2016年12月英语四级阅读练习题及答案(三十三)
The Trouble With TelevisionIt is difficult to escape the influence of television. If you fit the
statistical averages, by the age of 20 you will have been exposed to at least
20,000 hours of television. You can add 10,000 hours for each decade you have
lived after the age of 20. The only things Americans do more than watch
television are work and sleep.
Calculate for a moment what could be done with even a part of those hours.
Five thousand hours, I am told, are what a typical college undergraduate spends
working on a bachelor's degree. In 10,000 hours you could have learned enough to
become an astronomer or engineer. You could have learned several languages
fluently. If it appealed to you, you could be reading Homer in the original
Greek or Dostoyevsky in Russian. If it didn't, you could have walked around the
world and written a book about it.
The trouble with television is that it discourages concentration. Almost
anything interesting and rewarding in life requires some constructive,
consistently applied effort. The dullest, the least gifted of us can achieve
things that seem miraculous to those who never concentrate on anything. But
Television encourages us to apply no effort. It sells us instant
gratification(满意). It diverts us only to divert, to make the time pass without
pain.
Television's variety becomes a narcotic(麻醉的), nor a stimulus. Its serial,
kaleidoscopic (万花筒般的)exposures force us to follow its lead. The viewer is on a
perpetual guided tour: 30 minutes at the museum, 30 at the cathedral, 30 for a
drink, then back on the bus to the next attraction—except on television.,
typically, the spans allotted arc on the order of minutes or seconds, and the
chosen delights are more often car crashes and people killing one another. In
short, a lot of television usurps(篡夺;侵占) one of the most precious of all human
gifts, the ability to focus your attention yourself, rather than just passively
surrender it.
Capturing your attention—and holding it—is the prime motive of most
television programming and enhances its role as a profitable advertising
vehicle. Programmers live in constant fear of losing anyone's
attention—anyone's. The surest way to avoid doing so is to keep everything
brief, not to strain the attention of anyone but instead to provide constant
stimulation through variety, novelty, action and movement. Quite simply,
television operates on the appeal to the short attention span.
It is simply the easiest way out. But it has come to be regarded as a
given, as inherent in the medium itself; as an imperative, as though General
Sarnoff, or one of the other august pioneers of video, had bequeathed(遗留;传于) to
us tablets of stone commanding that nothing in television shall ever require
more than a few moments' Concentration.
In its place that is fine. Who can quarrel with a medium that so
brilliantly packages escapist entertainment as a mass-marketing tool? But I see
its values now pervading this nation and its life. It has become fashionable to
think that, like fast food, fast ideas are the way to get to a fast-moving,
impatient public.
In the case of news, this practice, in my view, results in inefficient
communication. I question how much of television's nightly news effort is really
absorbable and understandable. Much of it is what has been aptly described as
"machine-gunning with scraps." I think the technique fights coherence. I think
it tends to make things ultimately boring (unless they are accompanied by
horrifying pictures) because almost anything is boring if you know almost
nothing about it.
I believe that TV's appeal to the short attention span is not only
inefficient communication but decivilizing as well. Consider the casual
assumptions that television tends to cultivate: that complexity must be avoided,
that visual stimulation is a substitute for thought, that verbal precision is an
anachronism. It may be old-fashioned, but I was taught that thought is words,
arranged in grammatically precise.
There is a crisis of literacy in this country. One study estimates that
some 30 million adult Americans are "functionally illiterate" and cannot read or
write well enough to answer the want ad or understand the instructions on a
medicine bottle.
Literacy may not be an inalienable human right, but it is one that the
highly literate Founding Fathers might not have found unreasonable or even
unattainable. We are not only not attaining it as a nation, statistically
speaking, but we are falling further and further short of attaining it. And,
while I would not be so simplistic as to suggest that television is the cause, I
believe it contributes and is an influence.
Everything about this nation—the structure of the society, its forms of
family organization, its economy, its place in the world— has become more
complex, not less. Yet its dominating communications instrument, its principal
form of national linkage, is one that sells neat resolutions to human problems
that usually have no neat resolutions. It is all symbolized in my mind by the
hugely successful art form that television has made central to the culture, the
30-second commercial: the tiny drama of the earnest housewife who finds
happiness in choosing the right toothpaste.
When before in human history has so much humanity collectively surrendered
so much of its leisure to one toy, one mass diversion? When before has virtually
an entire nation surrendered itself wholesale to a medium for selling?
Some years ago Yale University law professor Charles L. Black. Jr., wrote:
"... forced feeding on trivial fare is not itself a trivial matter-" I think
this society is being forced-fed with trivial fare, and I fear that the effects
on our habits of mind, our language, our tolerance for effort, and our appetite
for complexity are only dimly perceived. If I am wrong, we will have done no
harm to look at the issue skeptically and critically, to consider how we should
be residing it. I hope you will join with me in doing so.
1. In America people do sleeping and watching televisions more than
anything else.
2. From the passage we know the time an average American spends on watching
TV could have made the person learn to become an astronomer or engineer.
3. The trouble with TV is that it distracts people’s attention and
encourages them to make no efforts toward their life.
4. TV programmers base this operation on the attraction of long-span
attention of audiences.
5. According to the author the improper television operation in American
society will be likely to make things eventually boring.
6. Americans will face a serious problem of illiteracy due to the negative
impact of TV.
7. In American society literacy is a certain right that cannot be
deprived.
答案解析：
1-7 N Y Y N Y NG N
(实习编辑：王晓晓)
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