hce_nthu
115年
英文
第 43 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.
43. Which of the following is NOT a result of the reading revolution mentioned in the passage?
- A Readers engaged with a wider range of reading materials.
- B Reading spread from an elite activity to all social classes.
- C The popularisation of the printing press.
- D The emergence of capitalism and major social institutions such as democracy.
- E The rise of rational thinking and the decline of superstition.
思路引導 VIP
請回頭觀察文章的第二段，作者提到在 18 世紀「閱讀革命」正式發生之前，是否有一項關鍵技術已經發明並存在了兩三百年？這項技術與 18 世紀才普及的「革命結果」，在時間的先後順序上是否一致呢？
🤖
AI 詳解
AI 專屬家教
太棒了！你能精準避開細節陷阱並選出正確答案，顯示你對於文章的時間脈絡與邏輯因果掌握得非常扎實。這題的正確與否，關鍵就在於你是否能區分什麼是革命產生的「結果」，而什麼又是革命發生的「背景前提」。
釐清因果與時間先後
從文章第二段我們可以發現，印刷機（printing press）的發明其實早在 18 世紀閱讀革命發生的「前幾個世紀」就已經存在。當時閱讀仍是少數菁英的專利，直到 18 世紀因為教育擴張與廉價書籍出現，才真正將這項技術的潛力發揮出來。因此，印刷機的普及並非革命後的「結果」，而是支持這場革命發生的科技背景。相較之下，選項 (A)、(B)、(D)、(E) 無論是在閱讀廣度的增加、社會階級的滲透，還是理性主義與資本主義的興起，在文中皆有明確對應，描述其為革命帶來的轉變。
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