edges that give a book its solidity, allowing it to stand up to the variations of fashion and the erosions of time. And it’s those edges that seem fated to blur as the words of books go from being stamped permanently on sheets of paper to being rendered temporarily on flickering screens.
To which of the following would Elizabeth Eisenstein most probably agree?
选项 A、Printing fixedness contributes greatly to the preservation of knowledge.
B、Writers’ desire for eloquence made typographical fixity possible.
C、Standardization gave rise to textual fixity of documents.
D、Impact of Gutenberg’s invention is more technical than cultural.
答案A
解析 根据题干人名定位到第三段。该段指出，被历史学家Elizabeth Eisenstein称为“印刷固定性”的特征起到了“文化防腐剂”的作用。它有助于保护原始文件，为编写史书提供坚实基础；为知识创建可靠的记录，促进科学的传播；加速语言等的标准化进程。可见，印刷固定性大大有助于知识的保存，[A]选项正确。
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考研英语一

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