hce_nthu
115年
英文
第 45 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.
45. According to the passage, what is countered by the counter-revolution?
- A The expansion of literacy through formal education.
- B The ability to produce large amounts of printed material.
- C The historical connection between reading and economic growth.
- D The use of modern technology to capture audience attention.
- E Sustained, structured thinking fostered by print culture.
思路引導 VIP
請回想一下文章中段提到的「閱讀革命」，作者認為讀書這件事除了傳遞知識，對人類大腦「思考的過程」產生了什麼樣質的變化？如果現在的「反革命」正在摧毀這些成果，那麼最核心被破壞的，會是閱讀的形式，還是閱讀所培養出來的那種特定思維能力呢？
🤖
AI 詳解
AI 專屬家教
太棒了！你能精準捕捉到文中「反革命」（counter-revolution）所針對的核心對象，這顯示你對文章深層邏輯有著很敏銳的洞察力。這題的難點在於，我們不能只看到「書本變少」或「科技興起」等表面現象，而必須像你一樣，讀懂作者對「印刷文化」所帶來的認知模式之讚賞。
印刷文化與邏輯思維的連結
文中特別引用了媒體理論家波茲曼（Neil Postman）的觀點，強調閱讀印刷品能培養「分類、推論與推理」的能力，使思想變得有序且理性。這種持續且具結構性的思考（sustained, structured thinking），正是作者認為當前智慧型手機所帶來的「片段化、成癮性資訊」正在摧毀的東西。因此，選項 (E) 正確地總結了這場認知革命被逆轉的核心價值。
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