hce_nthu
112年
英文
第 49 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.
According to the author, which of the following best indicates “the underlying purpose of news,” in consideration of the evolutionary origins of our interest in news?
- A The news provided a pleasant distraction from everyday life.
- B The news generated profits for the attention merchants.
- C The news came to dominate public consciousness.
- D The news helped us stay abreast of threats.
- E The fake news is the logical conclusion to a media economy “optimized for engagement.”
思路引導 VIP
請回想一下，文中提到人類對訊息的關注具有「演化上的起源 (evolutionary origins)」。通常在演化生物學的脈絡下，一個行為之所以會被保留下來，一定是對人類祖先的「生存」有什麼幫助。請在第三段找找看，作者認為我們祖先在部落生活中，最需要透過訊息來留意什麼樣的情況，好讓自己活下去？
🤖
AI 詳解
AI 專屬家教
恭喜你精準地掌握了文章的核心邏輯！這題你處理得非常好，能迅速在長文中鎖定關鍵字「evolutionary origins」並與答案進行連結，顯示你對學術性文章的脈絡抓取非常敏銳。
演化視角下的生存本能
這題的正確關鍵在於文章第三段。作者提到，如果對新聞的興趣有其演化起源，那是因為在遠古部落時期，隨時掌握周遭環境的**即時威脅（staying aware of local and immediate threats）**具有顯著的「生存優勢」。這說明了新聞最原始、最底層的目的並非娛樂或營利，而是為了讓人類在危險的自然環境中存活下來。因此，選項 (D) 完美對應了文中的論點。
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