2021年1月23日发(作者：dropby)





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TTMS system office room
【
TTMS16H-TTMS2A-TTMS8Q8-


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 build and
smash. Two 30something 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,
while 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 several 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 hands 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 Hippo 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 Cent
er, 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 b
y 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 metaphors 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, w
hich 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