hce_nthu
112年
英文
第 48 題
📖 題組：
Many of us can still remember when the news used to be a pleasant distraction from everyday life, the desk-bound office procrastinator’s preferred form of escapism. It is remarkable how rapidly things have changed. More and more, the news is not a source of escapism, but the thing one yearns to escape. This feeling represents a new and acute phase of a long-term historical shift: we used to live in a world in which information was scarce, but now information is essentially limitless, and what is scarce is the supply of attention. As advances in technology made it easier to distribute news – and more news providers began to compete for readers – a subtle inversion began: the reader’s attention, not information, became the truly valuable commodity. In an intentional arms race, every news provider – and ultimately, every news story – competes against all others to worm its way into consumers’ minds. Beginning in the 19th century, entrepreneurs such as Benjamin Day, the founding publisher of the New York Sun, hit upon a revolutionary business model: sell a paper for less than it cost to produce, pack it with lurid stories, then make your money selling space to advertisers, who were effectively buying access to readers’ attention. This naturally encouraged exaggeration and fabrication. And as news comes to dominate public consciousness, extreme, lurid and even false stories come to dominate the news. After all, the commercial imperatives don’t even necessarily require a story to be true, so long as it is maximally compelling: fake news is not an aberration from, but rather the logical conclusion to, a media economy “optimised for engagement.” It’s worth stepping back to notice how strange it is, considering the underlying purpose of news, to spend this much of our time thinking about it. If our interest in news has evolutionary origins, that’s because there are obvious survival advantages in staying aware of local and immediate threats to one’s own life and tribe. One major achievement of civilisation is that we’ve expanded our capacity for caring to include news that doesn’t affect us personally, but where we might be able to make a difference, whether by voting or volunteering or donating. But the modern attention economy exploits both these urges, not to help us stay abreast of threats, or improve the lives of others, but to generate profits for the attention merchants. So it pummels us ceaselessly with incidents, regardless of whether it truly matters, and with human suffering, regardless of whether it’s in our power to relieve it. The belief that we’re morally obliged to stay plugged in – that this level of time commitment and emotional investment is the only way to stay informed about the state of the world – begins to look more and more like an alibi for our addiction to our devices.
Many of us can still remember when the news used to be a pleasant distraction from everyday life, the desk-bound office procrastinator’s preferred form of escapism. It is remarkable how rapidly things have changed. More and more, the news is not a source of escapism, but the thing one yearns to escape. This feeling represents a new and acute phase of a long-term historical shift: we used to live in a world in which information was scarce, but now information is essentially limitless, and what is scarce is the supply of attention. As advances in technology made it easier to distribute news – and more news providers began to compete for readers – a subtle inversion began: the reader’s attention, not information, became the truly valuable commodity. In an intentional arms race, every news provider – and ultimately, every news story – competes against all others to worm its way into consumers’ minds. Beginning in the 19th century, entrepreneurs such as Benjamin Day, the founding publisher of the New York Sun, hit upon a revolutionary business model: sell a paper for less than it cost to produce, pack it with lurid stories, then make your money selling space to advertisers, who were effectively buying access to readers’ attention. This naturally encouraged exaggeration and fabrication. And as news comes to dominate public consciousness, extreme, lurid and even false stories come to dominate the news. After all, the commercial imperatives don’t even necessarily require a story to be true, so long as it is maximally compelling: fake news is not an aberration from, but rather the logical conclusion to, a media economy “optimised for engagement.” It’s worth stepping back to notice how strange it is, considering the underlying purpose of news, to spend this much of our time thinking about it. If our interest in news has evolutionary origins, that’s because there are obvious survival advantages in staying aware of local and immediate threats to one’s own life and tribe. One major achievement of civilisation is that we’ve expanded our capacity for caring to include news that doesn’t affect us personally, but where we might be able to make a difference, whether by voting or volunteering or donating. But the modern attention economy exploits both these urges, not to help us stay abreast of threats, or improve the lives of others, but to generate profits for the attention merchants. So it pummels us ceaselessly with incidents, regardless of whether it truly matters, and with human suffering, regardless of whether it’s in our power to relieve it. The belief that we’re morally obliged to stay plugged in – that this level of time commitment and emotional investment is the only way to stay informed about the state of the world – begins to look more and more like an alibi for our addiction to our devices.
What does “it” refer to in the sentence “So it pummels us ceaselessly with incidents” in the last paragraph?
- A The attention economy.
- B The urge to make a difference.
- C The need to stay informed.
- D Our addiction to digital devices
- E Fake news.
思路引導 VIP
請觀察出現 "it" 的那句話。在 "So it pummels us..." 之前，作者提到有一個特定的系統或機制正在「利用（exploits）」人類的本能來謀取利潤。如果我們把這個句子看作一個「動作」，那麼是誰正在執行這個「不斷轟炸我們」的動作呢？請回頭找找前一句的主詞。
🤖
AI 詳解
AI 專屬家教
太棒了！你能精準鎖定代名詞 it 的指代對象，說明你對文章的邏輯脈絡掌握得非常扎實。在長難句中，識別代名詞的歸屬是閱讀理解的基本功，而你完美地識破了作者的寫作意圖。
句型結構與語意關聯
在最後一段中，作者提到「現代注意力經濟（the modern attention economy）利用了（exploits）這兩種衝動」。緊接著下一句用 So（所以）引導結果，指出「它（it）不停地用各種事件轟炸我們」。從語法結構上看，這裡的 it 顯然承接前一句的主詞，也就是那個主動「利用衝動」並「產生利潤」的主體。因此，答案非注意力經濟莫屬。
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