单项选择题"If there is one thing I’m sure about, it is that in a
hundred years from now we will still be reading newspapers. It is not that
newspapers are a necessity. Even now some people get most of their news from
television or radio. Many buy a paper only on Saturday or Sunday. But for most
people reading a newspaper has become a habit passed down from generation to
generation.
The nature of what is news may change. What
basically makes news is what affects our lives-the big political stories, the
coverage of the wars, earthquakes and other disasters, will continue much the
same. I think there will be more coverage of scientific research, though. It’s
already happening in areas that may directly affect our lives, like genetic (基因)
engineering. In the future, I think there will be more coverage of scientific
explanations of why we feel as we do-as we develop a better understanding of how
the brain operates and what our feelings really are.
It’s quite
possible that in the next century newspapers will be transmitted (传送)
electronically from Fleet Street and printed out in our own home. In fact, I’m
pretty sure that how it will happen in the future. You will probably be able to
choose from a menu, making up your own newspaper by picking out the things you
want to read-sports and international news, etc.
I think
people have got it wrong when they talk about competition between the different
media (媒体). They actually feed off each other. Some people once foresaw that
television would kill off newspapers, but that hasn’t happened. What is read on
the printed page lasts longer than pictures on a screen or sound lost in the
air. And as for the Internet, it’s never really pleasant to read something just
on a screen.
单项选择题A child who has once been pleased with a tale likes, as a
rule, to have it retold in almost the same words, but this should not lead
parents to treat printed fairy stories as formal texts. It is always much better
to tell a story than read it out of a book, and, if a parent can produce what,
in the actual situation of the time and the child, is an improvement on the
printed text, so much the better.
A charge made against
fairy tales is that they harm the child by frightening him or making him sad
thinking. To prove the latter, one would have to show in a controlled experiment
that children who have read fairy stories were more often sorry for cruelty than
those who had not. As to fears, there are, I think, some cases of children being
dangerously terrified by some fairy story. Often, however, this arises (出现) from
the child having heard the story once. Familiarity with the story by repetition
turns the pain of fear into the pleasure of a fear faced and mastered.
There are also people who object to fairy stories on the grounds
that they are not objectively true, that giants, witches, two-headed dragons,
magic carpets, etc. do not exist; and that, instead of being fond of the strange
side in fairy tales, the child should be taught to learn the reality by studying
history. I find such people, I must say so peculiar (奇怪的) that I do not know how
to argue with them. If their case were sound, the world should be full of mad
men attempting to fly from New York to Philadelphia on a stick or covering a
telephone with kisses in the belief that it was their beloved
girl-friend.
No fairy story ever declared to be a description
of the real world and no clever child has ever believed that it was.
