2021年1月23日发(作者：小挎包)
2014
年
6
月英语四级长篇阅读原文来源及答案

本文节选自
2013
年
4
月《大西洋月刊》
(The Atlantic)
上的一篇同名文
章《触屏一代》
(The Touch Screen Generation)
。



On
a
chilly
day
last
spring,
a
few
dozen
developers
of
children
’
s apps for phones and tablets gathered at an old beach resort in
Monterey, California, to show off their games. One developer, a
self-described
“
visionary
for
puzzles
”

who
looked
like
a
skateboarder-recently-turned- dad,
displayed
a
jacked-up,
interactive
game
called
Puzzingo,
intended
for
toddlers
and
inspired
by
his
own
son’s
desire
to
buil
d
and
smash.
Two
30?something
women were
eagerly
seeking
feedback
for
an app
called
Knock Knock Family, aimed at 1-to-4-year-
olds. “We want to make
sure it’s easy enough for babies to understand,” one explained.



The gathering was organized by Warren Buckleitner, a longtime
reviewer
of
interactive
children
’
s
media
who
likes
to
bring
together
developers, researchers, and interest groups
—
and often plenty of
kids, some still in diapers. It went by the Harry Potter
–
ish name
Dust or Magic, and was held in a drafty old stone-and-wood hall
barely
a
mile
from
the
sea,
the
kind
of
place
where
Bathilda
Bagshot
might
retire
after
packing
up
her
wand.
Buckleitner
spent
the
breaks
testing whether his own remote- control helicopter could reach the
hall’s
second
story,
whi
le
various
children
who
had
come
with
their
parents looked up in awe and delight. But mostly they looked down,
at the iPads and other tablets displayed around the hall like so
many
open
boxes
of
candy.
I
walked
around
and
talked
with
developers,
and severa
l paraphrased a famous saying of Maria Montessori’s, a
quote imported to ennoble a touch-screen age when very young kids,
who once could be counted on only to chew on a square of aluminum,
are now
engaging
with
it
in increasingly
sophisticated
ways:
“The
h
ands are the instruments of man’s intelligence.”



What, really, would Maria Montessori have made of this scene?
The 30 or so children here were not down at the shore poking their
fingers in the sand or running them along mossy stones or digging
for hermit crabs. Instead they were all inside, alone or in groups
of
two
or
three,
their
faces
a
few
inches
from
a
screen,
their
hands
doing
things
Montessori
surely
did
not
imagine.
A
couple
of
3-year- old
girls
were
leaning
against
a
pair
of
French
doors,
reading
an
interactive
story
called
Ten
Giggly
Gorillas
and
fighting
over which ape to tickle next. A boy in a nearby corner had turned
his
fingertip
into
a
red
marker
to
draw
an
ugly
picture
of
his
older
brother.
On
an
old
oak
table
at
the
front
of
the
room,
a
giant
stuffed
Angry
Bird
beckoned
the
children
to
come
and
test
out
tablets
loaded
with dozens of new apps. Some of the chairs had pillows strapped
to
them,
since
an
18-month-old
might
not
otherwise
be
able
to
reach
the table, though she’d know how to swipe
once she did.



Not
that
long
ago,
there
was
only
the
television,
which
theoretically
could
be
kept
in
the
parents
’
bedroom
or
locked
behind
a cabinet. Now there are smartphones and iPads, which wash up in
the domestic clutter alongside keys and gum and stray hair ties.
“Mom,
everyone
has
technology
but
me!”
my
4
-year-old
son
sometimes
wails.
And
why
shouldn’t
he
feel
entitled?
In
the
same
span
of
time
it took him to learn how to say that sentence, thousands of kids’
apps have been developed
—
the majority aimed at preschoolers like
him. To us (his parents, I mean), American childhood has undergone
a
somewhat
alarming
transformation
in
a
very
short
time.
But
to
him,
it has always been possible to do so many things with the swipe of
a finger, to have hundreds of games packed into a gadget the same
size as Goodnight Moon.



In
2011,
the
American
Academy
of
Pediatrics
updated
its
policy
on
very
young
children
and
media.
In
1999,
the
group
had
discouraged
television
viewing for
children
younger than
2,
citing
research
on
brain development that showed this age group
’
s critical need for
“direct
interactions
with
parents
and
other
significant
care
givers.”
The
updated
report
began
by
acknowledging
that
things
had
changed significantly since then. In 2006, 90 percent of parents
said
that
their
children
younger
than
2
consumed
some
form
of
electronic media.
Nonetheless, the group took
largely
the same
approach
it
did
in 1999, uniformly discouraging
passive media
use,
on any type of screen, for these kids. (For older children, the
academy noted, “high
-
quality programs” could have “educational
benefits.”) The 2011 report mentioned “smart cell phone” and
“new
screen”
technologies,
but
did
not
address
interactive
apps.
Nor
did
it
broach
the
possibility
that
has
likely
occurred
to
those
90 percent of American parents, queasy though they might be: that
some good might come from those little swiping fingers.



I
had
come
to
the
developers
’
conference
partly
because
I
hoped
that
this
particular
set
of
parents,
enthusiastic
as
they
were
about
interactive media, might help me out of this conundrum, that they
might offer some guiding principle for American parents who are
clearly
never
going
to
meet
the
academy’s
ideals,
and
at
some
level
do
not
want
to.
Perhaps
this
group
would
be
able
to
articulate
some
benefits
of
the
new
technology
that
the
more
cautious
pediatricians
weren’t
ready
to
address.
I
nurtured
this
hope
until
about
lunchtime,
when the
developers
gathering in
the
dining
hall
ceased
being visionaries and reverted to being ordinary parents, trying
to
settle
their
toddlers
in
high
chairs
and
get
them
to
eat
something
besides bread.



I fell into conversation with a woman who had helped develop
Montessori Letter
Sounds, an app that teaches
preschoolers the
Montessori methods of spelling.



She was a former Montessori teacher and a mother of four. I
myself have three children who are all fans of the touch screen.
What
games
did
her
kids
like
to
play?,
I
asked,
hoping
for
suggestions I could take home.



“
They don
’
t play all that much.
”



Really? Why not?



“
Because I don
’
t allow it. We have a rule of no screen time
during the week,
”
unless it
’
s clearly educational.



No screen time? None at all? That seems at the outer edge of
restrictive,
even
by
the
standards
of
my
overcontrolling
parenting
set.



“
On the weekends, they can play. I give them a limit of half
an
hour
and
then
stop.
Enough.
It
can
be
too
addictive,
too
stimulating for the brain.
”



Her answer so surprised me that I decided to ask some of the
other developers who were also parents what their domestic ground
rules
for
screen
time
were.
One
said
only
on
airplanes
and
long
car
rides. Another said Wednesdays and weekends, for half an hour. The
most permissive said half an hour a day, which was about my rule
at home. At one point I sat with one of the biggest developers of
e-book apps for kids, and his family. The toddler was starting to
fuss in her high chair, so the mom did what many of us have done
at that moment
—
stuck an iPad in front of her and played a short
movie so everyone else could enjoy their lunch. When she saw me
watching, she gave me the universal tense look of mothers who feel
they are being judged. “At home,” she assured me, “I only let
her watch movies in Spanish.”



By their pinched reactions, these parents illuminated for me
the neurosis of our age: as technology becomes ubiquitous in our
lives, American parents are becoming more, not less, wary of what
it might be doing to their children. Technological competence and
sophistication have not, for parents, translated into comfort and
ease.
They
have
merely
created
yet
another
sphere
that
parents
feel
they have to navigate in exactly the right way. On the one hand,
parents want their children to swim expertly in the digital stream
that
they
will
have
to
navigate
all
their
lives;
on
the
other
hand,
they fear that too much digital media, too early, will sink them.
Parents
end
up
treating
tablets
like
precision
surgical
instruments,
gadgets that might perform miracles for their child’s IQ and help
him win some nifty robotics competition
—
but only if they are used
just
so.
Otherwise,
their
child
could
end
up
one
of
those
sad,
pale
creatures
who
can’t
make
eye
contact
and
has
an
avatar
for
a
girlfriend.



Norman
Rockwell
never
painted
Boy
Swiping
Finger
on
Screen,
and
our
own
vision
of
a
perfect
childhood
has
never
adjusted
to
accommodate that now- common tableau. Add to that our modern fear
that every parenting decision may have lasting consequences
—
that
every
minute
of
enrichment
lost
or
mindless
entertainment
indulged
will add up to some permanent handicap in the future
—
and you have
deep
guilt
and
confusion.
To
date,
no
body
of
research
has
definitively
proved
that
the
iPad
will
make
your
preschooler
smarter
or teach her to speak Chinese, or alternatively that it will rust
her
neural
circuitry
—
the
device
has
been
out
for
only
three
years,
not
much
more
than
the
time
it
takes
some
academics to
find
funding
and gather research subjects. So what’s a parent to do?



In
2001,
the
education
and
technology
writer
Marc
Prensky
popularized
the
term
digital
natives
to
describe
the
first
generations
of
children
growing
up
fluent
in
the
language
of
computers,
video
games,
and
other
technologies.
(The
rest
of
us
are
digital immigrants, struggling to understand.) This term took on
a
whole
new
significance
in
April
2010,
when
the
iPad
was
released.
iPhones had already been tempting young children, but the screens
were a little small for pudgy toddler hands to navigate with ease
and accuracy. Plus, parents tended to be more possessive of their
phones,
hiding
them
in
pockets
or
purses.
The
iPad
was
big
and
bright,
and
a
case
could
be
made
that
it
belonged
to
the
family.
Researchers
who study children’s media immediately recognized it as a game
changer.



Previously,
young
children
had
to
be
shown
by
their
parents
how
to use a mouse or a remote, and the connection between what they
were
doing
with
their
hand
and
what
was
happening
on
the
screen
took
some time to grasp. But with the iPad, the connection is obvious,
even
to
toddlers.
Touch
technology
follows
the
same
logic
as
shaking
a rattle or knocking down a pile of blocks: the child swipes, and
something immediately happens. A “rattle on steroids,” is what
Buckleitner calls it. “All of a sudden a finger could move a bus
or smush an insect
or turn into a big wet gloopy paintbrush.” To
a toddler, this is less magic than intuition. At a very young age,
children
become
capable of what the psychologist Jerome Bruner
called “enactive representation”; they classify objects in the
world not by using words or symbols but by making gestures
—
say,
holding an imaginary cup to their lips to signify that they want
a drink. Their hands are a natural extension of their thoughts.



Norman
Rockwell
never
painted
Boy
Swiping
Finger
on
Screen,
and
our
own
vision
of
a
perfect
childhood
has
never
adjusted
to
fit
that
now- common tableau.



I have two older children who fit the early idea of a digital
native
—
they
learned
how
to
use
a
mouse
or
a
keyboard
with
some
help
from
their
parents
and
were
well
into
school
before
they
felt
comfortable with a device in their lap. (Now, of course, at ages
9
and
12,
they
can
create
a
Web
site
in
the
time
it
takes
me
to
slice
an
onion.)
My
youngest
child
is
a
whole
different
story.
He
was
not
yet 2 when the iPad was released. As soon as he got his hands on
it, he located the Talking Baby Hippo app that one of my older
children had downloaded. The little purple hippo repeats whatever
you say in his own squeaky voice, and responds to other cues. My
son
said
his
name
(“Giddy!”);
Baby
H
ippo
repeated
it
back.
Gideon
poked Baby Hippo; Baby Hippo laughed. Over and over, it was funny
every time. Pretty soon he discovered other apps. Old MacDonald,
by
Duck
Duck
Moose,
was
a
favorite.
At
first
he
would
get
frustrated
trying to zoom between screens, or not knowing what to do when a
message popped up. But after about two weeks, he figured all that
out. I must admit, it was eerie to see a child still in diapers so
competent and intent, as if he were forecasting his own adulthood.
Technically I was the owner of the iPad, but in some ontological
way it felt much more his than mine.



Without
seeming
to
think
much
about
it
or
resolve
how
they
felt,
parents
began
giving
their
devices
over
to
their
children
to
mollify,
pacify,
or
otherwise
entertain
them.
By
2010,
two-thirds
of
children
ages 4 to 7 had used an iPhone, according to the Joan Ganz Cooney
Center,
which
studies
children’s
media.
The
vast
majority
of
those
phones had been lent by a family member; the center’s researchers
labeled this the “pass
-
back effect,” a name that captures well
the reluctant zone between denying and giving.



The market immediately picked up on the pass-back effect, and
the opportunities it presented. In 2008, when Apple opened up its
App Store, the games started arriving at the rate of dozens a day,
thousands
a
year.
For
the
first
23
years
of
his
career,
Buckleitner
had tried to be comprehensive and cover every children’s game in
his
publication,
Children’s
Technology
Review.
Now,
by
Buckleitner’s
loose
count,
more
than
40,000
kids’
games
are
available on iTunes, plus thousands more on Google Play. In the
iTunes
“Education”
category,
the
majority
of
the
top
-selling
apps
target
preschool
or
elementary-age
children.
By
age
3,
Gideon
would
go to preschool
and
tune
in
to
what
was
cool
in
toddler
world,
then
come home, locate the iPad, drop it in my lap, and ask for certain
games by their approximate description: “Tea? Spill?” (That’s
Toca Tea Party.)



As
these
delights
and
diversions
for
young
children
have
proliferated, the pass-back has become more uncomfortable, even
unsustainable, for many parents:



He
’
d
gone
to
this
state
where
you
’
d
call
his
name
and
he
wouldn
’
t respond to it, or you could snap your fingers in front of his
face
…



But, you know, we ended up actually taking the iPad away for
—
from him largely because, you know, this example, this thing we
were talking about, about zoning out. Now, he would do that, and
my wife and I would stare at him and think, Oh my God, his brain
is going to turn to mush and come oozing out of his ears. And it
concerned us a bit.



This
is
Ben
Worthen,
a
Wall
Street
Journal
reporter,
explaining
recently to NPR
’
s Diane Rehm why he took the iPad away from his
son, even though it was the only thing that could hold the boy
’
s
attention
for
long
periods,
and
it
seemed
to
be
sparking
an
interest in numbers and letters. Most parents can sympathize with
the
disturbing
sight
of
a
toddler,
who
five
minutes
earlier
had
been
jumping
off
the
couch,
now
subdued
and
staring
at
a
screen,
seemingly
hypnotized.
In
the
somewhat
alarmist
Endangered
Minds:
Why
Children
Don’t Think—
and What We Can Do About It, author Jane Healy even
gives
the
phenomenon
a
name,
the
“?‘zombie’
effect,”
and
raises
the possibility that television might “suppress mental activity
by putting viewers in a trance.”



Ever
since
viewing
screens
entered
the
home,
many
observers
have
worried that they put our brains into a stupor. An early strain of
research claimed that when we watch television, our brains mostly
exhibit
slow
alpha
waves
—
indicating
a
low
level
of
arousal,
similar
to
when
we
are
daydreaming.
These
findings
have
been
largely
discarded by the scientific community, but the myth persists that
watching television is the mental equivalent of, as one Web site
put it, “staring at a blank wall.” These common meta
phors are
misleading,
argues
Heather
Kirkorian,
who
studies
media
and
attention
at
the
University
of
Wisconsin
at
Madison.
A
more
accurate
point of comparison for a TV viewer’s physiological state would
be that of someone deep in a book, says Kirkorian, because during
both activities we are still, undistracted, and mentally active.



Because interactive media are so new, most of the existing
research
looks
at
children
and
television.
By
now,
“
there
is
universal
agreement
that
by
at
least
age
2
and
a
half,
children
are
very
cognitively
active
when
they
are
watching
TV,
”

says
Dan
Ander
son,
a
children’s
-media
expert
at
the
University
of
Massachusetts at Amherst. In the 1980s, Anderson put the zombie
theory to the test, by subjecting roughly 100 children to a form
of TV hell. He showed a group of children ages 2 to 5 a scrambled
version
of
Sesame
Street:
he
pieced
together
scenes
in
random
order,
and
had
the
characters
speak
backwards
or
in
Greek.
Then
he
spliced
the
doctored
segments
with
unedited
ones
and
noted
how
well
the
kids
paid
attention.
The
children
looked
away
much
more
frequently
during
the scrambled parts of the show, and some complained that the TV
was
broken.
Anderson
later
repeated
the
experiment
with
babies
ages
6 months to 24 months, using Teletubbies. Once again he had the
characters speak backwards and chopped the action sequences into
a
nonsensical
order
—
showing,
say,
one
of
the
Teletubbies
catching
a ball and then, after that, another one throwing it. The 6- and
12-month-olds
seemed
unable
to
tell
the
difference,
but
by
18
months
the babies started looking away, and by 24 months they were turned
off by programming that did not make sense.



Anderson
’
s
series
of
experiments
provided
the
first
clue
that
even very young children can be discriminating viewers
—
that they
are not in fact brain-dead, but rather work hard to make sense of
what they see and turn it into a coherent narrative that reflects
what
they
already
know
of
the
world.
Now,
30
years
later,
we
understand
that
children
“can
make
a
lot
of
inferences
and
process
the information,” says Anderson. “And they can learn a lot, both
positive
and
negative.”
Researchers
never
abandoned
the
idea
that
parental
interaction
is critical for the
development
of very
young
children. But they started to see TV watching in shades of gray.
If
a
child
never
interacts
with
adults
and
always
watches
TV,
well,
that is a problem. But if a child is watching TV instead of, say,
playing with toys, then that is a tougher comparison, because TV,
in the right circumstances, has something to offer.



How
do
small
children
actually
experience
electronic
media,
and
what does that experience do to their development? Since the
’
80s, researchers have spent more and more time consulting with
television programmers to study and shape TV content. By tracking
children’s
reactions,
they
have
identified
certain
rules
that
promote engagement: stories have to be linear and easy to follow,
cuts and time lapses have to be used very sparingly, and language
has
to
be
pared
down
and
repeated.
A
perfect
example
of
a
well-
engineered
show
is
Nick
Jr.’s
Blue’s
Clues,
which
aired
from
1996
to
2006.
Each
episode
features
Steve
(or
Joe,
in
later
seasons)
and Blue, a cartoon puppy, solving a mystery. Steve talks slowly
and
simply;
he
repeats
words
and
then
writes
them
down
in
his
handy-dandy notebook.
There
are
almost
no
cuts or
unexplained
gaps
in time. The great innovation of Blue’s Clues is something called
the
“pause.”
Steve
asks
a
question
and
then
pauses
for
about
five
seconds to let the viewer shout out an answer. Small children feel
much more engaged and invested when they think they have a role to
play, when they believe they are actually helping Steve and Blue
piece together the clues. A longitudinal study of children older
than 2 and a half
showed that the ones who watched Blue’s Clues
made
measurably
larger
gains
in
flexible
thinking
and
problem
solving over two years of watching the show.



For
toddlers,
however,
the
situation
seems
slightly
different.
Children younger than 2 and a half exhibit what researchers call
a
“
video deficit.
”
This means that they have a much easier time
processing information delivered by a real person than by a person
on
videotape.
In
one
series
of
studies,
conducted
by
Georgene
Troseth, a developmental psychologist at Vanderbilt University,
children watched on a live video monitor as a person in the next
room hid a stuffed dog. Others watched the exact same scene unfold
directly,
through
a
window
between
the
rooms.
The
children
were
then
unleashed into the room to find the toy. Almost all the kids who
viewed the hiding through the window found the toy, but the ones
who watched on the monitor had a much harder time.



A natural assumption is that toddlers are not yet cognitively
equipped to handle symbolic representation. (I remember my older
son, when he was 3, asking me if he could go into the TV and pet
Blue.) But there is another way to interpret this particular phase
of
development.
Toddlers
are
skilled
at
seeking
out
what
researchers
call “socially relevant information.”
They
tune
in to
people and
situations that help them make a coherent narrative of the world
around them. In the real world, fresh grass smells and popcorn
tumbles and grown-ups smile at you or say something back when you
ask
them
a
question.
On
TV,
nothing
like
that
happens.
A
TV
is
static
and lacks one of the most important things to toddlers, which is
a “two
-
way exchange of information,” argues Troseth.



A
few
years
after
the
original
puppy-hiding
experiment,
in
2004,
Troseth
reran
it,
only
she
changed
a
few
things.
She
turned
the
puppy
into a stuffed Piglet (from the Winnie the Pooh stories). More