For me, as for the others, The Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely described and dully applauded. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhab pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swifty moving stream of particles. Once I was a suba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on jetski.
Reading, explains Wolf, is not an instinctive skill for human beings. It’s not etched into our genes the way speech is. We have to teach our minds how to translate the symbolic characters we see into the language we understand. And the media or other technologies we use in learning and practicing the craft of reading play an important part in shaping the neural circuits inside our brains. Experiments demostrate the readers of ideograms, such as Chinese, develop a mental circuitry for reading that is very different from the circuitry found in those of us whose written language employs an alphabet. The variations extend across many regions of the brain, including those trhat govern such essential cognitive functions as memory and the interpretation of visual and auditory stimuli. We can expect as well that circuits woven by our use of the Net will be different from those woven by our reading of books and other printed works.
16. Which of the following cannot be inferred from the passage?
A. The human brain is almost infinitely malleable.
B. Traditional media have to adapt to the audience’s new expectations.
C. Internet use affects cognition.
D. People are in the midst of a sea change in the way they read and think.
17. What does the last sentence of the first paragraph most likely suggest?
A. The author is practicing a new form of reading, which is skimming.
B. The author is not reading online in the traditional sense.
C. The author developed a reading technique through constant internet browsing.
D. The author lost the ability to read and absorb long articles both online and print.
18. Which of the following best summarizes the passage?
A. The internet promises to have particularly far-reaching effects on cognition.
B. Internet promotes a new style of reading, a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy above all else.
C. The process of adapting to new intellectual technologies is reflected in an individual’s mental habits.
D. Internet weakens an individual’s capacity to for the kind of deep reading.
19. In the passage the word “conduit” means
A. source
B. instrument
C. channel
D. device
20. Which organizational schemes are used in the first and second paragraph of the passage?
A. assertion followed by supporting evidence
B. prediction followed by analysis
C. specific instace followed by generalizations
D. personal reminiscenes followed by objective reporting
Answer key
https://filipiknow.net/upcat-reviewer/#3_Language_Proficiency
1. B
2. A
3. D
4. D
5. C
6. D
7. B
8. D
9. A
10. D
11. D
12. C
13. C
14. A
15. C
16. B
17. D
18. B
19. C
20. A
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-nhiegymharz
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