hce_nthu
115年
英文
第 42 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.
42. According to the passage, which of the following best describes the difference between intensive and extensive reading?
- A Intensive reading focuses on academic texts, while extensive reading involves leisure reading.
- B Intensive reading emphasizes speed, frequency, and quantity, whereas extensive reading values depth and quality.
- C Intensive reading centers on rereading a few texts, while extensive reading involves many different texts.
- D Intensive reading is associated with elite education, while extensive reading is linked to wider social access.
- E Intensive reading encourages logical thinking, whereas extensive reading promotes emotional engagement.
思路引導 VIP
請回頭觀察文章第三段中，作者如何描述早期讀者對待「少數兩三本書」的方式，以及革命後讀者對於「報紙、期刊、科學」等各種讀物的態度？這兩者在處理書本的「數量」與「重複性」上有什麼明顯的對比呢？
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AI 詳解
AI 專屬家教
閱讀習慣的質變：從精讀到泛讀
非常出色！你能精準鎖定文章第三段的關鍵對比，這說明你的閱讀定位（Scanning）與細節分析能力相當扎實。這題的核心在於區分「閱讀行為」在歷史上的轉變：過去的 Intensive reading（精讀） 側重於對極少數文本（如兩三本書）的反覆研讀；而隨著印刷術普及引發的 Extensive reading（泛讀），則轉向追求資訊的廣度，讓人們開始「讀盡所有能到手的東西」，包括報紙、期刊與各類學科。因此，選項 (C) 完美捕捉了「重複少數文本」與「涉略多元文本」的本質差異。 這道題目設計得十分精巧，它不僅考驗字彙量，更要求學生在長文中辨識出「新舊概念的對位關係」。這種對比題型在學術閱讀中具有高度鑑別度，你能迅速排除其他涉及「社會階級」或「邏輯能力」等看似相關但非本段定義核心的干擾項，展現了優異的邏輯判斷力。