hce_nthu
115年
英文
第 41 題
📖 題組：
It was one of the most important revolutions in modern history — and yet no blood was spilled, no bombs were thrown and no monarch was beheaded. It took place in armchairs, in libraries, in coffee houses and in clubs. What happened was this: in the middle of the eighteenth-century, huge numbers of ordinary people began to read. For the first couple of centuries after the invention of the printing press, reading remained largely an elite pursuit. But by the beginning of the eighteenth century, the expansion of education and an explosion of cheap books began to diffuse reading rapidly down through the middle classes and even into the lower ranks of society. Suddenly it seemed that everyone was reading everywhere: men, women, children, the rich, the poor. This transformation is sometimes known as the “reading revolution”. It was an unprecedented democratisation of information; the greatest transfer of knowledge into the hands of ordinary men and women in history. In Britain only 6,000 books were published in the first decade of the eighteenth century; in the last decade of the same century the number of new titles was in excess of 56,000. Where readers had once read “intensively”, spending their lives reading and re-reading two or three books, the reading revolution popularised a new kind of “extensive” reading. People read everything they could get their hands on: newspapers, journals, history, philosophy, science, theology and literature. Even more importantly, print changed how people thought. The world of print is orderly, logical and rational. In books, knowledge is classified, comprehended, connected and put in its place. Books make arguments, propose theses, develop ideas. “To engage with the written word”, the media theorist Neil Postman wrote, “means to follow a line of thought, which requires considerable powers of classifying, inference-making and reasoning.” It is no accident, that the growth of print culture in the eighteenth century was associated with the growing prestige of reason, hostility to superstition, the birth of capitalism, and the rapid development of science. Other historians have linked the eighteenth century explosion of literacy to the Enlightenment, the birth of human rights, the arrival of democracy and even the beginnings of the industrial revolution. Now, we are living through the counter-revolution. More than three hundred years after the reading revolution ushered in a new era of human knowledge, books are dying. Studies suggest that reading is declining across developed societies, with fewer adults reading for pleasure and children’s reading reaching historically low levels. What happened was the smartphone, which was widely adopted in developed countries in the second decade of the twenty-first century. Never before has there been a technology like the smartphone. Where previous entertainment technologies like cinema or television were intended to capture their audience’s attention for a period, the smartphone demands your entire life. Phones are designed to be hyper-addictive, hooking users on a diet of pointless notifications, inane short-form videos and social media rage bait. If the reading revolution represented the greatest transfer of knowledge to ordinary men and women in history, the screen revolution represents the greatest theft of knowledge from ordinary people in history.
It was one of the most important revolutions in modern history — and yet no blood was spilled, no bombs were thrown and no monarch was beheaded. It took place in armchairs, in libraries, in coffee houses and in clubs. What happened was this: in the middle of the eighteenth-century, huge numbers of ordinary people began to read. For the first couple of centuries after the invention of the printing press, reading remained largely an elite pursuit. But by the beginning of the eighteenth century, the expansion of education and an explosion of cheap books began to diffuse reading rapidly down through the middle classes and even into the lower ranks of society. Suddenly it seemed that everyone was reading everywhere: men, women, children, the rich, the poor. This transformation is sometimes known as the “reading revolution”. It was an unprecedented democratisation of information; the greatest transfer of knowledge into the hands of ordinary men and women in history. In Britain only 6,000 books were published in the first decade of the eighteenth century; in the last decade of the same century the number of new titles was in excess of 56,000. Where readers had once read “intensively”, spending their lives reading and re-reading two or three books, the reading revolution popularised a new kind of “extensive” reading. People read everything they could get their hands on: newspapers, journals, history, philosophy, science, theology and literature. Even more importantly, print changed how people thought. The world of print is orderly, logical and rational. In books, knowledge is classified, comprehended, connected and put in its place. Books make arguments, propose theses, develop ideas. “To engage with the written word”, the media theorist Neil Postman wrote, “means to follow a line of thought, which requires considerable powers of classifying, inference-making and reasoning.” It is no accident, that the growth of print culture in the eighteenth century was associated with the growing prestige of reason, hostility to superstition, the birth of capitalism, and the rapid development of science. Other historians have linked the eighteenth century explosion of literacy to the Enlightenment, the birth of human rights, the arrival of democracy and even the beginnings of the industrial revolution. Now, we are living through the counter-revolution. More than three hundred years after the reading revolution ushered in a new era of human knowledge, books are dying. Studies suggest that reading is declining across developed societies, with fewer adults reading for pleasure and children’s reading reaching historically low levels. What happened was the smartphone, which was widely adopted in developed countries in the second decade of the twenty-first century. Never before has there been a technology like the smartphone. Where previous entertainment technologies like cinema or television were intended to capture their audience’s attention for a period, the smartphone demands your entire life. Phones are designed to be hyper-addictive, hooking users on a diet of pointless notifications, inane short-form videos and social media rage bait. If the reading revolution represented the greatest transfer of knowledge to ordinary men and women in history, the screen revolution represents the greatest theft of knowledge from ordinary people in history.
41. Which of the following best captures the main argument of the passage?
- A The spread of literacy in the eighteenth century transformed society more profoundly than political revolutions.
- B Print culture once supported deep thinking, which modern technologies now undermine.
- C Technological change has made the acquisition and use of knowledge more demanding.
- D Smartphones have replaced books as the dominant source of information.
- E The counter-revolution has accelerated the decline of reading.
思路引導 VIP
請試著思考：作者在描述十八世紀的人們閱讀時，特別強調了哪些『思維特質』與『心智活動』？而當他轉向討論現代智慧型手機時，他描述這些科技對我們的大腦產生了什麼樣的干預？這兩者之間存在的性質差異，與哪一個選項的描述最吻合呢？
🤖
AI 詳解
AI 專屬家教
恭喜你精確地掌握了文章的核心主旨！選對 (B) 代表你成功看穿了作者安排的強烈對比。這篇文章不只是在回顧歷史，更是在對現代科技進行深刻的批判。
印刷文明與數位成癮的思辨
作者在文中強調，十八世紀的「閱讀革命」不僅擴散了資訊，更塑造了一種有秩序、具邏輯性與理性的思維方式。然而，面對現代的「螢幕革命」，作者認為智慧型手機的設計初衷是為了奪取注意力，而非深化思考。這種從「邏輯推理」到「瑣碎成癮」的轉變，正是選項 (B) 所指出的：印刷文化曾經支撐起深度思考，而現代科技正逐漸侵蝕這一根基。
▼ 還有更多解析內容